# 40: Lesbian Nurses in a Twisted Serial Killing Pact

An episode of [Outlore with Eleanor Neale](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1682504024), 31 Aug 2023, 1 h 47 min.

Audio: https://anchor.fm/s/105f723ac/podcast/play/103880380/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-5-9%2F401851623-44100-2-c5dc98d458ad524e.mp3

Today's episode is on the angel of death murders committed by the ‘Lethal Lovers’, Cathy Wood and Gwendolyn Graham. In a twisted love pact, the lesbian serial killer duo murdered residents of the Alpine manor care home Trigger Warning: abuse and murder of vulnerable people by their carers, self harm, domestic abuse and violence, sexual abuse, animal abuse and threats of suicide Resources: https://linktr.ee/usualdisclaimer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

## Transcript

[0:05] Hello everyone, and welcome to Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor
[0:09] Neil, a true crime podcast where we crack open some of the most
[0:12] notorious cases in history. Given the topics that we'll be
[0:16] investigating, it goes without saying that this show comes with
[0:20] a content warning. The details can get a bit heavy
[0:23] and you might find some of the themes we discuss triggering.
[0:26] Listener discretion is strongly advised and check the
[0:29] description for some resources and further information.
[0:38] Before we get into the case, I just want to give my usual
[0:41] disclaimer that I mean absolutely no disrespect to
[0:43] anyone that I talk about in this video.
[0:45] Everything that I'm about to say is publicly available
[0:48] information that myself and my team have found on the Internet
[0:51] and we have compiled into this one video.
[0:54] While we make every effort to Fact Check our sources and make
[0:58] sure all of our information is correct, no action should be
[1:01] taken in reliance upon the information in this video.
[1:04] And I want to take this opportunity to remind you all
[1:07] that these are real people lives that we're talking about South.
[1:10] Please keep it respectful in the comments section.
[1:13] Keep it kind. All opinions in this video are
[1:16] mine and mine alone. And with all of that being said,
[1:19] let's get into the case of the Lethal lovers.
[1:22] So today's case takes place in Grand Rapids, MI in 1987 at a
[1:27] care home named Alpine Manor. It was a residential nursing
[1:31] facility for the elderly and disabled.
[1:34] Basically anyone that needed a high level of support and live
[1:37] in care, they would go to stay at Alpine Manor where there's
[1:40] nurses and there's nurses aids to look after them, people to
[1:44] make them meals and give them medication.
[1:46] The majority of the residents at Alpine Manor had Alzheimer's or
[1:50] dementia and they were pretty much entirely relying on the
[1:54] staff at Alpine Manor to meet every single one of their needs.
[1:58] Like I said, Alpine Manor was staffed with a mixture of nurses
[2:02] and nurses aids. Now, the difference between
[2:05] those two is that nurses, nurses and they've been to like medical
[2:09] school and everything, whereas nurses aides are usually
[2:12] unlicensed people, just individuals who work under the
[2:17] care of no, under the provision of, of these nurses to be able
[2:22] to give care to people. So they're not like qualified
[2:25] nurses, but they can do certain things when they've got an
[2:28] actual nurse present. You know, my auntie actually
[2:31] does that kind of job. She's not a nurse.
[2:33] She's never done like medical school or anything, but she can
[2:37] go out to these people's homes and make sure they've had their
[2:40] medication, cook them some dinner, make sure that they're
[2:43] all ready for bed, You know, help them get changed, help
[2:46] them, you know, just normal human tasks that some people
[2:50] might find and very difficult, whether that's due to their
[2:52] mobility or their memory or anything like that.
[2:55] And also, a big part of being a nurse's aide is to just fill
[3:00] people's social needs because especially, I guess less so for
[3:04] like residential facilities, but especially those that have
[3:07] nurse's aides come to their house, it can be quite lonely.
[3:11] So a nurse's aide is also just there to have a chat and bring
[3:15] some sunshine into people's lives.
[3:17] And nurse's aides were at the heart of Alpine Manor.
[3:20] They really kept that ship running smoothly.
[3:23] It was a large portion of the workforce in that residential
[3:27] place. And a lot of the women were just
[3:29] like a lot of them were women in their early 20s, mid 20s and a
[3:34] lot of them were actually romantically involved with each
[3:38] other. After work they would all head
[3:39] off into the town and visit the gay bars and get drunk and end
[3:44] up hooking up with their Co workers.
[3:46] They would all be in like flings with each other and like swap
[3:50] around with it and somehow the whole town knew that this was a
[3:54] thing. Like Alpine Manor was kind of
[3:57] notorious for its lesbian workforce.
[3:59] In fact, a journalist described it as a copy of Lesbians.
[4:02] And the reason I tell you all of this is because two of these
[4:05] lesbian nurses aides are at the centre of our case today, 23
[4:10] year old Gwen Graham and 24 year old Kathy Wood.
[4:14] Both of these women came from troubled backgrounds, which is
[4:17] actually their main reason for ending up at Alpine Manor.
[4:20] They both left their homes and their families and their state
[4:24] that they were born in and they had found themselves picking up
[4:27] a job here. The two of them started off as
[4:30] just friends of course when they both started working at the care
[4:32] home, but after a few outings with the other girls, Kathy and
[4:37] Gwen quickly became more than friends and more than friends
[4:41] very quickly developed into a Co dependent relationship.
[4:45] Both women were quite unstable without each other and this was
[4:50] both in inside work and outside of work.
[4:52] They would try to pick up the same shifts as each other.
[4:55] They both worked night shifts so that they could be together at
[4:58] work. And then outside of work they
[5:00] would go to bars together and then stay together in the same
[5:03] house and work up together and do stuff together during the day
[5:06] and then go to work. Like they had very quickly fused
[5:10] their lives together and this toxic relationship that they
[5:13] had, call it what it is, codependency is toxic.
[5:16] And the two of them would argue quite a lot because they're in
[5:19] each other's pockets. They were getting at each other
[5:21] a lot and this toxic relationship started to bleed
[5:24] over into their work life. Their Co workers were noticing
[5:28] it and very soon it wasn't just the two of them that it was
[5:33] affecting. Their relationship would soon
[5:35] have fatal consequences for their patients too.
[5:39] So I want to start by looking at the women's past and their
[5:42] upbringing and what brought them to Alpine Manor.
[5:45] I think it's all very important to know kind of the mindset of
[5:49] these two women when it got to the murders.
[5:52] So we'll start with Kathy, the older of the two.
[5:54] She was born Catherine Wood on March 7th, 1962 on a military
[5:59] base in Washington state. Because her father was in the
[6:03] military all her life, her mother was a stay at home mother
[6:06] who cared for Kathy and very soon a younger sister as well.
[6:10] The family were later stationed in Massachusetts, and it was
[6:13] around that time that Kathy's father was sent out to fight in
[6:17] the devastating Vietnam War. He did survive his service, but
[6:22] when he returned to his family, he was a shell of the man that
[6:25] he once was. He had severe PTSD, but not only
[6:29] that, he had become very cruel, like abusive, abusive to his
[6:35] wife, to his children, verbally, physically, emotionally.
[6:40] He was a cruel man now. The war had turned him into a
[6:44] bitter, horrible person. Kathy found herself isolating
[6:48] from her whole family pretty much, of course, her father.
[6:51] She didn't want to be around him.
[6:53] She tried to get away from him any chance that she could.
[6:55] She would just lock herself in a bedroom whenever her dad was
[6:58] home. And it also really affected her
[7:00] relationship with her mother as well, because her mother
[7:02] wouldn't stand up for the girls. Of course, Kathy and her little
[7:05] sister hadn't done anything wrong to their father yet he
[7:08] would abuse them all the time and their mother would never
[7:12] stick up for them. So she lost a lot of respect for
[7:15] her mother and just didn't feel safe.
[7:17] She didn't feel protected in her own home.
[7:19] She felt as though her only ally was her younger sister.
[7:22] That was the only person in that home that she even felt
[7:26] comfortable to talk to. In fact, her sister later said
[7:29] that this in a sad way did bring them closer together because
[7:33] they had this shared trauma that they could talk each other
[7:38] through. Life wasn't much easier for
[7:40] Kathy outside of the home either.
[7:42] She was bullied at school relentlessly.
[7:45] She struggled to make friends. She used to just spend a lot of
[7:48] her time sat alone reading in the playground.
[7:52] And when Kathy reached like puberty age early teens, her
[7:56] father became even more cruel. He would ridicule her in
[8:00] absolutely every way that he could, especially relating to
[8:04] her physical appearance and how it was changing, whether it was
[8:07] her height, her weight, her proportions, her face.
[8:11] He would just make fun or pick at her for everything, saying
[8:16] that she was plain and that boys her age are not going to want
[8:20] her. This damaged herself esteem
[8:22] terribly before she'd even started dating, before she even
[8:25] thought about it. But then at the age of 14, she
[8:29] did get into her first relationship.
[8:30] She told her parents that she had a boyfriend called David and
[8:34] she would go and see him all the time at his house.
[8:37] He would never come to hers. Of course, having a home life
[8:40] like she had, I wouldn't want to bring my partner back to meet my
[8:44] family. So her family never really met
[8:46] David. Kathy would just always go to
[8:48] his after school or on weekends and I believe her parents were
[8:52] fine with that. That was until one day about a
[8:55] year and a half into this relationship.
[8:57] They were together for a long time with Kathy and David.
[9:00] Kathy's mother goes to pick her daughter up from Davidde house.
[9:05] When she gets there, she knocks on the door and Davidde mom
[9:08] comes to the door and she's like, hi, I'm I'm Kathy's mom.
[9:11] I'm here to pick up my daughter. She's been hanging with David
[9:14] all day. And Davidde mom looked very
[9:18] shocked at what Kathy's mom had just said.
[9:20] And she was like, what? Like my daughter's here, She's
[9:24] going out with your son, like. And that was when David's mother
[9:27] said that she didn't have a son called David.
[9:31] She didn't have a son at all. The person that Kathy had been
[9:35] hanging out with at their house for the last year and a half was
[9:37] her daughter Debbie. Upon finding this out, Kathy's
[9:41] mother went absolutely ballistic.
[9:45] She was so angry with her daughter that she forbid her
[9:49] from ever seeing Debbie slash David ever again.
[9:53] Of course, Kathy put up a bit of a fight.
[9:54] I mean, she'd been with Debbie slash David for the last year
[9:58] and a half, and obviously there was a connection there.
[10:01] So she was begging her parents to just, like, calm down and try
[10:04] and listen and understand the situation.
[10:07] But they wouldn't. And they even threatened to
[10:09] throw her in a psychiatric hospital if she kept this
[10:11] relationship going. Kathy tried to tell her parents
[10:15] that she had no idea that David was a girl.
[10:19] She said that she had been going out with a boy called David for
[10:22] the last year and a half and that he was a boy and they had
[10:26] had sex. She'd lost her virginity to
[10:28] David and it was a penis that had penetrated her.
[10:32] She was sure of it. And she told her parents that.
[10:34] She said that Debbie must have just been dressing as a boy
[10:38] every time that she met her. You know, just like tying her
[10:40] hair back, putting a cap on, wearing boys clothes and acting
[10:44] as a boy, calling herself David all to trick Kathy.
[10:48] That was that was how she kind of explained this to her parents
[10:51] that like not only do you feel like you've been fooled and lied
[10:56] to us. So do I imagine how I feel.
[10:59] This is my boyfriend that has turned out to be biologically a
[11:03] girl. She managed to actually convince
[11:06] her parents that this was the case, that she had no idea that
[11:09] David was a girl and that she had been dating a boy called
[11:14] David or what she thought was a boy for the last year and a
[11:17] half. And she was just just as shocked
[11:20] and heartbroken and devastated as her parents were.
[11:23] Now, a lot of people, including Kathy own younger sister, don't
[11:28] think this is the case. They think that Kathy is lying.
[11:32] Kathy later is proven to be a pathological compulsive liar and
[11:37] it seems that she had been all the way through her life.
[11:40] The most believed theory is that Kathy was knowingly in a lesbian
[11:45] relationship with Debbie. She was attracted to girls even
[11:49] as a young teenager and this was like her first proper
[11:51] relationship and she knew that her parents would have a problem
[11:54] with it with with her partner being a woman.
[11:58] So she decided to lie and say that she was dating a boy just
[12:02] to, you know, not 'cause these kind of issues.
[12:05] Hence why they only ever met up at David's house or outside of
[12:09] the home. Of course she wasn't going to
[12:11] bring Debbie back to her mum and her dad.
[12:16] Kathy always likes to paint herself to be the victim of
[12:20] every single situation that she is in.
[12:23] And even though she is somewhat of a victim here of homophobic,
[12:27] unreasonable parents, but what she is not believed to be a
[12:30] victim of is catfishing. What do you call that
[12:33] catfishing? Even her own younger sister and
[12:36] people that knew Kathy in her life don't believe that she
[12:39] thought she would sit in a boy for a year and a half.
[12:41] This was all a story that she had come up with to cover this
[12:44] up. Of course, we don't know the
[12:46] full truth and it's kind of only really Kathy's word against
[12:50] everyone else's theory. And honestly, I don't suppose it
[12:53] matters too much to the case at large.
[12:55] So moving on. Her next relationship began when
[12:57] she was about 16-17 years old and she met a 20 year old man
[13:01] named Ken Wood who was the polar opposite of Kathy in pretty much
[13:07] every single way. She was quite a rebellious,
[13:11] unruly teen. She was very outgoing.
[13:14] She liked to she liked to get herself in some trouble, a
[13:17] little bit of trouble, but he couldn't be less like that if he
[13:20] tried. He he was calm, he was
[13:22] easygoing, he was sensible, he had his life together.
[13:25] And most importantly, he seemed to really, really adore Kathy
[13:30] Wood. They had a very whirlwind
[13:32] romancey first couple of months together and very quickly young
[13:37] Kathy fell pregnant with his child and they very hastily made
[13:42] the decision to keep the baby and to get married so that they
[13:45] wouldn't have the child out of wedlock.
[13:47] Like as soon as she fell pregnant, that was it.
[13:50] That was their lives sorted and concreted for them after just
[13:54] eight months of knowing each other.
[13:56] They were living together, planning their wedding and Kathy
[14:00] was on almost ready to pop with their baby.
[14:03] She spent the rest of her pregnancy in different like
[14:06] parenting classes, especially teen pregnancy classes.
[14:10] And she would spend a lot of time with her own mother just to
[14:13] kind of learn a thing or two about motherhood and having
[14:16] children. But at this point in her life,
[14:19] her mother had just been growing more and more and more bitter
[14:22] towards her as she'd been growing up and I guess becoming
[14:27] an attractive young woman. At this point, she was like
[14:29] 1718. She she would have had a womanly
[14:32] figure, she would have had a beautiful face.
[14:35] And I think her mother was very, very insecure about that.
[14:38] She was one of those jealous mothers that saw her daughter as
[14:42] competition in some weird way. But realistically, she'd never
[14:47] been very nice to her daughter. I think another big element of
[14:51] why she was so resentful of Kathy is because she'd managed
[14:55] to escape their abusive home. Her mother was stuck at home
[14:59] with her father, who was a horrible, cruel man.
[15:03] And maybe her mother looked at Kathy and thought she was so
[15:06] lucky to have got gotten away from him and to have her own
[15:10] life with her own man and, you know, a wedding and a baby.
[15:14] I think she was just jealous of her own daughter in a lot of
[15:17] ways and she couldn't deal with that.
[15:19] Throughout her pregnancy, Kathy's mental state declined
[15:23] very quickly. And I mean, it had never been in
[15:25] a good place to begin with due to her horrific home life and
[15:30] and of course, the the tumultuous breakup and
[15:32] separation from her first ever relationship and the bullying at
[15:36] school. She was also quite a loner,
[15:38] couldn't make friends. All of this meant that she'd.
[15:41] She'd always been quite low, quite depressed even as a child,
[15:45] but everything just seemed to get worse, worse and worse and
[15:49] worse continuously throughout her life.
[15:52] So at this point, of course, she's married, but they're going
[15:56] through some realizations that maybe Kathy and Ken are not for
[16:02] each other. But at this point it's kind of a
[16:04] bit too late. Or at least they think it's too
[16:06] late. They're pregnant and due to have
[16:08] a baby. They're planning their marriage
[16:10] like to in their minds, they can't go back on this.
[16:13] So now they're stuck together forever and they're not entirely
[16:16] happy. That was due to get worse, by
[16:18] the way. At this point, they were just
[16:20] realizing that they weren't that compatible.
[16:22] But as the years went by, it just devolved.
[16:25] At this point in her life, her new husband Ken was actually
[16:29] being bullied by her family. I'm not entirely sure why
[16:33] either. I couldn't find too much detail
[16:36] on Ken in general. I think it was just another
[16:39] situation of like, I don't know, I think her parents just were
[16:43] never happy with anything. They had a problem with
[16:45] absolutely everything, or they would find a problem with
[16:48] everything. And yeah, there was just
[16:50] something about their daughter's new husband that they didn't
[16:53] like. And they made him feel very
[16:55] uncomfortable and very unwelcome.
[16:57] And due to this, Ken's mental health, just like his wife's,
[17:01] began to decline rapidly to a point where he wasn't really
[17:06] there for Kathy during her pregnancy.
[17:08] And it was at this point in her life that Kathy Wood turned to
[17:12] food and overeating as a coping mechanism to deal with her
[17:17] emotions. Kathy gained over 100 pounds
[17:21] throughout her pregnancy and of course a bit of weight gain is
[17:25] absolutely natural and even recommended when going through
[17:30] pregnancy and childbirth. It's a little bit of cushion for
[17:33] the baby and it's more nutrients for the two of you.
[17:35] You need to be eating more, but £100 in nine months is quite
[17:40] dangerous not only for her but also for her baby.
[17:43] Her blood pressure began to soar insanely high and they were
[17:47] really, really worried about her.
[17:49] And actually, for the this reason, she gave birth to her
[17:52] baby quite prematurely. But when she did, everything was
[17:56] fine. Baby was healthy, mum was
[17:58] healthy, and they had a baby girl named Jacqueline.
[18:02] But even after the birth of her daughter, Kathy continued to use
[18:05] food as a coping mechanism to soothe her.
[18:09] She was gaining a lot of weight very quickly and she was
[18:12] isolating herself from the rest of the world as part of this,
[18:17] just to be able to eat in her own home.
[18:19] She didn't want to do any anything else.
[18:20] She didn't want to go out and socialize.
[18:22] She was so down that she just wanted to be in her enclosure.
[18:27] Her weight just climbed and climbed and climbed until she
[18:31] reached about £450, which at that point it's very hard for a
[18:37] person to to move without getting out of breath or getting
[18:41] into some sort of pain, you know, like joint pain.
[18:45] And it's a really painful existence.
[18:48] At this point, Kathy found it difficult to to do pretty much
[18:51] anything other than stay inside the house and just continue to
[18:56] eat and soothe herself. And she was unable to really
[19:00] exercise. And at this point it was really
[19:03] affecting more than just her own life.
[19:06] She couldn't care for her daughter properly.
[19:09] She wasn't there for her daughter.
[19:10] Whether it was physical care like changing nappies and stuff
[19:14] or getting up to go and cuddle her when she was crying, she she
[19:18] couldn't really do Ken ended up having to take on the majority
[19:24] caregiver role because Kathy couldn't do her part.
[19:29] She couldn't play with her daughter.
[19:30] She couldn't get down on her knees to like be with her.
[19:34] And so all of these reasons then meant that Kathy really
[19:38] struggled to bond with her daughter, which made her even
[19:42] more depressed because she felt like a failing mother and she
[19:46] felt like her life was ruined. At this point.
[19:50] She was in a a marriage that she wasn't entirely happy with.
[19:54] She had had a daughter that she wasn't really bonded with and
[19:57] she couldn't really bond with. She was physically unable to
[20:01] move to be able to bond with her daughter.
[20:03] And she was stuck in this really toxic addiction to food, this
[20:09] really negative cycle of eating more and then not wanting to
[20:14] leave the house because you've become depressed.
[20:16] So you just stay in the house and eat.
[20:25] Everything was just getting worse for Kathy.
[20:27] She was becoming more depressed, her self esteem was at an all
[20:31] time low and all of this turned her quite bitter.
[20:35] She became a very a very angry, snappy, Moody woman at home and
[20:41] this made life even harder for her husband Ken who was working.
[20:46] He was the majority giver of their daughter and now his wife
[20:51] was just being mean all the time.
[20:53] But Ken did really want to help her.
[20:55] He wanted to help his wife be happy and healthy again and to
[21:00] be a mother again. And so he suggested anything
[21:03] that he thought could help her, such as going to do like an
[21:07] educational course to get some qualifications to get a job or
[21:11] at least just get a low level entry job just to get back out
[21:16] there into the world. And it was with this support
[21:18] from her husband that Kathy managed to find the job as a
[21:21] nurse's aide at Alpine Manor. She specifically requested to do
[21:25] night shifts because night shifts were just generally a bit
[21:29] easier. I mean, most of the residents
[21:31] were asleep, so they were asking for stuff.
[21:34] It was more just getting them ready for bed and putting them
[21:37] to bed and then just kind of sitting around in case any of
[21:40] them woke up in the night and needed anything.
[21:42] And it was there, of course, where she met Gwen Graham.
[21:46] So before we get into the catastrophic partnership between
[21:51] these two women, let's go back through Gwen's childhood and
[21:54] upbringing. Gwendolyn GAIL Graham was born
[21:57] on August 6th, 1963 in Santa Monica, CA into a very hard
[22:04] family. Her father was a very cruel,
[22:06] emotionless man that insisted that children should shouldn't
[22:10] be cuddled or given too much physical affection because it
[22:14] would soften them, it would make them weak.
[22:16] And this is what I mean by she was raising a very hard family,
[22:20] very emotionless, very cold. Which just that in itself, not
[22:24] being cuddled as a child is known to lead to quite serious
[22:29] psychological effects later in life.
[22:32] Basically it gives kids problems when their parents aren't
[22:36] affectionate. And that was just the start of a
[22:40] terribly rough upbringing for Gwen.
[22:42] Her first ten years of her life were spent just constantly
[22:45] moving around. She was never settled anywhere.
[22:48] So for that reason, she never got the chance to really make
[22:50] friends or establish meaningful relationships at all.
[22:55] As soon as she would get to a new place and start a new school
[22:58] and start laying down the groundwork, getting to know her
[23:00] people, her parents would pull her out and whisk her away and
[23:03] send her somewhere else. They eventually settled on a
[23:05] farm in Texas when she was about 10 years old.
[23:09] But even through all of that constant turbulence and moving,
[23:14] she couldn't even rely on her family through all of that
[23:17] because, like I say, they were very cold and emotionless.
[23:20] And it gets even worse than that.
[23:22] Her father, just like Kathy, was abusive in a multitude of ways,
[23:28] physically, emotionally, and even sexually.
[23:31] All of this absolutely destroyed Gwen's mental health from a very
[23:37] very young age. She was self harming by the age
[23:39] of 12, and I believe she did this for multiple reasons of
[23:43] course, one of them being a coping mechanism.
[23:46] It is a very common coping mechanism to deal with such
[23:49] strong, horrific emotions. But also she was doing it to try
[23:54] to make herself look ugly so that her father wouldn't want to
[24:00] sexually abuse her anymore, which is one of the most
[24:03] heartbreaking things to hear. A 12 year old was thinking that
[24:09] if she could make herself look ugly and repulsive to her
[24:13] father, then maybe he wouldn't abuse her like that.
[24:15] But that's not how sexual abusers work really.
[24:19] It's it's not about attractiveness and desirability,
[24:23] It's more about the power. They just want to exert power
[24:27] over another human being and to them it doesn't really matter
[24:32] how their victim looks. It's the domination and control
[24:36] and being able to terrify and upset their victim.
[24:39] That's what they get off on. Her dad was a sick man, truly.
[24:44] Like he was horrific in every single way, even outside of the
[24:49] abuse of his family. He was just twisted in the
[24:53] things that he liked and the things that he wanted to do.
[24:57] Like, for example, they lived on a farm, like like I said, and he
[25:01] would always force Gwen to watch the animals get slaughtered just
[25:05] because. I think it again goes back to
[25:07] his wanting to toughen up his kids and not wanting to be too
[25:10] soft. Like he wanted them to witness
[25:13] death and fear and pain and blood because he thought it
[25:17] would be good for them. And that was bad enough in
[25:19] itself, having to watch their farm animals get killed.
[25:22] But it got even worse when their family dog that they'd had for
[25:26] over a decade became very sick. Now, this dog was like Gwen's
[25:31] best friend. She was very, very close with
[25:33] it. It used to sleep in her room,
[25:36] and so when she knew that it was getting sicker and sicker and
[25:40] probably needed putting down, she was so heartbroken and so
[25:44] torn up about it. She really didn't want them to
[25:46] kill the dog, but her father insisted that they needed to.
[25:50] It was time. So he gave Gwen's older brother
[25:54] a gun and made Gwen watch as her older brother shot her dog to
[26:00] death. And of course, Gwen was so
[26:02] disturbed and so upset witnessing this, but all her
[26:07] family did, especially her father, was just make fun of her
[26:11] for being upset, for being so emotional.
[26:14] And her father, like I said, a very, very sick man, decided to
[26:18] go one step further with this. And that night when Gwen was in
[26:23] bed, he stood outside her bedroom door and scratched at it
[26:27] and, like, whimpered the dog's name, all to try and tease her,
[26:32] terrify her, upset her, his own daughter.
[26:36] What what? What would possess a man to want
[26:39] to do that to his own child, to watch her in so much pain and
[26:43] distress? Now, I don't know at what point
[26:46] Gwen did this, but in the aftermath of her dog's death,
[26:50] she was struggling really, really badly with grief and just
[26:54] trying to process the whole thing.
[26:56] And it got to a point, I think just a couple of days after they
[26:59] buried the dog that she just couldn't deal with it.
[27:03] She just couldn't stand feeling like this anymore.
[27:06] And she knew she had to do something.
[27:08] And that's something she decided to do was go out to the dog's
[27:12] grave and dig it up, dig up her dog's dead body.
[27:17] Gwen ended up keeping the dog's skull and its teeth in a box for
[27:23] the rest of her life. She like carried that around
[27:26] from house to house that she had her first ever dog, which, you
[27:30] know, I think that's quite normal.
[27:32] People do have like ashes and stuff like that.
[27:35] But the part where she literally went out into the garden and dug
[27:40] up the remains of her dead dog, I don't want to be insensitive
[27:44] around this because people deal with grief in their own ways.
[27:48] And of course, she was young, she was a child and she didn't
[27:51] have proper support. But at the same time, you have
[27:54] to think to want to dig up a dead body that you know is not
[27:59] coming back. Like she knows she's not going
[28:01] to dig up that grave and her dogs going to jump out and, you
[28:04] know, be her dog again. She knows she's going to find a
[28:07] dead body in that grave. But I think to want to do that
[28:10] and to act on that, you have to question what's going on in a
[28:14] person's psychology. Gwen Graham was very passionate
[28:18] about animals. She always wanted to care for
[28:21] them. She even wanted to be a vet one
[28:23] day. That was like her dream job.
[28:24] Although that didn't end up happening because Gwen had to
[28:27] drop out of high school. I don't know entirely why, but
[28:31] she had to drop out of high school, meaning that she didn't
[28:33] really get any qualifications. A couple of years later, she did
[28:37] end up going somewhere to do some sort of high school
[28:41] equivalent course. And from there she went and
[28:44] joined a vocational course for nurses training.
[28:47] And you might think this is what led her to work in Alpine Manor,
[28:50] but it wasn't. She like started training as a
[28:52] nurse and dropped out with that too.
[28:54] Just want to remind you that she's also currently in Texas
[28:57] and Alpine Manor was all the way in Michigan.
[29:00] So yeah, the nurses training wasn't quite working out.
[29:02] I don't know if she was employed at this point in time, but I do
[29:05] know that it was around this time when Gwen was about 20
[29:09] years old that she met who would become her first proper
[29:14] relationship, An older woman named Fran, who was 28 years
[29:19] old, eight years her senior. I think the two of them were
[29:22] together for quite some time. They even moved in together in
[29:26] Texas. But it wasn't long until Fran
[29:29] decided that life in Texas wasn't really for her.
[29:33] There wasn't much for her there. She wasn't her happiest there
[29:36] and she wanted to move home to where her family lived in Grand
[29:40] Rapids, MI. She did offer for Gwen to come
[29:43] with her, like they could move together and they could restart
[29:46] their lives in Michigan together.
[29:48] But that was a big decision for Gwen to make.
[29:51] I mean, to leave everything behind.
[29:54] Absolutely everything. All the friends she'd ever made,
[29:57] all the relationships she'd ever like created, and even her
[30:01] family. This was quite a tough one for
[30:05] Gwen because of course she had horrific relationships with her
[30:08] family, but there was always a part of her that wanted to
[30:11] repair that and always hoped that they would somewhat repair
[30:16] at some point in her life. And I think moving to Michigan
[30:19] would be kind of admitting to herself that she was giving up
[30:23] on her family relationships. If she was to just move so far
[30:27] away and start a new life, how could she ever expect those
[30:30] familial relationships to repair?
[30:33] Not that I think they ever would.
[30:35] She thought on it for a little while, and I think she kind of
[30:38] realized that it it was fighting a losing game, it was never
[30:42] going to work. Her father was so incredibly
[30:44] cruel, and her mother just seemed very indifferent to how
[30:48] he would treat Gwen. It was kind of hopeless and so
[30:52] she decided to call it quits and moved to Grand Rapids with her
[30:56] girlfriend. There were also a few other
[30:58] reasons that made her want to move.
[31:01] She didn't have a very good career.
[31:04] I don't know what job she was in at the time, but it wasn't
[31:06] exactly a career. It was just a for the time being
[31:08] kind of job. And she felt quite lost in life.
[31:12] Did Gwen Graham And she felt that moving to Grand Rapids, she
[31:16] would have her older girlfriend and her family, you know, she
[31:20] would find like a bit of a family tree.
[31:22] Her girlfriend could help her to find a job in her hometown, and
[31:26] she could live with her girlfriend.
[31:28] Because at this point, actually, Fran had gone straight there,
[31:32] and she was waiting for Gwen to make her mind up at home.
[31:35] So Gwen was going to join her. So even better, Fran had already
[31:39] kind of established a life in Grand Rapids.
[31:42] She'd gotten an apartment if Gwen ever wanted to join her.
[31:45] Gwen knew that she was deeply, deeply unhappy at home, and Fran
[31:49] knew that too. And so when Gwen kind of came
[31:52] around to wanting to move, Fran was like, OK, I'm going to look
[31:56] for you some job opportunities here.
[31:58] Like she really wanted to help Gwen find her feet.
[32:01] And that was when they came across a nursing home called
[32:04] Alpine Manor, very close to where Fran lived.
[32:07] It was perfect because obviously Gwen had had an interest in a
[32:12] nursing career once before. She'd tried to join a course but
[32:15] dropped out. But still, it was something that
[32:17] she was interested in, something that she felt she would be good
[32:20] at. So with that, Gwen Graham picked
[32:22] up and left her life behind in Texas and moved to Grand Rapids,
[32:27] MI. But she very quickly felt like
[32:30] this was the wrong decision. As soon as she got there,
[32:34] everything felt wrong. The apartment that Fran had
[32:38] gotten was small and dark and a bit gross, like it wasn't a very
[32:43] nice place to live. And Fran herself seemed
[32:46] different. She seemed a bit more distant
[32:49] from Gwen. It it didn't feel like the same
[32:52] relationship that she'd had back in Texas.
[32:55] But one thing that was going well for Gwen was her new job at
[32:59] Alpine Manor. It was easy enough.
[33:03] I mean, she was put on the night shifts as well, which like I
[33:06] said, they, they're not as demanding.
[33:08] Most of it was just serving food to the residents and talking to
[33:12] them and making sure that they had their medication and it was
[33:15] easy breezy. She kind of enjoyed it and it
[33:18] would be good for her CV, good for like future jobs to have
[33:22] this kind of nursing experience. Her first day working at Alpine
[33:25] Manor was June 23rd, 1986, and Gwen Graham was an immediate hit
[33:31] with the existing staff. She was fun, she was kind, she
[33:35] was a lesbian, which was always going to bode well for her there
[33:39] since most of the other women that worked there were lesbians
[33:42] too. Which aside from the obvious
[33:44] like sexual tension or like, you know, people fancying each
[33:49] other, it's just kind of convenient to have your dating
[33:51] pool just right there. But other than that aspect of
[33:56] it, having such a strong LGBTQ workforce was just very
[34:02] comforting to all these women to have different people that
[34:05] understood them and had something in common with them,
[34:08] and they all related to each other on this level that no one
[34:11] else really could. Being a young lesbian woman and
[34:15] also just Grand Rapids in general wasn't a very LGBTQ
[34:19] friendly area in the 1980s. So yeah, it was very comforting
[34:24] to have such a community, a lot of people that you can trust and
[34:29] that understand you and will love and support you for who you
[34:33] are. That's so valuable, especially
[34:36] in the world work place. And like I said in the beginning
[34:38] of the video, they would all go out to the gay bars with each
[34:40] other after work. How convenient that like all
[34:43] your Co workers want to go to the same place as you.
[34:45] So when both of the women started at Alpine Manor, they
[34:49] were both in separate relationships.
[34:51] Kathy was still married to Ken and they had their daughter and
[34:55] Gwen was still with Fran. Even though it wasn't going
[34:59] great, it was probably on its way out but she was still with
[35:02] Fran. But as I'm sure you can imagine,
[35:05] neither of these relationships were going to last much longer.
[35:08] It was actually surprisingly Kathy's marriage that started to
[35:12] breakdown. Before Gwen and Frank, Kathy had
[35:16] actually started a little flirtationship at work with one
[35:20] of the other nurses aides named Dawn, and she hadn't left her
[35:24] husband or anything. This was just like a sneaky,
[35:27] cheeky little something that she shouldn't have been doing.
[35:30] And Kathy knew that she shouldn't be doing this.
[35:32] She shouldn't be having a relationship with Dawn, but she
[35:36] had gotten stuck in a marriage, in a in a relationship in a
[35:42] family unit that she didn't want to be in from a very young age.
[35:46] And as of lately, she had been having doubts about her
[35:51] sexuality. She didn't think she liked men
[35:55] really, but she hadn't had the opportunity to really explore
[35:58] that and realize that because, well, her first relationship
[36:01] with a girl, say for the sake of argument, that she knew that she
[36:07] was dating Debbie and that it was a lie.
[36:09] When she told her parents about after the reaction that she got
[36:12] from that first lesbian relationship, she was told that
[36:16] it was horrific and it was bad and she should be thrown in a in
[36:19] a psychiatric hospital. Horrible, horrible things.
[36:22] So her next relationship, no doubt she didn't want to repeat
[36:26] that. And so she gets with a man, Ken,
[36:29] and then all of a sudden she's pregnant, she's married, she's
[36:31] locked in, and she realizes, fuck, I never actually wanted
[36:35] any of this. I wanted a woman.
[36:38] So I think that's why this little flirtationship with Dawn
[36:42] started at work. And I'm not condoning it at all,
[36:46] not condoning cheating, but I think it makes a lot of sense if
[36:50] you look back at her dating history, that maybe she did just
[36:53] want to be with women all along. But I think, yeah, she did get
[36:57] stuck. And she was then realizing I
[37:01] would actually be a lot happier if I was with a woman, if I was
[37:04] living authentically to myself. And Kathy and Dawn had a nice
[37:08] time together. This was a fun little flirtation
[37:11] ship. But that was nothing compared to
[37:13] when Kathy would first meet Gwen Graham on one of their night
[37:17] shifts. It was like an instant click,
[37:21] instant chemistry between these two women.
[37:23] They got on like a house on fire, which is quite an accurate
[37:27] metaphor, actually, considering the total destruction and terror
[37:31] that came as a byproduct of their relationship.
[37:34] The two women immediately became inseparable.
[37:37] They would spend their whole entire shift talking and
[37:40] flirting. They would spend their break
[37:42] times together. They would eat together in the
[37:44] canteen. They would even start hanging
[37:46] out afterwards, work together, and on the weekends together.
[37:49] Seriously, these two women were never apart.
[37:52] Then, after just three weeks of knowing each other, Gwen and
[37:56] Kathy decided to move in together.
[37:58] They were going to get an apartment and move in just as
[38:01] friends though. Or at least that's what they
[38:03] told everyone. I mean, a lot of this case is
[38:06] just like what these women have told people, but you soon find
[38:10] out that they're both compulsive liars.
[38:12] So it's like, what is the truth in this case anyway?
[38:16] They move in together after three weeks of being friends and
[38:19] they tell everyone that like they're just roommates.
[38:21] You know, they're just two Co workers living together.
[38:26] I don't think it was ever that. I think the two of them
[38:29] immediately started a little bit of something that they shouldn't
[38:32] and they both kind of left their partners in a very messy way.
[38:35] They moved out from their partners before they actually
[38:38] broke things off. I think Gwen had a bit more of
[38:40] an excuse to be able to do it with Fran because Fran's
[38:43] apartment was very small and like I said, a bit gross.
[38:46] So I think she was like, look, I'm going to move in with one of
[38:48] my friends. I don't know how you bring that
[38:51] up to your husband, but like, oh, honey, I'm going to move out
[38:55] of our family home with our that we have with our daughter.
[38:59] And I'm going to move in with this last that I met at work
[39:01] three-week ago. I don't really know how that
[39:03] must have gone down in their marriage, but it did.
[39:06] Although it wasn't long after they they moved into this
[39:10] apartment together that they did decide to break things off with
[39:12] their previous partners. And remember, there's three
[39:15] partners for them to break up with as well, not just the 2.
[39:18] So Gwen broke up with Fran, and I think they kind of saw that
[39:22] one come in. Like I said, Fran even hadn't
[39:25] been the same since Gwen moved to Michigan to meet her.
[39:29] So I think that was quite an easy breakup.
[39:31] But Kathy had to divorce her husband and they had to go
[39:36] through all the court proceedings and everything.
[39:38] He got custody of their daughter.
[39:40] Like that was messy. And Kathy also had to break up
[39:44] with this woman that she'd been seeing at work to then start
[39:48] seeing another woman from work. So I imagine that was quite
[39:51] awkward, her breaking up with Dawn, you know, the woman that
[39:54] she'd been like in a little flirtationship with.
[39:56] I keep saying flirtationship, but I don't, I really don't know
[40:00] how deep that went. They could have been full on
[40:02] affair sleeping together, or it could have just been like a, a
[40:05] work wife. I don't know.
[40:06] But the point is now there are three broken hearts, 2
[40:11] households ripped apart. But now Gwen and Kathy are in a
[40:16] full-fledged relationship together.
[40:18] They're living together, they're working together, they're going
[40:21] out and partying in the evenings together.
[40:23] They are totally inseparable and also totally and utterly toxic
[40:28] for each other. They enabled and encouraged
[40:32] really bad self-destructive behaviours in each other, like
[40:36] drinking so much every night that they would black out
[40:39] regular occurrence, or if they didn't drink enough that they
[40:42] were like passing out and like forgetting gaps of the night.
[40:46] They were getting drunk and fighting each other.
[40:49] They would get into absolutely catastrophic arguments which
[40:53] would then turn physical. They would physically fight each
[40:56] other and when it wasn't a physical fight, it was screaming
[41:01] at each other, manipulating each other, threatening each other,
[41:05] absolute mental torture. The two of them would self harm
[41:10] in front of each other and it was just so tumultuous in so
[41:16] many different ways. It was such an intensely
[41:18] volatile relationship and they made no effort to hide this from
[41:22] anyone around them. Like they were toxic behind
[41:25] closed doors and they were toxic in front of Co workers, in front
[41:28] of friends, in front of anyone they didn't care who saw.
[41:31] To be honest, they weren't as bad when they were in work.
[41:35] It was more so like when they'd be drinking, but then they would
[41:39] just like turn up the next day at work completely right as rain
[41:42] and they'd be flirting with each other again and they'd like as
[41:45] if nothing had just happened the night before.
[41:48] This was that regular of an occurrence that they would get
[41:50] over such destructive fights that would break up most
[41:54] relationships just like that because they knew that they
[41:57] could, because this happens all the time.
[41:59] And then we're fine again. Like it's fine.
[42:00] But what was so intoxicating to Gwen and Kathy, the thing that
[42:04] kept them together through such a tumultuous relationship, and
[42:08] such is the case with a lot of abusive relationships, was all
[42:12] of these really intense high highs that would almost make
[42:16] them forget about those really low lows.
[42:20] The highs of their relationship being this like cheeky little
[42:25] workplace romance, the adrenaline that comes with that,
[42:28] the butterflies, the newness of this relationship, especially
[42:32] for Kathy, who hadn't been with a woman in years and years and
[42:35] years since her first ever relationship.
[42:37] Because she was locked in a marriage that she didn't want.
[42:42] So this was all so new and so exciting and they were so Co
[42:47] dependent on each other, spending so much time with each
[42:50] other. Their emotions completely
[42:52] depended on each other. So when they were in good moods
[42:54] and when they were like out drinking and having a great
[42:57] time, they were having an amazing time.
[42:59] But then they would come home from those amazing nights and
[43:02] have physical fights and manipulate each other and end up
[43:08] self harming. And it was such an intense
[43:11] roller coaster throughout this whole relationship on a daily
[43:15] basis. And another thing that these
[43:17] women really, really bonded over, which again, I think is a
[43:21] big factor as to why they stayed together through all of this,
[43:24] was that they both had such intense trauma in their past
[43:29] that they could both relate to each other and they could both
[43:32] talk it out together. And other people didn't quite
[43:35] understand them on that level. They'd never found anyone who
[43:38] had been through something quite as horrific as they had.
[43:41] And this was the first time, other than their own siblings,
[43:44] that they could find someone that could relate and that could
[43:47] comfort them. This connection between them
[43:50] made their relationship feel unlike anything they had ever
[43:54] felt before, because they couldn't get on to such a deep
[43:57] level with anyone before this. So that was the kind of
[44:00] relationship that they had. It was comforting in a way, but
[44:05] it was tearing them apart more than anything.
[44:08] So the dynamic of this relationship, Kathy was the more
[44:12] sensible, calm, down to earth, grounded one.
[44:16] She liked to make the decisions. She liked to be in control.
[44:20] I think some of this comes from the fact that she'd had a very
[44:23] settled life anyway before she met Gwen.
[44:26] I mean, she'd been a wife, she'd been married, she'd been a
[44:29] mother. She.
[44:31] Yeah, she'd had like a really settled down family life.
[44:34] Gwen, on the other hand, as we mentioned, was very lost before
[44:38] Alpine Manor. She didn't have a career.
[44:40] She had just left her hometown and the family that she never
[44:45] really got on with. She moved to Grand Rapids and
[44:47] suddenly her girlfriends being off the apartment is a bit grim,
[44:53] like she's just very lost in life.
[44:55] She doesn't know where she's going.
[44:56] She doesn't know what she wants to do, She doesn't know how to
[44:59] get there. And she needs a grounding force
[45:02] like Kathy. And Kathy wanted to be that for
[45:05] Gwen. As long as Gwen dirted on her
[45:08] and adored her, she was happy if she got to make all the
[45:11] decisions, you know? Gwen really needed that constant
[45:15] attention and reassurance and direction from her partner and
[45:19] Kathy could provide that for her.
[45:21] Their relationship was obviously very very unhealthy and everyone
[45:25] around them knew that as well because like I said, they made
[45:28] no effort to hide it. Throughout their relationship
[45:31] together, the two of them seemed to just get worse and worse
[45:35] mental health wise but also just as human beings.
[45:39] They were outwardly changing for the worst like their
[45:42] personalities and everything about them was just becoming
[45:45] very unpleasant. For example, they started
[45:47] pulling pranks on other staff at Alpine Manor and even different
[45:52] residents, literally the elderly, disabled, vulnerable
[45:56] people that they are paid to look after.
[46:00] They started pulling pranks on them.
[46:02] For example, they would take the residents like sneak them into
[46:06] another room and not tell any of these other staff.
[46:09] So they were essentially like hiding the patients and having
[46:12] other staff running around panicked looking for them.
[46:15] Meanwhile, these patients, obviously we don't really know
[46:18] what was going through their heads and what they were
[46:20] thinking, but I'm guessing a lot of them didn't even realise what
[46:24] was going on, didn't even realise that they were part of a
[46:26] prank. I don't know.
[46:27] When you're a patient somewhere and you trust everyone around
[46:31] you to take care of you, I think you would probably just assume
[46:35] that they were doing it for some good reason.
[46:37] They were taking you from 1:00 them to another for a reason,
[46:40] not for a prank, not just to worry their Co workers about the
[46:45] safety of their patients. But one of the most heartless
[46:48] things about these pranks is that these residents that were
[46:51] then, you know, taken to another room and no one was told about
[46:54] it. They were missing out on care
[46:57] for like whole chunks of time, like an hour or two until the
[47:00] rest of the staff found them. They weren't getting medication,
[47:03] they weren't getting water, food, anything, social time,
[47:07] absolutely nothing. They were just locked in another
[47:11] room, which I think is so sick that you would want to do that
[47:14] to vulnerable people. There's nothing pranky about it
[47:18] when a vulnerable person is being abused like this.
[47:21] It's literally just sadistic. It's not like you're hiding your
[47:25] Co workers stapler, putting your Co workers stapler in some
[47:29] Jelly. Like, I don't know, there's
[47:31] nothing cranky about this to me. It just makes me feel so upset
[47:34] to know that these people were just being locked in another
[47:38] room, taken away from from where they felt comfortable and safe,
[47:42] and just locked somewhere else until they were found.
[47:44] All of Kathy and Gwen's, like, friends and family look back on
[47:48] this time that they were working at Alpine Manor in 1987.
[47:52] And in retrospect, they realized that the two women were saying a
[47:56] lot of weird and suspicious shit around that time, but they just
[48:01] hadn't quite clocked on things. Like, no one would believe what
[48:05] we're doing at work and stuff like that.
[48:07] I don't know. They would keep it, like,
[48:09] secretive and make it sound like they were up to something.
[48:13] And at the time, people just thought like, oh, they're doing
[48:17] something behind their boss's back or like, I don't know,
[48:20] something about their relationship.
[48:21] I don't know. But no one actually assumed that
[48:24] it was something dark, something sinister.
[48:28] They wouldn't often be questioned about these things
[48:31] that they were saying about work.
[48:32] Like no one would believe what they're doing.
[48:34] No one really questioned them about it because they just came
[48:37] up with their own things in their head.
[48:38] But there was one time that Kathy was questioned on why,
[48:42] what are you getting up to at work?
[48:44] And she told this person not nothing that we would get in
[48:47] trouble for. But that wasn't exactly true,
[48:50] was it? And very soon they would be
[48:53] getting in trouble for what they were doing behind closed doors
[48:56] at Alpine Manor. The truth was exposed a year
[49:05] later in 1988, and the one to do it was actually Kathy's
[49:10] ex-husband Ken Wood. They'd been split up for over a
[49:13] year now, but they were actually still in touch a little bit.
[49:16] By this point in 1988, Kathy and Gwen's whirlwind romance had
[49:21] actually burnt out, and it burnt out in a very dramatic way.
[49:25] Maybe burnt out isn't even the word to use because the way that
[49:28] this ended, Kathy caught Gwen cheating on her with another
[49:33] nurse's aid from Alpine Manor. She was being unfaithful behind
[49:38] her back, but right in front of her face.
[49:40] Like imagine trying to cheat on your partner that you work with
[49:44] with someone else from work. Like, of course it was always
[49:48] going to blow up and it was going to be this huge dramatic
[49:51] thing. And this came as quite a shock
[49:53] to, well, Kathy at least. But I think quite a lot of
[49:56] people at work, because Kathy and Gwen had been a very public
[50:02] couple, like they would be PDA ING all over that nursing home.
[50:08] So everyone that worked there, all the residents, absolutely
[50:11] everyone knew that Kathy and Gwen were a couple.
[50:13] They made no efforts to hide it. In fact, they would rub it in
[50:17] everyone's faces. So the fact that Gwen had
[50:20] managed to cheat with someone from that also worked there that
[50:24] probably knew she was in a relationship is crazy.
[50:27] When Kathy found out about the infidelity, she was absolutely
[50:31] broken. In fact, it sent her spiraling.
[50:34] Her whole world was shattered completely because she had grown
[50:38] such an intense bond with this woman over the last year.
[50:42] She'd cut off her whole life, her whole past up until that
[50:46] point for this woman, and now all of that was gone.
[50:50] They lived together, they worked together, they partied together,
[50:53] They had the same friend group. Literally every single aspect of
[50:57] their lives was linked, and I can't imagine how painful that
[51:01] must be to sever all of those links so suddenly as well, to
[51:05] find out in such a horrific way. Following the breakup, Kathy
[51:09] didn't really have anyone else in her life.
[51:11] And I believe This is why her and Ken kind of stayed in
[51:15] contact a little bit because he was her whole entire life.
[51:19] She'd cut off all her family and moved away with him and their
[51:21] daughter. And yeah, and then she left them
[51:25] for this woman. So these are kind of the only
[51:27] people that she's got in her life.
[51:29] Kathy found herself with no one else to confide in pretty much
[51:33] in the whole entire world other than her ex-husband Ken.
[51:36] Which is a very strange set of circumstances to find yourself
[51:39] in. Like imagine cheating on your
[51:42] husband with a woman and then leaving him with with your
[51:46] daughter. Just abandoning your whole
[51:48] family for this woman and then when she cheats on you, you find
[51:51] yourself crawling back to your ex-husband just for someone to
[51:56] talk to. I mean, it serves her right.
[51:58] It really does. And it wasn't even like she was
[52:00] crawling back to him because she wanted to get back with him and
[52:02] like she'd realized she'd made a mistake.
[52:04] It was literally just because she had no one else to talk to.
[52:08] She had no one, she had no friends, nothing.
[52:10] She needed a shoulder to cry on. So she was going back to her
[52:13] ex-husband to cry about the woman that she cheated with.
[52:16] He's a better man than I Truly, if my ex came back to me in this
[52:20] set of circumstances, I would not be be willing to hear them
[52:23] out. Let's just say that.
[52:24] But anyway, Ken sits Kathy down and he gives her a shoulder to
[52:28] cry on and she tells him everything.
[52:31] And when I say everything, I mean absolutely everything that
[52:35] she'd never told anyone else before and Gwen had never told
[52:39] anyone else before, including the the true horrors of their
[52:44] relationship and what was going on behind those doors of Alpine
[52:47] Manor. So now I'm going to tell you
[52:50] everything that had been happening for the past year that
[52:54] somehow no one else knew about. Kathy said that when she first
[52:58] met Gwen at work, the two of them instantly fell head over
[53:02] heels in love. It was like this obsessive love,
[53:05] sick love at first sight kind of connection.
[53:08] I mean, I'm sorry to interrupt again, but imagine being her
[53:11] ex-husband hearing this. I would never be the same again
[53:15] if my ex came crawling back to me and she was like, yeah, you
[53:18] know, the one that I cheated on you with.
[53:19] It was just love at first sight. Oh my God.
[53:22] Anyway, continuing on actually before I continue on though,
[53:26] because I'm not going to keep interrupting myself, I just want
[53:29] you to remember all throughout this story that she was telling
[53:32] her ex-husband this. They go into detail about her
[53:35] sex life with Gwen and everything.
[53:38] I just, I just want you to just keep in mind who the original
[53:41] audience of all of this information was.
[53:44] So anyway back to the story. Kathy says that she and Gwen
[53:47] immediately start a sexual relationship, a BDSM sexual
[53:52] relationship. Kathy said that she was the
[53:54] submissive partner she always pretended to be like naive and
[53:58] weak whenever she was around Gwen who liked to dominate her
[54:02] partners. Kathy told her ex-husband that
[54:05] their BDSM relationship started off very normal and enjoyable.
[54:10] That was until Kathy just started getting more and more
[54:14] aggressive, more and more violent, and she'd started
[54:18] genuinely scaring Kathy, genuinely hurting her as well.
[54:22] Like this was going beyond the boundaries of a consensual BDSM
[54:27] relationship. Kathy even told Ken about this
[54:29] one time where Gwen had tied her to the bed and grabbed a gun and
[54:34] inserted it inside her and was acting as though she was going
[54:39] to shoot it. Kathy said that she was very
[54:41] fearful of her own girlfriend a lot of the time, but she would
[54:45] consent to all these crazy things that Gwen wanted to try
[54:49] with her just to keep Gwen happy because she was actually worried
[54:54] about when she got aggressive and when she got violent and
[54:57] when she got scary. Kathy thought it was just better
[55:00] to go along with anything that Gwen wanted.
[55:02] I just want to put a side note in here that that is not
[55:05] consent. Even though Kathy thought that
[55:07] she was consenting to things, consenting under duress is not
[55:12] consent. That is, that is duress that is
[55:14] being forced into things that you don't want to do.
[55:17] But Kathy would make it look like consent to Gwen so that
[55:21] Gwen wouldn't get angry. Kathy said that she and Gwen
[55:24] really, really bonded quite early on in their relationship
[55:28] over their trauma. They both had very similar
[55:31] childhood and familial trauma that they could both talk about
[55:35] and and relate to. They were both very, very
[55:38] mentally ill and had been since they were both children, mainly
[55:42] because of being abused as children.
[55:45] And so now as adults when they met each other, the two of them
[55:48] would talk and fantasize about what it would be like to get
[55:52] revenge on their abusers. And it was then that the topic
[55:57] of killing people was first brought up by Gwen.
[56:01] She was just saying I wonder what it would feel like to kill
[56:05] someone. Over time, this topic came up
[56:08] more and more, and Gwen would get more and more into it, more
[56:12] and more excited, until it was clear that it was no longer a
[56:15] fantasy and it was becoming a plan, an actual plan to commit
[56:21] murder. But the more that they talked
[56:23] about it, the more it strayed from the original plan or the
[56:27] original idea, which would be to get revenge on their abusers and
[56:30] to kill their abusers. Now it was just a conversation
[56:34] about murder in general. What would it feel like to
[56:37] commit murder? What would it feel like to hurt
[56:39] someone, to take a life? Kathy claims that she didn't
[56:43] fully believe Gwen. She thought that this was all
[56:45] just some sort of twisted fantasy, some like weird
[56:49] deprived interest that she had that she felt comfortable
[56:53] telling Kathy about South. Kathy didn't think it was
[56:56] anything too serious until Gwen did the unthinkable on January
[57:01] 18th, 1987. One of their residents at Alpine
[57:05] Manor was a 60 year old woman named Marguerite Chambers.
[57:09] She'd had Alzheimer's for 12 years at this point, and for the
[57:13] last five years she'd needed constant live in care to be able
[57:18] to meet her basic needs. So for that reason, she'd been
[57:22] at Alpine Manor for five years. She had a great relationship
[57:25] with all the staff, all the other residents.
[57:28] She was quite popular there. I mean, she'd been there for
[57:32] half A and she was very comfortable and very happy and
[57:35] her family were very happy with the care that she'd been
[57:38] receiving for the last five years before the Alzheimer's had
[57:42] taken over her. Marguerite was a very bubbly,
[57:46] outgoing, fun loving kind of gal.
[57:49] She was like the life of the party.
[57:51] And so for that reason, she really loved the social side of
[57:55] living at Alpine Manor. She just suddenly had like loads
[57:58] of mates, loads of roommates. Marguerite had been very
[58:01] adventure throughout her life. She was a dancer, she loved
[58:06] water skiing. She had a beautiful big family
[58:09] with her husband that she was still with.
[58:11] Actually, he used to come and visit her at Alpine Manor.
[58:14] They'd been together for decades, and on that day,
[58:18] January 18th, her husband came down to Alpine Manor to see her,
[58:22] as he did pretty much every single day, but this time he
[58:27] didn't know it was going to be the last.
[58:29] They sat and talked for about an hour, caught up, and then he
[58:33] gave her a kiss and said goodbye and went to return home for the
[58:37] evening. There was no reason for either
[58:39] of them to think that this could ever be their last encounter
[58:43] together, because even though Marguerite was in assisted
[58:46] living and she needed all this help from Alpine Manor, she was
[58:51] in a relatively good way. Her health hadn't like sharply
[58:54] declined or any anything like that.
[58:56] There were no warning signs that she could just drop dead
[59:02] overnight. So as Kathy is telling this
[59:04] story to her ex-husband Ken, she said that after Marguerite's
[59:10] husband had left for the night, Gwen suddenly started acting
[59:14] weird. Despite that, they continued to
[59:16] do their job as normal. They gave all the residents
[59:19] their medication, they gave them dinner, helped them to wash and
[59:23] get ready for bed, put them all to bed as usual.
[59:27] Everything went normally and it was then when Alpine Manor was
[59:31] quiet and peaceful that Gwen grabbed Kathy's arm and LED her
[59:37] to the doorway of Marguerite Chambers bedroom.
[59:39] Gwen told her to stand guard outside the bedroom door, she
[59:43] needed to watch and if anyone started approaching she needed
[59:46] to alert Gwen. So Kathy just kind of stood
[59:49] there and did as she was told. As Gwen walked inside the
[59:53] bedroom and approached her sleeping victim in bed.
[59:57] She lifted a damp cloth that she'd been holding this entire
[1:00:01] time, and she smothered Marguerite's nose and mouth with
[1:00:07] this cloth. Of course, Marguerite tried to
[1:00:09] fight back a little bit. This will have been very
[1:00:11] confusing for her. I mean, she was in asleep and
[1:00:15] then suddenly she's got something covering all of her
[1:00:17] breathing holes. She starts to kind of fight
[1:00:20] back. But like I said, she was a 60
[1:00:22] year old woman that needed constant care.
[1:00:25] She didn't fight back all that much, and Gwen just kept that
[1:00:30] facecloth in place until Marguerite fell limp.
[1:00:35] And just like that, Gwen Graham had murdered someone, just as
[1:00:39] she'd been talking about for so long, and now it was real.
[1:00:43] It was. It was that quick, it was that
[1:00:46] easy. Gwen had specifically chosen
[1:00:48] Marguerite as a victim because she knew that she was physically
[1:00:52] weak and that she wouldn't try to fight back, and it wouldn't
[1:00:55] be hard to overpower her. Kathy said that when Gwen was
[1:01:00] finished, she took a step back and just looked at Marguerite's
[1:01:05] dead body on the bed, almost as if she was admiring her work, as
[1:01:10] if she wanted to absorb everything that had just
[1:01:13] happened. She wanted to remember this
[1:01:14] mental image. She then walked over to Kathy,
[1:01:18] grabbed her arm once again as she had leading her to the
[1:01:21] bedroom, and she LED her back to whatever they were working on
[1:01:25] before they committed murder, and they just carried on their
[1:01:28] shift as if nothing had just happened.
[1:01:31] They were going to wait for someone else to find the dead
[1:01:35] body, and less than an hour later, when another one of the
[1:01:38] nurse's aides went in to go and check on Marguerite, they
[1:01:42] discovered her dead. It was just going to be a
[1:01:44] regular check. This other nurse's aide that
[1:01:46] hasn't been named just went in and immediately, as soon as she
[1:01:51] walked in the room, she knew that something was wrong.
[1:01:53] Marguerite looked pale. She didn't look like Marguerite.
[1:01:58] And so the nurse went over and as she touched her hand, she
[1:02:02] realized that Marguerite was completely cold.
[1:02:05] And at that point she realized she was unresponsive.
[1:02:09] And as soon as they checked her vital signs, they realized she
[1:02:12] was dead. Everyone at Alpine Manor was
[1:02:15] shocked and devastated to hear the news of Marguerite's
[1:02:19] passing. Like I said, she'd been there
[1:02:20] for so long. She was everyone's close friend,
[1:02:24] and it was so unexpected. I mean, even though she had had
[1:02:27] Alzheimer's for 12 years and it had been pretty bad for five of
[1:02:30] them, she was in a relatively stable condition.
[1:02:34] Like I'd said before, there were no warning signs that her time
[1:02:38] was nearing an end. But even though there were no
[1:02:41] immediate warning signs, they'd all kind of known that this day
[1:02:45] was coming. They'd all known to expect the
[1:02:48] day that Marguerite was going to pass away.
[1:02:50] Because I mean, that's why she was at Alpine Manor, because her
[1:02:53] health was just deteriorating and at this point she needed end
[1:02:58] of life care. And while they hadn't expected
[1:03:00] her to die so quickly, they had known that one day they were
[1:03:05] going to walk into Marguerite Chambers bedroom and find her
[1:03:08] dead. They just hadn't expected it to
[1:03:11] be now. So when she was found dead,
[1:03:14] there was not much questioning what happened.
[1:03:16] I mean, she was a very poorly lady and she had been for a long
[1:03:19] time. It seemed obvious that her cause
[1:03:23] of death will have just been something to do with her
[1:03:25] Alzheimer's. Her body was transported to a
[1:03:28] morgue and her death certificate was signed the next day.
[1:03:31] They didn't see there to be much point in doing an autopsy
[1:03:35] because like I said, the cause of death seemed obvious and so
[1:03:40] it was just recorded as natural causes.
[1:03:42] Kathy and Gwen had acted just as shocked and devastated and
[1:03:47] tearful as all of the other staff at Alpine Manor that
[1:03:51] night. And actually in the aftermath of
[1:03:52] the murder, the two of them took two days off of work.
[1:03:55] I believe they said it was to to grieve and to to pull themselves
[1:04:00] back together. But for the next two days, Kathy
[1:04:03] and Gwen spent the whole thing just drinking, doing drugs,
[1:04:07] having sex, holed up in their apartment.
[1:04:11] Like they barely left their apartment unless it was to go to
[1:04:13] the bar and drink more or to go out and buy drugs or whatever.
[1:04:17] But the whole time they were just like locked in their
[1:04:19] apartment having some kind of hedonistic Bender.
[1:04:23] And obviously part of this Bender was having their very
[1:04:27] dangerous non consensual BDSM sex that Kathy she was still
[1:04:32] very much uncomfortable with. But her scariest encounter was
[1:04:36] still yet to come. Well, actually it came in the
[1:04:39] middle of this Bender when Gwen seemed to want to relive the
[1:04:44] exhilaration that she had felt the night that she murdered
[1:04:48] Marguerite Chambers. As the two of them were having
[1:04:50] sex, Gwen grabbed a damp cloth and smothered Kathy's nose and
[1:04:56] mouth with it until she passed out.
[1:04:59] Marguerite Chambers was the first victim of the lethal
[1:05:02] lovers, but she was nowhere near the last.
[1:05:05] Kathy went on to tell her ex-husband Ken that they had
[1:05:09] gone through with this four more times after that and it was
[1:05:13] almost an exact repeat of the first process.
[1:05:17] It was like a copy and paste guide to murder.
[1:05:19] And she said that the two of them even decided to make it a
[1:05:22] little game right here in the beginning.
[1:05:24] After they killed their first victim, they knew that they were
[1:05:27] going to kill more and so they decided to make a game of it to
[1:05:30] try and spell out the word murder using their victim's
[1:05:35] first initials. So their first victim was
[1:05:37] Marguerite M, their next would have to be a UMU and they never
[1:05:43] actually got there. So this game ended after one
[1:05:47] letter because U is quite a unique first initial I think.
[1:05:53] And remember they're picking from people in Alpine Manor so
[1:05:57] it's quite a small sample pool. Basically, they decided to break
[1:06:01] this pattern after the first victim and instead just go for
[1:06:05] any victim that they thought would be an easy kill.
[1:06:09] But before we continue talking about victims of the lethal
[1:06:12] lovers, I want to just focus on how stupid that was, how stupid
[1:06:16] these women were. They hadn't even made-up this
[1:06:18] game in time for their first victim.
[1:06:20] They killed their first victim and then they were like oh okay
[1:06:23] let's make this a game and then never even never even followed
[1:06:26] through on that. So they never actually
[1:06:28] intentionally killed anyone with this game in mind.
[1:06:31] They made it up and then cancelled it before they even
[1:06:35] got to their second victim. So anyway, the next Alpine Manor
[1:06:38] resident to be found dead was a woman named Myrtle Luce who was
[1:06:41] just days away from her 96th birthday.
[1:06:44] And like I said, each murder was pretty much a copy and paste of
[1:06:48] the last, so everything happened exactly the same, apart from
[1:06:53] when Gwen was finished smothering Myrtle, she actually
[1:06:57] left that damp washcloth on the side in her bedroom so that the
[1:07:01] murder weapon could just be in plain sight when the body was
[1:07:06] found. And who was ever going to know
[1:07:08] it was a murder weapon? It was just a washcloth between
[1:07:11] each murder that they would commit.
[1:07:13] Kathy and Gwen would have these offenders of sex and drugs and
[1:07:18] drink in their apartment, and they would discuss the killings
[1:07:22] in great detail. And they really felt like the
[1:07:25] murders that they were committing together were bonding
[1:07:29] them somehow. They were bringing them closer
[1:07:31] together. They were now sharing a
[1:07:33] connection that neither of them had with anyone else because
[1:07:37] they'd never committed murder, a crime as horrific as double
[1:07:41] murder now with anyone else. So they had this kind of
[1:07:45] connection that that they'd never felt before.
[1:07:48] The two of them wanted to be bound for life in this
[1:07:51] relationship. They wanted a connection between
[1:07:55] them, a link between them for the rest of forever that no one
[1:07:59] else could ever replicate. And they felt like sharing this
[1:08:05] life ruining secret of being murderers together gave them a
[1:08:11] type of insurance in their relationship that would bind
[1:08:15] them better than any kind of relationship title, any kind of
[1:08:19] marriage, any children ever could.
[1:08:21] They were both keeping this secret to save each other's
[1:08:26] lives. Essentially, if either of them
[1:08:28] was to give over this secret to anyone, both of their lives
[1:08:32] would be over. They would both be in prison for
[1:08:34] the rest of their lives. So yeah, sharing this secret
[1:08:37] together did, in a way, bring them closer than they've ever
[1:08:41] been before, but in the most horrific of ways.
[1:08:44] Because even if they were to ever split up and, you know,
[1:08:48] break up and move on with their lives, they would still be
[1:08:51] connected by the worst thing they had ever done in their
[1:08:56] whole lives. Both of their freedom depended
[1:08:59] on both of them keeping this secret.
[1:09:02] And that would always be something that the two of them
[1:09:05] would share. Just them too.
[1:09:07] And to them, that was incredibly romantic in some kind of twisted
[1:09:12] way, that they would always have this invisible link of murder
[1:09:17] for the rest of their lives. And I also think there was an
[1:09:19] element of control in this major secret keeping.
[1:09:24] I think definitely on Gwen's part because she seemed to be
[1:09:28] the instigator of a lot of the dark elements of their
[1:09:32] relationship. Think the non consensual BDSM.
[1:09:36] And when she was talking about I wonder what it would feel like
[1:09:39] to kill someone and then that eventually LED into this.
[1:09:41] I mean, I think Gwen liked to have a lot of control.
[1:09:44] She wanted to feel like Kathy would do anything for her,
[1:09:48] including keeping the worst secret that either of them have
[1:09:52] ever had to keep. The Lethal Lovers third kill in
[1:09:55] three weeks was a 79 year old woman named Mae Mason.
[1:09:59] Between the regular scheduled nighttime checks, Kathy stood
[1:10:03] guard at the door while Gwen snuck into Mae's bedroom and
[1:10:08] smothered her with a washcloth. Again, her death was attributed
[1:10:11] to natural causes. They actually believed this one
[1:10:13] to be a heart attack. And, you know, no one ever
[1:10:16] questioned these natural causes deaths because it it was a
[1:10:21] residential home full of elderly and vulnerable people that were
[1:10:25] nearing the end of their lives or they were very, very ill with
[1:10:29] different ailments. And everyone kind of knew that
[1:10:33] their deaths were coming. So when they did eventually
[1:10:36] come, no one really questioned it.
[1:10:38] No one demanded autopsies, no one thought anything to be
[1:10:42] suspicious. The very next day after Mayor
[1:10:45] Mason died, her death certificate was signed.
[1:10:48] It was natural causes and her body was cremated straight away.
[1:10:53] So all the evidence relating to that murder was gone.
[1:10:56] Kathy said that the lethal lovers actually had a little bit
[1:10:59] of a tradition that they started doing after every murder and
[1:11:03] they would they would add to it after every murder as well.
[1:11:07] She said that to each other they would say I love you forever and
[1:11:10] a day and after every murder that they committed they would
[1:11:14] add on another day. So I love you forever and two
[1:11:17] days forever and three days until they got up to forever and
[1:11:21] five days. The 4th murder was of a 74 year
[1:11:24] old woman named Belle Burkhardt. And Belle, in the weeks running
[1:11:29] up to her murder, she had had a couple of medical issues.
[1:11:34] I don't know the specifics, but it was for that exact reason
[1:11:37] that Kathy and Gwen thought she would be the perfect victim
[1:11:41] because no one would really question her passing.
[1:11:44] She'd had dementia for years and she'd been having regular
[1:11:47] seizures for years as well, but it was over the last few months
[1:11:51] that her health seemed to be deteriorating.
[1:11:53] She was having all these other issues and that was actually why
[1:11:56] she was moved to Alpine Manor, because her family knew that
[1:11:59] they couldn't look after her, but they trusted Alpine Manor
[1:12:03] and all of their nurses to be able to do that.
[1:12:06] Belle was found dead by one of the nurses aides in the early
[1:12:09] hours of the morning on February 26th, 1987.
[1:12:13] Again, no suspicions were raised at all.
[1:12:16] Her death was filed as natural causes and their 5th and final
[1:12:21] murder took place on April 7th when the Lethal lovers murdered
[1:12:25] the oldest resident of Alpine Manor and honestly one of the
[1:12:30] most popular. Edith Cook was 97 years old at
[1:12:34] the time and she had been at Alpine Manor for quite a while.
[1:12:37] She had been a poorly woman for a good amount of years, but that
[1:12:41] being said, she was one of the most brightest, smiliest,
[1:12:45] happiest, most energetic residents at the hall of Alpine
[1:12:49] Manor. Despite her age, I mean 97, and
[1:12:53] despite her illnesses and despite how her health had been
[1:12:58] gradually declining over the years.
[1:13:00] None of that ever changed her personality, and everyone at
[1:13:03] Alpine Manor, staff and residents alike, adored Edith.
[1:13:08] At the time of her death, Edith was relatively, you know, like
[1:13:12] alert and well, but that being said, she was 97 and her health
[1:13:17] had been declining over the years, so Gwen and Kathy knew
[1:13:20] that her death wouldn't really be questioned.
[1:13:23] They carried out the murder pretty much the exact same as
[1:13:26] they'd carried out the other 4, but at the very end, when the
[1:13:29] two of them would usually just like run off back to work and
[1:13:32] carry on with whatever they were doing beforehand and just kind
[1:13:35] of lay low until someone else found the body, they decided to
[1:13:38] not do it like that this time. In fact, it was Kathy Wood
[1:13:41] herself that ran to her superiors and said that she had
[1:13:45] just found Edith dead in her bedroom.
[1:13:48] All the nurses rushed into the bedroom and declared her dead
[1:13:52] when they couldn't find her pulse, and at this point her
[1:13:55] body was still warm. Kathy Wood had literally ran
[1:13:59] right from the murder taking place to go and report it and
[1:14:02] this was the first time the lethal lovers had ever self
[1:14:06] reported their crimes. But as with all the others, no
[1:14:09] one really suspected anything, and Edith's death was ruled as
[1:14:13] natural causes, just like the last four murder victims deaths
[1:14:18] had. After committing their 5th
[1:14:26] murder, Kathy and Gwen went and had sex, I believe, in Alpine
[1:14:31] Manor. And apparently this was
[1:14:34] something that they did after every murder, which is so
[1:14:37] disturbing. But that's like one of the first
[1:14:39] things on your mind when you've just committed murder.
[1:14:43] And it just, it really tells you a lot about like their thought
[1:14:47] process behind all of this and the satisfaction that they're
[1:14:50] getting out of this and the excitement.
[1:14:52] And that's one of the most disturbing parts of all of it to
[1:14:56] me. How can you murder an old woman
[1:14:59] in her bed and then be in that kind of mood?
[1:15:02] So they commit this 5th murder. They go and have sex.
[1:15:05] And then Kathy wrote Gwen a poem that ended with the line, when
[1:15:10] you're mine. Oh, please say you'll be mine
[1:15:13] forever. And five days.
[1:15:15] And after that fifth murder, the killings suddenly stopped.
[1:15:18] Gwen and Kathy remained together.
[1:15:21] But I believe it was around this time that Gwen had gotten
[1:15:24] involved with another nurse's aide at Alpine Manor, the one
[1:15:29] that she ended up getting caught with.
[1:15:31] Gwen's new girlfriend was called Robin, and Robin was well aware
[1:15:35] that she was dating a taken woman.
[1:15:38] Because Gwen and Kathy were a very public couple at Alpine
[1:15:41] Manor, everyone knew that they were together, and so Robin knew
[1:15:44] that she had to keep her relationship with Gwen quiet,
[1:15:48] and they had to keep whatever they had as much of A secret as
[1:15:52] they could to avoid the word getting out to Kathy.
[1:15:55] And they they did this for quite a while, successfully, but
[1:15:59] obviously not long enough because Kathy eventually caught
[1:16:04] them. Of course, she was furious
[1:16:06] discovering that Gwen had cheated on her, that she had
[1:16:08] been unfaithful. And I think most people in that
[1:16:11] situation would leave that partner and move on.
[1:16:15] But remember, Kathy and Gwen decided to bond themselves with
[1:16:21] murder. They have this connection to
[1:16:23] each other that they feel like they will never get with anyone
[1:16:27] else. They have this secret between
[1:16:29] them that they need to keep. That was kind of the point of
[1:16:32] the murders. That was that was the whole
[1:16:34] thing that kept them doing it that that got them so excited
[1:16:38] about it whenever they would be like at home afterwards talking
[1:16:41] about it and having sex. They liked that they were bonded
[1:16:45] and connected so deeply through these murders.
[1:16:48] So that's why when Kathy finds out that Gwen's cheating on her,
[1:16:52] she doesn't split up with her because, well, they're together
[1:16:55] forever now. So she stays with Gwen and Gwen
[1:16:58] stays with Robin too. So now this is kind of like a
[1:17:02] love triangle. But obviously Kathy don't want
[1:17:05] shit to do with Robin, She hates Robin.
[1:17:07] But Gwen just has two girlfriends now, one of which
[1:17:11] she murders people with. The other one knows nothing
[1:17:15] about it and that marks the end of this whole insane,
[1:17:19] unbelievable story that Kathy Wood was telling to her
[1:17:22] ex-husband Ken. And he doesn't believe her
[1:17:26] actually because Kathy Wood had always been a compulsive liar
[1:17:32] and a narcissist. She had lied to him and made so
[1:17:36] much shit up throughout their whole marriage, especially when
[1:17:40] she was angry or when she was trying to hurt other people.
[1:17:44] And this was all very convenient to come out right after she
[1:17:49] found out that her girlfriend was cheating on her.
[1:17:51] Honestly, Ken just thought that this was Kathy trying to set up
[1:17:54] some insane revenge plan against Gwen.
[1:17:58] She cheated on her, so now Kathy is going to get her thrown in
[1:18:01] prison for being a serial killer.
[1:18:03] But all that being said, Ken couldn't look past how detailed
[1:18:08] Kathy's story was and how much of it incriminated her as well.
[1:18:13] And you know, if she was trying to get Gwen back for cheating on
[1:18:17] her and get her thrown in prison for being a serial killer, she
[1:18:20] wouldn't have included herself in that story, surely.
[1:18:23] Because I don't know if the plan goes how she wants it to, then
[1:18:26] she would also get thrown in prison.
[1:18:29] So that was the thing that was kind of putting Ken off of
[1:18:32] thinking it was a complete lie. When Kathy left his house that
[1:18:36] evening, Ken didn't tell anyone what she had told him for many
[1:18:41] reasons. One because he didn't think it
[1:18:44] was 100% the truth and he didn't know what was true and what was
[1:18:47] a lie or how serious this whole thing even was.
[1:18:50] And another reason why he hadn't told anyone was because he was
[1:18:53] so shocked and disgusted and horrified by what Kathy had just
[1:18:59] told him that he was honestly like in a bit of shock.
[1:19:02] He couldn't quite comprehend that his ex-wife had just come
[1:19:06] to him and said that she had helped to murder 5 innocent
[1:19:11] elderly residents of a care home.
[1:19:13] He just could not. It just, it just wouldn't sink
[1:19:17] in his head. He didn't want to repeat those
[1:19:20] words to anyone else, so for all those reasons he just kind of
[1:19:25] kept this to himself, hoping that it would resolve some other
[1:19:29] way. The two of them ended up meeting
[1:19:31] up again quite a few times after this, Kathy and Ken, and of
[1:19:36] course it was brought up again. And after a while, Ken was
[1:19:40] actually starting to believe her.
[1:19:41] When he was able to ask more and more questions and she had the
[1:19:45] answers, he was really starting to believe her.
[1:19:48] One of his main questions was why?
[1:19:50] Why do you need to murder these people?
[1:19:53] And he even tried to suggest that it could have been
[1:19:56] empathetic. He was, he was trying to come up
[1:19:58] with reasons in his head why his ex-wife, the woman that he had
[1:20:02] once loved and had a baby with, why she could possibly do this.
[1:20:07] So he was trying to suggest that maybe it was empathetic and
[1:20:10] maybe, you know, these old people were like, really ill and
[1:20:13] needed. Putting out of their misery.
[1:20:16] And so his wife, his ex-wife was doing that.
[1:20:18] But Kathy very quickly shattered this theory when she turned to
[1:20:22] him and said no, we did it because it was fun.
[1:20:25] When it finally sunk in for Ken just how deprived and soulless
[1:20:30] Kathy was, he actually suggested that she should go and get some
[1:20:34] psychological help because she was sick and twisted in the
[1:20:39] head. To be honest.
[1:20:40] He said that she should be hospitalized and the police
[1:20:43] should hear about this. He was in a proper panic now
[1:20:47] that he realized how big all of this was.
[1:20:50] It was going to be a whole massive police investigation.
[1:20:53] His ex-wife was a serial killer. He knew he needed to do
[1:20:56] something about this. He was really really flustered
[1:20:59] but Kathy stopped him and told him that if he dared go to the
[1:21:03] police and tell them anything she would kill herself.
[1:21:06] And so for that reason he didn't.
[1:21:08] He didn't go to the police because he didn't want her to
[1:21:12] die. So now there were three people
[1:21:15] that were in on this secret Kathy, Gwen and Ken.
[1:21:20] He just had to keep this secret. And he did for months, months
[1:21:24] and months and months, knowing that his ex-wife, who is still
[1:21:28] with her murderous girlfriend, is a serial killer.
[1:21:32] He knows all of this, that five elderly people died at the hands
[1:21:37] of these women, which by the way, is this, Is this not
[1:21:40] breaking their like pact that the two of them had between them
[1:21:45] that that they were going to share this secret that no one
[1:21:48] else was going to know about? Kathy's gone and told her
[1:21:51] ex-husband. That's letting someone in on
[1:21:53] your little bond thingy, isn't it?
[1:21:56] And this was one of their main reasons for having this packed.
[1:22:00] This secret is because as soon as that packed was broken and
[1:22:06] someone else was told, it would only be a matter of time until
[1:22:10] that came back to bite them. Until the secret was fully out
[1:22:13] and they were in trouble. Kathy thought that she could
[1:22:16] trust Ken with this secret. She even put her own life in the
[1:22:21] mix just to manipulate him into keeping this secret.
[1:22:25] But it would only be a matter of time until everything caught up
[1:22:29] with them. In July 1987, Kathy and Gwen got
[1:22:32] into one last huge fight, and Gwen actually ended up packing
[1:22:37] all her bags, packing up all her shit as if she was going to
[1:22:41] leave, as if she was going to walk out on Kathy once and for
[1:22:44] all. In retaliation, because
[1:22:46] obviously Kathy didn't want Gwen to leave her, she decided to
[1:22:49] threaten Gwen's girlfriend Robin.
[1:22:52] But this didn't really work. I mean, let's be honest, Gwen
[1:22:56] never really got that attached to people because there was
[1:22:59] always a new one. So as much as she was like
[1:23:02] pissed off at Kathy for threatening Robin, she was like,
[1:23:05] none of this even matters to me. And Gwen left anywhere.
[1:23:09] She left Alpine Manor, she left Kathy behind, she left Robin
[1:23:13] behind, she left everything behind, and she moved to Texas.
[1:23:16] So now Gwen is gone, she's in a complete other state and Kathy
[1:23:22] is just there in Grand Rapids still working at Alpine Manor.
[1:23:26] She is still divorced and her ex-husband has custody of her
[1:23:31] daughter and she's just kind of looking at her life now post
[1:23:35] Gwen thinking what the fuck happened?
[1:23:38] She's lost everything, she has lost everything, she has lost
[1:23:41] her girlfriend, she has lost her ex-husband that she left her
[1:23:45] girlfriend for and now she's just working this job at a
[1:23:49] residential care home and her girlfriend's not there anymore.
[1:23:53] It's a bit boring. Nothing's the same without Gwen.
[1:23:57] But the world keeps turning and life went on, and Kathy just
[1:24:02] kept living her very normal life now keeping this insane secret
[1:24:06] that she was a serial killer. Everyone was keeping this
[1:24:10] secret, pretty well actually, including Ken.
[1:24:13] He kept his mouth shut for over a year.
[1:24:16] He didn't tell anyone. Everything just continued as if
[1:24:19] nothing had ever even happened. That was until 1 bombshell of a
[1:24:24] day in the fall of 1988, when police actually turned up at
[1:24:29] Alpine Manor. Because the police had never
[1:24:31] come digging before, and because no one had ever mentioned
[1:24:36] anything to her, mentioned any suspicions, Kathy had naively
[1:24:40] convinced herself in her head that everything was going to be
[1:24:43] fine and that she'd completely gotten away with these murders.
[1:24:46] But what she didn't know was that the knowledge of the
[1:24:50] murders was eating Ken alive. He had had nothing to do with
[1:24:55] any of this, but because she had let him in on this deep dark
[1:25:00] secret that she shared with Gwen, he felt responsible now.
[1:25:04] And for the last year it had just been eating away at him.
[1:25:08] He felt so guilty that he was sitting on this knowledge and
[1:25:12] not telling the police. And so finally at this point, he
[1:25:15] cracked and he had gone and told them everything that Kathy had
[1:25:20] told him. Police arrived at Alpine Manor
[1:25:23] and arrested Kathy Wood on shift on suspicion of multiple
[1:25:28] murders. And all of the other staff and
[1:25:31] all of the residents looked on in horror as one of their
[1:25:35] favorite nurses aides got handcuffed and thrown in the
[1:25:38] back of a police car. When Ken had told the police all
[1:25:41] of Kathy's story, he had made sure to tell them that Kathy is
[1:25:46] a compulsive liar and a narcissist and she does
[1:25:50] embellish things a lot. So he had urged them to really
[1:25:53] try and find some physical evidence of Kathy's claims just
[1:25:57] to back everything up. And even the police actually
[1:26:00] were a bit skeptical at first, kind of the way that Ken was
[1:26:03] skeptical of Kathy in the beginning because they learnt
[1:26:06] that Kathy was his ex-wife. And so they were like, oh, maybe
[1:26:10] this Ken guy is just trying to get revenge on his ex-wife.
[1:26:13] That's like moved on. But no, as soon as they started
[1:26:17] looking into this case, they were like, oh shit, this is
[1:26:19] serious. They dug up the Alpine Manor
[1:26:21] patient records, specifically the patient death records, and
[1:26:25] they spotted those five deaths in very quick succession in the
[1:26:30] first few months of 1987, the five deaths that Ken thought
[1:26:35] that Kathy was responsible for. So police cross checked these
[1:26:39] death records, the time and date of death with the employee
[1:26:43] records of Alpine Manor to see which nurses aides were in on
[1:26:47] the nights that these people were killed.
[1:26:49] And Kathy Wood and Gwen Graham, you guessed it, were on shift
[1:26:53] for every single one of those five murders, not murders,
[1:26:56] sorry, deaths. This was the death record.
[1:26:59] They don't know that they're murders yet.
[1:27:01] And in fact, the police are a little bit like still a little
[1:27:04] bit skeptical because they can see that all of these patients
[1:27:08] death records were all natural causes and that, you know,
[1:27:11] doctors had seen them and released their bodies to their
[1:27:14] families for burial or cremation.
[1:27:17] So police were a bit like, yeah, it's suspicious that the women
[1:27:21] were in work on all these times, but nothing proves that they
[1:27:23] murdered them like intentionally took their lives.
[1:27:28] So police had already done all of that work, like behind the
[1:27:31] scenes when Ken came to them and told them this story.
[1:27:34] They did all that work before even getting in touch with
[1:27:36] Kathy. So they've got all these records
[1:27:39] up and they know that she was in work when all of these people
[1:27:42] died. So it was at this point they
[1:27:43] decided they wanted to go and speak to her.
[1:27:45] So they go down to Alpine and they arrest her and they take
[1:27:48] her back to the police station. Once she was sat down with the
[1:27:51] officers she relayed kind of the exact same story to them that
[1:27:55] she told Ken that Gwen was the murderer, she was the sadistic
[1:27:59] malicious 1, and Kathy had just been dragged along the whole
[1:28:03] time and told to keep wait and told to cover things up.
[1:28:07] She made out like she had been pressured to be a part of these
[1:28:12] sadistic killings by her girlfriend, and none of it was
[1:28:16] her fault. Police didn't confront her on
[1:28:18] this at all, at least not at first.
[1:28:20] They wanted her to tell her version of events, and they kind
[1:28:23] of fed into it a little bit, and they asked her questions about
[1:28:26] her evil girlfriend and everything.
[1:28:29] They tried asking her for a bunch of information that would
[1:28:31] connect her and Gwen specifically to these five
[1:28:35] deaths. Like what were the names of her
[1:28:37] five victims? And she gave them all over, and
[1:28:40] they were all the same names as those five deaths.
[1:28:43] In quick succession at the start of the year, Kathy told the
[1:28:45] police that it was Gwen that did absolutely every single one of
[1:28:49] the murders. She said that she herself hadn't
[1:28:53] actually touched any of the murder victims.
[1:28:55] It was Gwen that would always approach them with a damp
[1:28:58] washcloth. She would smother them.
[1:29:00] She did it the exact same five times over.
[1:29:02] And all Kathy did was just stand in the doorway and keep watch.
[1:29:06] She never actually did anything, or at least that's kind of what
[1:29:10] she wanted to make out to the police.
[1:29:12] She was making out the whole time that she was very naive,
[1:29:14] very weak, very easily controlled, and that her
[1:29:18] girlfriend was evil and and manipulative and, and
[1:29:21] threatening. She said that Gwen was the
[1:29:23] mastermind behind all of this. She was deprived, she was sick,
[1:29:26] she was evil. She would really get off on what
[1:29:29] they were doing. So the Michigan police contacted
[1:29:32] Texan police because Gwen had moved there now and they told
[1:29:36] him I go and arrest Gwen Graham right now.
[1:29:39] We think she's a serial killer. And they were like, okay, so the
[1:29:42] very same day, Gwen was brought into a Texas police station for
[1:29:46] questioning. And things only got really,
[1:29:50] really confusing from here. Gwen told the police the exact
[1:29:55] same story that Kathy had told her police, except in Gwen's
[1:29:59] version, the roles were completely reversed.
[1:30:02] So it was Gwen that was the weak, naive one that was forced
[1:30:07] to stand in the doorway and keep guard while her evil, malicious
[1:30:11] girlfriend Kathy Wood would wet a washcloth and go up to each of
[1:30:16] these five victims and smother them to death.
[1:30:18] Literally every single story that the two women told were the
[1:30:23] exact same details and everything but their roles were
[1:30:27] flipped. It was impossible to be able to
[1:30:31] tell which one of them was telling the truth, because after
[1:30:34] all, it was just the two of them there.
[1:30:37] When each of these murders happened, there was no one else
[1:30:39] that police could ask. There were no cameras in in the
[1:30:43] residential home. And it was more than just the
[1:30:46] murder stories where the roles were flipped.
[1:30:48] Gwen was now telling the police that they had this really
[1:30:51] violent BDSM relationship, that she wasn't quite consensual to
[1:30:55] her, but she would do it all anyway to make Kathy happy.
[1:30:59] She told them the story of how Kathy had inserted a gun into
[1:31:03] her and threatened to shoot it when it was the other way around
[1:31:07] in Kathy's version. So we really, honestly do not
[1:31:11] know what their relationship was like.
[1:31:15] All we have is what they have said and they both say different
[1:31:20] things. So what is the truth?
[1:31:22] So I think we can have confidence that each of these
[1:31:24] individual events happened that they were telling police about,
[1:31:28] but we just don't know who was the main perpetrator or even if
[1:31:31] there was a main perpetrator. What if they were both just
[1:31:34] fully in with it together at the same time?
[1:31:38] I don't know. But at the end of the day, does
[1:31:41] it entirely matter? I mean, all police know is that
[1:31:45] they are being told the stories of five murders from two women
[1:31:50] who are telling the exact same story.
[1:31:52] Now, they can't tell which one had more to do with the murders
[1:31:55] or whose idea it was. But like I said, does it really
[1:31:58] matter that much when they have proof that they have two
[1:32:00] murderers sitting in front of them?
[1:32:03] Like just just Chuck them both in prison?
[1:32:04] Just do it. Before they could do anything,
[1:32:06] the police needed to confirm that those five residents deaths
[1:32:11] hadn't been from natural causes. They needed to try to prove that
[1:32:15] they had been murdered. But this was going to be very,
[1:32:17] very hard because they'd all died about a year ago.
[1:32:21] So all of their funerals had taken place.
[1:32:23] Like I said, one of them had been cremated literally the day
[1:32:26] after her death certificate had been signed.
[1:32:29] So in that case, there wasn't a body at all to look at. 2
[1:32:34] victims of the lethal lovers had been buried, the other three had
[1:32:38] been cremated. And so, harrowingly, as part of
[1:32:42] the police investigation, their bodies had to be dug up, exhumed
[1:32:46] from the ground, taken to a morgue and autopsied.
[1:32:50] Over a year on from their deaths.
[1:32:53] Now, autopsies can be very, very difficult once there's been a
[1:32:58] great amount of decomposition. I just can't imagine how
[1:33:02] disturbing this whole process would be for those victims
[1:33:07] families to know that their bodies were being dug up out of
[1:33:10] their resting place to go be cut open and for those pathologists
[1:33:14] as well that have to cut open 1/2 decayed human body.
[1:33:19] Like all of this is just so grim.
[1:33:23] So in the autopsies of these two bodies, I don't know which
[1:33:26] victims were actually autopsied, but one of the things that the
[1:33:30] examiners noticed right off the bat was that that nothing seemed
[1:33:34] amiss from the outside. There were no marks.
[1:33:37] There were no signs of like prolonged abuse or, you know,
[1:33:42] self defence injuries or anything of the like, which
[1:33:45] makes sense. I mean, Kathy and Gwen would
[1:33:48] pick their victims intentionally because they were the weaker
[1:33:51] ones or the more frail ones, the ones that weren't going to put
[1:33:55] up a fight. So it makes sense that there
[1:33:57] were no self-defense wound. So finally, when it came to
[1:34:00] concluding A cause of death for both of these victims, both of
[1:34:05] them were found to have been suffocated to death.
[1:34:08] Kathy and Gwen had finally told some level of truth and that was
[1:34:14] that they were murderers. And this was all the evidence
[1:34:17] police needed to be able to confirm that.
[1:34:19] Now they had proof that these two women murdered at least two
[1:34:24] people. So now they could charge them
[1:34:27] and send it to trial. There was only one thing left.
[1:34:30] Before they could actually send this to trial, they had to
[1:34:32] figure out who was telling more of the truth than the other, who
[1:34:37] was telling a closer version of the truth because it was clear
[1:34:41] that both of these women were liars in some capacity.
[1:34:44] So there's no doubt that both of their versions of events were
[1:34:47] sprinkled with liars at the very least, if not all liars.
[1:34:51] So police really had to do some digging into these women's
[1:34:54] lives. They had to speak with their
[1:34:56] families, their friends. They tried to compare as much
[1:34:59] evidence, like witness statements and records and
[1:35:04] absolutely everything. They were looking into the
[1:35:06] woman's past to see what they lied about before, like any
[1:35:09] violent tendencies that they'd had before.
[1:35:12] It was a whole operation. Because honestly, I can't
[1:35:15] imagine actually how hard of a case this must be for police
[1:35:19] when you definitely know that these two people were killing
[1:35:22] together, but they're both telling different stories of it.
[1:35:25] How are you? How do you tease apart what is a
[1:35:28] lie and what is the truth? Eventually police came to a
[1:35:31] conclusion that Kathy was telling a closer version of the
[1:35:36] truth than Gwen was, but even then, they don't know to what
[1:35:41] extent 1 is lying and one is telling the truth.
[1:35:44] And of course, they will never be able to be 100% sure on this.
[1:35:49] It's just based on like, little bits of evidence and little, you
[1:35:53] know, little things, little details here and there.
[1:35:56] It just seemed that Kathy's version was more truthful, which
[1:36:01] meant that she likely had a lesser part in the murders.
[1:36:06] Still, they can't be 100% sure, but this is what police believe.
[1:36:09] So following this conclusion that they made, Kathy Wood was
[1:36:13] actually given a plea deal to give evidence against Gwen
[1:36:17] Graham at trial. She would get some time knocked
[1:36:21] off of a sentence, you know, for cooperating.
[1:36:23] Police knew that it wasn't ideal to give Kathy Wood a reduced
[1:36:27] sentence because she very much was complicit in these murders
[1:36:30] and she kept it a secret for over a year, showing lack of
[1:36:33] remorse. But due to the lack of physical
[1:36:36] evidence in this case, police knew that in order to actually
[1:36:41] get this case going and, and have a good chance of getting
[1:36:44] Gwen in prison, well, a good chance of getting both of them
[1:36:47] in prison, they needed extra evidence.
[1:36:50] They needed as much evidence as they can get.
[1:36:52] And that seemed like it was going to have to be Kathy Wood
[1:36:56] standing up there at trial and giving her whole version of
[1:36:59] events. And the only way to get her to
[1:37:01] do that is to give her something that she would want a couple of
[1:37:05] years off her sentence. I don't know.
[1:37:06] That confuses me just personally a little bit that you would
[1:37:10] trust someone that you've already established is a
[1:37:14] pathological liar and has lied all the way through this
[1:37:17] investigation. You're going to go, OK, now
[1:37:19] we're going to go put her on the witness stand, and we're going
[1:37:22] to believe her now. Like, I know that lying in court
[1:37:25] is illegal, but like, is that going to stop her?
[1:37:28] She's a serial killer. If the law was going to concern
[1:37:31] her, it probably would have done it before now.
[1:37:33] But either way, it went ahead. Kathy went and stood up there in
[1:37:37] trial. She gave every detail that she
[1:37:39] could, and she revealed a lot of disturbing information and a lot
[1:37:43] of disturbing information specifically about her
[1:37:46] relationship with Gwen, separate from the serial killings.
[1:37:50] She described how on the very last night that she saw Gwen
[1:37:54] when she, like, packed all the bags and went to move to Texas.
[1:37:57] Cathy admitted to the court that she physically threatened Gwen's
[1:38:01] girlfriend, Robin. She said that she was kind of in
[1:38:04] the headspace of, well, if I can't have Gwen, if Gwen's
[1:38:06] walking out and leaving me, then then I want other people to be
[1:38:09] miserable. No one else can have her.
[1:38:13] I don't know, that didn't really explain the logic to me
[1:38:15] entirely. But Kathy said that throughout
[1:38:18] the the second-half of their relationship, obviously the
[1:38:21] first half was committing murders.
[1:38:24] The second-half was this weird love triangle with Robin.
[1:38:28] Kathy said that she would always threaten Gwen throughout that
[1:38:31] second-half with going to the police, with telling the police
[1:38:35] about their serial killings. Kathy said that she would use
[1:38:38] this as her main manipulation tactic to get Gwen to do and act
[1:38:44] as she wanted her to. So once Kathy had finished
[1:38:46] giving her witness statement in court, Gwen was given a chance
[1:38:50] to defend herself against it a little bit.
[1:38:53] So Gwen went and stood up there in court and she said that Kathy
[1:38:56] had twisted it all. And they're actually, even
[1:38:59] though she admitted that she was a little bit abusive towards
[1:39:03] Kathy, she said that their relationship was mutually
[1:39:05] abusive, that yes, she had done some horrible things, but Kathy
[1:39:10] had also done some horrible, horrible things And said that
[1:39:13] Kathy would be verbally, physically, sexually and
[1:39:18] emotionally abusive to her, just as she would be to Kathy.
[1:39:24] She said that yes, they had a horrible toxic relationship full
[1:39:29] of different kinds of abuse, but it was mutual.
[1:39:33] What an incredibly difficult case to try to come to a final
[1:39:37] conclusion on. I mean, police were already
[1:39:40] pretty sure of their conclusion before they sent it to trial.
[1:39:43] They thought that Kathy was telling a closer version of the
[1:39:46] truth than Gwen was. But even still, it's it's so
[1:39:50] difficult that they literally just do not know what happened.
[1:39:55] It's one woman's word against the others and they're both
[1:39:57] telling complete opposite tales. I don't know how you actually go
[1:40:01] about that as like a law official.
[1:40:04] And that was very much the tone that was set in court, by the
[1:40:07] way. I mean, obviously Kathy was
[1:40:09] giving her plea deal witness testimony thing.
[1:40:12] So everyone kind of knew that Kathy's version of events should
[1:40:15] be trusted a bit more than Gwen's, but Gwen's defence team
[1:40:18] really tried to. Defend her.
[1:40:21] They said that it was very unlikely that Gwen Graham would
[1:40:24] have been able to carry out all these five murders to to plan
[1:40:27] them and carry them out and cover them up and keep it a
[1:40:30] secret for over a year. They said because she had
[1:40:34] borderline personality disorder and that she was low functioning
[1:40:38] with her BPD, which is all, you know, fair enough.
[1:40:42] But people with BPD don't just go out and commit 5 murders and
[1:40:47] keep it a secret and then you go to court and it's like, oh don't
[1:40:50] worry, they've got BPD, it's fine.
[1:40:52] Hello. But anyway, her defence team
[1:40:54] thought that that defended her and some of the things that they
[1:40:58] did to try and defend her, really liking that word in this
[1:41:01] video. Some of the things that they
[1:41:02] did, they brought in some of the lethal lovers, mutual friends,
[1:41:07] so people that knew them as a couple.
[1:41:09] And a lot of people did stand in there and say, no, yeah, their
[1:41:12] relationship was mutually abusive.
[1:41:13] Like, they were both horrible to each other.
[1:41:16] But actually, even a couple of their Co workers from Alpine
[1:41:20] Manor who were brought into court said that even after Gwen
[1:41:24] had moved away to Texas at the very end of their relationship,
[1:41:27] a lot of them said that Kathy stayed very bitter and mean and
[1:41:32] she was abusive to Co workers and sometimes even residents.
[1:41:37] So I guess that says a lot about Kathy's character, doesn't it,
[1:41:40] That even when Gwen's moved away, she's out of the picture.
[1:41:43] The two of them aren't together anymore.
[1:41:45] Kathy is still a foul person to everyone.
[1:41:50] But ultimately none of this really changed the case at hand.
[1:41:54] I think the court had already decided who was telling more of
[1:41:59] the truth and who was telling less of the truth.
[1:42:02] So in the end, Gwen Graham was found guilty of all 5 murders
[1:42:07] and for that she was handed five life sentences.
[1:42:10] Kathy Wood, on the other hand, was found guilty only of 1 count
[1:42:14] of second degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit.
[1:42:20] Her plea deal meant that she would only be sentenced to 40
[1:42:23] years in prison. I'm just going to say I'm mad.
[1:42:26] I'm mad. I don't like that.
[1:42:27] If she was telling the truth in her story, she stood there and
[1:42:32] watched as her partner, the woman that she was going to go
[1:42:35] and have sex with in an hour, was murdering 5 elderly people.
[1:42:39] She kept it a secret. I don't know, one count of
[1:42:43] second degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit
[1:42:46] murder don't sound right to me. I know I'm not a legal
[1:42:51] professional, but she did more than that.
[1:42:54] She did more than that. She was very complicit in her
[1:42:56] part of it, in my opinion. So like I said, she was
[1:42:59] sentenced to 40 years in prison. She became eligible for parole
[1:43:03] in 2005. And so she applied for it, but
[1:43:07] she kept getting denied it for a while.
[1:43:10] And then eventually in 2020, the year of the pandemic, she was
[1:43:14] released, which actually gave me a little bit of a chuckle in my
[1:43:16] research. I'm not going to like, imagine
[1:43:18] being in prison like pretty much all your life from your early
[1:43:21] 20s. You're in there for like, what,
[1:43:23] 40 years? You feel like so cooped up for
[1:43:26] so long and then you get out there into the world, and then
[1:43:29] all of a sudden there's a pandemic and you put on lockdown
[1:43:32] for 2-3 years. I don't know.
[1:43:34] Karma, probably. But yeah, like I say, she's out
[1:43:37] now. So Gwen Graham is actually still
[1:43:40] in prison to this day. I don't think she's ever going
[1:43:42] to get out. Five life sentences for five
[1:43:44] murders. No.
[1:43:46] Yeah, no. She's never seen the colour of
[1:43:47] the sky again. The most disturbing part of this
[1:43:49] whole case to me is that we still don't know what happened.
[1:43:53] Literally. Like we still don't know what
[1:43:55] happened. Someone has been in prison and
[1:43:57] come out of prison and we still don't actually know what
[1:43:59] happened. And we're never gonna because as
[1:44:02] I've been saying, it's one woman's word against the other.
[1:44:05] And there's no like objective physical evidence that says who
[1:44:11] did what in each of the murders. Like, we're just, we're never
[1:44:15] going to know. And I don't like that.
[1:44:17] There is a reason we only cover solved cases on this channel and
[1:44:20] that's because I need answers otherwise it sets my brain on
[1:44:24] fire and I will be thinking about this for the next week.
[1:44:26] Both of the women maintain their overall innocence to this day.
[1:44:32] They both maintain that they were the weaker, naive, easily
[1:44:37] LED one, and that their partner was mean and evil and murderer,
[1:44:41] and that they just kind of stood watch at the door.
[1:44:44] Only one ears can be telling the truth.
[1:44:46] And even then, what if neither of them are telling the truth?
[1:44:49] That's an even scarier thought. Is that like, what if neither of
[1:44:52] them are even close to the truth?
[1:44:54] And what if it was completely different?
[1:44:56] Alpine Manor, the residential home itself, has since gotten
[1:45:00] new management and they have changed their name so to
[1:45:03] distance themselves as much as they possibly can from their
[1:45:07] tragic, harrowing past. One of the most heartbreaking
[1:45:11] parts about this whole case that I couldn't get over at any point
[1:45:14] during my research was that all of these victims had been
[1:45:18] admitted to Alpine Manor for care.
[1:45:21] They trusted all of those staff to not only meet all their
[1:45:25] needs, but to also be caring and kind.
[1:45:29] And then the fact that those same people could turn and
[1:45:33] literally murder their patients, it's horrifying.
[1:45:37] It's just completely out of the realm of possibility in most
[1:45:41] people's minds that you could think that someone in a caring
[1:45:45] profession that has dedicated their lives to looking after
[1:45:49] people that has said, yes, this is what I want to do day in, day
[1:45:52] out for the rest of my life, is look after other people.
[1:45:54] You could never even imagine that in their head that they're
[1:45:58] fantasizing about what it might feel like to kill someone and
[1:46:01] that they could very easily act on it at their workplace.
[1:46:06] Oh, it it really freaks me out like Angel of death murders like
[1:46:11] this, where it's like doctors, nurses.
[1:46:13] Those are some of the most horrific to me that those kind
[1:46:17] of murderers, they're playing the long game that they go to
[1:46:20] school and they get educated and they get degrees.
[1:46:24] I mean, that's not the case here because they were just nurses
[1:46:27] aides, but still people like Harold Shipman.
[1:46:29] I don't know, sorry, I'm going on a tangent.
[1:46:31] But now I'm thinking about like Angel of death killers and I
[1:46:35] don't know. That's so that's literally my
[1:46:37] worst nightmare. Thank you so much for listening
[1:46:43] to Usual Disclaimer. At this point, I just want to
[1:46:45] say that if you've been affected by any of the topics we
[1:46:48] discussed today, please check the description where we've left
[1:46:51] some helpful resources. If you want to hear more cases
[1:46:54] like this one, make sure to follow Usual Disclaimer on your
[1:46:57] podcast app so that you get notifications when we post new
[1:47:00] episodes. And if you really enjoyed, I'd
[1:47:03] love it if you could leave a rating and a review too.
[1:47:06] Usual Disclaimer with Eleanor Neil is an Audio Boom Studios
[1:47:09] production. See you next time.

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