CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In the more than two decades since Michael Peterson’s wife Kathleen was found at the bottom of a staircase in their Durham home, the plot has thickened over and over and over again, so often that the whole story probably should have long ago hardened into a big block of cement.
All these years later, however, North Carolina’s infamous true-crime saga keeps cranking out wildly unexpected twists and turns.
This month, the director of the acclaimed 2018 Netflix docuseries “The Staircase,” which entered the case into the national pop-cultural lexicon, alleged that the creator of a new “inspired-by-true-events” HBO Max limited series — which is also titled “The Staircase” and dramatizes both the case and the making of that docuseries — is unfairly depicting how his docuseries was made.