Latest / Gone Cold - Texas True Crime / Arrest in the Mary Searight Case; Conviction in Mary Edwards Murder

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Arrest in the Mary Searight Case; Conviction in Mary Edwards Murder · Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

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  The Gone Cold podcasts may contain violent or graphics subject matter. Listener discretion is
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  advised. Mary Josephine Moore Seawright was born and raised in Paris, Texas,
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  before going off to college at the University of Texas in Austin. The daughter
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  of an influential and powerful judge, she married the son of an incredibly prominent
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  cattle rancher. Dan Seawright didn't follow in his father's footsteps, and instead went
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  on to become the vice president and board member of the Walter Tipps Company,
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  an enterprising general store that sold everything from iron pots and pans to cotton gins.
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  Headquartered in Austin, Mary and Dan Seawright became a prominent and influential couple
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  in their own right. Mary wasn't your typical socialite, however. In fact,
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  she chose to focus on philanthropic endeavors that most often helped preserve and maintain
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  nature and her adopted city of Austin's history and architecture. She'd grown up feeding
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  on a silver spoon, but the hard working and sometimes downright dirty life of
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  a rancher had Mary Seawright much more in her element than boring parties. Schmoozing
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  with the stuffy Austin elite. She and Dan were ahead of their time in
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  many ways too, including their encouragement of the inclusion and growth of all cultures
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  and peoples in their city. Dan was considerably older than Mary, and after
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  his death in nineteen fifty eight at age seventy, she became a widow at
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  age forty nine. She'd never marry again, and for thirty years she was
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  a rugged, pistol packing rancher who preferred blue jeans and dusty boots to ball
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  gowns and high heels. She lived in a small ranch house without indoor plumbing
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  on her more more than three hundred and forty four acre ranch, prime real
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  estate that developers wanted a giant piece of badly, but Mary would never sell.
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  Instead, when her body no longer allowed her to live the almost pioneer
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  lifestyle she loved, marymore Seawright donated more than two thirds of it to the
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  city of Austin, but with a catch. It had to be preserved and
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  available to the public for the people and not for the developers or to line
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  the pockets of fat cats. She wanted the residence of Austin to have it
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  and in nineteen eighty eight it became Marymore Seawright Metropolitan Park, which it's still
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  named today. Mary at a eighty moved back into her family home at seven
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  to eleven Pine Bluff Street in Paris, Texas with her big sister Margie.
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  She of course brought along her six dogs, sixty four Studebaker and forty eight
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  Ford pickup truck. Mary began buying up the houses that surrounded it. The
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  quite eccentric, do or die, independent and delightful woman began wearing nice dresses
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  to tend to her flower gardens, leaving behind her torn up western shirts and
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  frayed blue jeans. The sisters enjoyed several years back together at home before in
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  nineteen ninety three, Margie died of natural causes at age ninety. A few
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  years later came Mary's death, though hers was at the hand of violence.
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  On the evening of Sunday August eighteenth, nineteen ninety six, eighty seven year
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  old Mary Moore Seawrite was found in her home unconscious, bloodied, and barely
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  breathing. Doctors tried desperately to save her, but on August twenty first,
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  she succumbed to her injuries at a Dallas hospital. According to recently obtained arrest
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  warrant documents, Mary had severe injuries to her faith and head, such as
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  lacerations, bruises, with her entire face being swollen and covered with blood.
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  Mary had also been sexually assaulted. As Paris News reporter Cherie Bell reported in
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  nineteen ninety nine, law enforcement never contacted the television show Unsolved Mysteries to feature
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  Mary's case, and never approached the FBI to obtain a suspect profile. Presuming
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  why the Paris police neglected to pursue such things is not helpful at this point,
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  since we now know that the man who's been arrested for her murder was
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  approached and questioned the very night she was killed. Officers Vickers and Ritchie arrived
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  at the scene of Mary's murder at approximately nine forty three pm that August Knight
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  in nineteen ninety six. After assessing the scene and back up arriving, Vickers
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  began canvassing the neighborhood for witnesses. Next Door to Mary, in a house
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  she owned, lived one of her tenants, David Paul Katy, then twenty
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  five years old, Officer Vickers began questioning the man, who said he'd been
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  at home drinking all day. He'd seen a man in his landlord's backyard,
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  jumped the fence and chased him off, Katie told the policeman. As he
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  questioned the man, Officer Vickers noticed he was struggling to hide his right hand.
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  The officer purposefully kept him talking, and eventually, perhaps inevitably, the
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  policeman spotted a two inch laceration to the back of that hand. Katie told
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  Vickers he'd hit his hand on a tree. Another neighbor, however, later
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  told Officer Vickers that Katie claimed the fresh bruise and cut came from a fight
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  he'd gotten in when he saw it earlier that evening. Officer Vickers reported these
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  findings to Sergeants Golden and Springer, who went straight to David Paul Katy with
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  a request to swab his right hand. Katie gave written consent and the laceration
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  was swabbed. He was a suspect from day one, but it takes more
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  than a laceration and inconsistent stories about how it got there to make an arrest,
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  let alone get a conviction. It's unclear if the Paris police sat on
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  the swab so long due to lack of forensic DNA technologies to identify Mary's DNA
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  on Katie's cut properly and assuredly, but that seems the likeliest scenario. One
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  thing is certain, they kept details in the case extremely close to the chest.
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  If you're interested in hearing about the details of the case and a relatively
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  exhaustive history about Mary's life, please go back and listen to our episodes released
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  in late August of twenty twenty two titled The Slang of Mary Moore Seawrite Parts
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  one and two. Back then, we were lucky enough to speak with former
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  Paris News reporter Scharie Bell about the case. She told us about suspects who
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  weren't mentioned in the newspapers, tenants who lived directly next door to Mary at
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  seven thirty nine Pine Bluff Street. These folks, Schari told us, weren't
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  popular with the other neighbors. To put it lightly, they drank all day,
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  yelled obscenities outside the home, threatened folks, et cetera. This is
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  the same house David Paul Katy lived in at the time, and his criminal
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  record up to that point wasn't insignificant. Katie had been convicted of auto theft,
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  burglary twice, unlawfully carrying a weapon, and driving while intoxicated. Make
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  no mistake, marymore Seawright was a pretty capable eighty seven year old, but
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  David Paul Katy was six feet tall, and though I'm not sure what he
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  weighed then, currently at fifty three years old, he weighs two hundred and
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  seventy pounds anyway. On September fifteenth, twenty twenty three, Paris Police Detective
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  Lee Foreman sent the swabs taken from the laceration on Katie's right hand to the
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  Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Lab in Garland. She also sent to other
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  items. The DNA lifted from the swab of David Paul Katy's hand showed a
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  mixture of three individuals. The probability Mary's DNA is one of the three from
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  the mixture taken from Katie's swabs is fifty one quadrillion times greater than the possibility
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  it came from an unknown individual, indicating it's very likely, perhaps absurdly likely,
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  that the laceration on Katie's hand contained the victim's DNA. In the years
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  since Mary's murder, Katie has continued to get himself into trouble with the law.
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  He's also known to them by the nickname Dave Triple X and Bones with
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  a Z. It also appears he's worked as an informant for law enforcement,
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  though I can't be entirely sure. At this point, when he was charged
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  for killing marymore Seawright, Katie was being held on a one hundred thousand dollars
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  bond at the Hopkins County Jail on an unrelated charge of aggravated assault with a
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  deadly weapon with the charge of murder out of Lamar County for the slang of
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  marymore Seawright added his bonds total two hundred thousand dollars. That's it. That's
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  all we know right now. If you have any information that might further help
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  authorities secure a conviction against David Paul Caty, please call the Paris Police Department
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  at nine zero three seven eight four six' six eight eight, or contact
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  Lamar County District Attorney Gary Young at nine oh three seven three seven two four
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  five eight. I recorded this update on the marymore Sea wrote case several days
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  ago, and since then more good news came down the pipeline concerning another case
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  that went cold for many years. Last week, while many of us were
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  miserably failing at keeping our kids from going bored on spring break, the trial
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  of sixty three year old Clayton Bernard Foreman was taking place. In January of
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  nineteen ninety five, beloved fifth grade school teacher, thirty one year old Mary
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  Catherine Edwards was found brutally murdered in her Beaumont, Texas apartment. Her father
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  found her body slumped over the side of her bathtub, which held four to
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  five inches of water. She was black and blue, bloodied, and handcuffed.
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  Mary had been sexually assaulted. At the time, it was determined Mary
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  died as the result of drowning, but after re reviewing his own work,
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  doctor Charles Harvey recently changed his opinion. He now believes Mary died of a
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  restraint asphyxiation, where he told the court on the second day of Foreman's trial,
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  the victim's chest is compressed and they can't breathe. It would take five
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  to ten minutes to die this way, doctor Harvey testified. In the initial
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  investigation, police followed many leads, including one that took them three hundred miles
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  north to Arlington. In the fall and winter of nineteen ninety six, thirty
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  year old Christine huen Vou and twenty two year old Wendy Rochelle Prescott were found
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  sexually assaulted, bound, and murdered in their apartment bathtubs by a man later
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  dubbed by the press the bathtub killer. Investigators from Beaumont traveled to Arlington,
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  but ultimately discovered the case differed substantially from that of Mary Katherine Edwards. The
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  so called bathtub killer was ultimately brought to justice, but largely as the result
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  of lack of DNA forensic technology. Mary's case eventually went cold back in May
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  of twenty twenty one after the arrest of Clayton Bernard Foreman. Gone Cold covered
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  the Mary Katherine Edwards case. But with this update we need to give credit
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  where credit is due. Beaumont Police detective Aaron Llewellen began researching Mary's case in
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  twenty ten. Much of his work on the case, if not most,
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  was done after he clocked out and with plenty of help from his wife,
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  Beaumont Police detective Tina Llewellen. Without the work of these two individuals who eventually
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  listed the help of Texas ranger Brandon Bess. Mary Catherine Edwards's case might still
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  be sitting cold. Tina knew all about genealogy. After a DNA profile of
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  an unknown male was lifted from a cutting of Mary's comforter and Aaron exhausted his
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  genealogical knowhow, Tina got to work. That's where the other person responsible for
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  solving this case comes in. As she researched, Tina kept noticing the name
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  Schera Lapointe. Shera's father in law happened to be on the family tree of
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  a potential suspect. Tina got ahold of Schera, who is a forensic genetic
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  genealogist, and they teamed up. Though I'm certainly making this long complicated story
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  short, they began the process of ruling out and eventually ruling in a suspect.
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  The rest is now history. Even before he sexually assaulted and murdered Mary
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  Katherine Edwards, Clayton Bernard Foreman was convicted of binding in savagely raping a former
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  fellow high school student at knife point in nineteen eighty one. Mary Katherine Edwards
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  also went to high school with Foreman and was even a bridesmaid at his wedding.
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  After a seven day trial and about forty five minutes of deliberations, a
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  Jefferson County jury found Clayton Bernard Foreman guilty of Mary's murder. He was sentenced
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  to life in prison. He'll be ninety three years old before he'll be eligible
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  for parole. Although it was delayed, justice for Mary Katherine Edwards as finally
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  arrived after twenty nine years. We'd like to thank particularly Tina and Aaron Llewellyn
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  and chery La Point for making that happen, and of course we'd also like
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  to thank Paris least Detective Lee Foreman for solving marymore Seawright's case. If you
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  a link in bio in the episode's description. Thanks for listening, y'all.