Pod Insights Criminology Steven Freeman About this episode Just before 11:00 p.m. on August 1, 2018, authorities in Griffin, Georgia, were called to a home on the 800 block of Sunnybrook Drive. Twenty-three-year-old Steven Freeman had been shot, and Mary Katherine Higdon, who lived in the house with Steven, admitted that she was the one who shot him. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss Mary Katherine Higdon and the shooting death of Steven Freeman. At first, Mary Katherine claimed the shooting was accidental and the gun had gone off as she was handing it to Steven. Later, her story would evolve into one of self-defense. What would the jury believe? You can help support the show through Patreon https://www.patreon.com/criminology For news about the podcast, old episodes and more, visit our website. We'd love to connect with listeners on social media. We are available on the following platforms: Facebook - Facebook Discussion group - Instagram - Threads - X Formerly Twitter - Blue Sky - Youtube - Twitch - Tik Tok Find all of our social media in one place at: https://linktr.ee/criminologypodcast Criminology is an Emash Digital production hosted by Mike Ferguson and Mike Morford.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised.
0:37 Speaker 01 Hello everyone and welcome to episode 361 of the Criminology Podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson.
0:43 Speaker 00 And this is Mike Morford.
0:45 Speaker 01 Mr. Morford, how you doing?
0:47 Speaker 00 I'm doing pretty good. How you doing?
0:48 Speaker 01 I'm doing great, man. I'm loving the start of the warm up. We haven't had, you know, real warm weather yet, but it's starting. People are out, man. They're walking their dogs. My wife is talking about playing a little pickleball. There's some warm weather activities about ready to happen.
1:08 Speaker 00 And it's that time of year where schools letting out, we were talking before we started recording that school in your area is ending and next week my kids are out of school. So it's that busy time of the, the summer where things start to happen.
1:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, all good stuff. Let's go ahead and give our Patreon shout outs. We had Dar Willhite, Megan Clanton, and Skippity Bee Bob. So that's really fun to say, but we appreciate all the new support.
1:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a fun name and it's awesome to get support from someone with that cool name and from everybody else, we appreciate it. For anyone else that would like to support the show, head on over to patreon.com/criminology to get started. And just one note before we get started, at the end of our episodes, I usually talk about our social media and where to find us. And for years it's been only on X or Facebook, but just a heads up, Mike and I have finally got hip. We've caught up to the times and for all you social media fans out there, we're available right now on just about every social media platform there is. And here's a quick run through to being, in addition to being on X and Facebook, we're
2:15 Speaker 00 now on Instagram, Threads, Tik Tok, Blue Sky and Twitch. So just basically everywhere but Pinterest, because they don't like us for some reason. And just search for Criminology Podcast on any of your favorite platforms, you'll find us.
2:29 Speaker 01 And coming very soon, we'll also have a new YouTube channel. You'll be able to catch not only all of our new episodes there, but all of our old ones as well. So it's pretty exciting here for Morph and I to be catching up to the technology. We hope you'll interact with us on social media. As always, we love to hear from listeners and we'll include links to all of our social media in our show notes. All right. So now that we have all of that out of the way, let's get into this week's episode. The case we're discussing this week may be an age old tale. Love turned to resentment, turned to violence resulting in death. When the case made it to a courtroom, the outcome left some people shocked.
3:13 Speaker 01 We're talking about the 2018 death of a man named Stephen Freeman.
3:18 Speaker 00 Just before 11:00 PM on August 1st, 2018, authorities in Griffin, Georgia were called to a home on the 800 block of Sunnybrook Drive. There had been a shooting and help was urgently needed for 23-year-old Stephen Freeman, who had been hit in the neck. Mary Katherine Higdon, who lived in the home with Stephen, admitted that she was the one who shot him. She told the dispatcher that the gun had gone off when she grabbed it to take it to bed. According to Mary Katherine, they slept with the gun next to their bed on Stephen's request, keeping it nearby, but unloaded as a form of protection. Stephen was still alive and needed help urgently. Mary Katherine yelled frantically trying to keep Stephen awake.
3:59 Speaker 00 According to the Griffin Daily News, the dispatcher could hear Mary Katherine screaming, "Look at me, please Stephen, look at me, Stephen, Stephen, Stephen, look at me." In the background, the dispatcher could hear Stephen moaning.
4:12 Speaker 01 Mary Katherine was in the living room, trying to perform CPR on Stephen when officers arrived at the home. She screamed, "Please help me," over and over, until they made their way into the house and entered the living room. According to CBS News, Stephen was lying on a mattress in the center of the room, and Mary Katherine cried out, "Please just tell me he's alive." Officers confirmed for her that he did still have a detectable pulse, but time was of the essence and he was rushed to the hospital. Mary Katherine explained to first responders that she had just been trying to hand the gun to Steven when it accidentally went off. She had no idea there was even a round in
4:54 Speaker 01 the chamber. At the scene, officers were nervous that Mary Katherine, who was completely distraught, would reach for the weapon, a 380 caliber Glock 42, and use it to harm them or herself. So they picked it up off the floor, near Steven, and removed it from the home. According to the TV show 48 Hours, she said, "I cannot lose him. I cannot lose him." Officers could also smell alcohol on her breath. So I think we definitely have to kind of dissect this situation. Someone's been shot. Now, Mary Katherine has her story, right, that she's telling to first responders,
5:37 Speaker 01 to police, that the gun went off as she was trying to hand it to Steven. And she even said she didn't realize that there was a round in the chamber. And that goes back to, you know, what we talked about earlier, and that was that, according to her, they slept with this gun, next to their bed, but kept it unloaded. So there's a lot of questions right off the bat, Morv. If you have a gun that is normally unloaded, why did it have a round in the chamber? Why was she handing the gun to Steven? And how did it accidentally go off?
6:21 Speaker 00 I think those are all good questions. And it's a little bit odd to me because I have a gun for protection, a lot of people do, and you usually keep them in one central spot and leave it there. You might take it out if you're cleaning it, or you go to the gun range, or something like that. But to be like, bringing it back and forth to put it in that drawer when they go to bed, sounds kind of odd, and it's not explained why it's out of the drawer, you know, and depending if there's kids in the house or not. You'd probably want to keep that gun locked up to where they can't access it. But it just being those two, they might just leave it in the drawer loose, but it still doesn't explain how it came to be in her hands and not in the drawer.
7:06 Speaker 01 Well, my other thought is keeping an unloaded gun right next to you. How much protection is that really? I mean, you could throw it at someone, you could try to hit them with it, but an unloaded gun by itself is not much protection.
7:23 Speaker 00 And it may be a situation where they have a clip right next so that they can pop in quick enough, they feel if they need to, but you know, you do want to have that gun ready, you know, for somebody breaking into your house or your room in the middle of the night, you want to be able to just bring that out and defend yourself. Sadly, just before midnight, Stephen was pronounced dead at Wellstar Spalding Regional Hospital. Almost immediately, investigators believe they were looking at a homicide, not an accidental shooting. When officers first arrived, at least one of them had taken note of a sign hung up on the door of the home. According to CBS, the sign read, beware, one shotgun toting pistol packing Southern Bell lives here.
8:07 Speaker 00 Investigators found food all over the floor in the kitchen. It was the London broil that Mary Katherine said she had cooked for dinner that night. There was a large blood stain on the mattress where Stephen had ended up after being shot. Mary Katherine would later claim that she pulled the trigger because Stephen was coming at her. Investigators believe that the blood stain on the bed proves this is false. It's all one large pool of blood in the same area, suggesting that he was actually sitting down on the bed when he was shot and that he didn't move much afterward. But why would Mary Katherine want to kill her high school sweetheart?
8:40 Speaker 01 Stephen and Mary Katherine met while they were attending Spalding High School and had been dating since then. They had been off and on for about seven years. The two had a weekly Sunday dinner with Steven's parents and grandparents and their two families even celebrated Christmas together. Steven's mother later told CBS, "I loved her. We certainly considered Mary Katherine like a daughter." The couple were both into outdoorsy things like fishing and hunting. Steven's friend Chase Pruitt thought Mary Katherine was a good match for him because she could keep up with his hobbies. He told CBS, "Most girls won't even get in the woods for 30 minutes," noting that "if
9:24 Speaker 01 she'll go fish with you for four hours or go deer hunt with you, then that's awesome, man." The pair had also shared an enthusiasm for firearms. Between the two of them, they easily had 10 firearms inside the home. When officers arrived, they found multiple firearms lying around in different places throughout the house, including one hunting rifle on the floor in a pile of laundry.
9:51 Speaker 00 Mary Katherine later would tell 48 Hours that she and Steven were like two peas in a pod. She called Steven her best friend and appreciated how she could lean on him. When Mary Katherine was 17, her mother passed away suddenly in their home. Tragically, she was the one who found her body, and after that, she needed someone to lean on. That person for her was Steven. But their relationship ebbed and flowed, and they would be on and off at times. They weren't always off and on like that. The earlier part of their relationship was all on, but as time went by, they began to separate more often. Steven's best friend, Thomas Skinner, who also worked at the sporting goods store where
10:32 Speaker 00 Mary Katherine worked part-time, told WSB TV 2 Atlanta, "At first, I really liked her, I did." He went on to explain why their relationship went from solid and secure to off and on, saying that things between them started getting more toxic, and they began fighting and arguing. One of Steven's former coworkers, Elijah Varela, recalled that even when Steven was busy working, Mary Katherine would bombard his phone with calls and texts. Elijah told WSB TV, "He would just have his phone sitting down, and you could just see it off the hook. Upwards of 20 calls within the time it took us to get the truck loaded. Steven always drove, and it would just be sitting there ringing off the hook."
11:13 Speaker 01 And it's always interesting to hear friends.
11:18 Speaker 01 Coworkers, people like that talk about the individuals in a case and give their point of view about the individuals respectively, but also the relationship. You heard people talk about how they thought these two were perfect for each other. They had the same hobbies, they had the same interests, but then as you talked about Morph, you know, the relationship was on in the beginning, which is very normal, but it seemed like it was on and off as time went by. And then you start to hear people talk about why that might have been and use the word toxic.
12:03 Speaker 01 You had one coworker saying that Mary Katherine would just, you know, blow his phone up with calls and you start to get a picture of something going on here.
12:15 Speaker 00 But a lot of times people that are outside the relationship, friends, coworkers, they can see things and later recall things that might be troubling, maybe a sign that one person is more into the relationship, or at the very least, maybe they're just not as involved in texting and responding to texts, calling people back. And is that a case of somebody that's just likes to hang out on their phone a lot and they're maybe not busy, so they do a lot of texting and calling? Or is it a little bit of an obsession or an issue that maybe isn't healthy?
12:55 Speaker 01 So, police knew from a variety of different people that the relationship between Mary Catherine and Stephen wasn't perfect by any stretch, but was it to a point where it may result in violence? When she was first interviewed at the police station immediately after the shooting, Mary Katherine told detectives that she was trying to toss the gun to Stephen when it went off, a slight deviation from trying to hand it directly to him. Finally, Mary Katherine gave a full confession. She admitted that there was no accident that night. She was angry and she acted out, which cost Stephen his life.
13:36 Speaker 01 Detectives arrested her due to her confession and she was taken into custody. She was held without bond.
13:43 Speaker 00 So after this confession, it seemed as if police had everything they would need to make a case. Unfortunately for investigators, the audio on the tape was corrupted for some reason. In the audio, as soon as Mary Katherine begins to confess, a loud buzz starts, completely drowning out anything she or the detectives were saying. A lot of interrogation videos can be kind of hard to hear because of poor sound quality, especially if we're hearing it during a trial and not as a direct upload. But this isn't what the issue was. It was a crystal clear recording until precisely the moment that an audible recording mattered the most. It's just a sudden loud buzz with no apparent cause. The audio was unable to be restored, which left authorities with no confession.
14:28 Speaker 00 There was only their word that Mary Katherine had confessed, and it would be up to a jury to decide who was telling the truth. Did they have a strong enough case based on hard evidence without this confession? Remember, they didn't arrest her until after she admitted that she had shot him because she was angry, and that may be a clue that they felt they didn't have much. According to Lieutenant Chris Wilson in the 48 Hours episode, she said, "I did it out of anger, but there was no way to prove that, and now their suspect had an attorney."
14:57 Speaker 01 And obviously, this to me jumps out as, as very strange. I, I get it, you know, technology fails, right? We've all had those issues. But for the recording to be crystal clear, right up until the point, which I guess you would have to say is the most important point of the interrogation, that just seems so odd that at the point she is basically confessing, they don't have that audio.
15:32 Speaker 00 Yeah, the timing was just terrible for that to happen right at that precise moment. You know, if it had happened early on or late, maybe during when the, you know, the part of the matter wasn't being talked about, then, you know, it might not be as bad. But, you know, heading into trying to prosecute somebody.
15:52 Speaker 00 Minus that confession, you know, I'm not an attorney by any stretch, but it seems like it's a night and day difference for an attorney to have to defend in court.
16:03 Speaker 01 Well, absolutely. If you have something that you can play to the jury with the defendant's own words confessing to the crime. Okay, that's pretty hard to defend. But when you don't have that, when you have an officer or a few officer saying this is what the person said, that's a little different. The other thing is more of this is 2018. It's not 1970. You know, I get it. Like I said, technology fails, but I think, you know, how recent it is makes it even more strange to me. You know, there's probably a goal weight in your head and getting there on your own
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17:58 Speaker 01 Mary Catherine rejected the offer of a plea deal from the state and decided to take her chances at trial and pleaded not guilty to felony murder, malice murder, aggravated assault, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. Her trial began in June of 2019, and to the surprise of many people, she took the stand in her own defense. Now in court, Mary Katherine's story changed. No longer was she claiming that there was an accidental shooting. Instead, she admitted that she meant to shoot Steven, but was now insistent that it had been self-defense.
18:39 Speaker 01 She told the jury of her relationship with Steven, "When it was good, it was good. But when it was bad, it was bad."
18:47 Speaker 00 Mary Katherine claimed that Steven controlled pretty much every aspect of her life: her finances, her body, and how she spent her time. He also expected her to do his chores: folding his laundry, putting his shoes away, and even starting a shower for him. But it was never enough. Her attorney, Jorge Carbalha, told jurors he was slowly, systematically breaking her down. She could never please him. Mary Katherine's sister, Sarah, recalled seeing a bruise on her arm just two weeks before Steven was killed. Mary Katherine was hesitant to talk about it, but eventually admitted what happened, saying, "Steven just grabbed me a little bit too hard."
19:27 Speaker 01 It's clear there was something happening in the home that Steven and Mary Katherine shared. There had been five separate calls that had caused officers to respond to the home in the last year. Most of them were due to animal issues, but one of the calls was for domestic violence. And at one point, Mary Katherine's sister had called for a welfare check. But Steven's friends claimed that it was Mary Katherine who was the abusive partner. His friend, Thomas Skinner, said he saw her hit him multiple times, including one time she hit him on the face, chest, shoulders, everything. Another friend, Andrew McRee, recalled a time that she slapped him hard, and he kind
20:11 Speaker 01 of like grabbed her and was like, "Don't hit me."
20:14 Speaker 00 In footage from police body cam from one of the instances where police were called, Steven's friend Chase didn't have many good things to say about Mary Katherine, telling the officer, "She's just very loud, very dramatic, very always over the top, looking to go start an issue." More importantly, he told them that this wasn't surprising behavior from Mary Katherine. He said, "I know that she's pulled a gun on him before," adding that it had happened three or four times at least. Thomas wasn't surprised either. He told 48 Hours, "As soon as they said he was shot, I knew what happened. I knew Mary Katherine did it."
20:52 Speaker 01 So you have two different sides here, which I think is not all that uncommon in these types of cases. You have friends and family of Mary Katherine saying that Steven was abusive, but you have some of his friends saying that, "No, she was the abuser."
21:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it's interesting to get these different perspectives from people that witnessed things going on between them and, you know, how they interpreted who was responsible. And it definitely seems like there's some volatility there. And anytime you're tossing things out, like there's guns being involved, you know, that's pretty frightening and it indicates that there was some trouble in this relationship. And maybe it's not surprising that it ended in a death.
21:42 Speaker 01 Well, one of Steven's friends said that she pulled a gun on him three or four times. More, "I've been married almost 30 years. I can easily say my wife has never pulled a gun on me. I feel like the relationship would go downhill very quickly, once one person pulls a gun on the other."
22:03 Speaker 00 Yeah, that seems like something that would be pretty hard to overcome and get back to normal in a relationship.
22:08 Speaker 01 One of Mary Katherine's defense attorneys, Michael Granum.
22:13 Speaker 01 Said that the claims against Mary Katherine by Stephen's friends weren't true. Stephen was lying to his friends, or his friends were lying, with Michael saying, "nobody ever saw that." All of that came from Stephen. Mary Katherine insisted that she never pointed a gun at Stephen, and that the instances his friends were referring to with her pulling a gun were when she was feeling suicidal and wanted to take her own life, not Stephen's. But in one text from Stephen to Mary Katherine, he was very clear that she had indeed had a habit of pointing a gun at him, and that things were starting to feel out of control.
22:54 Speaker 01 In the show 48 Hours, Mary Katherine was confronted with that text, which read, "I know you pointed a gun at me a bunch of times, but the last time you did it, it scared the bleep out of me." Mary Katherine was asked, "Did you point a gun at him?" And she responded by saying, "No, no, like I didn't." Because when he was saying that, I had pulled a gun to kill myself. I was thinking about hurting myself. Mary Katherine's father, Tom Higdon, said that both he and Stephen had been concerned about multiple suicide threats by her.
23:32 Speaker 00 So now we have discussion of self-harm on Mary Katherine's part, which she's freely admitting to, and you have the other allegations of her pointing the gun at Stephen. To me, it's pretty clear, this is someone who shouldn't have had access to a gun and been using them, and you know, maybe hindsight is 2020, had some steps been taken to separate her from these guns, maybe Stephen would be alive right now.
24:02 Speaker 01 Well, the one thing I will say is that the water right now is very muddy as to, you know, who did what, what the intentions were. But you know, to your point more, even if they had taken Mary Katherine's guns away, it seems like Stephen had a bunch of guns too. So were they going to take his? If not, they're still both living in the same house. She probably would have had access to a gun in some form or fashion.
24:34 Speaker 00 It seems like the troubling texts in the relationship just didn't just come from Mary Katherine. The defense presented text messages between her and Steven going back years. And many of the messages from Steven weren't very nice, to say the least. In one of them, he told Mary Katherine, "I'm just gonna fucking wreck you for wrecking me." Another text included a photo of Steven holding up a dead fish. Steven captioned the photo, "This is you bitch." In addition, Steven would often accuse her of cheating on him, coloring on one of his texts, "Just a whore." Mary Katherine claimed in court that one of Steven's texts, where he mentions "a red room", was a reference to the book or film Fifty Shades of Grey.
25:18 Speaker 00 There was no actual red room inside their home. It was more the actions that happened inside that room that Steven was actually talking about. She said, "He would just tie me up and hit me."
25:29 Speaker 01 There are other situations that Mary Katherine described to the jury. This was something she had never told anyone until she got onto the stand. She claimed that Steven had sexually assaulted her on two occasions. One of the times was just after getting home from a trip to Disney World that Steven had funded. She describes him feeling entitled and not listening to her pleas. She told the court, "He started hurting me really, really bad. I said, 'Steven, please stop,' and he said that since he spent so much money on me at Disney, I need to give him what he deserved." Prosecutor Kate Lindhart, who does not believe a word of Mary Katherine's story,
26:12 Speaker 01 called it disgusting to get up there and call a dead man a rapist, noting how convenient it was that he can't defend himself.
26:22 Speaker 00 More disturbing things came to light in the courtroom having to do with rape. Just hours before she shot Steven, Mary Katherine was apparently searching for violent pornography videos featuring gang rape and bondage. All these searches made while she was supposed to be at a babysitting job. Prosecutor Kate Lenhart told the jury, "The woman who just told you she was raped, looks at gang rape porn, bondage porn, and then she asked Mary Katherine, 'Why would you relive that trauma?'" Mary Katherine had an explanation for this too. Her answer was, "I looked up things for ideas because obviously he's gone. I wanted to please him."
27:00 Speaker 01 And I want to talk about this more of, you know, this, this idea that people's lives are going to be kind of laid bare. After an incident like this, if you have a trial, all right, they're going to try to dig up everything. Old text messages, internet search histories. And obviously, some of the things that we said about Stephen's texts don't make him look great. I mean, you know, things that you say, pictures you send, some of that doesn't paint him in a very good light. Now, does it mean that he deserved to be shot? No, I'm not saying that at all. And then you have this search
27:45 Speaker 01 history on the part of Mary Katherine, which seems very strange. I mean, rightfully so, the prosecutor asked her, "Why would you look at that stuff if you had been a victim, as you claim? Why would you want to relive that trauma?"
28:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm not judging her for whatever she was into on that front, but it doesn't seem realistic, at least in my mind, that somebody had gone through something so terrible, such as being raped, would then later be interested in looking that stuff up and want to go through it. And as the prosecutor said, sort of relive that, that part doesn't seem believable. But you're right, that when there's cases like this, everything's...
28:35 Speaker 00 Pick through and laid out for display, whether it's the victim a lot of times or the suspect. We've talked about cases where things are laid out and the police say, we didn't find a clue at all. We didn't find, you know, there were no affairs, nothing, you know, there's no anything wrong. This was a really perfect person with no motive here. But then there's other cases where there's all kinds of things, you know, maybe they're, they have gambling problems, drug problems, they're having affairs. So in these cases, you know, a lot of this stuff really comes to light and it doesn't always look good.
29:11 Speaker 01 But, and I always think about it from the, the point of view of the jury. It's a lot to take in. And, and what do you make of all of it? Some of the texts exchanged between Mary Katherine and Stephen were ambiguous. One text from Stephen read, "The more shit you talk, the more you get punished when I get home." This could certainly be a threat of physical violence, but it could also have been some kind of kinky role play. There's no proof that Stephen was physically abusive in any of Mary Katherine's text messages with her friends. No offers from friends to help her escape the relationship. No complaints of arguments or selfies of injuries, nothing. When asked about
29:55 Speaker 01 the lack of documentation, Stephen had abused her, Mary Katherine said, "I never talked about it. Only with friends. I never texted it out."
30:05 Speaker 00 The more texts that were revealed, the more disturbing things came to light. Some of the texts from Mary Katherine backed up what Stephen friends were saying about his relationship. One from April 21st, 2018 read, "MK is running around screaming at the top of her lungs outside." It was immediately followed up by, "And now she's trying to shoot me and herself." Prosecutor Kate Lenherd asked the jury, "When your abuser is out of the house and you're safe, are you, as a victim of domestic violence, going to track down your abuser where he is with his friends? Are you going to go and track him down?"
30:42 Speaker 01 The most glaring piece of evidence in the case was the gun itself and the magazine inside of it. There were greasy smudges on both the slide of the gun and on the magazine. It was apparently cooking oil. This proved to investigators that Mary Katherine had intentionally loaded the gun that night. It could have been while she was cooking, or it could have been after they had an argument that ended with food all over the floor. Either way, this meant that her whole story about it being accidental and about not knowing there were any bullets in the gun could not be possible. Did she just forget that she herself loaded it shortly before pulling the trigger? However, one of Mary Katherine's defense attorneys,
31:27 Speaker 01 Jorge Caraballo, refuted this theory. He didn't believe that the grease left on the gun was from cooking oil at all, instead saying, "I didn't see that level of grease or anything on that gun, other than maybe what you would have on your fingers."
31:43 Speaker 00 It was revealed that Mary Katherine and Stephen had been fighting since the day before he was killed, or maybe Stephen ignoring her would be more accurate, and Mary Katherine had been stewing all day. On July 31st, the day before his death, Stephen went to a friend's house to spend the night and to get away from Mary Katherine, and he stopped responding to her texts and refused to answer any of her many calls. The next day, she called him multiple times. She called him at 9:10, 9:12, 9:17, 9:23, 9:29, 9:38, and so on. There were several more attempts. On the evening of August 1st, the day he died, Mary Katherine
32:24 Speaker 00 texted Stephen, informing him that she had cooked him a nice meal and wanted to know when he would be home.
32:30 Speaker 01 And Morpheus and I talk a lot about the number of texts that people send in a day, in an hour, and now we're talking about phone calls. It's very obvious that, for whatever reason, Stephen did not want to talk to her, but she kept calling and calling. I mean, just the times that you rattled off, and you didn't even include all of them, you know, within an hour, trying to, to call someone every few minutes. Just seems so excessive. Now, maybe there are people that would say, well, you know,
33:09 Speaker 01 I might do that. Maybe it's just me, right? To me, that seems excessive to send 150 text messages in a day to somebody to me seems excessive, but to others, maybe it doesn't. Maybe I'm getting old and I don't use technology the way that some people do.
33:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think I agree with you there. I'm in the same boat. And you know, it depends too, because like right now, we're recording, I have my phone on silent. It's sitting away from me. I can't see it. So if somebody is trying to get a hold of me for something, I'm not responding. And that's just because I'm busy, but there could be other reasons why he wasn't responding. Maybe he didn't want to talk to her. But I think this goes, is starting to show the level of, you know, obsession. She's not trying to get a hold of him because the house burned down and it's emergency. You know, she, it seems like she just wants to know about this dinner and was really intent on getting a hold of him.
34:07 Speaker 01 Well, it's all about context, right? These cases and the things that are revealed that happened on the day or in the weeks leading up, the text messages, the phone calls, the statements by friends. You know, there's, there's context to all of it. Now, Mary Katherine insists she wasn't angry when she was calling him at all, but that it was just irritating that she didn't know if she needed to make dinner for herself, or whether he was going to be there to join her for the meal. She ended up calling Steven's mother, Jennifer, who told her that he was at his friend's house. His mom testified in court
34:48 Speaker 01 saying, of course, I didn't realize that the night was going to escalate as it did. I have guilt to this day because I responded. I didn't want to lie to her.
35:01 Speaker 00 When Mary Katherine finally found Steven that night, he was with his friend, Thomas. Her behavior here is kind of unbelievable, but it's apparently what Steven was used to. Thomas still remembers how shocking it was saying she comes out of nowhere riding our tail like right on her bumper and she pulled up beside my truck, rolled her window down and she started yelling at him. She was like screaming at the top of her lungs. Steven told her he would come home and asked her to calm down. This was less than two hours before he was shot.
35:33 Speaker 01 Taking the circumstances of the day and the cooking oil on the gun, Griffin County Prosecutor Kate Lindhart believes what happened is very clear, telling the jury, she took the magazine out of the gun with the hands that had been preparing this food and was angry that he didn't want to eat it. She put bullets in that magazine. She put the magazine in the gun. She pulled the top of that gun back. She chambered around into it and she exerted five and three quarters pounds pressure on that trigger and she pulled the trigger because she was angry. Griffin Police Department Officer Todd Howard testified that the house
36:15 Speaker 01 was in disarray, like someone was packing up to leave. It turns out that it was Steven. He was planning to move to Helen, Georgia, about three hours north of Griffin. He was going to leave on August 2nd, the day after he ended up being killed and he was planning to do it without telling Mary Katherine, but he never got the chance. Steven had tried to leave Mary Katherine multiple times, but according to Thomas, every time he did, Mary Katherine texted Steven something along the lines of wanting to hurt herself and if Steven didn't move back in, she would kill herself. Thomas recalled that Steven described Mary Katherine as always angry and had once called her Satan.
37:01 Speaker 00 We've discussed this dynamic in multiple episodes now. Often, a woman stays in a relationship where domestic violence is ongoing because she's afraid to leave. And when she's finally had enough and decides to leave, it's the most dangerous time for her when she's most at risk. Well, in this situation, it seems like the roles were reversed and Steven was in danger after he made up his mind to get away. Mary Katherine claimed that she was actually the one who was breaking up with Steven because she just couldn't take it anymore. According to her, when Steven heard her say it was over, he got angry and flipped out, throwing things and pushing her. On the stand, she said, "He just threw everything that I made in my face and I just picked up the gun just
37:44 Speaker 00 to scare him, just to get him out of the house because I was scared." Mary Katherine insists she wasn't initially lying to police to cover anything up, explaining, "I guess I was just scared."
37:56 Speaker 01 In court, Mary Katherine's attorney, Michael Grantham, likened the situation to waiting for a Jack in the Box to pop up. You know it's coming, it's inevitable. That's just what happens when you wind the crank. But when? And even if you know it's coming, it doesn't keep you from flinching when it finally does happen. This is why she pulled the trigger that night. It wasn't unusual for him to lunge at her and she knew what would happen next. She just reacted, like you do when a Jack in the Box predictably pops up and startles you. Mary Katherine claimed that she hadn't been pointing the gun at Steven, she was just holding it out in front of her because she was afraid. She
38:38 Speaker 01 said, "I don't even see how like it even got him. I wasn't even like really pointing it directly at him in the first place." She said Steven lunged at her. According to Mary Katherine, the exact moment the gun went off was a blur. She said, "The next thing I remember then is him standing there saying, 'Call 911.'"
39:00 Speaker 00 Mary Katherine told the court, none of it had been intentional and she had it meant to kill him. She said, "All I know is what's in my heart and I know what happened that night. I loved Stephen and I would never, ever do anything to hurt him." According to prosecutor Kate Lenhard, Stephen was looking away from Mary Katherine when he was shot. She envisions the more likely scenario being Mary Katherine yelling at Stephen to look at her and shooting him when he didn't, not yelling at him to get away from her and shooting him when he lunged at her.
39:33 Speaker 01 While Mary Katherine's last job had been as a preschool teaching assistant at St. George's Episcopal School in Milner, by the time of Stephen's death, she was no longer working there. More interestingly, she had also worked part-time at a sporting goods store, selling guns. She should have known how to safely handle one and not point it anywhere close to the direction of someone. The first rule of gun safety is to always treat every gun as if it is loaded. Thomas Skinner, who was Stephen's friend, as well as Mary Katherine's coworker at the sporting goods store, told 48 hours, "Before you're able to sell a gun, you're trained and taught how to handle it, including things like how
40:18 Speaker 01 to hand somebody a gun. You would also likely be taught never to throw a firearm." Stephen's friend Andrew McRee recalled that Mary Katherine would brag about how she knew more about guns than Stephen or any of his friends did. When asked whether he believed this could have been an accident, Thomas replied, "No, no, not for a second. I know she knows how to handle a gun very well." And more, if I'm going back to the jury, and I'm kind of envisioning myself on this jury, absorbing all of these different things, right, that come out during the trial. Part
41:02 Speaker 01 of that is, you know, Mary Katherine's experience with guns, but I think a big thing for me was the prosecutor kind of talking about how Stephen was looking away from Mary Katherine when he was shot. And we don't have all the details and the science behind that.
41:24 Speaker 01 But if it was true, you know, how much does that play into the self-defense angle? He, you know, he's not lunging at her if he has his back to her or he's looking away from her.
41:40 Speaker 00 It's kind of hard to picture someone attacking somebody while they're not even looking at them. So, you know, that's pretty strong in itself, that, that one clue. But is that enough to sway the jury? Now, we know the, the theory by the prosecution is that Stephen was essentially sitting on the bed, looking away when he was shot by Mary Katherine. I don't know if they were able to fully prove that they had the science to back that up, but that was their theory based on the wounds to Stephen and the blood on the bed. And it definitely conflicts with Mary Katherine's story of him charging at her
42:24 Speaker 00 and her shooting him for fear he was going to harm her.
42:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's a good point. But again, right, as a juror, you gotta soak all of this in. The theories on both sides, the evidence on both sides. You can they prove their theories? And unfortunately, as it happens in many cases, when you have two people involved in an incident and one of them dies, there's only one person left to tell their side of the story.
43:01 Speaker 00 On July 26, 2019, after four hours of deliberation, a jury of five men and seven women found Mary Katherine Higdon not guilty on all charges. She immediately hugged her attorneys as she burst into tears of relief, probably mixed with some disbelief too. Mary Katherine had gambled by taking the stand and it had paid off. Stephen's family and friends were stunned and saddened by the verdict. Ben Coker, who was the Spalding County District Attorney at the time, told the Griffin Daily News, "I'm astonished that the jury has made this decision. While I'm disappointed by the outcome, as an officer of the court, I must respect the verdict."
43:41 Speaker 00 Prosecutor Kate Lenhart would later tell 48 Hours that upon hearing the not guilty verdict, she says, "I'm just sitting there and I'm thinking I failed this family." As she left the court, Mary Katherine said things like, "God did this and this is all God."
43:58 Speaker 01 The jurors that spoke out after the trial explained what a difficult job they found coming to a verdict had been. One juror named Chris told 48 Hours, "I knew pretty much no matter what you vote, one family gets hurt." The jurors also noted how important the ruined audio on the confession tape was. One juror named Victor asked a question to 48 Hours. She's still in custody after it was realized the confession audio was damaged. Why are you not going to bring her back in to at least speak with her again? Chris, the juror, called the evidence they did present at trial tainted from the way the cops handled the investigation.
44:41 Speaker 01 This didn't leave them with much to go off of. He said, "I didn't have any proof that Mary Katherine had done much of anything except for lying." And the jurors didn't seem to think the lies were as suspicious as the prosecution did. Chris admitted to 48 Hours, "If I was being arrested for potentially murdering somebody, I probably would get scared enough that I would just come up with whatever story I could." The other juror who spoke out, Victor, also didn't give much weight to Mary Katherine's lie, saying that "in toxic relationships, there are mountains and mountains and mountains of lies."
45:19 Speaker 00 It's a bit surprising why the jury didn't come back with a split verdict leading to a mistrial. The immediate vote was 10 guilty, 2 not guilty. How did 2 jurors sway 10 others into a not guilty verdict, leaving no chance for a second prosecution due to the double jeopardy laws? And due to those double jeopardy laws, Mary Katherine can never be tried again for Stevens murder. Even if she admitted now or in the future that she murdered him, she can never be punished.
45:47 Speaker 01 Stevens mother Jennifer has started to advocate for domestic violence prevention organizations. She now participates in 5K walks for the Promise Place in Thomaston, Georgia. According to their website, the Promise Place helps to prevent domestic violence through awareness programs and educational training and provides safe environments for the victims and their family and helps with legal advocacy, emergency shelters, and transitional housing.
46:18 Speaker 00 Discussing Mary Katherine's role in not guilty verdict, Stevens mom Jennifer said to 48 Hours, "She will never give me an answer that's going to be good enough for me because this should have never happened." Stevens uncle Judge Josh Thacker told WSB TV, "We've lost two people in this. We've lost Steven, but obviously our relationship will be changed with Mary Katherine and my heart goes out to the Higdon family because they are doing the same thing." Mary Katherine Higdon has moved out of Georgia and is trying to start over. It's not clear if the death of Steven Freeman at her hands will weigh on her or affect her life moving forward.
46:57 Speaker 01 And for me, it's tough to think that it's not going to affect her life moving forward because no matter how it went down, you did take someone's life. Unless you're a sociopath, I don't know how that doesn't weigh on you. But as we wrap this one up, Morf, I really want to talk about this verdict because I think it's controversial in some people's eyes. I mean, you said it, the immediate vote was 10 guilty, 2 not guilty. So somehow, as the deliberation went on, 10 people changed their minds.
47:40 Speaker 01 So there's that question of how exactly that happened. Now you and I have done a ton of cases and we have other podcasts where we've done many other cases. We've analyzed a lot of different trials and I never like to second guess the jury. I never like to say they got it wrong because you know, I wasn't there. I didn't see all the evidence presented. I didn't hear all the testimony, but what I will say is from the, the facts that we were able to gather.
48:20 Speaker 01 I, I think as a juror, it would be hard for me to vote not guilty. I, I feel like I can say that.
48:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm right there with you. I think I would have been one of those 10 that was voting for guilty. And I don't know that my mind could have been changed. Again, we don't know every detail that the jury knew and had heard, but we do know that they at least knew about the confession she had supposedly made and the technical issues with it. So they even have that, that she allegedly had confessed to it. And that still wasn't enough for them. So, and again, I wouldn't even want to be in this jury's shoes. I've never been on a jury, but in a case like this, just, this just seems like a monumental case.
49:10 Speaker 00 And as that one juror put it, he said, I know whatever we decide, we're going to really hurt one family badly.
49:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, there's, there's no doubt about it. You know, in a murder trial such as this, I mean, the jury's job is so tough. And, and we're just human, right? Everybody has their own thoughts and, and viewpoints. I can imagine some people not wanting to convict somebody of murder unless they were absolutely sure. Well, in how many trials are you absolutely sure? Because without that confession, I don't know that there are absolutes here. So what you're looking at is.
50:01 Speaker 01 Less likely an absolute, more like what's more likely than not. And that may not be good enough for a lot of people. You know, for me, I look at was Steven looking away from her when he was shot? Was he really on the bed? As some of the science seemed to indicate, again, to me, that doesn't seem like somebody who is coming after Mary Katherine.
50:31 Speaker 00 And I, at the end of the day, I can't help but think about that glitch in the audio is, could have been the difference maker here. You know, had the jury had her clearly on audio saying that she had done this and it was intentional, I don't know how they would have come to a not guilty verdict. So I think that is, is the, the case hinged on this, the outcome hinged a lot on this one little glitch. And, you know, I don't know if, if they've ever figured out what caused that. Hopefully they would keep that from ever happening again, because you're, it's a difference
51:11 Speaker 00 between, you know, a, a family, maybe in their minds, getting justice or not getting justice. And it's the difference between a person maybe going to prison for the rest of their life or not going to prison. So it's frightening that a little glitch like that could have a, an impact on all that.
51:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, assuming she said that, which was the claim, I think had it been on tape and presented to the jury, this would have been a totally different outcome. Because I, I think then, as a juror, some of those doubts go away because you're hearing the person in their own words say, I did this. But without that, I, I could see where some jurors are thinking, well, I don't feel comfortable sending someone to prison for the rest of their lives, let's say, based on what we have.
52:09 Speaker 01 Now, what I still don't understand is how 10 people's minds got changed during deliberation. To be a fly on the wall during that process would be absolutely fascinating.
52:23 Speaker 00 At the end of the day here, I don't think we really truly know what happened that night when Steven was shot, and I don't think anyone really does besides Mary Katherine. And that's kind of frustrating.
52:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is. It is very frustrating, but that is often the case. When you have two people involved and one person ends up dead. But that is it for our episode on Stephen Freeman. If you love the show, but haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, leave us a rating, leave a review. Also, keep telling your friends, word of mouth about the criminology podcast really helps us out.
53:04 Speaker 00 Once again, just as a reminder, as far as social media, we're on basically almost every social media platform. Just search for criminology podcast. And if you want to discuss the show or the cases we cover with like minded listeners, please join our Facebook discussion group, criminology podcast discussion and fans.
53:22 Speaker 01 So that's it for another episode of criminology, but Morph and I will be back with you next week with a brand new episode. So until then for Mike.
53:31 Speaker 00 And Morph.
53:32 Speaker 01 We'll talk to you next week.
53:33 Speaker 00 Take care, everyone.
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