On January 14, 1995, 31-year-old Mary Catherine Edwards, a beloved elementary school teacher, was found dead in her townhouse in Beaumont, Texas.
His parents found him. It was a horrifying sight: she was in a bathtub, handcuffed, and had been sexually assaulted. There were no signs of forced entry, which made investigators think they must know her killer. Smith & Wesson police-grade handcuffs are always a big clue, but when detectives try to trace the serial number, they come up empty. Investigators initially questioned various law enforcement officials and came up with nothing.
Texas Department of Public Safety
The case went cold, but as Beaumont police Det. Aaron Lewallen told “48 Hours” contributor Natalie Morales, “It’s almost like a ghost story around a campfire. Could it be someone we know?” Morales reports on the search for answers in “Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards,” airing Saturday, November 9 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.
Thanks to carefully preserved DNA from crime scenes and the advent of genetic genealogy, Det. Aaron Lewallen, Tina Lewallen’s wife, as well as detectives – along with Brandon Bess, a Texas Ranger in the cold case division, and Shera LaPoint, a professional genealogist – worked together for nearly three months in a nonstop push to solve the case.
After all the initial leads and the suspicion that someone in law enforcement has been involved, the family tree that was built shows someone else. His main suspect was not a law enforcement officer, but someone who attended the same high school as Edwards: Clayton Foreman.
Then she learned that Edwards and her identical twin sister Allison had been bridesmaids at Foreman’s first wedding. The brothers were good friends with his first wife, Dianna Coe, who also attended the same high school.
Coe remembers them, telling Morales how kind he was when he moved to a new town and started a new school.
“I was new to the area … so, I didn’t know anybody. And he … just started talking to me and asked my name … and we’ve been friends ever since,” Coe said.
The sisters were the first people Coe considered to be bridesmaids at her wedding. She and Foreman remained married for 11 years. They divorced by the time of the murder, but in hindsight, Coe began to see it in a different, dark, light. She remembers her ex-husband’s ingenuity with the police and the tools of the trade, such as handcuffs and billy clubs. As Coe told Morales, “He had a billy club that was kept … by the bed. You know, he said it was for protection. And I remember that he had ordered the handcuffs that … Well, he had hung over the rearview mirror.”
Coe also remembers a disturbing conversation with her ex-husband when he heard Edwards had been killed and called to talk about it.
“I was thinking, you know, crying and I said, ‘Oh, my God,’ I said, ‘someone has killed Catherine,'” Coe told “48 Hours.” “And – and then, ‘Oh, really?’ It’s like there’s no emotion, which I think is weird.”
Texas Department of Public Safety
A DNA match quickly determined that Foreman had indeed been at the crime scene. And when Det. Aaron Lewallen and Ranger Bess went to question Foreman, they had an arrest warrant. They also carry very symbolic items.
Together, they take the time to make a deal with the prosecutor so they can use the handcuffs they took as evidence at the crime scene. When they arrested Foreman for killing Edwards, they did it with the very handcuffs that had bound him the night he died. He wasn’t one of them, but during his investigation, he learned that Foreman had falsely claimed to be a police officer.
The handcuffs – as focused as they were at the beginning – came full circle at the end. Bess will never forget the feeling. When he said to Morales, “It’s a moment I’ll never forget…you feel you have to do something for Catherine there…put it back on the person who killed her…It might seem small to some, but it’s huge to us, and it feels good.
The jury in Foreman’s murder trial deliberated for less than an hour before finding him guilty of killing Edwards. The foreman was sentenced to life in prison.
