The 30 Year Old Texas Cold case That Was Just EXPOSED 

The 30 Year Old Texas Cold case That Was Just EXPOSED 

 

On the morning of January 14th, 1995, a couple in Beaumont, Texas drove to their daughter’s townhouse. She hadn’t answered her phone since the night before. The front door was unlocked. They found her in the upstairs bathroom, handcuffed behind her back with police-grade Smith & Wesson restraints.

 No signs of forced entry anywhere in the house. Her mother called 911 and said, “My daughter has been murdered.” Investigators recovered DNA from the crime scene that day. The handcuffs were traced by serial number and led nowhere. The case stayed open for 26 years. Her name was Mary Catherine Edwards. She was 31 years old, a fifth-grade teacher at Price Elementary in Beaumont.

 She had an identical twin sister named Allison, who also taught in the district. The two of them looked so much alike that Catherine would tell her new students at the start of every school year that if they saw another one of her walking around and she didn’t speak to them, not to get their feelings hurt. It was probably her sister.

   Catherine lived alone with her beagle Maggie in a townhouse on Park Meadow Drive. Her principal, Floyd Broussard, said she would normally stay late preparing her lesson plans for the next day.    She was described by the people who knew her as loving, trusting, and maybe a little naive.

 She’d graduated from Forest Park High School in Beaumont and stayed in the area her whole life. She was part of a tight group of friends from school and college where she joined a sorority. She lived a quiet routine, walked the dog, prepared her lessons, spent time with family.    She was close with her parents who lived nearby.

Friday, January 13th, 1995, Catherine left Price Elementary around 5:00 p.m., went home, walked Maggie, poured herself a glass of wine, and called her boyfriend. That was the last time anyone heard from her. By Saturday morning, her parents were at the townhouse and Catherine was dead. The first officer to respond to the scene was a woman named Carmen Brown-Apple, who recognized the victim’s name when dispatch sent the call.

 They’d been in the same sorority. Apple would later say that Catherine was  so full of life and that arriving at the scene and realizing it was her just knocked her for a minute. Catherine had been sexually assaulted. She had more than 30 injuries on her body. The medical examiner initially ruled the cause of death as drowning.

 He would later change that to entrapment asphyxiation. The weight of her attacker pressing down from behind had compressed her chest until she couldn’t breathe. It would have taken 5 to 10 minutes. The DNA from the sexual assault was run through CODIS, the FBI’s national database of DNA from convicted offenders.    No match.

 Detectives began collecting samples from anyone connected to Catherine. The ex-boyfriend, neighbors, acquaintances, colleagues. Every sample was tested. Every one came back negative. Evidence from the bedroom was tested, too. A Laura Ashley comforter from her bed, the shirt she’d been wearing, bedsheets, fingernail clippings. Um, some items couldn’t produce usable results because the technology in 1995 wasn’t sensitive enough to work with degraded or low-quantity samples.

   The evidence that did produce results pointed to a single unknown male. The handcuffs were professional restraints and the victim had let her attacker inside. Whoever did this either was law enforcement or wanted to look like it. Officers were questioned. None matched the DNA.

 One detective described the atmosphere around the case as almost like a ghost story told around the campfire. The question nobody wanted to ask was whether the killer was one of their own. Every lead dried up. The case went cold. But Catherine’s parents didn’t let go of it. They called detectives and asked for updates. Year after year, no news, and they kept calling.

 The Beaumont community didn’t forget, either. Um, former students who’d been 10 years old when she was killed grew up carrying the memory of the teacher who let them be themselves. One said years later that Catherine’s allowing him to be who he was, shy and withdrawn, helped him come out of his shell. Another said hearing about the state they found her in was horrible because she was a real nice lady.

 The case had no momentum. But detectives who inherited the file kept working it. They preserved the DNA, maintained the evidence, and ran CODIS checks every time the database expanded. New states kept adding mandatory DNA collection for certain offenders, and every time the database grew, detectives ran the Edwards profile again.

 It never produced a match. In 2010, Detective Aaron LeWallen started digging through the case files from scratch. He pulled crime scene photos and videos. He reread reports and checked into the dozens of suspects that early detectives had already excluded. He built a cold case list. The Edwards case was on it.

 Traditional forensic tools had been used up and CODIS only works if the killer’s DNA is in the system. Routine collection of DNA from convicted offenders didn’t start in most states until the mid to late 1990s. If the killer had committed crimes before that window, he wouldn’t be in any database. He could be walking around free with a criminal record and the system would never flag him.

In 2020, 25 years after the murder, the Texas Rangers Unsolved Crimes Investigation Program and Beaumont PD renewed their efforts. Jefferson County District Attorney Bob Wortham had made the case a priority the day he was sworn in. So, he met with the Beaumont police chief and told him to put his best agents on it.

 Texas Ranger Brandon Best took it on and began looking at genetic genealogy as a path forward. The idea is simple. Even if the killer never took a DNA test, a distant relative might have, and from that relative’s results, you can build a family tree backward until you find the person who matches the crime scene profile.

 They offered a $6,000 reward and partnered with Astrium, a forensic DNA lab near Houston that specializes in recovering usable profiles from degraded or contaminated evidence. The crime scene DNA was a mixture of Catherine and an unknown male. Standard testing in 1995 had only been able to read about 20 genetic markers from the sample.

Astrium’s technology could read hundreds of thousands. Their lab processed the degraded evidence, and separated the male DNA from Catherine’s and extracted more than half a million markers. That was enough to build a profile strong enough for genetic genealogy. The profile was uploaded to GEDmatch, a public database where people share their ancestry test results.

 Second cousins of the unknown male showed up in the results.    Detectives and genealogist Shera LaPoint began building a family tree outward from those matches. Over about 3 months, they contacted distant relatives one by one and asked for voluntary DNA samples. More than 30 people cooperated. Connections were confirmed on both the paternal and maternal sides of one family.

The tree narrowed to two brothers who had grown up in Beaumont and gone to Forest Park High. LaPoint was working the case late one night when the names came through. She messaged Detective Tina LeWallen and said there was a couple in Beaumont. Then she went to bed. When she woke up the next morning, her phone had blown up.

 Tina LeWallen and her husband, Aaron, also a Beaumont detective, began running both names through criminal record at all. Nothing. Not even a traffic violation. Aaron ran the other brother next. He had a conviction for sexual assault in Jefferson County. Aaron LeWallen later said the hair on the back of his neck stood up when he read the case file. He knew right then.

The method in the 1981 conviction was nearly identical to what had been done to Catherine Edwards 14 years later. On a rainy night in July 1981, a 19-year-old woman named Paula Ramsey left a nightclub off Interstate 10 in Beaumont. Her car had gotten stuck in a ditch outside the bar.    It had been raining hard and she slipped trying to get it out.

 She gave up and started walking to a gas station to call her mother. A man was sitting in a car nearby with his window down. She recognized him from Forest Park. He told her he was a police officer and offered her a ride home. Ramsey was wet and stranded,  and the offer from someone claiming to be a cop felt safe. She got in.

 Once she was in the car, he didn’t drive her home. He drove to a field, stopped, and his demeanor changed completely. He told her to stop and shut up.    He reached into the glove compartment, pulled out a knife, bound her hands behind her back with a belt, and raped her repeatedly. Then he drove her home. Ramsey didn’t tell anyone for about a week.

 She felt ashamed and wondered if anyone would believe her, wondered if it was somehow her fault. She would later say she just felt awful, that she told herself she could never tell anybody what happened. When she finally went to the police, um, the man was charged. He played guilty to aggravated assault, not rape, and received 3 years probation, not a prison sentence.

 Probation for binding a woman’s hands and raping her at knife-point while pretending to be a police officer. He was 21 at the time and working as a Nabisco salesman. Ramsey and Catherine had both gone to the same high school as this man. In both cases, the woman’s hands were bound behind her back and she was sexually assaulted.

 In 1981, he told Ramsey he was a police officer to make her feel safe getting into his car. In 1995, the killer used police-grade handcuffs on Catherine. And there was more. In 1986, 5 years after the rape and 4 years after his wedding, another woman from the same school said he came to her apartment and held her at gunpoint.

Catherine Edwards had also gone to Forest Park. And she and her twin sister, Allison, had been bridesmaids in this man’s 1982 wedding to his first wife, Diana Dalio Coe. The wedding was a year after the rape. He knew Catherine. She knew him. There was no forced entry at her townhouse because she let him in. His ex-wife testified at trial that she found out 3 weeks before their wedding that the man she was about to marry was on probation for a rape.

She confronted him. He told her it was a big misunderstanding and that the charges had been dropped. She believed him. Looking back, she said, “There were things she noticed during the marriage that only made sense later.” He kept a billy club by the bed. He’d ordered a pair of Smith & Wesson handcuffs and hung them over the rearview mirror of his car.

They were married for 11 years. They divorced in 1993, 2 years before Catherine was killed. When Coe heard the news about Catherine’s murder, she called her ex-husband. She told him somebody had murdered Catherine. His response was two words, “Oh, really?”    His name was Clayton Foreman. Foreman had left Beaumont in 2007 and moved to Reynoldsburg, Ohio, outside Columbus, where he was living with his fiance. He worked as an Uber driver.

He’d come back to Beaumont for the high school reunion in 2018. He was the one who organized it. Former classmates said he was in charge of the tributes to classmates who had died. He put together memorial slides and coordinated the program. People described him as thoughtful and said no one would have expected him to be charged with anything, let alone murder.

Aaron Lewallen sent a lead to an FBI field office in Cincinnati and asked for help with surveillance. On April 15th, 2021, with assistance from the Reynoldsburg Police Department, a local detective surveilled Foreman’s house and then conducted a trash pull from the curb. So, they waited for him to put the bags out and then collected them after he went back inside.

The detective selected items with DNA potential and cataloged each one. Hair, a plastic fork, a plastic spoon, five empty medicine bottles with Foreman’s name printed on the labels, dental floss. The items were shipped to the DPS crime lab in Houston for comparison against the 1995 crime scene profile. On April 28th, the results came back.

The DNA on the trash matched the DNA from Catherine’s sexual assault kit. The statistical likelihood was 461 septillion to one, a number with 26 zeros after it. The next day, April 29th, Texas Ranger Brandon Bess and Detective Aaron Lewallen flew to Ohio. Foreman agreed to come to the local police station voluntarily.

 They told him he wasn’t under arrest and was free to leave. And the Ranger even switched seats so Foreman was closer to the door. What followed was 49 minutes of recorded conversation. Foreman said he vaguely remembered Catherine and Allison being bridesmaids in his wedding but denied having any other contact with Catherine.

He claimed he didn’t even know she was dead. When they showed him a wedding photo with Catherine and Allison standing next to his bride, he confirmed it was his 1982 wedding and said he had no connection to either sister beyond that day. Bess and Lewallen backed him into a series of hard corners.

 Near the end, Bess told him directly his DNA had been found on Catherine’s bed and inside Catherine’s body. Foreman paused. He said he didn’t know how it got there, but that they were saying it was there. Bess told him there was only one way for it to get there. And he told Foreman there were two people who knew what happened that night, and one of them was dead.

Foreman ended the interview and asked for a lawyer. They let him walk out of the room. Roughly 30 seconds later, officers stopped him in the hallway and placed him under arrest for capital murder. They used the same pair of Smith & Wesson handcuffs that had been taken off Catherine Edwards’ wrists 26 years earlier.

Bess and Lewallen had talked prosecutors into releasing the evidence specifically for this moment. Bess would later say it was something he’d never forget. It felt like they got to do something for Catherine physically by taking the cuffs that bound her when she was murdered and putting them back on the man who did it.

 Foreman fought extradition and refused to leave his cell for the hearing. A governor’s warrant was prepared and sent to the governor of Ohio. After weeks of delays, Foreman was eventually transported back to Jefferson County. The trial began in March 2024, nearly 30 years after Catherine’s death. Her parents had both died before seeing it.

Bob Wortham, the DA who had pushed to reopen the case, had left office by the time Foreman went to trial. Prosecutor Pat Noth had worked the case from the DA’s side for years. He told the jury he’d waited 29 years to bring justice to Catherine’s family. He wished her parents were alive for this day.

 “No parent,” he said, “should have to go through what they went through.” Seven days of prosecution testimony, 73 potential witnesses on the state’s list. One of the first was Allison, Catherine’s twin sister, now 60 years old. Allison described the days leading up to the murder and told the jury her sister was trusting, maybe too trusting. The courtroom was packed.

 Foreman sat calmly at the defense table through all of it. The prosecution presented the DNA evidence, the crime scene evidence, the clothing Catherine had been wearing, the handcuffs, and the results of the sexual assault kit. Expert witnesses from multiple labs walked the jury through how the DNA testing had evolved from the original 20-marker profile in 1995 to the half-million marker profile Autrum produced in 2020.

The defense called zero witnesses. Foreman did not take the stand. His attorney told the jury that after 29 years, evidence degrades and memories change. He argued the DNA alone wasn’t enough and pointed to an unknown male DNA sample found under Catherine’s fingernails, suggesting someone else had been present.

 The prosecution’s response was direct. Catherine’s hands had been cuffed behind her back the entire time.    She couldn’t have scratched her attacker. The trace DNA could have come from anyone who handled the evidence over three decades. On the last day, the prosecution called Paula Ramsey. She was in her early 60s. The judge told the jury before she took the stand that they would be hearing evidence of another crime committed by the defendant.

 Ramsey identified Foreman across the courtroom after more than 40 years. She testified through tears about what he did to her in July of 1981, about the knife, the belt, and the field. When asked why she came forward,    she she said she wanted to see justice done for Catherine. The jury deliberated for 52 minutes, guilty of capital murder.

 Judge John Stevens sentenced Clayton Foreman to life in prison. He will be eligible for parole when he is 93 years old. The prosecution had not sought the death penalty. Foreman is appealing his conviction. Ranger Bess had said early in the investigation that they always suspected the killer was someone known to the family.

But nobody expected it would be someone who was in your wedding. Catherine opened the door because she recognized who was standing on the other side. A bridesmaid at his wedding. No reason to be afraid. Catherine Edwards was 31 years old. She taught fifth grade and had an identical twin sister and a beagle named Maggie.

And the handcuffs he used to restrain her that night are the same ones they used to take him away.