Who is Larry Pollard from HBO’s ‘Staircase’? The Owl Theory, ‘smoking feather’ and more
A new HBO limited series has renewed interest in the 2001 death of Kathleen Peterson and the murder trial of her husband, Michael, and will likely also bring Durham attorney Larry Pollard back into the spotlight.
Pollard is the author of “The Owl Theory” — a theory that Kathleen Peterson died from injuries sustained in an owl attack. He is portrayed in the Antonio Campos-created series “The Staircase” by actor Joel McKinnon Miller (best known as Scully from “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”).
Unlike Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s Netflix documentary “The Staircase,” the new series is a dramatization. It premiered on HBO Max on May 5.
The News & Observer sat down with Pollard last week in his Durham law office to talk about The Owl Theory and what he’s learned in the 20 years since Kathleen Peterson’s death.
Who is Larry Pollard?
Pollard, now 74, has lived on the same block in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Durham his whole life.
He and his wife, Brenda, live next door to the 1810 Cedar Street mansion inhabited by the Peterson family at the time of Kathleen’s death. Pollard says he has worked on Peterson’s case pro bono since her death.
For nearly two decades, Pollard has publicized his belief that an owl caused the blunt-force trauma and head wounds that made Kathleen Peterson bleed to death at the bottom of a back staircase in her home in December 2001 — not a fireplace blow poke, as prosecutors argued.
What is The Owl Theory?
Pollard has spent years investigating what has become known around the world as The Owl Theory, and he continues to stand behind his findings.
As a lifelong hunter, Pollard says his knowledge of animal tracks and bleeding patterns helped him identify that a barred owl is to blame for Kathleen Peterson’s death.
“People question why I spent so much time on this case, but I spent a lot of time uncovering evidence indicating that Mr. Peterson is an innocent man,” he said. “I’ve assembled what I believe is a very credible and truthful description of what actually happened to Mrs. Peterson and her demise.”
Pollard says that when he saw Kathleen Peterson’s autopsy photos after her death, he noticed something peculiar: The wounds on the back of her head looked like scratches — from talons, in fact.
“The first thing I said was ‘Those look like turkey tracks!’” Pollard said.
The details didn’t make sense to him at first, Pollard said, but he had gathered enough information by the end of Michael Peterson’s 2003 trial to confidently say that he believes a barred owl attacked Kathleen Peterson outside her home sometime after midnight on Dec. 9, 2001.
Kathleen Peterson then ran inside and tried to go upstairs for safety, Pollard theorizes, but her blood spilled onto her wooden steps, making them slippery.
Intoxicated by alcohol and a muscle relaxer (an autopsy report shows her blood alcohol level was .07, below the legal limit indicating intoxication in North Carolina), Peterson slipped and fell a couple times, Pollard says. The third time she slipped, Pollard believes she knocked her head into molding at the bottom of the staircase, which may have rendered her unconscious. She sat there in a pool of her own blood, which was where Michael Peterson found her later that evening, Pollard said. (Michael Peterson called 911 around 2:40 a.m. on Dec. 9.)
From his hunting experience, Pollard believes Kathleen Peterson was struck by the bird of prey outside the house — something the public continues to misunderstand, he said.
“Everyone always asks me, ‘How on earth did an owl get inside the house?’ Well, I never said it did,” Pollard said.
The ‘smoking feather’
A later-released State Bureau of Investigation report noted that Kathleen Peterson had a microscopic feather in her hair, helping Pollard’s argument that the owl’s razor sharp talons gruesomely lacerated her scalp.
“Owls are the only species of bird in the entire world that have microscopic feathers,” Pollard said. “That’s what I call my smoking feather!”
Pollard believes that an owl imprinted on reindeer lawn ornaments that the Petersons had outside their home for the holidays. Owls are commonly seen around the Durham neighborhood and sometimes kill dogs, he said, and he believes they lived inside the barn on the Peterson property where the reindeer were usually stored.
He thinks Kathleen Peterson moved the reindeer from inside the barn to her lawn that night, causing the owl to feel threatened and prompting an attack.
Could an owl have killed Kathleen Peterson?
The Owl Theory has never been tested in court, but in 2018, Peterson’s attorney David Rudolf (who argued in the 2003 trial that Kathleen Peterson died after falling down the stairs while inebriated) said the theory is plausible.
Michael Peterson feels empathy toward Pollard: “That man has suffered more than anybody, except me, during my trial and afterwards,” Peterson shared during an interview with The N&O last year. “He was ridiculed, dismissed as a lunatic. And then it came out oh, wait a minute, there might be more to this.”
The Audubon Society, a national bird conservation nonprofit, wrote in 2016 that experts say The Owl Theory is credible.
“After delving into the evidence, [executive director of Raptors of the Rockies Kate] Davis was convinced that an owl had attacked Kathleen Peterson, setting into motion the events that would lead to her death at the bottom of the stairs,” per The Audubon Society.
“She based her decision on the shape and placement of the victim’s wounds (a match to how the owl’s talons would strike), the timing of the attack (in December, when owls are mating and highly territorial), the presence of the tiny feather (owl feet are covered with them), and the force of the impact.”
Larry Pollard in HBO’s ‘Staircase’
The Larry Pollard character appears in several episodes of “The Staircase,” usually shown briefly as a supportive next-door neighbor to the Petersons.
That changes later in the season. Pollard’s Owl Theory is the primary focus of Episode 6, as Pollard presents his theory to “Staircase” editor (and Michael Peterson girlfriend) Sophie Brunet.
Together, Pollard and Brunet do more research on The Owl Theory and make connections to Kathleen Peterson’s autopsy.
Q&A with Larry Pollard of ‘HBO’s The Staircase’
We asked Pollard more about how he came up with The Owl Theory and about scenes from the new HBO series. His answers have been edited for brevity.
Q: Tell us more about your “ah-ha!” moment when thinking through The Owl Theory.
A: “They got the blood trail backwards. As soon as I realized that, everything else fell into place.
“I was in my basement, with my mounted deer heads everywhere, and one was over the mantle. I was watching television coverage of the trial that day, and I kept thinking ‘How in the world could the bird get inside the house?’ Everybody was asking me that too, and I said ‘I’ve never seen that.’ I kept looking at the deer, and the deer was looking down at me with great big rounded eyeballs, and I was in this trance thinking about it.
“I was talking to myself, saying, I remember the day I shot you ... I went to the spot where you were, and the age-old method of tracking a wounded animal is to go to the spot where you shot him, not where he ran to. Then you walk that line from where he was standing to where you shot him and where he entered the woods. It’s on that line you’ll find, pretty close to where you shot him, a hole. And he’ll be bleeding and you’ll have a drop of blood that’s usually no bigger than my fingernail. That one drop of blood tells you everything you need to know if you’re a deer hunter.”
Pollard continues: “The blood will come out, drop off and then you’ll look at where he went into the woods and you follow that line and you’ll find more drops, they’ll start coming faster. That’s the way you track the deer. You’ll follow him through the woods and you’ll see these spots of red. … He’ll run until he can’t go anymore. Then he bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. When he bleeds that much, there will be a puddle — big.
“I knew, when I saw that videotape, I said ‘Look at the way she’s sitting.’ She’s sitting on the floor. Michael may have moved her, but she didn’t fall down that staircase.”
How do you feel about being in the HBO series?
“I don’t feel elated, and I don’t feel upset. I haven’t had that much to do with filming.
“The director-producer, Antonio Campos, came to this office after Michael’s trial, and he talked to me about the owl. We’ve known the owl was going to be a part of his show.”
In the HBO series, Kathleen is shown diving into her swimming pool during a party and sustaining a neck injury, for which she wears a neck brace. Did that happen?
“She did fall into the pool, and she did wear a brace, but that was way before the death.”
In the HBO series, Larry’s character is shown buying just one reindeer lawn ornament at Peterson’s estate sale and paying $100 for it. Is that the way it happened?
“I bought them both on the same day. ... The day I came over there, I saw those wooden deer and said I wanted to buy them to decorate. ... They were pretty, you see them all the time in front of people’s houses — and they were dirt cheap! He was selling stuff for $15, $20.”
In the HBO series, the Peterson family stays with Larry and Brenda Pollard while police do their investigation inside the Peterson house. Did the family stay with you?
“Not at all. I knew him as a kind neighbor, but we didn’t have a friendship. In fact, he came to my house two, actually three, times before she died.
“The first time was when Brenda was running for secretary of state in 1996, we needed to get a press release out that she was going to run. I called him up and said, ‘Michael, you’re a good writer. Can you do a press release for us? Because I don’t write that well.’ He said ‘Sure!’ So he came over and sat in our living room and prepared the press release for her announcing her run.
“The second was to help me move something into my house. Peterson was really not a buddy of mine at all, he was a next door neighbor. I needed Mr. Peterson one day when I had a big box in the driveway. I called him and he came over immediately. ‘I’d be glad to come over and help you!’ … He came over, he was very cooperative, and it was something I appreciated.”
“The third was when we were having a football party cookout in my backyard, and Mike and Kathleen came to our house after they came back from a candidate forum at The Herald Sun’s office. It was a casual outdoor cookout, they didn’t even come inside the house that time.”
Brenda Pollard added: “And they walked back home hand in hand. Arm in arm.”
More on HBO’s ‘The Staircase’
For full coverage of HBO Max’s “The Staircase” and other background on the death of Kathleen Peterson and the murder trial of Michael Peterson, visit: newsobserver.com/topics/staircase
This story was originally published May 6, 2022 at 8:00 AM.
