Killer Women - Devasting True Stories of Female Murderers. Wensley Clarkson
he was no longer asleep. The full force of that bullet had somehow awoken him from his drunken stupor.
For a moment, Kathy was taken aback. She had not expected this by any means. With the gun still firmly in her hands she pulled back a few inches and aimed again at his head. This time it would have to work.
In those few moments between shots, her eyes explored every inch of his body, trying to establish whether his apparent consciousness was just a passing phase. But she could not take any chances. She fired again from close range. This time the bullet tore a gaping hole in the side of his head and took off on a helter skelter of a ride around the inside of his brain.
Without even a flicker of emotion, Kathy Gaultney pulled out a drawer from the chest next to the bed and dropped it on to her husband’s corpse. It seemed the perfect way to make sure it all looked like a robbery that had gone tragically wrong.
Ten minutes later she was leaving the house with her young son, completely unaware that her daughter Rachel was lying in wait across the street.
Rachel and her pal crept in the back door of the house in silence just in case they woke Keith Gaultney. The youngsters opened the door to the bedroom like two cat burglars on the prowl.
When she looked inside that bedroom where her step-father lay dead, she had no idea of the brutal killing that had just taken place. No one knows if there was even a flicker of life left in his body when she snooped around the room looking for his wallet. But one thing is sure – she took no notice of the drawer emptied over his body. It was all pretty much par for the course for the ever-drunken Keith Gaultney.
Once she found what she was looking for, Rachel left the room, completely unaware that she had been just a few feet from the body of her dead step-father.
But the timing of her secret snoop around that room was to be the crucial evidence in convicting her own mother of first-degree murder.
‘Is that the police? My husband’s been shot. You better come quickly.’
Kathy Gaultney sounded distraught to the telephone operator who took her emergency call later that evening. She told officers she had returned home from late-night shopping at a number of local supermarkets to find her husband shot dead in their bed. It seemed like a robbery that had gone terribly wrong.
As the paramedics, medical examiners and assorted police milled around the Gaultney house, one figure stepped back into the shadows and found herself examining her own conscience – Kathy’s 13-year-old daughter Rachel.
For she had witnessed her mother leave that house with her half-brother and she had seen what later transpired to be the body of her step-father. Basically, this scared young girl was withholding the key to his murder and she just did not know what to do.
While the flashing lights of the police cars disappeared into the distance some hours later, she retired in silence to her little bedroom, haunted by the role she had played in the whole tragic scenario.
It was only a few weeks later that Rachel decided to call the police and tell them what had happened that fateful night. Detectives later admitted that without her testimony it is entirely possible that Kathy Gaultney might never have been arrested.
For those first few weeks after the murder of her husband, Kathy Gaultney cut a pretty confident figure in St Jacob – still reeling from the first deliberate killing in its hundred-year history.
People may have been whispering behind her back, but Kathy did not care. She had got rid of her drunken, nagging husband and that was all that mattered in her mind.
Even when a friend advised her to contact a lawyer just in case police tried to haul her in for questioning, she was super cool about the whole business.
In fact, when she motored into nearby Edwardsville with a friend one morning, she did not feel in the least bit threatened by the vicious gossip that was sweeping the area about her involvement in Keith’s death.
As she slowed down at a crossing, she even smiled when she spotted two state police detectives and an attorney leading the investigation into her husband’s murder.
‘Aren’t you guys having a busy day?’
Kathy Gaultney really was pushing her luck. Here were the top law enforcement officers involved in her husband’s case and she was ribbing them mercilessly.
Unfortunately, what Kathy Gaultney did not realise was that the case against her was now sufficient to warrant her arrest. A few minutes later, police pulled up the van she was travelling in and arrested her for the murder of her husband.
In April 1990, Kathy Gaultney, aged 34, was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of the first-degree murder of her 35-year-old husband.
Prosecuting attorney Don Weber told the court, ‘This crime was planned, but it wasn’t planned well.’ And, describing Kathy Gaultney’s own daughter’s role in her mother’s conviction, he added: ‘In any crime, the inadvertent witness is the one thing you can’t plan for.’
Some months after her trial, Kathy Gaultney contacted authorities and agreed to provide inside information on the drug cartel she worked for with Martha Young.
Twelve people, including Mary O’Guinn and her notorious one-legged drug baron brother Roy Vernon Dean, were arrested and eventually given very lengthy sentences for their involvement in one of the biggest narcotics rings in US history.
Martha Young was also imprisoned as a result of testimony from her best friend Kathy. But, amazingly, the two women still write to each other from their respective prisons in Illinois and Gaultney says that they have remained friends despite everything.
Meanwhile Gaultney herself insists that she did not carry out the murder of her drug informant husband. She maintains that he was killed by other members of the Roy Vernon Dean gang who wanted to silence Keith Gaultney before he helped authorities close down their drug cartel.
When I interviewed her in the notorious so-called ‘women killers’ cottage in the grounds of the Dwight Correctional Center in January, 1992, she was still protesting her innocence and insisting that she would eventually succeed in overturning the jury’s verdict.
In a hushed voice, as various other inmates walked freely around the inside of the stone-built building, she told me, ‘I put up with a lot of shit from Keith but there’s no way that I killed him.’
As one woman inmate – imprisoned for life for murdering her parents – poured us each a cup of tea, Kathy went on, ‘I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but I ended up paying the price for working for an evil ring of drug smugglers. They killed Keith and then managed to get the police to arrest me. One day I’ll prise out the truth.’
Meanwhile, Kathy continues passing her days reading and cooking inside one of the strangest cottages that I have ever visited. It remains to be seen if her desperate attempts to appeal against her sentence will ever actually be heard.
Having spent two fascinating days inside one of the world’s most daunting prisons, I have to admit that Kathy Gaultney has a great deal of charm and intelligence. When she is eventually released, I have no doubt that she will successfully reinstate herself into society.
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