Mike Warner came home from work on a Friday afternoon in December 1988 and found blood smeared up the stairway walls of his apartment like it had been painted on.
His fianceé Kathy was dead in the bedroom doorway. Her night shirt nearly pulled off, her face covered in blood.
Their 9-month-old daughter Courtney was standing silently in her crib in the next room. Her diaper had been freshly changed.
The killer had left a bloody fingerprint on the pink bedroom phone, a bare bloody footprint on the bathroom floor.
The bathwater was still running. He had showered, changed his clothes, and walked out the front door of the Riverside Townous’s apartment on East Hoffman Street in Three Rivers, Michigan.
For 35 years, Mike Warner lived with the wreckage of that afternoon. The drinking, the guilt, the jobs he couldn’t hold, the question that never stopped circling in his head.
Who could have done this to Kathy? And then in 2023, detectives told him the fingerprint belonged to someone he had known his entire life.
Someone he had built forts with as a kid. Someone he had bumped into at the grocery store just a month before Kathy died and invited over to the apartment for a visit.
His childhood best friend. This is the story of Kathy Sue Schwarz, the 19-year-old mother from a small Michigan town who was murdered inside her own home while her baby slept down the hall.
The killer who hid in plain sight for three and a half decades. And the bloody fingerprint on a pink bedroom phone that waited 35 years for science to catch up.
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You won’t want to miss what’s coming. Now, let’s go back to the beginning. Because before Kathy Schwarz became a case number in a filing cabinet at the Three Rivers Police Department, she was a girl from a tiny farming village who loved horses, hunted with her dad, and dreamed about bigger things.
20 years before that bloody fingerprint ended up on a bedroom phone in Three Rivers, Kathy Sue Schwarz was born on May 24th, 1969 in Mend, Michigan.
Mend sits on a bend of the St. Joseph River in the southwest corner of the state about 20 mi south of Kalamazoo and a short drive from the Indiana border.
It is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody. Farmland stretches flat in every direction.
The graduating class at Mend High School was so small it barely filled two pages of the yearbook.
Kathy grew up on a 2acre farm with her parents David and Audrey Schwarz. Her father ran the pro shop at the local bowling alley.
Her mother, who everyone called Auggie, was the kind of woman who held the family together.
Kathy joined the Girl Scouts and 4H. And by the time she was 8 years old, she had her own pony.
She was a talented artist who could draw just about anything. Friends and family described her as sweet, caring, confident, and well-loved.
She called herself a tomboy, and she meant it. She went hunting with her father every season and loved every minute of it.
Her lifelong friend, Jennifer Outman, later described the kind of closeknet world they grew up in.
Mend was small enough that the kids all knew each other by name, and the parents all knew each other’s business.
If you needed something, you asked a neighbor. If your kid was acting up, someone else’s mom would set them straight before you even heard about it.
The kind of town where bad things just did not happen. Or so everyone believed.
Kathy had a big brother, David Schwarz Jr., and the two of them grew up the way farm kids in rural Michigan do.
Riding bikes on dirt roads, helping out with chores, spending summers outside until the sun went down.
Kathy was especially close with her father. David Senior was the kind of dad who took his daughter hunting, not because he wanted a son, but because she wanted to go.
She loved it. She was good at it. And she was never the kind of girl who needed to be told she could do something.
She just did it. Before Cathy’s senior year, her family moved to Three Rivers, a slightly larger town just up the road with a population of around 8,000 people.
Three Rivers sits where the St. Joseph River meets the Rocky and Portage rivers. It was founded in the 1830s and grew up around paper mills and small factories.
By the late 1980s, it was a quiet workingclass community where people went to work at the plants, bowled on weekday nights, and looked out for their neighbors.
It was not the kind of place where young women got murdered in their apartments.
Kathy did not finish high school. She dropped out and in March of 1988 at the age of 18, she gave birth to a daughter she named Courtney.
She worked briefly at a grocery store and then at a Burger King trying to make things work as a young single mother.
And then in September of 1988, she met Mike Warner. Warner worked at a paper plant called Lakeland Paper in Sturgis, a town about 15 mi east of Three Rivers.
He was steady, hardworking, and he fell for Kathy quickly. She fell for him just as fast.
He moved in with her and Courtney at the apartment in Riverside Townous, a cluster of brick and aluminum sided rental units on East Hoffman Street on the edge of town.
It was a modest two-story unit, nothing fancy, but it was theirs. Warner treated Courtney like his own daughter.
The three of them felt like a family. By November 10th, 1988, just 2 months after they started dating, Warner came home with flowers and asked Kathy to marry him.
She said yes. She was 19 years old. She had a baby, a job, and a man who loved her.
For the first time since Courtney was born, things were falling into place. They were engaged for exactly 22 days.
Their last evening together was Thursday, December 1st, 1988. They ate fish and chips. They played board games.
Sorry, and payday at the kitchen table. Kathy left love notes for Warner around the apartment, the way she always did, just little scraps of paper with the kind of things a 19-year-old in love writes when she thinks she has her whole life ahead of her.
She had no idea that by the time the sun went down the next day, she would be gone.
If you believe victims like Kathy deserve to be remembered for who they were and not just how their stories ended, this is the channel for you.
Hit that subscribe button so you never miss one of these cases. Friday, December 2nd, 1988.
Three Rivers, Michigan. The temperature hovered near freezing. It was the kind of gray, still morning that settles over southwest Michigan in early December and does not lift until spring.
[music] Mike Warner woke up early that Friday morning, the way he always did. Around 5:25, he kissed Kathy goodbye.
She was still in her night shirt, still half asleep. Baby Courtney was in her crib in the next room.
Warner grabbed his things and drove east to Sturgis for his shift at [music] the paper plant.
He had no way of knowing that he had just seen Kathy alive for the last time.
Sometime during the hours that followed, while Warner was at work and Courtney was in her crib, someone entered the apartment at Riverside Townous.
There were no signs of forced entry, no [music] kicked in doors, no broken windows.
The lock was undamaged. Whoever came through that door, Kathy almost certainly let them in.
She knew her killer. The attack began downstairs. Blood drops in the kitchen told investigators the violence started on the first floor [music] and moved upward.
The medical examiner later determined that Kathy had been beaten for an extended period, perhaps as long as 15 minutes based on the [music] pattern of bruising.
She was strangled by hand and then her throat was cut in three places. The deepest wound was more than 2 in [music] deep, severing her right corateed artery and her right internal jugular vein.
She had defensive wounds on her hands, which meant [music] she fought back. She fought hard.
And then the killer did something that still unsettles investigators to this day. He changed [music] Courtney’s diaper, the baby who had been in the next room the entire time.
He changed her diaper, placed her back in the crib, and left her there alive and unharmed.
Lead detective Kenny Baker later developed a theory that the killer had repositioned Cathy’s body in the bedroom doorway, turning her 180° so that she faced the door of the baby’s room, as if he wanted her to see the crib.
The reasons behind that detail have never been explained, and now they never will be.
The killer then walked into the bathroom. He turned on the bath. He washed the blood off his body.
He left a single bare bloody left footprint on the bathroom floor size 9. And at some point, either before or after he cleaned himself up, he picked up the pink telephone in the bedroom.
Its cord had been cut. And when he set it back down, he left behind a single bloody fingerprint.
He walked out the front door and disappeared. Warner came home from work around 3:30 that afternoon.
He walked in the front door carrying the kind of easy exhaustion you carry after a long shift at a paper plant, expecting to find Kathy and Courtney doing what they always did on a Friday afternoon.
Instead, he stepped inside and saw drops of blood on the foyer floor. Then he looked up the staircase.
Blood was smeared along the walls, thick and deliberate, like it was painted on. He would later say.
He ran up the stairs and found Kathy in the bedroom doorway. He ran to a neighbor’s apartment to call 911.
Then he went back inside and climbed the stairs again, past the blood on the walls, past the bedroom where Cathy’s body lay, and into the nursery.
Courtney was standing in her crib, silent, [music] staring at nothing. Her diaper was clean.
She had been in that crib for hours [music] alone in the apartment with her dead mother.
The call went out across the Three Rivers Police Department and the response was immediate.
Within hours, Riverside Townous was surrounded by police cruisers, crime scene tape, and the kind of controlled chaos that a small town department musters when the worst thing anyone can remember happens on a quiet residential street.
Neighbors came out of their units and stood in the cold, watching. Word spread through three rivers the way it does in any town that size.
By nightfall, everyone knew Kathy Schwarz was dead. Someone had killed her inside her apartment and the killer was gone.
The Three Rivers Police Department called in Michigan State Police crime scene technicians immediately. First responder Mike Mooney, who would later become a detective sergeant himself, described the apartment as containing every adjective you could think of for describing a brutal, violent scene.
Technicians deployed a handheld alternate light source wand, a piece of technology so new that it was the first time the unit had used it in the field.
Under the ultraviolet glow, writing appeared on the refrigerator that was invisible to the naked eye.
The words Metallica and Harley was here fluores on the surface. Someone had written them in marker at some point and then wiped them off, but the chemical residue remained.
Retired crime scene technician Ken Linga later said it was the only case in his entire career in which he compared bare footprints.
The evidence was rich. A fingerprint, a footprint, DNA in the killer’s own blood. In a town of 8,000 people, investigators were confident.
They expected a fast arrest. This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected.
3 days after the murder, on December 5th, 1988, police arrested Troy Schulties. He was Cathy’s ex-boyfriend.
He was a Metallica fan. His nickname was Harley after his love of Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
The writing on the refrigerator seemed to point directly at him. For a moment, it looked like the case was all but closed.
Schulties admitted he had written Metallica and Harley on the refrigerator months earlier during a visit using a red marker.
He said he wiped it off afterward, which explained why the words only appeared under the alternate light source.
But he denied killing Kathy. He denied being anywhere near the apartment on December 2nd.
On December 14th, 9 days after his arrest, Troy Schulties was released. His fingerprints did not match the bloody print on the phone.
But in a town the size of three rivers, the damage was already done. Everyone had heard about the arrest.
Everyone had their own theory. And even though the physical evidence cleared Schulty’s completely, the whispers followed him everywhere he went for the next 35 years.
His mother later said the rumors and the staires turned him into a hermit. He dropped out of high school.
He could barely function in the community that had already convicted him in their minds.
Troy Schulties was never charged, never tried, and never guilty. But he spent decades paying for a crime he did not commit.
I mean, think about that for a second. A man loses the best years of his life to suspicion because he happened to like Metallica and owned a Harley.
Meanwhile, the actual killer was settling into a new life in another state, building a career, raising children, going about his days as if nothing had happened.
The wrong man was drowning in suspicion while the right man was swimming free. Some investigators on the case, including Baker’s original partner, remained convinced for years that Schulties was involved, possibly with the help of his father.
But Schulty’s father died before his prince could ever be obtained. The funeral home refused to release them without a warrant, and detectives never pursued one.
That thread went cold along with everything else. Investigators moved on to other suspects. Michael Howard, who was identified as Courtney’s biological father through a paternity test on December 6th, was quickly cleared by his fingerprints and a solid alibi.
Warner, the fiance, had been at work all day. His prince did not match. His alibi was ironclad.
Police pressed him anyway for years because that is what detectives do when they are out of leads.
They go back to the people closest to the victim and push harder. The FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime produced a behavioral profile of the killer.
Local male, 15 to 25 years old, immature, a loner, someone who knew Kathy. And here is the detail that would later prove eerily prophetic.
The FBI profiler suggested the killer might be the last person on Earth that people who knew Kathy would ever suspect.
That profile was accurate in almost every respect, but it would take 35 years and a technology that did not yet exist to prove it.
The investigation did not slow down after Schulty’s was released. It accelerated. Detectives launched one of the most exhaustive fingerprinting campaigns in Michigan history.
They printed over a thousand people in Three Rivers and the surrounding area. High school classmates, co-workers, neighbors, registered sex offenders, anyone who had even a tangential connection to Cathy or the apartment complex.
When suspects died before they could be printed, investigators went to funeral homes and printed the corpses.
The St. Joseph County prosecutor at the time, Jeffrey Middleton, offered informal leniency on unrelated minor charges to anyone who could identify the fingerprint.
It was a desperate move and it did not work. Nobody knew whose print it was.
3,000 more names remained on the list of people who still needed to be [music] printed, but the leads were drying up and the resources were running thin.
Detective Kenny Baker, the lead investigator, refused to let go. He staked out Cathy’s grave at Mend Cemetery for 6 months, sitting in his car in the cold, watching, hoping the killer would feel the pull to visit.
He set up a hidden video camera near the headstone around the 1-year anniversary. Nobody came.
Police explored the possibility that a serial killer was responsible. Two eerily similar murders had occurred in Indiana within the following year.
In August 1989, Lisa Copanakis was murdered in Portage, Indiana. In October 1989, Sherry Hair was killed in Warren, Indiana.
Both were young women. Both were murdered on Fridays. Both had throat wounds. The similarities were striking, but investigators could never definitively connect them to the Schwarz case.
And then there was the evidence that disappeared. Over the years, critical materials went missing from the case files.
Crime scene video, interview tapes, bloody shower curtains collected from the bathroom, lifted fingerprints. The kind of losses that happened slowly in an underfunded department over three decades, but losses that would have been devastating if the case ever went to trial.
But here is the detail that hurts the most. Buried somewhere in the thousands of pages of the Schwarz case file was a single line, one mention, one name.
Robert Waters. He had been inside the apartment about a month before the murder. Warner had bumped into him at a grocery store, an old childhood friend, [music] and invited him and his girlfriend over for a visit.
When investigators followed up, Waters told them he had already moved to Arizona by December, gone before the murder happened.
The detectives took him at his word. They crossed his name off the list. They never took his fingerprints.
They never asked for a DNA sample. They moved on. This decision seemed small at the time.
It wasn’t. As the years passed, the Schwarz case settled into the kind of cold case purgatory that small town police departments know all too well.
The file sat in a cabinet. Detectives retired. [music] New officers came on. Chiefs came and went.
Thomas Bringman served as chief for years, eventually retiring in 2021, [music] carrying the Schwarz case with him into retirement like a weight he could never set down.
Prosecutor Jeffrey Middleton, who had spent more time on the case than any other in his career, eventually became a St.
Joseph County District [music] Judge. He left the prosecutor’s office knowing the biggest case of his career was still unsolved.
And then there [music] was Kenny Baker, the detective who staked out the grave. The detective who printed [music] a thousand people.
The man who gave more of himself to the Schwarz case than anyone else in the department.
Baker developed cancer in the years after the investigation stalled. He fought it the same way he fought every lead in the case.
Stubbornly and for as long as he could. He lost. Kenny Baker died without ever knowing whose bloody fingerprint was on that phone.
The answer was in the file he had built with his own hands, buried in a single line on a single page, and he never found it.
The case became part of the institutional DNA of the Three Rivers Police Department. Not just memory, training.
Every new officer who joined the department was walked through the Schwarz [music] case during field training.
They read the file. They studied the evidence. [music] They learned about the fingerprint, the footprint, the thousand people who were printed, and the zero matches.
It was the case that defined the department. The open wound, the one they could not close, the one that reminded every rookie walking through the door that sometimes the job is not about solving cases.
Sometimes it is about carrying them. And in the homes around Three Rivers, the fear never fully went away.
Kathy’s best friend, Jennifer Alman, slept with a machete under her mattress for years after the murder.
This is a small town, she said. Nothing bad like that happened before. The killer could be anyone.
He could be the man behind you in line at the grocery store. He could be your neighbor.
And without a name to attach to the fingerprint, that fear had nowhere to go.
The detectives who worked this case never stopped pushing. And this channel exists to tell these exact [music] stories, where patience and persistence finally paid off.
If you want to follow cases where justice was delayed but never denied, hit subscribe and tap the bell so you are the first to know when the next one drops.
While the Schwarz [music] case file gathered dust in the Three Rivers Police Department, the world outside was changing in ways that would eventually crack it wide open.
In 2020, Western Michigan University launched its cold case program in partnership with the Michigan State Police.
Directed by criminal justice professor Dr. Ashlin Curston, the program assigned teams of college students to real unsolved cases.
The students were not there to play detective. They were there to do something detectives in 1988 never had the resources to do.
Organize. The Schwarz case file was massive. Over 10,000 documents, handwritten interview notes, typed reports, lab results, suspect lists, tips called in by neighbors, 35 years of accumulated paper from an investigation that had been touched by dozens of officers across Bobber across multiple agencies.
The students scanned every page. They organized the documents into a searchable digital database. They built timelines.
They compiled suspect indexes. They turned a mountain of paper into something a modern investigator could actually navigate.
It was the kind of work that does not make headlines. No dramatic breakthroughs, no DNA hits, just a team of undergraduates in a university classroom in Kalamazoo scanning and tagging and cross- referencing page by page, week after week for months.
They were criminal justice students. Many of them were not much older than Kathy had been when she died.
And they were handling the evidence of her murder with the kind of care that the case had always deserved, but never quite received from the systems meant to solve it.
What they created was something no investigator in 1988 could have imagined. A digital searchable record of every interview, every tip, every lead, every dead end.
For the first time, a detective could search for a name across all 10,000 pages in seconds instead of flipping through boxes of paper for days.
The students found buried connections that had been invisible inside the chaos of the original file.
Timelines that did not match, statements that contradicted each other, small details that gained new weight when you could see them side by side instead of scattered across 35 years of accumulated paperwork.
Without that work, what happened next might never have been possible. In January 2022, Scott Bowling became the new chief of police in Three Rivers.
One of the first things his officers told him about was the Schwarz case. It was still part of field training, still the department’s open wound.
Bowling had a daughter around the same age Kathy had been when she was murdered, and the case hit him differently than most.
He made it a personal priority. Then came the phone call that changed everything. In May 2022, Sergeant Joel Schultz, the DNA director at the Michigan State Police Crime Lab in Grand Rapids, contacted the Three Rivers Department.
A cold case grant had become available. It could fund something called forensic genetic genealogy, a technology that had only existed for a few years and was already transforming cold case investigations across the country.
The DNA from the bloody fingerprint on Cathy’s pink bedroom phone had been preserved, frozen, stored for over three decades, and it was still viable.
That sample had already been entered into Cotus, the FBI’s combined DNA index system back in March 2012.
It came back with no match. The reason was simple and infuriating. The killer had never been arrested.
He had never been convicted of anything. He had never provided a DNA sample for any reason anywhere in his entire life.
In every law enforcement database in the country, he simply did not exist. COTUS works by comparing crime scene DNA against profiles of known offenders.
People get into COTUS when they are arrested, convicted, or required by law to submit a sample.
If a person has never entered the criminal justice system, their DNA is simply not in the database.
It does not matter how strong the evidence is. It does not matter how clean the sample is, you cannot find someone who is not there.
And Robert Waters was not there. He had never been arrested, never been convicted, never been required to give a sample for any reason.
For 35 years, the killer had lived a clean, unremarkable, invisible life. And that clean life was his greatest defense.
The system that was supposed to catch him could only work if he stumbled. And he never stumbled.
Forensic genetic genealogy works differently. Instead of searching for a direct match in a criminal database, it builds a DNA profile from hundreds of thousands of genetic markers, far more than the roughly 20 markers used in a standard CODS test.
That expanded profile is then uploaded to public genealogical databases. The kind of databases that millions of ordinary people have voluntarily submitted their own DNA to in order to trace their ancestry and find distant relatives.
By identifying distant cousins and then working backward through birth, marriage, and death records, genealogologists can construct a family tree that narrows the suspect pool from millions of possibilities to a handful of names.
The frozen DNA sample from Cathy’s phone was sent to Oram, a forensic genealogy laboratory headquartered in the Woodlands, Texas, a masterplanned community north of Houston.
Aram was founded in 2018 [music] and had already helped law enforcement agencies across the country solve cases that had been cold for decades.
It was the same lab that had recently helped identify a suspect in the 1987 murder of Roxanne Wood in nearby Niles Township, Michigan.
For the first time in 35 years, the investigation had forward momentum. In January 2023, delivered its results to the Three Rivers Police Department and the Michigan State Police.
The DNA profile from the bloody fingerprint on Cathy’s phone belonged to one of four sons of John and Judith Waters.
The Waters family had lived just north of Three Rivers. Four brothers. One of them had left a bloody fingerprint on a dead woman’s phone in 1988.
The question was which one? Detective Sergeant Sam Smallcom of the Three Rivers Police Department and Michigan State Police Detective Sergeant Todd Peterson took the lead on what would become the most methodical elimination process in the history of the department.
They needed to work through each brother carefully. Eliminate them by DNA, one at a time.
The first elimination was the easiest. One of the four brothers already had his DNA in Cotus from a prior legal matter.
His profile was already on file. It did not match the crime scene profile from the bloody fingerprint.
He was ruled out immediately. Three brothers left. Two of the remaining brothers were still living in Michigan.
Detectives approached them and [music] asked for voluntary DNA samples. This is always a delicate moment in an investigation.
You are walking up to someone and asking them to provide evidence that could link them or their family to a murder.
Some people refuse. Some people lawyer up. Some people disappear. These two brothers did none of those things.
Both agreed to provide samples without hesitation. One of them, Sonnie Waters, sat down for a recorded video interview and offered a mouth swab openly.
“I’d love to help any way I can,” he said on camera. Get justice done.
Whether he realized what the implications of that DNA test might mean for one of his brothers is something only he knows.
The DNA from both brothers came back negative. Neither [music] of them was the killer.
One brother left. That left the only one who had never been tested, the only one who had never been fingerprinted, [music] the only one who had left Michigan before the murder and never come back.
The one whose name had been sitting in the case file [music] for 35 years, crossed off with a single stroke because he told police he was already gone.
Robert Odell Waters. Pay attention to this next detail because it [music] explains everything. Robert Waters’s name was already in the Schwarz case file.
It had been there since 1988. A single mention buried [music] in 10,000 pages. He had visited the apartment with his girlfriend about a month before Kathy was killed.
After Warner ran into him at a grocery store and invited his old friend over.
When investigators followed up, Waters said he had moved to Arizona in September 1988. He was gone before December.
The detectives took him at his word and moved on without ever collecting his prints or his DNA.
If they had printed him in 1988, the case would have been solved in days.
Detective Smallcom said it plainly after the case was closed. Without forensic genetic genealogy, they would have never solved it.
Waters had managed to keep himself completely clean for 35 years. No arrests, no criminal record, [music] no DNA in any database.
He had never given law enforcement a single reason to look at him. But now they were looking.
Robert Odell Waters was 53 years old. He lived with his wife Julie in Buford, South Carolina, a small coastal city in the Low Country about halfway between Charleston and Savannah.
Bowford is the kind of town that shows up on best small towns in America lists live oaks draped in Spanish moss, antabbellum architecture, marshes [music] that stretch to the horizon.
It is a long way from the flat farmland and paper mills of Three Rivers, Michigan.
Since 1999, Robert [music] B. Robert and Julie Waters had operated a plumbing business called Waters Plumbing of the Low Country.
He told detectives he had once run as many as six trucks before the 2008 economic downturn [music] forced him to scale back.
He was a married father of two. He lived [music] in a gated community with a tennis court, walking trails, and a community dock, the kind of neighborhood where retirees and professionals settle into comfortable, quiet lives.
His home was valued at roughly half a million dollars. He attended church. He had no criminal record in Michigan or South Carolina.
Not a single arrest, not a single incident. In 35 years of adult life, Robert Waters had never given anyone a reason to look at him twice.
His brother Sony later told investigators that Robert had gotten into trouble as a juvenile.
Enough trouble to be sent to a juvenile facility at some point during his youth.
When Robert married, his wife made a decision that would shape the next three decades of both their lives.
[music] She moved him out of Michigan. “You’re not going to hang around here because it’s not good for you,” Sony recalled her saying.
And Robert never came back. Over 800 miles from the apartment where Kathy Schwarz died.
Over three decades removed from the morning, a bloody fingerprint was left on a pink phone, living a completely unremarkable life.
And the DNA [music] said he was the one. Sunday morning, April 30th, 2023, [music] around 7:40 in the morning, detectives Smallcom and Peterson stood on the front porch of a half million dollar home in a gated community in Bufort, South Carolina, and knocked on the door.
Robert Waters answered. The detectives did not tell him why they were really there. They gave him a cover story.
They said they were cleaning up old interviews, people who had left Michigan a long time ago, routine stuff, nothing to worry about.
Waters agreed to come down to the local police station to talk. And then he did not show up right away.
There was a recorded phone call. Waters contacted an attorney. The attorney called the detectives and asked a question that tells you everything you need to know about what was running through Robert Waters mind at that moment.
The attorney asked whether it was too late for him to run. The detective’s answer was immediate.
Yeah, that would be a mistake. [music] Investigators executed search warrants for W’s DNA, fingerprints, and footprints.
[music] They printed him three times to ensure the comparison would be precise enough to withstand courtroom scrutiny and then began one of the most agonizing weights in the history of the Three Rivers Police Department.
Robert Waters spent more than 7 hours inside the Buford Police Department that day. 7 hours.
[music] Think about what that weight must have felt like on both sides of the conversation.
Waters sat there making small talk with the detectives, casual conversation, the weather in South Carolina, his plumbing business, how he used to run six trucks before the 2008 economic crash forced him to downsize, the back injury he suffered in 2018 that still gave him trouble.
He talked about his life in Buoffort, his wife, his home. The kind of ordinary domestic details a man shares when he is trying very hard to look like he has nothing to hide.
Or perhaps the kind of details a man shares when he is trying to hold on to the last hours of the life he built before it all comes crashing down.
The detective sat across from him and listened. They asked follow-up questions. They kept the conversation going.
They were not there to interrogate him. Not yet. They were there to wait because 700 m north in a forensic laboratory inside the Michigan State Police Crime Facility, examiners were comparing the fingerprints they had taken from Robert Waters that morning to the single bloody fingerprint lifted from Kathy Schwarz’s pink bedroom phone on December 2nd, 1988.
The comparison process was painstaking. The examiners needed absolute [music] certainty. This was a 35-year-old cold case with a single suspect, no confession, and a fingerprint that would have to stand up in a courtroom.
They printed him three times that morning to make sure the reference samples were clean and precise.
And then they went to work. Around 5:45 that evening, after more than 10 hours of forensic analysis, the call came in from Michigan.
The fingerprint matched. Detective Smallcom told Waters that the St. Joseph County prosecutor had authorized a warrant.
Robert Odell Waters was placed under arrest for the open murder of Kathy Sue Schwarz.
And if you’re wondering whether it was just the fingerprint, it wasn’t. His footprint matched the bloody size 9 print from the bathroom floor.
His DNA matched the blood profile recovered from the scene. Three independent pieces of forensic evidence collected in 1988 and preserved for 35 years all pointed to the same man.
Triple confirmation. St. Joseph County prosecutor David Marvin signed the charges. Marvin had been a middle school kid in the area when Kathy was murdered in 1988.
He remembered the case. He remembered the fear. He never imagined he would be the one to prosecute it.
Waters was charged with open murder, which under Michigan law can carry a sentence of life in prison.
[music] He waved extradition, meaning he agreed to be transported back to Michigan to face trial.
The St. Joseph County Sheriff’s Office under Sheriff Jason Bingaman began arranging the logistics of bringing him home.
For the first time in 35 years, the Schwarz case had a name, a face, and a [music] suspect in custody.
And the name was the one nobody expected. Not a stranger, not a drifter, [music] not one of the sex offenders who had been printed and cleared during the original investigation.
Not Troy Schulties, the man an entire town had quietly blamed for three decades. The man sitting in a jail cell in South Carolina was the childhood best friend of the man who found Cathy’s body.
[music] The boy who had grown up with Mike Warner. The boy who had built forts with him and slept over at his house.
The man who sat on Warner’s couch in November 1988, a month before the murder, and looked around the apartment.
Who met Kathy? Who met the baby? Who shook Warner’s hand on the way out the door and said goodbye?
Remember the FBI profile from 1988? A local male, someone who knew the victim, someone who might be the last person on Earth that acquaintances would suspect.
[music] The profiler nailed it. The profile described Robert Waters almost perfectly. And for 35 years, nobody connected the dots.
And somehow it gets worse. Robert Waters was held at the Buoffort County Detention Center in South Carolina while deputies from the St.
Joseph County Sheriff’s Office in Michigan prepared to make the 800mile drive south to pick him up.
The plan was to retrieve him on Monday, May 8th, 2 days away. He just had to sit in a cell for a weekend.
He was placed in general population. He was not put on suicide watch. The Buoffort County Detention Center is operated by a private organization.
And from everything the staff could see at intake. Waters was a 53-year-old man with no criminal history, no documented mental health concerns, and no prior incarceration.
He had just been [music] arrested on an outofstate warrant. There was no documented reason to flag him for heightened observation.
He was by every standard measure a lowrisk inmate. On the morning of Saturday, May 6th, 2023, 5 days and 8 hours after his arrest, corrections officers at the Bufort County Detention Center found Robert Waters unresponsive in his cell during a routine check.
He had hanged himself with a bed sheet tied to the top bunk. He was alone.
Life-saving efforts were attempted on the scene. They failed. Robert Odell Waters was pronounced dead.
On the small table in his cell, guards found three Bible-based devotional pamphlets. From bitterness to forgiveness, the power of forgiveness and discovering creation.
Whether those pamphlets represented genuine remorse, a performance for anyone who might find them, or simply the kind of reading material that jails stock in every cell block, nobody will ever know.
The death occurred around a shift change at the detention center. The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, known as SLED, took over the investigation into the in custody death.
They reviewed jail surveillance footage [music] and examined the physical evidence. Their conclusion was that the injuries were self-inflicted.
There was nothing suspicious. Nobody else was involved. Prosecutor David Marvin did not mince words.
He called the suicide an act of cowardice. I think that he one admitted that he did it, Marvin told reporters, and two admitted that he’s a coward.
Marvin said he had not been worried about proving what happened. The DNA, the fingerprint, and the footprint were overwhelming.
What he wanted was the answer to a question that now could never be asked in open court.
Why? Why did Robert Waters kill Kathy Schwarz? What happened inside that apartment that morning?
What was his motive? I’m afraid we may never know, Marvin said. And there it is.
The contradiction at the center of this case that will never be resolved. Robert Waters told police in 1988 that he had moved to Arizona in September of that year, 3 months before the murder.
His daughter was born in the Phoenix area in January 1989, which supports the timeline of a move in the fall.
If he was living in Arizona by September, how did his blood, his fingerprint, and his bare footprint end up inside a Three Rivers apartment in December?
There are only two possible explanations. Either he lied about when he left Michigan and he was still in the Three Rivers area in early December 1988, or he did move to Arizona in September, and then for reasons only he would ever know, came back to Michigan in December, came back to the town he had left, [music] went to the apartment of his childhood friend’s fiance, and killed her.
Both possibilities raise questions that cannot be answered. If he lied about when he left, why did the original detectives believe him without verifying?
If he came back, what brought him back? Was it planned? Was it impulsive? Did something happened during that visit a month earlier that set something in motion?
Nobody will ever know. When detectives arrested him on April 30th, Waters invoked his right to an attorney.
He was never formally interviewed about the murder. He never explained himself. He never confessed.
He never denied it. He said nothing at all. And then 6 days later, he was dead.
The Three Rivers Police Department declared the case of Kathy Sue Schwarz officially solved and closed in May 2023.
Police Chief Scott Bowling, the man who had made the case his personal priority just 16 months earlier, stood before reporters and delivered the news.
The evidence was definitive. The fingerprint matched, the footprint matched, the DNA matched. The suspect was identified beyond any reasonable doubt.
Robert Waters acted alone. There were no co-conspirators. There were no other suspects. The case was closed, but solved and answered are not the same thing.
The file is closed. The questions are not. And for the people who loved Kathy Schwarz, the absence of a motive is its own kind of wound.
Knowing who is not the same as knowing why. Courtney Schwarz was 9 months old on the day her mother was murdered.
She grew up not knowing who had killed the woman who gave birth to her.
She was raised by Cathy’s parents, David and Audrey Schwarz, on the same kind of quiet Michigan property where Kathy herself had grown up.
The grandparents who stepped in and gave Courtney a childhood. David and Audrey Schwarz both died before the case was solved.
Think about what that means. Two parents who buried their 19-year-old daughter, who took in their granddaughter and raised her as their own, who lived every day knowing that the man who murdered Kathy was out there somewhere, free, unpunished, unnamed.
They waited their entire lives for a name, [music] an arrest, a trial, some form of justice for their daughter.
They went to their graves without it. The answer came two, five, maybe 10 years too late for the people who needed it most.
Courtney grew up in their care. She went to school. She grew into adulthood carrying a story that nobody should have to carry.
The baby who survived, the daughter of a murdered teenager, the girl who spent her childhood knowing that somewhere out there, the person who killed her mother was walking free.
She became a mother herself, which must have given her a new and terrible understanding of what Kathy had done that morning in the apartment.
The choice to stay and fight instead of running. The choice to protect the baby upstairs at the cost of her own life.
Courtney built a quiet life working as an activities assistant at a rehabilitation center in Ohio.
And in 2023, 35 years after she stood in a crib while her mother’s killer showered in the next room, she finally got the phone call.
In a later interview, Courtney spoke about what the resolution meant to her. I have been living with this for 36 years.
She said, “They solved this case with DNA, so I can close this book and open up my own book with my own kids, and there’s no words for that.”
She said she is convinced her mother died trying to protect her. That Kathy could have run outside and screamed for help, but her baby was upstairs.
She was not going to leave that apartment without Courtney. “I feel like she would have just ran outside and yelled,” Courtney [music] said.
“But I was upstairs and she wasn’t going to leave that apartment without me.” She called Robert Waters a coward.
She said his suicide left her more in limbo than she had been before he was identified.
She wondered out loud whether he had done this to anyone else, whether there were other victims in other states across all those quiet decades.
Jennifer Outman, Cathy’s childhood friend from Mend was furious about one thing above all else.
Robert Waters’s name was in the case file. He had been in the apartment a month before the murder and nobody ever took his fingerprints.
That’s a big mess up, she said. A big issue. If a single detective in 1988 had crossed the room and pressed Robert W’s fingers against an ink pad, the case would have been closed within a week.
Troy Schulties would never have been arrested. Mike Warner would never have spent years being interrogated about the murder of the woman he loved.
And the family would not have waited 35 years for a name. Mike Warner. The man who found Kathy.
The man who carried Courtney out of that apartment on December 2nd, 1988. The man who came home expecting fish and chips and board games and instead found blood on the walls and the love of his life dead in the doorway.
He told interviewers that the murder turned him into an alcoholic. He could not process what he had seen.
He could not outrun it. He struggled for years. He could not hold down a job.
[music] The trauma of what he saw in that bedroom doorway reshaped the rest of his life in ways that no amount of therapy or time could fully repair.
35 years is a long time to carry that weight. And Warner carried it alone because nobody around him could truly understand what it was like to walk up those stairs and find what he found.
And then decades later, he learned that the person who did it was someone he had trusted since childhood.
Someone he had built forts [music] with, someone he had slept over at as a kid, someone he had bumped into at the grocery store a month before Kathy died and thought, “Hey, it would be nice to catch up.”
He invited Robert Waters into his home. He introduced him to Kathy, and a month later, Kathy was dead.
Warner never suspected his childhood friend. Not once, not in 35 years. Troy Schulties, arrested [music] 3 days after the murder, released 10 days after that, cleared by physical evidence, and then condemned by his own community for the next three decades.
His mother watched her son withdraw from the world because an entire town believed he was a murderer.
Schultis is another victim of this case. Not the primary one, but a real one.
Detective Smallcom reflected on what the resolution meant for the community of Three Rivers. He said the Schwarz family no longer had to wonder whether the killer was walking among them at the grocery store.
That simple statement carries more weight than it might seem. For 35 years, the people of Three Rivers lived with the knowledge that someone in their midst or someone who had once walked their streets had committed the worst [music] act of violence in their town’s history.
And nobody knew who it was. Mothers locked their doors at night and wondered. Fathers looked at the men in line at the hardware store and wondered.
Cathy’s [music] friends grew up, had children of their own, and still wondered. Now they knew.
And the man was already dead. The Schwarz case was eventually featured on ABC’s 2020 in an episode titled The Codere Breakers that aired in March 2025 reported by David Mure.
The episode explored how forensic genetic genealogy was transforming cold case investigations across the country.
And Cathy’s case was presented alongside the 1995 murder of Texas school teacher Katherine Edwards.
Another case cracked open by Oram’s technology. But television episodes last an hour. The real story lasted a lifetime.
And for the families involved, it is still not over. It will never be entirely over.
There is something that needs to be said about the science that solved this case because it matters beyond Kathy Schwarz.
Forensic genetic genealogy did not exist when Kathy was murdered. It did not exist when her parents died.
It barely existed 5 years before the case was solved. The technology that identified Robert Waters was built on the voluntary DNA submissions of millions of ordinary people who spit into tubes and mailed them to ancestry companies hoping to find distant cousins or trace their roots back to a particular village in Ireland or Germany.
They did not submit their DNA to catch a murderer, but that is [music] what happened.
A distant relative of Robert Waters, someone he may never have met, [music] submitted their DNA to a genealogy database.
And that submission created the bridge that connected a bloody fingerprint in 1988 to a plumber in South Carolina in 2023.
That is how this case was solved. [music] Not through a confession, not through a witness coming forward, through the accumulated accidental kindness of strangers building their family trees.
Before Kathy Schwarz was a case number in a police file, she was a girl from a farm in Mend who loved horses and drew [music] pictures and bowled with her mother on weekday nights.
She was a 19-year-old who had just gotten engaged. A mother who left love notes on the kitchen counter.
A young woman who played board games on a Thursday night and then fell asleep in her night shirt, not knowing that Friday morning would bring the end of everything.
She was 19 years old. And it took 35 years, over 10,000 pages of case files, a team of college students, a forensic laboratory in Texas, and a single bloody fingerprint on a pink bedroom phone to bring her story to a close.
That is what we do here at Cold Case Redemption. We tell the stories of the victims who waited the longest for justice and the people who refused to let them be forgotten.
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Because these victims deserve more than a closed file. They deserve to be remembered. [music] We will see you in the next one.
