The Three Rivers Killer | Bloodline Detectives with Nancy Grace | Forensic Files

[THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: December 2, 1988, Three Rivers, Michigan. A man returning home expects to be welcomed by his fiancée.
Instead, he makes a horrible discovery. He walked upstairs and saw his fiancée, who he was planning
on marrying about six months later, brutally, brutally murdered. NANCY GRACE: The victim is 19-year-old Cathy Swartz.
She's the mother of a nine-month-old baby girl, and with Christmas just weeks away,
she has everything to live for. She had a large laceration to her throat, and she had also been strangled.
She had numerous cuts on her hands from what you would think would be defensive wounds.
NANCY GRACE: While Cathy Swartz lies dead, her baby daughter is also in the house, apparently unharmed.
Three Rivers detectives immediately investigate her murder. They started looking at people in the community
around similar age range. NANCY GRACE: In the months that follow, investigators fail to find Cathy's killer, and in the end,
the case goes cold. Who in their right mind would do that to somebody? NANCY GRACE: This is the story of the murder of a young mom,
Cathy Swartz, and how advances in investigative genetic genealogy blow open a seemingly impossible case.
I'm Nancy Grace. This is "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Three Rivers, Michigan, a town two hours
East of Chicago, one hour from Grand Rapids. Three Rivers is a small, rural, middle class town.
Not a lot happens here. NANCY GRACE: Just before Christmas 1988, this friendly town shaken by a terrible murder.
The victim 19-year-old Cathy Swartz, murdered while her baby daughter Courteney is
asleep in the same apartment. She had gotten up that morning with Mike at about 5:30
before he left for work. She was supposed to go do laundry that day, so he'd left some money behind for her
to go to the laundromat. She went and laid back down. At about 3:30 in the afternoon, Mike returns home from work.
Mike comes home, sees that the front door is open. When he came into his apartment,
he noticed some blood near the entryway. He calls for Cathy, doesn't get a response.
He comes upstairs and finds her laying in the doorway of the master bedroom. He was shocked and he ran out of the apartment
to a neighbor's, and the neighbor reported that she called 911 because he just wasn't able to.
NANCY GRACE: Three Rivers Police immediately respond to the emergency call. They go in and clear the apartment to make sure
that there's nobody inside. They saw an excessive amount of blood splattered on the floors, walls, banister.
They went upstairs and verified that Cathy was deceased. She didn't have a pulse.
NANCY GRACE: Then police discover Cathy's nine-month-old baby girl asleep in the room
next to where Mommy's body is lying. At that time, they had Mike Warner come and take
the child from the apartment. They immediately realized that they needed a lot more
resources for what they had. And then they called for the Michigan State police for the crime lab to come down.
An officer from Three Rivers PD along with the lab techs collected the evidence there at the scene and took photographs.
There was no forced entry. One of the theories they started to work with is that Cathy might have known the person.
There is reason to believe that Cathy tried to fight off her attacker. Presumably, she tried to get away from him,
calling a neighbor, family member, or 911. My theory was that Cathy was retreating upstairs
to call 911, but she was also retreating upstairs instead of exiting the apartment because her daughter
was upstairs in the bedroom. And she felt that if she could make it to that phone,
she could call 911 and get help. Instead of running out the door, she ran upstairs because that's where I was.
They were putting a waterbed in her room, and she couldn't close the door because the hose
was in the door. And that's where he tried to sexually assault her, and he cut her neck from ear to ear.
There was a phone sitting on Cathy's bed. There was blood on there. There was two fingerprints found on the phone.
One was Cathy's fingerprint and another was for an unknown subject that was blood of an unknown person.
NANCY GRACE: Detectives find more evidence in the bathroom. In the bathroom between the toilet and shower,
there was a footprint. It was later determined that it was in Cathy's blood. Anyone can look at that and surmise
that the suspect obviously attempted to clean up in some way. NANCY GRACE: Police hoping a coroner's autopsy
will provide more clues. She had multiple stab wounds on her head, midsection, legs.
She also had numerous lacerations on her back and two lacerations on both of her hands.
It looked like she put up a fight. One of the things that came up was Cathy's ex-boyfriend.
Mike said he'd been there. They had partied together there at the apartment with Cathy.
He was interviewed and could not account for some of his time that day. But they quickly were able to determine
that the blood typing didn't match, and he was released. In a small town like this, where violent attacks
are extremely rare, police are confident they'll quickly find the killer. We find out if that happens next on "Bloodline Detectives."
[THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: December 2, 1988, Three Rivers, Michigan, a small, rural town where serious crime
is a very rare event. On this day however, the town is stunned by the murder of 19-year-old mom Cathy Swartz.
Her battered body, discovered by her fiance when he gets home from work, her nine-month-old baby girl
found sleeping in the room next to Mommy's body. They were looking at a lot of people.
They went through the process one by one, interviewing, getting fingerprints, and footprints
from these people. Unfortunately, a lot of it was just based on speculation and rumor.
NANCY GRACE: Leads are drying up. Detectives from Three Rivers ask Michigan State police for a behavioral profile of Cathy's killer.
The profiler believed that it would be someone who was in Cathy's social circle,
but not particularly close to Cathy. It would be somebody who has trouble making
relationships with women. It also stated that there was a likelihood that after the homicide that this person
would most likely try to distance himself from the area. NANCY GRACE: Investigators focus on the men
who are known to Cathy, the victim. They followed up on a lot of similar aged males
to Cathy that were in her social circle, who either left town or joined the military right after the murder happened.
NANCY GRACE: The investigation drags on all through 1989. At the end of the year, detectives
appeal again to the public for any information. A year later, there was a reward of $7,000 put out
by the Three Rivers Police Department and calls for the public to call in tips. NANCY GRACE: Years go by and every single lead dries up.
Friends, family, and police investigators are all concerned Cathy's killer remains at large.
Everyone just described her as energetic and fun and had her whole life ahead. She was going to get married the next year.
Her father worked at the local bowling alley, which, in the '80s, was the hangout.
She liked to draw. She was absolutely crazy about her daughter Courteney. She just sounds like a genuinely wonderful woman.
NANCY GRACE: Little baby Courteney is cared for by Cathy's grieving family. They have a very difficult decision to make,
when to tell Courteney about her mother's murder and what exactly they should say to this little girl.
When they first told me anything, it was in first grade. They just told me that a really bad man hurt my mom,
and that she was in heaven. It was just empty. Like, I knew that I had them, and I knew that they loved me,
but that's not my mom. NANCY GRACE: Also struggling to come to terms with the loss of Cathy Swartz, her young partner Mike.
He can't get the image of his murdered fiancee out of his mind. And I feel so bad for him because I
could not imagine seeing the love of my life, how it's described. He told his mom that it breaks his heart
to look at me because I remind him of Cathy, and I haven't really seen him. Detective Smallcombe and I have
met with Mike several times. He admits that that dramatically affected his life and that he still struggles with it, still has
these memories that haunt him. NANCY GRACE: More years pass and still no suspects,
but police do have the killer's bloody fingerprint from the phone at the crime scene.
DNA technology is still in its infancy, but some new developments in fingerprint profiling
may offer hope to investigators. Cathy's case was actually the fifth one to be entered into AFIS, which is the Automated Fingerprint
Identification System that's run nationwide by the FBI, and we really thought that when we entered the prints into AFIS
we were going to get a hit and be able to solve the case. There was a lot of hope at that time
that we would get a match through that system, but it never happened. In 2012, we were contacted by the Michigan State Police
for CODIS believing that we could take the DNA that we had from the scene and enter that into the system,
and we'd get a hit. Members from our forensic laboratory created that profile for CODIS, entered it into CODIS,
but there was never any hits as to a suspect. NANCY GRACE: Then, 2022, 34 years after Cathy Swartz's
murder, the new chief of police there in Three Rivers, Scott Boling, takes a fresh look at the old case.
I became chief. I sat down with my officers, and we discussed cases that were open, cases that were
important to the community, and this case immediately came up. And at that time, Detective Sergeant Smallcombe
started briefing me on the case, and it instantly sparked an interest. And it was our one unsolved homicide
that we had for the department. I think that we both agreed we were at a point that if we didn't use forensic genetic genealogy
that we had pretty much exhausted all our other leads. NANCY GRACE: Investigative genetic genealogy
is an exciting new scientific technique that is yielding incredible results with cold cases.
The Three Rivers Police don't have much expertise in the area, so they ask Michigan State police for help.
Our state police and the state receive grants to examine old cold cases that had some usable DNA.
This is a tricky thing to do, right? Because in 1988, we really don't know much about DNA.
We don't know how to preserve it necessarily. When you go back through these boxes,
it really takes a team of people to go figure out what is available with DNA and what's still testable.
NANCY GRACE: The blood sample police believe comes from the killer is given to Othram Labs in Texas.
Othram, a pioneer in solving cold cases using genetic genealogy. We do basically a four point inspection.
We look at how much DNA is there. Is there degradation? Is there contamination? And is there a mixture component?
And if we pass all those four levels, then we accept the case forward, and then we
move on to sequencing. If we don't pass those four steps, then we stop there. We don't burn any evidence or budgets,
and we let them know, hey, you're going to want to wait for technology to advance before we
try to consume this DNA. We received the evidence for this case at the end of 2022,
and we were able to process the bloody fingerprint left behind by the perpetrator.
I've seen law enforcement personnel decide not to utilize the one last sample that they have because the DNA technology
has not caught up yet. And if they use the DNA that they have, that's it. They only have one more test that can be done,
so they kind of put things on hold for another few years until the DNA technology can catch up.
We used a laboratory test that we developed called forensic grade genome sequencing.
It involves measuring hundreds of thousands of markers throughout the genome, and we built a computer file
that represented essentially the DNA profile, all these markers for this unknown individual.
The bloody fingerprint was found on the telephone in the bedroom. There was DNA there from other people
as well, and so that's what made this case a little bit more complicated. Plus, it was trace amounts.
We then did a genealogical search. We do this in databases that allow law enforcement search,
and involve the matching of this profile to folks that have consented for law enforcement,
and also share some minimal genetic similarity with this person. We arrived at no close relatives,
but a lot of distant relatives. And with these distant relatives, we began to build a family tree.
When we get the information from our genealogist team, from Carla and her team, and they put it in a report form,
we get very excited to get law enforcement on the phone and let them know that we have a piece of information that can
help them solidify the case. It's a fantastic breakthrough, but there is still so much work to be done.
We find out exactly what that is next on "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Three Rivers, Michigan, 2022.
There's been a breakthrough in the 1988 murder of teen mom Cathy Swartz. Cathy found dead in her apartment,
her nine-month-old baby girl sleeping in the room next to her mom's body. Now, a new police chief is applying
new forensic technology, investigative genetic genealogy, to the cold case. The idea behind it is that from a blood sample,
you kind of establish a family tree. It helps narrow us down to typically a family of people that could be possibly suspects.
NANCY GRACE: January 2023, that's just what happens. The team gets the news they've waited many years to hear.
We had a match that was between a third and fourth cousin level. We start looking for information to identify
who that person is in the database and extend those branches. We don't know until we start building
the tree how that match actually is related to the perpetrator. They finally got a hit, and we've got an idea.
There's a family that it came back to. They'd called Michigan State Police, which was related
to my detective, and he came into the office, and he's like, you'll never guess what.
They had narrowed it down to one specific family that had lived in the Three Rivers area in 1988.
The brothers were Sonny, John, Robert, and Barry, the children of John and Judith Waters.
There was one half brother, but Othram had already ruled him out because they knew it was a full sibling
of one of the four brothers. Before they approached the brothers, detectives enlist the help of criminology students
from Western Michigan University. They asked the students to digitize all the case
notes going back 30 long years. It was the biggest file that we've ever gotten, about 10,000 pages.
And we got it dropped off, and I got assigned to it. We had to go through and make sense of it all, organize it.
We basically dumped them out and covered the entire floor with the papers, depending if it was
a police report, an interview. We made probably 50 different piles of papers. One box was just probably 15 different officers
or detectives names that we had to sort through those. It was quite the process.
I think it took us about two weeks just to sort through them. We scan it, digitize it, organize it on the computer,
and then put it into an OCR, which is the ocular recognition, so that we can keyword search it.
After everything's scanned, it's then put into that, and then that's the final copy that we give to the detectives.
That was extremely helpful to our investigation. That we literally have boxes and boxes of files
and it helped the review process of the investigators. When we had a theory or we wanted
to investigate a path that we could quickly access that information. NANCY GRACE: Detectives now focus
on the four Waters brothers. At this time, we've got the OCR file from Western Michigan
students, so we're able to search them pretty easily and see when and where they were interviewed back
during the original investigation. We're immediately able to rule out Barry because his DNA was already in the system.
He had a lengthy criminal history and had his CODIS entered into several different state's
databases, so that kind of took us back down to just three brothers now. Sonny Waters, John Waters, and Robert Waters.
Two of the brothers had been interviewed and were still living here in Michigan locally.
Detective Sergeant Smallcombe was assigned to make contact and interview one, request a DNA sample.
I made contact with Sonny, who lives in the Three Rivers area, to interview him and he willingly
submitted a DNA sample. Because at this point, we know that our suspect is one of these three brothers.
And then Detective Sergeant Peterson from Michigan State Police handled making contact with the other brother.
I then contacted John Waters. They were both very cooperative, immediately consented
to their blood, which was then sent up to genealogy and to CODIS at the same time.
And we were able to eliminate both of those brothers. Othram did another test, and it
was a kind of another verification that it says it is definitely one of the siblings.
So we knew beyond a reasonable doubt that it was one, and we had just ruled out three, and the last one
was Robert Waters, currently living in South Carolina. NANCY GRACE: Detectives have a lot
of questions for Robert Waters. They wonder how he managed to evade police so many years.
The Waters family grew up in Flowerfield just outside of Three Rivers. He never got more than a traffic ticket,
which is probably why he's escaped notice for after all of these years. NANCY GRACE: And now detectives look back
at those recently digitized files from the students at Western Michigan University.
Is there a mention of Robert Waters? He was only mentioned one time, and that was on a list of people that had been interviewed.
And next to his name, it said that he had moved to Arizona in September. He seemed like a two bit player in this whole story.
He left Michigan right after her death. I think that Cathy knew Robert Waters. His brother John had been interviewed.
John actually worked with Cathy at a local grocery store. She wouldn't have let someone in that she didn't know.
NANCY GRACE: Police are satisfied they've got a prime suspect. They start to build a case against Robert
Waters, a case strong enough to secure a conviction. Robert Waters was in South Carolina,
had been for years and years. So we immediately started to come up with logistically
how are we going to now continue this investigation there? Our plan was that we wanted to go down there,
we wanted to interview him, and then we wanted to get a sample of his DNA, his fingerprints,
and get his footprint. Rather than trying to surreptitiously get DNA from him in another state, we were just going
to do the direct approach. So we reached out to detectives in Beaufort, South Carolina,
to their police department to ask them for help. Once we came up with the initial plan,
we met with the prosecutor. We discussed the case. Started putting things together, working on an affidavit.
Through Beaufort, we received a search warrant for Robert Waters' DNA, his fingerprints,
and his footprints through the local courts there. And once we got that fingerprint match,
that we would submit request to the prosecutor to get an arrest warrant to arrest him on that.
And then we would also submit the footprint and the DNA, which would take a little bit longer to match.
Investigators travel all the way to South Carolina to confront the prime suspect.
Next on "Bloodline Detectives," how will Robert Waters react when he's questioned about a brutal murder
committed in 1988? [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Three Rivers, Michigan. Detectives use investigative genetic genealogy
to ID a suspect in the murder of a teen girl, Cathy Swartz, back in 1988. The suspects name, Robert Waters.
He was also 19 at the time of the murder. Detectives travel to South Carolina to face the murder suspect.
We flew down to South Carolina, made contact with the local police department down there,
Beaufort, and they made arrangements to bring additional personnel and give us any resources that we needed.
Robert was a plumber, so most likely during the week, he would be out doing plumbing jobs.
We were afraid that if we tried to approach him on a Monday through Friday, he would be too busy doing jobs
to come in and speak with us. So we decided to try and make contact with him on a Sunday thinking that would be a day off for him.
On April 30th, myself and Detective Sergeant Smallcombe go out and wait near the residence
while a surveillance is watching Robert's residence. We saw him come out of his house.
Detective Smallcombe and Detective Peterson said that, hey, he's just walked out of his house.
You guys want to make contact with him? And at that time, they made contact with him and asked him,
hey, we're following up on a cold case we have. We're just trying to rule people out.
Do you mind coming down to the station and talking to us for a while? He immediately agreed.
Said that he had just a couple of things to do and that he would come right down to the police department
and speak with us. But then he never showed up. The two brothers that live here in Michigan
still talk, so I'm sure after we contacted the first brother and then we contacted the second brother,
they probably called the third brother to let him know that, hey, law enforcement has
been contacting us. So at that point, I put a call in to Mr. Roberts to see just if there was a hold up,
and it went right to voicemail. Another 20 to 30 minutes later, I placed another phone call,
Robert answered the phone. And I asked him just said, hey, we're still here. Just wondering if you were coming down.
What was going on. He asked, explain to me again what are you guys here for? So I explained to him that we were reopening a case in Three
Rivers, Michigan, from 1988. It was a homicide case, and he stated that he didn't feel
it would be appropriate for him to come down and talk to us without his attorney.
Then I kind of felt like the game was up. He knew why we were here. NANCY GRACE: Robert Waters is clearly
reluctant to speak to cops. They're concerned about what he may do next. If he's talking about attorneys
and not coming down now, I figured, well, now we've got a problem because now Robert's in his house.
He's not going to consensually come down and talk to us, so I need to focus more on how I get
him peacefully out of that house and serve these search warrants. So we kind of talk back and forth,
and he said he could come in on the following week with his attorney. And I advised him that, you know,
we're not going to be here. We don't have that kind of time. We're only going to be here for a couple of days.
And I then told him, hey, why don't you give your lawyer a call. Talk to him, give him my cell phone number, and let me
know what you guys find out. So we did. We waited for a few minutes, and a few minutes later,
I got a call from his attorney. And so we explained to the attorney that we did in fact
have search warrants for his DNA, his fingerprints, and his footprints, and we'd rather he consensually
come in and submit to that versus us executing the warrant and kicking his door in and possibly somebody gets hurt.
My goal at this point is to get those things as safely as I can. He agreed, and then he went to work talking with Robert
so that he could come in and meet with us consensually so that we could serve those search warrants.
So the end result was his attorney told us that we were not allowed to ask any questions of Mr. Waters,
but that he would arrange for him to surrender to us for the search warrant collection.
We showed up at his house, and he willingly came out. He was transported back by the Beaufort Police Department
to get his fingerprints taken. When he came in, we advised him, hey, we have search warrants for your fingerprints and your DNA,
and kind of explained to him the process. That at the PD there, there was no live scan
digitized fingerprinting system, so we had to roll the prints in ink. So we had to do ink and paper, and then scan them in,
and email them back to Michigan, where we had two fingerprint examiners from the Michigan State police on standby
to compare Mr. Waters prints to the prints found at the crime scene. The problem we had was trying to get those fingerprints,
which was our first best piece of evidence that we could get as quickly as possible,
verified to kind of bolster that probable cause that he committed this murder. It took numerous attempts at different parts of his fingers
to be able to get the portion of the fingerprint that we needed to make that analysis.
So in between sending those prints off and the lab techs examining those, that Detective Peterson just engaged in small talk with him.
I sat and talked with Robert for over five hours about everything but that case.
Everything from our kids and family to plumbing to remodeling houses. Anything you could possibly think of, we talked about,
and he had no hesitation about any of it. No concerns about the length of time. Five hours to someone you don't know
is a considerable amount of time. He actually seemed very calm, very pleasant, very engaging,
which kind of surprised all of us. NANCY GRACE: Later that afternoon, the detective team
in South Carolina gets the call from fingerprint technicians in Michigan, and it's the news
they've been waiting for. Detective Sergeant Tom Flowers from Michigan State Police
forensic laboratory in Grand Rapids finally called and said, hey, we've got enough.
We can say now that we have made an identification. That his fingerprints match the bloody fingerprint on the phone
found in Cathy's bedroom. I advised Detective Sergeant Smallcombe that I had just
gotten the call from the laboratory and, yep, the fingerprint matches. I immediately called our prosecuting attorney here
in Saint Joe County and advised him the fingerprint matched, and then I sent off our affidavit of probable cause
to the prosecutor. He then wrote up a complaint and authorized it, and we sent that to the magistrate.
The magistrate then reviewed it and issued a warrant for the arrest of Robert Waters for the murder of Cathy Swartz.
I walked in and Mr. Waters was sitting in the interview room there at the Beaufort Police Department,
and we'd been talking to him in just friendly chatter for the last five hours. And I advised him, I said, Mr. Waters,
do you remember those fingerprints that we took from you earlier? Those matched to the crime scene.
You are under arrest for the murder of Cathy Swartz. There was very little emotion in his response,
and I think that's what really struck all of us. He knew it was coming. If you're an innocent man and someone comes in and tells you
that you're under arrest for the murder of someone that you didn't murder, that's going to raise your blood
level a little bit, I think. Most people, it's going to be contentious. So to see him just say, OK, and literally
there's no emotional change with him, I think says a lot about his guilt. The Bloodline Detectives are convinced they've
caught Cathy Swartz's killer. Now they want to know exactly what happened in her apartment
34 years ago. That's next. [THEME MUSIC] NANCY GRACE: Three Rivers, Michigan, 2023.
Cathy Swartz's killer can finally be brought to justice 34 years and two months after he murdered her.
One of the first people to hear the news, the victim's daughter Courteney. As a baby, Courteney is found asleep in the room
next to her mom's dead body. Courteney was happy that we've identified a suspect.
I always wondered. Like, I wonder if they're still working on my mom's case. It's always in the back of your mind,
but to know that they actually were, it feels good to know that they actually cared enough.
Because it was 35 years. NANCY GRACE: Detectives cannot take Waters directly to Three Rivers, Michigan.
He's in a different state, South Carolina, and there's the formality of extraditing him from one
jurisdiction to another. We served him the warrant that day, and then the officers from the Beaufort Police Department
then transported him to the local jail there in Beaufort. NANCY GRACE: In Three Rivers, the community breathed
a collective sigh of relief. There was this looming fear that there may be a murderer around us.
Who could have done that? Are they still living here? Is it my neighbor? Is it somebody that I pass in the grocery store?
One of the things that I was told by Cathy's brother David was now I at least know that I'm not
going to walk through the grocery store and wonder if one of these people was the person that killed my sister.
NANCY GRACE: So what motivated Robert Waters to murder Cathy Swartz? I think that we all have an idea of what a murderer is,
and he just is not something that would come to mind. The question I think everybody wants to know, why?
Why did he do it? He never showed any remorse for the murder. NANCY GRACE: In the days following the arrest,
new information comes to light. It wasn't until after the arrest that we made contact with Mike, and he stated that he knew
him from elementary school. And that Robert Waters had actually stopped by his apartment out of the blue several weeks earlier.
He had been to the house at least once before. I believe it may have been more than that for Cathy
to just open the door to him. I just think a teenage boy thought he was going to get lucky, and he
didn't, and my mom fought back, and it led to him killing her. Once the arrest was made, Robert was taken to the jail.
The following day, he went through a hearing for extradition back to Michigan. He waived that, so he would be extradited back
to Michigan as soon as they could make arrangements for travel. We all flew back, came back and started
putting things in order with all the documentation. The following Saturday, May 6th, at about 6:45
in the morning, I received a phone call from Investigator Nicole Anderson from Beaufort City Police Department.
I knew something must be wrong. You know, that hour on a Saturday, and she advised me that she had just been contacted
by SLED, which is their investigative division in South Carolina. I get a text from Detective Peterson telling me
that Waters was found dead in his jail cell in Beaufort, South Carolina. The suicide of the man in custody,
the man believed to be the killer of Cathy Swartz, is a shocking development. Detectives now need to tell Cathy's daughter Courteney.
I got hold of my detective and we both agreed that, hey, we're going to need to let her know in person.
They came to my house. It was Saturday, and I knew it wasn't good because it was Saturday.
And they told me that he killed himself. And I don't believe that he deserves to be in heaven.
I don't think he deserves to be in hell. I don't think he deserves to be anywhere.
I feel like he needs to be in limbo where I am with all these questions, everything.
Like, he deserves to be where I am. When someone does that, they kind of take any of those possibilities of hearing
any of those pieces of why. A lot of times we solve the homicides, and we're able to produce enough evidence to put people in jail,
but we don't know the why. Because that's something that they hold, and that's going to be that way with this case.
We're never really going to know why. NANCY GRACE: Robert Walters unexpected death behind bars
has a ripple effect, which goes way beyond his prison cell. I think there's a lot of collateral damage.
I think it affected a lot of people in the community. There was times that there was probably
mothers afraid to let their children outside for a while. NANCY GRACE: Now police can say with certainty they
know who killed Cathy Swartz and a community can hopefully find . Peace I have a daughter the same age as Cathy was.
I think it definitely impacted me. I don't think anybody deserves to die that way.
I don't think it's fair that they took this beautiful girl away from the family.
Just be involved in it and be asked to help with it was huge for me. NANCY GRACE: For Cathy's daughter Courteney
so many questions will always remain unanswered. I know her grandparents stepped
in and raised her as their own. It still leaves that question, you know, who is my mom?
What was she like? Why isn't she here? I want to know like, her favorite color. What kind of music she listened to.
Everything. NANCY GRACE: As tragic as the murder of Cathy Swartz is, it highlights the incredible power
of investigative genetic genealogy. It's a forensic science that is empowering law enforcement
and victims to find at least some of the answers that were thought unattainable just a few years earlier.
I'm Nancy Grace. Thanks for being with us here on "Bloodline Detectives." [THEME MUSIC]

December 1988, Three Rivers, Michigan; a man comes home to find his fiancée stabbed to death. Thankfully their baby is unharmed. It will take 34 years before cutting-edge science solves the mystery of who robbed a now grown woman of her mother.

Now in its fourth season, Bloodline Detectives is the leading true crime series that explores how police departments harness genetic genealogy to solve crimes that were once considered "unsolvable," bringing long-awaited answers to victims' families.

=============== Like, comment and subscribe if you’re ready for more true crime. Your favorite shows like World’s Most Evil Killers, Meet Marry Murder, Forensic Files, Unsolved Mysteries, Murdered At First Sight and Bloodline Detectives are all available to stream 24/7 for free via the FilmRise Streaming Network. You can access The FilmRise Streaming Network through most free App Platforms and Smart TV portals such as Amazon Fire TV, The Roku Channel, Android, iOS and many more.

Brief Summary

Cathy Swartz's 1988 murder is solved using genetic genealogy, leading to suspect Robert Waters, who dies by suicide before trial.

Key points

The Murder of Cathy Swartz. Cathy Swartz, a young mother, is brutally murdered in her home, leaving her baby unharmed.
Cold Case Investigation. Years pass with no leads in Cathy's murder, leaving her family and police desperate for answers.
Breakthrough in 2022. New forensic technology leads to a breakthrough in the cold case of Cathy Swartz's murder.
Robert Waters Arrested. Detectives confirm Robert Waters' fingerprints match evidence from a 1988 murder case.
Waters Found Dead. Robert Waters, the suspect in Cathy Swartz's murder, is found dead in his jail cell.
Cathy's Daughter's Pain. Courteney reflects on her mother's murder and the unanswered questions that remain.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Who in their right mind would do that to somebody?

Nancy Grace expressing disbelief over the murder.

1:22WatchJul 30, 2024

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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