The Code Breakers

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Tonight we take you inside two cases. Two young women both brutally murdered in their homes.
The killers in each case evading police for decades. In one case, a mother just 19 years old, she was engaged to be married.
Her fiancee, who was about to marry her, adopt her daughter, he gets home, and he immediately notices something is wrong. There's blood smeared on the stairway.
The killer had attacked her in the bedroom. There was hand prints of her trying to hold the door closed, and she just wasn't strong enough.
Another case in Texas, the beloved teacher, her whole future ahead of her. Drove in to Memphis.
She just started a new school. She was loving teaching, her students.
She was in a very good place. Now what was your emergency? What's going on? I was murdered.
What did your daughter do? She's been murdered! You remember walking in and what you discovered.

I remember walking into the bathroom and seeing her body on the floor.

She'd been handcuffed.

That's correct.

She'd been handcuffed with her hands behind her back.

There were about 36 different wounds on her body.

She put up a fight.

Of course, the question, who would want to kill each of these women,

the mystery behind their murders would torment their loved ones for decades. They've got handprints, they've got footprints.
Why are they not finding this person? It was like the talk of the town forever. And for the detectives who were working these cases, frustrating dead ends.
There was also a suspicion, could it have been a member of law enforcement? Right, there was no forced entry, so our speculation was that it was somebody that she knew or somebody that presented a position of authority that could have garnered that trust to get inside the apartment. All of these questions lasted for years and years.
Yes. Both of these brutal murders were cold cases for decades.
And what links both of those cases all of these years later is the cutting-edge forensic technology inside this lab. Tonight, you'll see it unfold right here as they unmask the killer in both cases.
It's the first week of December 1988. Nineteen-year-old Kathy Swartz is home with her nine-month-old daughter.
In Kathy's living room, a tree decorated, ready for the first Christmas for her little baby. She was living with Mike Warner.
They were setting up their life, although he wasn't the father of the child. They were a couple, and they were trying to make their way.

He definitely came in and kind of was her knight in shiny armor.

They were a happy little family.

Mike got up around 5.30 in the morning for his job.

He gets home at 3.30, and he immediately notices something is wrong.

Things were in disarray. Blood up the banister and then in the bedroom was Kathy.
Very bloody,

unclothed mostly. He would later describe it as like the walls were painted with blood.

I'm not going to die. Very bloody, unclothed mostly.
He would later describe it as like the walls were painted with blood. Mike is so distressed, he immediately runs to a neighboring apartment because he can't bring himself to call the police.
Mike does go back into the apartment to find her daughter. Kathy's baby, who's nine months old, dressed in pants, a shirt.
She has one sock on. Her diaper looks like it's been recently changed.
She was standing up in the crib when Mike walked in. This is that baby left standing alone in that crib all those years ago.
She's now 36 years old. How was your mother described to you?

Beautiful, happy-go-lucky.

She did love, like, ACDC, Metallica.

She was like a little rock and roll girl.

And everybody tells me that I was, like, her whole world.

So you were 16 years old when you read the police report. Mm-hmm.
It was awful for somebody to do what they did to her, knowing I was in the crib right next door. I just couldn't believe that somebody could do that.
So detectives had questioned at the time whether or not this suspect had changed the diaper. Yeah.
When the police got there on scene, I was dry. I didn't have a dirty diaper on.
And it was some hours I was alone. So one of the first things that investigators notice is that there doesn't seem to be any sign of forced entry, which again suggests that she knew the person who came in and killed her.
She was very good about locking her doors. I would call her and I would say, hey, I'm going to come over.
And I would go her door. It was locked, and I would knock, and she would, you know, who is it? And then she would let me in.
We theorized that the assault started in the kitchen, because in the kitchen there was passive blood drops on the floor, and then the smearing goes up the stairway to the upstairs bedroom. There are defensive wounds found on her hands.
Her throat has been cut in multiple places. She's been strangled.
She fought like hell. She was trying to protect her daughter, and she did.

And the idea that this happened and you were just a couple of feet away.

Yeah.

Makes me mad that I wasn't old enough to help her.

I'm 100% convinced she was trying to save her baby.

Because I feel like she would have just ran outside and yelled. But I was upstairs, and she wasn't going to leave that apartment without me.
In the bedroom where Kathy was found is a phone on the bed. The phone cord was cut, but on the phone there was Kathy's fingerprints, and then there was also an unknown fingerprint in blood.
In 88, obviously, DNA was in its infancy. The fingerprint on the phone, how significant? Very significant because they were in actual blood and it was not my mom's.

There is a bloody footprint in the bathroom.

It looks like the suspect took a shower after the murder to try to maybe wipe the blood off, clean up.

But in the process of doing so, he left behind a left footprint size nine in blood.

And then the person left without being seen

and without being discovered.

It was very unsettling

that something like that could happen.

It just didn't make any sense.

None of it made any sense.

But when crime scene investigators

passed through that gruesome scene again,

this time with a new forensic light source,

they find a new clue and one that was imperceptible

to the naked eye.

It was like a great big neon clue.

It was like, holy smokes.

South Lanes is a bowling alley in Three Rivers, Michigan.

It's the social epicenter of this small town where Kathy Swartz's father ran the pro shop. After her brutal murder back in 1988, it also became a place that connected Kathy's daughter, Courtney, to her mother.
I grew up in the bowling alley. I spent a lot of time there.
I was raised by my grandparents. They tried to fill the void as much as they could.
What were you told about your mother's absence when you were a little girl? About first grade, they had told me that a bad man had hurt my mom and she was up in heaven. And when it would thunderstorm, they would tell me that that was my mom up in heaven bowling a strike.
So it was pretty cool watching the thunderstorms as I was little because I'm like, oh, she must be bowling pretty good today. Your mother's best friend, Jennifer, has told you a lot about your mom.
Yes, she has. Kathy and I were very good friends.
I've known her since grade school, so we've been friends a long time. Kathy was, like, somebody you could count on.
She was a good listener. Always there for you.
Just a, you know, good person. Childhood friends Kathy and Jennifer both found themselves pregnant as teenagers and formed an unbreakable bond.
They would talk on the phone several times a day until December 2nd, when Jennifer couldn't get ahold of her best friend. 123, 10, 19.
A police officer came to my apartment and he asked me to go to the station. I remember him asking me questions, you know, do you know anybody that would wanna hurt Kathy, along those lines.
And I finally just was like, what's going on?

Is Kathy okay?

And he told me, and I just...

I don't even remember.

I know that the first thing out of my mouth was,

is Courtney okay? Where is Courtney?

I do remember pictures of our first Christmas tree,

and she had presents under there for me,

but she never got to give them to me.

We can see it's the pain to still carry with you. They were a young family just starting out.
Kathy and Mike Warner had only been engaged about three weeks before her brutal death and since he was the one who found her body, you know, of course police would have a lot of questions for him. When the police initially interviewed him, he had this kind of flat affect to his voice.

He didn't seem to be all that upset that she was dead.

He didn't get emotional, and that seemed very suspicious to police.

I can't imagine, you know, walking into that scene and what that does to somebody. There was polygraph examinations that were done with...
We were able to verify that he was at work in Sturgis all day long, and there was no way he could have came back to Three Rivers to do it. I had no doubt in my mind that he didn't have anything to do with this.
You know, I knew it in my heart. No, he loved her.
She and Courtney were his world. I go by Judge Jeffrey Middleton now, but at the time of this, I was Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney.
We would have maybe one homicide a year,

not a young woman killed alone in her apartment

during broad daylight.

At that point, they were leaving no stone unturned.

So the police department actually rented the apartment

for a month after the crime,

just so that we could return and continue

to look for clues and process.

This is one of the first cases where they deployed alternative light sources. They went into the crime scene with a black light.
On the refrigerator they noticed two pieces of writing. Metallica was written on the refrigerator and Harley was here.
was here. These were inexplicable writings that apparently had been erased.
And we found that that someone had written on her body, probably a magic marker on the inside of her thigh, and said, I was here with an arrow pointing up toward her groin. That was not visible to the naked eye.
And when detectives speak to kathy's friends they hear about an ex-boyfriend named troy schultes it turns out he had a nickname harley which of course got their attention he was a huge fan of the band metallica in fact he has a harley-davidson decal on his truck the truck was spotted spotted outside Cathy's apartment that very afternoon of her murder.

Well, that's who I told him to look at and to question.

I know a lot of other people did too.

I don't know how to really describe it,

but it was not a good, really.

They were not good together.

And when they further look into him,

he doesn't have an alibi for that afternoon.

So he immediately becomes their number one suspect. They pick him up for questioning.
Troy Schultes admitted that he was the one that wrote on the refrigerator and on the wall in the apartment. But he never admitted to writing it on her thigh.
And he said, well, I didn't do it. And still with no solid alibi for the night of the

murder, police zero in on Troy. I thought that's got to be it.
Because again, it's got to be somebody she knew, somebody she trusted. And before long an arrest in the Kathy Swartz case is announced.
But if investigators think they've got their guy, a rude awakening is ahead. Kathy Schwartz's daughter, Courtney, the baby left standing in her crib after her mother was brutally murdered, is a mother herself now.
Why are you breaking everything? And she and her four children have stayed in Three Rivers, Michigan, finding comfort in a mother that she lost when she was just a baby. I do bring the kids out here for like holidays, her birthday, but I also do come out here a lot by myself too.
Back in 1988, police believed they found the perpetrator who brutally murdered Courtney's mother, the man whose nickname was scrawled across her refrigerator, her ex-boyfriend, Troy Schultes. You know, you look at that and you think, well, that's somebody leaving a calling card behind, that they were there.
Without any kind of solid alibi and now under a cloud of suspicion, Troy is arrested, he's charged, and he pleads not guilty. We had the fingerprints, but we also had a sample of blood that was left behind.
We believe, because Kathy fought back, that whoever the killer was had sustained an injury. And Troy's blood type did not match.
They take fingerprints and footprints from him, and those prints also do not match. So the charges were dismissed.

As it turns out, he was wrongfully arrested and wrongfully charged.

So with the investigation now back at Square One, the Three Rivers Police Department,

they refocused on matching the fingerprint and the footprint found at the crime scene to the killer.

We had fingerprinted and footprinted so many individuals

that had been living in Three Rivers at that time,

and none of them were a match.

I thought we would solve this quickly.

So the first month passed, we didn't know.

Three months passed.

A year passed, and it wasn't solved.

Police even looked at similar crimes

that had taken place elsewhere in the area. They took fingerprints, footprints.
There was no match. And the case got colder and colder.
And as DNA technology improves, law enforcement, they continue to work the case. We fast forward to 2012.
We're going over the evidence again. The fingerprint that they had found on the phone was in the suspect's blood, and it was still in viable condition to obtain a DNA profile from that.
And we've entered into CODIS, and we think, that's going to give us a hit. And of course, it doesn't.
As the years continue to pass, the mystery and the collateral damage for this whole community only grew. The town was haunted by this.
Did you feel the eyes of the town on you as you were growing up? Yes. And I was the baby, so, like, everybody wanted to take care of the baby, and, you know, like, it's still that way.
When you don't have answers, you just have questions all the time. But it definitely changed me.
It really changed me. I slept with a machete under my mattress for years.
So every December 2nd represents another year without justice for Courtney and her grandparents. Today the family is together

remembering Kathy on the anniversary of her death. It's hard.
Real hard. I felt a certain point that I wasn't sure that they would ever find out.
Probably right there before she died. It's been 25, but remembering hasn't gotten any easier for David Swartz.

I think probably the worst thing for me is why.

Why? Why did it have to happen like something like that? Yeah. When you look at these kinds of cases around the country, there is generally an investigator or a detective who never gives up.
Yes. And in this case, it was Jeffrey Middleton.
Yes. He is a great guy.
What was it, do you think, that kept him going on this case for so long? He was young, just starting out, and this was really the only cold case in our town. I spent more time on this case than any other case in my entire career.
Sometimes in later years I would pretend I was on vacation and lock myself in the library and just go through this file. As Courtney got older she would call me sometimes and ask if I knew anything and I never had any answers.
Police have DNA, fingerprints and a lot of physical evidence. What they don't have is the person who murdered a 19-year-old Three Rivers woman in 1988.
Here's a lot of the evidence right from property. Eventually, the Three Rivers Police Department decide to partner with the Michigan State Police.
They're convinced that with advances in DNA testing technology, that the Kathy Swartz case can finally be solved. In Kathy's case, we had DNA that was in CODIS and we had not gotten a match.
We'd exhausted, you know, the fingerprints and these things which normally get us a hit did not. So I honestly felt like the genetic genealogy was our only chance for solving this case.
And then three years ago, Othram, a forensics lab in Texas, now enters the picture. A promising something everyone close to the Kathy Swartz case has waited decades for, answers.
Othram uses DNA technology to help identify victims and perpetrators when law enforcement cannot. They knew that it was an unknown male contributor to that DNA, but they didn't know who it was.
All these years later they said, well look at this and see if there's something you can do with it. And you were convinced you could? We were absolutely certain that we could help the Michigan State Police work this case.
They said, we'll get you a lead back. We're not gonna guarantee that it's the lead, but we'll get you a lead.
They had over a thousand suspects. All of a sudden, it's narrowed down to four.
It was our breakthrough. Hey, I'm Brad Milkey.
You may know me as the host of ABC Audio's daily news podcast, Start Here. But I'd like to add aspiring true crime expert to my resume.
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ABC's got some unique access here, so I'll talk to the reporters and producers who have followed these cases for months, sometimes years. We're bringing the latest developments and the larger context

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GMA 7A on ABC. In 2022, a package containing DNA, that single bloody fingerprint from Kathy Swartz's pink phone, arrives right here at this building just north of Houston.
You know, to the outsider, it looks like just another office building, but what's actually happening inside, in these labs, is now changing how investigations across this country are being solved. This is the headquarters of Othram, a cutting-edge forensics lab that's been mentioned in some of today's most talked-about criminal investigations.
And Othram has been credited by law enforcement with helping to solve cases that have been unsolvable for years now. How are you? It's good to see you.
Good to see you. Thank you.
Welcome to Othram. David and Kristen Middleman are the husband and wife team behind all of this.
Everything you see on our right side will be forensic. Everything you see on the left side will be research.
Not every case is suitable for DNA testing right now. Burnt remains, exploded remains, really difficult mixtures.
But we hope that one day we live in a world where every case can be suitable for DNA testing. So you'll hold on to remains for a while and keep trying? We don't give up ever.
The Middleman's partnership, both in work and in life, actually began over a few blind mice. It's the year 2000.
You've just started your PhD at Baylor. You're doing a study on mice.
I was. And there was another young scientist.
David, yep. So our projects collided, and he actually cured my blind mice.
So I thought, wow, if this guy can do that, I think I'll marry him. David Middleman had worked in biomedical research for years before realizing that law enforcement was relying on a limited form of DNA testing.
He knew that better technology was available, but said it just wasn't being widely used out there. It sounded like science fiction at the time.
This way you could take decades old DNA, put it into a genealogy database, build a family tree for your suspect, and then that takes you right to his door. That was pretty amazing.
You start to think, wow, this is really an unused tool here for law enforcement. Yeah, it felt wrong that there were tools available, and yet there was this piling up backlog of cases that were unsolved.
So at one point, you turn to Kristen and you say, I want to start my own lab. His words were, let's build a forensic lab of the future.
And my words were, what? Who's going to give you evidence? You thought from the very beginning, who's going to trust us with this? 100%. I said, I don't think people will come.
And he said, well, I'm going to build it and we're going to see. Within a year, he was solving cases almost every week.
And the more cold cases they closed, the more publicity they got. And police departments around the world started sending them cases.
It's just grown exponentially. In terms of publicly announced solves, Auththram is number one in the world.
That includes homicides, rapes, unidentified bodies that they've been able to give names to. And Othram's reputation now for cracking these cold cases using DNA evidence and forensic genetic genealogy is what actually led Michigan detectives to send that 30-year-old DNA to this lab.
In the Kathy Swartz case, this DNA was how old when it got here from that ping phone? It was decades old, and in spite of being so old, the DNA was still intact and usable for testing. She knew right away this was suitable, and this was just his DNA, the suspect's.
Yeah, the DNA was a single unknown male contributor. It's a small sample, but in spite of that, there's anywhere from hundreds to thousands of cells worth of DNA.
So if you touch David's hand, how much DNA, how many cells have you left there? Hundreds, hundreds of cells. Hundreds of cells on his hand, and sometimes you're dealing with 10, 15.
Even less. From years ago.
Yeah. And still able to solve the case.
It's a very, very sensitive technology. In this Kathy Swartz case, you've chemically labeled all the different parts of the DNA in this room right here, and what do you do with it from there? It is now ready to actually be read.
This particular DNA sequencer is one of the most powerful sequencers on earth. This here with the green? Yes.
Give me a comparison to what authorities used to have to deal with. What would the DNA sequence reveal versus what you can reveal with the DNA sequencing from this machine now? Sure.
So for the last 30 years people have used a different kind of DNA testing technology that can measure 20 data points in the DNA. This machine actually can read out the entire sequence.
So whereas you might get 20 data points in the earlier versions of this technology, this machine could give you anywhere from 100,000 to a million data points. 100,000 to a million? 100,000 to a million data points.
So now that you have this sequencing that they just didn't have access to years ago, in this particular case, for example, what do you then do with that? So with the data file that comes out that might have 100,000 to a million DNA markers, you can do a lot more, including genetic genealogy and that search for distant relatives. You're taking what in many cases is a very old DNA sample from these cold cases.
You're expanding the DNA sequence, but you're also able to take that information now and put it up against vast public data now because families and relatives and third cousins and fourth cousins have put all of this information out there, and it would seem that this might unlock cold cases everywhere. Correct.
At that point, Authram's in-house genealogy team takes over to build a family tree for the suspected killer of Kathy Swartz. These types of crimes going unsolved have a ripple effect across society.
Not just the victim and the family not having answers, but the law enforcement that worked the case for decades consumed by a case they can't solve. Finding those investigators and then gaining their trust is what Othram says has been critical to their success in helping to crack these cases.
In those early years, you have no background in law enforcement. Are you essentially making cold calls to police stations? I spent my time almost exclusively talking to law enforcement.
You live in Texas, and you know if you want to land a case in Texas, you got to get to the Texas Rangers. But how did you convince them that we've got a tool here? Well, the one that I've done the most work with is Ranger Brandon Bess.
Brandon Bess is almost out of central casting for a Texas Ranger. He's this imposing man with his white hat.
When David Middleman founded Othram, nobody had heard of them. And when he best visited in 2019, he was really kind of taken aback.
David walks in this room and it's to speak to David's confidence in that he's wearing a t-shirt that's about two sizes too small. He's wearing jeans that have holes in them.
It looks like he hadn't slept in 14 days, his hair standing up. I have instant respect for him because I can tell this is a guy that doesn't give up.

Pass came away impressed.

He heard about the opportunity to solve a cold case and he thought, let's team up.

And he had one case in mind.

They told me it was the most heinous thing that had ever happened that was unsolved in

Beaumont.

That other case, that young school teacher, 31-year-old Catherine Edwards. What was unique about this case? The victim was a schoolteacher, well-liked by everyone.
There was no sign of forced entry. So it's a very odd situation.

It just didn't add up.

This is a crime of violence, a crime of passion,

a crime of control.

It gives you chills even today.

Even today.

Yes, even today.

There was someone that she knew or someone

that presented themselves as an officer.

It was almost like whispered in the hallways,

it could be one of our own.

So on January 14, 1995, the Beaumont Police Department gets a 911 call from a man at a townhouse in West Beaumont.

Oh, Jesus! townhouse in West Beaumont. He had found his daughter has been murdered.
Okay, what happened, ma'am?

We came over here and found her.

She's handcuffed.

She's been tortured.

Please send me a message.

We're sending someone.

Don't hang up, okay?

Okay, is there anyone else in the house?

My husband is here with me.

Okay.

We found her.

That woman was Catherine Edwards,

and she's a teacher at a local elementary school.

She was supposed to have plans with her sister and family for lunch.

When she didn't respond by phone call, they went by her house and found that her car was still there.

Got inside the house with a key.

Her father said he grabbed her and pulled her over and rolled her over to look and see if there's anything he could do. He was crying hysterically.
To listen to the emotion in those calls, you know, just gut wrenching. In 30-plus years, I'd never heard anything like it.
Dad covers her with a towel. Police show up.
There's one officer by the name of Carmen Brown. She shows up first, and she secures the crime scene.
And that officer Carmen Brown-Apples has the memory of her entering Catherine Edwards' townhouse has played over and over again in her mind for decades. You remember walking in and what you discovered? I remember walking in and going up the stairs, looking first into the bedroom that was very much in disarray.
What did you find as far as the bedroom and the bathroom? The bedroom, there was a, looked like there had been some type of tussle in there. Things had been knocked around.
Sheets were partially torn off. A portion of the bedpost had come off.
And then walking into the bathroom. And seeing her body on the floor.

She'd been handcuffed.

That's correct.

She had been handcuffed with her hands behind her back.

When her mother said her name,

Yes.

you thought, I know her.

I know her.

I went to college with her.

We were in sororities together.

She was so full of life and so friendly and so nice.

That just always stuck with me. To come to the scene and then suddenly realize it was Mary Catherine, it just knocked me for a minute.
It gives you chills even today. Even today, yes, even today.
She is not your typical victim by any stretch of the circumstance. It was an extremely unusual case.
Catherine and her twin sister Allison grew up in Beaumont. They were part of a close-knit Presbyterian family.
They both attended Forest Park High School and then Lamar University which is in Beaumont and they both became school teachers at the Beaumont Independent School District. Catherine and her sister were extremely close.
When you talk about Mary Catherine and talk about Allison and look at them, I mean, they are identical twins. You can't tell them apart.
They both had students come up to each other in the grocery store thinking they were the other twin. Investigators learned that her sister Allison was likely the last person, aside from the killer, obviously, to see Catherine alive.
Allison would tell detectives that her twin sister arrived at her house after work to pick up her beloved beagle, Maggie. She came by, visited with her sister, went home.
From what we can tell, she'd had a glass of wine and just kind of was relaxing and about to go to bed. And I think the last time she was heard from was about 8 o'clock that night.

One of the neighbors told police that he heard someone clomping down the stairs overnight on the night of January 13th.

There was a 12-year-old boy and his dad that were staying with some friends that were right next door to Catherine Edwards' townhome.

He heard somebody run down the stairs and then a door slammed and a little while later a car sped off with loud music. There were some other neighbors that heard some loud banging.
It lasted for 60 to 90 seconds. And they said they never heard a scream, so they just figured that something else might have been going on.
They had no idea that there was a murder taking place next door. Crime scene investigators found that there was no sign of forced entry, which is significant because it either meant that Catherine had kept her door unlocked or had potentially recognized her killer and let him in.
Of course, in these cases, it's standard's bedspread and from the right to the right to the right to the right.

The crime scene investigators

found semen on Catherine's bedspread

actually points in a different direction. The crime scene investigators at the time

also collected a lot of evidence from the house,

and one of those pieces of evidence being the bedspread.

Investigators found semen on Catherine's bedspread

and from the rape kit. We've got some DNA here.
Now we've just got to match it. The DNA actually doesn't match her ex-boyfriend, and he's now cleared in the case.
And there are no matches to the DNA in CODIS, which is the National Criminal Offender DNA database either. Police were really stumped.
They tried every avenue they could think of, but every avenue hit a dead end. One of their initial theories was that the killer had some sort of law enforcement background.
The handcuffs were Smith & Wesson. That's a popular brand with law enforcement.
They were trying everything they could think of. They really did.
They went and tracked down sales of handcuffs in this area, receipts. All members of the Beaumont Police Department were tested.
There were no matches. It kind of sent a panic to the community.
You know, if this can happen to somebody in a really quiet part of town, could it happen to them kind of thing. It went from a rumor to just spreading like wildfire throughout the community.
Everybody wanted to know, was this a one-time deal? Was this a serial killer? The case would go cold for decades, and obviously it's just one of hundreds of thousands of unsolved murders in this country. But then in 2020, two investigators, Ranger Brandon Best and Beaumont Police Detective Aaron Llewellyn, decide to take a fresh look at the case.
At the time, Best had just been connected with this new lab called Othram, and Detective Llewellyn knows that there's DNA that's actually available to test in this case. But when Brandon presented Othram to me

right then and there, I'm like, let's make this happen.

We believed that was gonna be our only hope.

The last hope for answers, the DNA evidence

from the murder of that elementary school teacher,

Catherine Edwards, is now headed to Othram for testing.

Bloody fingerprint left on a phone and a footprint.

And in the case of that Michigan mom, Kathy Swartz,

what new lead is about to be uncovered right behind this glass? You'll see right here tonight how both cases are about to crack wide open, sending investigators across this country to find the killers they've been searching for for decades. The person that did it was in the 10,000 pages of police reports.
You have all these puzzle pieces,

but if they don't all fit together,

you don't see the picture.

I want you to think about the next words

that come out of your mouth.

I want you to think very hard about that.

We felt like we had a home run right then and there.

And they said he was like a godly man down there.

I was like, wow, we're going to get some answers. Tonight, two horrible murders.
I just just felt awful. And now a survivor who lived to tell.
I was just like, I can't tell him. I'll never tell anybody what happened.
What did your daughter do? He's been murdered! It gives you chills even today. Even today.
That someone had written on her body, on the inside of her thigh, and said, I was here. But only one way to solve it after years of going cold.
I honestly felt that genetic genealogy was our only chance. All these years later, they said, well, look at this and see if there's something you can do with it.
It's his fingerprint. It's his bare, bloody footprint.
And it's his DNA. It turned into a massacre.
The floor goes out from under you. It was, I'm like, no way.
This cannot be happening. He said, your sister's dead, your sister's dead.
There's two people that know that story. You're one of them, and she's the other.
And she can't talk. Without the DNA, the story doesn't matter.
That the two of them were able to go back and look at that evidence. when you were a nine-month-old baby in the crib just a few feet from your mother.

And there was a moment like, this is our guy.

For some families, you are the last hope. Courtney Swartz's childhood was clouded in mystery.
She was the sole survivor. She was just a baby at the time during a vicious attack that left her 19-year-old mother, Kathy Swartz, strangled and stabbed to death right near her.
Among the clues left behind at the scene, a single bloody fingerprint on Kathy's pink phone. It contained DNA of the possible killer.
But of course the question for decades, who was the killer? For years you were haunted by that question. Yeah, growing up, most kids, you know, they look at people and they don't have to think, is that the man that killed your mom? And everybody that I met, that's the first thing that would pop into my mind.
This is the original file from 1988. When you have your files in the cold case, the killer's name, it's in there somewhere.
The profilers really believed that whoever it was would return and return to her grave site. And for years that was part of our initial rookie training program was, this is Kathy Schwartz's grave site.
If you see somebody at that grave site, you need to stop and identify them because they could be a prime suspect in the murder. More than a thousand miles from Three Rivers, Michigan, we're right here on the Natchez River in Beaumont, Texas, where another family, heartbroken for decades, the community wondering, do they too have a killer in their midst after the brutal murder of a young elementary school teacher, Catherine Edwards.
She was just 31. And detectives here wondering, would they ever have the tools to solve this case.
You know that every day that you don't solve that crime

is a day that you're not going to be able to bring that perpetrator justice. This certainly is a scene that has always stayed with me.
And you retired and when you left the force at that point it had not been solved. That's correct.
Every now and then someone would dust off the case file

and start looking at it with fresh eyes.

And I always thought, maybe this time something will spark

and we'll catch whoever did this.

It would turn out that spark,

the one that would finally reignite

the whole investigation into the murder of Catherine Edwards,

was actually coming,

thanks to a major leap forward in forensic technology.

In 2020, a courier drops off a package at Authram's office. and inside are a sample of the bedspread from Catherine Edwards's apartment a vial of DNA taken from the posthumous rape kit.
Authram technicians take a look and they build a genetic profile of their suspect. Investigators now have a human profile that can actually be searched in public databases to try to find possible family members across this country.
And to do that, you need a genealogist to connect the dots. And Beaumont Detective Aaron Llewellyn didn't have to look far for help.
Aaron Llewellyn knew one who would work the case for free, and that was his wife Tina. I remember sitting at the table one night and getting really frustrated trying to map all this out.
And she was like, let me help. Actually, just move over.
I got this. Tina doesn't ask.
Tina Llewellyn was a detective in the Beaumont Auto Crimes Division. And she had an amateur interest in genealogy.
I remember dozing off one night and I wake up and she's got lines going here and lines going there. So now along with the middleman's from the Othram Forensic Laboratory,

you've got two husband-wife teams actually working the case of this elementary school teacher,

Catherine Edwards, and soon another critical partner joins the hunt.

When Tina Llewellyn is looking through the matches to their suspect,

these are distant relatives of the suspected killer,

She noticed that she was a little bit older. When Tina Llewellyn is looking through the matches to their suspect, these are distant relatives of the suspected killer, she notices that a lot of them are in clustered in Cajun country in Louisiana and the same contact name keeps popping up.
This woman named Shira LaPointe. I was sitting at my desk one day and I got a phone call.
He said, I'm Detective Aaron Llewellyn from the Beaumont Police Department. Your email is attached to one of the matches that we have to the person of interest.
Cheryl LaPointe just happens to be a professional genealogist with experience working in criminal cases. She also has Cajun ancestry.
Cajuns, back to the late 1700s, we were a small population who came to South Louisiana and so they married their neighbors who was usually their relatives also. Cajun ancestry is notoriously complicated and complex to perform genealogical work on.
I knew it was going to be a challenge from the start. We spent hours and hours and hours on the phone talking to each other.
Probably no less than five times a day. A friendship quickly forms as the two women spend the next three months building a family tree around the suspects DNA using every record they can find.
A combination of internet research and good old-fashioned library archives. A lot of newspaper articles.
A lot of newspaper articles. Obituaries, census records.
I remember I got to a couple in Beaumont and there are yearbook records of two sons that that couple had. And the first one we came across, he was the right age.
He went to the same high school with our victim. Aaron goes and does research and finds out that he had a criminal history from here.
And it was a prior sexual assault that occurred in 1981. And there was a moment like, oh, this is our guy.
And the details of that assault set off alarm bells for detectives. There were a lot of similarities in that case that mimicked Captain Edwards' case.
The victim's hands were bound behind her back and she was sexually assaulted. We felt like we had a home run right then and there.
Suddenly they realized that this suspect had a second victim. The difference this time, the victim survived and lived to tell.
He started telling me that he was training to become a policeman and stuff. He was like, I'll just take you home.
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So all these years later, investigators in the Catherine Edwards case, the schoolteacher who was brutally murdered, now think there might have been a second victim of the suspect who is still alive, Paula Bledsoe Ramsey. I was 19.
There was a new country western bar that opened up. I really didn't want to go that night, but I'd promised the other girls that I would go.
I decided I wanted to leave. I was done.
I wanted to get home. The parking lot was mud, and my car was stuck in the mud.
I just thought, I'll just walk to the gas station and call my mom.

She says a man offered her a ride home.

He said his brother's name, and then he said

where he went to high school.

And then he said, do you go to Forest Park?

And I was like, yeah.

And then he started telling me that he

was training to become a policeman and stuff. And so then he was like, I'll just take you home.
And I don't know why, but, you know, I just, I believed him. She realized very quickly that that man wasn't driving in the direction of her home.
He started off being very nice.

The thing I know, we're at this field.

And then his whole demure changed.

He drove her to a nearby park, threatened her with a knife,

tied her hands behind her back, and raped her in the backseat of the car.

Then he dropped her off at her house. I just felt awful and shameful.
I was just like, I can't tell him. I'll never tell anybody what happened.
I don't know. I was kind of like, I don't know if anybody would believe me.
You know, is it my fault? Was it my fault? Paula said she summoned the courage about a week later to tell police what had happened. They would soon tell her that they identified the man who attacked her.
And it turns out he wasn't a police trainee. He was a 21-year-old salesman in Beaumont.
She said, yeah, I did it. I just got carried away.
She said that the prosecutor talked to her, said, you know, this is his first offense. We want to plead him to an aggravated assault.
She didn't understand what that meant, other than he was pleading to a felony and for assaulting her and so she agreed to the plea bargain agreement.

I think today they take it more serious than they did back then. I wanted him to

be punished. I think I was just pushing everything down and just trying to focus

on with life. Good, how are you? Brand your best? Brandon, yes sir.
Pleasure. So when you looked at what had happened in 1981 with this sexual assault, you thought there's a lot here that seems awfully close to the Katherine Edwards case.
I didn't. It turns out that the man who pleaded guilty in that 1981 case is a man by the name of Clayton Foreman.
Now, this is the same name that turned up in Tina and Chera's genealogy hunt. He was one of two brothers from the family tree that they actually put together.
And you might be wondering why his name never surfaced before. You have to remember that this case was back in 1981, and DNA collection wasn't even a thing by law enforcement.
It was still a decade away. This is how he eluded detectives at the time.
He essentially got away scot-free. As investigators get closer to solving this mystery, they begin to learn more about Clayton Foreman's background.
And in a twist in this case, one of the things they learned is that Clayton Foreman, the suspect, actually went to the same school as Catherine Edwards, the woman who was killed. In fact, they probably walked down the same hallways here at school.
And there was something else. Catherine Edwards was actually friends with the suspect's first wife.
In fact, Catherine Edwards was a bridesmaid at their wedding.

Investigators figure out that Clayton Foreman is working in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, and he's working as a rideshare driver.

We've got a suspect. Now we've got to make sure that's the right guy.

So they go, they pull the trash can, they get some plastic silverware from takeout

and some other things from the trash can.

So you tell the FBI what you found, and they gather some trash at the suspect's home in Ohio?

Correct. They shipped that down here to me and then once I went through it,

I coordinated with our lab here in Texas to see what items would be best to test

and they compared it to the evidence that we had.

And we got the call. This is our guy.
This is a match.

Of course, we're chomping at the bit to get there to Ohio. So he'd been told that one of his Uber customers had had something taken and that he needed to come down.
Maybe you guys could ask him a few questions about it. That's not what you were gonna ask him.
No, no, not at all. What we're here about is we're cold case investigators.
Okay want that shock and awe factor. You want him to walk in the room, you want him to see a guy with a cowboy hat on, and he knows that this is not someone from Ohio.
We're asking you to visit with us about a crime that we're investigating, okay? You don't have to talk to us at all. He thought we were there just following up on an old case.
Like, hey, these guys, they don't have anything. They're just asking me all these questions in case they do one day.
I don't think he had any idea that we had his DNA. So the crime that we're looking at is the murder of Mary Catherine Edwards.
She was murdered in 1995. She and her sister, Allison, were actually in your wedding.
Right. In 1982.
Were you aware of the crime even? No. You didn't know that Catherine Edwards was murdered? No.
Did not? Wedding night only would have been the only time you'd seen her? Probably so. Okay.
Never obviously had sex with her? No. Never? Never.
Did you ever go in her house at all? Any house that she ever lived in? No. Clay, I'm a level with you.
Okay. Right here and now, I want you to hear me real close.
All right, sir. What I'm going to tell you right now is your DNA was on Catherine's bed and was inside Catherine.
Okay. I mean, I don't know how I got there, but I could say it was there.

There's only one way for it to get there.

Okay.

And that's by you putting it there.

Okay.

There's two people that know that story.

You're one of them, and she's the other.

And she can't talk.

Mm-hmm.

What I ask you is now to be honest with us completely and tell us. Yeah.
How did that happen? I'm not going to say anything. So if I need an attorney now, I say...
You probably need one or you do need one. I need an attorney.
After he makes it outside, you know, that's when we executed the arrest warrant and arrested him. You showed up with the handcuffs that he used on Catherine Edwards.
We did, and got to put him on him after we got through interviewing him. Did he know that those were the handcuffs he used? He was told.
New developments tonight on the murder of a beloved BOMA teacher. So finally, 36 years after Catherine Edwards' murder and arrest, the team can now return to Texas to prepare for trial.
And in South Carolina, another team of investigators, they're now chasing a promising lead in their case because of this new technology, the murder of Michigan mom, Kathy Swartz, whose daughter has gone so many years without answers. At what point did hope return for you? I got a phone call from Sam Smolcombe and he said we may have the guy that killed your mom.
How can we help you? Investigators working the cold case murder of Kathy Swartz, the young Michigan mother who was murdered, her baby right nearby, they had sent off the perpetrator's DNA taken from her pink phone to that lab in Texas, Othram. So after three decades with no arrests in this case, Othram actually uses their cutting edge technology to build a comprehensive DNA sequence of who the perpetrator is.
So now that you have this sequencing that they just didn't have access to years ago, what do you then do with that? We could use that profile to search a database of people. And in doing this, we can then begin to figure out how these people that are near relatives are arranged on a family tree.
And if we can do that, then we can begin to ask where the person that we're looking to identify might fit on the tree. In going down the family tree you find that there is actually a family that lives in Three Rivers, Michigan, a mother and father with four sons.
That's correct. We got the report back and they believed it was a family that had lived in three of hers.

The DNA was male, so this narrowed it down to four brothers. The youngest brother, Barry, and then there was the oldest was Sonny Waters, then John Waters, and then Robert Waters.
We were very excited because now we have leads to run off from. We are very quickly able to eliminate Barry because his DNA that was in CODIS.
And they're able to rule him out, so they take him right off the list. Detectives then track down two more of the Waters brothers who both quickly agree to turn over their DNA.
One, two, three, four. And with that DNA they're able to eliminate them as well, which just left Robert Waters.
Robert Waters was married, had a couple of children, and had been living in Beaufort, South Carolina for quite some time. He was a local business owner and had a plumbing business.
And from what detectives can tell from looking at his wife's Facebook page, Robert Waters appears to be a happily married family man. Hey, how you doing? Good morning.
Good morning, how you doing? Good, how are you?

How can we help you?

I'm Sam Smolcom from Three Rivers PD.

This is Todd Peters from Michigan State Police.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you too.

Can we talk for just a couple minutes?

Sure.

Not inconvenienced so much.

All right, sure.

You seem like the guy next door that would mow your lawn for you

if you were going to be out of town for a week.

So I'm helping Sam and we reopened this case from three of us way back in the day, going back through and getting interviews and just clearing everything. So we were wondering if you'd have time to come down to the TV and talk with us down there? Yeah, okay.
Somebody comes in to you and knocks on your door,

investigators from another state,

and asks you to come down to a department and talk,

you're probably going to ask why.

Never asks why and agrees to drive himself down and meet us there.

So we'll just expect you in a couple minutes and we'll meet you down there.

That's fine.

All right.

Thank you, sir.

After initially not showing at the police station,

detectives call waters.

He's informed that they have a warrant for his prints and his DNA, and later that day he actually comes in. But what I'm trying to do is do the three and...
We had to just focus on getting the fingerprints and the DNA. Yeah, don't have a seat.
And one of the issues we had run into is the Beaufort Police Department did not have the fingerprint live scan machine.

So we had to use the traditional ink and paper.

Hang on for just a second.

I gotta take a call real quick here.

Yes, sir.

Hey, Sergeant Bobby, where's your struggling with this print here?

Unfortunately, at that police station, they're having trouble actually getting a clean print

from Waters.

You wanna come get your fingers dirty again? Yeah. We going to try to do it on just card stock.
So we rolled him a second time, sent those back. Never gets upset about it, never gets worked up about the time.
We're going to go flat down. He still just willingly, I guess, hung out with us.
So you've got the detectives now waiting for a definitive answer from the lab in Michigan.

So they spend the next five hours actually making small talk with Robert Waters.

If you like seafood, you will like that place.

We talked about our families, his family, plumbing and remodeling houses.

You would never guess by looking at that guy that he was concerned about why he was there or the outcome of it. All right.
Okay, I just wanted to tell you, we did submit the print that we took from here earlier. It did match to the one at the crime scene.
So at this time you are under arrest for the murder of Cassie Schwarz, okay?

Okay.

It really surprised me he did not really react.

I feel like he knew when we showed up that morning that the game was up.

Do you remember when you learned that the prints were a match?

There was just so many emotions and everything going on that I was just overwhelmed and so excited because finally they had him. So after decades you have your answer.
Yes. 53 year old Robert Waters, a former Three Rivers resident, now a plumber, husband, father, and accused killer.
I didn't recognize his name. Didn't sound familiar to me at all.
But investigators always believe that Kathy Swartz must have known her killer in some way. You'll remember there was no forced entry.
And they finally discover the connection when they go back to speak to Kathy's one-time fiancé, Mike Warner. Well, let me ask you the obvious question.
What about Rob Waters? He came there one time. He came there one time? One time.
OK, do you remember, like, was that close to December? I think so. He knew Robby Waters had visited the apartment about a month before the murder.
We had scenes since grade school. Yeah.
OK, so he just somehow figured out that you guys were living in Riverside. Showed it up.
And showed it up that one time. Yeah.
I honestly think she knew him then, obviously, because he was friends with Mike, and he was in town and tried to come see my mom,

and she wasn't having it. He's waiting to be extradited to St.
Joseph County. It really was, you know, like, wow, we're gonna get some answers.
We're gonna find some things out. But before his day in court could actually come, the suspect Robert Waters does something that shocks everyone.
No way. This cannot be happening.
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And they said he was like a godly man down there. To that you say? No.
They don't know he was a real man. But after evading law enforcement for decades, Robert Waters never makes it back to Michigan.
At like 6.30 in the morning, I received a call from an investigator from Beaufort. and she had explained that she had just come from the jail

and that Robert Waters had hung himself in his cell.

I'm like, no way. This cannot be happening.

Again, like a disbelief, you know, like why?

How could this happen?

He had some material that they'd given him in the jail,

and it was some devotionals,

and the parts that he had ripped out talked about forgiveness and asking for forgiveness. To me it says that you're guilty.
I mean, no one is going to do that in that situation if they're innocent. You feel robbed that you did not get the opportunity to see him face to face.
Yes. I just wanted him to feel my presence in the room.
What would you have said to him in court? I don't think I would have said anything. I just think I would have walked in, and my presence is enough words for him.
He would have seen that baby. Yeah.
That he left there in that crib all the time. And probably my mom, because I look like her, they say.
He's a coward. To take her away from all of us in the manner that he did, and then he got to go live his life, you're not going to give us any answers.
I mean, he's just a coward. But remember, there are two cases here that have been unlocked by this new technology, and back in Beaumont, Texas, Catherine Edwards' loved ones are determined to see the suspect in that case, Clayton Foreman, the man charged with murdering her, face a jury.
Clayton Foreman goes on trial in March of 2024 in Beaumont. He is charged with capital murder.
Clayton Bernard Foreman, how do you plead for the indictment? Guilty or not guilty? Not guilty. There were family there.
There were friends there. There were former students of Catherine's that were there to see that justice was going to be served.
Prosecutors begin by playing that 911 call Catherine's parents made for the jury. Police, police.
What's going on? I found my daughter was murdered. That 911 tape was very impactful to start the trial off with.
That really gets you involved and to know that something horrible happened. You know, Catherine's parents did not live to see the man accused of killing their daughter arrested.
So this is left now to the twin sister, Allison, to tell jurors about her sister. Are you related to Mary Catherine Edwards? Yes, she was my twin sister.
Allison is now 60 years old and she offered really powerful testimony about growing up with Catherine. She just was always very nurturing and loving to people and if anyone had a problem they would come to her and she would talk to strangers and make friends with people and compliment people and just was an amazing

person. Allison recalls the afternoon where her sister's body was discovered.
Catherine just never showed up to this lunch so eventually her father Lum agreed to go check on her. And my dad answered the phone and he was frantic.
And he said, your sister's dead, your sister's dead. It was just heartbreaking to see, I mean, her twin, identical twin, is what she would have looked like today if she was alive.
There she is up on the stand testifying. And the emotion and the love and the hurt, all of it came out and was so impactful with the jury.
Allison said when Catherine died, she thought her parents died a little bit that day too. It was horrible.
They were never the same. But we decided as a family after that happened that

we were going to not let what happened kill us too. And that we were going to live to

honor her. And that's what we always did after that.

In a heart crushing moment, Allison shares with the jury how she honored her sister after

her death.

Four years later, I had a daughter and her name is Catherine. Catherine Ann.
After my sister. She never got to know her.
My oldest was nine months old and she was her godmother and she never got to know her either. You can know the case inside out, but until you see somebody testify and see the raw emotion that's going on that was raw raw emotion that they relived on the stand.
Excuse ma'am thank you. Prosecution's next witness is about to detail the surprising connection between Catherine Edwards and Clayton Foreman.
And you got married to a person by the name of Clayton Foreman? Yes. What she's about to tell the jury about his reaction to Catherine's death.
It dumbfounded me. Jurors in the trial of Clayton Foreman, the man accused of killing that school teacher, Catherine Edwards, are now hearing about this investigation that took nearly 30 years, and all of it now culminating with this cutting-edge DNA testing done by that Texas lab, Othram.
I was very eager to get to the courtroom. I 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. There's one thing to solve a case,

and there's another to be able to defend

how that work was done,

allow it to be interrogated openly and critiqued.

We want to see at least 50% of the markers,

and you can see that in actuality,

we have, it looks like 87%.

So that's far in excess of what is necessary

to produce a workable profile.

Without the DNA, the story doesn't matter. That's that one puzzle piece that puts it all together.
So prosecutors want the jurors now to hear from the woman who can actually detail the connection between that school teacher, Catherine Edwards, and Clayton Foreman. She was married to him.
My name's Diana Cote. And remember, Catherine Edwards and her twin sister were

actually bridesmaids at the wedding. Were they friends of yours in high school? Yes.
She also

testified that while she was married to Foreman, she actually discovered something unnerving in his

car. You had found a briefcase in the trunk of the defendant's car, is that correct? That's correct.

All right. What was inside the briefcase? It was was a gun a set of handcuffs and some horrible pornographic material okay regarding the gun was there any reason for him to have a gun that you knew of at the time no reason i mean is there any reason that you knew of that he would have a pair of handcuffs in the back of his truck? No.

Did you ever talk to him about that?

No. I didn't know what he would say.
I didn't know what he would do. And later, when questioned by the defense, Diana said she never saw the briefcase again.
She also recalled an odd conversation that she'd actually had with her ex-husband about Catherine and her twin sister. He had told me that in high school, he would see them in the hall and he always thought they were so cute because they were twins and he felt as though he wanted to make sure he protected them.
After 11 years of marriage, Diana and Foreman divorced, but they continued to stay in touch. And she tells jurors how two years later,

in 1995, she actually called her ex-husband after finding out that Catherine had been murdered. Was that very upsetting to you? Yes.
When you told him, how did he react? He didn't. It was very shocking to me.
He just, it had like no feeling whatsoever and just basically was like, oh really?

And it dumbfounded

me. And there was one more witness jurors would hear from, Paula Ramsey, Foreman's victim from

1981. It had been decades since Paula had even heard the name of the man who assaulted her.

It was a Friday and I was at work. My phone rang and it said Beaumont Police.
This emotion came over to me and I was like, what, is someone messing with me? And on the other end of the line was Detective Lou Allen. He said he's a suspect in a murder.
And that's when he started telling me about the DNA. And he said it is a cold case murder.
And I was like, you don't even have to ask. I will go.
I will testify. We hung up.
I just broke down. I mean, you just go back to being that girl again, where that fear and all of it just kind of consumes you again.
And so suddenly, all these years later, in a courtroom full of strangers, Paula is telling her story about how she was assaulted by Foreman. Did he do something with your hands? He tied them in the back, behind.
He took your hands, put them behind you, and secured them with an object. Do you believe that object may have been a belt? Yes.
Did he threaten to cut your throat if you didn't do what he wanted? Yes. I just kind of blocked out everything else and just focused on the questions.
Did he say something that you found odd concerning what he'd just done to you? Yes. What was that? When I was getting out of the car, he said, Stop crying.
I'm sorry. I hope I didn't hurt you.
You have to say these things out loud. And then knowing that he's sitting right over there.
Just being in the same room, that was hard. She relived it on that stand, and it was amazing to watch her, how brave she was to do that.
You came here today to tell Miss Cherry what happened to you 42 to 43 years ago, right? Yes. Who did you do that for? For Catherine.
I wanted to see justice done for her. And in the end, Clayton Foreman's defense, they wouldn't call any witnesses, but they did deliver a closing statement.
You, ordinary citizens, get to decide whether or not on the day in question, January 14, 1995, Clayton committed the offense of capital murder. He may not like it, what he did back in 81, that doesn't make him a murderer.
That doesn't make him that he went out and killed somebody. The case was very one-sided, and the prosecution had all the witnesses, had all the evidence.
There is very little the defense could do. The verdict is in 29 years of waiting, came down to seven days of testimony and ultimately 52 minutes of deliberation.
I'll tell you that anytime 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.
We in the jury find the defendant guilty of the offense of capital murder. It took police nearly 30 years to bring Clayton Foreman to trial for the murder of Katherine Edwards.
It took the jury less than an hour to convict him. It was very fast.
He was sentenced to life in prison. It was just relief.
I was thankful that I did it. Thankful that it did help.
It did help putting him away. It 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. As 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. It is.
Thankfully, the detectives worked very, very hard on this. And never gave up.
Never gave up, and they solved it. Detective Llewellyn called me, and he said, hey, Carmen, you remember how you said you always wanted that case solved before you retired? Well, I know you've retired, but I think we got him.

And he did.

I can see the satisfaction on your face.

Justice after all these years.

After all these years, absolutely.

Justice, finally, for that elementary school teacher,

Katherine Edwards.

And in the second case, justice as well

for Kathy Swartz's daughter, Courtney.

Hi, Courtney. Hi, Courtney.

Hello.

Hi.

So these are the two who helped solve the case.

Hello, Kristen.

Kristen.

I'm going to try to hug you.

I'm going to hug you.

Oh, my God.

Just 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.

I can't even. I don't even have no words.
You don't need words. I'm glad you have answers.
Thank you. It'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.
You give them this DNA sample and the next thing you know, you know who your suspect is. Do you think that there are cases like this all over the country right now just waiting to be solved with this new technology? Absolutely, all over the country and all over the world.
But finding every case, I think, would be the goal. Every 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. And that means answers, finally, for thousands of families.
Sure, absolutely. There are tens of thousands of little tubes of DNA in crime labs across this country, and all of them have answers.
I 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.

For some families, you are the last hope.

For many.

I 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.
Okay! I have been living with this for 36 years. And these people, they took their time.
They 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.
And we should know that that lab, those DNA decoders, Kristen and David Middleman, Othram, they recently announced their 455th DNA match. Deborah, they are solving these cases.
And 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.
That's our program for tonight. Thanks so much for watching.
I'm Deborah Roberts. And I'm David Muir from all of us here at 2020 at ABC News.
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