Please feel free to contact me by email at:
katiecoolady@yahoo.com
middle child
I am a middle child sandwiched between homicide and schizophrenia. This is our true story.
Please feel free to contact me by email at:
katiecoolady@yahoo.com
middle child 
Dear Kathy, you really seem to be a strong lady. I spoke with another couple in Mesa that have a daughter whose husband hired a hit man but he didn’t kill her. She is in wheelchair tho and suffering. I would love to chat with you if you feel like it sometime.,
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Kathy, you inspire me to do better. Thank you.
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Like most citizens of this country, conversations sometimes ensue between friends about the death penalty. I oppose it, but I always qualify my conversation with the thought that if someone murdered a family member, my opposition to it would probably crumble. I watch the True Conviction story about your sister’s murder, and I have to admit that my opposition to the death penalty is at its weakest point that it’s ever been. What she went through, and what you have gone though then and in the years since are quite literally beyond my comprehension, and I won’t soon forget your or your sister’s pain. (I think that series is very well done and handled with grace from the host and producers.). It’s difficult for me to believe that her killers should be allowed to live.
I wish you peace.
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Thank you Mike for your honest share here. The truth is, for me, I oppose the death penalty AS IT STANDS. What other penalty, for any crime, takes decades for it to be imposed, or never imposed at all? What other penalty, drains millions of dollars of tax payer funds, to fight it? Not just per case, per EVERY case. What other penalty, requires completely innocent grieving family members to be held in limbo at best and abused at worse? Just some of the things we have lived through. As I’ve said, the worst of the worst of our society receive the best of the best legal assistance, on our dime.
Our case should stand as a poster case for these issues, as these killers are not even US citizens, never paid a dime to US tax coffers, yet have received these costly benefits. On us, all of us.
Opponents use “it’s so expensive” as one of their arguments, while concurrently being the very reason the death penalty is so expensive–chalking up decades of very costly legal fees for these murderers. ONE appeal for the Apelts last 7 years and cost US taxpayers over 10 million dollars. That is just ONE of their appeals spanning almost 3 decades now. I need to keep speaking the truth about this. The death penalty, in my opinion, as it stands, is far worse for families than Life without Parole. Yet I don’t oppose it for the reasons the DP opponents want me to. I oppose it for the way they abuse our tax payer funds and the ways they torture my family with it.
I’m not attached to Michael Apelt ever being executed. I’m interested in only two things–that he never, under any circumstances, be released from prison.
Unfortunately for us, lucky for him, should his sentence ever be commuted to life, he would be grandfathered in to Life WITH parole and I am just not ok with that on any level. Remember, this is a man who hatched a scheme to have another woman murdered “copycat” style from jail, hoping to deflect his crime as some kind of serial killer out there. Yet people argued his “mental retardation” with a straight face.
My second wish is that he be forgotten–that he and his leave us alone. I have been swatting flies for almost 30 years from his champions.
Again, thank you for your straight up honest sharing here. I hope you keep reading.
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Hello Amazing Person, just watched the True Justice (?) episode about your sister’s murder at the hands of two of the most sociopathic homicidal maniacs ever to sit on death row. I watch a lot of true crime and I can’t recall eVer being this horrified by any crime. There really are no words in any language equal to describing those two grotesques, the Apelts. You’ve endured things that would crush me, things that I doubt even the strongest people I know could endure, at least not with the amazing grace that you have. I briefly interacted on Facebook with Jan Williams, Manling Williams’ mother-in-law, and her restrained but heartbreaking observations about capital punishment, and the additional torment inflicted upon victims’ families by the criminal justice system, haunted me for days after our exchange. I send you my warmest wishes and my thanks for, in the face of unspeakable horror, somehow showing those of us who most need to see it, what we humans are capable of not just surviving, but transcending. You deserve nothing but joy, in 2021 and every day of the rest of your life.
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What an amazing note to wake up on the first day of the nee year and read. You helped start my year off with light and freedom. Thank you so much for taking the time to hunt me down and share your feelings.
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