In 1988 Cathy Wood told her former husband that she and her ex-girlfriend, a fellow aide at the Alpine Manor nursing home in Walker, Michigan, outside Grand Rapids, had killed patients there the year before. He went to the police. Over a series of interviews with Walker police detectives, Wood let out her account a piece at a time. In it, Gwendolyn Graham was the planner and the killer, and Wood kept watch.
Graham was born on August 6, 1963, and Catherine May Wood on March 7, 1962. They met at Alpine Manor, where both worked as nurse's aides, soon after Graham moved to Michigan from Texas, and in 1986 they became friends and then lovers. By Wood's account, in January 1987 Graham went into the room of a woman with Alzheimer's disease and smothered her with a washcloth while Wood stood lookout. The woman was too frail to fight, her death looked natural, and there was no autopsy. Wood said Graham did it to relieve tension, and that each of them believed the shared secret would stop the other from leaving.
Over the next few months, Wood said, Graham killed four more. Most of the victims were incapacitated, many had Alzheimer's, and they ranged in age from sixty to ninety-eight: Mae Mason, seventy-nine; Edith Cook, ninety-eight; Marguerite Chambers, sixty; Myrtle Luce, ninety-five; and Belle Burkhard, seventy-four. Wood testified that the couple made a game of it, first trying to choose victims whose initials would spell M-U-R-D-E-R and, when that proved hard, counting each killing as a day, as in "I will love you forever and a day." A poem Wood wrote to Graham, read at trial, ended "You'll be mine forever and five days." Wood said Graham kept souvenirs from the victims; police never found any. The relationship ended when Graham began dating another aide at Alpine Manor, moved with her to Texas, and took a hospital job caring for infants.
Two of the dead had not been cremated and were exhumed. The examinations found no physical evidence of homicide, which is not unusual with smothering, and the county medical examiner ruled the deaths homicides anyway on the strength of Wood's interviews. On December 4 and 5, 1988, both women were arrested and charged with two murders, Wood in Walker and Graham in Tyler, Texas.
Wood pleaded to reduced charges and testified. Graham testified that the killings had never happened and were part of an elaborate mind game by Wood. What swayed the jury, in the absence of physical evidence, was the testimony of Graham's new girlfriend, who said Graham had confessed to five killings to her. On November 3, 1989, Graham was convicted of five counts of murder and one of conspiracy and given five life sentences. Wood, convicted of one count of second-degree murder and one of conspiracy, received twenty years on each and was released on January 16, 2020.
The journalist Lowell Cauffiel's 1992 book Forever and Five Days called Wood's account and her portrait of herself as Graham's pawn into serious question. The case was later fictionalized in the sixth season of American Horror Story. Graham is held at the Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility. In May 2026, as part of a request to Governor Gretchen Whitmer for a pardon, Graham, who now identifies as a transgender man, said the killings never happened, that it had all begun as a joke after watching the film Motel Hell, that Wood turned the joke into lies when they broke up, and that the trial had been colored by homophobia.