TEXAS 1995 Cold Case Solved — The Victim Was a Bridesmaid at His Wedding 

When Bowmont police walked into Mary Katherine Edwards’s townhouse on January 14th, 1995, the first thing they noticed were the handcuffs. Not toy handcuffs, not novelty cuffs from a costume shop. Smith and Wesson, law enforcement grade, the same brand clipped to every officer’s belt in that room.

 A beloved elementary school teacher, 31 years old, found by her own parents, handcuffed, and killed in her own bathtub. and the restraints used on her were the kind that only police officers and security guards were supposed to carry. For 26 years, that detail haunted the investigation. Could the killer be one of their own? One detective put it plainly.

 Could it have been somebody that we knew? The DNA they collected from that crime [music] scene sat in a federal database returning zero matches. Dozens of men were tested over the years. Every single one was cleared and the case went cold while the file gathered dust on a shelf in the Bumont Police Department. What nobody knew at the time was that the answer had been hiding in plain sight for decades, not in a database, not in a fingerprint file, in a wedding photo from 1982, where a young woman in a bridesmaid dress stood smiling beside a groom named

Clayton Bernard Foreman. That bridesmaid was Mary Katherine Edwards. And 13 years after she stood at his wedding, Foreman would come back into her life one final time. [music] It would take a detective’s wife, a Louisiana genealogologist, a family tree with over 7,000 names and a $10,000 DNA test to finally connect the bloodline to the man who had been trusted enough to invite Catherine to his wedding.

 This is how a 26-year cold case was cracked. And this is the story of the woman at the center of it. A woman who deserved to be remembered for far more than how she died. If you appreciate the time and research that goes into telling these stories the right way, take a second to hit like on this video. It makes a real difference in getting these cases in front of more people.

 If you had asked anyone in Bumont, Texas about Mary Katherine Edwards in the early 1990s, they would have told you she was one of the kindest people in the city, that she was the type of teacher who stayed late to prepare lessons and spent her own money buying snacks for her fifth graders at Price Elementary School, that she never missed a Sunday service and volunteered at St.

 Elizabeth Hospital because she believed faith without action [music] was just talk. They would have told you she was an identical twin. Catherine and her sister Allison were born on July 9th, 1963 [music] to Lum and Maryanne Edwards in Bumont, Texas. From the very beginning, the two [music] were inseparable. They looked so alike that their high school yearbook at Forest Park High accidentally swapped their photos, printing Catherine’s name under Allison’s picture and Allison’s name under Catherine’s.

 Neither sister corrected it. They thought it was hilarious. As adults, both became teachers in the Bowmont public school system, and they would sometimes switch classrooms just to see if their students could tell the difference. Nobody ever could. The twin bond between Catherine and Allison was the kind of thing that fascinated everyone who witnessed it.

[music] They finished each other’s sentences. They showed up to family events wearing the same outfit without coordinating. They had the same laugh, the same mannerisms, the same instinct to help anyone who needed it. The twins grew up together in Bowmont, attended Forest Park High School together, graduated together, and then enrolled at Lamar University together, earning their teaching degrees side by side.

 After college, they moved into a townhouse together on Park Meadow Street [music] in West Bumont. It was the kind of bond that people noticed and remembered years later. Not just [music] sisters, not just twins, two halves of the same person living parallel lives in the same city.

 When Allison got married in 1991, Catherine stayed in the townhouse on her own. She had her dog for company and her routines, school during the week, church on Sundays, hospital visits to sit with patients who had nobody else. She also mentored young students through the I have a dream scholarship program, working with kids who reminded her of the ones she taught every day at Price Elementary.

Her principal, Floyd Brousard, called her a diligent teacher. That word doesn’t quite capture it. Former students remembered Catherine Edwards decades later. One of them, a man named Corey Krenshaw, recalled how she would buy classroom snacks out of her own pocket so nobody would go hungry during the school day.

 Another former student, a woman named Helenia Adams, was so deeply affected by what happened to Catherine that she would later change the entire direction of her life because of it. Catherine kept a journal. She wrote in it regularly, working through her thoughts, her faith, her questions [music] about the future. On December 11th, 1994, exactly 1 month before she was murdered, she made an entry that the detective who later read it could never forget.

 She wrote that she had given her life to God and that she would follow his path for her. She was 31 years old. She trusted people easily. Friends described her as a bit naive in the best possible way. The kind of person who always assumed the good in others. In a different story, that quality would have been her greatest strength.

 If this case is new to you and you want to follow along as the investigation unfolds, [music] subscribe to the channel. Every case we cover on Cold Case Redemption went cold for years, sometimes decades, before a breakthrough [music] changed everything. Catherine’s story is one of the most stunning examples we have ever covered.

It was Friday, January 13th, 1995. Catherine spent the afternoon with her twin sister. She drove to Allison’s house to pick up her dog, and the two of them talked the way they always did. easy, comfortable, the kind of conversation where you don’t have to explain yourself because the other person already knows what you mean.

Later that evening, they spoke again by phone. Catherine mentioned something that seemed small at the time. She had decided to cut off contact with an ex-boyfriend. She didn’t go into detail. It was just a passing comment in a Friday night phone call between sisters. That conversation was the last time Allison Edwards Brocado heard her twin sister’s voice.

 Sometime after that call, inside the townhouse on Park Meadow Street in West Bumont, something terrible happened. A neighbor who shared a wall with Catherine’s unit woke up around 1:30 in the morning to two or three heavy thumps coming from the other side. A 12-year-old who was staying at that neighbor’s house that night described the sounds differently, like somebody kicking a wall.

 Then footsteps coming down the stairs. Then a door opening and closing. Then a car pulling away. And then silence. The next day was Saturday. Catherine was expected at a family lunch. She didn’t show up. Her parents called her phone. No answer. They called again. Nothing. This was not like Catherine. She didn’t miss family events.

 She didn’t go silent without a reason. Lum and Maryanne Edwards drove to the Park Meadow townhouse. When they went inside, they found their daughter in the second floor bathroom. Maryanne Edwards picked up the phone and dialed 911. Her words were clear even through the shock. My daughter has been murdered. We found her.

 She’s handcuffed and has been tortured. I think they drowned her. When Bowmont police arrived at the townhouse, the crime scene told a violent story. The shower curtain and rod had been knocked down. The bedding was disturbed. There were 36 documented injuries on Catherine’s body. She had been handcuffed behind her back and left slumped over her bathtub, which had been filled with water.

 There was no forced entry of any kind. The windows were intact, the doors undamaged. The locks showed no tool marks. Whoever did this had either been let inside by Catherine herself or had a way in that didn’t require force. That detail immediately narrowed the investigation in a direction that made everyone uncomfortable. Catherine had known her killer.

 On a Friday night, she had opened the door and let someone into her home, someone she trusted enough not to question. The implication was clear from the first hour of the investigation. This was personal. This was not a random breakin that escalated. Whoever entered that townhouse came with a purpose [music] and came prepared.

 And then there were the handcuffs, Smith and Wesson, law enforcement grade, the kind issued to police departments and security companies, not the kind you could buy at a gas station or a costume shop. Detectives tried to trace the serial numbers on the cuffs, hoping they might lead to a specific purchase or a specific department.

 The effort came up empty. The handcuffs could not be traced to anyone. Crime scene technicians Sarah Moon and Boyd Lamb processed [music] the townhouse. They collected DNA evidence from the bedroom and from sexual assault swabs. A partial fingerprint was lifted from a wine glass. The forensic pathologist, Dr. Charles Harvey, performed the autopsy and documented everything.

 He initially ruled the cause of death as drowning. The DNA was there. The evidence was collected. In 1995, that was actually unusual. Most departments were not yet using DNA as a primary investigative tool. Bumont was ahead of the curve. The question was whether any of it would lead anywhere. The Bumont Police Department and the Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office threw everything they had at this case from day one.

 This was not a department that treated the Edwards murder as routine. A young teacher beloved in the community, found by her own parents, restrained with police grade handcuffs. The case drew immediate attention and resources. Chief investigator George Mitch Woods and DA investigator Steve Thrower led the effort. They made a decision early on that was actually unusual for 1995.

They prioritized DNA evidence. In the mid 1990s, DNA forensics was still a relatively new tool in criminal investigations. Many departments didn’t fully trust it yet, [music] and the infrastructure for processing and comparing genetic evidence was still being built. The National Cotus database wouldn’t become fully operational for another 3 years.

The DNA samples recovered from Catherine’s [music] crime scene were sent to two separate labs for independent analysis. One was the FBI laboratory at Quantico, Virginia, where an analyst named Carrie Oyen ran the tests. The other was Cellmark Diagnostics, a private forensic lab where analyst Melissa Staples conducted her own independent analysis.

Sending evidence to two labs simultaneously was a sign of how seriously Bowmont was taking this case. The first suspect was obvious, Catherine’s ex-boyfriend, David Perry. She had just told Allison that she planned to cut off contact with him. There was no forced entry which suggested she knew whoever came through the door. Perry fit the profile.

 Perry was investigated thoroughly and then he was cleared. He had been out of town on the night of the murder. His DNA did not match the sample recovered from the [music] crime scene. He was eliminated. So, detectives widened the net. Over the months and years that followed, DNA was collected from dozens of men connected to Catherine’s life.

 Friends, acquaintances, [music] colleagues, neighbors, anyone with even a peripheral connection. Cellmark Diagnostics ultimately excluded 11 individuals. Every test [music] came back the same way. Not a match. The partial fingerprint from the wine glass was run through every available database. Nothing.

 When the combined DNA index system known as COTUS came online as a national database, the profile from Catherine’s crime scene was entered. Detectives waited for a hit. It never came. Zero matches. Whoever killed Katherine Edwards had never been entered into the system. And that’s when the most troubling possibility started to settle over the investigation.

 The Smith and Wesson handcuffs were law enforcement grade. The killer had left no fingerprints at the point of entry. There was no forced entry. The crime showed a level of control and planning that did not suggest a random act. Detective Aaron Lewalan later described the fear that crept into the department. Could it have been somebody that we knew? The thought that the killer might be a fellow officer or someone in law enforcement was never spoken out loud in official channels, but it lingered.

 The case file grew thicker. The leads grew thinner and eventually the investigation reached the point where there was simply nothing left to pursue with the tools available at the time. The DNA was there, sitting in a federal database, waiting for a match that never came. The file was shelved, not forgotten, not officially closed, just cold.

another unsolved homicide in a department that did not have the technology to take it any further. In June 2020, the Texas Department of Public Safety publicized the case through the Texas Rangers Unsolved Crimes Investigation Program. They increased the reward to [music] up to $6,000 for information leading to an arrest.

 The DPS press release called it a cold case the Texas Rangers never forgot. But by that point, 25 years had passed without a single actionable lead. For the Edwards family, the years that followed the murder were a specific kind of grief that only families of unsolved homicide victims truly understand. Allison Edwards Brocado had lost her identical [music] twin.

 The person who had shared her face, her childhood, her career, her home. Every mirror was a reminder of what had been taken. Every family gathering had a chair that should not have been empty. Every January 13th came and went with the same unanswered question hanging over the family like a weight that could never be set down.

Lum and Maryanne Edwards had walked into their daughter’s townhouse expecting to find her running late. Instead, they found a crime scene that no parent should ever have to witness. That image [music] never left them. And the answer to who had done this to Catherine remained locked inside a DNA profile that no name had ever been attached to.

 A genetic fingerprint [music] with no face, no name, no arrest. The case sat cold for more than two decades while Bowmont changed around it. New buildings went up, old ones came down. The detectives who had worked the original investigation retired or moved on to other assignments. Students who had sat in Catherine’s classroom at Price Elementary grew up, went to college, started families of their own, and somewhere in that silence, [music] more than a thousand miles away in an Ohio suburb, the man who had killed Catherine Edwards was living a

completely [music] ordinary, completely free life. The same high school that produced Mary Catherine and Allison Edwards also produced Clayton [music] Bernard Foreman. He graduated from Forest Park High School in Bowmont in 1978, several years ahead of the twins. Their paths crossed the way paths do in a midsized Texas city.

 Same school, same social circles, same community events. Foreman married a woman named Diana Dalio in January of 1982. Dalio happened to be a middle school friend of the Edwards twins. And when the wedding took place, Catherine Catherine and Allison stood at the altar as bridesmaids. There is a photo from that wedding.

 The groom smiling, the bridesmaids in their dresses, Katherine Edwards standing right there beside the man who 13 years later would take her life. In 1984, Foreman and Delo had a son. That son would later attend Price Elementary School while Catherine was teaching there. The connections between Foreman and Catherine Edwards were layered.

 High school, a wedding, her classroom. He was not a stranger. He was woven into the fabric of her life. Foreman also stayed connected to the Forest Park High community over the decades. He helped organize class reunions. At the 2018 reunion, he was actually placed in charge of organizing tributes [music] to deceased classmates, standing at the podium and honoring people who had passed away.

 Katherine Edwards would have been among the names he acknowledged. The man responsible for her death leading a moment of remembrance for the dead. Former classmates who attended that reunion were stunned when they later learned the truth. The person they had trusted to honor their fallen friends had killed one of them.

 This is the detail that even the investigators who finally cracked the case could never fully explain. Why her? Why someone he knew? Someone who had celebrated one of the most important days of his life. Someone whose classroom his own son had sat in. No motive was ever established. Prosecutors never offered one at trial and Foreman never confessed.

 Not during his arrest. Not during the years he spent awaiting trial. Not at any point [music] during the proceedings. He maintained his denial from the moment the DNA evidence was placed in front of him until the verdict was read. What investigators [music] did find once they knew where to look was a pattern that had started long before Catherine’s murder.

 On July 2nd, 1981, Foreman was a 21-year-old Nabiscoco salesman living in Bowmont. That evening, he encountered a 19-year-old woman named Paula Bledso Ramsay whose car had gotten stuck after heavy rain. Foreman pulled over and offered to help. He told her he was a police officer. He was not. He used that false authority to get her into his car and then he drove her to a secluded location, restrained her hands behind her back and assaulted her.

 When Foreman was caught, he confessed. His explanation was five [music] words. He said he had been out drinking and just got carried away. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault, a thirdderee felony in the state of Texas. His sentence was 3 years of probation. He served zero days in prison. And because the COTUS database and mandatory DNA collection for convicted offenders did not exist yet in 1981, no genetic sample was ever taken from him.

 [music] There was no biological record of Clayton Bernard Foreman in any law enforcement database [music] anywhere in the country. A violent sexual predator walked out of court with probation and left no trace in the system. If Foreman had committed the same crime even 10 years later, his DNA would have been collected, entered into Cotus, and the match to Catherine’s crime scene [music] would have been immediate.

 The case would never have gone cold. He would have been identified within days or weeks of the 1995 murder, not decades. 3 years of probation. And then in January 1982, just six months after the assault conviction, he got married with Katherine Edwards standing beside him as a bridesmaid. Inside the marriage, things were not what they appeared.

 Diana Dalio, now Diana Co, would later testify that during their time together, she found a briefcase in the trunk of Foreman’s car. Inside were a gun, a pair of handcuffs, and pornography. He had no law enforcement background. He had no professional reason to own handcuffs. She did not understand why those items were there.

 The couple divorced in 1993, 2 years before Catherine was murdered. After the divorce, Foreman drifted. He worked as a salesman and a store manager. A co-orker at a debt collection agency, a woman named Christy Wymer, found a pair of handcuffs in his desk drawer. A later fiance, a woman named Terresa Brewer, discovered disturbing materials among his possessions and noted that he obsessively read the Bumont Enterprise newspaper online, keeping tabs on his old hometown from hundreds of miles away.

 Around 2007, Foreman moved to Reynoldsburg, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. He worked [music] as a bill collector and later started driving for Uber. His fianceé at the time of his eventual arrest would later tell investigators that he was intensely opposed to DNA testing. She said the word vehemently.

 He refused to provide his DNA under any circumstances. For 26 years after Catherine Edwards’s murder, Clayton Bernard Foreman lived as a free man. He drove passengers around Columbus. He attended the Forest Park High School reunion in 2018 and was actually put in charge of organizing tributes to deceased classmates. Former classmates were stunned when they later learned what he had done.

 The man who had stood at the podium honoring the dead had killed one of them. If cases like this one matter to you and you want to make sure victims like Katherine Edwards are never forgotten, hit subscribe. We cover cold cases that everyone else gave up on. New deep dives every week. So, the DNA sat in a database for over two decades with no match.

 The investigation had exhausted every conventional lead. [music] And then, starting around 2014, the ground began to shift. Bob Woreram had just been elected Jefferson County District Attorney. On his very first day in office, he picked up the phone and called Bowmont Police Chief Jimmy Singleary. [music] He told Singleary he wanted the department’s best people assigned to the Edwards case.

 This was not a routine request, [music] a newly elected district attorney making a cold case from 1995. His first phone call sent a message. Catherine Edwards had not been forgotten. The real breakthrough, though, came from [music] an unexpected place. Texas Ranger Brandon Best had been working genetic genealogy cold cases across the [music] state.

 Around 2020, he approached Detective Aaron Lwalan of the Bumont Police Department [music] and asked if there was a cold case with preserved DNA evidence that might be a candidate for the new forensic technology. Lwallan didn’t hesitate. He named the Edwards case immediately. He had seen what genetic genealogy had done for the Golden State Killer investigation in California, where a serial offender who had evaded capture for decades was identified through DNA uploaded to a public genealogy database.

If it could work there, Lwalan believed it could work here. In April of 2020, the Bowmont Police Department paid approximately $10,000 to a forensic laboratory called Oram, located in the Woodlands, Texas, about 90 mi west of Bowmont. Aram was founded by David and Kristen Middleman, and had quickly become one of the leading labs in the country for extracting usable DNA profiles from degraded or decades old evidence.

 The lab received two pieces of evidence from the Edwards case. a cutting from the bed comforter collected at the crime scene and the preserved vaginal swab from the sexual assault kit. Using a [music] process called differential extraction and a machine called the aluminina Nova sex 6000 for whole genome sequencing built a genetic profile from the 25-year-old evidence.

The results were remarkable. David Middleman would later testify that the lab recovered more than half a million genetic markers from the crime scene DNA, far more than [music] what was needed to produce a usable profile. That profile was uploaded to GED Match, a public genetic genealogy database where individuals can voluntarily upload their DNA data, often for the purpose of finding relatives or tracing ancestry.

The system returned a match, a woman in Louisiana who appeared to be a second [music] cousin of whoever had left the DNA at Catherine’s crime scene. A second cousin, not a brother, not a father, not a son, a second cousin, which meant the actual suspect could be separated from this woman by multiple generations and dozens of family branches.

 The connection was real, but it was distant. [music] It was a starting point, not a solution. Building a usable suspect identification from a second cousin match is one of the most difficult tasks in forensic genealogy. Imagine being handed a single thread pulled from a massive tapestry and being told to reconstruct the entire pattern.

 You know the thread connects to the design somewhere. You just have no idea where or how many layers of fabric sit between you and the answer. Most investigative teams would have been discouraged. The Bowmont team was not. This is where the investigation took a turn that nobody could have predicted. Detective Aaron Lwalan’s wife, Tina Lwalan, was also a Bowmont police officer. She worked in auto crimes.

 She had no formal assignment to the Edwards case, but she was a dedicated hobbyist genealogologist. And when Aaron came home and told her about the second cousin DNA match, she volunteered to start building the family tree on her own time. She began working nights and weekends, tracing the Louisiana woman’s family line backward through generations of records, birth certificates, marriage licenses, census documents, church records.

 The work was painstaking and it was complicated by a specific challenge. The suspect’s bloodline appeared to be Kjun, and in Kinjun communities, intermarriage between families was historically common. That meant shared DNA percentages were inflated, making it harder to determine exactly how closely related two people actually were. As Tina Lwalan worked deeper into the tree, a surname kept appearing, Le Point.

 She traced the name to a professional genealogologist in Bunky, Louisiana named Sherah Le Point, who went by the title the gene hunter. When Tina reached out, she discovered something unexpected. Sherah Le Point’s father-in-law’s DNA was already in the tree. [music] His genetic profile was one of the data points connecting the branches.

Le Point was no stranger to cold case work. She had previously helped identify a victim in the Texas Killing Fields case. one of the most notorious unsolved serial murder investigations in the state’s history. When she heard about the Edwards [music] case, she volunteered to help immediately. Together, Tina Lwalan and Sherah Le Point built a family tree that eventually exceeded 7,400 names.

Meanwhile, Texas Ranger Brandon Bess and Detective [music] Aaron Lwalan spent months on the road driving across Texas and Louisiana to collect voluntary cheek swabs from people connected to various branches of [music] the tree. They collected between 30 and 40 samples, each one ruling out another family line and narrowing the search.

 About 3 months into the genealogy work, Le Point traced one branch of the tree to a specific couple in Bowmont. The couple had two sons. Both were the right age. Both had attended Forest Park High School. When Aaron Lwalan ran the names through law enforcement databases, [music] one of them came back with a record. Clayton Bernard Foreman, aggravated assault, 1981.

A young woman restrained and assaulted after being told she was in the custody of a police officer. Lewalan later described the moment. He said the hair on the back of his neck stood up. The modus operandi was almost identical. The false claim of being a police officer, the restraints, the control, the violence, and now a direct connection between this man and Catherine [music] Edwards.

 A connection that went all the way back to a wedding in January 1982. But having a strong suspicion and having courtroom proof DNA evidence are two very different things. Foreman had never been entered into CODIS. His 1981 conviction predated genetic databases entirely. The only [music] way to confirm the match was to get a sample of his DNA without alerting him that he was a suspect.

Foreman was living in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, more than a thousand miles from Bowmont. The FBI’s Ohio field office was contacted [music] and retired agent Tom Gil working with a local detective named Gaml was assigned to conduct what law enforcement calls a trash pole. The concept is simple. Anything a person throws away in their curbside garbage is legally considered abandoned property.

Once it hits the curb, it no longer belongs to the person who discarded it. Investigators can collect it without a warrant. Gil and Gaml went to Foreman’s residence in Reynoldsburg and retrieved items from his garbage, dental floss, plastic utensils, strands of hair, prescription bottles.

 All of it was sent to the Texas DPS crime lab in Houston, where supervisor Tanya Dean ran the comparison. The result was definitive. The probability that the DNA found at Catherine Edwards’s crime scene came from Catherine and Clayton Foreman rather than from Catherine and some unrelated male individual was 461 septilion to one.

 That number is so large it essentially eliminates all statistical doubt. 461 septilion, 24 digits. On April 29th, 2021, 26 years and three months after Katherine Edwards was found in her bathtub, Texas Ranger Brandon Bess and Detective Aaron Lewalan flew to Ohio. They had coordinated with the Franklin County Police Department in advance.

 The plan was to bring Foreman in under a pretense. They told him they were investigating a purse that had been left in his Uber by a passenger, a routine matter. Would he mind coming down to the station to answer a few questions? Foreman agreed. He had no reason to suspect anything. As far as he knew, this was about a forgotten handbag.

 He drove himself to the Franklin County Police Station, parked his car, and walked in voluntarily. He sat down in an interview room positioned closest to the unlocked door. Bess and Lalan were already inside waiting for the man whose DNA they had matched to a 26-year-old crime scene with a certainty of 461 septilion to one.

 For the two Texas investigators sitting across the table, this was the moment everything had been building toward. The years of dead ends, the family tree of 7,000 names, the trash pull, the lab results, all of it came down to this room in Columbus, Ohio, and the man who had just sat down believing he was here about a purse.

 At first, the conversation was calm, routine questions, background. Then the investigators shifted the topic. [music] Foreman was asked about Catherine Edwards. He said he didn’t know she was dead. He denied having any relationship with her beyond a casual acquaintance. He denied ever being inside her townhouse on Park Meadow Street.

 Then the investigators told him what the DNA had revealed. His seaman had been found at the crime scene. Inside and on Catherine Edwards. Foreman’s response was five words. I don’t know how it got there. He asked for a lawyer. He tried to stand up and leave the room. And at that moment, officers stepped in and placed him under arrest.

 The arresting officers used Smith and Wesson handcuffs, the same brand that had been used to restrain Catherine Edwards 26 years earlier. The Jefferson County DA’s office had specifically authorized Bess and Lalan to bring a pair with them to Ohio for the arrest. It was not an accident. During the arrest, Foreman made one more claim that would later be contradicted at trial.

 He told the investigators that he had once been a police officer he had not. He had never served in law enforcement in any capacity, but it was the same lie he had told Paula Ramsay in 1981 when he had pulled over and identified himself as an officer before assaulting her. Foreman fought extradition.

 He refused to leave his jail cell for a scheduled hearing in May 2021. Ohio’s governor eventually issued a governor’s warrant compelling his transfer and a judge ordered that he be picked up by Texas authorities by July 6th, 2021 or released. A Jefferson County Sheriff’s plane flew a ranger and a detective to Ohio to bring him back.

On September 22nd, 2021, a Jefferson County grand jury returned an indictment. The charge was capital murder. The trial of Clayton Bernard Foreman began on March 11th, 2024, nearly 29 years after Katherine Edwards’s murder. Jury selection took place before Judge John Stevens in the Jefferson County Criminal District Court.

 [music] The prosecution was led by Mike Leair, Sunonny Echart, and First Assistant District Attorney Pat Nth. Defense attorney Tom Burbank represented Foreman. [music] The prosecution had prepared a list of up to 73 potential witnesses. The courtroom in Jefferson County was full. Members of the Edwards family were present.

 Former classmates from Forest Park High sat in the gallery. People who had followed this case for nearly three decades were finally going to see it reach a courtroom. The case the prosecution built was methodical, layered, and anchored by the DNA evidence that had finally connected Foreman to the crime scene. But the prosecutors understood that DNA alone, no matter how overwhelming the numbers, needed a human story around it.

 They needed the jury to understand who Catherine Edwards was before they could understand what had been taken from her. The trial opened with the 911 recordings. The courtroom heard Maryanne Edwards voice from January 14th, 1995, raw and shaking, the moment a mother discovered what had happened to her daughter. My daughter has been murdered.

The words filled the room. Several jurors visibly reacted. [music] Then Allison Edwards Brocado, Catherine’s identical twin, took the stand. She testified about their relationship, their bond, their inseparable childhood, and their last phone call on Friday the 13th. She described arriving at the townhouse and seeing what her parents had already found.

 For the jury, looking at Allison was like looking at a living reflection of the woman they would spend the next week hearing about. The resemblance was striking. The absence it represented was devastating. The prosecution then built their forensic case brick by brick. Crime scene technicians Sarah Moon and Boyd Lamb testified about the evidence they collected.

 The neighbor who had heard the thumps through the wall at 1:30 a.m. described what he remembered from that night. Dr. Charles Harvey, the forensic pathologist who had performed the original autopsy in 1995, took the stand. In a notable development, he testified that he had revised his original opinion on the cause of death. He had initially ruled it as drowning, but after further review, he now believed Catherine had died from restrained esphyxia, meaning her chest had been compressed from behind against the edge of the bathtub for an extended period, cutting

off her ability to breathe. The indictment had charged death by both drowning and asphyxiation. David Middleman, the founder of Aram, testified next. It was his first time ever appearing before a jury. He walked them through the science of forensic genetic genealogy, explaining how his lab had extracted more than half a million genetic markers from DNA that had been sitting in evidence storage for a quarter century.

Detective Tina Lewalan and genealogologist Sherah Le Point testified about the family tree. They described the 7,400 names, the months of work, the cinjun ancestry complication, the moment the branches led to two sons from a Bowmont family who had attended Forest Park High. Le Point, who had driven from Louisiana for the trial, was visibly emotional on the stand.

 Tom Gil, the retired FBI agent, described the trash pull outside Foreman’s Ohio home. Tanya Dean, the Texas [music] DPS lab supervisor, presented the DNA comparison results to the jury, 461 septilian to one. The court then ruled on a contested piece of evidence. The prosecution wanted to play the recorded interview from April 29th, 2021 when Bess and Lwalan had confronted Foreman at the Franklin County Police Station.

 The defense objected, arguing that Foreman had not been read his Miranda rights. But Judge Stevens ruled that Foreman [music] had come to the station voluntarily, had been told he was free to leave, and had been seated nearest the unlocked door. He was not in custody at the time of the interview, so Miranda warnings were not required.

 The recording was admitted. The jury watched Foreman deny knowing Catherine was dead. They watched him deny ever being inside her home. They watched him hear that his DNA was found at the crime scene and respond with, “I don’t know how it got there.” On the final day of testimony, the prosecution presented what would become the emotional climax of the entire trial.

 The state called witnesses to establish what the court termed signature evidence, proving that Foreman had a documented pattern of behavior that matched the Edward’s murder. Foreman’s ex-wife, Diana Co, testified about the briefcase she found in his car trunk. handcuffs, a gun. No legitimate reason for either. Christy Wymer, the coworker, described [music] finding handcuffs in his desk at the debt collection agency where they both worked.

 Terresa Brewer, the former fiance, testified about disturbing materials she found among his belongings and his obsessive habit of monitoring the Bowmont Enterprise from Ohio. And then Paula Ramsay walked into the courtroom. The woman Foreman had assaulted in 1981 when she was just 19 years old with a car stuck in the rain. The woman he had lied to, telling her he was a police officer, the woman he had restrained and violated before driving her home. She was now in her 60s.

 She identified Foreman, and she told the jury why she had come to testify after all these years. She said she did it for Catherine. The court identified no fewer than 12 common elements between Foreman’s 1981 assault and the murder of Katherine Edwards. The false claim of being a police officer, the use of restraints on the victim’s hands behind the back, the sexual violence, the control, the same predatory pattern separated by 14 years.

The defense called no witnesses. Foreman did not testify. Defense attorney Tom Burbank argued that evidence of past behavior did not prove murder and that the prosecution had not met the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. He pointed to unknown DNA found under Catherine’s fingernails, which prosecution witness Tanya Dean explained was expected given the physical struggle and the handcuffs.

In closing arguments, First Assistant District Attorney Pat Nou turned to the jury and said, “A job half-done is a job undone. You are the voice. Her family, her friends, this community has waited 30 years to hear.” At approximately 4:19 in the afternoon on March 20th, 2024, the jury left the courtroom to begin deliberations. At 5:15 p.m.

, they came back. 52 minutes. Less time than it takes to watch a single episode of television. After 29 years of waiting, 12 jurors needed less than an hour to reach their decision. Guilty. Capital murder. The courtroom erupted in quiet emotion. Members of the Edwards family embraced. Allison Brocado, who had waited nearly three decades for this moment, wept.

 Investigators who had worked the case for years stood in the back of the room. Some of them visibly shaken by the weight of what had just happened. Because the state of Texas had not sought the death penalty, the sentence was automatic. Life in prison. Under Texas law, Foreman would not be eligible for parole until he had served 30 years.

 He would be 93 years old. For all practical purposes, he will die in a Texas prison cell. Juror Larry Delcamber, a pastor from Port Nishius, spoke to reporters afterward. He said the DNA evidence was decisive. How can you deny? You can’t deny that. Foreman showed no emotion when the verdict was read. The only visible reaction came moments later when he was told that an appellet attorney would be appointed to handle his case.

He shook his head. a refusal. As if the idea of anyone continuing to fight on his behalf was something he wanted no part of. Foreman was received into the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on August 8th, 2024. He began serving his sentence while his attorneys prepared an appeal. On January 7th, 2026, the Texas 9th Court of Appeals at Bumont issued its ruling.

 In a unanimous memorandum opinion written by Justice Jay Wright with justices Johnson and Chambers concurring, the three judge panel rejected every one of Foreman’s five challenges to the conviction. He had argued that the evidence from his 1981 assault should not have been admitted. The court ruled it was admissible to show identity, intent, and modus operandi given the 12 documented parallels between the two crimes.

 He had argued that testimony about the gun and handcuffs found in his car trunk should have been excluded. The court ruled it was relevant to premeditation. He had argued that his recorded interview should have been suppressed because he was not read his Miranda rights. The court ruled he was not in custody and had come to the police station voluntarily.

 He had argued that Detective Tina Lwalan’s testimony about how the case was reopened constituted her say. The court ruled it was offered for investigative context, not for the truth of the matter asserted and was duplicative of testimony the defense had not objected to. All five issues overruled.

 The conviction was affirmed. Clayton Bernard Foreman is currently serving his life sentence in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. After the verdict in March 2024, the people closest to this case spoke publicly about what it meant. Their words were careful. Nobody was celebrating. Jefferson County District Attorney Keith Giblin called the outcome an amazing team effort.

 He said genetic genealogy was the crime fighting tool of the future and that it was speaking for victims who could not speak for themselves. Sherah Le Point, the Louisiana genealogologist who had volunteered her time and expertise to build the family tree, was moved to tears. She said she was honored to have been given the privilege to help give answers.

 Diana Co, the woman who had married Clayton Foreman in 1982 with Katherine Edwards standing beside her as a bridesmaid, said something that has stayed with everyone who heard it. She said, “I was married to a monster and didn’t know it.” Detective Aaron Lwalan expressed a belief not proven but deeply felt that there may be other victims who have never been connected to Foreman.

 That belief remains unconfirmed. But the pattern documented at trial, the handcuffs, the false claims of police authority, the predatory control left many people in that courtroom wondering the same thing. And then there was Tina Lwalan, the detective’s wife, [music] who had spent her nights and weekends building a family tree of over 7,000 names.

 The autocrimes investigator who had no official assignment to the Edwards case, but who could not walk away from it once she started. When asked about closure, she refused to use the word. She said, “I never used the word closure. I never used the word justice. There’s no justice. He got to live 26 years as a free man.” She did not.

 Texas Ranger Brandon Bess, who had initiated the genetic genealogy approach, was equally measured. He said, “I don’t believe there is such a thing as closure, not on this earth.” They were right. There is no version of this story where the ending fixes what happened on Park Meadow Street in January 1995. Catherine [music] Edwards cannot be brought back.

 The years her family spent not knowing who killed her cannot be returned. The 26 years Foreman spent free while Catherine’s name sat in a cold case file cannot [music] be undone. What can be done is this. Her name can be spoken. Her life can be remembered. Not the handcuffs, not the bathtub, not the crime scene photos. The fifth graders she fed with snacks bought from her own paycheck. The patients at St.

Elizabeth Hospital who had no visitors until she walked in. The students she mentored through the I have a dream program. The twin sister who never stopped fighting for answers. The journal entry from a woman of faith who had given her life to God and was following his path for her. Helaniah Adams, one of Catherine’s former students, was so deeply affected by her teacher’s murder that she changed her entire career trajectory.

She pursued criminal justice studies and then law school. She built her professional life on the foundation of what Catherine’s death had shown her, that the system needed people who refused to let cases stay cold, who refused to let victims become statistic. The CBS program 48 hours produced an episode on the case titled Tracking the Killer of Mary Katherine Edwards, which first aired in November 2024.

ABC’s 2020 followed with its own episode, The Code Breakers, in March 2025. pairing the Edwards case with another genetic genealogy cold case solve. Both programs highlighted technology and the growing role of forensic genealogy in solving cases that conventional methods had failed to crack.

 Catherine Edwards was a bridesmaid at her killer’s wedding. She taught his son at Price Elementary. She trusted him enough to open her door on a Friday night in January. And because of a $10,000 DNA test, a detective’s wife who couldn’t let go of a cold case, a Louisiana genealogologist who volunteered her expertise, and a family tree with 7,400 names.

 The man who killed her is spending the rest of his life in a Texas prison cell. The handcuffs that haunted every detective who touched this case for 26 years finally have an answer. They did not belong to a police officer. They belong to a man who only pretended to be one. Catherine’s story didn’t end in that bathtub on Park Meadow Street.

 It ended in a courtroom in Jefferson County 29 years later when 12 jurors needed less than an hour to say what her family had been waiting three decades to hear. Guilty. If Catherine’s story stayed with you, share this video with someone who cares about these cases. [music] And if you are not yet subscribed to Cold Case Redemption, now is the time.

 Every case we tell here went cold. Every victim we feature deserved better. And every breakthrough we document happened because someone somewhere refused to give up. We will see you in the next one.