THREE RIVERS, Mich. (WOOD) — Courteney Swartz knows her mom only through a couple of photographs and stories told by her grandparents and her mom's old friends.
"A lot of them have reached out and said I was the light of her world," she said.
She was 9 months old in December 1988 when a man brutally murdered her 19-year-old mom, Cathy Swartz, in another room of their apartment during what police called an attempted sexual assault. The killer beat and strangled her and slit her throat. Courteney Swartz was left alone in an apartment that was covered in blood.
"Sick," she said of the murder, "especially with her daughter, like a baby, in the next room."
Using a bloody fingerprint and a footprint in blood, police eliminated one suspect after another before the case turned cold.
Then in April, 35 years later, she was stunned to learn that police more than 1,000 miles away had arrested a man she had never heard of. And, she said, she predicted the outcome: that he would die by suicide.
"He's a coward," she said. "I feel there might be more to this story and him just taking his own life was just the easiest way for him to not have to deal with anything."
A BAD MAN HURT MY MOM
At a picnic table in a Three Rivers park, Courteney Swartz stared at a photograph of herself as a newborn, in a onesie, on her mom's lap. Her mom is holding her tiny hands. It was like she was looking at some other baby, some other mom.
"I just I wish could have got to meet her, or know her, you know?" she said. "It hurts, and that's all I have."
Her biological dad wasn't part of her life, so her mom's parents raised her.
"My grandma was granny, and my grandpa for a really long time was dad, because I had a mom up in heaven, but I didn't have a dad," she said.
She was a first grader when they told her about her mom in words a first grader might understand.
"They sat me down on the bed and they told me, 'We've got to talk to you about your mom, if you want to know,' and I said, 'Well, yeah, I want to know.'
"They told me that a bad man hurt my mom and that she was up in heaven," she said.
Then, in the fourth grade, "they actually told me that my mom was murdered, somebody entered the apartment and beat her really bad. She had just had like a root canal done and that is the side that she was mostly beaten on. Then they slit her neck from ear to ear."
"I stayed home from school that day. I just took it in, and I just tried to live like a normal kid," she said.
"I remember my whole life just going to the store or anywhere, seeing people, and just wondering, 'I wonder if that's who killed my mom?'" she continued. "That's kind of like how my grandparents raised me, too, like everybody was a suspect, so I was very sheltered, very sheltered."
A SUSPECT 1,000 MILES AWAY
More than three decades later, in late April, Three Rivers police called to tell her they had reopened her mom's case. The killer had left a fingerprint in his own blood, enough for DNA genealogy tests to narrow it down to one family of four brothers.
"The next day is when they called and said they were down in South Carolina and they had Robert Waters in custody, and it's really crazy because my very first instinct then, when they called and told me, is he's going to kill himself," Courteney Swartz said. "That was the first thing that came to my mind."
Police said Waters refused to talk to them, but that DNA tests confirmed his blood at the scene. The fingerprint and bloody footprint also were a match, they said. This, they said, was their killer.
Waters was a childhood friend of her mom's fiance and had visited their apartment shortly before the killing, but Courteney Swartz had never heard of him and police back then never questioned him.
He had moved, was married with kids and settled in Beaufort, South Carolina, where he owned a plumbing business and had no criminal record.
SUICIDE LEAVES UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Courteney Swartz is 35 now, raising four kids not far from Three Rivers. Her grandparents died without knowing who killed their daughter.
She wonders how a man could kill as police say he did, then go on to live a seemingly normal life.
"It kills me knowing that they just are down there, they were just down there living the best life that they could, and here I am trying to make sure that my kids never feel what I felt," she said.
Before police could move the 53-year-old suspect to Michigan to appear in a courtroom where Courteney Swartz planned to stare him down, he died by suicide in the Beaufort County Jail.
"I start to think of things I was going to say to him, and I was going to write then down, but then I found out that he killed himself, so I didn't. I just stopped," she said.
She mostly wanted to know why.
“Just how could you do that, especially with her own baby in the room next, in the apartment? You left her in there, you left me in there, and then to just leave and act like nothing ever even happened, I don't know," she said.
"He didn't have to look at me or anything. He didn't have to say anything. All I wanted was for him to feel my presence in that room. Like, I'm the baby; here I am 35 years later. That is all I wanted."