Police-style handcuffs on Texas murder victim made investigators fear the killer was among them

On January 14, 1995, Mary Catherine Edwards31-year-old beloved elementary school teacher was found dead in her Beaumont, Texas home.

Her parents found her. It was a terrible scene: she was in her bathtub, handcuffed and had been sexually assaulted. There were no signs of a break-in, leading investigators to believe she must have known her killer. Police-grade Smith & Wesson handcuffs were always a big clue, but when detectives tried to trace the serial numbers, they came up empty. Initial investigators questioned various law enforcement officers and found nothing either.

The case remained cold, but as Det. Aaron Lewallen told 48 Hours contributor Natalie Morales, “Could it have been someone we knew?…It was almost like a ghost story told around the campfire…” Morales reports on the search for answers in an encore of “Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards,” airing Saturday, Jan. 10 at 9/8c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

Thanks to carefully preserved crime scene DNA and the advent of genetic genealogy, Det. Aaron Lewallen, his wife Tina Lewallen, also a detective – along with Brandon Bess, a Texas Ranger in the cold case division, and Shera LaPoint, a professional genealogist – spent nearly three months working together in a relentless effort to finally solve the case.

After all the initial leads and suspicions that someone from law enforcement was involved, the family tree they built revealed someone else. Their main suspect turned out not to be a law enforcement officer, but a man who attended the same high school as Edwards: Clayton Foreman.

And then they learned that Edwards and her twin sister Allison had been bridesmaids in Foreman’s first wedding. The sisters were good friends with his first wife, Dianna Coe, who also attended the same high school.

Coe remembers them fondly, telling Morales how kind they were to her when she moved to a new town and opened a new school.

“I was new to the area…so I didn’t know anyone. And they…just started talking to me and asking my name…and we were friends from then on,” Coe said.

The sisters were the first people Coe thought of as bridesmaids at her wedding. She and Foreman remained married for 11 years. They were divorced at the time of the murder, but looking back, Coe began to see things in a different, darker light. She remembered her ex-husband’s fascination with police officers and their work tools, like handcuffs and batons. As Coe told Morales: “He had a club that he kept…by the bed. You know, he said it was for protection. And I remember he ordered these handcuffs…Well, he hung them above the rearview mirror.”

Coe also remembers a disturbing conversation with her ex-husband when she learned Edwards had been murdered and called to talk about it.

“I think I was crying, you know, and I said, ‘oh, my God,’ I said, ‘someone murdered Catherine,'” Coe told “48 Hours.” “And – and he says, ‘Oh, really?’ Like no emotion, which I found strange.”

A DNA match quickly established that Foreman was indeed at the crime scene. And when Det. Aaron Lewallen and Ranger Bess went to question Foreman, they had a warrant for his arrest. They also brought something with them, something very symbolic.

Together, they took the time to reach an arrangement with prosecutors so that they could use the handcuffs recovered as evidence at the crime scene. When they arrested Foreman for Edwards’ murder, they did so with the same handcuffs that had bound her the night she died. He was not one of them, but during the investigation they learned that Foreman was falsely claiming to be a police officer.

The handcuffs – so important in the beginning – came full circle in the end. Bess will never forget how that felt. As he told Morales, “It’s a moment I’ll never forget…you feel like you have to do something for Catherine there…You know, what you have to do physically for her is take the handcuffs that tied her up when she was murdered and put them back on the guy who murdered her…That might seem small to some, but it was a really big deal for us, and it felt good.”

The jury in Foreman’s murder trial deliberated for less than an hour before finding him guilty of Edwards’ murder. Foreman was sentenced to life in prison.