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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. As the sun beat down on the quiet streets of Texas on August 7th, 1996, the Corzelius family went about their day, running errands and completing their usual routines.
But what started as an uneventful afternoon quickly turned into a parent's worst nightmare. Six-year-old Catherine thought it would be fun to walk home from the mailbox. It was less than a quarter mile. So mom agreed. She parked her car and waited for Catherine. But the six-year-old little girl never made it back up to the house. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 174.
The Mysterious Death of Catherine Corzelius.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola. Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.
As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. As a thank you for supporting the show, you'll get early ad-free access to weekly episodes, shout-outs and episodes, priority on case suggestions, and access to weekly bonus episodes.
To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now let's get to this week's episode. On August 7th, 1996, Nancy Corzelius and her two young kids, six-year-old Catherine and nine-year-old Chris, left their home in Elder Circle, Texas to run some errands.
The plan that afternoon was to stop at a few stores to pick up some things that the family needed and pick up a birthday present for Nancy's husband, Paul. In August 1996, Paul worked as a business manager for Bon Jovi. So that afternoon, one of the family's stops was to pick up a birthday present for Paul. The family planned to have dinner and celebrate Paul's birthday later that night. The first stop Nancy and the children made was to the kids' math tutor.
After the math lesson with the tutor, they stopped at a local Subway restaurant for lunch, where they all ordered sandwiches. Then the last stop on the trip that afternoon was to pick out a birthday present for Paul, some golf clubs that he had been waiting months for. After Nancy and the kids got Paul's golf clubs, they returned home.
The family lived in a lovely home in the neighborhood of Elder Circle, a small upper-class community near the more densely populated city of Austin, Texas. Before Nancy, Catherine, and her brother Chris arrived at the house, they first stopped at the community mailboxes located at the top of the road.
Like many neighborhoods in the area, the mailboxes were all located in a central location. They weren't directly in front of the homeowner's property. So to get the mail in Elder Circle, you would have to stop at the community mailboxes at the top of the street. So around 4 o'clock p.m., Nancy and the kids stopped at the mailboxes before heading up to the house a little bit farther up the street.
But before they could start heading home, six-year-old Catherine had a special request for her mom, Nancy. Catherine asked if she could walk the rest of the way home instead of riding in the car with her mom and older brother. It was less than a quarter mile, and the distance was only about four houses between the community mailboxes and the family's home. So it was a relatively short distance for a six-year-old girl to walk alone.
Plus, Catherine had made this walk between the mailboxes and the house at least a half dozen times before. So Nancy felt comfortable letting her six-year-old daughter walk the quarter mile home. It should only take her a few minutes, and she knew just how responsible Catherine was.
So without much hesitation at all, Nancy said yes. She allowed Catherine to get out of the car and then she and her older brother Chris drove the quarter mile back up to the house. Nancy and Chris went one direction through the neighborhood up to the house while six-year-old Catherine went the other way, the shorter way.
Once Nancy and Chris got to the house, Chris went inside the house and Nancy brought in Paul's golf clubs. Then Nancy waited for her daughter to walk through the front door any minute. Although she and Chris had taken the long way through the neighborhood up to the house, she knew Catherine took the shorter route and should be home any minute now. So Nancy waited and waited some more. But six-year-old Catherine never returned.
When Catherine didn't make it home, her older brother, nine-year-old Chris, decided to walk back down to the mailboxes to look for her. But only a few minutes later, he returned back to the house. But this time, he was crying. He kept saying, she's not there, mom. She's not there.
So Nancy and Chris both hopped into the car and drove around the neighborhood to see if they could find her. Maybe Catherine decided to take a different route home than she normally did when she walked home from the mailboxes. After only a few minutes of driving around the neighborhood, Nancy and Chris found Catherine's body in the street at around 4.15 p.m.
This was only about 15 minutes after they last saw her alive when she was supposed to be walking home. When they found her, Catherine was lying in the street on the opposite side of the cul-de-sac about six houses down from her own. She was lying in a fetal position with her legs stretched out in front of her and her face toward the ground.
When Nancy and Chris jumped out of the car toward her, they said she was unresponsive, but she was still breathing. Instead of calling 911 and waiting for paramedics to arrive, Nancy said she instinctively decided to pick her daughter up from the street and drive her to the hospital herself. From where the family lived on Elder Circle, it was about a 25-minute drive to the nearest trauma center, Seton Medical Center.
As soon as Catherine arrived at the hospital, the doctors and nurses immediately began working on her. They knew that every second mattered in a situation like this. And if they had any real chance at saving this little girl, they needed to do everything they could. But unfortunately, they were too late. Between 5 and 11 p.m., the doctors at Seton Medical Center did all they could. But Catherine's injuries were too severe.
She never regained consciousness and was only alive because she was on a breathing machine. The doctors at the hospital had concluded that she was brain dead. And at 11.30 p.m., Catherine's parents, Nancy and Paul, decided to take her off life support. She was pronounced dead at only six years old. From the start, everyone, including the police and doctors, assumed Catherine had become the victim of a hit-and-run driver.
The first assumption was that while Catherine was walking the quarter mile from the community mailboxes up to her house, a driver accidentally struck her and drove away without calling for help. That seemed to be the only logical explanation for what happened and the only thing that could explain how quickly this all went down.
So after the accident, Catherine's family and neighbors got together to see what they could do to try and identify this driver. Everyone wanted the person responsible for hitting and killing Catherine to be found and prosecuted. What kind of monster not only hits and kills a small child, but doesn't even stop to help after they realize what's happened?
So a few days after the accident, Nancy and Paul posted flyers around the neighborhood offering a $5,000 reward for any information leading to an arrest or suspect. The family was really hopeful that this tactic would pay off. The Elder Circle community was small. It was a place where everyone knew each other. So the family hoped that at least one person in this very small community knew something or possibly heard something.
And maybe all they needed was a little financial incentive to come forward. At the time of Catherine's death, her dad, Paul, worked as a business manager for Bon Jovi. So this relationship helped spread the word about the story. Bon Jovi used his massive platform to tell people about what happened to Catherine. And even Bon Jovi himself begged anyone with information to come forward.
But even his platform of millions of fans seemed to fall on deaf ears because the police didn't receive any promising tips. In the days following Catherine's death, the community feared a dangerous driver might be on the loose. No one knew if it was even intentional or not. And it was even scarier for residents when they discovered no one claimed to have heard or seen anything the afternoon of the accident.
Catherine's parents and the police knocked on every door in the neighborhood and spoke with everyone who lived there. No one seemed to know anything about the accident, though, or who might have been responsible. What was also troubling about the scene where Catherine's body was found was that there weren't any skid or break marks.
So if someone had struck her with their car, it didn't appear that they made any attempt to stop or brake first. Which seemed odd because where Catherine would have been hit was clearly visible to drivers.
It seemed like whoever the driver was would have had a lot of time to see Catherine in the street and be able to stop in time before hitting her. But they didn't. There wasn't a single skid mark or tire track on the road. Although this quote-unquote hit-and-run theory seemed plausible initially...
This theory had two big hiccups. The first hiccup was the location of Catherine's body on the cul-de-sac. The second was the autopsy results. From where the community mailboxes are located in Elder Circle, there are only two ways to get to the family's house. You can turn right, which is the shorter path to the house, or you can turn in the opposite direction and take the long way.
Either direction will take you directly up to the house. On the afternoon of August 7th, 1996, Catherine was supposed to walk the shorter path home, which was about a quarter mile long. Nancy and Chris were going to drive the other way, which was a little bit longer through the neighborhood. Either way, both streets take you directly up to the family's house. But something strange happened that afternoon.
Catherine's body wasn't found on the side of the street where she was supposed to be walking. Instead, she was found on the opposite side of the circle, about a half mile from the house. On the same side of the circle, Nancy and Chris said that they drove home. Catherine's autopsy also posed trouble for this hit-and-run theory.
According to the Travis County medical examiner who performed the autopsy, Catherine's injuries weren't consistent with being hit by a car.
When Catherine arrived at Seton Medical Center, she had significant head trauma. But besides a fracture to her skull, there weren't any other fractures or broken bones in her body. She also didn't have any other internal injuries that are usually seen in most hit-and-run accidents.
Instead of fractures or broken bones, she had a lot of bruises and scrapes to her body, including cuts to her shoulder, back, hip, elbows, knees, and hands. And according to the Travis County Medical Examiner, these types of injuries are more consistent with a fall, not a car accident. But a fall...
How did Catherine suffer a fatal fall during the short walk from the mailboxes to the house? And how does a fall explain why she was found on the other side of the cul-de-sac? Well, according to Robert Bayardo, the county medical examiner, Catherine might have fallen, jumped, or had been thrown from a moving vehicle. In a public statement following the autopsy, he had this to say, quote,
The injuries that Catherine sustained could have been the result of either jumping from a moving vehicle, being thrown from a moving vehicle, or falling from a moving vehicle. The types of injuries that we expect in these circumstances would have been the same, end quote.
One theory proposed by investigators that supported this finding of the autopsy was Catherine might have tried to hold on to the back of a car but fell off. But whose car could they be talking about? Well, according to investigators, it could have been her mom, Nancy. Not only does this theory explain the injuries, but it also explains where her body was found in the neighborhood.
Remember, Catherine's body was found on the same route Nancy and Chris took to drive home, the opposite side of the neighborhood from where she was supposed to be. So this theory proposed by investigators can explain two critical facts. Number one, the location of Catherine's body. And number two, the types of injuries she had. Instead of a lot of broken bones like you'd expect to see in a car accident,
She had a lot of bruises and abrasions. These injuries made sense if she had fallen or slid across the asphalt. But not everyone agreed with investigators, including Catherine's own family. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. The police's theory about what happened to Catherine completely stunned her family. How could this six-year-old have jumped on the back of her mom's car without her knowing?
Wouldn't you think Nancy would have seen her daughter holding on to the back of the car? Or at the very least, wouldn't she have heard Catherine when she fell off? There was also some talk about maybe this was intentional. Maybe Nancy knew her daughter was on the back of the car, but she drove off toward the house anyway.
But once Catherine fell off and Nancy saw what happened, she decided to drive off and make it look like this was some type of hit and run. Some people who believe this theory pointed to the fact that Nancy and her son decided to drive in the opposite direction home that day. Instead of following Catherine from behind or even driving out in front of her, Nancy went the opposite way home.
She drove the quote-unquote long way home around the neighborhood instead of driving in the same direction that her daughter planned to walk. So many people wonder why Nancy decided to drive that way. Why not follow her from behind or drive in front of her and wait for her back at the house? Because we're only talking about a quarter mile here. It was a very short walk from the mailboxes to the house.
So people wanted to know why she drove the other way home instead of the way that her daughter was supposed to go. Nancy and Paul quickly hired a private investigator to look into the case. They didn't like that the cops had devised this theory that seemed to suggest Nancy might have driven the car that killed her daughter. So they hired their own private investigator to see what they could come up with and possibly discover another possible explanation.
The family decided to work with Barbara O'Brien, an experienced PI from the Houston, Texas area. The first thing Barbara O'Brien started to do was explore different theories about what might have happened to Catherine. Was this a tragic hit and run as they suspected in the beginning? Or were the cops right? Was Catherine thrown from a moving vehicle, possibly her own mother's car?
Or was there another possible explanation? Another explanation the cops hadn't considered that also lines up with the forensic evidence. After diving deep into the case as well as the evidence, private investigator Barbara O'Brien came up with a few conclusions of her own. And here's what she had to say about the evidence.
Barbara O'Brien didn't think it was physically possible for Catherine to be able to hold on to her mother's car as the cops suggested. And here's why. On the day of the accident, it was a hot day in Elder Circle, Texas. This all happened at the beginning of August, one of the hottest months all year long.
So the family's PI doesn't think Catherine would have been able to hold on to her mom's car because simply it would have been too hot outside. It probably would have burned her hands if she tried holding on to any part of the car. And she wouldn't have been able to do it even if she wanted to. She would have realized it was too hot before her mom even started to drive away.
According to Barbara O'Brien, there were only two ways for Catherine to quote car surf on her mom's car. The first way was to hold on to the metal bar on top of the car. At the time of the accident, Nancy drove a large Chevy Suburban SUV. And like most Suburbans, the top of the SUV had a metal bar where you would attach something like an extra cargo carrier.
So the first way Catherine could have hold on to the car was to stand on the bumper or the side of the car and hold on by the SUV's metal bars on top. But with the weather being so hot that day in August, would Catherine have been able to do that? Wouldn't the metal be extremely hot to the touch? The other way the family's PI believes she could have done it was to hold on to the back door handle.
To do this, she would have had to stand on the bumper, crouch down, and hold on to the door handle. But according to Barbara O'Brien, the PI, this doesn't make much sense either. If Catherine was holding on the back of the door handle, this would have caused the back door to fly open.
She simply doesn't think that Catherine would have been able to hold on to the handle without the door coming wide open. And once the door opened, Nancy would have certainly been able to see it that it was open through her rearview mirror. Or her son Chris would have probably seen it and told his mom to stop. Then, then there was Catherine's broken finger.
At the time of the accident, Catherine's left thumb was broken and had a splint on her finger. So on top of all the challenges she would have faced to try and hold on to her mom's car from either the top or the back door handle, she would have had to do it with a broken left thumb and the finger was still in a splint.
So after taking all of this into consideration, the family and their private investigator didn't think Catherine could have been, quote, car surfing on Nancy's car.
Not only would Nancy never allow her six-year-old daughter to do that, but she would have seen it. So even if Catherine decided to jump on the back of her mom's car without her mom knowing, the family said Nancy would have seen her in the mirror almost immediately. And then she would have been able to prevent any type of accident because she would have stopped the car.
So if Catherine wasn't involved in a hit-and-run accident and she wasn't car surfing, then what else might have happened? Well, this is what the family and their private investigator have said. If Catherine wasn't the victim of a tragic hit-and-run accident, as they suspected early on, then she might have been a victim of an abduction gone wrong. And here's how this theory could go.
While Catherine was walking the quarter mile from the community mailboxes to her parents' house, someone tried to kidnap her. Maybe someone was simply in the right place at the right time to abduct a small child. Or maybe it was someone who was already following the family home. Either way, once Catherine got out of her mom's car and started walking home alone, someone tried kidnapping her.
After Catherine was snatched off the street and put in her kidnapper's car, she might have tried to escape by jumping out of a moving vehicle. This could explain the type of injuries the medical examiner found on her body. Or her kidnappers might have thrown her from the car. Maybe Catherine was screaming or making too much noise and her abductors were worried that one of the neighbors might hear.
So within minutes of abducting her, they decided to ditch their plan and throw her out the door while the car was still moving. And again, that could explain the type of injuries. There was also another possible theory. Catherine was abducted and murdered within a 10 to 20 minute time frame. Her kidnappers saw that she was alone, so they decided to snatch her up.
They put her in the car where they murdered her. Then before driving away, they threw her body out of the car. But here's another key piece of evidence that makes this case even stranger. And that's how Nancy claimed she found her daughter's body that afternoon. According to Nancy, when she and Chris found Catherine lying in the street, it looked like her body had been posed.
Nancy said it almost looked like she had been deliberately placed in the street that way. Catherine's hair looked like it had been smoothed down or even brushed. Her shirt and shorts were both straight, like someone had neatly placed her down. Her legs were completely straight in front of her body, and she still had her sandals neatly on her feet.
According to Nancy, nothing about how she found her daughter's body suggested that she had been thrown from a car. To her, it looked like someone had neatly placed her body in the middle of the street. But there is a slight problem with some of Nancy's statements. Catherine's body was moved long before the cops ever arrived at the scene. So no one was able to document anything about how Catherine looked while lying in the street.
Remember, Nancy said as soon as she discovered her daughter, she picked her up from the street and drove straight to the hospital. She didn't wait and call 911 so that paramedics and the cops could come for help. Instead, she picked her up and went to the hospital herself. So there's no official record of how Catherine's body was placed in the street that day.
The only thing the cops have to go on is Nancy's own statements. No photographs were taken of the scene until well after Catherine's body was removed. If Catherine was murdered and her body was placed in the street, then who did it? The Elder Circle community is a quiet and safe place to live. It's not a place known to have child killers running around the streets.
And when the cops questioned all of the neighbors who lived there, no one stood out. In fact, the police were never able to identify any possible suspects in the case. No one that lived in the neighborhood or anyone else for that matter. So if Catherine was murdered, who's the perpetrator?
Investigators brought canine search dogs to the neighborhood a few days after her death. They wanted to see if the dogs could pick up on any clues. And when they got to the neighborhood, they found something interesting. The canine dogs were able to track Catherine's scent to a vacant property lot about 30 yards away from the mailboxes. The lot was completely empty at the time and nothing was there. No houses, nothing.
So it seemed strange that the dogs were able to track Catherine's scent to the vacant lot 30 yards away, but didn't find anything after that. Catherine's scent seemed to go completely cold after the empty lot. This piece of information seemed to suggest Catherine might have been killed or injured near this empty lot. The lot was in the same direction where Catherine would have been walking toward her house.
And it makes sense the dogs lost it there because after someone kidnapped her or hurt her, they transported her body across the street to where her mom found her. But that's all just a possible theory. When the cops searched the lot, they didn't find anything. So the only thing it seemed to suggest was that Catherine was near the lot, about 30 yards away from the mailboxes, and that's it.
Without any additional leads or evidence, the case risked turning cold. No one was really sure what happened, and no theory seemed to answer all the open-ended questions. If this was a hit-and-run accident, why didn't anyone in the neighborhood hear the crash? And why weren't her injuries consistent with that type of accident?
Or why was her body posed in such an unusual and neat way if she had been struck by a car? If this was a case of Catherine car surfing on the back of her mom's SUV, why didn't the mom see her or her older brother? And is it possible that she could have held on to the side of the car with or without her mom knowing despite a broken finger?
If this is a case of child abduction and murder, then who was responsible? And how was she killed? According to the medical examiner, Catherine's injuries were consistent with being thrown from a moving vehicle. So if she was kidnapped, assaulted, then was she thrown from the kidnapper's car? How do you explain the posing of the body?
Without answers to any of these questions, the case eventually turned cold. No one, including the cops, could say exactly what happened to Catherine that afternoon while walking home from the mailboxes. In 1997, Bon Jovi, a close friend and client of Catherine's father Paul, released a song titled August 7th, 1996, The Same Day Catherine Died.
Besides working with Bon Jovi as a performing artist, the family was also incredibly close to him. Both of their families were friends. So it's said that Catherine's death was extremely hard on Bon Jovi. Not only did he share a close bond with her father, Paul, but he also knew Catherine very well. He had spent time with her since she was born. So the whole thing had a tremendous impact on him.
And he decided to release a song about it a year later. And some of the lyrics say, quote, It was another day, a perfect Texas afternoon, a mother and two children play the way they always do. As they raced home from the mailbox, a mother and her son against a little girl of six years old, the independent one, end quote.
About 12 months after the incident, some of the family's neighbors planted a tree and plaque in her memory. They also created their own signs that they put up in the neighborhood. The signs said that the speed limit was no more than 25 miles per hour. They were put up to try and stop drivers from driving so fast through the neighborhood. But we don't even know if that's what happened to Catherine.
Catherine's death not only took a toll on her family in the beginning, but the effects of it were long-lasting. Her parents, Nancy and Paul, divorced only a few years after the incident, and tragedy struck the family for a second time. In March 2020, Catherine's older brother, Chris, who was only nine years old at the time, died at 32 in a car accident.
At the time of his death, he had dedicated nine years of his life for working as a police officer for the Travis County Sheriff's Department, the same agency that helped investigate his younger sister's tragic death. The cause of Catherine Corzelius' death remains a mystery even 27 years later. We still don't know what happened to her that day in August 1996.
Was she tragically struck and killed in a hit-and-run accident? Was she abducted and murdered? Did someone neatly place her body in the street that day? Was she car surfing on the back of her mom's SUV when she accidentally fell off? Or did something else happen to her? Something that hasn't been explained by the forensic evidence even after all these years.
The forensic evidence told the medical examiner Catherine might have been thrown from a moving vehicle. But could there be another possible explanation? And if she was thrown from a car, why? To share your thoughts on this week's story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales.
After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case. You'll want to listen to this one because I'm going to share with you what I think happened to Catherine. Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday. If you love the show, consider leaving us a positive review or tell friends and family about us.
You can also help support the show through Patreon. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please join me next week. We'll have a brand new case and a brand new story to talk about. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.
Thank you.
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to find out how you can become involved. For a complete list of sources used in this episode, please visit ForensicTales.com. Thank you for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.