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