Was Erin Caffey a Psychopath? What the Tapes Revealed to Me

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:02]I had a hard time just getting anyone to talk because a town is trying to forget.

[00:00:09]There are some crimes so awful they stain a community long after the headlines disappear. The people who live there spend years trying to understand how kids they knew, kids they watched grow up, devolved into violence.

[00:00:24]>> 911. What's the address of your emergency? I've got a man that's been shot out here in my house.

[00:00:30]>> On March 1st, 2008, in rural East Texas, 16-year-old Aaron Caffy was accused of orchestrating the murder of her family.

[00:00:40]Her mother and two younger brothers are killed. Her father barely survives after crawling from their burning home.

[00:00:49]Today, Aaron Caffy is 34 years old and according to the Texas Inmate Database, she becomes eligible for parole in 2038, meaning she could be released before the age of 50.

[00:01:03]>> Officer Sanders with the Reigns ISD Police Department. I'm here with um Aaron Caffy, who's 14 years of age.

[00:01:11]>> Was Aaron Caffy a teenager manipulated by a psychopath? Was she the architect of the murders? Or is this something more disturbing?

[00:01:21]Is this the perfect storm of four young people reinforcing each other until fantasy becomes violence?

[00:01:28]>> I don't think one person by themselves would have gone out and done that.

[00:01:33]>> As part of our investigation into this case, we've uncovered neverbeforeheard audio from the original investigation.

[00:01:42]Recordings made only days after the murders. So, this was talked about a month ago.

[00:01:47]>> I've gone through these interviews piece by piece and when you hear these conversations for yourself, the case becomes far more complicated than the headlines ever suggested.

[00:01:59]>> I said, "Well, no, Charlie." And he said, "Well, Aaron's talking about murdering her parents."

[00:02:07]>> I'm James Buddy Day. This is unmarked.

[00:02:17]There are rare cases when someone kills their entire family. Criminologists call this familicide, a form of mass murder that occurs within a family unit.

[00:02:31]It's among the rarest forms of homicide.

[00:02:33]In Canada, researchers identified only 25 famil cases across a 10-year period.

[00:02:41]On average, that's roughly two and a half cases a year. In the United States, broader estimates place family annihilation style murders at roughly 20 to 25 cases annually, depending on how that term is defined. And in nearly every case, the perpetrator is an adult male. But insight is often found in the outliers and the murders of the Cathy family defy almost every convention. It was the most talked about story in town.

[00:03:14]And today, I mean, I remember whenever I was doing it, no local person had gone back out there to try and do another piece on it. I believe that's the voice of Daniel Pierce. He's an investigative reporter who grew up in East Texas.

[00:03:29]Years later, while working in Tyler, he revisited the Cathy murders on their anniversary. A few years ago, I met Daniel while traveling through Tyler, Alba, and Emory, Texas, retracing the aftermath of the murders and the trials that followed. The interviews you'll hear in this episode are ones that we recorded during that initial reporting.

[00:03:53]I spent uh you know a week trying to get law enforcement to to release an you know interrogation video. Uh and the most I ever got was mug shots and then just trying to get anybody in the in the town. I reached out to Aaron, Charlie, and Charles. They all declined, you know, to talk. While in Texas, I spent my weekends filing multiple public records requests with the Reigns ISD Police Department and eventually I obtained the original police recordings from the case. Reigns ISD Police Department. It is >> 10:45 March 1st. I'm in the uh emergency room at Suler Springs Hospital. And >> these tapes provide invaluable insight into the case. And using these records along with court documents, interviews, and original reporting, we're going to move beyond the sensational retellings and examine the question at the center of the case. Who is responsible?

[00:04:53]Aaron Caffy, the 16-year-old daughter accused of setting everything in motion.

[00:04:58]Charlie Wilkinson, the boyfriend her father would later describe as a psychopath.

[00:05:04]Or was it the group itself? Four young people reinforcing one another until fantasy becomes murder.

[00:05:13]In this episode, it's not about choosing the easy answer. It's about testing all three.

[00:05:21]So before we go too deep, let me catch you up. On March 1st, 2008, police respond to a rural property near Alba, Texas, after reports of a shooting and housefire.

[00:05:34]The home belongs to Terry and Penny Cathy, and their three children, Aaron, Matthew, and Tyler. Only Terry Cathy survives, later describing a violent home invasion allegedly carried out by his daughter's ex-boyfriend, Charlie Wilkinson.

[00:05:54]Within hours, Wilkinson is arrested alongside two friends. Soon after, the Cathy's 16-year-old daughter, Aaron Cathy, is also arrested and accused of helping to plan the murders.

[00:06:08]Aaron still hasn't, you know, admitted or accepted the fact that she did orchestrate all this. She's still saying, you know, I I could have stopped that. I could have done this and that.

[00:06:18]Um, but I don't think at any point she's ever said, I did this. What Daniel is describing gets to the center of this case. Over the years, people have tried to force the case into a simpler narrative with claims like Aaron Caffy is a psychopath capable of directing violence through others or that she herself fell under the influence of her psychopathic boyfriend Charlie Wilkinson or that a group dynamic is to blame.

[00:06:48]Those are the questions hanging over everything. And to answer them, we need to understand who these people were before the murders, the homes they grew up in, the relationships that began pulling them towards each other. So to understand how this comes together, we have to go all the way back to the beginning.

[00:07:17]I've spent a lot of time in Texas. I lived in Austin for years. It's where I fell in love with Waterburger, Bies, and Torches. But Texas is massive, and every region has its own unique identity. East Texas in particular, it feels like a different universe entirely. The highways narrow, pine forest swallow the horizon, rusted farm equipment is visible in the tall grass. Small towns bleed into long stretches of woods where everybody knows everybody. Or at least they think they do. In 2006, 2 years before the murders, the Cathy family moves to Reigns County near the small towns of Alba and Emory.

[00:08:08]I actually drove out to the former Cathy property. The house sits deep in the woods along a narrow gravel road that bends through dense pine trees. Growing up in East Texas, I, you know, I understand the dynamic of the family because they were homeschooled. They were very, you know, churchgoing, God-fearing people. I want to push back on that framing because over the years, a kind of mythology has grown up around this case. The idea that the cafes were simply a quote normal god-fearing family, that's just too reductive. The Caffies are not casually religious.

[00:08:48]Terry Caffy and his wife Penny, they meet at a revival. They're deeply embedded in a fundamentalist environment centered around Miracle Faith Baptist Church. Everything about their family life orbits around the church. In fact, reportedly they moved to Alba specifically to be closer to it, attending services and church functions multiple times every week. So for the Cathy children, faith is not just something practiced on Sundays. This is the environment their three children grow up in. Matthew, known as Bubba, 13 years old. Tyler, who's 8, and their 16-year-old daughter, Aaron.

[00:09:34]We met when we were I was 12 and she was 13. So, we met each other relatively young and we're pretty inseparable when we first met.

[00:09:45]>> This is one of Aaron's closest friends at the time, Charlene Pence.

[00:09:50]>> We met at my dad's karate class. So, I I took karate. I really didn't I wasn't into it at all, but my dad taught the class. So, I I went and um Aaron and her brother started the class and like I said, we just kind of became instant best friends and and just kind of went on from there and were pretty inseparable from that moment. In the years since the murders, pseudocience commentators and television personalities have speculated that Aaron Caffy was a psychopath.

[00:10:23]TV shows like Dr. Phil and various body language analysts have pointed to her a effect in interviews as evidence of emotional detachment or manipulation.

[00:10:35]But that's clickbait. There's no science to any of these claims.

[00:10:40]What we know is that at 16 years old, there's no documented evidence suggesting Aaron Caffy displays the precursors of psychopathy. Quite the opposite. According to people who knew her, she formed strong attachments easily.

[00:10:57]>> She was really quiet when you first met her, but then she was loud. She was fun.

[00:11:01]We always had a good time. We got along really, really well. She We were always really goofy. I mean, your typical teenage girls, I guess.

[00:11:09]>> That doesn't mean Aaron is innocent, but it does complicate the idea that she fits neatly into the profile of a calculating teenage narcissist.

[00:11:19]>> Her brothers were like my brothers. We would, you know, pick fights with each other. We would play jokes on each other and it was a really cool family dynamic.

[00:11:27]I mean, Penny was like my second mom. I mean, I talked to her as much as I talked to Aaron.

[00:11:34]>> At the time, Aaron and her brothers are being homeschooled by their mother, Penny. And this is key to what comes next.

[00:11:41]>> When you're homeschooled, you get the questions of, "How do you have friends?"

[00:11:45]and oh but you're so social and oh you're so so we kind of bonded on that aspect of you know we both had to deal with our moms as teachers.

[00:11:55]The caffe's homeschooling is another aspect of this case that often gets flattened into something simpler than it actually was. Aaron is not homeschooled from childhood as part of some carefully planned educational philosophy.

[00:12:11]According to investigative notes, when the cafes relocate to Reigns County, Aaron and her brothers initially attend public school. Then, only about a month into the school year, the children are abruptly withdrawn and placed into homeschooling under a Biblebased curriculum. And according to later accounts, the catalyst is striking.

[00:12:36]Aaron reportedly encounters a girl at school who attempts to kiss her in the hallway. Psychologically, this is a family highly focused on self-imposed religious boundaries.

[00:12:50]Rather than treating Aaron's encounter as an uncomfortable but ordinary part of adolescence, the solution is total withdrawal.

[00:13:00]This is social isolation. And research on adolescents raised in highly insular religious environments suggests that this kind of restriction, it can intensify identity conflict rather than resolve it. And for Aaron, that means by the time she meets Charlie Wilkinson, she's not entering the dating world gradually like many teenagers. She's encountering an entirely different social identity all at once.

[00:13:34]It's July of 2007.

[00:13:37]Aaron Caffy gets her driver's license, an old Chevy pickup, and a job at the Sonic on Emry's Main Drag. You see, you know, people who maybe grow up in a really, you know, Christian home that that maybe don't get the experience of the outside world a little bit. and Aaron working at Sonic. Uh she was able to to get a little bit of that. Not like uh not like her parents were were keeping her trapping her inside her home, but she was able to mix him in with people who maybe had different views of the world or different um attitudes toward life than she had.

[00:14:11]Teenagers flirt openly. Older kids are drinking. Public school social dynamics are at play. Sexuality, independence, rebellion. entire ways of living her family has spent years trying to keep outside their home. For the first time in her life, Aaron is not just observing the outside world at a distance. And for someone raised in a highly insulated environment, that kind of exposure can feel less like ordinary adolescence and more like psychological whiplash, as though an entirely different universe has suddenly opened up in front of you.

[00:14:51]This is where Aaron Caffy is when she meets Charlie Wilkinson, the older teenager who will later carry out the murders alongside a friend.

[00:15:06]When I speak with investigative reporter Daniel Pierce, he tells me that people in the community still talk about Charlie carefully.

[00:15:15]I had a hard time just getting anyone to talk because the town is trying to forget. You can see photos of him in the yearbook growing up as a kid. And so he grew up in this town interacting with the people there. They knew him. It's not like he was a criminal. He was just a kid that marched to the beat of his own drum, was rebellious, uh, did what he wanted to do. At the time they meet, Charlie and Aaron are in very different places. Charlie is 2 years older, a senior in public school, and has recently returned from boot camp at Fort Sil, Oklahoma with his Texas National Guard unit. That doesn't make him responsible for everything that follows, but it does establish a power dynamic.

[00:16:02]>> When you're a teenage girl and you get a boyfriend, you you get slightly obsessed about your boyfriend and how cute his hair is and how cute this is. And I mean, it was pretty much typical teenage girl conversations about boys. So, I mean, of course, she was infatuated with him, but who isn't when they're a teenage girl? The conflict between Charlie and the Cathy family. It begins about 2 months before the murders when Aaron introduces Charlie to her father Terry. Terry in his book and you know interviews and just even in talking with people that knew Terry and that knew Charlie. It was always, you know, he just didn't take those extra steps to be a gentleman to the family. You know, if a if a dad walks into a room, you stand up, you shake his hand. That's just you grow up learning that. And apparently he, you know, didn't really do that. He just kind of sat there and said, "Who are who are you?" But it's more than simple disrespect.

[00:17:00]Charlie Wilkinson exists outside the moral and social bubble the caffies have built around themselves and their children.

[00:17:09]He's not part of their church community.

[00:17:11]He's not homeschooled. He doesn't share the same expectations around authority, family hierarchy, or religious identity.

[00:17:19]So, when Terry meets Charlie, he's not just evaluating a teenage boyfriend.

[00:17:24]He's evaluating someone who represents an entirely different worldview entering his home through his daughter. And from Terry's perspective, Charlie immediately fails that test.

[00:17:38]This is audio of Terry Cathy speaking with investigators on March 3rd. In this interview, he's describing his first impression of Charlie. They've been going out for maybe four or six months, I guess.

[00:17:52]>> Not long. And when we first met this guy, I just have funny people. First, I thought it was just cuz he was annoying.

[00:17:58]You talk all the time. You should you just do everything about everything. We can start to see the emotional triangle forming. a deeply controlled religious environment, a 16-year-old girl just beginning to experience independence, and an older boyfriend who represents everything outside the boundaries of her family's world. And in this case, the question becomes whether that emotional pressure begins pushing everyone towards something dangerous.

[00:18:33]Aaron over that six months period.

[00:18:35]That's whenever he noticed just looking at the dynamic of her, she was becoming more rebellious, more distant from, you know, the family that she grew up in that that displayed, you know, love and affection. Um, and in this god-fearing family, trying to to mold this young girl. This again is Terry Cathy describing his concerns to police.

[00:18:57]>> I was afraid they're going to run off together or something. I was trying to give a little slack there. keep an eye out all day. But we just started thinking, we could tell she started changing the last few months.

[00:19:12]According to Terry, his daughter begins to change rapidly during this time. He says Aaron stops taking care of herself the way she used to, stops washing her hair, stops dressing the same way. Aaron is not just changing her appearance. She is reorganizing her identity around Charlie Wilkinson, around his approval, his values, and increasingly his conflict with her parents. Research on adolescents raised in highly controlled environments suggests that the first romantic relationship can become psychologically oversized, especially when it represents freedom and access to the outside world. He seemed to be controlling. He like he wanted to know everywhere she was and all but he like shower her with shower work her with like roses all the time. Real protectant gifts and they landings on each other a month. From Terry's perspective, Charlie appears possessive and controlling. And there are elements here that do resemble coercive attachment. Excessive gifts, constant monitoring, emotional intensity. But again, we have to be careful because we're already seeing this situation through the eyes of a father who already sees Charlie as outside his moral world. And he's watching his daughter drift away from the family's religion in real time. So, this evidence does not settle the questions. It complicates it because by this point, we still don't have the full picture. And that's because the murders involve two other people, Charles Wade and Bobby Johnson, 19 and 18 years old, respectively.

[00:21:02]Aaron was was the youngest of the group.

[00:21:05]Uh, and so whenever you're the youngest of a group like that, just in my my personal experience being a young person hanging out with a bunch of older older guys or girls or a group of people, uh, it it's something that it's just a cool feeling, you know?

[00:21:21]Most people imagine murder as a solitary act. One offender, one motive, one pathology. But criminologists have long understood that groups can be more dangerous than individuals.

[00:21:36]Responsibility diffuses. Loyalty begins replacing morality and violence can become normalized inside the group. Each member helping to reinforce behavior that none of them might commit alone.

[00:21:51]And this is especially true among teenagers and young adults. And that brings us back to the central question of this case. Is Aaron Cathy driving the violence and using this group as a mechanism to carry it out? Or is Charlie Wilkinson the dominant personality pulling everyone? To understand, we have to pull apart the final weeks leading up to the murders. And that begins with a promise ring given to Aaron by Charlie.

[00:22:22]According to investigative notes and interviews, Charlie gives Aaron this ring shortly after Christmas of 2007.

[00:22:31]It's roughly 3 months before the murders. This again is Terry speaking to detectives. We was at church one night and the wife came up and said, "Did you see what happened with her fingers?"

[00:22:42]Said, "No, you got a wet she got a wedding, man." I said, "No, you don't."

[00:22:45]So I went low. Sure enough, you guess. I pulled him to the side.

[00:22:49]And I confronted him about it. I said, "She's just 16. You realize that y'all moving way too fast." He had given her an engagement ring. And then Terry uh Aaron's father saw it and just basically flipped out and said, "You're giving that ring back to him. You're you're this is this is not happening. Once you move out of my house, then you can you can you can do whatever you want to do.

[00:23:11]But here on my roof, you're not." At 16 years old, a promise ring carries enormous emotional weight. It's not just jewelry. It represents identity, a future self. And for Aaron, the ring symbolizes something even larger, a life outside of her church and family. Here you have a kid in high school who meets this this girl who's 100%, you know, different than him. Fall in love. Of course. Yeah. if you're going to propose and and try and marry her. This again is Terry Cathy speaking with detectives.

[00:23:47]>> Ring my wife set him down like a couple days after we found the ring. We had him come over and we handed the ring back to him. We said this is not appropriate.

[00:23:56]And I said and that was disrespectful how you talk to him at church in the I said cuz if you're not going to respect me, how do I respect my daughter? The ring basically just set off to, hey, no, we're putting an end to this now.

[00:24:10]Because I I I can't remember if Terry had tried to stop it beforehand. She continued to see him. Then after telling Aaron that she couldn't see him again, they caught her talking to to him on the phone. This becomes the turning point.

[00:24:25]Once Terry and Penny insist the relationship end, Charlie is no longer just a boyfriend. To Aaron, losing him now threatens the future she's emotionally attached herself to. So, predictably, Aaron and Charlie begin communicating secretly, reportedly using MySpace to stay in contact. Penny had accessed uh Charlie's MySpace page, and they saw some things on it that as parents and as Christian parents, they just they didn't really approve of.

[00:24:58]That's James Pence, one of the Cathy's friends at the time, who later co-wrote a book with Terry Caffy called Terror by Night. And again, I think the term Christian parents underells what's happening here. The Cathies are not simply religious in the casual cultural sense. Their church is the center of their family life. Aaron has already been pulled out of public school. Now through Charlie, that outside world is re-entering the home on the computer through MySpace.

[00:25:31]>> I think there were tensions there. Uh again, probably not more than any parent would interpret as typical adolescent, you know, issues with a daughter who you might not like the boyfriend. We're seeing a recognizable adolescent pattern intensified inside a highly controlled environment. An increasingly polarized relationship between teenager and parent. That's what's hard at, you know, such a young age. You you feel infatuated with somebody, you know, the the first person that you're able to talk to that has different views than you and you you fall head over heels.

[00:26:09]You say you're going to get married and then this happens. And that's how we arrive at the key question, the decision to act. Over the years, the case has been framed in radically different ways.

[00:26:23]Some portray Aaron as the mastermind.

[00:26:26]Others point to Charlie as the driving force. So, let's look at the evidence.

[00:26:32]According to reporter Daniel Pierce and others, it's Aaron who first introduces the idea of killing her parents.

[00:26:40]Apparently, a couple weeks before that, Aaron had been talking, you know, just whether it'd be venting or she was actually serious, talked about, you know, I just want my family dead. You know, I wish that they were dead. Which, I mean, if you have ever been mad at your parents or, you know, at that age to where they just kind of contain you or they tell you you can't do a certain thing and you want to do it, of course, you're going to lash out and say stuff like that. You vent. And that might have, who knows if that might have been what she was doing in the moment with with Charlie, but then it just kept building and building. Now, that directly contradicts claims that Aaron Caffy has made over the years, specifically that Charlie Wilkinson is the first person to introduce the idea.

[00:27:21]But according to multiple witness statements taken immediately after the murders, Aaron is the one floating the idea of murdering her parents.

[00:27:31]This is a police interview with Brandon Bry, a close friend of Charlie Wilkinson's recorded within days of the murders. So, this was talked about a month ago >> between them or so and and and Charlie talked to you about it.

[00:27:46]>> Charlie was telling me asking, you know, he came over and it was just a typical hangout night cuz we hang out, you know, once class a week to try to. I said, "What's new, Charlie?" And he said, "Well, Aaron's talking about murdering her parents." And I was like, "No way."

[00:28:00]He was like, "Yeah, she is." And I was like, "She trying to get you to do it?"

[00:28:04]He was like, "Yeah, but I can't, dude.

[00:28:06]They got two little kids in their house."

[00:28:08]>> It's difficult to know exactly what weight to give this evidence. Teenagers inside emotionally intense relationships often engage in catastrophic fantasy language. I hate my parents. I wish they were dead. We can't be together because of them. But the deeper I dig through this evidence, the more I've come to question whether Aaron is truly originating the plot or simply reflecting back ideas that are already circulating inside the relationship and the group around her because there are other witnesses from the time and they describe something very different. This is a police interview with Aaron's cousin, Courtney Cathy. Did Charlie ever say how he wanted them to die or did he ever go into detail about them dying? I mean, did he ever did he ever say anything?

[00:29:00]He told me once he he wanted to get somebody or himself to do something to her parents or something like that so I guess they could be together or whatever. According to this witness and others, it isn't Aaron introducing the idea. It's Charlie.

[00:29:24]>> He is like saying stuff like he just wished that they would die so that they could be together and stuff. And I was like, you know, that's my family.

[00:29:32]>> Charlie would tell you that.

[00:29:34]>> Yeah. And then uh >> so he he's told you before that he wishes that they would die.

[00:29:40]>> Yeah. But uh I never thought that he would do something like this.

[00:29:47]So, is Aaron Cathy encouraging these fantasies or is she reflecting back what Charlie is already saying? Her parents got mad and they were just like, "Well, I don't think you should see Charlie anymore." So, then Aaron kind of got upset, but then she, you know, did what her parents said and she broke up with them.

[00:30:05]>> When was that?

[00:30:07]>> I think it was, it was Friday. Thursday or Friday?

[00:30:11]>> Thursday or Friday. So, that's very recent then. Just a couple days ago. And then >> so she broke up with Charlie.

[00:30:17]>> According to Aaron's friend from the time, Charlene Pence, there are no obvious warning signs from Aaron leading up to the murders.

[00:30:25]>> Could I have done something? Could I have seen the signs? But looking back, every memory I ever had of going over there, of being with her, of being with her family, it was all good. I never had any negativity. I never saw her slamming her bedroom door and getting mad at her parents. So, I never really saw anything.

[00:30:45]>> So, what we can say is this. Both Aaron and Charlie appear to be openly discussing the idea with other people while simultaneously framing the other person as the one driving it. All the while maintaining an intense secrecy within the relationship. And at a certain point, it becomes impossible to untangle where the idea truly begins.

[00:31:11]And this is when the two other members of the group are pulled in. Charles Wade and Bobby Johnson. This again is investigative reporter Daniel Pierce. I never understood why Charles and Bobby went through with it though. I never understood that. By this time, Charles Wade is 20 years old. Like the others, he comes out of an East Texas Christian household, but his life is already more complicated.

[00:31:41]He's married, recently separated from his wife, and has an infant daughter.

[00:31:46]Some reports I found suggest he may have had more than one child. Wade and Charlie Wilkinson are close friends with multiple accounts describing nights spent drinking and driving around, occasionally getting into fights. In other words, Wade is not connected to the Cathy's insulated faith-based world anymore than Charlie Wilkinson is. He enters the story through Charlie Wilkinson.

[00:32:13]>> Charles was promised $2,000. The Aaron said that they had or that uh that Terry and Penny had $2,000 in a safe in the house. And so they promised Charles that money. Um, and so that was his motive for for plugging in. According to the the, you know, police records and interviews, >> they also bring along Charlie Wade's girlfriend, Bobby Johnson, described by people who knew her as outgoing, bubbly, and largely unprepared for the reality of what is unfolding. On the night of the murders, the group is driving her silver Dodge Neon. Bobby was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uh, honestly, I It's one of those things where I I don't think she fully appreciated or understood what was what was going down.

[00:33:17]>> I don't think one person by themselves would have gone out and done that. I think it was a group thing. They all got wrapped up into it and and it happened.

[00:33:29]>> People can reframe violence as justified, necessary, or even loving. In the Cathy case, the murders are repeatedly framed inside the group as a way for Aaron and Charlie to be together. That emotional framing helps reduce guilt and blur moral boundaries.

[00:33:49]Psychologists sometimes refer to this process as moral disengagement.

[00:33:55]This again is Brandon Bimer speaking with detectives.

[00:33:58]>> Crime frames with all four of the people I bought.

[00:34:01]>> Okay. All right. Um saw him a little bit better than others.

[00:34:05]>> Any indication that this was going on?

[00:34:07]>> No, sir. I mean, uh I've seen I seen Bobby and Charles I think Friday night or was it Thursday night? It Thursday or Friday night? can't recall clearly, but they were, you know, just happy as bluebirds. Didn't show no signs of anything.

[00:34:21]>> Okay.

[00:34:21]>> When I seen Charlie on Thursday, he didn't show like he was going to do anything. I mean, he was just happy golucky.

[00:34:30]>> On March 1st, 2008, Terry Cathy arrives home around 9:00 p.m. He watches television, goes to bed, and sometime later, he wakes up to the sound of the family dog barking.

[00:34:47]Sometime I heard my dog barking barking would shut up. But he'll bark with a black lamb. He'll bark anything. I'll get up and go outside and shout a light and you will have a crim tree or certain mur squirrel. He'll bark anything.

[00:35:02]Waiting outside is the group of Charlie Wilkinson, Charles Wade, and Bobby Joe Johnson. But at first, according to investigators, they lose their nerve.

[00:35:13]They drive up to the house, the dog's barking, then Charlie, Charles, and Bobby drove away. And Aaron's like, "No, come back. Like, I'm going to hold the dog and everything's going to be fine."

[00:35:24]Regardless of where the original idea comes from, this is an active decision point. According to phone records and witness accounts, Aaron is not simply present. She is participating. Looking at it, too, she held the dog. The phone records show that she was calling them to come back to the house to finish it.

[00:35:45]That I mean to just to to carry it out, just get it over with. I mean, you just don't do that without thinking like, "Okay, this is this is going to work.

[00:35:53]We're going to do it tonight."

[00:35:57]Not long after, the three return to the Cathy property at Aaron's behest.

[00:36:03]According to police reports, Aaron Caffy exits the house and she and Bobby Johnson remain outside in Bobby's car while Charlie Wilkinson and Charles Wade enter the house through the front door which Aaron has left unlocked. Both Wilkinson and Wade are armed with 22 caliber pistols at this point and a large blade described in media reports as a samurai sword. Aaron sat in the car with Bobby uh and Aaron held an actual dog to keep it from, you know, running off, making noise while Charlie and Charles went inside the house. Within minutes, the Cathy family is attacked inside their home. Investigators later describe the scene as chaotic and extremely violent. The gun jams during the assault. The attackers move room to room. Terry and Penny are shot in their bedroom while the younger boys attempt to hide elsewhere in the house.

[00:37:02]>> Even if you look at it, it was it was, you know, the autopsy report and police investigators, it it was sloppy. It's like you could tell this family was was butchered. And it's Aaron Caffy's actions immediately afterward that become important. According to investigators, she does not flee from the others. She doesn't call for help or attempt to separate herself from the crime. Instead, she leaves with the group. Not only did she leave the house with them, they then went and dumped the sword off into a creek, which is about I mean maybe 10 miles from the house, then drive back across town over to uh Charlie Wilkinson's brother's house. But unknown to Aaron, Charlie, or the others, Terry Caffy survives the attack.

[00:37:51]This is Terry's friend and co-author, James Pence, alongside Terry's police interview describing the events that happened next. He said the first shot kind of blew him out of the bed and it was a very tight, narrow bedroom. And uh Terry's side of the bed there wasn't much space between him and the and the wall.

[00:38:13]>> The next day I remember waking up. It was hot. I looked up my bed of my bed is on fire.

[00:38:20]of a good rank who just threw fire and I could hear a rolling fire.

[00:38:25]>> When he woke up, the house was engulfed.

[00:38:29]Uh and uh so he climbed over the bed and he saw that Penny was very clearly dead at that point. He was kind of in survival mode and not really knowing what to do. But >> he's bleeding at this time.

[00:38:44]>> He was bleeding. He was wearing his I believe he said pajama pants and a a t-shirt. He would walk a few steps and then, you know, fall down and then catch his breath and then crawl a few feet further and then he'd get up and stumble a little further. At this point, Terry crawls roughly 600 yd to the home of his nearest neighbor, Tommy Gaston. He's been shot multiple times and is bleeding heavily. At one point, according to later accounts, he falls into a creek and nearly drowns before continuing on.

[00:39:23]That was the shocking part for me whenever I went out to the scene was seeing how far Terry had to crawl. He had been shot several times in the back and the face. He then crawled out of his house, you know, crawled along, you know, 500, 600 yards of land just to get to Tommy Gaston's house. This is the actual 911 call that night placed by neighbor Tommy Gaston.

[00:39:48]>> 911. What's the address of your emergency?

[00:39:50]>> This is Tommy Gaston. I've got a man that's been shot out here at my house.

[00:39:56]>> The first thing Terry says is they're all dead. Penny and the kids are dead.

[00:40:00]Um, and the 911 tape is is him saying, "There's a massive fire out here. I got a a guy who's been shot. I need help."

[00:40:08]>> When did this happen?

[00:40:10]>> I don't know. just a little bit ago. And we've also got a house on fire out here >> and the house is on fire.

[00:40:16]>> The 911 tape says, you know, sir, who shot him? How where is he bleeding? And he said Tommy Gaston whenever he talked to me said he's bleeding everywhere.

[00:40:26]He's bleeding from all over.

[00:40:28]>> Okay. What part of the body was injured?

[00:40:30]>> I don't know. I don't know, but I've got to go get >> sir. I need to know where he was shot.

[00:40:36]>> What?

[00:40:36]>> I need to know where he was shot at.

[00:40:38]>> I don't know.

[00:40:39]>> He's right there. And you don't know where he was shot. Where's he bleeding?

[00:40:43]>> Over.

[00:40:48]>> Terry thought that all of his family was dead. He thought that he was the only person to make it out.

[00:40:52]>> It's important to keep one thing in mind at this point. Terry Cathy believes his entire family has been murdered by Charlie Wilkinson, including Aaron.

[00:41:03]Police are dispatched almost immediately and quickly locate Charlie at his brother's home nearby. Within hours, they were at Charlie Wilkinson's brother's house. And as investigators were looking through the house, they actually saw Aaron.

[00:41:21]Before the police locate Aaron, Charlie Wilkinson denies all involvement, though investigators reportedly notice blood spattered boots in plain view. and quickly obtained a search warrant.

[00:41:35]That's when one of the officers noticed what appears to be strawled hair beneath a pile of clothes. They thought it was a doll at first until they moved the hair.

[00:41:46]Aaron moved and they was like, "Oh my gosh, that's that's Aaron." Um, and then she mentioned how she woke up in a house of smoke. Uh, she was forced out of the house, you know, kidnapped. She didn't know what was going on. She was drugged.

[00:41:58]Of all the evidence I received from authorities, this tape, it may be the most important. This is the actual police interview with Aaron Caffy on the day of the murders. What you're about to hear is Cathy being interviewed by investigators from the Reigns ISD Police Department.

[00:42:18]>> This is Officer Sanders with the Reigns ISD Police Department. I'm here with um Aaron Caffy who's 14 years of age and we're in the emergency room um speaking in reference to the instances that occurred last night.

[00:42:35]Today is March 1st, 2008.

[00:42:39]Uh Aaron, you said that he woke up and smoke was everywhere. Is that right? To put this in context, this recording is only audio. Aaron hasn't been arrested or charged, having been discovered at the Wilkinson home only hours earlier. And from the beginning of the interview, the investigator is treating her less like a suspect and more like a traumatized child. I'm going to play one line again. Listen carefully.

[00:43:10]>> I'm here with um Aaron Caffy, who's 14 years of age. The officer incorrectly states that Aaron is 14 years old. And Aaron, who's actually 16, never corrects her. And that detail is revealing because throughout the interview, Aaron appears to regress emotionally while simultaneously maintaining this false story that's meant to protect the group's involvement. She's almost inaudible at times, crying softly, speaking in fragments, sounding far younger than 16. It's as though the reality of the murders has collided with the fantasy that preceded them. And Aaron retreats into a more childlike emotional state while still trying to hold on to the narrative she's constructed.

[00:44:00]>> And you said that two guys were with swords. Are you okay?

[00:44:13]Um, tell me again what they told you to do.

[00:44:19]>> They let you down and stay down. Face down.

[00:44:24]>> Get down and stay down. Face down.

[00:44:26]>> Aaron makes up the story of I was kidnapped by people. They had a, you know, had a sword up to me. I woke up in a house of smoke. I was in this house that was like full of smoke.

[00:44:38]>> You were in a house full of smoke. Was it your house?

[00:44:42]>> You don't think it was? Were you in a bedroom or a living room or >> It was a couch.

[00:44:48]>> Did you see any guns?

[00:44:49]>> No, just to be >> Did you hear any gunshots?

[00:44:58]>> What were they wearing?

[00:45:00]>> They were all black.

[00:45:01]>> All black. The story is incoherent. The details are vague. The explanations sound improvised and childlike. It's not calculated in the way that adult psychopaths perform emotion. Instead, it suggests panic, emotional collapse, cognitive overload.

[00:45:20]None of this makes Aaron Cathy innocent.

[00:45:23]In fact, quite the opposite. But it does debunk the image of a cold, fully formed mastermind calmly executing a plan.

[00:45:33]>> Charlie's your boyfriend. Is he your boyfriend or was he or >> he was?

[00:45:37]>> He was. Why isn't he now?

[00:45:39]>> I don't know. We just My mom didn't lock in and so she would get broke.

[00:45:46]>> Okay. She didn't like him.

[00:45:48]>> So, she made y'all break up. It's easy to forget how young Aaron Caffy is until you hear the full tape itself. This interview is 15 minutes long, and I'm going to let you do just that. I'll post the full recording on Patreon inside Unmarked Case Files.

[00:46:06]>> Can you remember anything else?

[00:46:12]Okay, we're going to end the interview at this time. You did good. Okay. At what point do you think, "Okay, this this isn't going to this isn't going to blow up in our faces. This we're going to get away with it." And that's that's the part that you you don't understand.

[00:46:26]I mean, these right here are just kids just going on a rampage. And that's that's something that I never understood why they think that they could get away with it. And then the story shifts again because once investigators begin separately interviewing Charlie Wilkinson, Charles Wade, and Bobby Johnson, the blame immediately starts moving towards Aaron. Wilkinson in particular begins implicating Aaron almost immediately.

[00:46:54]This again is the police interview conducted with Charlie Wilkinson's friend Brandon Bimer after Wilkinson calls him from jail. This recording takes place within roughly 72 hours of the murders.

[00:47:08]>> It is Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 8:13 a.m. This is Detective Richard Almond Reigns County Sheriff's Office. Present in the room with me uh is Brandon Bimer.

[00:47:19]>> We did not call you, correct?

[00:47:21]>> No, sir.

[00:47:21]>> You came of your own free will.

[00:47:23]>> Yes, sir.

[00:47:23]>> Why did you come this morning?

[00:47:25]>> To tell you some information that we thought you might need and can cut on the case.

[00:47:30]>> What information is that? Well, I got a collect phone call from Mr. Charlie Wilkinson >> yesterday. Yes, sir.

[00:47:36]>> Okay.

[00:47:38]>> He he mentioned a little bit about Aaron talking him into doing it. He said she was kind of behind the whole little scheme.

[00:47:45]>> Had he ever mentioned it to you before that this had been talked about or anything like this?

[00:47:50]>> Uh about a month ago, he was telling me that his girlfriend was thinking about it.

[00:47:55]>> Who was his girlfriend? Aaron >> from jail. Wilkinson repeatedly frames Aaron Cathy as the driving force.

[00:48:03]>> You asked him a question. What was the question?

[00:48:07]>> Oh, about the shooting?

[00:48:10]>> Yes.

[00:48:10]>> I asked him if he pulled the trigger.

[00:48:12]And what did he say?

[00:48:13]>> He said, "Yes, I shot the mom and the dad, but I did not shoot the kids." He said he couldn't pull the trigger on the little kid. I asked him why he did it.

[00:48:23]He said Aaron talked him into doing it.

[00:48:25]And then we went to a conversation about how he told her to just run away and she wouldn't do it and he didn't know how she talked him into doing something like this. So, we're left in an uncomfortable place. The evidence shows Aaron is not merely a passive bystander.

[00:48:43]But it also does not support the image of a sadistic teenage psychopath orchestrating murder with detached precision. Instead, what emerges is something messier. Adolescent fantasy, emotional fusion, coercion, loyalty, resentment, group reinforcement, it all collapses into real violence.

[00:49:09]Even in interviews, you know, post what happened, uh, he talked about how he still loved her. And what's sad is Aaron says, "Oh, I just I don't feel that way anymore." And it's like you it took the death of your mother and your two brothers to find that out. Police now face the impossible task of telling Terry Cathy that his daughter is alive but involved. Terry because he was still in the hospital. You know, we found out that his daughter was alive and then investigators come in and, you know, say, you know, Aaron had something to do with this. And then Terry asked what was her involvement and they say her involvement was great.

[00:49:56]This is the actual police interview of that moment recorded with Terry 2 days after the murders while he's still recovering in hospital.

[00:50:07]Today is third day of March to Delve and I in the time of 12 week Po.

[00:50:15]Do you mind if I follow you?

[00:50:17]>> I don't want to know a whole lot of detail, but >> yeah.

[00:50:24]What kind of involment she in moon?

[00:50:32]Great.

[00:50:37]I'm here or here for deep breath control.

[00:51:04]It it it hurts me talking about this.

[00:51:09]>> And maybe that's the real horror at the center of this case. Not simply that a famili occurs, but that even afterwards, nobody can fully agree on what Aaron Cathy actually is. Because the whole situation is psychologically messy. A teenager raised inside a highly controlled religious environment where family, morality, education, and identity are tightly intertwined. It suddenly collides with romance, rebellion, sexuality, and independence, and a social group willing to reinforce fantasy instead of restraining it. You can imagine this father's struggle, too.

[00:51:50]you know, he wants he wants them to pay almost like Aaron wanted her family to pay for the shelter that they had brought her up in or her blaming them.

[00:51:59]And so you kind of see Terry was so angry. But then after, you know, especially religiously people, you know, praying as often as you can, that's what that's what he did and ultimately led to him saying, you know, writing letters saying, "I don't want them to die."

[00:52:18]Wade, Wilkinson, Johnson, and Cathy.

[00:52:21]They're each charged with capital murder. All are tried as adults and all accept plea deals for life terms with the possibility of parole.

[00:52:33]Over the years, Terry Caffy becomes an advocate for forgiveness. He publicly opposes the death penalty for the people responsible, including his own daughter.

[00:52:44]And maybe that's the final contradiction of this story. The same faith, obedience, and tightly controlled family structure that helped create these emotional conditions surrounding the murders. It also allows Terry to survive them. It's sentiments like that that make the Cathy case so unsettling. It's not just that it defies convention. It's that it doesn't stop. Strip away the headlines, the brutality, and the spectacle. And underneath we find dynamics that exist in countless homes and communities.

[00:53:21]Overprotective parents, teenagers searching for identity, love, social isolation, rebellion, peer pressure, fear of the outside world. And maybe that's why people in East Texas still hesitate when they talk about the case.

[00:53:38]Because fully confronting what happened inside the cafe home means confronting all of the underlying forces that actually made this possible.

[00:53:53]Before we wrap a few show notes. We covered a ton of evidence in this episode and we're going to be posting a lot of it inside our research portal, unmarked case files on Patreon where you can examine the evidence for yourself.

[00:54:07]Next, as many of you know, I am an independent author. I have two books out right now. The first is Charles Manson: The Last Words. This covers my 10 years of research on the Manson family, including all the conversations I had with Charles Manson himself. Best place to get it is Amazon, Kindle, or Kindle Unlimited. And if you're a reader like me, I read voraciously. I'm deeply into dark, grim, dark fantasy. And I've written my first novel. It's called A Plague of Steel. And likewise, it's available on Kindle, Amazon, and Kindle Unlimited for a limited time. This episode of Unmarked was produced by John Nado and edited by Dave Alderson. Our additional producer is Jesse Demeray.

[00:54:52]Until next week, this is Unmarked.