July 15th, 1986

CONTENT WARNING + DISCLAIMER

Before we begin, a content warning. This episode discusses suicide, overdose, infidelity, child abuse, child neglect]. If any of that is hard for you to hear, take care of yourself however you need to. If you’re struggling, you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time, day or night. Everything I say in this episode is my opinion and interpretation, not established fact, unless I specifically note otherwise. I’m telling you what I believe happened and why. You can decide for yourself what you make of it. All photos and documents connected to this episode are available under the Upgrade button on Substack Once you upgrade and refresh you will see all the extras.

📄 EVIDENCE IN THIS EPISODE

• Document: Full Death certificate
• Document: Judgment Entry In RE: Chelsea Smith Abused
• Document: My original birth certificate
• Photo: Obituary
• Document: Proof Chuck was married and living in Ohio August of 1986 Less than a month after my mom died.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:06

A healthy woman dies suddenly. There is no autopsy. The death certificate is a guess. Something on it is scribbled out. Her husband gives three different accounts of her death and then disappears with her children. That woman was my mother, and that man is my biological father. My name is Chelsea, and this is Colvin Blue. Let me take you back to that day properly. It's July 15th, 1986. The top story that day was the heat with record highs, the kind that settles over everything by noon. But was already close to 95 degrees. I was two years old, my brother Jonah was four, and all three of us, Jonah, me, and our mother, were just two months away from our birthdays. Jonah's is September 14th, mine is September 20th, and my mom's is September 22nd. That morning was off. I know that it sounds strange to say when I was only two, but I remember confusion. I remember Jonah being upset. I remember being in the car with my grandpa and feeling grateful to be out of the house. I tried very hard to separate what I actually remember from what I've been told. Because with a story like this, memories and family accounts start to live beside each other. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they blur, and sometimes one tiny detail refuses to leave you alone. Most mornings, my grandpa would come to the house and pick us up for the day. He'd come inside, say good morning to my mom, say good morning to Chuck, gather our bags, and then we'd go. That was the morning routine. According to my grandpa, my mom was in remission from Crohn's disease. He described her as being in the prime of her life. That is a direct quote. She was not bedridden, she was not on her deathbed, she was not someone everyone was expecting to suddenly die. But that morning the routine changed. Chuck met my grandpa on the porch with Jonah and I. There was no waiting, no walking into the house, no saying good morning to my mother. And Chuck told him that my mom had just fallen asleep. And looking back, my grandfather said he realized Chuck had never ever done that before. Never had us ready at the door like that, never rushed us out so quickly. At the time, Grandpa thought it was strange. But like people do when something feels a little off, but not yet dangerous, he shrugged it off. He took us and he left. And that evening, Chuck called him, and according to my grandfather, this is what he said.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

Well, Kathy's cold and blue. I don't know what you want me to do with her.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

I've told you pieces of this before. Today I want to put them on the table all at once. No teasing it out across episodes, just facts late side by side the way I've had to look at them. Because here's the whole thing I've come to understand about my mother's death. It isn't one story with holes in it. It's several stories that can't all be true at the same time. And the man at the center of all this is my biological father, Chuck. I've sat with that sentence most of my life. Well, Kathy's cold and blue, I don't know what you want me to do with her. And I need to be honest about how I know this. I wasn't on the call, I was two years old. This is something my family carried and passed down to me. My grandpa's account of what Chuck said to him that evening. He used to tell me the story every time I asked. But here's what I've learned doing this. The things people remember word for word decades later are usually the things that broke something open in them. My grandpa didn't remember the weather that day. He remembered that sentence and he carried it with him until the day that he died. And it lands different once you understand the time. This was 1986. There was no 911. Not the way that we think of it now. You didn't have one number burn into every kid's brain. In a lot of places, it wasn't standard yet. If someone collapsed in your home, calling for help wasn't a reflex. It was a decision. You had to know who to call and you had to choose to do it. Cold and blue means time had passed. That's not the language of someone who just found her. It's the language of someone reporting a conclusion. And the question that follows isn't how do I save her? It's what do I do with her? Like she was a problem to be solved. Like she was already a thing and not a person. Let's talk about what the official record says happened to her. Because that record is its own kind of witness. Kathy died on July 15th, 1986. She was 35 years old. I have her death certificate. I want to walk through what it says slowly, because every line on it is doing something, or rather, refusing to do something. The cause of death listed is a possible gastric hemorrhage. Possible. A death certificate is not supposed to deal impossible. It's a legal record. It's supposed to be the end of the question, not the beginning of one. A gastric hemorrhage means bleeding in the stomach. People do die from it. My mom had a coloscomy bag. I'm pretty sure if she had a gastric hemorrhage, it would be pretty obvious how she died. But if it's not, you confirm it by looking inside the body. You confirm it with an autopsy. And here's the part I keep coming back to. There was no autopsy. Now I'm not a doctor. I'm gonna say that every time because this matters too much for me to pretend I know more than I do. But the people who do this for a living all describe the same standard. When a relatively healthy 35-year-old dies suddenly at home with no witness medical cause, that death gets looked at. It gets referred. Somebody is supposed to ask, why did this person die today? And someone did refer it. There's a notation on the record. The machinery that's supposed to kept a death like this, it actually engaged. And then the autopsy didn't happen. There's one more thing on that paper I've never been able to explain. Something scribbled out, not a clean correction with initials and a date, something crossed out. It's obscured. A mark where information used to be or what's about to be. So that's the document. A guess where there should be a fact. A referral that led to nothing. In a mark covering up something someone didn't want left on the record. Three things wrong with one piece of paper. Hold on to that number. Three, it's going to keep coming up. Now let's talk about the drive. I have to take you back to before she died because something happened in the days before July 15th that I only learned recently after making contact with my half-sister and half-brother. And it's honestly something that I can't unknow. I'm going to use the initial D in reference to my second half-brother to respect his privacy. Before my mother died, Dee told Kate that Chuck had taken him on a random drive. It was just the two of them. And during that jive, Chuck told him that Kathy was really, really sick. I want you to hold that next to the death certificate and next to my grandpa's account. The one on paper, the one my grandpa believed, is that Kathy was healthy, in remission, in the prime of her life. Not someone anyone expected to suddenly die. And yet, before she died, Chuck was already telling people that she was sick, really sick, so sick, had been sick for years. The first thing out of his mouth when the coroner was there is that she's been sick for years. You don't predict a sudden death in a healthy person unless you know something the healthy person doesn't. Allegedly. That's not grief getting ahead of itself, that's a story being planted before it's needed. And here's where it all comes apart. Because Chuck didn't tell one story about how my mother died. He told three. Story one is on the paper, gastric hemorrhage, the possible bleeding in the stomach, never confirmed, never examined. Story two is an overdose. That she took too much of something, that it was in some version an accident with medication. Story three is suicide. That she did it to herself, that she chose to go. Those are not three details about one event. Those are three completely different deaths. A hemorrhage is something that happens to you. Your body fails. An overdose is an accident or a mistake or something administered. A suicide is a decision. They cannot all be true. They can barely coexist in the same room. A person who watched someone die, who was simply present for a tragedy, tells one story, the same story, every single time. Or if they weren't there and they discovered a body, they say, I don't know. I want to know what happened. A person who tells three different stories is not reporting what they saw. They're testing what people will accept. And notice what all three versions accomplish. Hemorrhage means her body did it. Overdose means she did it by accident. Suicide means she did it on purpose. Every single one of them puts the cause on Kathy. Her illness, her mistake, her choice. Not one of these three ever points back at the man telling the story. That's the part that troubles me. Three stories and all three roads lead away from Chuck. Now, I don't want to be the person who only sees what she wants to see. So let me do the opposite. Let me take each one of these stories seriously, as if it were true, and see if it holds. Let's start with the hemorrhage, the official one. Could a healthy 35-year-old or a relatively healthy 35-year-old with Crohn's disease die of a gastric bleed? It's not impossible. Crohn's is a serious disease. But here's what doesn't fit. A gastric hemorrhage is not a quiet death. It is not slipping away in your sleep. It is violent and it is painful. There would be signs, there would be evidence, there would be a mess. You don't just doze off and bleed out peacefully. And there's something specific to my mother's body that makes this even harder to believe. She had a coloscomy bag, which means that if she were bleeding internally the way a gastric hemorrhage requires, it would not have been hidden. It would have been visible, obvious. The kind of thing you cannot miss and cannot mistake for sleep. And I'm not a doctor, I'm gonna say that as many times as it takes. But that's not a small detail. That's a body that would have told the truth if anyone had looked. It is a body that the doctor would say, oh, this is definitely a gastric hemorrhage, not a possible one. Story two, the overdose. Maybe she took too much of something by accident, or maybe she was given too much. That one I can't dismiss as easily, and I certainly won't pretend to. But think about what it requires. For my mother to die quietly in her sleep from medication, she'd have to ingest something strong enough to stop her without waking her. And here's the complication. My mom was in chronic pain, and she took painkillers, probably a lot of them, regularly. So her body was used to them. Her tolerance would have been very high. Higher than an average person's. So the amount it would have taken to kill her in her sleep accidentally is a lot. That's a hard accident to have. Which leaves the third story, suicide. And I need to walk carefully here because this is the version that got told the loudest, and I know exactly where it came from. Chuck was having an affair. Chuck was always having an affair. I think he was having an affair with every single person he was in a relationship with. The woman he was seeing went around town telling people that Chuck was leaving my mother for her, and that when he told Kathy, my mother killed herself in front of him. That was the story she spread. I believe she even confronted my grandfather with it. I'm not guessing at this. That account is preserved in letters written by my mother's own aunt. Letters where she refers to this woman as that horrible woman. So the suicide story has a source. And the source is the girlfriend. Or rather, the source is Chuck telling his girlfriend. So let me actually interrogate it. Suicide. How? She intentionally poisoned herself, swallowed handfuls of pills the moment her husband said he was leaving because she couldn't bear that he was cheating, that he was walking out. I want to give that its fair hearing. People in unbearable pain do unbearable things. I would never shame anyone for that. And if that were the truth, I would tell you. But I know that my mother, even at two, even mostly through the people who loved her, and I'll tell you what I believe. And I'll be clear about this, it's a belief. It's not proof. All of this is allegedly. I do not think at all, not one bit, that my mother killed herself. In my heart of hearts, I do not believe that. If anything, I imagine that conversation went the other way. Not, I can't live without you. More like, you cheated, you put me through hell, you made me sick with stress, and now you can see you just get to leave. I imagine fury, not surrender. I imagine a woman standing her ground, not a woman giving up. And that's the standing her ground is the part I keep circling. Please remember that this man walked out on two children and a wife for my mother. That he cheated on his wife with Kate's mom. He was a serial cheater and he had a long pattern of abandoning children. But when it's all said and done, when all three versions of this story are laid out side by side, not one of them explains what Jonah saw in that room that morning. Because whatever he saw was not nothing. He saw something that looked like a struggle, something powerful enough to send a four-year-old, almost five-year-old, into panic. Something that made him overtly worried about his mother for the rest of the day. And that matters. Because children may not always have the words for what they witness, but they know when something is wrong. And Jonah knew something was very, very wrong. I cannot prove how my mother died. No one can. Not anymore. There was no autopsy. There was no body of evidence to test. What I do have is a death certificate full of guesses. Three stories that contradict each other, a community built to keep secrets, and a man who ran. So what follows is not a finding. It's not an accusation I could take to court. It's what I believe as her daughter. After looking at everything I just laid out in front of you, I want to be very clear and honest about that line, because it matters to me. Here's what I believe. I believe Chuck did not want the life that was coming for him. He was leaving my mother for another woman, and leaving my mother meant divorce. Divorce meant alimony, it meant child support for two more children. That's a very expensive way to leave a marriage. Fact is, my mother was sick. She had a known illness. She was sick since she was an adolescent. Someone people could believe might die soon. A sick wife is cheaper to lose than to leave, and a death no one examines is a death no one can ever take back. That's not a verdict, that's a daughter looking at a man as her own biological father and his life and feeling sick about what it adds up to. I could be wrong. Truthfully, I want to be wrong. But I've looked at this for a very long time, and being wrong gets harder every time I look. Let's talk about what an innocent man does after his wife dies suddenly and unexpectedly. I would imagine that he stays. He answers any and all questions. He wants to know what happened to his 35-year-old wife, mother of his two children. He wants that autopsy. He stays, he answers any and all questions. He wants to know what happened as badly as anyone. He helps the investigation. But here's what Chuck did. From very good sources, he did not cry at the funeral. He didn't really show any emotion, actually. The first thing out of his mouth was that my mom had been sick for years, and this was not unexpected. And by August, he had a new wife or a new mommy or fiancee for Jonah and I. And when he disclosed this to my grandfather, my grandfather got physically ill. So what he did was he packed up Jonah and I, he destroyed the house that my grandfather had given them for their wedding, and he went off the grid. He left Dale and his brother without child support or any father figure at all. And he took Joan and I with him away from our grandfather, who had just lost his daughter, and he lost his wife a week later. My grandpa spent a year of his life looking for us. A year chasing a man who did not want to be found across state lines, trying to get back the grandchildren who had been carried off in the middle of the night. We were eventually pulled out through Child Protective Services in 1987. I actually have the exact date now. And I'm gonna go ahead and read the Court of Common Place, Henry Chelsea Smith abused. The court finds that said child was placed in temporary custody of the Butler County Department of Human Services pending investigation in hearing on April 16th, 1987. That was the day we were taken out of that house, and was adjudicated an abused child on June 16, 1987, which means the judge saw enough evidence to declare that I was in fact abused and could not remain in custody of Chuck. The court, having duly heard and considered the evidence in this case, finds that said child is dependent, that father Charles Smith then has acted in such a manner that said child is without adequate parental care and will continue to act in the near future in such a manner that the child will continue to be without adequate parental care. The court further finds that father Charles Smith executed a permanent surrender form in the presence of the court in compliance with the court finds that it is in the best interest of said child to be committed to permanent care, custody, and control of the Butler County Department of Human Services. That's how this ended. Not with Chuck coming home, not with the truth coming out, but with the system finally prying two kids loose from a man who had every reason to keep moving. You tell three different stories about how she died, make sure there's no autopsy, and then vanish with the children before anyone can press. That is not the behavior of a grieving husband. That is the behavior of someone managing an exit. Before I tell you about the official on-call that night, I have to tell you how the world he and Chuck lived in actually worked. Because it's a kind of world that doesn't just keep secrets, it's actually what it's built on. The Word of God was a religious movement that started in Michigan in 1967 and spread out from there with a presence in Erie. But it wasn't a church you went to on Sundays. It was a community that wrapped all the way around your life: who you married, how you raised your kids, what you confessed, and what you covered. Authority ran through the group and so did silence. And the rule underneath all of it was very simple. What protects the community stays inside the community. Kate is Chuck's daughter from an affair. For most of our lives, none of us knew she existed. The DNA testing is how we found each other. But three people always knew about Kate. Kate's mother knew, the man who raised Kate, the dad she grew up loving, he knew. And Chuck knew. Three adults carrying the truth of who this child was for decades and saying absolutely nothing. Dale was also Chuck's son. When Kate was a baby, she was around. She adored Dale, followed him, lit up whenever she was around him. And Dale was best friends with her brother Tommy. So he was around a lot. And the adults, the ones who knew exactly who she was, will look at the two of them and say things like, ah, it's like she's your little baby sister. Like, as if a cute thing to say about two kids who weren't related. Except she was. Literally. She was his sister, and every adult who said it knew it was true while they were saying it. I'm gonna let Kate tell you this part because it's her family too, and she lived it.

SPEAKER_00 22:11

So there was one time that uh Dale was actually at our house. He had come to help my dad Ed with something, and I probably was like, I don't know, maybe four or five or so, maybe, and so I was just climbing up on Dale's lap. I love Dale, he was just like my brother's best friend, and I was just hanging on him and stuff, and my parents were like, Oh, Dale, it's almost like she's your little sister. And Dale said that it was said in such a way, basically, that it stuck with him. It stuck with him.

SPEAKER_01 22:50

So think about what that actually is. They didn't hide the secret by avoiding it, they hit it by saying it out loud in front of everyone. Disguised as a joke. The truth was right there in the room in plain sight, and the whole point was that no one was allowed to really see it. The adults have been tumbling on themselves for years, hiding nothing and everything at the same time. And no one, no one questioned a thing. That's the machine, that's how it ran. The whole community trained to look at the truth and agree together not to see it. Now hold on to that in your mind, because I'm gonna tell you about a man from the same community who, on the night my mother died, had the authority to decide whether anyone would look. When my mother's death got referred, an official had to respond to assess it, to decide whether her body needed a closer look. In Erie County, that's the coroner's office. On the night she died, there was a deputy coroner on call. I learned his name and I learned something about him that stopped me cold. This man belonged to the word of God, the same community I just walked you through, the same machine, the one trained to look at the truth and agreed together not to see it. I am being very careful here because lots of people pass through groups like this and belong to one, and belonging to one doesn't make you guilty of anything. But remember who else led inside this community? My biological father, Chuck, the man who told three stories about how Kathy died, the man who quietly warned people she was sick before she was gone, the man who took us and ran. He didn't just belong to the word of God. He led prayer meetings inside of it. And the official, with the authority to decide whether Kathy's sudden death got examined or quietly released, moved in that exact same world. I am not finding fault with this man. I want to be very clear about that. I believe that our biological father is extremely manipulative. He's very convincing, he's very charismatic. And I'm almost positive that he must have said something along the lines of, you know, she was really, really sick. I just need her to be buried so the children and I can move on with this. Please, just you don't even need to do an autopsy. I'm so devastated. Please, can we just can we just get her a funeral and get this over with? I'm sure it went something like that. I can't prove any of what was said or what the conversation was. But the fact is, is that this man was the deputy coroner at the time, that my mother died. And he did belong to the same community as Chuck did. So as we're wrapping up here, let me put all of this into one place, the way I have been doing the past couple months. A person with a chronic illness, but was managing it, a 35-year-old woman dies suddenly. Before she dies, her husband is telling people she's sick. After she dies, that same husband tells three different incompatible stories about how. There's no autopsy, even though the death was referred for one. Her death certificate has a guess on it and a mark scribbled out. The man with the authority to order a closer look belonged to the same secret community her husband led. Any one of those things on its own, you could explain away. And honestly, I tried. But you can't explain all of them at once. At some point, the explanation stop being explanations and start being a pattern. You know, people ask me why I do this, why I put my family's worst night on the internet, why I'd say my biological father's name out loud. My grandfather spent over a year of his life trying to find Jonah and I to bring us home and praying that we were safe. And until the day he died, he wanted my mother's body exhumed. In fact, he didn't even put down a gravestone until 14 years after. Because he couldn't accept that she just died suddenly. He wanted someone to look. He wanted to be that person. But he never got that. And as much as I would like to, I can't exume anything. I'm not a coroner or a detective or a lawyer. I'm just her daughter. And I have a death certificate. And I have three stories I don't add up. And honestly, a really stubborn refusal to let possible be the final word on her death certificate. But you know, I can't make all of this on the podcast into some sort of work of art about all the facts and my beliefs about how my mother died. Because my mother's name was Kathleen Ann Walter. And I guess I'll put Smith on the end of that anyway. She was 35 years old. And she was in the quote unquote prime of her life. And she really, really deserved for someone to ask why. So this is for you, Mom. Thanks for listening.