Lestrade is a character here (played by Vincent Vermignon), as is his producer Denis Poncet (Frank Feys), which emphasizes that “The Staircase” has always been a story about the telling of stories-to a jury, to the press, to ourselves, to each other. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, who had won the Best Documentary Oscar for 2001’s “Murder on a Sunday Morning,” was intrigued by the idea of following another dubious case of Southern American jurisprudence and started filming his original “Staircase” before Peterson’s 2003 trial in North Carolina even had begun. Or is it? That’s been the question since Michael Peterson found his wife, Kathleen, at the bottom of a flight of stairs, or put her there, and launched a case that would serve as an autopsy of American justice. The story has surfaced and resurfaced for the better part of 20 years, but the latest version of “The Staircase” gets off to a rollicking start with that most engaging of plot devices-bloody murder.
