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Season Seven: Rewind: The Murder of Catherine "Catrina" Mowrey Part I.
228 Plays23 days ago
We are putting two episodes back into play in the feed about the unsolved murder of Catrina Mowry in the 1980s in Dallas Texas.
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Transcript
Introduction and Trigger Warning
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
True Crime Headlines and Riley Conner Case Overview
00:00:25
Speaker
This is True Crime
00:01:02
Speaker
It's been kind of a crazy busy week. We haven't had ah chance to record on our normal schedule. We had some older stuff that like needed post-production. and And this is the lead up to that. i did want to put some true crime news in here.
00:01:17
Speaker
ah The first thing I wanted to bring up in this episode was, did you see that there was a Riley Conner decision made?
Crime Details and Legal Proceedings
00:01:27
Speaker
um Which one is that? so So Riley Conner, this was the Felicia. Out of North Carolina. Yeah, yeah. This is the North Carolina case. um It was the Felicia Porter case from 2016. Right.
00:01:40
Speaker
right Riley Conner, he was, according to the Columbus County News. Now, this is one of those cases, like, I'm pulling from a news article right now, but it's it's one of those that if you go read the paperwork on it, there's so much paperwork in the appeal document. It's fascinating.
00:01:56
Speaker
Right. So when he was 15 years old, Riley Connor went to his aunt's house. um His aunt was Felicia Porter and he lured her out of her home in Tabor City, North Carolina. It's kind of a rural area.
00:02:11
Speaker
And her body ends up being found the next day because her husband, you know, reports are missing and ground searchers start looking around ah her house and and the wooded areas around her house.
00:02:26
Speaker
So initially, an older cousin gets blamed for the crime, but DNA evidence ah ends up showing that it is in fact this 15-year-old boy. the The way it went down was the the family thought she had gone to the supermarket nearby.
00:02:44
Speaker
But instead, he had lured her outside and he had hit her in the face with a shovel and then raped her. Now, this is his aunt. And then he had continued to beat her with a shovel and dragged her body into the woods.
00:02:58
Speaker
And it's all sorts of like messed up. But the bottom line is he was indicted by a grand jury on charges of first degree murder, first degree fraud.
Sentencing and Legal Reconsiderations
00:03:09
Speaker
vehicle, possession of stolen property, breaking and and entering multiple other larcenies related to this break-in at a store nearby where he stole like a huge amount of cigarettes.
00:03:22
Speaker
There was a landmark case, an Alabama case called Miller v. Alabama, where there was a juvenile defendant in that case who had been sentenced to life without parole. Under North Carolina law, juvenile murder defendants typically are eligible for parole after 25 years in prison.
00:03:39
Speaker
The issue was Conner, Riley Conner, ended up being found guilty of all of this. And there are like a huge amount of what I call mitigating factor arguments.
00:03:53
Speaker
But there's also aggravating factor arguments, which like included his previous record. The way he gets sentenced, which was he pleads out to first-degree murder and first-degree rape in February 2019, and there's this massive plea deal where he's convicted of of those charges, but they're kind of consolidating them all.
00:04:14
Speaker
He ends up sentenced to 45 years in prison before he could be considered for parole. So essentially, he's a life with – the possibility of parole because of how it shakes out with his aides. By the time he's sentenced, he is, if I've got this correct, 17 years old and he wouldn't be eligible for parole until he's in his sixties.
00:04:38
Speaker
So they've decided that this case needs to go back for resentencing, that it's unconstitutional because it, it basically is a life sentence for him. And that's based on the Miller versus Alabama ruling where,
00:04:54
Speaker
It doesn't mean that they're automatically not going to get a life sentence. it It just means that they're required to have a specific type of hearing rather than just de facto being sentenced to these these long, sprawling prison sentences. This is particularly brutal crime. So I was a little surprised that this is the route it went, but not so surprised that like it needed a
Plea Deals and Judicial Processes
00:05:18
Speaker
rehearing. Well, um it's interesting. And, you know, this is being semantic. This is um playing semantics. But so you said that he was found guilty. And I distinguish pleading guilty from being found guilty. I know a lot of people probably don't. And it probably doesn't really matter. and I'm not saying he's not guilty. But ah so he pleaded guilty to, ah like you said, the murder and rape charges. And he gets sentenced to 25 years and 20 years to be run consecutively. So that's where they're piled on one another as opposed to being ah sent being served at the same time, right? yeah it's a boxcar sentence. And so now his defense attorney, it's weird because so he pleads out to this, understanding what the sentence is going to most likely be
00:06:15
Speaker
But he his attorney filed a motion with the court, I guess maybe because they ended up making it concurrently as opposed to um consecut i mean i'm sorry consecutively as opposed to concurrently. the His attorney filed a motion with the court that um life with parole, which is what it would essentially be based on how old he would be when he got out,
00:06:40
Speaker
And then it was ah the court denied it, denied the motion that he not have those sentences run like that. And I wonder if that was the grounds for um it being relooked at, because when you take a plea agreement, it seems odd to me that that little detail wouldn't have been ironed out first, The way it ends up before the appellate court is even more complicated than that, because what they started with, if you go through and like read the history of this case, is the judge just sort of stacks all these additional requirements, including...
00:07:20
Speaker
A satellite based monitoring requirement, a lifetime satellite based monitoring requirement. So the way that it ends up like sort of going through the appellate process. So in North Carolina, what they do is you start out in a district court when you're charged, you move to superior court for like arraignment for indictment. So basically the the district court is really just an appearance saying you've been charged.
00:07:44
Speaker
And then when you get to superior court, that's where all the actions take place. There is a court of appeals, which is the first step. And then there's the Supreme court of North Carolina.
00:07:56
Speaker
And beyond that, it would have to go to federal court for other types of hearings if it were eligible for those. But this is the, so the way that it gets into the appellate courts is like a lot of quabbling over how, how,
00:08:09
Speaker
the The sentences are stacked and all of the requirements related to it. The defendant's arguments were that the consecutive sentences were not permitted under the North Carolina statute, which is like they call them the Miller fix statutes. It's a very specific thing that the legislature had to deal with related to this Miller versus Alabama decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.
00:08:32
Speaker
But he also argued that the sentences were the functional equivalent of life without parole, like you said, and this they would be unconstitutional imposed on what is considered to be a redeemable juvenile.
00:08:43
Speaker
And then the lifetime satellite based monitoring without a hearing was the the third argument that the defense was making on appeal.
Juvenile Sentencing and Legal Debates
00:08:52
Speaker
And so the only thing that I can really kind of, so, you know, I don't know how long it's been, but ah not so long ago, a lot of...
00:09:04
Speaker
practices in criminal court that violate like what is reasonable and prudent of the eighth amendment, which is all citizens of the United States have the right to not be cruelly and unusually punished. And as, um, as that concept has made its way through the different courts, they've decided that, um, I think recently, i don't know that it's aired or But we talked about how someone who ah had a cognitive disability couldn't be sentenced to death.
00:09:34
Speaker
And because ah under the Constitution, that's considered cruel and unusual punishment. And through different cases, the court system has worked out, like, you know, what is a cognitive deficiency?
00:09:48
Speaker
And so in this case, we've got a kid here who ah committed a heinous crime, And ah this case is pretty recent. I think you said 2016 is when the crime occurred. Correct.
00:10:01
Speaker
And so going along with that Eighth Amendment, trying to sort of iron out, because basically it's it says just like, you know, putting somebody to death that's cognitively deficient, sentencing a child, ah a minor, to to life in prison,
00:10:20
Speaker
is cruel and unusual. My issue is that this was a plea deal, right? i know, that's where i was kind of headed with this. when you make a plea deal,
00:10:34
Speaker
The plea deal is essentially a negotiation between a defense attorney and state's prosecutor. And so you're pleading guilty under terms that are worked out like way beforehand before you go before the judge.
00:10:47
Speaker
Typically, the judge, you know, it's a rubber stamp situation because if judges had to like analyze every single case that came before them with a plea deal, I mean, that's the way it really should be, but like we just don't have the resources in place to do that.
00:11:03
Speaker
And so the majority of the time, you know the judge trusts the defense attorney and the prosecutor to have come to a fair arrangement. And that way the case is disposed of.
00:11:15
Speaker
So you've entered a guilty plea and then you go before the judge. And I've seen it happen both ways. I've seen it happen where the judge says, I'm not prepared to sentence you according to your plea agreement. Are you sure you want to p plead guilty? Right? Right.
00:11:33
Speaker
And then I've also seen it not be ah offered for the plea to change and the judge just to make the sentence regardless of the plea agreement. That like really undermines our ah that part of our judicial system, right? Because if you plead guilty to something thinking that you've got this deal and then you're sentenced to the maximum all of a sudden under your guilty plea, That's going to create a lot of problems. And so in this case, i i can't figure out why the plea was made and then immediately.
00:12:08
Speaker
um did you did you happen to see, was it because of the way it was imposed? Yeah. So the imposition of the sentence plus the additional elements is what... really are the impetus for the like the appeals process. But then they ramp it up because of the Miller versus Alabama decision. So that decision ends – the idea is that this case was not in line with how North Carolina looked at – Miller versus Alabama. And this case was unfolding sort of as Miller versus Alabama was being like, so that case, it's actually a very old case, but the way that it was like argued and decided was in like 2012. And like Miller ends up with his resentencing hearing, I think it was in 2017 2018. And the,
00:12:59
Speaker
the The point being, the defense was able to use that as one of the three arguments that they were making. But the other part of it was that they weren't surprised by both the lifetime satellite-based monitoring, which means this kid will forever have an ankle device.
00:13:14
Speaker
I don't necessarily think that that's, ah I don't feel like that's too much, but that's a different story. Well, but the the defense attorney wasn't saying it was too much or wasn't too much. He was saying the kid didn't get a hearing on that. So that's the other problem I have with this is it's very difficult to say, oh, they didn't get a hearing on this when a plea deal has been worked out. But in this case,
00:13:34
Speaker
Like you said, North Carolina was abiding by this open plea policy, which is so so everyone knows what that is. It's very similar to how you described it. When you go forward, the defense and the prosecution have worked something out, but they're putting an open plea on the table where the defense is going to ask the judge for something and the prosecution is going to recommend to the judge something. And those two things are generally in line with each other. Sometimes there's some variables on the prosecution side. Like if the defense may say he's going to plead the manslaughter and we only want to do eight years and we want him out. And the prosecution may say, well, we'll do an open manslaughter plea. And what we're going to recommend to the judge is that it's eight to 15.
00:14:14
Speaker
And like, you know, it'll be somewhere in there for your guy. So that's how people generally get what they want. The problem is that judges sometimes have a stick up their ass and they want to make a point.
00:14:25
Speaker
And sometimes they're doing it for good reasons. And sometimes they're doing it because of the ego that comes with being a judge in North Carolina. That ego can sometimes end up with a boxcar sentence like this where it's kind of ridiculous. Although I will say this is an incredibly heinous crime.
00:14:40
Speaker
Like he did this to his aunt and it's a terrible crime. We haven't even got to what like blew my mind about this case yet. So if you have anything else you want to say about it, i would do that now because like, I totally don't understand how it's back.
00:14:54
Speaker
The only thing I would say is I feel like um the what's going to happen. So this has to he's not like his conviction wasn't overturned. His sentence is what has been overturned unless they just the sentence has been thrown out. Yeah. not Unless they just nullified the plea agreement. um are the ah So I feel like what's going to happen is they're just going to change it to be concurrent terms.
00:15:17
Speaker
I think that you're probably right. I wondered if because it was a plea agreement and the sentence is thrown out, does that put it back on the table for him to withdraw the plea? And and I say generally the answer would be no to that. But in this case, because it's like there's so many variables, I was wondering if that might be the case that this ends up actually going to trial. I think it's just going for a resentencing hearing right now. But that is a motion. That's an option.
00:15:41
Speaker
I don't feel like that they so they um remanded it back for a new trial. No, they didn't. It was just a resentencing. And so he he doesn't – this court would have had to say that he had the right to a trial. Right. So this is the thing that blew my mind about this case. Have you read, like, some of the court documents around it? I haven't read any of the court documents on this. Okay. Okay. Cause I kind of threw this at you at the last minute. Cause it was very shocking to me. I just read, um I read where the court had a sentence, I had remanded it back to the lower court. That's all.
00:16:16
Speaker
So when you get appellate documents and we've explained this like and in different ways and different times, you get a lot of factual summaries and that's just sort of what everybody has either decided has been proven in court or it's what's been presented as evidence and sort of certified. It's the record of the case. Yeah, it's the record of the case.
00:16:34
Speaker
This case, which is, I'll just call it Felicia Porter's murder, Riley Connors' conviction, because that's probably the right, I i may have said found guilty earlier. I think that you called me out on that, and that's correct.
00:16:47
Speaker
the The better word is the plea agreement and conviction here. And, like, there's not really any dispute that he did it Like, like all the testing and everything related to this case, although there was an initial suspect, he had a hand in that. Like he ID'd somebody and said that person did this. It turned out to be him.
00:17:05
Speaker
Right. And it's not necessarily relevant in this case. I'm just saying that I find I find a difference between a jury finding someone guilty and someone pleading guilty. Right. Yeah, no, you're totally right. And like that was just ah I am on the same boat as you with that.
Conner's Background and Criminal Behavior
00:17:22
Speaker
What messed with me about this case is I got into like the mitigating factors. and And I'm not going to like belabor it ah because like i i sort of am torn. Like, is that like excusing the crime or something?
00:17:36
Speaker
But Riley Conner, he was born in 2000. This crime happens in 2016. And this kid truly had no chance, like at all.
00:17:47
Speaker
And they were having, like, he had siblings, so they had multiple kids. But um even the week right after the crime, and this is not me speculating, this is doctor's testimony. if If you, like, go through it, you can find it as the North Carolina versus Connor case. If you just look up R-I-L-E-Y, which is Riley's,
00:18:08
Speaker
connor c-o-n-n-e-r appeal it'll give you like a lot of the court documents they're available online at least to some degree they're a little more implicit in the record itself but what's amazing about this is so first of all the week after the murders he was hospitalized with absolutely uncontrollable seizures to the point that he damaged an um mri machine and broke a hospital bed So while a lot of people use that as like an excuse that like something is wrong in his head or whatever, and you'll see a lot of like forensic psychology, I call it some of it BS, but the gist of this was everyone in Riley Conner's life.
00:18:54
Speaker
If I'm, like if the immediate but tentacles of his family tree. If I'm really like honest about it, they're terrible people. He has a few people that are redeeming him there. And I'm not going to differentiate name who's who you can read the story like online,
00:19:11
Speaker
But there was a theft of a a large amount of cigarettes being used by a family member's van. Riley Conner does the theft. He steals like cartons and cartons of cigarettes.
00:19:22
Speaker
And the gist is, all of this happens because he thinks he's going to get turned in. So he goes to punish this aunt, Felicia Porter. But as far as his parents and all of the people around him...
00:19:35
Speaker
This defendant literally never had a chance. And I want to just say that that doesn't excuse that he committed this crime. This kid has head injuries in the record and severe scarring and damage to his frontal lobe as early as four years old.
00:19:55
Speaker
Four years old. So I've never seen a case that like I looked at it and I went, well, that guy probably like needs like a serious sentencing hearing where they consider like a mixture of like how much time he's going to do and how much time is going to be in a hospital versus a prison.
00:20:14
Speaker
His mental acuity at trial was testified to be 62. Okay. And we've talked about ranges. Most of the episodes haven't aired yet, but you and I have talked about those before. Once you get below 70, you're in an area where the Supreme Court starts to question like like what the sentence could be, whether it can be death or life without parole.
00:20:33
Speaker
But this kid was addicted to multiple drugs by the age of 12. And the people around him, like there were a couple of people that were really trying for him the best of their ability. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that their efforts were rewarded. it it This kid just had no chance.
00:20:55
Speaker
He is so far, like they, they diagnosed him with different conduct disorders. He has ah multiple problems with alcohol and cannabis. It's a, 15-year-old they're examining when they're doing this. He's 15 and 16 years old at the time of the examinations that show up.
00:21:11
Speaker
The worst parts of life sort of culminate in this kid's case. He was being supplied with alcohol, cocaine, opiates, methamphetamines, PCP, heroin. And on the day of the crime, he was heavily intoxicated with marijuana and PCP.
00:21:31
Speaker
That doesn't excuse that the crime happened. This kid just absolutely had no chance. And I've never like i run into that like from time to time where I just look at a case and I go, I don't understand.
00:21:46
Speaker
But the night terrors in this kid's case were documented by outside sources when he was seven years old. So when I think about kids like him like getting some kind of resentencing hearing, like this is what i want to ask you.
Juvenile Resentencing and Justice System Challenges
00:22:00
Speaker
Do you think that makes any difference in this case? i Well, yeah, I mean, his sentence is, quite I mean, they could re-sentence him to the exact same thing, taking the, um what the court has, the upper court has remanded it with, but it will just get... huh appealed again. um i feel like, ah now you did mention that at the time of what would have been the trial, which didn't occur because he had a plea agreement, his IQ was at 62. So that is in the record.
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's in here. they yeah they had They introduced all these things in pretrial motions. That's how I have all this information. So the first situation, ah you know, being a juvenile is...
00:22:46
Speaker
way easier to prove than um the IQ or the cognitive deficiency element of the Eighth Amendment, right? ah Because, you know, your age is documented and um they get into some and kind of, I mean, gray area when it comes to like what a cognitive deficiency sufficient to Of course, that's just with the death penalty cases anyway, I believe. i don't think there's anything that's... There is no... um I mean, so far, I don't think that cognitive deficiency is ah an acceptable reason for somebody to not be sentenced to life in prison.
00:23:30
Speaker
This kid clearly needs help. Um... It's unfortunate that he wasn't, it's unfortunate that he lived a life that he did. And in our justice system, there's a constant grapple with, you know, these sort of just really sad cases of, you know, kids not having chances.
00:23:52
Speaker
Unfortunately, you know, ah the justice system doesn't really come into play until somebody has done something, right? Like in this case, he murdered his aunt.
00:24:04
Speaker
um Before that, you know, the the state was involved through child protective services, right? But it wasn't enough to get him sort of on the right track. And so...
00:24:21
Speaker
You know, the fact that he was a minor, i would say at 15, mean, no matter what, no matter what level of cognitive deficiency or ah damage brain damage that had occurred, um you know, if he's not going to be like in prison for the rest of his life, he's going to be um institutionalized for sure, I think, because he is suffering from major problems and he would need to be under a doctor's care given all the, I guess you would call them mitigating circumstances of why perhaps he committed this crime. He's still, he needs help.
00:25:02
Speaker
Yeah, i don't so I'm so torn on like how you deal with these cases that are this brutal to family members. And it's interesting, like this case has so much paperwork and so much work that was done on it. So it happens in 2016.
00:25:16
Speaker
Whenever someone has a traumatic death like that, and this is, ah you know, I don't get into splitting traumas where like I rate them or or say this is more traumatic than not traumatic. but But this truly is, like so you've got a defendant, right?
00:25:30
Speaker
who in my opinion is also a victim of multiple people. um And then you've got a victim of that defendant who has suffered like this absolutely horrific ending to their life.
00:25:42
Speaker
And it becomes like very frustrating to to look at law enforcement and look at the criminal justice system and to say, you know, well, good job, everybody.
00:25:54
Speaker
like It's hard to do that in a case like this because on the one hand, you know, this kid's sort of been failed. And on the other hand, this woman had this horrible ending. and And you have an entire family of, you know, varying levels of criminality who are now all victims of like this having happened. Yeah.
00:26:14
Speaker
Right. And the court hasn't made any sort of distinction as to the crime itself. All they've said is that ah subject to Miller, like you were saying, a well even though it's not said to be a life sentence, 25 and 20 year sentence are run consecutively, which means one after the other.
00:26:37
Speaker
is in effect a life sentence for this kid. And so, you know, it's got to be sent back. And ah like I said, I feel like it'll be just changed to the sentence the sentences running concurrently. And that means they would be run at the same time. So then you're going to have 25 years to be eligible for parole.
00:26:57
Speaker
And then you need the resources in place, the state does, to ah make a an accurate determination at that 25-year point where he would be eligible for parole.
00:27:12
Speaker
And, you know, because just because you're eligible for parole doesn't mean you're going to get out. Yeah, and they make it more complicated because not only is he going to be eligible for parole, he's still probably going to have like cognitive problems.
00:27:25
Speaker
And they want him to come out, and he's going to be expected to pay for his own community parole. like they like He's going to have to pay for his satellite-based monitoring. He's going to have to pay probation and parole fees.
00:27:37
Speaker
um He's going to be expected to get a job. We're putting this kid, and they do mark him up as a redeemable juvenile. I don't know where that comes from. It's on both sides.
00:27:47
Speaker
appellate arguments that they say that, you know, even in the case of a redeemable, a redeemable juvenile, this sentence is appropriate by the state. And the defense says, this is not an appropriate sentence for a redeemable juvenile. So I don't know where that just means that they believe that like something could happen to make him a productive member of society. I don't know what that is. And I don't think that him spending, like you said, 20 to 40 years in prison before he's even released on parole makes any sense.
00:28:16
Speaker
Well, eli he would just be eligible. Well, I'm saying if he gets – right. he he He's suddenly eligible at 25 years. But if he gets released on parole, say he got some good time or like he did whatever – if he gets released on parole in 20 years or 30 years, he's not going to be a fine upstanding citizen with a job that's able to comply with his you know his programming as that's part of his parole and like to pay for his satellite-based monitoring. Right. And I feel like that's where it comes in to play that he his parole would be denied.
00:28:51
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's like, I i think that's a ah consideration that makes me wonder why, like like, how this is going to play out. Because, you know, you you waste all this time and all these resources trying to sort it in a way where it would just be more time and resources that are going to, like, I'm sure that's the reason that they're going to ultimately end up trying to figure out this kid's sentence. But I think he just would be denied parole as being resource heavy.
00:29:20
Speaker
Well, right. He wouldn't, ah because you have to meet so many qualifications yeah and to grant it to begin with. Right. And, you know, I don't know what the situation is going to be. ah My first inclination, which, you know, I doubt very seriously is ah it's probably in la-la land because...
00:29:39
Speaker
um I feel like all children who commit crimes, ah ah violent crimes, right? They all should be treated. And what I mean by that is like, you know, having ten ah cognitive medical attention to figure out what on earth is going on with them and to try to help them, right? That doesn't happen, of course.
00:30:03
Speaker
ah But I do think it's... The justice system can't be responsible for every aspect of every child, right? It's not. It's not responsible for it. All it does is bring justice when justice is required, right? Yeah, yeah. And so all these arguments fall on, you know, everything the justice system does has to not violate any part of the Constitution that guarantees us a right to something. All it is is the law stating, the law being practiced by the state versus the defense, and you know what is a violation of, in this particular case, the right for all of the citizens of the United States to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. Court decisions have indicated that ah
00:30:58
Speaker
a child being sentenced to life in prison is in effect a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
00:31:06
Speaker
Yeah, you know, i hate I could talk about these cases all day, um and I hate that this is the segue that I'm dealing with, because it's going to I'm going to end up making this the most awkward segue we've ever had on the podcast.
00:31:17
Speaker
um I brought this up as a case where, you know, we could see unfolding ah someone who had been victimized and ended up going to prison.
00:31:28
Speaker
um But I also... and Like i said, I'm also looking at a ah much older case right now that i that I drug you down the rabbit hole on. So this episode is going to turn into an interview portion.
00:31:42
Speaker
And so we're going to we're going to be talking to someone at the end of this episode. We're going to talk to them in the next episode as well. They come from the opposite perspective. They grew up having had a violent crime happen in their family that many, many, many years later,
00:31:58
Speaker
continues to affect their family in fact over a course of 40 years it's affecting them so i'm gonna move into the interview segment of this now um and this is gonna we'll we'll come back and we'll talk about that a little bit at the beginning of the next episode after the interview segment plays out
Introducing Katrina Marshall and Her Story
00:32:18
Speaker
So this is a little bit of a different take on what we do. We talk a lot about victims of crime and family and friends from cases that you see of the mainstream media.
00:32:32
Speaker
But in this particular case, um there's not just one victim. There's a lot of them, and it's become sort of a generational thing. So with me today, this is Katrina Marshall.
00:32:48
Speaker
And Katrina, why don't you tell me like where you are in life, kind of just like the general version of kind of what you do and like if there's kids, whatever you feel comfortable like telling an audience.
00:33:04
Speaker
Sure, yeah. I am now 31 years old. I have three kiddos, two daughters that are my oldest two, and my son, who's the youngest.
00:33:17
Speaker
They're all exactly six years apart somehow. or wasn't planned that way. so I've got a 15-year-old almost, a 9-year-old, and a 3-year-old to keep up with every day.
00:33:33
Speaker
um i work in transportation, I'm pretty much the one that coordinates all the logistics and behind the scenes, you know, arrangements of, you know, cargo, transportation, trucking, logistics, shipping, receiving, supply chain management type stuff.
00:33:55
Speaker
Um, my father was a trucker, so I guess it kind of ran in that side of the family. But, um, I mean, my father is still alive.
00:34:08
Speaker
He's quite a bit older than my mom. They were married for four or five years before getting divorced. And I lost my mom on 11, 11 2020. She took her own life in the state of Arizona, technically.
00:34:30
Speaker
It was in the middle of the pandemic. And I actually had COVID at that point. And so did all my kids. And so it was kind of blow after blow there that day. I'm very sorry to hear that.
00:34:45
Speaker
and That sounds very terrible. It was pretty brutal. That was a day that I just was ready to end. I mean, that's the brief and short version of my life, I guess you could say. And then in my spare time, I pretty much...
00:35:04
Speaker
try to keep digging on the case of my aunt and fact that it's unsolved and trying to change that.
Katrina's Family Dynamics and Challenges
00:35:16
Speaker
So where did you grow up geographically? I grew up, well, since my parents were divorced growing up, I kind of split my time between Lawrence, Kansas and Wichita, Kansas.
00:35:30
Speaker
My dad is in Wichita. My mom was in Lawrence. And then when I was a teenager, she relocated to Arizona. And I spent two years with her there in Arizona before coming back to Kansas and staying with my dad to finish out high school.
00:35:48
Speaker
Did you have a large extended family? Three hours from each other.
00:35:54
Speaker
On my mom's side, yes. On my dad's side no. i'm his I'm his only ever born child. he didn't I wasn't even born until he was in his like forty s or something.
00:36:06
Speaker
He has two siblings, but they never had kids. So I don't have any cousins or or uncles really or anything on that side of the family. you were close with your mom growing up. Is that accurate?
00:36:22
Speaker
Close, definitely. we We talk every day multiple times a day about, you know, everything from stupid to, you know, serious life stuff.
00:36:34
Speaker
I'm not going to say we got along very well a lot of the time. You know, a girls and their mom's buttheads, especially when they get in those teenage years, as I'm learning for myself as we speak. Yeah.
00:36:51
Speaker
And so, um I mean, we definitely had our fair share of arguments for sure. However, she was um at the end, last 10 or 15 years of her life legally and permanently mentally disabled.
00:37:10
Speaker
Like officially she was declared ah permanently disabled from her mental health for the last 10 or 15 years of her life. So she was like on disability and everything. But personally, i mean, me growing up with her and knowing her really well and how she is and how she was and why she was that way.
00:37:31
Speaker
For me, I was able to kind of I guess, not immediately like write off a relationship like someone who might have met her more recently or something would based on, you know, the way she acts or the things she might say because of her relationship.
00:37:50
Speaker
mental illness, I guess you could say. as As much as you're comfortable describing that, what what what what would an interaction be like between the two of you that might stand out?
00:38:03
Speaker
mean, it kind of and would depend on the day. just never really knew what you were going to get. and i would say good words that accurately describe those interactions would be She's very emotional, both good and bad. I mean, like, she'd cry at the drop of a hat over something good just as easily as she would if it were something bad.
00:38:31
Speaker
um Impulsive, very impulsive to the point of where if it was something, you know, that was bad, she didn't process it before she acted on it.
00:38:48
Speaker
or reacted on it, I guess you could say. so basically her emotions would take over her actions before she could actually like, you know, think about it. And that's kind of where the impulsivity would come in and like, she would jump to to conclusions a lot, that kind of thing.
00:39:08
Speaker
and then kind of just mentally check out if it was overwhelming enough. She just kind of had, she was very sensitive, very sensitive. Were you similar? A lot of people took advantage of that.
00:39:20
Speaker
Okay. No, I'm pretty opposite, to be honest with you. um I don't know. i didn't always... I wasn't always that way, I guess, until I grew up watching my mom that way. And it kind of... It pissed me off a lot because people would really take advantage of her genuine, like, niceness. You know, she's very, like, nonjudgmental, accepting...
00:39:46
Speaker
she was really all about, you know, she loved the underdog stories kind of thing and bettering yourself growing basically. And so think some people, when they realized that about her, they would take advantage of it and kind of use for whatever they could get out of her, whether it were actions or material things or, you know, whatever that may be.
00:40:14
Speaker
And kind of, i guess, had that reverse effect and kind of made me opposite about it. Cause I would get angry for her and she wouldn't get angry about it herself. So I kind of became a little defensive and I guess you could say protective and that's Dan.
00:40:34
Speaker
What, what age did you become protective of your mom? o
00:40:42
Speaker
Probably when I got old enough to, understand the magnitude of what happened to her to some extent. I still don't even think I fully understand it, but um probably pre-teen years.
00:40:58
Speaker
How many siblings did your mom have? Oh boy, a lot. um More than she even knew, actually, come to find out.
00:41:08
Speaker
There were five altogether. So the older two were boys. They were born first. They were all five stair-stepped. And so then were my mom and her sisters. They were, of course, also stair steps. So my oldest aunt, Katrina, the one I'm named after, came in 1961. And then Joanne 1962.
00:41:26
Speaker
and then joanne and nineteen sixty two And then my mom in So they were like ah five less than a year apart They were really close in age and also you know very close otherwise, especially the girls together. And so she had one older, the oldest boy was her half brother from a different father.
00:41:46
Speaker
And then she also had stepbrothers from my grandfather that my grandma married after my mom's real dad in her split up. And that's Jim, Michael and Mark, right?
00:42:01
Speaker
Jim is the half-brother, and then Michael and Mark all share the same mom and dad with my mom and her sisters. And then she's got some half-siblings that I've just so recently found out about, actually, after doing dna testing.
Family History and Hidden Connections
00:42:17
Speaker
That's kind of another story, but ah interesting as well from my grandfather on my mom's side. But their biological father was never around growing up and Since my mom was the youngest, she always grew up with my step-grandfather as her father, basically.
00:42:36
Speaker
So DNA testing, the the ancestral DNA testing, what made you decide to do that? Honestly, it was like, i think, ah Mother's Day sale that I saw or something. I mean, it was always kind of interesting. i always kind of wondered and Or no, I think it might have been like a St. Patrick's space. I don't know. They put it on sale all the time for just like random reasons. I don't know. But I ended up ordering one and it was really very interesting. And then I also bought my father one when it went on sale for Father's Day. And so the next time he came to visit, I made him spit in the tube.
00:43:18
Speaker
And so it was, it's pretty neat, actually. It's so complicated if you don't know anything about genealogy or anything, but It's still a mystery on my mom's side a little bit sometimes. So my grandfather had like married three or four different times and had families with all of them and they none of them knew about each other.
00:43:41
Speaker
I want to step uncles and stuff. That's that's what i was about to ask. but I was going to say my grandfather was married quite a few times and I've often wondered, Meg is actually into DNA and genetics and genealogy. I am still like, so i like I mean, I don't mind being connected to people, but I don't fully understand it.
00:44:03
Speaker
and I don't think anyone does, to be honest with you. Yeah. It's so complicated, especially when you have, you know, 16 or 17,000 DNA matches. And those are just DNA matches that I've tested on Ancestry or MyHeritage or whatever. those Those don't even include the numbers of the people that haven't even done it.
00:44:24
Speaker
So you ah started off talking about your mom and you mentioned that your mom had killed herself and you also mentioned in her taking her own life that she had a lot of siblings um you've been a very you're a very interesting person to read about in terms of all the connections you have to a lot of i i want to call it interesting but it's more
00:44:59
Speaker
strange and traumatic than than interesting situations with your mom and her siblings. So her case, would you say that's the closest trauma or traumatic event as far as her and her siblings go for for you personally? Honestly,
00:45:20
Speaker
that's a really good question, actually. I'm not even really sure if I would consider that the most, I guess. traumatic in a sense. I mean, was
00:45:32
Speaker
it was probably, trying to figure out how to word this exactly. would say have my moments, obviously.
00:45:44
Speaker
but I guess and I knew my mom and I knew her more better than anyone. We talked all the time, even when she lived in Arizona. Um, And I know she was probably pretty difficult for some people to deal with, including myself sometimes.
Reflections on Trauma and Uncovering Secrets
00:46:01
Speaker
A little dramatic. um But, I mean, again, I sympathized with it. She made some unfavorable life decisions that didn't really help on that end either.
00:46:13
Speaker
But I guess we've all made those. That's how you learn. um But she she just she was miserable. she hated her existence overall.
00:46:26
Speaker
And I honestly felt like she was just, you know, miserably going through life each and every day just for me. That's a lot of pressure. Yeah. I think that in the end, like in a way, as bad as it sounds to say, like, obviously it's, it's not something I would have chosen. However,
00:46:51
Speaker
you know, it finally kind of like freed her from the hell that she felt like she was living in every single day and truly, you know, wanted to be free from it, then i guess what other choice do I have but to support that decision?
00:47:08
Speaker
i guess I'm just glad I got the closure that I did get. a lot of people in that situation, you know, are usually, or at least they claim they had no idea you wow, I didn't see that coming or, you know, that kind of a reaction. But I knew it was coming. I knew it was going to happen eventually. She'd had several attempts before, unsuccessfully, of course.
00:47:36
Speaker
I just wanted her to be not miserable anymore, honestly. How has her choosing that way out, how has it affected you in these last two years?
00:47:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, in some ways, i'm I'm kind of glad my mom didn't have to be alive and see or hear or be informed of some of the stuff that I have found out since she's passed away, especially in regards to her sister's cases.
00:48:10
Speaker
Because, man, it's pretty unfathomable and almost dumbfounding in some ways. Some of the stuff that has been hidden and secretive for so long about these things that she'd probably roll over in her grave after hearing them. I'm just being honest, but it's hard, I guess. I have my moments where if I hear a song or I'm reminded of something or, you know.
00:48:41
Speaker
But I've also got three kids that keep me pretty, guess, distracted on those days, especially that are hard. And it kind of just, I guess I think I fueled it into
00:48:54
Speaker
case. The anger or sadness has kind of been redirected into figuring out what happened. Not necessarily to find answers. I mean, of course, that would be nice.
00:49:09
Speaker
But more to find closure in general, whether it's for my mom or my aunt or even just the effort of trying, I feel like is better than nothing.
00:49:22
Speaker
how has it affected your kids? Well, my oldest is probably the only one that was, um, has a lot of memories, you know, of her overall and the memories she has um her aren't necessarily good ones. I wouldn't say, um they were, you know, towards the end of,
00:49:47
Speaker
her life. So she wasn't really very, young grandmotherly and her actions didn't work. and Unfortunately, I really wish my kids could have seen the mom that I remember, of course, before, you know, things went downhill so much, but you didn't never used to be that way.
00:50:09
Speaker
i was going to, that's sort of leads into my, my question. and that was going to be, With your mom, ah so obviously because of your AIDS, you were born sort of after one major trauma in your mom's life, but right before another.
00:50:30
Speaker
Yes, yeah that's a good point. um So my mom and dad met each other, and they got married two years before I was born.
00:50:43
Speaker
And they were married for like five years. And so in 1991, January, since the beginning of 91, I was born, which my first, my oldest aunt, the one I'm named after, of course, was killed in 85.
00:50:59
Speaker
and so then my mom, of course, was, you know, devastated. but eventually she met my dad and they ended up getting married. And then I came along two years later,
00:51:12
Speaker
And then two years after I was born, and I think during that point in my mom's life, it kind of revived her a little bit and gave her, you know, that glimmer, I think, of hope again, and also kind of gave her a chance memorialize her sister by, you know, passing down her name to me as well. So it kind of, think, gave her that desire to live again, you know what I mean?
00:51:43
Speaker
And then, of course, two years after I was born, and in 93, my other aunt was murdered also. And then there was no there was no coming back from that.
00:51:57
Speaker
She went steadily and consistently downhill after that until the very end.
00:52:08
Speaker
Well, I've been talking to you for a while now, and you seem very well put together to find yourself as a mom and working full time and also having this sideline where you're not only ah promoting the story and attempting to get attention to it, um meaning the story of one of your aunts, and we're going to get to both of them.
Investigating Unresolved Cases and Law Enforcement Challenges
00:52:33
Speaker
but you're also in a position where you've literally found yourself as an investigator ah pushing to get all of the facts of this story. How did you find yourself in the position of being the one to be doing all of this investigative work?
00:52:52
Speaker
Honestly, it was when my mom was still alive, actually. Once I got to you know adulthood, my mother and I kind of teamed up together to start working on it and figure it out, you know, especially during the beginning of the pandemic when everyone was stuck at home.
00:53:11
Speaker
um And I started getting more curious and wondering, I mean, I am named after the person after all, you know? And so my mom would always just say, yeah, I chucked in with and checked in with Dallas today and thats no updates or anything. i'm like, that's literally like every single time you check in Like, my entire life, literally.
00:53:34
Speaker
Like, are you sure that's what they said? Like, are you, they didn't say anything else. Ever. Never. And she's like, no they're They're, you know, they're still investigating and trying to figure it out. And eventually, i was just kind of like, hmm.
00:53:53
Speaker
I just kind of felt like, I got that feeling like maybe they were giving her the run around a little bit or something just didn't quite sit right with me, I think. I'm pretty good at, I think, getting those vibes or in intuition and and kind of reading between the lines, I guess you could say.
00:54:13
Speaker
And so my curiosity, of course, got the best of me, and I just, I went ahead and I ordered the death certificate. I was curious what they had listed as the cause of death And just kind of wanted some clarification because I knew that my mom's story was probably understandably a little biased.
00:54:32
Speaker
So you felt like you needed to dig into it. And and I'm paraphrasing. You're. youre Digging into it from one angle to sort of clarify ah her take on things, is that like is that part of the idea? just wanted some documentation in black and white to back up the department's claims of their ongoing investigation.
00:55:00
Speaker
and wanted some type of, you know, proof or anything. I'm kind of surprised my mom didn't already have that stuff, to be honest, but And i'm sure intently did you get the proof that you were looking for? And what did that reveal to you? Well, it wasn't really the proof I was looking for or expected, but it was the proof um that needed to be, you know, communicated.
00:55:32
Speaker
Did it leave you um with the impression that there was an active ongoing investigation? No, not at all. it was um It was pretty shocking, and I knew as soon as I got it, because it came to my house in the mail eventually, and I knew as soon as I got it and saw it, i knew exactly how my mom was going to react, and I knew it wasn't going to be good, and I really had no other choice or option because she knew I had ordered it, and she knew it was coming, and so I really had to tell her you know and send her a copy of it
00:56:05
Speaker
for what it said. And it said that her cause of death was undetermined following ah complete investigation, toxicology, and autopsy.
00:56:16
Speaker
And how long had passed since your aunt had been, died? How long was it between the time you got it in the mail and she had passed away? Like 30 or 40 years.
00:56:29
Speaker
So a really long time. Yeah, and so eventually I'm like, okay, so what exactly does this mean? and And it means exactly what I figured it probably meant, um that that it wasn't and you know actively investigated like they had always led us to believe it was. um yeah And actually it was pretty false.
00:56:53
Speaker
Do you have any idea um why your mom was getting those types of answers? Like in your opinion, why was somebody telling her that they were working on it when that was clearly not the case?
00:57:07
Speaker
I think they were just kind of, I don't know if it's laziness or didn't really feel like doing the digging that I would have taken because, you know, it is an older case now at this point.
00:57:20
Speaker
You know, i mean, I've heard a lot of excuses myself at this point too. And I mean, i just felt like they were kind of just Keeping her, you know, in a cycle or sort of going in a circle of repetitive excuses of some kind. anyone even knew what they were talking about.
00:57:39
Speaker
Yeah. Just placating the situation so she, to get off the phone with her. Prolonging it. Yeah. Prolonging it and dragging it out more and more, hoping she would just eventually say, screw it and give up and I guess not call anymore or something.
00:57:55
Speaker
i um John and I go through sort of cycles with cases that we cover where we talk about how law enforcement, um there's sort of two sides to things where ah you can have incompetence and you can have malfeasance, right? So you've got basically law enforcement that...
00:58:13
Speaker
they're not necessarily trying to do anything wrong. They just don't have the skills to accomplish what they need to be accomplishing. And then, you know, with malfeasance, you've got like somebody deliberately setting out to, you know, not do the right thing. do you have an opinion? think it's of both.
00:58:30
Speaker
Okay. Both, both, equally both for sure. And I'm not saying like, you know, everyone now is that way, but it could have been, you know, people from the past as well that have gone and retired and died even or been fired, hired, you know. I mean, no one there at this point has firsthand experience with this specific case, you know, in this time period in any anyway.
00:58:57
Speaker
And so they they don't really have that experience or closeness or they don't feel a connection to the case because they didn't really know anything about it to begin with.
00:59:09
Speaker
And so, I mean, i mean ive the communications I've had with them were pretty ridiculous. I mean, it took one detective, a lieutenant in the homicide unit specifically, six months to figure out how to utilize their own database to look up the last name correctly.
00:59:28
Speaker
yeah oh no. That kind of thing is just... unacceptable to me and the fact that a huge city like dallas has a homicide lieutenant in their department that doesn't know any better than that is really alarming right and that leans more towards incompetence i think um because and you know As we started doing investigations, i was i I'm less startled now, but at first I was very startled at sort of where my expectations were and where um sort of the bar of how they had to act fell. It was way lower than what I expected in most cases, right? And um when I read... as
01:00:18
Speaker
I think I read your petition and I've read like a few articles, I think maybe that have stemmed from the petition. um i was immediately outraged at um how old the case is.
01:00:30
Speaker
And I immediately, i try to go towards incompetence as opposed to malfeasance because... That makes me less mad at law enforcement, you know, because if they're just incompetent to do it, it doesn't seem like they're at least, they're not intentionally like disregarding someone. Right. And very i was, I was outraged though, that you being the niece of the the victim in this case,
01:00:59
Speaker
are now picking up the pieces of this 40 years later. i'm not actually, it was in 1985, so ah a little less than 40 years later. And I think to myself as an investigator, like why on earth is this situation happening? Why are you having to go through this? Except we already kind of know because John and I have seen this happen over and over again.
01:01:25
Speaker
And it's almost as if your aunt's case just fell right through the cracks and you're left to yeah try and pick up any pieces you can find and like put it back together and beg them to help you. Well, I mean, that's the thing. I pretty much, you know, I have a lot of the pieces that they don't and it might go vice versa, but i can't do it or put pieces together that I don't have the rest of.
01:01:56
Speaker
and they're sure they're they're not, they're not, know, communicative or responsive. And when they do answer, they're not helpful at all. Um, they just direct you to someone else who send you elsewhere who sends you elsewhere, you elsewhere.
01:02:11
Speaker
But then they also state that they're not, if this case is not in their homicide database because it's not a homicide. It's undetermined, which I'm pretty sure all homicides are undetermined and until they're figured out anyway.
01:02:26
Speaker
We've talked a lot about um with the manners of death and, you know, you're right, undetermined or accidental, they don't necessarily warrant an investigation, right, um by law enforcement. Right.
01:02:42
Speaker
This technically was announced in the media, in the news, specifically quoted by the Dallas police multiple times that this was a cocaine overdose. um And that they found her and that she had died of a cocaine overdose. And they had called my grandmother and told her that her daughter died of a cocaine overdose. And that is the only phone call that she ever got.
01:03:06
Speaker
They never called her to clarify. Okay. Any of the information that you've gotten from law enforcement, has it indicated how um how it went from the cocaine overdose to her being naked and wrapped in a bed sheet in the trunk of a car?
01:03:24
Speaker
No, she, they never said anything or gave any explanation or clarification. I actually got the, I ordered the um full autopsy and toxicology reports and that's how I found out. I never found out anything from law enforcement. I've had to find it out around them somehow every time.
01:03:42
Speaker
um And, well, and so, you know, just my sort of thinking, not necessarily your aunt, but anybody in this type of situation, i would think to myself, well, okay, if someone overdoses, they don't wrap themselves in a bed sheet and end up in a trunk, which I think is sort of where this all starts falling apart. that And it wasn't it wasn't a cocaine overdose. There was no cocaine in her system.
01:04:24
Speaker
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01:04:35
Speaker
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01:04:49
Speaker
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01:04:57
Speaker
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01:05:08
Speaker
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01:05:19
Speaker
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01:05:30
Speaker
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01:05:48
Speaker
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