On the night of August 20th, 2008, an eighty-one-year-old woman was found dead inside the rural Anderson County, Texas, home where she had lived alone for years. There was no obvious sign that an intruder had forced a way inside, and investigators could find no murder weapon. The victim, Mary Waters, had suffered a severe wound to her throat. Her death became Anderson County’s first homicide of 2008.
Mary Waters lived on County Road 363 in Anderson County, outside the East Texas city of Palestine. According to contemporary reporting, she had been living at the residence for several years and was alone in the home. Members of her family lived outside Anderson County, something that would complicate investigators’ immediate effort to determine exactly when she had last been seen alive.
On Wednesday evening, August 20th, Mary’s son went to her home and discovered his mother dead inside. Early reports described a deep cut to her throat. The Texas Department of Public Safety’s official cold-case record is somewhat less specific, stating that an autopsy determined that Mary died from a knife wound.
What investigators encountered inside the house only deepened the mystery. Anderson County Sheriff Greg Taylor told KLTV shortly after the murder that there were no signs of forced entry into Mary’s home. Investigators also did not recover the weapon used to kill her.
Those details left investigators with fundamental unanswered questions. Had Mary willingly opened her home to whoever killed her? Had a door been left unlocked? Was the killer someone familiar to her, or had a stranger simply found another way inside without leaving obvious damage? No publicly available evidence has established an answer, and investigators have not publicly identified any of those possibilities as the definitive theory of the crime.
One of the first challenges was determining Mary Waters’s final movements and establishing when she had last been known to be alive. Because her relatives lived outside the county, investigators did not initially have a clear timeline. Sheriff Taylor said deputies were interviewing Waters’s family members and neighbors in the hope of finding someone who had recently seen her, or who might have noticed a person or vehicle near her house.
There was apparently little in the initial investigation to immediately point detectives toward a suspect. Contemporary reports did not identify a robbery, burglary, dispute or other event as a known motive. Nor did authorities announce that a particular individual had become the focus of the investigation.
Investigators continued interviewing people in the weeks after Mary’s death, but the case did not appear to gain significant momentum. By September 23rd, 2008, more than a month after the murder, the Anderson County Sheriff’s Department still had no solid lead, identified suspect or known motive, according to KLTV. At the time, authorities announced a reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to the arrest of the person responsible.
And then the case gradually became what so many homicide investigations become when the initial weeks fail to produce a breakthrough: a cold case. Texas Crime Stoppers still offers a reward of up to $3,000 for information leading to the arrest of the person or people responsible for Mary Waters’s murder.
Crime Immemorial 