Welcome back to The Path Went Chili. I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and
I'm Ashley. Let's dive right into this week's case. May fourteenth, nineteen
ninety one, Vider, Texas, thirty four year old Kathy Page is found
dead inside her car after an apparent crash into a drainage ditch well. The
scene resembles an accident. The evidence shows that Kathy was strangled to death and
the crash was staged since Kathy's marriage to her strange husband, Steve Page,
was falling apart and there were a number of suspicious actions on his part.
Kathy's family believed that Steve was responsible for murdering her, but the authorities do
not believe there's enough evidence to file charges and the case remains unsolved. After
that The Path Went Chile. So today we are covering a case which has
been featured on such true crime shows as Unsolved Mysteries and Coal Justice, the
nineteen ninety one murder of Cathy Page. However, this story has garnered some
additional notoriety over the past several years because it was the apparent inspiration for the
critically acclaimed film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Released in twenty seventeen.
Three Billboards stars Francis mcdormant as a woman from a small fictional town whose teenage
daughter is raped and murdered, and since the local police are unable to make
any progress in the investigation, mcdorman's character expresses her frustration by renting out a
trio of roadside billboards which contained the messages quote raped while dying, how come
Chief Willoughby still no arrests endote. The film was written and directed by Martin
McDonough, who claimed he got the idea for his story during a bus trip
through the United States during the nineteen nineties as he passed by a series of
billboards in which a murder victim's family expressed her dissatisfaction with the investigation. While
McDonough was unable to recall the exact case mentioned on these billboards, it seems
very likely that they were in reference to the murder of Kathy Page, a
wife and mother who was killed in the small town of Vider, Texas,
during a failed attempt to stage her death to look like a car accident.
Now, aside from the basic premise about the billboards, the plot and characters
in Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, are completely fictional and have nothing to
do with this case. In the film, no one seems to have any
idea who committed the murder. But the biggest source of frustration for the family
of Kathy Page is that they are confident that the perpetrator was her estranged husband,
Steve paye Age, and believe he was never charged with the crime because
the local authorities watched the investigation and they have been protecting him. Regardless of
whether Steve Page is guilty or innocent of this crime. This is a very
tragic story which has caused a lot of hurt and dissension between two families,
and it's still up in the air whether there will ever be a conclusive resolution.
I already feel so much pain for both families, honestly, because you
have this couple who at one point was happy and they were in love enough
to get married, and then you have this quote accident where the families quite
convinced that the husband actually murders their daughter, and instead of feeling like they
get help and support and assistance from the local police, they're faced with this
reality that there's really nothing else that's going to be done for their daughter.
To bring about justice. And when you think about it, the husband also
has a family too, and that was their daughter in law at one point.
The suspected killer was Kathy's husband, and that's another family son in law
at one point, and so there were these really tight relationships and connections that
fell apart during the estrangement. But both families are left struggling with one family
thinking their sons being falsely accused of murder and another family thinking their former son
in law killed their baby. And it's devastating to feel like possibly the police
didn't either do a thorough enough investigation or didn't have proper communication to tell the
family where they truly were in that investigation. And as we're going to talk
about later on in these episodes, the people who have suffered the most in
this whole affair are Stephen Kathy's two daughters because they've been caught in the middle
of this drama between two families, and they've also lost their mother and experienced
a lot of tragedy. I also wondered to either of you seeing three billboards
outside Ebbing, Missouri. It's excellent. It is. Yes, I'll talk
more about it later on in these episodes. But it was kind of cool
to find out that this case inspired it. Have you seen it, Ash,
I don't think I've seen it, but now I'm going to have to
add it to my mess watch list, and I'm running out of great things
to watch, so this will be at the top of it. Our story
begins in nineteen ninety one Invider, Texas, a small town of around eleven
thousand people located in Orange County, and our central figure is thirty four year
old Lucille Catherine Page, who goes by the name Kathy. Originally born in
Hollandale, Mississippi, to parents James and Dorothy Fulton. Kathy also had two
brothers and three sisters. She was originally born in Hollandale, Mississippi, before
she eventually relocated to Texas. At this point, she's currently living Invider with
her two daughters, twelve year old Aaron and seven year old Monica. Their
house is located on a dead end street next to inter State ten, and
Cathy works as a waitress at the Hofbrow restaurant in the nearby city of Beaumont.
She originally married her husband, Steve Page, in nineteen seventy eight while
she was pregnant with Aaron, but their relationship has not been in a good
place in a long time. After they got into a heated argument, Kathy
asked Steve for a separation, and he agreed to move out of their home
into an apartment. In spite of this, Steve maintained that they continued to
remain cordial and friendly with each other, as he believed that Kathy was simply
going through a phase in which she needed to find herself, but was willing
to work things out with him. However, Kathy's family believed the marriage had
no chance of being saved and said that Kathy was planning to divorce Steve sometime
in the near future. On the evening of May thirteenth, only one day
after Steve spent his first night at his new apartment, he was contacted by
Kathy, who asked if he would babysit their two daughters. Cathy told Steve
that she wanted to go out to a bar in Beaumont with a friend of
hers named Charlotte Baringen Morgan, so Steve agreed to return to the house to
watch over the kids. Steve claimed that he last saw Kathy between eleven fifteen
and eleven thirty pm before he went to sleep a short time later, but
sometime over the next five hours, Kathy would wind up dead under very strange
circumstances. At four twenty am on the morning of May fourteenth, a newspaper
carrier discovered Kathy's black mercury tracer in a drainage ditch alongside Interstate ten. The
location was only one hundred and fourteen yards from Kathy's residence, though the vehicle
appeared to be pointing in the opposite direction. Kathy was lying dead in the
driver's seat, so the vido of police department were summoned to the scene,
and at first glance, it appeared that she had been killed in a tragic
accident. So if her car is facing away from her home, it would
seem as though when she was leaving around eleven fifteen or eleven thirty, that's
when that accident would have occurred, which means she would have been sitting there
for five hours, almost when the police arrived at four twenty, or when
someone summons the police at four twenty. So that's really scary. One hundred
and fourteen yard from her house, she made it that far before she has
this tragic accident. It seems very very suspicious. Well, as we're going
to talk about, she definitely did not die at around eleven fifteen or eleven
thirty, because there are other people who can vouch for her whereabouts over the
next few hours. So that's the biggest hole in the accidents seen so far,
is that it appears that she did return home at some point, But
if she got into a crash while she was driving home, wires are car
facing in the opposite direction, so that would be the first sign that this
accident may have been staged. So when Detective Sergeant Ray Moseley and another investigator
went to the Page residence, Steve answered the door wearing nothing but a pair
of boxer shorts. Mosley asked Steve if he is the husband of Kathy Page
and whether he knew his wife's whereabouts, but Steve replied that she was not
home. Before Moseley could inform him about what happened, he noticed that Steve
appeared to be looking down the street in the direction where Kathy's car had been
found. After the investigator were invited into the house, Steve was finally notified
that his wife had been killed, and Mosley noticed Steve go through some radical
changes in his behavior, as he appeared to start crying and hysterically throwing himself
on the couch, before his emotions would quickly dissipate and he would go back
to carrying on a conversation with no signs of tears in his eyes. The
living room lights were left off the entire time the police were inside the house,
and even when they asked Steve to turn them on, he never did.
Mosley also noticed a small pile of clothes on the floor and found it
odd that Steve never asked to see Kathy or made any attempt to leave and
visit the accident scene. That is incredibly odd, and the way that he
reacts with such grander and such dramatic flare, and yet he's not asking the
specific questions, you know, what happened to her? Where is she?
Please? Let me see her? Can I go to her? You know?
Can my girl see her? None of that. He's not really asking
any of that, and so it's quite odd. Almost seems like he's trying
to appear as though he's not at all suspecting anything. When he shows up,
you know, at the door, with his boxers on and then when
they come in, he's almost alluding them by not turning the lights on and
things like that. Yes, I could see he'd be in shock, but
when they say, hey, turn your lights on, why wouldn't he?
Is he hiding something? Are there scratches on him? Or are those clothes?
Do they have blood on them? What was it that he didn't want
to come the lights on for? Could be anything right? What if there
was a spot of blood on a carpet? What if there had been a
fuss and maybe something had broken, maybe he had scratches, or maybe he's
trying to cloak himself in darkness because he feels as though it will be harder
to gauge whether or not his emotional reactions are genuine, because it seems to
me personally, and I'm sure to both of you as well. We've seen
cases like this before. And when you've got a perpetrator or a potential perpetrator
who doesn't ask more questions about what happened, doesn't want to see their loved
one, even if it is a wife, that you are the one that's
saying that she's finding herself and then you're going to work it out, but
you're not trying to go and see the accident, seeing and going why why,
and like, how did this happen? Let me see her. Those
are major red flags, and obviously investigators are clocking that right from the start,
and especially given the relationship they currently have. Like, yes they're strange,
Yes they're likely going through a divorce, but they're close enough to where
they at least know they're going to co parent. They're close enough that she
could call him late at night and say, hey, can you watch the
girls for me? And he said, yeah, sure, that's no problem.
So even for your children's sake, you want to know those questions,
and for the mother of your children, that's still someone you have a love
for at this point, you know, it's not like she's taking them kids
away from him and ruined his career or anything like that. I mean,
at this point, they're still cooperating with one another. So again, you
never know how someone's going to react to grief. So I do have to
say, you know, who knows. It could be his own grief reaction,
But it does definitely seemed suspicious that he didn't follow police protocol or requests
to turn the lights on. It's very bizarre that he went from zero to
kind of three hundred percent, yet wasn't expressing some of the questions you typically
think he'd ask. And since he recently died, I should mention that One
of the most infamous examples of this behavior is oj Simpson, who flew to
Chicago after his ex wife was murdered, and the police called him at his
hotel to say, I'm sorry to inform you your ex wife has died,
and he says, oh my god, that's terrible. I'll fly right home.
And then when the call ended, the detective said, he never asked
how she died. Don't you find that very suspicious? And that's pretty much
the same thing with Steve, where he's not asking any questions about what happened
to his dead wife. It didn't take long for investigators to reach the conclusion
that Kathy did not actually die in a car crash, and that her so
called accident had been staged. Even though the drainage ditch was fairly deep,
there was very little damage to the interior or sterior of the mercury tracer and
no sign of skid marks anywhere. Kathy's feet were pushed back against the seat
rather than stretched towards the petals, and even though she was not wearing her
seatbelt, she remained in a reclined position in the front seat and had not
been thrown forward. Kathy didn't have any wounds or injuries on her upper or
lower body, though she did have a laceration on the back of her head,
as well as a broken nose in a black eye that did not appear
to be caused by a crash. Even those soft drinks from a fast food
restaurant were on the floorboard, the impact of the crash had somehow not caused
them to spill or tip over, and Kathy's purse was sitting upright in the
passenger seat. The rear view mirror had also been turned in sideways and was
facing the driver's seat and touching the windshield, so it was theorized that someone
had accidentally adjusted it while loading Kathy's body into the car. When an autopsy
was performed later that day, it would reveal that Kathy had significant injuries to
her neck and her exact manner of death was manual strangulation. Oddly, while
there were traces of bloodstains on Kathy's skin, undergarments, and inside of her
clothing. There was no blood on her outer clothing, though the presence of
a blade of grass on the bottom of her jeans suggested that her body was
dragged across the ground at some point. It seemed likely that Kathy was murdered
at another location before the perpetrator cleaned and dressed her dead body. They then
placed Kathy inside her car and ran it off the road into a ditch to
give the false impression of a fatal accident. So what are we talking about
here? Why are we even questioning what happened to Kathy? Because they told
us what happened to Kathy, The medical examiner says, it's manual strangulation.
You can see injuries to her body, like the laceration on the back of
her head, the broken nose in the black eye, Yet it doesn't look
like she's fallen forward and hit the steering wheel or crashed into the windshield or
anything like that. The food still standing upright in the floorboard of the car
is her purse, and her physical body doesn't seem to even be slouched over
or slumped over from the impact. So I'm angry. I'm starting to think,
just like the family's thinking, why is there a question mark as to
what happened. At least look at the facts where she's been dragged into that
car. She has grass on the bottom of her bottom of her jeans,
So she has grass on the bottom of her jeans. So them saying clearly
it's a murder. They told us it's manual strangulation. Who was it?
Who knows? But I get what the family's saying, How dare you say
this is an accident. They're telling you that it's not an accident, The
evidence is telling you it's not an accident, and yet you're telling me years
and years and years later, the police still claim it's an accident. Actually,
no, they actually did. They did reclassified as a homicide. I
mean, the police made a lot of mistakes in the investigation, but at
least at the very getting here, they did look at the facts and said,
okay, this is definitely not an accident. I mean, they didn't
do much a very good job at trying to find the perpetrator. But I
have seen other cases like this where they go years before changing the classification on
accidents. So at least they did the right thing right away. Oh good,
Okay, So I was gonna say I'm already enraged, just like everybody
else would be looking at this case, because you know you're being told by
medical professionals it's manual strangulation. There's no way to just say, oh,
it was a car accident. The autopsy also revealed the presence of seamen in
Kathy's vagina to indicate that she had sexual intercourse a short time before her death.
Investigators soon learned that Kathy's story about going out with her friend Charlotte was
completely false and that she was actually meeting up with a secret boyfriend at the
Best Western Hotel in Beaumont. This man did not live in the area,
and it originally met Kathy a few months earlier when he stopped by the Hofbrow
restaurant while she was working there, and they developed an instant connection. Since
he usually stated at the Best Western Hotel whenever he passed through Beaumont, he
made arrangements with Kathy to secretly meet up there. When the boyfriend was questioned
by police, he admitted that he and Kathy had sex at the hotel on
the night of her death before she left at around two thirty am. By
all accounts, this man was very cooperative with the investigation and passed a polygraph,
so he was cleared as a suspect. One of the oddest details of
Kathy's death is that when she was found inside her car, she was not
wearing makeup, socks, or any of her jewelry, including her watch,
ear rings, and wedding ring. The boyfriend confirmed that when he last saw
Kathy at the hotel, she was dressed in the same clothes she was wearing
at the time of her death, but he was also certain that she was
still wearing her makeup and jewelry. According to those who knew her, Kathy
usually only took off her jewelry when she got ready for bed, leading to
speculation that she had made it home at some point before she was killed.
Another surprising revelation from Kathy's autopsy is that some of the seamen found in her
vagina did not have any sperm, which indicated that she had sexual intercourse with
someone who had undergone a vasectomy. Well, Kathy's boyfriend never had of a
sect to me, but Steve Page had received one months earlier. When confronted
about this, Steve claimed that when he first arrived at the house that night,
Kathy stepped out of the shower while wearing a towel, and they decided
to have sex on the carpet in the living room before she left. However,
Kathy's family had a hard time believing this story, as prior to moving
out, Steve had been sleeping on the couch and there did not appear to
be any intimacy left in the relationship. It seemed unlikely to them that Kathy
would agree to have sexed with Steve right before going out to meet up with
another man. None of that makes sense. I just don't buy it.
You have Kathy who has told people were clearly going to get a divorce.
She's going out to meet with this boyfriend, which is possibly one of the
reasons she's pretty confident in a divorce, like, I still got it.
There's someone to try me. I have a good time with him, and
I don't feel the same stress and upset that I feel when I'm around my
ex husband or my husband who I'm estranged from. And if you think about
this, she's asked him to watch the kids, so the kids are close
by, sleeping let's say in another room or something like that, and his
account is like they had this hot I can't even control myself kind of sex
on the floor, Okay, as grown people, I'm just telling you,
my back hurts too much for that. I'm not having sex on the living
room floor, and I'm surely not doing that while my kids are in the
house. Like, you have to be more discreet even if they're sleeping,
so they don't have that kind of relationship where it's this hot steam. I
can't even make it into the bedroom to have sex with you. It doesn't
make any sense. It makes more sense that she gets home and she's getting
ready for bed, and he's either figured out that she was out with this
man or she says something like, look, I'm interested in someone else,
I'm not interested in you, and he is enraged, feeling betrayed, feeling
emasculated, things like that, and he hurts her. Remember she has a
laceration on the back of her head, her eyes are bruised. She also
has a broken nose. So it's more likely that he beat her, hurt
her, killed her, and raped her because she wasn't interested in him anymore
and he wasn't going to allow somebody else to have his wife. It's almost
like he wanted to stake his claim one last time by raping her and then
killing her and just ending her life like that. But I'm with you,
I don't think that in any world is it possible that this man that she
seems to be happy to be rid of, she's told all of her friends
and family. No, this divorce is happening like it's going through, and
she's met a guy she's got an instinct connection with and they're meeting up to
have this exciting night that's going to be I'm sure filled with passion. The
last thing that she's going to be thinking about doing is having sex with her
ex husband while the kids are there. It just doesn't even sound believable.
It sounds like he's trying to come up with a reason why his semen is
inside her. Yeah, and he probably wasn't counting on that because they probably
would have assumed that all the semen belonged to the boyfriend until they noticed that
some of it was missing sperm and that the boyfriend didn't have a vasectomy.
So Steve realized, oh, I have to come up with a cover story
to explain this, and this was the best he could dream up. But
of course no one believed it because knowing the circumstances of their relationship, there
was no way they were having sex on the living room floor that night.
The Fulton family would notice a number of suspicious actions on Steve's part following Kathy's
death, though Steve and his own family would later dispute that a lot of
these things even took place. According to Kathy's parents, James and Dorothy Fulton,
Steve bwonned their residence that morning to inform them about what happened. The
Fulton said they immediately went over to the Page residence and when they arrived,
they saw Steve walking around the living room wiping his hands with a bathcloth while
dressed in red shorts and a white T shirt, and he appeared to have
a scratch on his nose. Shortly thereafter, Dorothy said she noticed Steve doing
laundry and washing clothes. There had been contradictory accounts from different witnesses who were
at the residence that morning who have either confirmed or denied that they heard the
washing machine running, though most of the people who denied it were members of
Steve's family. According to Kathy's sister Jan Kelly, when she visited the residence,
Steve made a comment that Kathy had gone out drinking and was probably drunk
or taking valium when she crashed her car into the ditch, even though the
toxicology report would show no traces of any alcohol in her system. Kathy did
use valium, but Steve alleged on a few occasions that Kathy was also using
cocaine, though he later acknowledged that these allegations were untrue and that he'd simply
made the mistake of repeating rumors that he'd heard about Kathy's drug use. I
love how his immediate response is like victim blameing and and accounting and making excuses
for how and why the accident happened. I don't know, it just seems
like, you know, immediately when someone passes away, you don't really think
about all those things. You're not sitting there going like, oh man,
I know he was abused in drugs and drunk and flew into that ditch and
these kinds of things. I might ask that, like I might say,
do you guys think it's possible she was drinking and driving? Do you guys
think it's possible that she ingested something or took medication that made her really sleepy?
But to start spreading rumors and sharing definitive kind of character attacks on her
seems really bizarre. It's okay to say what caused the accident and just you
know, hypothesize like what could have happened, But it almost seems like he's
trying to make sure everyone looks at Kathy's bad behavior, which isn't even truthful
in this scenario, and doesn't look his direction. It's very bizarre. He
has that scratch on his nose. It's very bizarre. He's washing clothes.
I tend to side with the people who aren't trying to protect him, which
would be Kathy's family. It's possible they misheard something, but usually I mean,
if you think you heard the washing machine running, I guarantee you the
morning your daughter died, you'd say why was laundry important today? Like?
Why are you doing laundry right now? We're trying to help two babies deal
with the death of their mom. I'm trying to help you deal with her
death. Why are we doing the household chores right now? Oh? I've
seen so many cases like this where someone who is not known for doing laundry
at all suddenly feels compelled to do it. After their spouse goes missing or
is murdered, they just suddenly feel this need to clean their clothing, even
though that's completely at a character for them, so it seems awfully convenient.
The day after Kathy's death, one of her other sisters, Sherry Vallentine,
visited the house and said she noticed a very strong smell and saw oscillating fans
being used to dry out the carpet. Steve claimed he was cleaning the carpet
after spilling some fish breeze on it, and said the spill occurred on the
very same spot where he and Kathy had s on the evening of May the
thirteenth. There has been a lot of dispute from different witnesses about the details
of when Steve supposedly cleaned the carpet, as his daughter Aaron, and one
of Steve's sisters have always claimed they personally witnessed him spilled the grease, but
this incident did not actually occur until after Kathy's funeral. Oddly, Steve told
multiple members of the Fulton family that he did not want the police coming over
to his house because they might find blood on the carpet at a spot where
Kathy had previously shaved her legs. He said he did not trust the police,
believing they had previously planted evidence on some of his friends. When Steve
was interviewed by Detective Moseley at the police station, he even repeated the same
statement about not wanting the police at his house because he feared they might find
something to incriminate him. The police also told Steve that they wanted to form
an autopsy on Kathy, but he told them that he didn't want anyone quote
unquote cutting into her, so James Fulton was the one who officially authorized this.
He seemed to indicate that Cathy was manually strangled by a left handed person,
and there would be contradictory accounts about whether Steve was left handed. Steve
and his family maintained that he was right handed, even though members of the
Faulton family and other witnesses claimed they had seen and performed tasks with his left
hand. He could also be ambidextrius, where he can use both hands to
do task pretty equally. He might default to his right hand, but doesn't
mean he can't do things with his left hand, and maybe since his right
hand's stronger, he's holding Kathy down with that one, and he's using his
left hand, which he's very capable of doing, to injure her as well.
Man, this is really frustrating. You talk about a husband who supposedly
cares so much for this woman, he wants to be at least apparent with
her, but also he believes here getting back together, and then all of
a sudden he's like, not in this house, police aren't coming in here.
Remember that one time she cut her legs shaving. Right here on this
carpet is where she was bleeding, and it's right where we had sex,
and it's right where I spilled this fish grease. Very bizarre that he's trying
to cover up and hide the home in general, that he's drawing attention to
himself, whether he knows it or not, by having that carpet cleaned again
the day after she dies. Day of her death, he's doing laundry and
trying to talk about how she probably was drunk or overdose on something. And
the second day he has fans oscillating all around a really strong smell where he's
cleaning this carpet because he was cooking fish that he's spilled there. And that
story doesn't even check out, because even the people that are his alibi witnesses
for that say, oh, yeah, it happened at the day of her
funeral, which clearly was not two days after her death. Question, so
where was this spot that he was claiming that he spilled the fish grease?
Was it even in the kitchen? Uh? No, it was on the
carpet, like in the living room, Like why would it be there?
Why why would you have fish grease in the living room. I don't understand
you walking around the pan or a that of fish grease. And when you
shave your legs and you cut your legs jewels, do you sit there and
like with blood dripping down your legs, You're like, let's go hang out
in the living room with this. You sit in a bathroom or you at
least get to the kitchen and put a band aid on. You're not like,
no problem, guys, I'm just dripping blood down my legs to the
carpet and I'm just gonna sit here with it. And who shaves their legs
in the living room over carpet? Anyways, it doesn't even make sense.
Well, believe it or not, this is not the first case we've covered
in which someone has used as it as an excuse. You might remember a
couple of years ago we did an episode about the murderer of Lulukor Shane,
and that was another one where they found blood in her apartment and the suspects
said, oh, yeah, she was shaving her legs there that night.
It's very convenient that women like to shave their legs in the living room shortly
before they get murdered. It seems to be a common theme. And with
twelve year old kids driving sex in the living room floor, it's just our
bags can't do it. We just can't. The Fultons also noticed some suspicious
behavior from one of Steve's best friends. A private investigator named Roger Howell told
the family that he needed to take photographs of Kathy's body in order to help
Steve, and asked to view the body at the funeral, though they could
not understand why. During a visit to the Page residence, Sherry claimed she
saw Roger enter the bathroom with Steve while carrying a manila envelope. When they
walked out, Sherry noticed that the envelope was bulky and made a metallic sound
when it moved. While Stephen Roger later claimed the envelope was actually a bag
of candy. The Fultons have always suspected that it contained Kathy's watch, as
Steve needed to get rid of it since it would have proved Kathy arrived home
and took it off before she was killed. One of Kathy's coworkers at the
Hofbrow restaurant also claimed that Roger phoned her on the morning of May fourteenth to
inform her about what happened to Kathy, but he specifically stated that she'd been
strangled to death, even though the autopsy that determined the manner of death would
not be performed until hours later. Wow, what kind of can you need
to bring in a manila bag just to just to ask people? But okay,
backing up, this is what they're preparing the body two days, three
days after she dies, and Steve has felt it necessary to reach out to
his best friend, Roger Howell, who's a private investigator, to do things
to help him. What is he helping you with? As far as you
know right now, she was in a car accident. So what are you
calling a private investigator for now? If you're telling me three or four months
later, the police haven't left you alone, that you're being called in every
week question that they keep asking you to take polygraph tests, they keep lying
to you about information that you know is not true. Yeah, do you
get an attorney? Do you get a private investigator? Sure, my gosh,
sure, But before her body's even buried, before you even know the
cause of death, you're going to have this private investigator or working on your
behalf to quote help you. There's no help right now, just be here
in present with because my wife's dead. And of course a more standing thing
is that Roger knew about the strangulation before the police even dead, So you
get the impression that Steve had to tell him a secret. So yeah,
so where's Roger and all this? Does he get questioned by the police later
in the investigation? I'm not entirely sure. I mean, he seems to
be the wild card here where it really sounds like he had knowledge about what
actually happened. But he has never really been questioned or interrogated, even though
he may actually be an accessory to murder. Nor would he tell the truth
though, because it's clear he's going to help Steve do whatever he wants,
in fact, possibly even getting rid of a watch as eminence. Do we
know anything about the phone records between the two of them, especially on the
evening or like May thirteenth and May fourteenth. That's a good question because phone
records do play a good, big role in this case, because we know
about some phone calls that took place during the early evening hours. But I
think that if they found a record that Steve had phone er around the time
that his wife was killed, I think we would have heard about it.
So who knows. Maybe Roger came over to his house or something and he
told him in person. So there just is in a paper trail or an
electronic trail, or maybe he was smart enough to drive to a payphone,
because there was lots of payphones back then. That is true, Yes,
darn't many now, So crooks are out of luck if they want to make
a secret phone call. So Kathy's friend Charlotte confirmed that on the night of
her death, Kathy had phoned her to let her know that she was planning
to secretly meet up with her boyfriend at a hotel. Kathy told Charlotte that
Steve might attempt to check up on her, so she asked Charlotte to cover
for by not answering the phone in case Steve called well. Charlotte told police
that she received a call at two thirty am that morning, and when she
answered it, the caller immediately hung up, leading her to suspect it was
Steve. Charlotte did receive a call from Steve sometime between five point thirty and
six am, where he informed her that Kathy had not yet come home,
so Charlotte told him they had out together before they parted ways hours earlier.
There has been some dispute about when this second phone call actually took place,
as Steve would keep changing his story about what time he made the call,
providing such differing times as two thirty, three thirty, and four thirty.
While this has never been corroborated, Sherry Valentine claimed that she heard from Steve's
sister in law that after Kathy left for the night, Steve found a pair
of phone numbers Kathy had scrawled down in a notebook next to the phone.
The first number was Charlotte's phone number and the second was for the Best Western
Hotel in Beaumont. Kathy's family theorized that after Steve called Charlotte's number and discovered
she was still at home. He decided to call the second number, and
after learning it was for a hotel, he became convinced that Cathy was with
another man. When Kathy arrived home later that morning, Steve may have confronted
her about this, and things escalated to the point where he raped Kathy and
strangled her to death before staging the fake accident scene. That's exactly what happened.
Yeah, yes, you have that right where Charlotte is already prepped.
She knows, Hey, my husband's clearly gonna call. I'm using you as
my alibi. Can you just not answer the phone tonight so that he knows
we're out together? While at two thirty in the morning, if you weren't
going out, that's kind of startling to get a phone call. And when
he hears her voice, he goes, well, well, well, well
she's not out with my wife. Calls that other number and it's a hotel.
He does exactly what you just said, Robin. He realizes she's at
a hotel with somebody, and when she comes home, you know, there's
a confrontation there. I wouldn't be shocked if she said something like I'm done
with you. I found someone who makes me happy. You get over yourself.
I'm not getting back with you. And like we talked about earlier,
that feeling of lack of control, the feeling that you're being emasculated because you
didn't keep your prize and you didn't get to keep your girl, all of
that would lead to a rage that I think could have resulted in the injuries
you see to poor Kathy. She has the bruises, she has the broken
nose, she has a laceration on the back of her head, and she's
been manually strangled. That seems like someone who's acting out of pure rage.
And then to think that he would also sexually assault her and rape her.
Oh, I mean, it fits exactly the scenario you just described. Of
course, Steve denied any involvement in Kathy's death. When the case was featured
on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries which aired in April of nineteen ninety eight,
Steve agreed to be interviewed, and he offered his own theory about who killed
Kathy. Steve claimed that he had received a number of phone threats in which
he was warned that the same thing in which happened to Kathy could also happen
to him. He said that a member of a prominent Italian family who were
involved in the Quote Beaumont mafia, was responsible for Kathy's death, and the
Vita Policeice Department when were attempting to frame him for the crime and refusing to
investigate other leads for their part. The Fulton family believed that the viter PD
and the Orange County District Attorney's Office were covering for Steve and did not want
to arrest him as a number of the investigating officers, including Detective Ray Mosley,
knew him personally and Steve's parents were reportedly friends with the chief of police.
The viter PD did make a number of mistakes in the investigation, as
they took pictures of Kathy's so called car crash with no film inside the camera,
so there were no actual photos of the crime scene to be entered into
evidence. For unknown reasons, the District Attorney's office refused to grant the police
a warrant to search the Page residents until years after Kathy's death took place,
and the search failed to uncover any evidence. During this time period, the
Fulton family noticed that whenever they placed flowers on Kathy's grave. They would always
return to find them vandalized and thrown away, so they became con vince that
Steve was responsible. When the Fultons hired a private investigator to follow Steve around,
he managed to videotape him in the act of kicking a set of flowers
off Kathy's gravesite. So Steve was subsequently indicted on the charge of desecreating a
grave and received a sentence of probation. Steve eventually moved he of state and
took his two daughters, Aaron and Monica, to Tennessee to live with his
sister. What a real winner, you know. I mean, I don't
care how frustrated you are. You don't go to someone's gravesite and kick the
flowers off of her grave. That's just I don't know, disgusting is not
a good enough word for it. But what really bothers me is is fact
that they don't get a search warrant for years after Kathy's death to search the
home. The reality is there was a declaration that she was manually strangled,
and it clearly she did not die in this car accident. Therefore, you
have a right to go to the place where you know she was recently,
which is her own home. Why they weren't able to look through that house,
and why they wouldn't make that a priority even if Steve wasn't one of
the people at the top of their list. I want to see what could
have happened in the last hours of her life. I want to see even
when she was getting ready. Could we find something like those phone numbers?
Would he find something like in her diary that says I'm worried because this person's
harassing me. They didn't get to go look for any of that stuff because
it would be years later. Why wouldn't they search the page home and the
Best Western. You've got two men who admittedly have their semen inside of her.
One of the perpetrators is likely one of those two men, and the
boyfriend has basically been eliminated because of his polygraph. But still you would search
that Best Western hotel room just in case he was able to pass it while
he was still guilty. But it just seems odd that nobody would ground to
warrant, especially since he said that the last time he saw her she had
on her jewelry, and then when her body was found, she had all
that stuff taken off, like her makeup and her jewelry, which is something
she only did right before bed, so it seems like she likely did go
home. So I just can't understand why they wouldn't grant that search warrant.
Yeah, if they had done it right away, they might have found the
watch before Roger was able to take it out and put it in the envelope,
and that would have been concrete evidence that Kathy had made it home and
could have potentially led to an arrest. And if they got that warrant,
they might have been able to get some clothes that may or may not have
had blood or bodily fluids on them, maybe some sheets, and that spot
on the ground where the quote unquote fish grease was that they had sex or
she might have cut her leg with a razor. They would have had access
to that, but since they waited for years, he had all the time
in the world to clean it up. So Ashley, after hearing Steve's comments
string his interview, have you changed your mind? Do you now believe it
was the Beaumont mafia? Totally? I feel really sorry for him that he's
under suspicion and he was such a great, you mean loving husband and father
that he kicked the flowers off her grave. It was just a stress,
that's all. Yeah. Absolutely, it's a hotbed for mafia activity. Beaumont,
Texas. Since a grand jury declined to indict Steve with Kathy's murder,
James Fulton became very frustrated with the lack of progress in the investigation. So
you were surmonded by placing hand paided signs alongside Interstate ten, which shared such
messages as quote, bider PD botched up the case waiting for confession. This
could happen to you end quote. As the years went on, James decided
to publicly express his frustration by renting a series of billboards along the interstate containing
statements like quote, this is Orange County, city of Bider Here you get
by with brutally murdering a woman end quote. A wrongful death suit would be
filed against Steve on behalf of James and Dorothy Fulton, and one of Kathy's
sisters, Diane Daegel, who was acting as the official guardian for Kathy's daughter
Monica, since she was still a minor at that time. The Fultons wanted
to prevent Steve from collecting Kathy's life insurance, and the case would go through
a pair of mistrials in civil court, which featured many pieces of conflicting testimony
from the Fulton and Page families. While Kathy's sister Sherry testified that Steve was
controlling, jealous, and abusive and would often grab or push Kathy during arguments,
Steve and his family denied this, and their daughter Aaron testified that she
never personally witnessed anything like this. However, during the third trial in October
of nineteen ninety nine, the Fultons finally won a civil judgment against Steve,
as the jury awarded them a total of two hundred thousand dollars in damages and
life insurance, with one hundred and fifty thousand dollars going to the Fultons and
the other fifty thousand going to Monica. So I'm assuming he didn't get life
insurance of any kind, right, Like they got everything plus the damages exactly,
Like that was part of the total, the damages and the life insurance
that he was trying to get, Okay, So there had to be enough
where this civil court, Remember it's a different burden of proof. You have
to prove in a civil court. But it's really sad that his kids are
being called into this. They're having to sit there and when their mother's deceased,
their suspect suspicion on their father that he killed their mother. Now they're
having to recount was my dad abusive or not? I mean, just the
trauma of that is hard and trying to think about, like, Okay,
my parents fuss, but was the abusive. I just feel really sad for
both the kids who are trying to defend the only parent they have left,
you know, even if they're wrong in this situation, And my heart is
breaking for her family who's saying pay attention please. We're literally going to any
links possible, even making hand pain and signs and putting on the side of
the road saying, well, someone listened to us. And finally the civil
case did get someone to listen to them. But no amount of money is
going to bring any kind of feeling of justice to the family. It simply
says at least Steve didn't get that too right, at least he didn't benefit
from that as well as her being deceased. But Monica got some of the
money, which is the miner at the time. I'm sure Aaron was taken
care of as well in certain ways by the family, but oh, it
just what a heartbreaking reality that those kids had to go through. Yeah,
we're going to go into more detail about this in our next episode because Aaron
in recent years has published a blog talking about all the trauma this whole situation
has caused for her, and she has some pretty tough feelings not only against
her father but from her mother's side of the family as well. And it's
sad. People talk about kids and you know, like they'lding on a documentary
and they'll be defending the living parent or trying to understand what happened, but
they're not. They almost seem naive. But I sit back and I think
that's all they have left. And if that house of cards falls too,
if they really come to the conclusion that their dad killed their mother and he's
this abusive man, like I can't have a relationship with him anymore either.
I two parents, So I do understand the psychology and the default to trying
to say, like, is there a way to explain this away or to
make it where my dad's not responsible? And I think the older those kids
get. The more that you know, the naive mind starts to kind of
fade and some of those realities would come to pass. It's very, very
sad. Why do you guys think that Monica got fifty thousand but Aaron wasn't
awarded any I'm I think she was a miner. Well, Monica was a
miner, and let me just double check. I want to see how old
Aaron was. So Aaron was twelve at the time of her death, so
she would have been nineteen at the civil trials, so she wouldn't have been
a miner at that time. But it could be because I think she was
on Steve's side, like she seemed to be testifying on his behalf saying that
I never personally witnessed any abuse or controlling behavior from him. So maybe that's
why she didn't get any of the insurance money. That's unfortunate, though,
because the reality is she is still a child who has been traumatized by this
situation and everything that Ashley said rings true. For somebody to be able to
actually absorb that information and go, oh, yes, there is a strong
likelihood or probability that my father is the one that killed my mother I think
that you're going to fight tooth and nail on a subconscious level to prevent yourself
from believing that right. You're going to distance yourself as much as you can
from that, because the reality you have to confront is, do I write
off my father? Do I not have a relationship with him? You've already
lost your mother. Do you really want to face a reality in which your
father is guilty of murdering your mother and then you have to make a choice
to cut him out of your life or not. I think it's easier to
go no, he didn't do it. You double down, And I mean,
I'm going to use this example, not that I think necessarily one way
or the other that Michael Peterson is guilty or not. But the staircase,
all the kids there, except for Kathleen's biological daughter, all supported Michael wholeheartedly,
even though Kathleen had been in their life for a very long time.
I think just the idea of him going away it was just to be able
to grasp that is just too much for the psyche of a young child to
be able to grasp. But also for an adult child. No one wants
to believe that. And same with his family. Look, they're all coming
to his rescue, saying the washer was not running, it was not on
while we were there. They're trying to defend him too. I think even
if you had a gut feeling that your son was responsible, you would want
to do anything but look that in the eye. You would want to explain
in a way any way possible. And even when you talk about the children,
you know, like the case of Gabriel Fernandez, where days before he's
killed by this mother who's been abusing him for years, he's holding up a
sign that says Happy Mother's Day, and he writes her a letter about what
an amazing mother she is to him. And so I really do think our
brains tried to turn off the reality that the people that are supposed to love
us the most, and the people who are supposed to protect us and are
going to be in our life forever, that they could be anything but good.
And I could see a scenario where the family is like, we know
that he didn't do it. They've told themselves this, but we need to
create a scenario where the police are going to believe that there's a strong likelihood
that he wasn't cleaning up potential evidence from a crime scene, thereby saying no,
the washer and the dryer weren't running, and being okay with potentially fabricating
something like that because they're telling themselves they know that he's innocent. They're just
helping show the police what they already know themselves to be true. Now that
Stevid lost a wrongful death lawsuit, and as attempts to appeal the verdicts were
unsuccessful, James Fulton felt more confident about publicly accusing him of Kathy's murder on
his billboards. He soon erected a new one, which featured a photo of
Steve's face and the words quote invited. He got by with murder. Found
responsible for wife's death in civil court, Appeals court, upheld conviction, pleaded
guilty of desecrating her grave, criminal case, no arrests end quote. In
twenty twelve, James posted yet another new billboard, featuring both Steve and Cathy's
photos in it. Read quote, Steve Page brutally murdered his wife in nineteen
ninety one. Viter PD does not want to solve this case. I believe
they took a bribe. The Attorney General should investigate James Fulton her father end
quote. A billboard was also put up in the park Invider with the message
quote Vider's garbage dump park security provided by the local police department. I believe
my daughter was being raped while she was strangled to death in nineteen ninety one.
The Viter police department would not accept outside help and the case is never
been solved. I believe the police department did not want to solve this case.
Will you be the next unsolved murder? Predators love parks? The Lighter
police department did not solve my daughter's murder. Will be assisting you with any
complaints or problems with this so called park. James Fulton end quote, Wow,
yeah, oh, okay, James. I mean everyone deserves a daddy
like James. I'm kind of surprised he would go to this kind of links.
I'd be scared of something like a libel or slander kind of case coming
against my family and keeping this in court and things like that. But he
wants it in the public eye, and I understand that he wants to say.
You might be looking away, you might think this is done, but
it's not until you convict someone of my daughter's murder, and until you look
at the evidence. Ye know, you're a father who's hearing that your daughter
who's deceased had semen inside of her that has no sperm. So you know
fat your son in law had sex or force himself on your daughter, but
for her death or shortly after her death. And you know that your daughter
had no intention of sleeping with her a strange husband. And so the ultimate
conclusion you come to is that he raped her that night and he killed her.
And so if that's what you're thinking as a father, there's all this
evidence that was overlooked. There wasn't even film in the camera when you were
taking pictures of the crime scene. You never looked into their house, and
you haven't listened to a word we've said about the way he's treated her.
He's angry. He's angry that his daughter's body was taken advantage of. He's
angry that she was killed and stolen from them. He's angry his grandbabies are
still in his custody. And don't think their dad's guilty. I mean,
he's angry about all of this. And so it is ballsy and bold and
spicy, but wow, everyone deserves a daddy like him. Well, sadly,
Dorothy fall And died in October of two thousand and seven at the age
of seventy three, and another terrible tragedy would take place just over three years
later, when Steve and Cathy's youngest daughter, Monica, passed away at the
age of twenty seven in March of twenty eleven. Monica reportedly lived a very
troubled life following her mother's death and succumbed to a drug overdose, which some
people have suspected was a suicide. The investigation remained quiet for several years until
the highly acclaimed movie Three Billboards Outside Eving, Missouri, received a white theatrical
release in November of twenty seventeen. Once media outlets started picking up on the
fact that the movie's premise appeared to be inspired by Kathy Page's murder, interest
in the case was rejuvenated. Fider Police Chief Rod Carroll, who had only
been in office for less than a year at this point, agreed to reopen
the investigation, and the Texas Department of Public Safety offered a six thousand dollars
reward for new information. Okay, that's amazing that they knew. Have some
new blood and other department. They're saying, let's look at this case again.
But how many years had it been since her actual murder? Sixteen sixteen
years? Yeah, and when you ask a cold case detective to go pick
up this case file, it seems logically it's very easy to tell that Steve's
responsible. But if I have to prove in the court of law beyond a
reasonable doubt, they botched the investigation to a point where what evidence do you
want me to prove that with? Just the semen, because it's that he
said, she said, and she's not here to defend herself. So if
I don't have any evidence sixteen years later, unless someone comes forward with a
confession or some kind of evidence that they've been saving, like possibly the watch
that was handed to the private investigator, how would they do anything with that
case at this point. In October of twenty eighteen, the case would be
featured on an episode of the Oxygen true crime series col Justice, hosted by
a former Harris County prosecutor, Kelly Siegler. The episode was titled The Case
Behind the Billboards and featured Segler and her team of investigators taking a fresh look
at the case alongside local law enforcement. The biggest new development was when they
spoke to an eye witness who told them that during the early morning hours of
May fourteenth, nineteen ninety one, he had been driving down Interstate ten and
saw Steve Page, whom he knew personally, walking away from the spot where
Kathy's car had crashed. However, the witness elected not to come forward at
that time because he was a married man who'd been with his mistress that night
and he did not want his family finding out about the affair. At the
end of the Cold Justice episode, Sealer and her team would submit all the
new evidence they had uncovered, including the eyewitness statement, to the Orange County
District Attorney's office, but they did not believe the evidence was sufficient enough to
file charges against anyone for Kathy's murder. In June of twenty twenty one,
Crime Stoppers of Southeast Texas raised their reward for information to fifty thousand dollars,
which is the largest reward they've ever offered in an unsolved cold case. At
the time of this recording, James Fulton is over ninety years old and claims
that the billboards he's put up accusing Steve Page of his daughter's murder will remain
there until he either dies or there's a conviction. Steve is currently living in
the Houston area, but after more than thirty years, the murder of Kathy
Page continues to remain unsolved. So I guess you could say the path went
chili. Okay. So when you go back to this idea that there's an
eyewitness who comes forward and says I saw him leaving the scene of a quote
crash this evening, but I was having an affair at the time didn't want
to come forward and tell them that I was out with a mistress and saw
this man. Normally i'd say, eh, you know, it's an eyewitness,
it is what it is. But it's not. This is a friend
or a very well known acquaintance to Steve who knows owes him. And so
in that case, when you're talking about seeing somebody one hundred and fourteen yards
from their house and you know that person on a personal level, and you're
out doing something bad, so in your head you're going, oh my,
that's odd, but I can't say anything because I'm doing something that I don't
want anyone to know about. It really does make me think that his account
would most likely be truthful. I believe him, and this is just a
reminder like when you look at a situation where a lack of integrity in personal
relationships can have serious ramifications. Because if he would have come forward at the
time and pointed the finger at Steve Page, who's a strong likelihood that the
Vider police would have had to have moved on a search warrant. Oh absolutely,
like if he had done it at the time, this case might have
been solved. But I can kind of understand the reluctance since they're only learning
his story like seventeen years after the fact, and thinking we can't take Steve
to trial based on his testimony because it took so long for him to come
forward. But they did interview him on the Cold Justice episode, and even
though he kept his identity secret, he pretty much acknowledged that, Yeah,
my marriage ended a long time ago, so it really doesn't matter now if
they found out I was having an affair. But yeah, you almost want
to strangle him though, thinking that, man, if you had not kept
quiet for so long, then this case might have been solid by now.
So I think this would be a good time to bring an end to Part
one. But join us next week as we present part two of our series
about the murder of Cathy Page. Robin, do you want to tell us
a little bit about the Trail Went Cold Patreon? Yes, The Trail Cold
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so check out those patreons will link them in the show notes. So I
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Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy