Mary Catherine Edwards

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail and may be sensitive for some listeners. Warning this episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. It may be sensitive for some listeners. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey guys, welcome to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. This is my first official episode. There goes to drag racers. Welcome to twenty twenty five from PTK Studios, aka my office space where I get all of my recording done. Now that I have this fancy schmancy Mike stand with a phone holder in it, which I am obsessed with, it is the best. So welcome officially to the first Primetime Crime episode of my producing in twenty twenty five. Pisode is going to be a good one. I do want to talk right now in true crime. We have a few things to catch up on. Obviously. There is a lot going on right now in the world, a lot. It is overwhelming. Twenty twenty five already is just it's been something else already. There's been a few things just going on, but we're going to stick to crime only. So first thing is, first, I want to talk about Jake Wagner's sentence. Now, if you don't know who Jake Wagner is, then you will learn a lot more about Jake Wagner and his cohorts in the twenty twenty five summer series I'm doing on the Pike County massacre, which occurred in Pike County, Ohio. Now, the Pike County massacre occurred in twenty sixteen. I'm not going to give you a ton of detail because it is a very involved and convoluted case. But Jake Wagner was one of the people respond puncible for this Pie County massacre and he was sentenced and the judge sentenced him to life in prison, but is giving him the chance of parole eligibility in thirty two years now. Like I said, I'm not going to really get into the meat and potatoes of this case yet because I want to save it for summer series. But Jake Wagner and his people will talk all about them in a little while. Like in the Summer series, eight people lost their lives. Eight people lost their lives, and this judge, who obviously lost his damn mind, said Jake Wagner is eligible for parole in thirty two years. When Jake heard that, his face completely lit up. We're going to talk about all of it in summer series. But he also gave like this really preachy, insane statement during the sentencing, and I wanted to rip my eyes out. So I don't even know what is going on in Paie County and what is going on with this judge in my opinion, but thirty two years eligible for parole after eight people died, absolutely freaking not. So I hope that whoever in thirty two years is deciding the fate of Jake Wagner doesn't grant him parole because Jake is not a good person. And you'll learn about it in a few months when I talk all about the different things. There were also some other sentences. I'm not going to talk too much about those, but that was like a big deal that he was sentenced to life in prison but eligible for parole in thirty two years. It is wild to me that someone that is responsible for a massacre, what they're calling a massacre, is eligible for parole in eight thirty two years. I'd love to say eight. Years in thirty two years mind blown emoji. All right, now, moving on to other things, we are going to talk about Luigi Mangioni, who is the alleged shooter of Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO in New York City. They have pretty much stalled his court proceedings until February. There is a lot going on. There's also apparently allegedly beef with him and Didty in jail because he is in the same jail as P Didty is, and Diddy is upset because Luigi is getting all of the support from the outside and also prisoners on the inside, and P Diddy is not getting that support, and P Didty is jealous. So what is happening? I'm really unsure, but that is kind of where we're at with that. So court proceedings for Luigi have been delayed until February. But I will continue to keep you guys updated as I hear more and more and more. Of someone else that doesn't need to be up for parole. Yolanda Salazar, who is responsible for murdering the Queen of Takana Music Selena, is going to go to a parole hearing in March to plead her case. I don't think there's anyone in their right mind that would look at this woman who in cold blood shot her quote unquote best friend and think that she needs to be out and about mingling with people in the public. So I'm hopeful that she will not be granted parole. But twenty twenty five is already been a wild year, so you really don't know what's going to happen. But I will be sure to keep you guys updated on that. And we are going to switch gears now to Donna Adelsen. Her trial has officially been set for June third of twenty twenty five, so it is coming up. It'll be here before we know it. We have a very busy year for trials. We have Brain Coburger, Idaho four. We have Donna Adelson. We have Lori Valo representing herself in the murder of her husband, Charles Valo, in the attempted murder of her ex nephew in law, Brandon Woodreau. She is representing herself, meaning she's going to be cross examining the witnesses, She's going to be questioning people, and it is going to be an absolute disaster, and I think it's going to be her karma and I'm so ready to see it all happen. Last thing I want to talk about real quickly, going back to Adelson. Charlie Adelson, who was convicted and sentenced to the murder for higher scheme in his ex brother in law Dan Marcel's murder. He wants to be resentenced. He was sentenced to life in prison, no possibility of parole, and he wants to be resentenced. There was a filing that recently. Came out and his reasoning for wanting to be resentenced is a lot of red tape legality stuff. Gigi from Pretty Lies and Alibis read through the filing on her podcast. If you want to hear the details, go and listen to our episode. It is entitled let me get the title for you. It is entitled Charlie wants to be resentenced. Let's read the filing and she will give you all of the details, all of the ins and. Outs and read through the filing and kind of explain things. So if you want to know more, go listen to her episode Pretty Lies and Alibis that was released on January seventh. It is short and sweet, right to the point. But yeah, that is the update on Charlie Adelson. His mom is going to be going to trial in the summer, and I have never been more ready for a trial to come than Donna's because I feel like it's all going to start to come full circle and it's going to be really interesting to see if we learn anything new in Donna's trial that we didn't learn in the previous three. So that is the right Now on True Crime update for this week, and we are going to go ahead and get into today's episode, the first official episode of twenty twenty five, and I hope you guys enjoyed the episode. Okay, guys, today we are jumping into a brand new case happy first episode of twenty twenty five. I'm excited for a full year of unsolved cases, bringing attention to these cases that so desperately need our attention. But today I'm going to be telling you about a case that was cold for twenty six years, but we finally have resolution in it, and I'm going to tell you how they kind of got to this point and why this case is no longer cold. I wanted to kind of start off the year with an episode like this, because I think it's so important to shine a light on the fact that you should never give up when it comes to cold case advocacy, because tomorrow could be the day that a cold case has a break. So today I'm going to be telling you about the. Murder of a woman named Mary Katherine Edwards, who was thirty one years old living in Beaumont, Texas, in nineteen ninety five. Mary Catherine Edwards was born July ninth of nineteen sixty three to her parents' Lum Edwards and Mary Anne Edwards. She also had a twin sister named Alison and a brother. She was known to her friends and family as Catherine, and as she grew up, she decided she wanted to become a teacher, so she went to school got her degree to become a teacher, and at the time of her death, she was a second grade teacher at Price Elementary School in Beaumont, Texas. She was very dedicated to her students and to her job. So now we're going to get into a little bit about Catherine's last day and what transpired leading up to her death. So Catherine was last seen leaving her classroom on Friday, January thirteenth, nineteen ninety five. Around five pm on Saturday, January. Fourteenth, Catherine didn't show up for a family lunch that she had planned with her family, and her family was having a difficult time getting a hold of her via phone. Now this is before text messaging and all of that, so her mom and dad decided to go to. Her home to check up on her make sure she was okay. So they went to our townhouse in Beaumont, Texas, which was located at one zero zero five Park Meadow Drive, And when they went inside the house, they were met with an awful scene. They found Catherine dead in her bathtub. She had handcuffs on her wrists which were bound behind her back. She had been sexually assaulted, and most interestingly of all, there were no signs of forced entry, to the fact that Catherine likely knew and trusted her killer. Another really interesting fact was that the handcuffs found on Catherine weren't just run of the mill regular handcuffs. They were police grade handcuffs, which baffled the investigators even more, thinking could this be one of her own that has done this to this poor woman. While there was no denying that there had been some type of assault that transpired with Catherine and her perpetrator. They did think that initially she could have drowned in the bathtub, but once they did the autopsy, there wasn't enough fluid in her lungs for that to be the case. The medical examiner then went on to determine that Catherine had died from entrapment asphyxiation with the force of the attacker on top of her cutting off her ability to breathe. Now, they did have DNA evidence, as like I said, Catherine had been sexually assaulted, and they even attempted to trace the serial number that was on the handcuffs, but they ended up coming up empty handed on that front as well. They questioned a man who was named David Perry. He was an ex boyfriend of Catherine, but he had a very solid alibi and was not even in town at the time of her murder. Now, like I said, they had the DNA, and they tested David's DNA in conjunction with the DNA they had and it was not a match. So David Perry was very quickly ruled out as a suspect. The Beaumont Police Department did everything that they could to try to figure out what had happened in this case and give Catherine's family the resolution that they needed. But years would pass and eventually it went cold. There was no new leads, there was no hits on the DNA they entered into the databases, and there was essentially nothing. So from nineteen ninety five to twenty eighteen, nothing really happened this case, no movement, no new suspects, and no justice for Catherine or her family, and this horrendous killer, whoever it was, remained free. And this was a vile person. Whoever did this to Catherine. This is not somebody that you want walking around with you in your community, interacting with you on a daily basis, not knowing that they are responsible for killing Catherine Edwards. So luckily, in the years that passed where this case was pretty much cold, there were steady advances in DNA technology, and although there wasn't any new movement on Catherine's case, DNA evidence was very well preserved since the time of her death in nineteen ninety five. So once twenty eighteen year olled around, there was a new process with DNA where they could take the DNA left at a crime scene and search for relatives in a program called ged Match. Now this is where I'll talk about familial DNA and all of that. I've talked about that on this podcast before. So around that time, Detective Aaron Leuallen was approached by Ranger Brandon Bess, who all worked in the Beaumont area, and he asked him if he thought they had a case that they could use this type of technology with, and Detective Luallen immediately knew that Catherine's case was the one that really needed this type of technology because they did have this DNA. So from nineteen ninety five to twenty twenty, there is limited to no movement on this case until April of twenty twenty, when the DNA from Catherine's case is sent over to Authoram Lab in the Woodlands, Texas. I've talked about Authorham in the past. They do amazing work, but they are only one of the labs in the USA doing amazing things with DNA technology and solving cold cases left and right. At the end of this episode, I am going to be sharing a Facebook group that you guys can fin follow along with where you can see all of the cold cases that Authorn Labs are solving on a weekly basis. It's amazing to see all of these cold cases that people you literally thought were unsolvable being solved by the DNA familial technology that Offrham has. So with this, the DNA familial matches started to come in and Detective Leuwellen was quickly overwhelmed because what it does is it basically shows even if the person shares one percent in DNA with someone else, it shows all of the matches. So Detective Llewellen being overwhelmed, he was talking with his wife, Tina, who was an auto crimes detective, and she started helping him kind of piece things together. And one thing she noticed was all of the matches seemed to be of Cajun descent and from the Louisiana area, So this was definitely a big step in the right direction. It kind of narrowed things down quite a bit. She was also. Able to narrow things down to not just Louisiana, but Caplin, Louisiana. So Beaumont is pretty much right on the Texas and Louisiana border, so this wasn't a huge stretch to think that her killer came from a neighboring town. So this all kind of made sense. So investigators decided to go back to Catherine's journals and they were going to just go in and look for any French Cajun names that might help them tie to someone in the family tree. Some names ended up coming up. As a dead end and they were immediately eliminated. But in Tina's research, she kept coming up on one particular last name, which was the last name of Lapointe. Now, if you haven't done ancestry before, you can build family trees and you can essentially see who added to their family tree from other family trees and so on and so forth. So with this lappoint aim that kept popping up, it was always tied to this woman who was named Cheryl Lapointe. And no one knew who Cheryl LaPoint was. Was she related to her suspect, could somebody in Shara's family be responsible for Catherine's stuff? They didn't really know. So they decided to reach out to. Shera and they found out that she had been working on building her family treon ancestry. But more interestingly, she was also known as the quote unquote gene hunter and had done some work and had identified a woman that was a victim of the Texas Killing Fields, which I will probably get into the Texas Killing Fields at some point. I have a lot of requests to do that one, so look for that probably in the next year. So Shara had this connection to already previously identifying the victim of a homicide, and her name kept kind of popping up, so that a really interesting coincidence. But once they chatted with her, she was very much willing to help, even knowing that someone in her own family could be the killer of Catherine Edwards. Shara is quoted as saying that it was really kind of scary because she said, I'm putting my own second cousins into this tree, and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, you know, could one of my grandfather's sister's grandchildren have done this they lived here in Texas. You just never know in these situations where you're going through these family trees and you never know if you're going to come across something that might lead back to one of your own family members. That's kind of how it was looking in this whole situation with Shara. So they ended up going through this multi layer process using available DNA. They used birth records they used depth records, and Sarah said very much as you build the different trees, you're looking for information that is pertinent to the case you're working on. So in the case. Of Catherine, you have a tag for people who lived in Beaumont. You have a tag for people that might have worked in education, because Catherine was a teacher. So you kind of build the tree. You look for people who lived in Beaumont who worked in education who might have some tie to Catherine along the way, and the tree grew to almost seventy five hundred names. So, of course, finding the one person that was responsible for Catherine's death was going to be a huge, huge feet but Shara and Tina were working diligently on trying to figure out who this one person was. They became very very closely. They were literally working night and day on this case, trying to find a needle in a haystack, so to say, and tie down the suspect. Time they would come across somebody that they were interested in, they wanted to either eliminate or confirm that this person could have been involved. They turned to Tina's husband, who was Detective Lluellen and Ranger Best and they would go and get the DNA needed to clear them eliminate them as a suspect. So this was really police work at its finest. Them doing the things that they needed to do to eliminate these people as they happened across this family tree. So they went through this process. Many times, and once they got the DNA of this person or a potential relative of this person, and the genetic material shared with the killers DNA was low, they knew that that would be a dead end for them and they could cross that person off of their list of interests. So they went on doing. This process for a total of three months, and they were, like I said, literally working night and day. When they essentially hit a jackpot, so to say. So it was around ten thirty pm. Shara had been working a line in her own family tree that was distantly related to her family and she came across the last name of Thibodeaux. So she ended up in this line finding a couple that had lived in Beaumont and they had two sons, both of which went to Forest Park High School, which was the same high school that Catherine went to around the same time that Catherine went. So Shara ended up putting the names into the tree. She messaged Tina and ended up going to bed, and when she woke up the next morning, her cell phone was blowing up. They had their connection. It was one of these brothers. They just weren't sure which brother it was. So there was Michael Foreman and there was Clayton Foreman. I don't know what it was with Detective Llewellen that just told him he needed to run these names. But he decided to run Clayton Foreman's name first. And when he ran Clayton's name, it pulled up that he had a prior conviction for sexual assault. And he said the hair on the back of his neck stood up and he knew immediately that this was the guy who had killed Catherine. So in nineteen eighty one, there was a nineteen year old woman who had told law enforcement that Clayton Foreman had bound her hands behind her back and raped her. This is a woman who also had gone. To Forest Park High School, where Clayton was the manager of the football team. Clayton Foreman ended up being convicted, but was given probation and he essentially had to pay a fine. And this was the early nineteen eighties nineteen eighty one, he wasn't required to give a DNA sample or anything like that because things were so vastly different than they are now. But there was another connection to our victim, Catherine Edwards. And this connection goes back to a woman named Diana Coe who was friends with Katherine Edwards since middle school. So when Diana was in high school, she was a little bit younger. She was in love with this boy and he had already graduated. He was three years ahead of her, but they were in love and they wanted to get married. So they ended up getting engaged and. Diana started to plan their wedding although she was still in high school. So Diana decided to go to her two best friends, who were Katherine and her twin sister Allison, and said, will you guys please be in this wedding. So the wedding ended up happening in nineteen eighty two. And who is the man that Diana was so in love with that she married while she was still in high school None other than a man named Clayton Foreman. What the heck this is like? Literally what I live for in these true crime cases is the moment it all comes together. So this right here tells us that Catherine did know Clayton. She was in his wedding. Not only did they go to high school together, although they went to high school for a short time. Because Clayton was older and he graduated. He knew her and he knew her well enough that she was in his wedding. Now, around the time that Diana and Clayton were planning this wedding is around the same time that Clayton was arrested for the sexual assault of this woman. So Diana did know about Clayton's quote unquote legal issues. But by that time the invites to the wedding had already been sent out, and Clayton very much explained it away as it was a big misunderstanding, and Diana believed him a because she was young and she thought, well, if he really had raped a girl, he would probably be in jail, and he's not in jail, so it must have been a misunderstanding. So Clayton explaining it away was really all that Diana needed to believe him. This was the man she wanted to marry. And yeah, we could argue all day. She was young, she didn't know any better, but I probably would feel the exact same way. You would think if he did do this, he should be in jail. He probably would be in jail. So I don't think that she really had any idea that she was marrying someone that could have potentially done something like that, because if he would, he would be in jail. So despite all of this, Diana's family did want her to call off the wedding, but she loved Clayton and she saw herself with him, married to him, starting a family with him. So again, she was young, she was in love, and that's kind of how it goes when you're young and you're in love. Blind are on and you just see what's right in front of you. And Clayton was portraying himself as a family man. I want to get married to you. I would never hurt anybody. So Diana and Clayton did get married. They stayed married a little longer than eleven years old. They did have a son together, and their relationship started kind of falling apart because Clayton had lied about some of their financial stuff and he ended up having an affair as well. And looking back on. It now, Diana says she can see that he really had an odd, unhealthy fascination with police officers and the tools that they used in their everyday life, the tools of their trade, something like handcuffs, which, as we talked about earlier, Catherine was handcuffed using these police grade handcuffs before she was sexually assaulted and murdered. So Diana recalls a time that Clayton had ordered some handcuffs and he ended up draping them across the rear view mirror in his car, but she didn't really think anything of it. I mean, hindsight is twenty twenty, of course. So Clayton and Diana were already divorced at the time of Catherine's death, and she remembers calling him about Catherine being. Murdered, and she said that he was very flat. He showed no emotion, and she thought that was kind of odd because Catherine was very very close with Diana and that was one of her oldest friends. So you think that he would have some type of emotional reaction to it in some way, shape or form. I mean, this was a good friend of his ex wife's and they were still cordial. Clayton and Diana, even though they were divorced, they were still cordial, so you would think you would have some type of emotion regarding the horrific murder of this woman who was in your wedding. Even if they weren't super close, he still knew who she was. So now that law enforcement has pretty much narrowed down that they think this is their guy, they needed to try to track him down. Now he no longer was living in Beaumont. He had relocated to Ohio, and he was also now in his. Sixties and worked as an uber driver. Which is the number one reason I always say don't get in an uber alone because there literally could be a killer driving you to and from and this is a prime example of that. Oh my gosh, so freaking scary. So they tracked him down and they did what they call a trash run, basically to solidify through the DNA evidence that they have their guy. So this is the same thing that they did with the Long Island serial killer and the pizza crust that he had thrown in the pizza box that he threw away outside of his office in New York City. So they go to his house, they kind of stake it out, and they get the piece of trash out of the trash can they need. They run the DNA and they tested against the DNA sample from the murder of Catherine Edwards and bam. The likelihood that the DNA belonged to Clayton Foreman was a big number, four hundred and sixty one septillion percent, meaning that this DNA one hundred million percent belonged to Clayton Foreman. So when Diana first learned that they had a lead, she was shocked and saddened that the DNA came back to match her ex husband Clayton. She was shocked. She was like, there's no way that clay could. Do something like this to somebody that was a close friend. So when law enforcement decided that they were going to officially move in and they went to Ohio to talk to Clayton, they kind of did it under a the ruse of a story about one of his Uber passengers had left a purse in his car, So they basically brought him in to talk about this purse that had been left in the car and then nobody could find it. So as law enforcement started talking to him, Clayton quickly realized that it wasn't about a purse left behind during an Uber ride, and they then went on to talk to him about the photos from his wedding, and they showed him photos of his wedding. They showed him a. Picture of Diana the bride with Catherine and Alison, her two bridesmaids, and just kind of were hinting around, so to say, And they ended up asking him if he was aware that a crime was committed against Catherine, and he said no, and then they asked him if anyone ever came to him about a crime committed against Catherine, and he said no. Then they ended up asking him a series of questions regarding Catherine. Did you know her well? And he just said that they went to high school together, but she was a freshman while he was a senior, which you married a woman who was also a freshman while you were a senior, so that doesn't really say much. And then he said that he knew of her through his ex wife, but he didn't know her well, he didn't know where she. Lived, never dated her. And they said, and you definitely never had sex with her, You never slept with her, and he was like, no, never had sex with her, never slept with her. So then the. Detectives say, well, if this is true, then explain to us how your DNA ended up on Catherine and in her bed. So the detectives think at this point that Clayton is kind of thinking if they really had anything on me, they would have already arrested me, and I also having given them a voluntary given them my DNA, so they have nothing on me. But little did he know they had everything and more that they needed to make an arrest that day and arrest Clayton Foreman. And if you remember correctly, when Clayton was brought in, it was under the pretenses of someone having left something in one of his ubers, so he had no idea what was happening to him. He had no idea. And when they have first brought him in, they said, you know, you're just coming in for questioning. You're going to be free to go at the end of this. So I think all along he knew that he was going to be let go regardless of what this conversation entailed. But they really did have everything they needed to prove that he was guilty, and they basically told him that we have everything that we need to prove that you are the one that sexually assaulted and murdered Mary Catherine Edwards. The crime was processed perfectly and the DNA had been stored properly for decades of time. They told Clayton that they pretty much had everything they needed, and all Clayton would really say was okay, and then he said that he thought that he probably would need an attorney. So they told him, when you walked in here, we told you that you were going to be free to walk out, and that's exactly what we're going to let you do. I think they were like dangling the bait a little bit for him to see what his next move would be. So they did. They let him walk out, and as he walked out and headed towards the elevator, they walked up to him and arrested him for the murder of Mary Catherine Edwards. Finally a start to justice. So before they had met with Clayton, they obviously knew that they were going to make an arrest. They had enough evidence to make this arrest, but they wanted to talk to him. But another thing they really wanted to do, and they had to get special permission to do, was use the same handcuffs that were used on Catherine that day. So they got. Special permission from the DA's office beforehand and were granted the permission to use those SAM handcuffs to arrest Clayton Foreman, which was such a big, in my opinion, FU moment to Clayton from law enforcement, from beyond the grave, from Catherine to Clayton, a giant FU. And I love when karma comes back around and bite somebody in the butt. So Clayton Foreman ended up being tried in March of twenty twenty four, which was nearly thirty years since Catherine was killed in her town home in Beaumont, Texas in nineteen ninety five. So the trial, of course, like we've talked about, was pretty much a slam dunk because of the DNA evidence, but they of course still had to go through the trial process. The prosecution brought their a game, while the defense didn't really bring much of anything. The defense attorney that was representing Clayton didn't even present an opening statement. The prosecution ended up. Calling Allison, who was Catherine's twin sister, which had to be so bizarre for Clayton to be looking in the eyes of a spitting image of what Catherine would have looked like. If her life wasn't taken all of those years ago. They also would go on to talk about all the forensic experts and discussed how they came to the conclusion that Clayton, Foreman was their guy. And then on the final day they. Called witnesses, and they called a bunch of women who had either known Clayton in one way or another, or they called women who had been victims of Clayton, because as suspected, Catherine wasn't his only victim. We heard from an old coworker who said any time she opened to drawer at work, there was handcuffed senate. We heard from an ex fiancee of Clayton's who found pictures of young girls among some of Clayton's possessions, and when she asked him about it, he basically told her that he had the picture so he could fantasize about taking their virginities. Clayton is just disgusting. Diana, who was Clayton's ex wife, agreed to testify against her ex husband, and it was on this day that Diana finally learned what had happened all those years ago before she had married Clayton. In regards to the rape charge that Clayton basically got a get out of jail free card for so. The woman testified her car had gotten stuck and Clayton said he was a police officer and offered to help. Of course, he gained her trust, which wasn't too hard with his ruse of I'm a police officer. He then proceeded to tie her hands behind her back and threatened to slit her throat if she fought back during the sexual assault, and then he sexually assaulted her. He drove her home and dropped her off. She was obviously upset and crying, and even at one point he said to her stop crying. I'm sorry. I hope I didn't hurt you. What a sick ass individual Clayton forman is to do that to a woman and then apologize and say, I hope I didn't hurt you. What is wrong with you? There was another woman who didn't directly testify, but she did go on record and she said that Clayton had attacked her, but she did it press charges. She was attacked from behind. She was a woman who was a friend of Diana's, and he had essentially put a gun to her head, and she said that in eighty five or eighty six, he had come to her apartment, knocked on the door and told her that he was having financial and narrow problems with Diana and he basically needed somebody to talk to. So she let him out, and then he proceeded to attack her. So investigators believe that this is very much what happened with Catherine as well. Katherine loved Diana, and if Clayton had showed up to her townhouse and said that he needed to talk about something regarding Diana, Katherine would have willingly let him in because she was a good, caring person and would do anything for her friends. So the fact that he took advantage of that only for his sick sexual creepiness is astounding to me. And that he got to live so many years of his life free to do that to other people. He got to get married, he got to have kids, things that Catherine never got the chance to do. The defense ended up calling no witnesses, and they only really said that it's obvious that Clayton wasn't a good guy, but that doesn't make him a killer. I tend to disagree with that, and the DNA obviously doesn't lie the jury came back in less than an hour with a guilty verdict and he was sentenced to life and murder. So Detective llew Ellen very much believes that there are more victims out there and they just don't know who they are yet. And I think that's the scariest part of this is obviously there were warning signs. This happened way before there was a sexual assault database and all that kind of stuff. So he basically did commit that horrific sexual assault against that woman, and then he was let out and he was free, and he was free to do this to other people, and that led to Catherine losing her life. I do want to end this episode with some writings from Catherine's journal. She did keep a diligent journal, and these are just a couple of things she wrote about before her life was taken. Shortly before her life was taken, quote, I have given my life to God and I will follow his path for me. That gives me a feeling of great relief and peace. She also said the human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it, and I think that that is so telling in this case, because we waited almost thirty years for justice for Catherine, and I think those journal entries really likely helped propel her family, her friends, some of her former students. I'm going to talk about one of them in a minute. It helped keep them going and helped keep them on track, and they never gave up hope. And luckily, Clayton Forman is behind bars and will never see the light of day. So one of Catherine's students who was only seven years old when Catherine was murdered, she was present every day in the courtroom and she'll never forget the impact that Catherine had on her life and how the murder. Changed the path of her life. And only seven years old, she is studying for her masters and criminal justice and plans to apply to law school. And she's doing this as a tribute to Catherine, who very much impacted her life. And that really just goes to show you that you can literally impact somebody's life and not even realize that it's happening as it's happening. This little girl was at least seven, and Catherine was so important to her that all these years later, she is now pursuing a degree in criminal justice, trying to become a lawyer. As a tribute to her teacher that taught her when. She was seven. That is an amazing legacy. So I now want to talk about Earlier in the episode, I talked about a group that you guys could join on Facebook that you can keep up with all of the Awthroom news and the different cases that they are solving every day every week. It is amazing. So I'm going to put a link to the group in the show notes. It is called DNA Solves Advocates. It is on Facebook and you'll be able to see these cases, how any cases are getting solved because the DNA is getting tested in these new ways. There are so many others out there, just like Mary Catherine Edwards. So Mary Catherine Edwards's mom, Mary Ann Edwards, passed away on October twenty fourth of twenty fifteen at the age of eighty one. Lum Edwards Junior. Who was Catherine's dad, passed away March twenty ninth of twenty nineteen at age eighty seven, and Lum Castwell Edwards, a third, who was Catherine and Allison's brother, passed away January fifteenth, twenty twenty one, at sixty one years old. None of them got the chance to see justice for Catherine while they were alive. But the justice did come, and I. Know that they were all reunited with Catherine and celebrating the fact that her killer is behind bars and we'll never see the light of day again. And I am celebrating. As well, because this shows you that you can never give up hope. We are at, like I said, almost thirty years to justice, and her family never stopped pursuing it. People that happened upon the case fresh set of eyes, never gave up. They brought other people in. People that seemingly weren't even going to be part of the case ended up becoming part of the case. And that is how it got solved. And that is why I. Say these cold cases are so important to share because they're all solvable. Every single one of them is solvable, especially if there's DNA evidence, especially if it's been. Well preserved, they are solvable. I truly hope that Catherine's family has found a little bit of peace, a little bit of closure, knowing that the person that her Catherine is no longer out there. I hope Diana doesn't question herself and think that any of this is her fault, because it is a one hundred percent not her fault. It is one hundred percent Clayton's fault. And someone like Clayton is the kind of person that is able to take off the mass and be who he is and then go back to being a nice guy. Lots of people that found out that Clayton was the one responsible were completely and totally shocked because he portrayed himself as a nice guy. That is the man that Diana married, the nice guy. This other individual, the one that assaulted these women, who kept handcuffs in his desk, and who killed Catherine, is the other side of that nice guy. And unfortunately, as much as we think we know people, we never truly know people. So I really hope that everyone involved in. This case doesn't harbor any guilt for any reason whatsoever, because the only person that should feel guilty in the scenario is Clayton Foreman. And I I didn't see anything, any articles or anything that said that he ever apologized or showed any remorse or anything like that. So as far as I know, Clayton Foreman doesn't care about what he did, and I think that's all we need to know about what kind of person he is. He's not a good person, and I'm glad that he's locked up behind bars. So I hope that you guys enjoyed this episode. I really wanted the first episode of twenty twenty five to be one that is solved, because I wanted to show you that it is possible. It might take thirty years, but it is possible. So I hope you guys had a great start to here twenty twenty five, and I will see you next week for a brand new unsolved case. Have a great weekend and stay safe. Bye.