• 18 hours ago
20 20 2025 S03 E07

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Transcript
00:00:00Tonight, David Muir reporting.
00:00:02We take you inside two cases.
00:00:04A mother just 19 years old.
00:00:06She was trying to protect her daughter.
00:00:08She fought like hell.
00:00:09Another case is a beloved teacher.
00:00:11Her whole future ahead of her.
00:00:12Mysterious cold cases.
00:00:13It gets you chills even today.
00:00:15Yes.
00:00:16What links both of those cases
00:00:17is the cutting edge forensic technology
00:00:19inside this lab.
00:00:20It sounded like science fiction at the time.
00:00:22Can they be solved?
00:00:23You'll see it unfold right here
00:00:24as they unmask the killer in both cases.
00:00:27Watching The Killers.
00:00:28On tonight's 2020 The Code Breakers.
00:00:35Tonight we take you inside two cases.
00:00:38Two young women both brutally murdered in their homes.
00:00:41The killers in each case evading police for decades.
00:00:45In one case, a mother just 19 years old.
00:00:48She was engaged to be married.
00:00:50Her fiance, who was about to marry her,
00:00:54adopt her daughter, he gets home
00:00:56and he immediately notices something is wrong.
00:01:01There's blood smeared on the stairway.
00:01:05The killer had attacked her in the bedroom.
00:01:08There was handprints of her trying to hold the door closed
00:01:11and she just wasn't strong enough.
00:01:14Another case in Texas, a beloved teacher.
00:01:17Her whole future ahead of her.
00:01:19Drove in to Memphis.
00:01:22She just started a new school.
00:01:24She was loving, teaching her students.
00:01:27She was in a very good place.
00:01:29911, what's your emergency?
00:01:31What's going on?
00:01:33I've been murdered.
00:01:35What did your daughter do?
00:01:37She's been murdered.
00:01:39You remember walking in and what you discovered?
00:01:41I remember walking into the bathroom
00:01:43and seeing her body on the floor.
00:01:45She'd been handcuffed.
00:01:46That's correct.
00:01:47She had been handcuffed with her hands behind her back.
00:01:50There were about 36 different wounds on her body.
00:01:53She put up a fight.
00:01:55Of course, the question,
00:01:56who would want to kill each of these women?
00:01:58The mystery behind their murders
00:01:59would torment their loved ones for decades.
00:02:02They've got handprints, they've got footprints.
00:02:04Why are they not finding this person?
00:02:07It was like the talk of the town forever.
00:02:10And for the detectives who were working these cases,
00:02:13frustrating dead ends.
00:02:15There was also a suspicion,
00:02:16could it have been a member of law enforcement?
00:02:18Right, there was no forced entry,
00:02:20so our speculation was that it was somebody that she knew
00:02:22or somebody that presented a position of authority
00:02:24that could have garnered that trust
00:02:26to get inside the apartment.
00:02:27All of these questions lasted for years and years.
00:02:30Yes, yes.
00:02:34Both of these brutal murders were cold cases for decades.
00:02:38And what links both of those cases all of these years later
00:02:42is the cutting-edge forensic technology inside this lab.
00:02:46Tonight, you'll see it unfold right here
00:02:48as they unmask the killer in both cases.
00:02:58It's the first week of December 1988.
00:03:0019-year-old Kathy Swartz is home with her 9-month-old daughter.
00:03:04In Kathy's living room, a tree decorated,
00:03:06ready for the first Christmas for her little baby.
00:03:10She was living with Mike Warner.
00:03:12They were, you know, setting up their life,
00:03:14although he wasn't the father of the child.
00:03:17They were a couple, and they were trying to make their way.
00:03:21He definitely came in and kind of was her knight in shiny armor.
00:03:26They were a happy little family.
00:03:29Mike got up around 5, 30 in the morning for his job.
00:03:36He gets home at 3.30,
00:03:39and he immediately notices something is wrong.
00:03:43Things were in disarray.
00:03:46Blood up the banister,
00:03:49and then in the bedroom was Kathy,
00:03:53very bloody, unclothed mostly.
00:03:56He would later describe it as like the walls were painted with blood.
00:04:02Mike is so distressed, he immediately runs to a neighboring apartment
00:04:06because he can't bring himself to call the police.
00:04:10Mike does go back into the apartment to find her daughter.
00:04:14Kathy's baby, who's 9 months old,
00:04:17dressed in pants, a shirt.
00:04:19She has one sock on.
00:04:21Her diaper looks like it's been recently changed.
00:04:23She was standing up in the crib when Mike walked in.
00:04:29This is that baby left standing alone in that crib all those years ago.
00:04:34She's now 36 years old.
00:04:37How would your mother describe to you?
00:04:40Beautiful, happy-go-lucky.
00:04:43She did love, like, ACDC, Metallica.
00:04:48She was like a little rock and roll girl,
00:04:51and everybody tells me that I was like her whole world.
00:04:55So you were 16 years old when you read the police report?
00:04:59Mm-hmm.
00:05:01It was awful for somebody to die.
00:05:06It was awful for somebody to do what they did to her
00:05:10knowing I was in the crib right next door.
00:05:14I just couldn't believe that somebody could do that.
00:05:20So detectives had questioned at the time
00:05:23whether or not this suspect had changed the diaper.
00:05:26Yeah.
00:05:28When the police got there on scene, I was dry,
00:05:32I didn't have a dirty diaper on,
00:05:34and it was some hours I was alone.
00:05:40So one of the first things that investigators noticed
00:05:43is that there doesn't seem to be any sign of forced entry,
00:05:46which again suggests that she knew the person who came in and killed her.
00:05:51She was very good about locking her doors.
00:05:54I would call her and I would say, hey, I'm going to come over,
00:05:58and I would go to her door, it was locked, and I would knock,
00:06:02and she would, you know, who is it?
00:06:04And then she would let me in.
00:06:07We theorize that the assault started in the kitchen
00:06:11because in the kitchen there was passive blood drops on the floor,
00:06:16and then the smearing goes up the stairway to the upstairs bedroom.
00:06:23There are defensive wounds found on her hands.
00:06:27Her throat has been cut in multiple places.
00:06:30She's been strangled.
00:06:32She fought like hell.
00:06:36She was trying to protect her daughter, and she did.
00:06:42And the idea that this happened and you were just a couple of feet away.
00:06:46Yeah.
00:06:48It makes me mad that I wasn't old enough to help her.
00:06:53I'm 100% convinced she was trying to save her baby
00:06:58because I feel like she would have just ran outside and yelled,
00:07:02but I was upstairs,
00:07:04and she wasn't going to leave that apartment without me.
00:07:14In the bedroom where Kathy was found is a phone on the bed.
00:07:19The phone cord was cut, but on the phone there was Kathy's fingerprints,
00:07:25and then there was also an unknown fingerprint in blood.
00:07:30In 88, obviously, DNA was in its infancy.
00:07:34The fingerprint on the phone, how significant?
00:07:37Very significant because they were in actual blood, and it was not my mom's.
00:07:45There is a bloody footprint in the bathroom.
00:07:50It looks like the suspect took a shower after the murder
00:07:54to try to maybe wipe the blood off, clean up.
00:07:57But in the process of doing so,
00:07:59he left behind a left footprint size 9 in blood.
00:08:05And then the person left without being seen and without being discovered.
00:08:12It was very unsettling that something like that could happen.
00:08:19It just didn't make any sense. None of it made any sense.
00:08:25But when crime scene investigators pass through that gruesome scene again,
00:08:28this time with a new forensic light source,
00:08:31they find a new clue and one that was imperceptible to the naked eye.
00:08:37It was like a great big neon clue.
00:08:41It was like, holy smokes.
00:08:49South Lanes is a bowling alley in Three Rivers, Michigan.
00:08:53It's the social epicenter of this small town
00:08:56where Kathy Swartz's father ran the pro shop.
00:09:01Okay!
00:09:03After her brutal murder back in 1988,
00:09:06it also became a place that connected Kathy's daughter, Courtney, to her mother.
00:09:11I grew up in the bowling alley.
00:09:14I spent a lot of time there.
00:09:16I was raised by my grandparents.
00:09:18They tried to fill the void as much as they could.
00:09:23What were you told about your mother's absence when you were a little girl?
00:09:28About first grade,
00:09:31they had told me that a bad man had hurt my mom and she was up in heaven.
00:09:38And when it would thunderstorm,
00:09:40they would tell me that that was my mom up in heaven bowling a strike.
00:09:47So it was pretty cool watching the thunderstorms as I was little
00:09:51because I'm like, oh, she must be bowling pretty good today.
00:09:55Your mother's best friend, Jennifer, has told you a lot about your mom.
00:10:00Yes, she has.
00:10:04Kathy and I were very good friends.
00:10:07I've known her since grade school.
00:10:10So we've been friends a long time.
00:10:13Kathy was like somebody you could count on.
00:10:16She was a good listener, always there for you, just a, you know, good person.
00:10:23Childhood friends, Kathy and Jennifer,
00:10:25both of whom were very good friends.
00:10:29Childhood friends, Kathy and Jennifer,
00:10:31both found themselves pregnant as teenagers and formed an unbreakable bond.
00:10:35They would talk on the phone several times a day until December 2nd
00:10:39when Jennifer couldn't get a hold of her best friend.
00:10:44A police officer came to my apartment,
00:10:47and he asked me to go to the station.
00:10:51I remember him asking me questions, you know,
00:10:55do you know anybody that would want to hurt Kathy, along those lines.
00:11:00And I finally just was like, what's going on?
00:11:03Is Kathy okay?
00:11:06And he told me, and I just, I don't even remember.
00:11:17I know that the first thing out of my mouth was,
00:11:23is Courtney okay, where is Courtney?
00:11:28I do remember pictures of our first Christmas tree,
00:11:32and she had presents under there for me,
00:11:36but she never got to give them to me.
00:11:43We can see it's the pain you still carry with you.
00:11:48They were a young family just starting out.
00:11:51Kathy and Mike Warner had only been engaged about three weeks before her brutal death.
00:11:55And since he was the one who found her body,
00:11:58you know, of course police would have a lot of questions for him.
00:12:01When the police initially interviewed him,
00:12:04he had this kind of flat affect to his voice.
00:12:08He didn't seem to be all that upset that she was dead.
00:12:12He didn't get emotional, and that seemed very suspicious to police.
00:12:16I can't imagine, you know, walking into that scene,
00:12:21and what that does to somebody.
00:12:27There was polygraph examinations that were done with.
00:12:30We were able to verify that he was at work in Sturgis all day long,
00:12:34and there was no way he could have came back to Three Rivers to do it.
00:12:38I had no doubt in my mind that he didn't have anything to do with this.
00:12:42You know, I knew it in my heart. No, he loved her.
00:12:46She and Courtney were his world.
00:12:53I go by Judge Jeffrey Middleton now, but at the time of this,
00:12:57I was Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney.
00:13:00We would have maybe one homicide a year,
00:13:03not a young woman killed alone in her apartment during broad daylight.
00:13:07At that point, they were leaving no stone unturned.
00:13:12So the police department actually rented the apartment for a month after the crime
00:13:16just so that we could return and continue to look for clues and process.
00:13:22This is one of the first cases where they deployed alternative light sources.
00:13:28They went into the crime scene with a black light.
00:13:33On the refrigerator, they noticed two pieces of writing.
00:13:37Tallica was written on the refrigerator, and Harley was here.
00:13:43These were inexplicable writings that apparently had been erased.
00:13:47And we found that someone had written on her body,
00:13:51probably a magic marker on the inside of her thigh,
00:13:55and said, I was here, with an arrow pointing up toward her groin.
00:14:00That was not visible to the naked eye.
00:14:04And when detectives speak to Kathy's friends,
00:14:06they hear about an ex-boyfriend named Troy Schultes.
00:14:09It turns out he had a nickname, Harley, which of course got their attention.
00:14:13He was a huge fan of the band Metallica.
00:14:16In fact, he has a Harley Davidson decal on his truck.
00:14:19The truck was spotted outside Kathy's apartment that very afternoon of her murder.
00:14:24Well, that's who I told them to look at and to question.
00:14:29I know a lot of other people did, too.
00:14:32I don't know how to really describe it, but it was not good, really.
00:14:36They were not good together.
00:14:38And when they further look into him, he doesn't have an alibi for that afternoon.
00:14:42So he immediately becomes their number one suspect.
00:14:48They pick him up for questioning.
00:14:50Troy Schultes admitted that he was the one that wrote on the refrigerator
00:14:53and on the wall in the apartment,
00:14:55but he never admitted to writing it on her thigh.
00:14:59And he said, well, I didn't do it.
00:15:01Still, with no solid alibi for the night of the murder, police zero in on Troy.
00:15:06I thought, that's got to be it.
00:15:08Because, again, it's got to be somebody she knew, somebody she trusted.
00:15:12And before long, an arrest in the Kathy Schwartz case is announced.
00:15:15But if investigators think they've got their guy, a rude awakening is ahead.
00:15:21Kathy Schwartz's daughter, Courtney,
00:15:23the baby left standing in her crib after her mother was brutally murdered,
00:15:26is a mother herself now.
00:15:28Why are you breaking everything?
00:15:31She and her four children have stayed in Three Rivers, Michigan,
00:15:34finding comfort in a mother that she lost when she was just a baby.
00:15:42I do bring the kids home.
00:15:44I do bring the kids out here for, like, holidays, her birthday.
00:15:47But I also do come out here a lot by myself, too.
00:15:56Back in 1988, police believe they found the perpetrator
00:15:59who brutally murdered Courtney's mother,
00:16:01the man whose nickname was scrawled across her refrigerator,
00:16:04her ex-boyfriend, Troy Schultes.
00:16:06You know, you look at that and you think,
00:16:08well, that's a pretty good name for a guy who's been around for a long time.
00:16:12You know, you look at that and you think,
00:16:14well, that's somebody leaving a calling card behind that they were there.
00:16:18Without any kind of solid alibi and now under a cloud of suspicion,
00:16:22Troy is arrested, he's charged, and he pleads not guilty.
00:16:26We had the fingerprints,
00:16:28but we also had a sample of blood that was left behind.
00:16:32We believe because Kathy fought back
00:16:34that whoever the killer was had sustained an injury,
00:16:37and Troy's blood type did not match.
00:16:40They take fingerprints and footprints from him,
00:16:43and those prints also do not match.
00:16:45So the charges were dismissed.
00:16:48As it turns out, he was wrongfully arrested and wrongfully charged.
00:16:54So with the investigation now back at square one,
00:16:57the Three Rivers Police Department,
00:16:59they refocused on matching the fingerprint and the footprint
00:17:02found at the crime scene to the killer.
00:17:04We had fingerprinted and footprinted so many individuals
00:17:07that had been living in Three Rivers at that time,
00:17:10and none of them were a match.
00:17:12I thought we would solve this quickly.
00:17:15So the first month passed, we didn't know,
00:17:18three months passed, a year passed, and it wasn't solved.
00:17:22Police even looked at similar crimes
00:17:24that had taken place elsewhere in the area.
00:17:27They took fingerprints, footprints.
00:17:29There was no match.
00:17:31And the case got colder and colder.
00:17:34And as DNA technology improves,
00:17:36law enforcement, they continue to work the case.
00:17:40We fast forward to 2012.
00:17:43We're going over the evidence again.
00:17:45The fingerprint that they had found on the phone
00:17:47was in the suspect's blood,
00:17:49and it was still in viable condition
00:17:51to obtain a DNA profile from that.
00:17:54And we enter it into CODIS,
00:17:56and we think, that's going to give us a hit.
00:17:58And, of course, it doesn't.
00:18:00As the years continue to pass,
00:18:02the mystery and the collateral damage
00:18:04for this whole community only grew.
00:18:07The town was haunted by this.
00:18:09Did you feel the eyes of the town on you as you were growing up?
00:18:13Yes, and I was the baby,
00:18:15so, like, everybody wanted to take care of the baby.
00:18:19And, you know, like, it's still that way.
00:18:23When you don't have answers,
00:18:25you just have questions all the time.
00:18:28But it definitely changed me.
00:18:31It really changed me.
00:18:33I slept with a machete under my mattress for years.
00:18:37So every December 2nd represents another year
00:18:41without justice for Courtney and her grandparents.
00:18:44Today the family is together
00:18:46remembering Cathy on the anniversary of her death.
00:18:49It's hard.
00:18:51Real hard.
00:18:53I felt a certain point
00:18:56that I wasn't sure that they would ever find out.
00:19:01Probably right there, before she died.
00:19:04It's been 25 years,
00:19:06but remembering hasn't gotten any easier for David Swartz.
00:19:11I think, yeah, probably the worst thing for me is why.
00:19:17Why? Why did it have to happen like that?
00:19:30When you look at these kinds of cases around the country,
00:19:33there is generally an investigator or a detective
00:19:36who never gives up.
00:19:38Yes.
00:19:39And in this case, it was Jeffrey Middleton.
00:19:41Yes. He is a great guy.
00:19:44What was it, do you think,
00:19:46that kept him going on this case for so long?
00:19:49He was young, just starting out,
00:19:51and this was really the only cold case in our town.
00:19:59I spent more time on this case
00:20:02than any other case in my entire career.
00:20:05Sometimes in later years, I would pretend I was on vacation
00:20:09and lock myself in the library and just go through this file.
00:20:13As Courtney got older, she would call me sometimes
00:20:18and ask if I knew anything, and I never had any answers.
00:20:23Police have DNA, fingerprints, and a lot of physical evidence.
00:20:27What they don't have is the person who murdered
00:20:29a 19-year-old Three Rivers woman in 1988.
00:20:33Here's a lot of the evidence right from property.
00:20:36Eventually, the Three Rivers Police Department
00:20:38decided to partner with the Michigan State Police.
00:20:41They're convinced that with advances in DNA testing technology,
00:20:44that the Kathy Swartz case can finally be solved.
00:20:48In Kathy's case, we had DNA that was in CODIS,
00:20:51and we had not gotten a match.
00:20:53We had exhausted the fingerprints,
00:20:55and these things, which normally get us a hit, did not.
00:20:58So I honestly felt like the genetic genealogy
00:21:01was our only chance for solving this case.
00:21:07And then three years ago,
00:21:09Authram, a forensics lab in Texas, now enters the picture.
00:21:13A promising something everyone close to the Kathy Swartz case
00:21:16has waited decades for, answers.
00:21:19Authram uses DNA technology to help identify victims
00:21:23and perpetrators when law enforcement cannot.
00:21:26They knew that it was an unknown male contributor to that DNA,
00:21:30but they didn't know who it was.
00:21:32All these years later, they said, well, look at this
00:21:34and see if there's something you can do with it.
00:21:36And you were convinced you could?
00:21:38We were absolutely certain that we could help
00:21:40the Michigan State Police work this case.
00:21:42They said, we'll get you a lead back.
00:21:44We're not going to guarantee that it's the lead,
00:21:46but we'll get you a lead.
00:21:48They had over 1,000 suspects.
00:21:50It was our breakthrough.
00:22:06In 2022, a package containing DNA,
00:22:09that single bloody fingerprint from Kathy Swartz's pink phone,
00:22:12arrives right here at this building just north of Houston.
00:22:15To the outsider, it looks like just another office building,
00:22:18but what's actually happening inside, in these labs,
00:22:21is now changing how investigations across this country are being solved.
00:22:26This is the headquarters of Authram,
00:22:28a cutting-edge forensics lab that's been mentioned
00:22:30in some of today's most talked-about criminal investigations.
00:22:36And Authram has been credited by law enforcement
00:22:38with helping to solve cases that have been unsolvable for years now.
00:22:42Hi, it's good to see you. Good to see you.
00:22:44How are you? Thank you. Welcome to Authram.
00:22:47David and Kristin Middleman are the husband-and-wife team behind all of this.
00:22:50Everything you see on our right side will be forensic.
00:22:54Everything you see on the left side will be research.
00:22:57Not every case is suitable for DNA testing right now.
00:23:00Burned remains, exploded remains, really difficult to make sure.
00:23:04But we hope that one day we live in a world
00:23:06where every case can be suitable for DNA testing.
00:23:09So you'll hold on to remains for a while and keep trying.
00:23:11We don't give up ever.
00:23:13The Middleman's partnership, both in work and in life,
00:23:16actually began over a few blind mice.
00:23:19It's the year 2000. You've just started your Ph.D. at Baylor.
00:23:22You're doing a study on mice.
00:23:24I was.
00:23:25And there was another young scientist.
00:23:27David, yep.
00:23:28So our projects collided, and he actually cured my blind mice.
00:23:33So I thought, wow, if this guy can do that, I think I'll marry him.
00:23:38David Middleman had worked in biomedical research for years
00:23:41before realizing that law enforcement was relying
00:23:43on a limited form of DNA testing.
00:23:45He knew that better technology was available,
00:23:47but said it just wasn't being widely used out there.
00:23:50It sounded like science fiction at the time,
00:23:52this way you could take decades-old DNA,
00:23:56put it into a genealogy database,
00:23:58build a family tree for your suspect,
00:24:00and then that takes you right to his door.
00:24:02That was pretty amazing.
00:24:04You start to think, wow,
00:24:05this is really an unused tool here for law enforcement.
00:24:07Yeah.
00:24:08They thought wrong that there were tools available,
00:24:11and yet there was this piling up backlog of cases that were unsolved.
00:24:15So at one point, you turn to Kristen,
00:24:17and you say, I want to start my own lab.
00:24:19His words were, let's build a forensic lab of the future.
00:24:22And my words were, what?
00:24:26Who's going to give you evidence?
00:24:28You thought from the very beginning,
00:24:29who's going to trust us with this?
00:24:31100%.
00:24:32I said it.
00:24:33I don't think people will come.
00:24:34And he said, well, I'm going to build it, and we're going to see.
00:24:38Within a year, he was solving cases almost every week.
00:24:42And the more cold cases they closed, the more publicity they got.
00:24:47And police departments around the world started sending them cases.
00:24:50It's just grown exponentially.
00:24:52In terms of publicly announced solves,
00:24:55Authram is number one in the world.
00:24:57That includes homicides, rapes, unidentified bodies
00:25:01that they've been able to give names to.
00:25:03And Authram's reputation now for cracking these cold cases
00:25:06using DNA evidence and forensic genetic genealogy
00:25:09is what actually led Michigan detectives
00:25:11to send that 30-year-old DNA to this lab.
00:25:14In the Kathy Swartz case,
00:25:16this DNA was how old when it got here from that pink phone?
00:25:19It was decades old.
00:25:21And in spite of being so old,
00:25:23the DNA was still intact and usable for testing.
00:25:25So you knew right away this was suitable,
00:25:27and this was just his DNA, the suspect's?
00:25:30Why is DNA the suspect's?
00:25:32Yeah, the DNA was a single unknown male contributor.
00:25:35It's a small sample, but in spite of that,
00:25:37there's anywhere from hundreds to thousands of cells worth of DNA.
00:25:40So if you touch David's hand, how much DNA,
00:25:43how many cells have you left there?
00:25:45Hundreds, hundreds of cells.
00:25:47Hundreds of cells on his hand,
00:25:49and sometimes you're dealing with 10, 15.
00:25:51Even less.
00:25:53From years ago and still able to solve the case.
00:25:55It's a very, very sensitive technology.
00:25:59In this Kathy Swartz case,
00:26:01you've chemically labeled all the different parts of the DNA
00:26:04in this room right here, and what do you do with it from there?
00:26:07It is now ready to actually be read.
00:26:09This particular DNA sequencer
00:26:11is one of the most powerful sequencers on Earth.
00:26:14This here, the green? Yes.
00:26:16Give me a comparison to what authorities used to have to deal with.
00:26:19What would the DNA sequence reveal
00:26:21versus what you can reveal with the DNA sequencing from this machine now?
00:26:24Sure, so for the last 30 years,
00:26:26people have used a different kind of DNA testing technology
00:26:29that can measure 20 data points in the DNA.
00:26:32This machine actually can read out the entire sequence.
00:26:35So whereas you might get 20 data points
00:26:37in the earlier versions of this technology,
00:26:39this machine could give you anywhere
00:26:41from 100,000 to a million data points.
00:26:43100,000 to a million?
00:26:45100,000 to a million data points.
00:26:47So now that you have this sequencing
00:26:49that they just didn't have access to years ago,
00:26:51in this particular case, for example,
00:26:53what do you then do with that?
00:26:55If you've got a file that comes out
00:26:57that might have 100,000 to a million DNA markers,
00:27:00you can do a lot more, including genetic genealogy
00:27:03and that search for distant relatives.
00:27:05You're taking what in many cases
00:27:07is a very old DNA sample from these cold cases.
00:27:10You're expanding the DNA sequence,
00:27:12but you're also able to take that information now
00:27:15and put it up against vast public data now
00:27:18because families and relatives and third cousins and fourth cousins
00:27:21have put all of this information out there,
00:27:23it would seem that this might unlock cold cases everywhere.
00:27:26Correct.
00:27:28At that point, Authorum's in-house genealogy team
00:27:31takes over to build a family tree
00:27:34for the suspected killer of Kathy Swartz.
00:27:37These types of crimes going unsolved
00:27:39have a ripple effect across society,
00:27:41not just the victim and the family not having answers,
00:27:44but the law enforcement that worked the case for decades
00:27:47consumed by a case they can't solve.
00:27:51Finding those investigators and then gaining their trust
00:27:54is what Authorum says has been critical to their success
00:27:57in helping to crack these cases.
00:27:59In those early years, you have no background in law enforcement.
00:28:03Are you essentially making cold calls to police stations?
00:28:06I spent my time almost exclusively talking to law enforcement.
00:28:09You live in Texas, and you know if you want to land a case in Texas,
00:28:13you've got to get to the Texas Rangers.
00:28:15But how did you convince them that we've got a tool here?
00:28:18Well, the one that I've done the most work with is Ranger Brandon Bess.
00:28:24Brandon Bess is almost out of central casting for a Texas Ranger.
00:28:28He's this imposing man with his white hat.
00:28:32When David Middleman founded Authorum, nobody had heard of them,
00:28:36and when Bess visited in 2019, he was really kind of taken aback.
00:28:41David walks in this room, and it's to speak to David's confidence
00:28:45in that he's wearing a T-shirt that's about two sizes too small.
00:28:48He's wearing jeans that have holes in them.
00:28:51It looks like he hadn't slept in 14 days, his hair standing up.
00:28:55I have instant respect for him because I can tell this is a guy that doesn't give up.
00:29:00Bess came away impressed.
00:29:02He heard about the opportunity to solve a cold case,
00:29:06and he thought, let's team up.
00:29:08And he had one case in mind.
00:29:10They told me it was the most heinous thing that had ever happened
00:29:13that was unsolved in Beaumont.
00:29:15That other case, that young schoolteacher, 31-year-old Catherine Edwards.
00:29:26What was unique about this case?
00:29:28The victim was a schoolteacher, well-liked by everyone,
00:29:32and there was no sign of forced entry.
00:29:35So this was a very odd situation. It just didn't add up.
00:29:38This is a crime of violence, a crime of passion, a crime of control.
00:29:43It gives you chills even today.
00:29:45Even today, yes, even today.
00:29:47Either it was someone that she knew or someone that presented themselves as an officer.
00:29:51It was almost like whispered in the hallways, it could be one of our own.
00:29:55So on January 14, 1995,
00:29:58the Beaumont Police Department gets a 911 call
00:30:01from a man at a townhouse in West Beaumont.
00:30:08Oh, Jesus!
00:30:11Oh, my God!
00:30:13Oh, my God!
00:30:15Oh, my God!
00:30:17Oh, my God!
00:30:19Oh, my God!
00:30:21Oh, Jesus!
00:30:25911, what's your emergency?
00:30:27Get me the police, please.
00:30:30He had found his daughter in the second-floor bathroom,
00:30:33slumped over the tub.
00:30:35Okay, ma'am, what's going on there?
00:30:37Our daughter has been murdered.
00:30:39Okay, what happened, ma'am?
00:30:41We came over here and found her.
00:30:43She's handcuffed, she's been tortured.
00:30:45Please, we're sending someone. Don't hang up, okay?
00:30:49Okay, is there anyone else in the house?
00:30:51Her husband is here with me, and we found her.
00:30:55That woman was Catherine Edwards,
00:30:57and she's a teacher at a local elementary school.
00:31:02She was supposed to have plans with her sister and family for lunch.
00:31:05When she didn't respond by phone call,
00:31:08they went by her house and found that her car was still there.
00:31:13Got inside the house with a key.
00:31:16Her father said he grabbed her and pulled her over
00:31:20and rolled her over to look and see if there's anything he could do.
00:31:24He was crying hysterically.
00:31:27Please, get water.
00:31:33To listen to the emotion in those calls,
00:31:36you know, just gut-wrenching.
00:31:38In my 30-plus years, I'd never heard anything like it.
00:31:42Dad covers her with a towel. Police show up.
00:31:45There's one officer by the name of Carmen Brown.
00:31:48She shows up first, and she secures the crime scene.
00:31:52And that officer, Carmen Brown Apples,
00:31:54has the memory of her entering Catherine Edwards' townhouse
00:31:57has played over and over again in her mind for decades.
00:32:01You remember walking in and what you discovered?
00:32:03I remember walking in and going up the stairs,
00:32:06looking first into the bedroom that was in the house.
00:32:11The bedroom that was very much in disarray.
00:32:15What did you find as far as the bedroom and the bathroom?
00:32:20The bedroom, there was a...
00:32:22It looked like there had been some type of tussle in there.
00:32:25Things had been knocked around.
00:32:27Sheets were partially torn off.
00:32:29A portion of the bedpost had come off.
00:32:33And then walking into the bathroom...
00:32:37...and seeing her body on the floor.
00:32:40She'd been handcuffed.
00:32:42That's correct.
00:32:43She had been handcuffed with her hands behind her back.
00:32:48When her mother said her name...
00:32:50Yes.
00:32:51...you thought, I know her.
00:32:53I know her. I went to college with her.
00:32:55We were in sororities together.
00:32:57She was so full of life and so friendly and so nice.
00:33:01That just always stuck with me.
00:33:04To come to the scene and then suddenly realize it was Mary Catherine,
00:33:09it just knocked me for a minute.
00:33:12It gives you chills even today.
00:33:14Even today. Yes, even today.
00:33:19She is not your typical victim by any stretch of the circumstance.
00:33:24It was an extremely unusual case.
00:33:34Catherine and her twin sister Allison grew up in Beaumont.
00:33:38They were part of a close-knit Presbyterian family.
00:33:42They both attended Forest Park High School
00:33:45and then Lamar University, which is in Beaumont.
00:33:48And they both became schoolteachers
00:33:50at the Beaumont Independent School District.
00:33:53Catherine and her sister were extremely close.
00:33:56When you talk about Mary Catherine and talk about Allison
00:33:59and look at them, I mean, they are identical twins.
00:34:02You can't tell them apart.
00:34:04They both had students come up to each other in the grocery store
00:34:07thinking they were the other twin.
00:34:09Investigators learned that her sister Allison was likely the last person,
00:34:13aside from the killer, obviously, to see Catherine alive.
00:34:16Allison would tell detectives that her twin sister
00:34:19arrived at her house after work to pick up her beloved beagle, Maggie.
00:34:23She came by, visited with her sister, went home.
00:34:27From what we can tell, she'd had a glass of wine
00:34:31and just kind of was relaxing and about to go to bed.
00:34:35And I think the last time she was heard from
00:34:38was about 8 o'clock that night.
00:34:41One of the neighbors told police
00:34:44that he heard someone clomping down the stairs
00:34:47overnight on the night of January 13th.
00:34:51There was a 12-year-old boy and his dad that were staying with some friends
00:34:55that were right next door to Catherine Edwards' townhome.
00:34:58He heard somebody run down the stairs and then a door slam,
00:35:01and a little while later a car sped off with loud music.
00:35:07There were some other neighbors that heard some loud banging.
00:35:10It lasted for 60 to 90 seconds.
00:35:13And they said they never heard a scream,
00:35:15so they just figured that something else might have been going on.
00:35:18They had no idea that there was a murder taking place next door.
00:35:21Crime scene investigators found that there was no sign of forced entry,
00:35:26which is significant because either meant that Catherine had kept her door unlocked
00:35:30or had potentially recognized her killer and let him in.
00:35:36Of course in these cases it's standard procedure for investigators
00:35:39to look at those closest to the victim,
00:35:41and really from the beginning her ex-boyfriend is seen as a prime suspect.
00:35:45But critical evidence from the scene actually points in a different direction.
00:35:49The crime scene investigators at the time
00:35:52also collected a lot of evidence from the house,
00:35:54and one of those pieces of evidence being the bedspread.
00:35:58Investigators found semen on Catherine's bedspread and from the rape kit.
00:36:06We've got some DNA here. Now we've just got to match it.
00:36:10The DNA actually doesn't match her ex-boyfriend,
00:36:12and he's now cleared in the case.
00:36:14And there are no matches to the DNA in CODIS,
00:36:16which is the National Criminal Offender DNA database either.
00:36:20Police were really stumped.
00:36:21They tried every avenue they could think of,
00:36:24but every avenue hit a dead end.
00:36:29One of their initial theories was that the killer
00:36:32had some sort of law enforcement background.
00:36:36The handcuffs were Smith & Wesson.
00:36:38That's a popular brand with law enforcement.
00:36:40They were trying everything they could think of.
00:36:42They really did.
00:36:43They went and tracked down sales of handcuffs in this area, receipts.
00:36:48All members of the Beaumont Police Department were tested.
00:36:50There were no matches.
00:36:52It kind of sent a panic through the community.
00:36:54You know, if this can happen to somebody in a really quiet part of town,
00:36:58could it happen to them kind of thing?
00:37:01It went from a rumor to just spreading like wildfire throughout the community.
00:37:06Everybody wanted to know, was this a one-time deal?
00:37:09Was this a serial killer?
00:37:13The case would go cold for decades,
00:37:15and obviously it's just one of hundreds of thousands
00:37:18of unsolved murders in this country.
00:37:20But then in 2020, two investigators,
00:37:23Ranger Brandon Bess and Beaumont Police Detective Aaron Llewellyn,
00:37:26decided to take a fresh look at the case.
00:37:28At the time, Bess had just been connected with this new lab called Authram,
00:37:32and Detective Llewellyn knows that there's DNA
00:37:34that's actually available to test in this case.
00:37:38But when Brandon first sent Authram to me,
00:37:40right then and there, I'm like, let's make this happen.
00:37:42We believed that was going to be our only hope.
00:37:44The last hope for answers, the DNA evidence from the murder
00:37:47of that elementary school teacher, Catherine Edwards,
00:37:49is now headed to Authram for testing.
00:37:51Bloody fingerprint left on a phone and a footprint.
00:37:54And in the case of that Michigan mom, Kathy Swartz,
00:37:57what new lead is about to be uncovered right behind this glass?
00:38:01You'll see right here tonight how both cases are about to crack wide open,
00:38:05sending investigators across this country
00:38:07to find the killers they've been searching for for decades.
00:38:12The person that did it was in the 10,000 pages of police reports.
00:38:17You have all these puzzle pieces, but if they don't all fit together,
00:38:22you don't see the picture.
00:38:24I want you to think about the next words that come out of your mouth.
00:38:27I want you to think very hard about that.
00:38:29We felt like we had a home run right then and there.
00:38:32And they said he was like a godly man down there.
00:38:38I was like, wow, we're going to get some answers.
00:38:53Tonight, two horrible murders.
00:38:55I just felt awful.
00:38:59And now a survivor who lived to tell.
00:39:01I was just like, I can't tell him.
00:39:04I'll never tell anybody what happened.
00:39:08What did your daughter do?
00:39:10He's been murdered!
00:39:12It gives you chills even today.
00:39:14Even today.
00:39:16That someone had written on her body, on the inside of her thigh,
00:39:19and said, I was here.
00:39:22But only one way to solve it after years of going cold.
00:39:25I honestly felt that genetic genealogy was our only chance.
00:39:29All these years later, they said, well, look at this
00:39:31and see if there's something you can do with it.
00:39:33It's his fingerprint.
00:39:35It's his bare bloody footprint.
00:39:37And it's his DNA.
00:39:38It turned into a massacre.
00:39:41The floor goes out from under you.
00:39:43It was like, no way.
00:39:45This cannot be happening.
00:39:47He said, your sister's dead.
00:39:49Your sister's dead.
00:39:51There's two people that know that story.
00:39:53You're one of them and she's the other.
00:39:55And she can't talk.
00:39:57Without the DNA, the story doesn't matter.
00:39:59That the two of them were able to go back and look at that evidence.
00:40:02Yes.
00:40:03From when you were a nine-month-old baby.
00:40:05Yes.
00:40:06In the crib, just a few feet from your mother.
00:40:08And there was a moment like, this is our guy.
00:40:12For some families, you are the last hope.
00:40:33No!
00:40:46Courtney Swartz's childhood was clouded in mystery.
00:40:51She was the sole survivor.
00:40:53She was just a baby at the time during a vicious attack
00:40:56that left her 19-year-old mother, Cathy Swartz,
00:40:58strangled and stabbed to death right near her.
00:41:02Among the clues left behind at the scene,
00:41:04a single bloody fingerprint on Cathy's pink phone.
00:41:07It contained DNA of the possible killer.
00:41:10But, of course, the question for decades,
00:41:12who was the killer?
00:41:15For years, you were haunted by that question.
00:41:17Yeah.
00:41:18Growing up, most kids, you know, they look at people
00:41:21and they don't have to think,
00:41:24is that the man that killed your mom?
00:41:27And everybody that I met,
00:41:30that's the first thing that would pop into my mind.
00:41:40This is the original file from 1988.
00:41:44When you have your files in Sokol case,
00:41:46the killer's name, it's in there somewhere.
00:41:49The profilers really believed that whoever it was
00:41:52would return and return to her gravesite.
00:41:55And for years, that was part of our initial officer,
00:41:58our rookie training program was,
00:42:00this is Cathy Swartz's gravesite.
00:42:02If you see somebody at that gravesite,
00:42:05you need to stop and identify them
00:42:07because they could be a prime suspect in the murder.
00:42:21More than 1,000 miles from Three Rivers, Michigan,
00:42:23we're right here on the Neches River in Beaumont, Texas,
00:42:26where another family, heartbroken for decades,
00:42:29the community wondering,
00:42:30do they too have a killer in their midst?
00:42:33After the brutal murder of a young elementary school teacher,
00:42:36Catherine Edwards, she was just 31,
00:42:39and detectives here wondering,
00:42:40would they ever have the tools to solve this case?
00:42:45You know that every day that you don't solve that crime
00:42:47is a day that you're not going to be able
00:42:50to bring that perpetrator to justice.
00:42:52This certainly is a scene that has always stayed with me.
00:42:55And you retired, and when you left the force,
00:42:57at that point, it had not been solved.
00:42:59That's correct.
00:43:00Every now and then, someone would dust off the case file
00:43:03and start looking at it with fresh eyes,
00:43:06and I always thought, maybe this time something will spark
00:43:11and we'll catch whoever did this.
00:43:15It would turn out that spark,
00:43:16the one that would finally reignite the whole investigation
00:43:19into the murder of Catherine Edwards,
00:43:21was actually coming,
00:43:22thanks to a major leap forward in forensic technology.
00:43:34In 2020, a courier drops off a package at Authram's office,
00:43:40and inside are a sample of the bedspread
00:43:46from Catherine Edwards' apartment,
00:43:49a vial of DNA taken from the posthumous rape kit.
00:43:52Authram technicians take a look,
00:43:54and they build a genetic profile of their suspect.
00:43:58Investigators now have a human profile
00:44:01that can actually be searched in public databases
00:44:03to try to find possible family members across this country.
00:44:06And to do that, you need a genealogist to connect the dots.
00:44:10And Beaumont detective Aaron Llewellyn
00:44:12didn't have to look far for help.
00:44:14Aaron Llewellyn knew one who would work the case for free,
00:44:17and that was his wife, Tina.
00:44:18I remember sitting at the table one night
00:44:20and getting really frustrated trying to map all this out.
00:44:23And she's like, let me help.
00:44:24Actually, just move over. I got this.
00:44:26Tina doesn't ask.
00:44:29Tina Llewellyn was a detective in the Beaumont Auto Crimes Division,
00:44:34and she had an amateur interest in genealogy.
00:44:39I remember dozing off one night, and I wake up,
00:44:41and she's got lines going here and lines going there.
00:44:43So now, along with the middlemen from the Authram Forensic Laboratory,
00:44:47we've got two husband-wife teams actually working the case
00:44:50of this elementary school teacher, Catherine Edwards.
00:44:52And soon, another critical partner joins the hunt.
00:44:59When Tina Llewellyn is looking through the matches to their suspect,
00:45:05these are distant relatives of the suspected killer,
00:45:08she notices that a lot of them are enclustered
00:45:10in Cajun country in Louisiana.
00:45:13And the same contact name keeps popping up,
00:45:17this woman named Cheryl LaPointe.
00:45:19I was sitting at my desk one day, and I got a phone call.
00:45:22He said, I'm Detective Erin Llewellyn from the Beaumont Police Department.
00:45:26Your email is attached to one of the matches
00:45:31that we have to the person of interest.
00:45:34Cheryl LaPointe just happens to be a professional genealogist
00:45:37with experience working in criminal cases.
00:45:39She also has Cajun ancestry.
00:45:42Cajuns, back to the late 1700s,
00:45:45we were a small population who came to south Louisiana.
00:45:49And so, they married their neighbors,
00:45:52who was usually their relatives also.
00:45:55Cajun ancestry is notoriously complicated and complex
00:46:01to perform genealogical work on.
00:46:04I knew it was going to be a challenge from the start.
00:46:06We spent hours and hours and hours on the phone talking to each other.
00:46:13Probably no less than five times a day.
00:46:15A friendship quickly forms as the two women spend the next three months
00:46:18building a family tree around the suspect's DNA,
00:46:21using every record they can find,
00:46:23a combination of Internet research and good old-fashioned library archives.
00:46:28A lot of newspaper articles.
00:46:29A lot of newspaper articles.
00:46:31Obituaries.
00:46:32Census records.
00:46:33I remember I got to a couple in Beaumont,
00:46:36and there are yearbook records of two sons that that couple had.
00:46:42And the first one we came across, he was the right age.
00:46:45He went to the same high school with our victim.
00:46:48Aaron goes and does research and finds out that he had a criminal history from here,
00:46:53and it was a prior sexual assault that had occurred in 1981.
00:46:57And there was a moment like, oh, this is our guy.
00:47:00And the details of that assault set off alarm bells for detectives.
00:47:04There were a lot of similarities in that case that mimicked Katherine Edwards' case.
00:47:08The victim's hands were bound behind her back.
00:47:10She was sexually assaulted.
00:47:11We felt like we had a home run right then and there.
00:47:14Suddenly they realized that this suspect had a second victim.
00:47:17The difference this time, the victim survived and lived to tell.
00:47:21He started telling me that he was training to become a policeman and stuff.
00:47:26He was like, I'll just take you home.
00:47:29I don't know why, but I believed him.
00:47:43So all these years later, investigators in the Katherine Edwards case,
00:47:46the schoolteacher who was brutally murdered,
00:47:48now think there might have been a second victim of the suspect who is still alive, Paula Bledsoe Ramsey.
00:47:56I was 19.
00:47:58There was a new country western bar that opened up.
00:48:03I really didn't want to go that night, but I'd promised the other girls that I would go.
00:48:09I decided I wanted to leave.
00:48:12I was done. I wanted to get home.
00:48:15The parking lot was mud, and my car was stuck in the mud.
00:48:20I just thought, I'll just walk to the gas station and call my mom.
00:48:27She says a man offered her a ride home.
00:48:31He said his brother's name, and then he said where he went to high school.
00:48:35And then he said, do you go to Forest Park?
00:48:38And I was like, yeah.
00:48:40And then he started telling me that he was training to become a policeman and stuff.
00:48:44So then he was like, I'll just take you home.
00:48:49And I don't know why, but, you know, I just, I believed him.
00:48:57She realized very quickly that that man wasn't driving in the direction of her home.
00:49:02He started off being very nice.
00:49:05The thing I know, we're at this field.
00:49:09And then his whole demeanor changed.
00:49:12He drove her to a nearby park, threatened her with a knife,
00:49:16tied her hands behind her back, and raped her in the backseat of the car.
00:49:20Then he dropped her off at her house.
00:49:28I just felt awful and shameful.
00:49:34I was just like, I can't tell him.
00:49:38I'll never tell anybody what happened.
00:49:42I don't know. I was kind of like, I don't know if anybody would believe me.
00:49:46You know, is it my fault? Was it my fault?
00:49:54Paula said she summoned the courage about a week later to tell police what had happened.
00:49:59They would soon tell her that they identified the man who attacked her.
00:50:02And it turns out he wasn't a police trainee.
00:50:04He was a 21-year-old salesman in Beaumont.
00:50:07He said, yeah, I did it. I just got carried away.
00:50:10She said that the prosecutor talked to her, said, you know, this is his first offense.
00:50:14We want to plead him to an aggravated assault.
00:50:18She didn't understand what that meant other than he was pleading to a felony and for assaulting her.
00:50:23And so she agreed to the plea bargain agreement.
00:50:26I think today they take it more serious than they did back then.
00:50:31I wanted him to be punished.
00:50:36I think I was just pushing everything down and just trying to focus on life.
00:50:48Hey, good. How are you?
00:50:49Ranger West.
00:50:50Brandon. Good to see you.
00:50:51Yes, sir. Pleasure.
00:50:52So when you looked at what had happened in 1981 with this sexual assault,
00:50:55you thought there's a lot here that seems awfully close to the Catherine Edwards case.
00:50:59I did.
00:51:01It turns out that the man who pleaded guilty in that 1981 case is a man by the name of Clayton Foreman.
00:51:07This is the same name that turned up in Tina and Chera's genealogy hunt.
00:51:11He was one of two brothers from the family tree that they actually put together.
00:51:15And you might be wondering why his name never surfaced before.
00:51:19You have to remember that this case was back in 1981,
00:51:22and DNA collection wasn't even a thing by law enforcement. It was still a decade away.
00:51:26This is how he eluded detectives at the time.
00:51:28He essentially got away scot-free.
00:51:34As investigators get closer to solving this mystery,
00:51:36they begin to learn more about Clayton Foreman's background.
00:51:39And in a twist in this case,
00:51:41one of the things they learned is that Clayton Foreman, the suspect,
00:51:44actually went to the same school as Catherine Edwards, the woman who was killed.
00:51:49In fact, they probably walked down the same hallways here at school.
00:51:52And there was something else.
00:51:54Catherine Edwards was actually friends with the suspect's first wife.
00:51:58In fact, Catherine Edwards was a bridesmaid at their wedding.
00:52:04Investigators figure out that Clayton Foreman is working in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio,
00:52:10and he's working as a rideshare driver.
00:52:12We've got a suspect. Now we've got to make sure that's the right guy.
00:52:15So they go, they pull the trash can,
00:52:17they get some plastic silverware from takeout and some other things from the trash can.
00:52:22So you tell the FBI what you found,
00:52:24and they gather some of the trash at the suspect's home in Ohio.
00:52:27Correct. They ship that down here to me,
00:52:29and then once I went through it, I coordinated with our lab here in Texas
00:52:32to see what items would be best to test.
00:52:34And they compared it to the evidence that we had.
00:52:36And we got the call, this is our guy. This is a match.
00:52:39Of course, we're chomping at the bit to get there to Ohio.
00:52:45So he'd been told that one of his Uber customers had had something taken
00:52:49and that he needed to come down.
00:52:51Maybe you guys could ask him a few questions about it.
00:52:53That's not what you were going to ask him?
00:52:55No, no, not at all.
00:52:56What we're here about is we're cold case investigators.
00:53:00Do you want that shock and awe factor?
00:53:03You want him to walk in the room, you want him to see a guy with a cowboy hat on,
00:53:06and he knows that this is not someone from Ohio.
00:53:11We're asking you to visit with us about a crime that we're investigating, okay?
00:53:15You don't have to talk to us at all.
00:53:17Okay.
00:53:18He thought we were there just following up on an old case,
00:53:20like, hey, these guys, they don't have anything.
00:53:22They're just asking me all these questions in case they do one day.
00:53:25I don't think he had any idea that we had his DNA.
00:53:28So the crime that we're looking at is the murder of Mary Catherine Edwards.
00:53:31She was murdered in 1995.
00:53:34She and her sister, Allison,
00:53:38were actually in your wedding.
00:53:40Right, 1982.
00:53:42Were you aware of the crime, even?
00:53:44No.
00:53:45You didn't know that Catherine Edwards was murdered?
00:53:48No, sir.
00:53:49Did not.
00:53:50Wedding night only would have been the only time you'd seen her?
00:53:52Probably, sir.
00:53:53Okay.
00:53:54Never, obviously, had sex with her?
00:53:56No.
00:53:57Never?
00:53:58Never.
00:53:59Did you ever go in her house at all?
00:54:01Any house that she ever lived in?
00:54:03No.
00:54:05Clay, I'm gonna level with you, okay?
00:54:07Right here and now, and I want you to hear me real close.
00:54:09All right, sir.
00:54:10What I'm gonna tell you right now is your DNA was on Catherine's bed
00:54:16and was inside Catherine.
00:54:19Okay.
00:54:20I mean, I don't know how I got there, but per se, it was there.
00:54:23There's only one way for it to get there.
00:54:25Okay.
00:54:27And that's by you putting it there.
00:54:29Okay.
00:54:30There's two people that know that story.
00:54:32You're one of them, and she's the other.
00:54:34And she can't talk.
00:54:36What I ask you is, now, to be honest with us completely
00:54:42and tell us, how did that happen?
00:54:46I'm not gonna say anything.
00:54:51So if I need an attorney now, I can.
00:54:54Do you probably need one, or you do need one?
00:54:57I'll need an attorney.
00:55:00After he makes it outside, you know,
00:55:02that's when we execute the arrest warrant and arrested him.
00:55:05You showed up with the handcuffs that he used on Catherine Edwards.
00:55:08We did and got to put them on him after we got through interviewing him.
00:55:11Did he know that those were the handcuffs he used?
00:55:13He was told.
00:55:15New developments tonight on the murder of a beloved Beaumont teacher.
00:55:19So finally, 36 years after Catherine Edwards' murder and arrest,
00:55:23the team can now return to Texas to prepare for trial.
00:55:26And in South Carolina, another team of investigators,
00:55:29they're now chasing a promising lead in their case because of this new technology.
00:55:33The murder of a Michigan mom, Kathy Swartz,
00:55:35whose daughter has gone so many years without answers.
00:55:38At what point did hope return for you?
00:55:41I got a phone call from Sam Smallcomb,
00:55:45and he said, we may have the guy that killed your mom.
00:55:49How can we help you?
00:56:00Investigators working the cold case murder of Kathy Swartz,
00:56:03the young Michigan mother who was murdered, her baby right nearby,
00:56:07they had sent off the perpetrator's DNA taken from her pink phone
00:56:11to that lab in Texas, Othram.
00:56:15So after three decades with no arrests in this case,
00:56:18Othram actually uses their cutting-edge technology
00:56:21to build a comprehensive DNA sequence of who the perpetrator is.
00:56:26So now that you have this sequencing that they just didn't have access to years ago,
00:56:30what do you then do with that?
00:56:32We could use that profile to search a database of people.
00:56:35And in doing this, we can then begin to figure out
00:56:38how these people that are near relatives are arranged on a family tree.
00:56:42And if we can do that, then we can begin to ask
00:56:45where the person that we're looking to identify might fit on the tree.
00:56:48In going down the family tree,
00:56:50you find that there is actually a family that lives in Three Rivers, Michigan,
00:56:54a mother and father with four sons.
00:56:56That's correct.
00:57:01We got the report back, and they believed it was a family that had lived in Three Rivers.
00:57:06The DNA was male, so this narrowed it down to four brothers.
00:57:10The youngest brother, Barry, and then there was...
00:57:13the oldest was Sonny Waters,
00:57:16then John Waters, and then Robert Waters.
00:57:25We were very excited, because now we have leads to run off from.
00:57:29We'll very quickly be able to eliminate Barry
00:57:32because his DNA that was in CODIS.
00:57:36And they're able to rule him out, so they take him right off the list.
00:57:39Detectives then track down two more of the Waters brothers,
00:57:42who both quickly agree to turn over their DNA.
00:57:45One, two, three, four.
00:57:48And with that DNA, they're able to eliminate them as well,
00:57:51which just left Robert Waters.
00:57:55Robert Waters was married, had a couple of children,
00:57:58and had been living in Beaufort, South Carolina for quite some time.
00:58:02He was a local business owner and had a plumbing business.
00:58:06And from what detectives can tell from looking at his wife's Facebook page,
00:58:09Robert Waters appears to be a happily married family man.
00:58:14All right.
00:58:22Hey, how you doing?
00:58:23Good morning.
00:58:24Hey, Robert, how you doing?
00:58:25Good, how are you?
00:58:26How can we help you?
00:58:27I'm Sam Smulcombe from Three Rivers PD.
00:58:29This is Todd Peters from Michigan State Police.
00:58:31Nice to meet you.
00:58:32Nice to meet you as well.
00:58:33Can we talk for just a couple of minutes?
00:58:34Sure.
00:58:35All right.
00:58:37He seemed like the guy next door that would mow your lawn for you
00:58:41if you were going to be out of town for a week.
00:58:44So I'm helping Sam, and we reopened this case from Three Rivers
00:58:49way back in the day, going back through and getting interviews and just everything.
00:58:56So we were wondering if you'd have time to come down to the PD
00:59:01and talk with us down there.
00:59:03Yeah, okay.
00:59:04If somebody comes in to you and knocks on your door,
00:59:07investigators from another state,
00:59:09and asks you to come down to a department and talk,
00:59:11you're probably going to ask why.
00:59:13Never asks why, and agrees to drive himself down and meet us there.
00:59:17So we'll just expect you in a couple minutes, and we'll meet you down there.
00:59:19That's fine.
00:59:20All right.
00:59:21Thank you, sir.
00:59:22After initially not showing at the police station, detectives call Waters.
00:59:26He's informed that they have a warrant for his prints and his DNA,
00:59:29and later that day he actually comes in.
00:59:31But what I'm probably going to do is do the three.
00:59:34We had to just focus on getting the fingerprints and the DNA.
00:59:39And one of the issues we had run into is the Beaufort Police Department
00:59:43did not have the fingerprint live scan machine.
00:59:47So we had to use the traditional ink and paper.
00:59:50Hang on for just a second.
00:59:51I've got to take a call real quick here.
00:59:53Yes, sir.
00:59:58Unfortunately, at that police station,
01:00:00they're having trouble actually getting a clean print from Waters.
01:00:03You want to come get your fingers dirty again?
01:00:06We're going to try to do it on just card stock.
01:00:09Okay.
01:00:10So we rolled him a second time, sent those back.
01:00:14He never gets upset about it, never gets worked up about the time.
01:00:17We're going to go flat down.
01:00:19He still just willingly, I guess, hung out with us.
01:00:24So you've got the detectives now waiting for a definitive answer from the lab in Michigan.
01:00:28So they spend the next five hours actually making small talk with Robert Waters.
01:00:34If you like seafood.
01:00:35Yep, I do.
01:00:36You will like that place.
01:00:38We talked about our families, his family, plumbing and remodeling houses.
01:00:43You would never guess by looking at that guy
01:00:46that he was concerned about why he was there or the outcome of it.
01:00:50All right.
01:00:52Okay.
01:00:53I just wanted to tell you, we did submit the print that we took from you earlier.
01:00:58It didn't match to the one at the crime scene.
01:01:01So at this time you are under arrest for the murder of Cassie Schwartz.
01:01:06Okay.
01:01:07Okay.
01:01:08It really surprised me.
01:01:09He did not really react.
01:01:11I feel like he knew when we showed up that morning that the game was up.
01:01:18Do you remember when you learned that the prints were a match?
01:01:22There was just so many emotions and everything going on
01:01:26that I was just overwhelmed and so excited because finally they had him.
01:01:35So after decades, you have your answer.
01:01:38Yes.
01:01:4053-year-old Robert Waters, a former Three Rivers resident,
01:01:43now a plumber, husband, father, and accused killer.
01:01:47I didn't recognize his name.
01:01:50Didn't sound familiar to me at all.
01:01:52But investigators always believe that Cassie Schwartz must have known her killer in some way.
01:01:57You'll remember there was no forced entry.
01:01:59And they finally discover the connection
01:02:01when they go back to speak to Cassie's one-time fiancé, Mike Warner.
01:02:05Well, let me ask you the obvious question.
01:02:07What about Rob Waters?
01:02:10He came there one time.
01:02:11He came there one time.
01:02:12One time.
01:02:13Okay.
01:02:14Do you remember, like, was that close to December?
01:02:16I think so.
01:02:18Cassie knew Robby Waters had visited the apartment about a month before the murder.
01:02:24We had seen him since grade school.
01:02:26Yeah.
01:02:27Okay, so he just somehow figured out that you guys were living in Riverside.
01:02:30Showed up.
01:02:31And showed up that one time.
01:02:32Yeah.
01:02:36I honestly think she knew him then, obviously, because he was friends with Mike.
01:02:41And he was in town and tried to come see my mom, and she wasn't having it.
01:02:48He's waiting to be extradited to St. Joseph County.
01:02:51It really was, you know, like, wow, we're going to get some answers.
01:02:56We're going to find some things out.
01:02:58But before his day in court could actually come,
01:03:00the suspect robbed Waters to something that shocks everyone.
01:03:03No way.
01:03:04This cannot be happening.
01:03:11A major breakthrough in a cold case murder out of three rivers.
01:03:14Investigators say they have finally arrested a suspect.
01:03:17His name is 53-year-old Robert Waters.
01:03:20Those too tight?
01:03:22No.
01:03:23The plans were already in place.
01:03:25He had waived extradition, so he knew that he was going to be brought back to Michigan.
01:03:29They go down to South Carolina, and they discover that this man had been living a full life.
01:03:36Yeah.
01:03:37Married, children, a job.
01:03:40A good job.
01:03:42A good life.
01:03:45And they said he was like a godly man down there.
01:03:49To that you say?
01:03:50No.
01:03:52They don't know the real man.
01:03:54But after evading law enforcement for decades, Robert Waters never makes it back to Michigan.
01:04:01At like 6.30 in the morning, I received a call from an investigator from Buford,
01:04:07and she had explained that she had just come from the jail
01:04:10and that Robert Waters had hung himself in his cell.
01:04:15I'm like, no way.
01:04:17This cannot be happening.
01:04:19Again, like a disbelief.
01:04:21Why? How could this happen?
01:04:24He had some material that they had given him in the jail,
01:04:27and it was some devotionals, and the parts that he had ripped out
01:04:30talked about forgiveness and asking for forgiveness.
01:04:33To me it says that you're guilty.
01:04:35I mean, no one is going to do that in that situation if they're innocent.
01:04:41You feel robbed that you did not get the opportunity to see him face to face.
01:04:45Yes.
01:04:49I just wanted him to feel my presence in the room.
01:04:53What would you have said to him in court?
01:04:55I don't think I would have said anything.
01:04:58I just think I would have walked in, and my presence is enough words for him.
01:05:06He would have seen that baby.
01:05:08Yeah.
01:05:09That he left there in that crib all day.
01:05:11And probably my mom, because I look like her, they say.
01:05:15He's a coward.
01:05:17To take her away from all of us in the manner that he did,
01:05:24and then he got to go live his life.
01:05:27You're not going to give us any answers.
01:05:31I mean, he's just a coward.
01:05:35But remember, there are two cases here that have been unlocked by this new technology,
01:05:39and back in Beaumont, Texas,
01:05:41Catherine Edwards' loved ones are determined to see the suspect in that case, Clayton Foreman,
01:05:46the man charged with murdering her, face a jury.
01:05:50Clayton Foreman goes on trial in March of 2024 in Beaumont.
01:05:56He is charged with capital murder.
01:05:58Clayton Bernard Foreman, how do you plead for the indictment, guilty or not guilty?
01:06:03Not guilty.
01:06:04There were family there, there were friends there,
01:06:07there were former students of Catherine's that were there to see that justice was going to be served.
01:06:13Prosecutors begin by playing that 911 call Catherine's parents made for the jury.
01:06:19What's going on?
01:06:24That 911 tape was very impactful to start the trial off with.
01:06:27That really gets you involved and to know that something horrible happened.
01:06:31You know, Catherine's parents did not live to see the man accused of killing their daughter arrested,
01:06:35so this is left now to the twin sister, Allison, to tell jurors about her sister.
01:06:40Are you related to Mary Catherine Edwards?
01:06:43Yes, she was my twin sister.
01:06:45Allison is now 60 years old, and she offered really powerful testimony about growing up with Catherine.
01:06:55She just was always very nurturing and loving to people,
01:06:59and if anyone had a problem, they would come to her and she would talk to strangers
01:07:03and make friends with people and compliment people and just was an amazing person.
01:07:09Allison recalls the afternoon where her sister's body was discovered.
01:07:15Catherine just never showed up to this lunch, so eventually her father, Lum, agreed to go check on her.
01:07:22And my dad answered the phone, and he was frantic, and he said,
01:07:32Dad, your sister's dead. Your sister's dead.
01:07:39It was just heartbreaking to see.
01:07:41I mean, her twin, identical twin, is what she would have looked like today if she was alive,
01:07:46and there she is up on the stand testifying.
01:07:49And the emotion and the love and the hurt, all of it came out and was so impactful with the jury.
01:07:57Allison said when Catherine died, she thought her parents died a little bit that day, too.
01:08:02It was horrible. They were never the same.
01:08:07But we decided as a family after that happened that we were going to not let what happened kill us, too,
01:08:17and that we were going to live to honor her, and that's what we always did after that.
01:08:22In a heart-crushing moment, Allison shares with the jury how she honored her sister after her death.
01:08:27Four years later, I had a daughter, and her name is Catherine, Catherine Ann, after my sister.
01:08:35But she never got to know her.
01:08:38My oldest was nine months old, and she was her godmother, and she never got to know her either.
01:08:45You can know the case inside out, but until you see somebody testify and see the raw emotion that's going on,
01:08:51that was raw, raw emotion that they relived on the stand.
01:08:54Excuse me. Thank you.
01:08:56Prosecution's next witness is about to detail the surprising connection between Catherine Edwards and Clayton Foreman.
01:09:03And you got married to a person by the name of Clayton Foreman?
01:09:07Yes.
01:09:08What she's about to tell the jury about his reaction to Catherine's death.
01:09:13It dumbfounded me.
01:09:22Jurors in the trial of Clayton Foreman, the man accused of killing that schoolteacher, Catherine Edwards,
01:09:27are now hearing about this investigation that took nearly 30 years,
01:09:31and all of it now culminating with this cutting-edge DNA testing done by that Texas lab, Othram.
01:09:37Please have a seat.
01:09:39I was very eager to get to the courtroom.
01:09:42I work at Othram. We'll do the testing, and it will result in the building of a DNA profile to generate new leads in the investigation.
01:09:50It's one thing to solve a case, and it's another to be able to defend how that work was done,
01:09:55allow it to be interrogated openly and critiqued.
01:09:59We want to see at least 50% of the markers, and you can see that in actuality we have, it looks like, 87%.
01:10:06So that's far in excess of what is necessary to produce a workable profile.
01:10:11Without the DNA, the story doesn't matter.
01:10:13That's that one puzzle piece that puts it all together.
01:10:16So prosecutors want the jurors now to hear from the woman who can actually detail the connection
01:10:21between that schoolteacher, Catherine Edwards, and Clayton Foreman.
01:10:25She was married to him.
01:10:27My name's Diana Cote.
01:10:29And remember, Catherine Edwards and her twin sister were actually bridesmaids at the wedding.
01:10:33Were they friends of yours in high school?
01:10:36Yes.
01:10:37She also testified that while she was married to Foreman, she actually discovered something unnerving in his car.
01:10:42You had found a briefcase in the trunk of the defendant's car. Is that correct?
01:10:47That's correct.
01:10:48All right. What was inside the briefcase?
01:10:50It was a gun, a set of handcuffs, and some horrible pornographic material.
01:10:58Okay. Regarding the gun, was there any reason for him to have a gun that you knew of at the time?
01:11:03No reason. I mean...
01:11:06Is there any reason that you knew of that he would have a pair of handcuffs in the back of his trunk?
01:11:10No.
01:11:11Did you ever talk to him about that?
01:11:13No. I didn't know what he would say. I didn't know what he would do.
01:11:16And later, when questioned by the defense, Diana said she never saw the briefcase again.
01:11:21She also recalled an odd conversation that she'd actually had with her ex-husband about Catherine and her twin sister.
01:11:28He had told me that in high school, he would see them in the hall,
01:11:35and he always thought they were so cute because they were twins.
01:11:38And he felt as though he wanted to make sure he protected them.
01:11:43After 11 years of marriage, Diana and Foreman divorced, but they continued to stay in touch.
01:11:48And she tells jurors how two years later, in 1995, she actually called her ex-husband after finding out that Catherine had been murdered.
01:11:56Was that very upsetting to you?
01:11:57Yes.
01:11:58When you told him, how did he react?
01:12:02He didn't. It was very shocking to me. He just, it had like no feeling whatsoever, and just basically was like, oh, really?
01:12:12And it dumbfounded me.
01:12:16Excuse me. Thank you.
01:12:18And there was one more witness jurors would hear from, Paula Ramsey, Foreman's victim from 1981.
01:12:24It had been decades since Paula had even heard the name of the man who assaulted her.
01:12:28It was a Friday, and I was at work. My phone rang, and it said Beaumont Police.
01:12:34This emotion came over me, and I was like, what? Is someone messing with me?
01:12:40And on the other end of the line was Detective Lou Allen.
01:12:43He said, he's a suspect in a murder, and that's when he started telling me about the DNA.
01:12:49And he said, it is a cold case murder.
01:12:51And I was like, you don't even have to ask. I will go. I will testify.
01:12:58We hung up. I just, I just broke down.
01:13:01I mean, you just go back to being that girl again, where that fear and all of it just kind of consumes you again.
01:13:15And so suddenly, all these years later, in a courtroom full of strangers, Paula is telling her story about how she was assaulted by Foreman.
01:13:23Did he do something with your hands?
01:13:28He tied them in the back, behind.
01:13:32He took your hands, put them behind you, and then secured them with an object.
01:13:38Do you believe that object may have been a belt?
01:13:41Yes.
01:13:42Did he threaten to cut your throat if you didn't do what he wanted?
01:13:46Yes.
01:13:47I just kind of blocked out everything else and just focused on the questions.
01:13:53Did he say something that you found odd concerning what he had just done to you?
01:13:59Yes.
01:14:00What was that?
01:14:01When I was getting out of the car, he said, stop crying. I'm sorry. I hope I didn't hurt you.
01:14:13You have to say these things out loud, and then knowing that he's sitting right over there, and just being in the same room, and that was hard.
01:14:30She relived it on that stand, and it was amazing to watch her, how brave she was to do that.
01:14:36You came here today to tell this jury what happened to you 42, 43 years ago, right?
01:14:41Yes.
01:14:42Who did you do that for?
01:14:45For Catherine.
01:14:49I wanted to see justice done for her.
01:14:54And in the end, Clayton Foreman's defense, they wouldn't call any witnesses, but they did deliver a closing statement.
01:15:00You, ordinary citizens, get to decide whether or not, on the day in question, January 14th, 1995, Clayton committed the offense of capital murder.
01:15:14You may not like it, but he did that in 81. That doesn't make him a murderer. That doesn't make him that he went out and killed somebody.
01:15:22The case was very one-sided, and the prosecution had all the witnesses, had all the evidence. There was very little the defense could do.
01:15:35The verdict is in.
01:15:3629 years of waiting came down to seven days of testimony, and ultimately 52 minutes of deliberation.
01:15:45I'll tell you that any time I've had a jury trial, I'm scared to death when they're walking back in that room. That is the most tense moment ever for me.
01:16:01It took police nearly 30 years to bring Clayton Foreman to trial for the murder of Catherine Edwards. It took the jury less than an hour to convict him. It was very fast.
01:16:12He was sentenced to life in prison.
01:16:15It was just relief. I was thankful that I did it. Thankful that it did help. It did help putting him away.
01:16:24It was an extraordinary thing to have closure in that courtroom for that young school teacher. And that other case, the mother who was brutally murdered, her baby, just a few feet away. Now, she's about to meet the couple who unlocked this case.
01:16:42As we stand here today, all these years later, it's so peaceful and quiet here. It's hard to imagine what played out behind us.
01:16:51It is. Thankfully, the detectives worked very, very hard on this.
01:16:56And never gave up.
01:16:57Never gave up, and they solved it.
01:17:00Well, I know you've retired, but I think we got him. And he did.
01:17:04I can see the satisfaction on your face. Justice after all these years.
01:17:08After all these years. Absolutely.
01:17:11Justice, finally, for that elementary school teacher, Catherine Edwards. And in the second case, justice for Clayton Foreman.
01:17:17I'm an old man. I'm sorry. I want to hug you. I want to hug you.
01:17:47Just the idea, though, that the two of them were able to go back and look at that evidence and solve it all these years later.
01:17:54I can't even, I don't even have the words.
01:17:58You don't need words. I'm glad you have answers.
01:18:03It's unbelievable just in my career to see, like, when I started in 97 to where we're at today, you have these cases that are literally going nowhere.
01:18:12You give them this DNA sample, and the next thing you know, you know who your suspect is.
01:18:17Do you think that there are cases like this all over the country right now, just waiting to be solved with this new technology?
01:18:23Absolutely. All over the country and all over the world. But finding every case, I think, would be the goal.
01:18:28Every one. Every sexual assault. Every homicide. Every one of them. We need to find those cases, and we need to get them submitted and work.
01:18:35And that means answers, finally, for thousands of families.
01:18:38Sure. Absolutely.
01:18:40There are tens of thousands of little tubes of DNA in crime labs across this country, and all of them have answers.
01:18:49I think we're going to live in a world in this lifetime where there are no unidentified victims, victims that are named voiceless, where perpetrators are caught the first time they commit a crime.
01:19:02For some families, you are the last hope.
01:19:05For many.
01:19:06I don't believe in closure when you've gone through something as horrible as one of these violent crimes, but I do believe that truth allows you to turn the page.
01:19:17I have been living with this for 36 years, and these people, they took their time.
01:19:25They solved this case with DNA, so I can close this book and open up my own book with my own kids. And that's, there's no words for that.
01:19:39And we should know that that lab, those DNA decoders, Kristen and David Middleman, Othram, they recently announced their 455th DNA match, Debra. They are solving these cases.
01:19:49And how incredible, David. Catherine Edwards' killer, Clayton Foreman, will be eligible for parole in 30 years. He'll be in his 90s. He's appealing his conviction.
01:20:00That's our program for tonight. Thanks so much for watching. I'm Debra Roberts.
01:20:04And I'm David Muir from all of us here at 2020 at ABC News. Good night.
01:20:19You