1893
Calera was incorporated in 1893.
about 0:06:08The story
Kathleen Dawn Martin, known as Kat, was born in 1975 and grew up in Florida, the daughter of Nancy and John Martin. Friends remembered her as extroverted and the life of the party, a woman who loved the outdoors and was fixated on Marilyn Monroe. Her parents said she struggled with bipolar disorder and drank heavily, and that her feelings of isolation and self-doubt often spiralled. She was, by her own account online, an exhibitionist, and she built a following first on Facebook and Instagram and later on OnlyFans under the name Kitty Cat West.
Her mother said it was love at first sight, and within a year they married in Las Vegas. Their daughter Lola was born in 2005. In 2007, while living in Cartersville, Georgia, they filed for bankruptcy. Friends described the marriage as unconventional. By 2018 her OnlyFans work had become a substantial income, with hundreds of paying subscribers.
The relationship was not calm in the weeks before her death. On January 4th, 2018, she wrote that she knew he was scared to tell her he did not want to be with her. Two days later she told him it was the last time he would wrong her, and sent a middle finger emoji. On January 12th they seemed to have made up. They went for dinner at the Red Zone Bar and Grill, stopped at R&R Wine and Liquor where they spent $139 on absinthe and Jameson whisky, picked up an energy drink at a grocery store, and were home by about 8.30 p.m. Each drank roughly six more drinks. He said he went to bed at about 10.30 p.m. while she stayed up.
What the alarm and phone data later showed was different. The front door opened at 10.53.01 p.m. and closed ten seconds later. Kat's phone recorded its last movement at 10.54 p.m., taking 87 steps.
At about five o'clock on the morning of January 13th, 2018, 19-year-old McCorsha Purifoy was driving to her fast-food job when she saw what looked like a person lying half in the road. She went home for her parents, and her mother called 911. The body was face down, dressed only in a sports bra, blue and cold. Kat's head lay in the road and her body in the grass. There were two pools of blood. An open, mostly full bottle of absinthe stood propped on top of her mobile phone, with the cork nearby and no spilled alcohol. A matchbox from the Red Zone lay at the scene. Across the street the lights were on at the West home and the front door stood open; a man was seen pacing inside, and the door later closed.
The detective found it strange that he never asked how his wife was, whether she was alive or dead. He suggested she might have fallen and hit her head. A search of the trampoline and backyard with luminol found no blood.
The autopsy found a roughly two-inch gash on the left side of Kat's head and a fractured skull caused by blunt force trauma. The force had pushed her brain into its stem. There was evidence of sex but no sign of sexual assault, and her blood alcohol level was 0.23. The medical examiner could not say how the injury happened and ruled the manner of death undetermined.
About a month after the death, tests found a small chip of glass and two spots of Kat's blood on the bottom of the absinthe bottle.
The state argued that he had thrown her phone into the street and clubbed her with the liquor bottle when she went after it, and that the careful positioning of bottle and phone showed it was staged. The defence argued that Kat, drunk and clumsy, had fallen, got up and fallen again, and pointed to the undetermined manner of death, the lack of blood on the trampoline, the absence of glass in the wound and the absence of any history of violence. Kat's mother Nancy Martin was the only defence witness. Both sets of parents supported him.
With credit for time served he had 13 years left.