Michael was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1943 before moving to work for the U.S. Department of Defense after college. He later met his first wife Patricia Sue, an elementary school teacher, in West Germany. They wed in 1968 and had two boys together, Todd and Clayton.
After serving in the Vietnam War, he began to write novels and newspaper columns about his experiences following his honorable discharge in 1971.
Does Michael Peterson have a daughter?
Michael Peterson had five children and for a time, they were a close-knit family. His children included two sons, Todd and Clay, who were both Peterson’s biological sons from his first marriage, and three daughters, Margaret, Martha, and Caitlin. But The Staircase docuseries inadvertently followed the unspooling of their family ties.
Margaret and Martha, Peterson’s adopted daughters, were the children of a close family friend, Elizabeth Ratliff, who had also died after falling down a staircase. The case was eerily similar to what happened to Kathleen nearly two decades later.