Mary Katherine Higdon | Murder or Self-defense?!

today's video is brought to you by bright sellers get 50 off your first six bottle box using my link below hey guys and welcome back to my channel so today i have another really controversial case for you guys one that i think you guys might disagree on maybe i think most of you are going to go one way on this one for sure today we're going to be talking about mary catherine higdon and steven freeman so first let's talk about steven he was born on january 1st 1995 and he grew up in the small town of griffin georgia he grew up with both of his parents around jennifer and troy and his brother blake and he definitely had a happy childhood you know loving family around him a large circle of friends according to people that knew him everybody liked stephen and one thing that a lot of people said about him is that he was constantly smiling and also would not hesitate to say i love you a lot which i thought was really cool and from a young age steven loved the outdoors he always wanted to be outside you know fishing hunting camping and stephen was a very chill dude his family actually said that he would outlive all of them probably because he didn't have a lot of stress that he carried you know they say stress can kill you but he was very laid back and seemed to never stress out about anything growing up stephen had a close relationship with both his parents but especially with his mom jennifer and i thought this was really sweet at one point jennifer went back to school later in her life and stephen wrote her this adorable note when she did it says to the most wonderful woman in the world and know that if you put your mind to it you can accomplish all of your hopes and dreams and more i love you to the moon and back stephen and according to his mom this was their special sign off with each other they would say i love you to the moon and back so they had a very very close bonded relationship then we have the other person in this story mary catherine hidden she was born in 1994. her family said growing up she was a very happy-go-lucky playful fun kid who was constantly performing for them putting on little plays she was always entertaining everybody in the room she's also very creative she loved animals one time she walked a frog around her neighborhood that she found with a shoelace and as you may have guessed mary katherine and stephen were dating in fact they were high school sweethearts so they have been together for a while as soon as they met they had so much in common that they quickly became inseparable one passion that they both share is that they love the outdoors they love to go camping fishing hunting together mary is a pretty rugged type of girl she's you know into guns she likes to hunt she likes to get dirty and he really loved that about her he felt like they weren't just in a relationship that they had a strong friendship as well as soon as they graduated high school they moved into their own place in griffin georgia and stephen worked as a metal worker at drain right gutters and roofing and mary catherine worked as a part-time teacher's assistant in saint george's episcopal school in milner georgia and she also worked at a local sporting goods store selling guns i'm sure some of you already know where this story will be heading so one of steven's best friends thomas skinner actually worked with her at the store for a while and he said that before selling guns all employees there were expected you know to know how to handle them to make sure they didn't accidentally shoot them off in the store make sure that they could demonstrate them correctly to the customers they learned to load and to shoot and you know basic gun safety rules as well so mary and catherine definitely knew how you know to handle gun how to load a gun and how to shoot a gun steven was also a gun enthusiast and owned at least 10 guns in fact her and steven kept a glock 42 in their home and mary catherine felt like she was actually even more into guns than stephen was and that she knew more about them and she would even brag about this to his friends so steven spent a lot of time with his really close friends at the time chase pruitt thomas skinner and andrew mckee they were really really close friends and they really cared you know who each other was dating so of course when they met mary katherine they were a bit hesitant but as soon as they got to know her they actually really liked her and they thought that she was perfect for him they loved how outdoorsy she was and how happy she was making him his friends thought it was really cool you know that she did so many things that he did as well and they just felt like they were a pretty good match at first mary katherine also got along with stephen's family his mother jennifer really loved mary katherine and said that she considered her to be like a daughter mary katherine would have dinner with them every sunday night at jennifer's house with steven's grandparents and extended family there as well so she was really part of their family so by summer of 2018 mary catherine was 24 stephen was 23 and they had been dating on and off for seven years at this point and still live together in griffin but then on august 1st 2018 a call came into 911 at 10 42 pm about a shooting victim at a house on sunny brook drive i'll try to put some of the call in for some reason youtube doesn't like 911 calls it kind of freaks them out i think but i think it's so important to the case and to understanding the case to hear these calls so i'll try to put in a little bit tommy yes ma'am i actually am not done with hayward and i'm so shocked i was like just tell my boyfriend in the night i'm just sorry so clearly this woman is hysterical um there's been a lot of debate back and forth on this 9-1-1 call some people say the call sounds like she's genuinely very scared some people say the call sounds staged but one thing's for sure she said the words i accidentally just shot my boyfriend and that's really important she had shot stephen freeman right in his chest just below the neck with her glock 42. so when officers arrived to the scene mary katherine was absolutely hysterical according to people there she could not be calmed down no one there could get her to calm down steven was lying on a mattress and she was actually like kneeling on the mattress next to him just begging over and over for you know him to live through this for him to survive saying please help me please help me over and over again as she was led away from the room she kept yelling i can't lose him i can't lose him and you know of course this is debated it's up to you what you think but some people say this is very staged it's very overdramatic some people say this is very genuine emotion that she's displaying so how did this happen according to mary mary catherine says the gun just went off as she was handing it over to steven she said that they keep it next to their bed for protection she just lifted it up to hand it to him and it accidentally went off and she said she didn't even know that it was loaded when she picked it up apparently their guns are typically not loaded in their house she said she didn't understand how the bullet could possibly hit him that she wasn't even really pointing it at him and when they got to the scene stephen actually did still have a pulse he was rushed to the hospital but unfortunately passed away a couple minutes before midnight when he got there and right off the bat officers on the scene said that they thought this was a homicide not an accident so of course they took mary katherine in for interrogation and when they started talking to her they started asking you know how was your relationship how are things going how did this all happen and she starts explaining that she loved stephen he was a love of her life and she would never never hurt him on purpose and she told them that the shooting was an accident just like what she said at the crime scene but then she changed her story she said that instead of just handing him the gun that she was tossing him the gun when it went off but the detectives right away were not buying it one of them specifically had enough experience with guns to know that it doesn't really work that way you know when you throw a gun it doesn't just go off you know someone needs to pull the trigger there needs to be intention especially to hit someone right there and the evidence at the crime scene definitely makes it seem like this was not an accident that something was going down at that house before the gun went off first of all there was food all over like all over not just on the counters like thrown they had had some type of fight where food was thrown all around their kitchen not only that they also smelled alcohol on her breath which could mean there was an argument as well so like i said right away they really don't believe her story but they get her to agree to sit down and talk to them without a lawyer and to have it all on tape as the interrogation went on they kept pushing her to tell the truth they just did not believe the story that she was just tossing him the gun that it was all an accident they believed a fight happened you know something went wrong and at one point the detectives really start yelling at her and they said this is an interrogation technique but they started screaming at her to stop lying to tell the truth and this tactic actually worked mary katherine admitted that she did it and that she did it out of anger and it was all on tape so you think at that point case closed why are we even talking about this case today well because there was a major technical difficulty after they had already arrested her on this confession and charged her with murder they go to review the tape and guess what it is absolutely [ __ ] pretty much all you can hear is feedback noise and they had no backup audio they didn't have like a little recorder in their pockets nothing even my podcast has backup audio in case the first file gets corrupted or something all they have now is their word the two detectives that were in the room versus mary catherine's word after all those hours and getting her to confess the interrogation was useless now this was definitely the best evidence that they had but it wasn't the only evidence that they had there was evidence that the gun had been loaded that night mary catherine had cooked a london broil for dinner which is very greasy this was what officers found thrown on the floor but they found that cooking grease on the magazine and the side of the gun showing that someone had loaded it after cooking dinner it also came out that police had been to their residence five times in the past year and two of those times were definitely for domestic disputes and one of them apparently was an issue related to animals which is super weird i don't exactly know what that was but the more details that they started to uncover the more they leaned towards homicide so they started interviewing people closest to mary katherine and stephen including stephen's friends and all of stephen's friends instantly said that they thought that mary katherine did it according to them she was possessive and very unstable they said that she was very verbally abusive to stephen that she was constantly yelling at him that they were constantly yelling at each other and whenever he would leave the house to try to get away from her get a break from her if they were fighting she would call him text him over and over again until he would have to block her one time he was at work he was in the car with a co-worker and they were driving to a job together and she called him according to the co-worker over 30 times while they were in the car someone's several different occasions he would get to work and before we even got to the first job he had 30 missed calls from her like she was just blowing him off the line all of his friends said that stephen was afraid of mary catherine and get this they said that she had pulled a gun on him before and that he had told all of them about it and not just once three or four times she had pulled her gun out all of them said when they heard that steven had been shot their minds instantly went to marry katherine so the police are you know gathering evidence putting together a timeline and got ready for trial and they hope to get justice for stephen and for his family who was absolutely devastated that he had passed so let's go over kind of the timeline of their relationship from what the police were able to put together leading up to the night that stephen was shot so on april 21st 2018 three months before stephen was killed he texted his friend andrew and said mk is running around screaming at the top of her lungs outside and now she's trying to shoot me and herself then a few weeks later stephen tells a friend that mary katherine had pointed a gun at him and he specifically said that when he looked in her eyes she had a specific look that she looked like she might actually shoot him that wasn't just you know for show just because they were fighting that he really thought she wanted to kill him in that moment and after this happened he went to a friend's house and you know got a break from her but he didn't end up reporting it to the police because he really loved mary katherine and didn't want her to get in trouble so things were toxic with them for a while they fought a lot and in july of 2018 it seemed that stephen may have been ready to actually leave her according to his friend thomas stephen had definitely made the decision by july that he was going to move out and he was actually planning to move to a different town and just not tell her because that's how afraid of her he was he was going to do this while she was at work you know just basically sneak away and he had actually planned to leave on august 3rd 2018 which is two days after he was shot and killed on july 30th just two days before he was shot stephen and mary catherine actually exchanged some loving text messages and they said good morning beautiful and then she said have a great day and he said you too love you but that's how their relationship was you know hot and cold that's how most toxic relationships are going back and forth between the two extremes so the next day they got into a fight and it was so bad that stephen said he just wasn't coming home and he actually told his friend that he was running from satan so that tells you how afraid of her that he was so the next night she made him a nice dinner a london broil one of his favorites she hoped that he would come home they would have dinner together talk it out and you know continue on like they always did but stephen didn't come home and he would not answer her calls that night and later when she was questioned about this she said that you know she just was irritated that she had made this meal and he wasn't coming back and she just wanted to know you know if she should start eating without him or not and that's why she was calling him off the hook she even went as far as to call steven's mom jennifer and his mom said that he was over at his friend thomas's house so of course she jumps in her car and heads off to find him so stephen and thomas had already left his house and were driving around in his truck and this is some real crazy [ __ ] [ __ ] but mary katherine spotted the truck somehow and started following them thomas said she was right up on his bumper and that she eventually pulled up to the side of the car and started screaming out the window saying are you coming home now his friend said stephen looked like he had given up and he said yes i'm coming home will you calm down and then two hours later steven was shot so it's pretty obvious what happened steven probably went home to end things with mary katherine she didn't like the fact that they weren't going gonna just have this nice dinner that she made for him you know and move on so she threw the food on the floor got her gun who knows what else exactly happened but at some point she clearly shot him the fact that he was telling his friends multiple times that she had pointed a gun at him and he was scared for his life definitely makes you think twice about her when you think about it it just all makes sense i mean she really is very familiar with how to use guns for her to say she just accidentally discharged it when she's learned all this stuff about gun safety in her life it's just extremely hard to believe but of course when it came time for the trial she had completely changed her story again she was going to be pleading not guilty and she claimed that she had to shoot stephen in self-defense mary catherine was charged with murder aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during a commission of a felony she was offered a plea deal of life in prison with the possibility of parole but she did not take this and the case went to trial and the trial wasn't too long it only took about a week for them to present both sides and mary catherine was represented by public defenders and they argued that this was self-defense they said that mary catherine was afraid of stephen because his history of abuse and since the prosecution did not have the confession tape anymore they had to rely mostly on physical evidence which isn't too much in this case but the fact that there was grease on the gun was huge it showed that it had been loaded so that was a big part of their argument they also brought in steven's friends as witnesses of course because they were so familiar with how the relationship was according to stephen and of course when you go to trial everything comes out all of their text messages search histories their conversations with each other over long periods of time and we'll go over some of that in a second but they also in a very risky move had mary catherine take the stand and this was pretty intense she told a completely different story of their relationship she alleges that she had suffered every type of abuse from stephen for years she said he had a very controlling and manipulative side that not many people knew about and she said he made her act a certain way she couldn't help but get extremely emotional and heated in times because of the way he pushed her according to her he was also very controlling and had to know where she was at all times what she spent money on what she was eating what she was doing and of course this is all her word keep in mind as i'm saying this i'm not speaking these things as if they're facts it's hard with these cases where the victim is not here to speak for themselves you know defend themselves in any way but this is what she argued in court she also said that one time while she was sitting on her bed stephen kicked her incredibly hard and actually pushed her forward off the bed and her head hit their door frame really really hard and she said she never called the police because she would end up blaming herself that she had pushed him that far to abuse her and the defense also recovered a bunch of text messages from the two of them and they're not pretty in fact there were 63 pages of very very vulgar and threatening scary messages from stephen to mary catherine that were sent the year before and apparently these messages are so brutal that the news hasn't revealed a lot of them a lot of them haven't been shared with the public because they're so bad and in one message he even sent a picture of himself holding up a dead fish and said this is you [ __ ] in another one he said i'm going to [ __ ] wreck you for wrecking me and he was actually referring to her cheating on him at one point she did cheat on him and he just went crazy over it he was so so angry steven's mom says that she had no idea that he was you know talking to a woman this way that she's not proud of the way he was talking but she said that this was out of anger i think we've all been in the position before where someone has really hurt us and we have said something mean to them that we don't mean truly not that it makes it okay what he said in any way it's very abusive but at the same time i don't know if it can be used as proof that she needed to shoot him in self-defense one of the messages that he had sent her even said the more [ __ ] you talk the more you get punished when i get home when the court asked you know what did he mean by punish she said that he would slap her grab her punch her she said that he would scream at her say why can't you just listen to me and do the things that i tell you why can't you be better he you know smacked me around sometimes he would grab me and shake me and say you know why can't you just do better and be better and just do what i tell you to do so when any time i would stand up for myself or you know kind of retaliate he said don't don't hit me because if you hit me i'm going to ditch it to numbs harder so mary katherine explained as much as she could of the relationship she explained a lot about you know how it was really controlling and toxic and when it was good it was really good but it was bad it was just bad then they revealed that steven had a red room according to mary katherine in 50 shades of grey this was a room that was used for i guess we could just say aggressive sex because i don't know what else i can say on youtube but mary catherine said that they would use this room and that he would take her in there and punish her in the red room and this is when she made a huge accusation and everyone in the court was kind of shocked and not expecting this but she said that stephen had raped her twice now of course steven is not here to defend himself so we have to go off of her word and there's really no way to know if she's telling the truth or not she said on one of these occasions they had just gotten back from a trip to walt disney world they have a great time at disney they come back and they have sex and mary katherine claims that he was being really aggressive and she wanted him to stop and asked him several times to stop and then she says that he said you know i bought you all this stuff at disneyland or disney world so you have to do what i tell you you have to give me what i deserve and then according to her he raped her and she claimed that the night that stephen died went completely different than police thought she said she broke up with him actually after making the london royal for him that's kind of weird and then he got really angry freaked out started throwing things screaming even though two hours before this he was fleeing from her and she was chasing him with her car but she said that he kept getting angrier and angrier and eventually she picked up the gun and pointed at him to scare him and she said her last words to him were get the [ __ ] out of my house and then he lunged at her and all she can remember is the gun going off she said he was standing there bleeding he's still conscious and he said call 9-1-1 and then fell down however while she was on the stand she didn't specifically talk about pulling the trigger she just talks about the lunge and then it all happened as a blur mary catherine said that she originally had lied to the police that she was just embarrassed to be a victim and mary catherine's sister also took the stand and backed her up said that she was being abused by stephen she said there were bruises on her weeks before all this happened she said at first mary catherine said that he had just grabbed her too hard but that she knew something more was going on but now let's talk forensic evidence the forensic evidence showed that mary catherine had shot him while he was sitting on the corner of their mattress he had never even moved he was sitting when he was shot and he fell back of course like i said they called up steven's friends and they all testified that she was the abusive one in the relationship not him which is hard because he did write those messages and they are horrible but according to them she was physically abusive to him and verbally abusive to him as well apparently she would hit him in the face in the chest punch him in his shoulder and they said they never saw stephen hit her that one time she slapped him and he grabbed her and said not to hit him again and that was all that they ever saw as far as physical action against her which of course things can happen behind the scenes without friends seeing it they also pointed out the obvious you know she worked with guns before she had had gun safety lessons she should know how to operate again it's very hard to believe that she would accidentally shoot one off she was constantly bragging to people about how good she was with guns and then she accidentally misfires one it doesn't really add up of course the defense said that you know steven's friends never actually saw her abusing him with their own eyes they don't have proof of it they also don't have proof of her confession obviously so according to their side she never confessed they also alleged that stephen had a drug and alcohol use problem which attributed to his violent behavior and the prosecution brought up another very important text message it was recovered from steven's phone and it said i know you pointed a gun at me a bunch of times but the last time you did it it scared the [ __ ] out of me but mary catherine said this was about shooting herself mary catherine often would threaten to commit suicide and that's one of the reasons that stephen's mother believes that stephen stayed in the relationship so long is that mary catherine would threaten to harm herself if he left the prosecution also noted that mary katherine had slightly altered or changed her story completely at least 10 times she had told everybody something different she had told the 911 operator that she was grabbing the gun and putting it next to the bed she told the first responders that she was handing it to stephen and then she goes in and tells the detectives that she had tossed it over to him and it accidentally goes off her story constantly changed but of course the fact remains that all of her interrogation footage is completely ruined and not usable and not only that you guys the murder weapon was also tampered with at the scene first responders actually had moved the gun because they were worried that mary katherine might pick it up and shoot herself which is understandable but they should have just moved mary katherine away from the gun you never touch a crime scene especially the weapon and the worst part is they didn't even take pictures of the gun in its original position before they moved it they just moved it and it's very frustrating because it's not like they came to the scene thinking it was like a suicide or something she said on the phone i shot him they should have known to handle the weapon to process the weapon correctly it makes no sense this is like the number one rule i just i don't understand so of course because mary catherine took the stand she was also cross-examined of course she was grilled about never reporting the abuse never talking to anyone about it never texting anyone about it it was very rare that she talked to anyone about it and she always spoke to people not text and then they brought up the fact that just hours before the shooting happened she was actually babysitting and while she was babysitting she was looking up really violent adult content on the computer but she claims that this was all done because she was getting ideas that that's what stephen was into and she wanted to please him and they actually argued that there's no way that someone who had had the sexual trauma that mary catherine was claiming to have would be looking up these horribly violent videos so in closing arguments they reminded the jury that mary katherine had changed her story so many times they also brought the fact that it's unlikely that if she was being abused that she would track down her abuser in their car and force them to come home it just didn't really add up and they said that you know their relationship finally hit a boiling point literally when she made that london broil and he wasn't into having dinner with her and probably told her he was planning to leave and in the defense's closing arguments they actually talked about how mary catherine had seen a face come up on stephen's face that reminded her of when he would abuse her they actually brought it a jack in the box and used it to make the point that when you know what's coming as you're winding it up you're gonna have a reaction you're gonna prepare to defend yourself because you know the dude's gonna jump out of the jack in the box i feel like it's a pretty weak comparison i see what they were going for but anyway i am so curious what you think at this point in the video the verdict is going to be before i tell you so pause it and comment below so this jury has seven women and five men and in the first few minutes of their deliberation they took a vote it was ten to two guilty the two jurors that were voting not guilty were men and they were struggling because they felt like no matter what they did they would destroy a family it's a lot of pressure to be a juror i mean i've never experienced it but i would not want to be on the jury especially for a case like this this is really really hard because no one truly knows what went on in their relationship except for them and all of the jurors said that they knew for sure that she had lied that she had shot him but it was that gray area of self-defense that kept them from staying guilty the jury talked back and forth about abusive relationships whether she would be used to lying or not they deliberated for hours after this initial vote but then the following day they came to their final verdict mary katherine higgton was found not guilty on all charges we the jury find as follows count one malice murder we find the defendant not guilty count two felony murder we find the defendant not guilty steven's family was absolutely crushed and the whole prosecution was crushed as well and felt like they had let his family down all the jury members said that they thought she did it but there was not enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt and that's why i want to know what you guys think do you think there's enough evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of course there's personal suspicion you know like saying i think she did it because of x y and z but do you think there is enough evidence to charge her with the murder so just like that mary catherine was free all the charges are dropped and on june 26 2019 she was released from jail to this day stephen's mom says that she thinks that he just did not get the justice that he deserves and she's extremely angry for how everything played out the jurors who have been interviewed since say you know it was an extremely tough call and some of them a lot of them think that she did it like i said but that they felt like it was the right decision and that there just was not enough evidence not having that confession tape just destroyed this case destroyed any possibility of justice for stephen if mary katherine hitched in really did murder him but of course some people think that she was telling the truth that they had a toxic relationship and it got too far at one point many people think that this was the right call that she does not belong in jail and that's where the case ends mary catherine moved to another state started a new life she says to this day she feels extremely guilty for what happened that she never wanted to hurt stephen and she hates how all of this ended up steven's mom is still heartbroken over the loss of her son and she still tries to raise awareness about domestic violence to this day which reminds me if you would like to purchase a planner or journal from magic vi we are running that special right now and 15 of the proceeds are going to her justice which helps women in new york specifically with some domestic violence cases they do some other things as well i will link their website below if you want to check out exactly what they do but just in case you didn't catch that in my last video i wanted to bring that up but jennifer has not spoken to mary catherine since as you can imagine it's pretty tense she says she doesn't plan to either she says there's nothing she can say to make it better and i completely understand that i'm sure she feels so much anger just about how the crime scene was processed about the fact that the audio was ruined i mean the frustration you would have over those types of mistakes i don't know how you'd really ever get over them but i really want to know what you guys think do you think the jury made the right call or i guess i have two questions one do you think she's innocent or guilty two do you think the jury made the right call regardless of what you answered for number one let me know in the comments below and before i go i wanted to tell you about today's sponsor which is a new sponsor and i'm super excited to be working with them it is bright sellers if you haven't heard of bright sellers you guys it's really really cool all you do is take their quick seven question non wine snobby quiz so that they can gather your taste preferences and deliver you wines that you're guaranteed to like i really love the ones that they picked for me it was really fun to try some ones that i wouldn't have necessarily thought to pick up or known about it makes getting a variety of wines so convenient they send the wine directly to you so no need to venture out to the liquor store the grocery store to grab bottles of wine and waste money trying new bottles that you may not even like and one thing that bright sellers prides themselves on is wine education 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Channel: Kendall Rae

Views: 1,386,135

Rating: 4.9404402 out of 5

Keywords: kendallraeonyt, kendallrae, kendall rae, mary katherin higdon, true crime, true crime documentary, true crime story, true crime daily, crime documentary, true crime stories, christian andreacchio

Id: y3-Ng4q1GDQ

Length: 33min 34sec (2014 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021