Juror Aaron Ellis

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.

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.

He's a monster. He's worse than a monster. He had everybody kind.

I know I cried when I listened to that tape.

Up to this point, the worst trouble I've ever gotten is being late to class.

The knives were given to me as a present from my grandpa. I'm not particularly fond of knives.

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.

The way she threw him under the bus just, I mean, that told you right there. She just used him.

The first vote I had voted, not guilty.

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.

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.

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.

It's just so intimidating that you got someone's life on the line. It weighs on you.

The kids, you know.

Somebody would do that.

But he did that.

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.

And the fall down the stairs wouldn't create that scenario on her body.

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.

But she never got any details, and her fiancé explained it away.

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.

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.

When Catherine was killed, they were divorced. But Diana remembers calling her ex-husband to talk about it.

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?

You need to collect a piece of DNA so that you can ensure that it's the right guy. Correct.

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.

Aaron Llewellyn and Brandon Best were about to hop a plane to Ohio, ready to face the man they felt sure had killed Catherine.

And while they're doing that, Tina pays a visit to Diana Coe. Did they tell you they had DNA, though?

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.

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.

Did he immediately go, uh-oh? No, he didn't.

I guess he pretty quickly realized he wasn't there to give up a purse. He did.

So, and he's denying, denying.

And after all those years and all that work, Aaron Llewellyn and Brandon Bess had one thing left they needed to do.

The very handcuffs that bound Catherine the night she died. How did it feel to put those handcuffs on?

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.

March 12th, 2024.

Nearly 30 years after Catherine Edwards was found dead in her townhouse.

Beaumont prosecutor Patrick Knaud and his colleagues Mike Laird and Sonny Eckhardt are ready for trial.

And they're extremely confident about their case against Clayton Foreman.

No, Your Honor. Tom Burbank is defending Foreman.

The prosecution calls Catherine's twin sister, Allison.

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.

So you would do the police work. Yes.

It was just that she was gone was all I knew. The pain and the loss still so palpable.

Helenia Adams, Katherine Edwards' student when she was 7 and now 37, sat in the courtroom nearly every day.

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.

And on the last day, the prosecution calls all the women who had been scarred by Foreman and were alive to say so.

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.

Yes.

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.

She was the final witness. Returning to the night her car got stuck and Foreman, falsely claiming he was a policeman, offered to help.

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

Prosecutors suspect Foreman used a similar ruse the night he appeared at Catherine Edwards' door.

After seven days of prosecution testimony, the defense calls no witnesses, and attorney Burbank closes.

The prosecution wraps up its case.

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.

It takes less than an hour for the jury to come back with a verdict.

Clayton Foreman, guilty and sentenced to life for the murder of Catherine Edwards.

Larry Delcambre, juror number two, says he and his fellow jurors had very little to talk about.

For Helenia Adams, finally some justice for a favorite teacher after all.

And when you heard those words guilty, what was that like for you?

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.

Bess always wanted a confession. They all wanted to know why.

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.

There was no sign of forced entry at the time, right? Right.

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.

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?

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.

For Texas Ranger Brandon Bess, almost everything about the Mary Catherine Edwards case was different.

Were they police grade handcuffs?

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.

Catherine was 31. My mom is the one that told me.

She had been friends with Catherine and her twin sister, Allison, since middle school.

The sisters, both schoolteachers, looked so much alike, everyone had trouble telling them apart, especially their young students.

Helenaia Adams remembers being in her classroom.

Early investigators could not piece together what happened, but those police-grade handcuffs were a big clue.

Detective Aaron Llewellyn.

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.

But Perry was out of town that night. He gave a DNA sample, and it was not a match.

The crime scene DNA stayed well preserved and the years dragged on and on until forensic science changed.

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.

So in April 2020, the DNA from Catherine Edwards' crime scene went to Othram, a lab outside of Houston for testing.

But the number of names to pursue was overwhelming.

Aaron's wife, Tina, an auto crimes detective, began using her off hours to help sort through it. The matches were all Cajun.

So Tina went back to Katherine's journals looking for clues.

And as she was building out the branches, one of the names on the family tree kept coming up.

And when they called her, they found out Shara had been building her family tree.

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.

Even if it meant taking a hard look at her own relatives.

It was a complicated, multilayered process using publicly available DNA, birth and death records, finding parents, siblings and cousins.

The tree grew up and down and sideways. There were almost 7,500 names.

All the while, Tina hardly slept, working through most nights knowing there was a killer still out there.

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.

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.

Was there ever a time, though, that somebody actually thought my uncle may actually be a killer? Who knows?

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.

After almost three months of ups and downs and nearly nonstop work, Shara hit pay dirt. It was about 10.30 at night.

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.

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?

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.

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.

And when she started planning her wedding, she immediately turned to her old friends, Catherine and Allison.

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.