Police-style handcuffs on a murder victim in Texas led investigators to fear the killer was among them

On January 14, 1995, Mary Catherine Edwards, 31, a popular elementary school teacher, was found dead in her townhouse in Beaumont, Texas.

Her parents found her. It was a horrific scene: she was lying in her bathtub, handcuffed and being sexually assaulted. There were no signs of forced entry, leading investigators to believe she must have known her killer. The police-grade Smith & Wesson handcuffs have always been an important clue, but when investigators tried to figure out the serial numbers, they came up blank. The first investigators questioned various police officers and also came to no conclusion.

The case was not pursued further, but as police Det. Aaron Lewallen told 48 Hours' Natalie Morales, “It was talked about almost like a campfire ghost story. Could it have been someone we knew?” Morales chronicles the search for answers in “Tracking the Killer of Mary Catherine Edwards,” airing Saturday, November 9 at 10/9c on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.

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

After all the early clues and suspicions that someone from law enforcement had been involved, the family tree they created revealed that it was someone else. It turned out that their main suspect was not a police officer, but a man who attended the same high school as Edwards: Clayton Foreman.

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

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

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

The sisters were the first people Coe considered to be bridesmaids at her wedding. She and Foreman remained married for 11 years. They were already divorced at the time of the murder, but in retrospect Coe began to see things in a different, darker light. She remembered her ex-husband's fascination with police officers and their tools such as handcuffs and batons. As Coe told Morales, “He had a baton that he kept… next to the bed. He said it was for protection. And I remember he arranged these handcuffs… Well, he left them hanging over the rearview mirror.”

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

“I think I, you know, cried and said, 'Oh my God,' I said, 'Someone murdered Catherine,'” Coe told “48 Hours.” “And – and he says, 'Oh, really?' Just no emotion, which I found strange.”

A DNA comparison quickly revealed that Foreman had actually been at the crime scene. And when Det. Aaron Lewallen and Ranger Bess went to question Foreman, they had a warrant. They also brought something with them – something very symbolic.

Together they had taken the time to make an agreement with the prosecutor so that they could use the handcuffs they had taken with them as evidence at the crime scene. When they arrested Foreman for Edwards' murder, they did so with the same handcuffs that had bound her the night of her death. He wasn't one of them, but during the course of the investigation they learned that Foreman had falsely claimed to be a police officer.

The handcuffs that were so central at the beginning closed at the end. Bess will never forget how it felt. As he told Morales: “That's a moment I'll never forget…you feel like you have to do something for Catherine…you know, like you have to do something for her physically, by taking the handcuffs, with to whom she was tied up when she was murdered…”Put her back on the guy who murdered her…It might seem small to some, but to us it was a really big deal and it felt good.”

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