In 1988 Catherine May Wood, a former nurse's aide at the Alpine Manor nursing home in Walker, Michigan, told her ex-husband that she and her lover, a coworker named Gwendolyn Graham, had killed patients there the year before. He went to the police. Everything that followed, the charges, the trial, the story of a lovers' pact told in books and television documentaries, rested chiefly on what Wood said.
She was born on March 7, 1962, in Soap Lake, Washington, and was twenty-five in 1987. The deaths at issue were those of five elderly women with dementia or Alzheimer's disease: Mae Mason, seventy-nine; Edith Cook, ninety-eight, whose name and age some reports give as Edith Cole, eighty-nine; Marguerite Chambers, sixty; Myrtle Luce, ninety-five; and Belle Burkhard, seventy-four. Each had been recorded at the time as a natural death. By Wood's account, Graham smothered them with a washcloth while Wood kept watch, and the two first tried to choose victims whose initials would spell the word MURDER. Detectives later said there might have been as many as a dozen.
Walker police detectives Roger Kaliniak and Tom Freeman worked the case. Both women were arrested in December 1988. Under a plea agreement Wood pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of Marguerite Chambers and to conspiracy to commit second-degree murder, and in exchange she testified against Graham. In September 1989 she was sentenced to twenty to forty years. Graham, convicted of five counts of first-degree murder on that testimony, received life without parole and has always denied everything.
The two investigators came to disagree about her. Kaliniak called Wood the mastermind who pulled Graham's strings and said she could kill again. Freeman said she had earned her freedom by testifying. The Michigan Parole Board refused her eight times, finding her a danger and unremorseful, before voting to release her in September 2018. The victims' families went to court to stop it, led by John Engman, Mae Mason's son-in-law, but a Kent County judge ruled in October 2019 that she should go free. She had served most of her sentence at the federal prison in Tallahassee, Florida, kept apart from Graham, and on January 16, 2020, she was released to live with her sister in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
The foundation she laid has since been attacked directly. In 2026 the Michigan Innocence Clinic filed a 642-page clemency petition for Graham arguing that the murders never happened at all. By the clinic's account, the aides at Alpine Manor had watched the horror film Motel Hell and traded dark jokes about patient deaths, and Wood escalated the joke by telling friends and coworkers that she and Graham were really smothering patients. The petition calls her story a fabrication. The deaths had been certified as natural, the bodies buried, and the prosecution had almost no physical evidence beyond her word.