Juror Aaron Ellis
Appearances
48 Hours
Strange Truth
I felt that the evidence that was presented to me was not all the evidence that could have been collected and was the most scientific. And with that in mind, I could not find him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
48 Hours
The Mind of a Murderer
Well, I'll be honest with you. When we went into deliberation with that PET scan and all that computerized stuff they did, I said I felt like I've been dazzled with brilliance and baffled with BS.
48 Hours
Coerced Confessions
Up to this point, the worst trouble I've ever gotten is being late to class.
48 Hours
Coerced Confessions
The knives were given to me as a present from my grandpa. I'm not particularly fond of knives.
48 Hours
Coerced Confessions
I'd say probably the chest and neck. Maybe the stomach. He has to make sure that she can't scream. He has to make sure that she can't make any noise.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
The way she threw him under the bus just, I mean, that told you right there. She just used him.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
I was leaning toward a guilty vote, but, you know, I guess I wanted to make sure that we looked at everything as closely as we possibly could.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Once I seen the bruises, that was like, yeah, he's guilty. It was his gun missing, and to me, that was the hardest evidence.
48 Hours
A Family Affair
Even today, some jurors aren't sure. Robin Height was a manipulative person who stopped at nothing to get what she wanted. I think Robin played him like a fiddle.
48 Hours
The Perplexing Death of Susann Sills
It's just so intimidating that you got someone's life on the line. It weighs on you.
48 Hours
The Perplexing Death of Susann Sills
The dogs would have to choke her on the stairs. And my dog was as big as hers. And my dog cannot get a grip on wooden stairs with their nails to do anything. They just slide.
48 Hours
The Perplexing Death of Susann Sills
And the fall down the stairs wouldn't create that scenario on her body.
48 Hours
The Perplexing Death of Susann Sills
I just didn't think he planned it. I don't. If he had planned it or done any kind of forethought, it wouldn't be a hot mess crime scene that it was. It was kind of like a snap.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
But she never got any details, and her fiancé explained it away.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Right. Diana's sister Anne and her brother Scooter were not so sure, and neither were their parents, who wanted her to call it off.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The relationship began to fray over Foreman lying about their finances, and it ended after he had an affair. And looking back, Diana can see that he had an unhealthy fascination with police officers and the tools of their trade, like handcuffs.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
When Catherine was killed, they were divorced. But Diana remembers calling her ex-husband to talk about it.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
With all the mounting evidence, Foreman needed to be found. He was 60 and no longer living in Beaumont. They quickly tracked him to Reynoldsburg, Ohio. What was he doing there?
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
You need to collect a piece of DNA so that you can ensure that it's the right guy. Correct.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The likelihood that the DNA belonged to Clayton Foreman was a big number, 461 septillion. It doesn't get better than that, says Cheryl LaPointe. I mean, you can't fight those odds.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Aaron Llewellyn and Brandon Best were about to hop a plane to Ohio, ready to face the man they felt sure had killed Catherine.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And while they're doing that, Tina pays a visit to Diana Coe. Did they tell you they had DNA, though?
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
When Texas Ranger Brandon Bess and Detective Aaron Llewellyn arrive at the Franklin County Sheriff's Office to confront Clayton Foreman, they have a cover story. It's about a lost item from one of Foreman's Uber rides.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
It was April 29th, 2021, 26 years after Catherine Edwards was murdered, and they are sure they are sitting in front of the man who murdered her.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
I guess he pretty quickly realized he wasn't there to give up a purse. He did.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And after all those years and all that work, Aaron Llewellyn and Brandon Bess had one thing left they needed to do.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The very handcuffs that bound Catherine the night she died. How did it feel to put those handcuffs on?
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Even though they had their suspicions about him, the news that Clayton Foreman was arrested for the murder of Catherine Edwards was still a shock for his ex-wife, Diana Coe, and her siblings, Ann and Scooter.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Nearly 30 years after Catherine Edwards was found dead in her townhouse.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Beaumont prosecutor Patrick Knaud and his colleagues Mike Laird and Sonny Eckhardt are ready for trial.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And they're extremely confident about their case against Clayton Foreman.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
No, Your Honor. Tom Burbank is defending Foreman.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The prosecution calls Catherine's twin sister, Allison.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Here at 60, sitting before them was the spitting image of what could have been. That is a picture of my sister, Catherine. reliving the day she lost Catherine.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
It was just that she was gone was all I knew. The pain and the loss still so palpable.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Helenia Adams, Katherine Edwards' student when she was 7 and now 37, sat in the courtroom nearly every day.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
You measure the proximity of matching DNA. Detective Tina Llewellyn and genealogist Cheryl LaPointe, along with other crime lab technicians, walk the jury through the process of the genealogy and the DNA match. Texas Ranger Bess and Detective Aaron Llewellyn go through the final stages of the investigation, all carefully coordinated to make the chain of evidence airtight.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And on the last day, the prosecution calls all the women who had been scarred by Foreman and were alive to say so.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
That's correct. An old co-worker. Whenever I opened up the drawer, there was a pair of handcuffs. A former fiancé who found pictures of young girls. He said to me that he had them so that he could fantasize about taking their virginity. his ex-wife, Diana Coe, who agreed to testify.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And it was during the trial that Diana learned about what really happened to that 19-year-old woman in the months before she and Foreman married.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
She was the final witness. Returning to the night her car got stuck and Foreman, falsely claiming he was a policeman, offered to help.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
stop crying i'm sorry i hope i didn't hurt you and there was another woman who did not testify but went on the record an alleged victim of foreman's violence also a high school friend of diana who did not press charges she told investigators foreman attacked her from behind and put a gun to her head
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Prosecutors suspect Foreman used a similar ruse the night he appeared at Catherine Edwards' door.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
After seven days of prosecution testimony, the defense calls no witnesses, and attorney Burbank closes.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Now it would be up to a jury to decide Clayton Foreman's future. Patrick Knaud wants them to remember Catherine Edwards didn't have one.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
It takes less than an hour for the jury to come back with a verdict.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Clayton Foreman, guilty and sentenced to life for the murder of Catherine Edwards.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Larry Delcambre, juror number two, says he and his fellow jurors had very little to talk about.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
For Helenia Adams, finally some justice for a favorite teacher after all.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And when you heard those words guilty, what was that like for you?
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Was it emotional we did it? This whole case was emotional. For detectives Tina and Aaron Llewellyn, genealogists Cheryl LaPointe and Ranger Brandon Bess, it was the ending they had all worked for. But it left lots of room for reflection.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Bess always wanted a confession. They all wanted to know why.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And everyone was still reeling, asking themselves how it was that Clayton Foreman walked among them and no one saw his monstrous core all those years, hiding in plain sight.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
There was no sign of forced entry at the time, right? Right.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
But in the wake of the trial, it was time to turn away from Foreman and remember Catherine Edwards as she was and in her own words. Wow, I didn't realize the timing on this one.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The vibrant, beloved schoolteacher in her prime gone far too soon. If you could talk directly with Mary Catherine Edwards, what would you wish to tell her?
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Helen Aya is a student once again. She's studying for her master's in criminal justice and plans to apply to law school, a tribute to her teacher.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
For Texas Ranger Brandon Bess, almost everything about the Mary Catherine Edwards case was different.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
January 14th, 1995. It was a Saturday. Catherine, as most people called her, didn't show up for a family lunch and she wasn't answering her phone. When her mother and father went to check on her, they had to see what no parent ever should.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Catherine was 31. My mom is the one that told me.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
She had been friends with Catherine and her twin sister, Allison, since middle school.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The sisters, both schoolteachers, looked so much alike, everyone had trouble telling them apart, especially their young students.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Helenaia Adams remembers being in her classroom.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Early investigators could not piece together what happened, but those police-grade handcuffs were a big clue.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
In the weeks after the murder, police focused on tracing the serial numbers of the handcuffs, but came up empty. They also zeroed in on an old boyfriend, David Perry.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
But Perry was out of town that night. He gave a DNA sample, and it was not a match.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The crime scene DNA stayed well preserved and the years dragged on and on until forensic science changed.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
By 2018, there was a way to take the DNA left at a crime scene and search for biological relatives. A program, GEDmatch, scarfs up all the DNA from people who agree to share it with law enforcement and upload it when they use sites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
So in April 2020, the DNA from Catherine Edwards' crime scene went to Othram, a lab outside of Houston for testing.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
But the number of names to pursue was overwhelming.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Aaron's wife, Tina, an auto crimes detective, began using her off hours to help sort through it. The matches were all Cajun.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
So Tina went back to Katherine's journals looking for clues.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And as she was building out the branches, one of the names on the family tree kept coming up.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And when they called her, they found out Shara had been building her family tree.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And then they found out something that changed the course of the investigation. Shara was known professionally as the gene hunter and already skilled at working these cases. She'd identified one of the women buried along Interstate Highway 45 in the Texas Killing Fields case. And she agreed to lend her expertise. I told him that I was willing to help.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Even if it meant taking a hard look at her own relatives.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
It was a complicated, multilayered process using publicly available DNA, birth and death records, finding parents, siblings and cousins.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
The tree grew up and down and sideways. There were almost 7,500 names.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
All the while, Tina hardly slept, working through most nights knowing there was a killer still out there.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Hunkered down at their computers day after day, constantly back and forth on the phone, Tina Llewellyn and genealogist Cheryl LaPointe are quickly becoming great partners.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Best buds. I don't know what else to say. And when they needed DNA, they turned to Tina's husband, Aaron, and Texas Ranger Brandon Bess.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Was there ever a time, though, that somebody actually thought my uncle may actually be a killer? Who knows?
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
Once the uploads were compared to the killer's DNA, if the amount of shared genetic material was low, they knew it was a dead end.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
After almost three months of ups and downs and nearly nonstop work, Shara hit pay dirt. It was about 10.30 at night.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
This was a major lead, a family in Catherine's town with two sons who went to Forest Park High, the same school Catherine did, at around the same time.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
This is them. We found them. Just didn't know which one. Okay. It's either Michael Foreman or Clayton Foreman. What did you do to figure that out?
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
In 1981, a 19-year-old woman told police that Clayton Foreman bound her hands and raped her. She had also gone to Forest Park High School, where Clayton was the manager of the football team. Foreman was convicted, but was given probation and paid a fine. But he did not have to give a DNA sample at that time.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And then they found another connection. It went all the way back to Diana Coe, Catherine's friend from middle school. In high school, Diana fell madly in love. Her boyfriend had graduated three years ahead of her, and they got engaged.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And when she started planning her wedding, she immediately turned to her old friends, Catherine and Allison.
48 Hours
Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards
And the groom, the man Diana co-married back in 1982, now he was their number one suspect, Clayton Foreman. She, in fact, didn't know him. Yes. In hindsight, there were signs. When Diana found out about Clayton's legal troubles, the wedding was less than three months away.