Twisted devotion

A tale of passion turned lethal

In January of 1987, Marguerite Chambers was a patient at Alpine Manor, a nursing home in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was her fourth year there. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease nearly twelve years earlier.

Her doting husband, Ed, frequently visited her. He would sit in a chair next to her bed, chatting and holding his wife’s shaking hand. In the time since she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she had lost the ability to communicate. Ed was not always able to understand what his wife was trying to tell him, but these visits remained a part of Marguerite’s routine, so there he sat, rubbing the back of her hand with his thumb.

One cold winter night, after Ed left, Marguerite was sleeping when she suddenly couldn’t breathe. She awoke in a panic, her eyes darting about to find the source of the unyielding pressure over her nostrils and jaw.

Overwhelmed by whatever was cutting off her air supply, she lost consciousness. She survived the assault and regained consciousness the next day. But in her state of dementia, she was unable to comprehend or communicate what had happened to her.

Then, in the late hours of January 18, 1987, two nurses’ aides working the night shift at the manor approached her room.

The more feminine of the duo, the blonde, stood in the doorway to watch the hall. After she confirmed the coast was clear, her masculine, brunette partner approached Marguerite with a cloth. The woman knew how weak Marguerite was, so she had faith that her second attempt would take care of her problem. As she crept towards the patient, the blonde watched from the door.

The brunette stood beside Marguerite’s bed, then held the cloth over the older woman’s mouth and nose with unrelenting pressure. Their eyes met as Marguerite thrashed and struggled for breath. When they were sure Marguerite had taken her last breath, the two women fled to an unoccupied room to appreciate the murder they had just committed.

The next morning, Marguerite was found unresponsive. Workers attempted to revive her, but it was far too late.

The staff let Marguerite’s family know they needed to come and retrieve her belongings. The day before, they had brought her a balloon bouquet. Now, with the woman’s bed empty, a family member noticed that one of the balloons was missing.

In January of 1987, Gwen Graham and Cathy Wood seemed happy. Their relationship was still new. They had just celebrated the New Year as a couple for the first time.

The more masculine Gwen was able to find a match in her more feminine lover, Cathy. Each wanted to do anything she could to show the other just how much she loved her.

In the fall of the year before, Gwen had moved from her home town of Tyler, Texas, to Grand Rapids. There she and Cathy worked together as nurses aides’ at Alpine Manor, where they quickly struck up an affair.

To bring some excitement to the job, the two women liked to play pranks on their coworkers and patients. They created drama among the staff, and would frequently move patients into other rooms. After a while, the games grew boring. So they invented a new one. They called it the Murder Game.

They thought it would strengthen their relationship. They hoped to create a list of victims whose first names would spell out “M-U-R-D-E-R,” and declared that for every life they took, their love bond would grow stronger. This was partly romantic, partly pragmatic, since, if they ever broke up, each might implicate the other. So they promised to love each other forever plus one day for every life they claimed.

Born August 6, 1963, Gwendolyn Graham was raised on a farm outside of Tyler, Texas, until she was in 5th grade, when she and her family moved to Michigan. She had a loveless childhood; her father was a disagreeable man with often abusive ideas about how a child should be raised. He forbade Gwen’s mother from holding her daughter, believing it would make the child weak. He taught Gwen about life and death by forcing her to watch the slaughter of chickens and pigs.

When she was 11 years old, Gwen’s dog Misty barked at a horse, causing the rider to be thrown from the saddle. Gwen’s father made her older brother shoot the dog and forced his young daughter to watch.

The incident haunted Gwen. After the dog’s death, she went into the yard where Misty was buried and dug up her remains. She kept the teeth and skull in a heart box for most of her life.

In her teenage years, Gwen’s father became a violent substance abuser. He frequently got drunk and sexually molested Gwen. Gwen began to slice her skin open with razors and burn herself with cigarettes. By the time she left home at 18, she had more than thirty scars on each arm from her self-mutilation.

Catherine Wood was born a year before Gwen, on March 7, 1962, at an army base in Washington state. She had a similarly abrasive childhood. The Woods moved to Massachusetts shortly after Cathy’s sister, Barbara, was born; then her father was shipped off to fight in the Vietnam War. He wasn’t around much after that, but when he was, he would criticize Cathy’s appearance, which made her feel ugly and uncomfortable. Cathy was able to develop a strong bond with her sister, but she didn’t socialize much outside of that.

“I spent a lot of time by myself,” Cathy would later tell the court about her childhood. “I read a lot. My dad was… he drank a lot, he was an alcoholic, he was abusive, so I stayed by myself most of the time.”

As she entered her teenage years, Cathy felt that she should be interested in boys, so she began the search for a relationship. She began dating a nice boy named David, and for the most part, she was happy.

One day, as she was passing by David’s house, she saw his car in the driveway and went up to the front door. She was greeted by the boy’s mother, but the woman was confused. She had a daughter, not a son. She led Cathy inside and showed her a photograph of David with long, flowing hair and wearing a floral-pattern dress.

Cathy learned that “David” identified as female and went by her given name, Debbie. Cathy believed Debbie had deliberately misled her into thinking she was a male. This likely led Cathy to mistrust partners in future relationships.

When she was 16, Cathy met and started getting to know a man named Ken Woods. After their first date, they went home together and she had him undress. This was only to confirm he was biologically a man. The two dated for a while, and after Cathy got pregnant at 17, they decided to get married.

They moved to Walker, Michigan, where Cathy gave birth to a daughter, Jacqueline, in 1980. But it quickly became clear that Cathy had zero interest in being a mother. Jackie later described her mother as narcissistic, manipulative, and a pathological liar, and has said she “spent most of her life afraid of her mother and her constant extremely drastic mood swings”.

The marriage was strained. Ken tried to hold on. But in 1986, Cathy filed for divorce. She allowed Ken to leave with Jackie, and she began looking for jobs.

***

A study published in 1988 found that over 40 percent of those seeking services at an agency for homosexual adolescents reported they had experienced physical violence, with approximately half the violence occurring within their families, mostly in interactions with parents. Twenty-two percent of clients within this agency also reported experiencing sexual abuse.

Another study, published eleven years later, supported the growing view that people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, either in adolescence or adulthood, experience higher rates of maltreatment than heterosexuals during childhood and adolescence. They also are more likely to have been mistreated by a parent.

Yet of all the LGBTQ persons who were abused in their youth, few grew up to commit murder.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health proposed a link between maltreatment and crime. The authors suggested that child maltreatment roughly doubles the probability that an individual will engage in many types of crime. The severity of the abuse increases the likelihood of crime.

So why these women? What happened to them that led them to kill?

***

Alpine Manor, located in Walker, Michigan, was known to have numerous lesbians on its staff. It is unclear what made working at the Manor so attractive to lesbians. In any case, Cathy would not begin exploring this side of herself until she began working as a nurse’s aide in 1985.

After she got the job and began meeting some of her coworkers, she developed a newfound confidence that allowed her to be more social. She frequently went out with her new friends, and soon began a relationship with another aid named Dawn Male. In the following year, Gwen Graham would also start working at Alpine Manor.

One day at work, Cathy was in the employee lounge, sitting and chatting with her girlfriend at the time, Dawn, when another one of her coworkers strolled in. It was Gwen. She and Cathy knew of each other but didn’t interact much. On this particular day, Gwen was wearing her uniform with the sleeves rolled up; the scars from her abuse as a youth were visible. Cathy remembers seeing Gwen’s scars and notes that was the moment she began “watching” Gwen.

The two soon struck up a friendship, and as they spent more time together, their bond became undeniable. The two shared childhood trauma and abuse by their fathers, so it might be true that they were drawn to each other because they both wanted a relationship without such treatment.

Gwen seemed to be the more masculine of the pair, the strong, silent type. She was quiet and worked hard, but it was clearly Cathy who was in charge. She had the upper hand with Gwen and much of the staff as well; she was sharper than most nurses. Their relationship began positively, but when their drama, tricks, and pranks began, their coworkers soon felt as if it was “them versus the world.”

The two women had both been diagnosed in their teenage years with two different personality disorders that might have made them feel more comfortable in their relationship with each other. Gwen has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, and Cathy, apart from being a pathological liar, had narcissistic personality disorder.

Borderline personalities tend to feel empty and have deep fears of loneliness, which means they will search for someone who is likely to relieve their loneliness. They also tend to gravitate to a person who will accept the inconsistency of being angry one minute, then loving, then stealing from the person, then expecting love.

Narcissistic personalities, on the other hand, come off as strong and genuine in their passion, but what seems to be genuine care or love for their partner, is typically just how their partner makes them feel about themselves. The narcissist sees their partner as a tool for getting whatever they want.

Recall how Cathy didn’t even notice Gwen until she noticed the scars on her arm from her self-harm — a sign of someone with self-esteem so low they might be easily manipulated.

A relationship between two such personalities will begin passionately, with an intense desire, even an obsession, that will lead toward toxic repulsion in the end. But Gwen and Cathy were determined to prove they would stay together forever.

On October 31, 1986, the couple attended a Halloween costume party. Gwen decided to come dressed as an Alpine Manor patient, with medical restraints around her wrists and ankles.

That night at their apartment, after the party, Cathy used the restraints to bind Gwen to the bed. She then pulled out a cloth to place on Gwen’s mouth and nose, and the two performed a sadomasochistic activity referred to as breath play, being deprived or depriving someone of oxygen.

Shortly after this night, the women began stalking the nursing home, lurking in the hallways, constricting the noses of patients, clamping shut their nostrils to cut their air off, and trying to see how a potential victim might react. Some victims reported attacks or feeling someone was after them. But due to their condition, no one believed them.

If they struggled or seemed strong enough to fight them off, the women would give up and spare them. But if the victims seemed too weak to fight off their own suffocation, they received a “mercy killing.”

After they murdered Marguerite Chambers in January 1987, the women killed four more patients by April of the same year. They gave up “The Murder Game” and decided that rather than spelling out a word, it would be easier simply to kill the weakest possible victims. The women suffocated Mae Mason, 79; Edith Cook, 98; Marguerite Chambers, 60, Myrtle Lace, 95; and Belle Burkard, 74.

Cathy found pleasure in the experience, describing it as “easy and kind of fun,” because their victims were defenseless. She said Gwen once told her that each of the killings provided an emotional release for her, with the exception of Edith Cook, who Gwen said was killed to end her suffering from gangrene.

Dawn Male, who was fired from her job at the nursing home late in the summer of 1986, said Cathy and Gwen discussed the killings when she visited the women in their home in Grand Rapids.

“I didn’t believe them,” Dawn said. “I thought it was a joke, a sick joke, but a joke. Head games.”

To prove their story, Dawn said the women took her into a bedroom and showed her several random objects a shelf. They said they had been taken from each of the murdered patients. The collection of socks, jewelry, and other seemingly meaningless trinkets alarmed Dawn, but she did not think much of it at the time.

***

They always killed the women in the same way. Upon nightfall, Cathy and Gwen would select their victim and approach the women’s room. Cathy acted as the lookout while Gwen entered with her terry cloth. She would creep up to her victim, sleeping in bed, and clamp the rag over her mouth and nose. Gwen would cup the terry cloth over her fragile face, pressing down and blocking her airways until she felt the woman take her final breath under her hands. Cathy and Gwen would then retreat together to relive the thrill of the murder.

Gwen and Cathy’s behavior after their Halloween party shows that this method of killing might have been their fantasy. When just fantasizing was no longer enough to satisfy them, they had to accommodate and construct a new plan.

The murders were ritualistic killings.

These murders were not spur-of-the-moment crimes of passion, but rather pre-constructed and premeditated fantasies. However, because the reality did not match their fantasy, they had no choice but to repeat their crimes, hoping to perfect their method and have it match their vision.

The women committed the murders in such a way that did not raise suspicion. People in nursing homes are expected to die. When their victims did so, no one suspected murder.

***

About six months into their relationship, Gwen decided she was no longer willing to be subjected to the abuse of her pathologically domineering lover. She moved out of the apartment she and Cathy shared and attempted to move on, dating another nurse from Alpine named Heather.

When Cathy uncovered the new romance, she began threatening Gwen and her new lover. She went to Gwen’s new apartment wielding a pistol and said she had the ability to send Gwen to prison if she continued this new relationship with Heather.

For Cathy, the murders were leverage. They served as insurance; she now had the ultimate a way to blackmail Gwen to prevent her from leaving her. During this time, Cathy sent Gwen a romantic poem of sorts, reminding her of their murder pact and the implications behind that.

She ended the poem by saying “You’ll be mine forever and five days.”

Gwen was so frightened by Cathy’s threats that she decided to move back in with Cathy. As soon as she did this, the abuse got worse. Gwen recounts an incident that occurred during this period, when Cathy bound Gwen to their bed, took Gwen’s gun, and threatened to kill her. Cathy proceeded to sexually assault Gwen with the pistol before leaving her tied up alone in the house for hours.

Cathy also remembers this episode, but in her version, it was Gwen committing these actions.

Gwen put up with a relationship she described as psychologically abusive for another three months. Finally, after nine months with Cathy in all, she decided enough was enough and tried to get as far away from her as possible. Gwen and Heather moved back to Gwen’s hometown of Tyler, Texas. For a time, they lived relatively peacefully.

Then, in 1988, Cathy Wood, feeling nostalgic, reached out to her ex-husband, Ken Wood. They had a relatively normal conversation, but then Cathy told Ken she had done some horrible things.

When pressed, she said, “What do you think is the worst that a person could do?”

Ken thought for a moment before answering, “Murder,” to which Cathy responded:

“Try six times that.”

Ken sat with what Cathy confessed to him for six months before deciding he should go to the police. He had always known Cathy to stretch the truth and initially thought that confessing to the murders was a sick prank or lie that she had decided to rope him into.

“I thought about the families of the victims; so many people were going to get hurt,” Ken told the media in 1989. “But Cathy wasn’t getting any better. I sensed a lot of guilt. She couldn’t let go of what had happened. … I went to the police because she needed help.”

Eventually, Ken relayed Cathy’s story to the police, who opened an investigation into the Alpine Manor. Police discovered that many deaths were recorded in the year 1987, but, as the Alpine Manor is a nursing home, none of the deaths really seemed suspicious. It was also true that out of the five alleged victims, only two did not get cremated. However, the police knew how easy it would be to conceal a murder among so many natural deaths. So they questioned Cathy.

***

After a period of questioning, Cathy revealed more of the details of the murders to police in exchange for a plea deal. She painted Gwen Graham as the mastermind behind the murders. Cathy said that her ex-girlfriend had coerced her into participating, and that she only acted as the lookout.

Michigan’s Attorney General at the time, Dana Nessel, said that “as a nurse’s aide, Wood was one of the people who could have and should have made these women comfortable in their waning years. Instead, she helped inflict terror and death… the willful targeting of those victims because of helplessness, the abuse of the caretaker relationship, the pure malice evidenced by taking souvenirs of the victims.” Mr. Nessel wrote in his brief of the case, “that this is an exceptional circumstance that warrants exceptional consideration.”

Police exhumed the two bodies of the women who had not been cremated. The coroner found no physical evidence of homicide, but if the women had been smothered, as Cathy claimed, there would be no evidence left after so long. Thus, based solely on Cathy’s testimony, the victims’ cause of death was changed to “homicide,” and arrest warrants were served for both Cathy and Gwen.

By this point, Gwen had also slipped up. Her new girlfriend, Heather Baragar, would testify that Gwen confessed the murders to her.

“She joked around about it,” Heather said. “She’d say, ‘I killed six people’.”

The Walker police department opened a full investigation and ran background checks on the two women. They found that Cathy had no criminal record. Reaching out to the police department of Tyler, Texas, they discovered Gwen had an outstanding warrant for writing bad checks. Detectives flew to Tyler, obtained a search warrant, and searched Gwen’s house, but came up empty.

At Alpine Manor, Detectives Roger Kaliniak and Tom Friedman pulled records and found Cathy Wood and Gwen Graham had been on shifts at Alpine when each of their alleged victims died. With this, the detectives decided to question Cathy.

At first, Cathy denied that any murders had occurred, claiming that she had only told her ex-husband that as a joke. However, after forty minutes of interrogation, Cathy broke down and confessed that the murders did occur, but she didn’t actually kill anyone herself. She insisted that she could prove it with the letters between her and Gwen and some of the trophies they took from the victims.

Police found the love letters when they searched her house, but there was no sign of the trophies Cathy claimed to have. With no evidence to verify her claims, police convinced Cathy to take a polygraph test.

She failed the test, leading the operator to believe she was making the entire thing up.

However, Detective Friedman remained certain that Cathy was telling the truth. He confronted her about the polygraph and suggested that she had failed the test because she was not admitting her full role in the murders. She got up and walked out of the room without saying a word.

Three days after the polygraph, Cathy confessed.

Court documents released recently stated the couple killed five patients and tried to kill “at least five others, but were unsuccessful because some of the elderly men and women fought back.”

***

Cathy presented an idealistic version of herself during Gwen’s trial, but court documents, close friends, coworkers, and family members of Cathy Wood confirm she is extremely manipulative and a pathological liar.

She told the court a fictitious story that “Gwen told [her] she liked walking past the nursery and she wanted to take one of [the babies] and smash it against the window,″ Cathy testified. She added that she “had to stop her somehow.”

Gwen Graham said she believed that “[Cathy] expected to get me locked up and that she was going to walk away and go home. I don’t think she expected to do a day… I thought the first year, she’d give it up, but she didn’t.”

Ken Wood also admitted to seeing signs of Cathy’s pathological narcissism in their married life.

Cathy’s daughter Jackie believes that in the trial, more of the focus was placed on Graham in terms of who thought up the crimes, however, based on her experiences and discussions with people surrounding the case, she believes that her mother was behind it all. She recalls a time when Cathy told her father that she wondered what it would be like to kill somebody.

Jackie remains empathetic for her mother and understands how her traumatic past led her to commit horrendous crimes. She says that she relates to her on some level, “feeling like you’re not lovable and feeling like you’re not good enough and going to extreme measures to guarantee you’re loved,” she said in an interview.

***

In November of 1989, Gwen Graham was found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit murder and was given a life sentence for every life she took without the possibility of parole. To this day she remains in the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Pittsfield Charter Township, Michigan.

Cathy Wood was found guilty of one count of second-degree murder and one count of conspiracy to commit second-degree murder. She received 20 years on each count, but was granted parole in October 2018. As her release approached, Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, weighed in with a stark appeal to keep her in prison. From Nessel’s brief:

“The vicious nature of the crimes Wood has admitted to carrying out, the helplessness of the victims, the willful targeting of those victims because of that helplessness, the abuse of the caretaker relationship, the pure malice evidenced by taking souvenirs of the victims, and the sheer number of victims should each individually show that this is an exceptional circumstance that warrants exceptional consideration. Combined, these factors reveal a truly exceptional series of heinous crimes and a perpetrator more depraved than civilized society can bear.”

Gwen Graham will likely never step outside prison. But Cathy Wood, in defiance of Nessel’s warning, was released in 2020. This came as a shock to many, especially Gwen. In a prison interview in 2019, Gwen described Cathy as evil. She said Wood “thought it was a game, and she won, and in the end, she’ll win. If I die here and she’s walking around free, she’ll win.”

Retired detective Roger Kaliniak, who worked on their case, told reporters in 2020 that “Cathy Wood was the mastermind, she was the one that was pulling strings on Gwendolyn Graham… Gwendolyn Graham handled the dirty work and Cathy Wood was the brains behind it.”

The parole board had denied Cathy’s release eight times, saying she was not remorseful and would pose a threat. But police said she began acting as a model prisoner, so she was granted her freedom, leaving the public in outrage.

John Engman’s mother-in-law, Mae Mason, was murdered by the women. He thinks Cathy is a danger to society, and feels sorry for the people who now have to live around her.

Roger Kaliniak fears Cathy will strike again now that she has been released, he says, “She is a serial killer and could do it again. Most of them do.”

***

The story of Gwendolyn Graham and Catherine Wood gives a harrowing look at a passionate and manipulative love affair that turned sour and raises questions about how mental health, trauma, and codependency impact relationships. Their story serves as a drastic example of how two people’s energy can feed off of each other in the wrong way.

There are still many inconsistencies in both Gwen’s and Cathy’s stories, leaving us wondering who was really the instigator behind the murder spree at Alpine Manor. One can assume that both women have the motivation to lie, so it is difficult to say who did the manipulation and who got their hands dirty.

Only the two ex-lovers will ever really know — Gwen, in her jail cell, and Cathy in her sister Barbara’s home in Fort Hill, North Carolina.

A Note on Sources

Principal sources for my story include newspaper reports (The Morning Call, Associated Press News, United Press International News, Dayton Daily News), articles published by those working on the case, court documents with witness and suspect testimonies, and several podcasts (some of which included interviews with Cathy Wood and Gwen Graham, as well as Cathy Wood’s daughter Jackie). I watched television news reports on the case and also compiled research on the connection between homosexuality and child abuse and child abuse and crime. I also looked at several psychiatric journal entries to understand mental health diagnoses such as borderline personality and narcissistic personality disorders and how mental illness impacts relationships. I also consulted Janet Currie and Erdal Tekin’s Does Child Abuse Cause Crime?, Lowell Cauffiel’s Forever and Five Days and Peter Vronsky’s Female Serial Killers: How and Why Women Become Monsters. These secondary sources allowed me to develop a more concise understanding of the case in its entirety — and revealed to me that the story was much more complicated than it seemed on its surface.