Town note
The town's motto is 'turning point of the American Revolution'.
about 0:10:27The story
Ruth Witter was born in 1910. She came from Illinois and had lived around the Midwest. After her husband's death she volunteered at the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Evergreen Park, Illinois, and at the Memorial Hospital in St Joseph. By February 2000 she was ninety years old and living alone in Stillwater, New York, a village in Saratoga County about three hours north of New York City. She was still in a bowling league, and her son Alfred, then in his sixties, collected her every Friday to take her grocery shopping.
Her parents divorced when she was young and her father moved to the Stillwater area. In Idaho she was a straight-laced child who did well at school and said she wanted to go to college and then become an officer in the armed forces. In her teens she moved to New York to finish high school with her father and stepmother, and she changed. She began drinking and partying and stealing from the house, to the point that her father and stepmother padlocked the rooms they did not want her in. She burned her own stomach with a curling iron and told the school psychologist that her father had done it, then admitted she had done it herself. She bragged about things she had not done.
He had never had a girlfriend before Catherine, and he was besotted with her. She was much cleverer than him. Both were unemployed and spent their time drinking and taking drugs.
On 12 February 2000 a neighbour, Richard Barnhart, saw a small red car in Ruth Witter's driveway, a car he had never seen there before. That weekend the two of them partied at a motel and did 685 dollars' worth of damage. They sat the pair down, and Catherine sat with her legs crossed reading a newspaper, then closed it and said it was all a lie and she was not paying anything.
That same day, 14 February, Alfred realised his mother was missing. He had not spoken to her the day before and she was not answering, so he went to her house and found her gone. They had him for a burglary at the High Rock Lanes bowling alley, where keys and an address book had been taken from a car and used to burgle a house while the owners were bowling, and they read him his Miranda warning. He agreed to talk. Over several hours he said he had been in Stillwater only once, on 14 February, then remembered he had been there on 11 February too, then on the 12th, and finally that he had been there every day that week. He said Catherine had wanted to show her great-grandmother the car but that they could not find the house. He denied ever having been in a pawn shop, then remembered a visit two years before, then the previous summer, then two weeks before, then two days before.
A few days later a male friend of Catherine's telephoned the police. She had told him that she had killed her great-grandmother and buried her in the woods, and she kept bringing it up. The friend agreed to wear a wire and to ask her to show him the body. On 18 February he drove out towards the Saratoga countryside with Catherine in the car. She noticed a car following them, decided it was the police and turned on him, shouting that he had set her up. The police pulled them over. A state police investigator named Bud York put his hand on her shoulder and said, 'Kate, it is time to show me where grandma is.' She did, and Ruth Witter's body was found in the snow about a hundred yards from the road, where a field met some trees.
The body was frozen solid and wrapped in a yellow floral bed sheet. She had been gagged with duct tape, her hands and ankles bound with tape, and an electrical cord wrapped twice around her neck. She was fully clothed. Six ribs were broken in a pattern consistent with being dragged, and there was a small scrape on her back. Because the body was frozen, the autopsy at Albany Medical Center could not be carried out for three days, and the medical examiner concluded that she died of asphyxia from ligature strangulation.
Police checked pawn shops over a wide area and found that Ruth's ring had been sold for 800 dollars at a pawn shop in Manchester, Vermont. Police found a pellet gun in the snow at the house, a CO2 pistol that looked exactly like a .357.
The prosecution's fibre evidence was that the gloves worn during the strangling were Catherine's. She said she came back in to find the cord already around her grandmother's neck. She also said he had told her he wanted to bind Ruth's hands and feet, that she helped him spread a bed sheet on the floor, and that he dragged the body through the house to the car.
A couple of months later he broke into a Saratoga Springs restaurant through the ceiling, set off the alarms, saw the cameras and ran away without taking anything.
He was under investigation for falsifying casework. He had routinely failed to conduct required tests and then recorded that he had done them, he could not explain aberrant results, and an assessor found that he could not properly operate a microscope.
She moved to Astoria, Queens, where a post-release programme helped her find housing, and she got a job as an office manager at an electric company. They were together for about ten months. One day they argued, each believing the other was seeing someone else, and he took a kitchen knife and stabbed her about a hundred times in the face and torso.
On St Patrick's Day 2010 he was in the passenger seat of a friend's Nissan Maxima when a fight between two groups in Saratoga Springs ended with the car speeding out of a parking lot and hitting a twenty-seven-year-old man named Ryan Rossley, who died at the scene.
The district attorney in her case, Murphy, later became a judge.