Criminal Episode 1, Animal Instincts: Did an Owl Kill Kathleen Peterson?

December 9, 2001. Durham, North Carolina. Kathleen Peterson, a successful corporate executive, is found dead at the bottom of a back staircase in the mansion she shares with her husband, novelist Michael Peterson. He says she fell. Prosecutors say he killed her. In 2003, a jury agrees and convicts him of first-degree murder.

Then a neighbor, a local attorney, starts asking a question that sounds like a joke: what if the killer was an owl? That's the jaw-dropping theory at the center of Animal Instincts, the very first episode of Criminal, which host Phoebe Judge and co-creator Lauren Spohrer launched in January 2014. Judge sits down with the lawyer who built the theory and walks through his evidence, including microscopic feathers he says turned up in the case, and asks just how much damage a wild bird could really do.

Is it brilliant or completely bonkers? The episode lets you decide, and once you hear it, you'll never watch The Staircase the same way again. The case never got a clean ending, either. Peterson won a new trial in 2011 after a judge ruled a key prosecution witness had given misleading testimony. In 2017, he entered an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter, which let him maintain his innocence, and walked free.

It's short, strange, and impossible to forget. Listen on Apple Podcasts tonight, and then tell us whooo you believe.