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Forty years ago today, my mother, Kathy, died suddenly inside her home. There was no autopsy, no real investigation, and no definitive explanation for what happened to her.

For decades, her death was reduced to rumors of an overdose, depression, or suicide. But after examining the death certificate, the medical evidence, the timeline of that morning, and the conflicting stories told by her husband, one thing has become clear: the evidence does not support any of those claims.

In this final episode of Cold and Blue, I revisit everything I have uncovered—including my mother’s medical history, the rigor mortis timeline, the decision not to perform an autopsy, and the disturbing events that followed her death. I also confront the two possibilities that remain: that she died naturally amid an almost unbelievable series of coincidences—or that something far darker happened inside that bedroom.

I may never find the smoking gun. But forty years later, I can finally clear my mother’s name.

She did not overdose. She did not take her own life.

And now, you can decide what you believe happened.

Transcript

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Please take note of the following legal disclaimer. The views, theories, research, interpretations, timelines, and conclusions presented in this episode are entirely my own personal opinion and independent analysis as the host. The official state record of Pennsylvania remains permanently ruled as a natural death due to medical complications, and no criminal charges were ever filed in connection with the passing of Kathleen A. Smith. All individuals discussed are legally presumed innocent of any uncharged actions. Commentary regarding public officials, historical investigative protocols, and organizational dynamics represents protected expressions of personal opinion, independent research, and fair comment on matters of public interest and historical record. Dear old man, I can see you. I know you thought you could hide, slip under the radar, disappear into the night, and start a new life over and over and over again. Vanish. That is what you have always been the best at. And now as you approach 86 years old, I wonder if you are tired. You must have thought the little girl you left in a field would be too broken to remember anything. Too young and scared and too small. Surely, she would never speak. But you forgot one small detail. I am my mother's daughter. You may have forgotten her. It has been almost 40 years since she died. Maybe you have buried her so far down in your mind that you have convinced yourself she was only a chapter, you survived. But I do not believe my mother was the kind of woman who would simply stand by and be left. Not after you had already left behind a wife and two boys, confused and alone. Not after you had already proven what you were capable of walking away from. You are the kind of man who can knowingly produce a daughter and never claim her. The kind of man who treats children like consequences and obligations. Easy to walk away from. The kind of man who leaves other people to clean up the wreckage and then calls it a new beginning. But here's the part I want you to hear. My sister and I grew up with incredible fathers, real fathers, men who loved us unconditionally, men who showed up, who stayed, who did the work you were too selfish or too empty to do. My dad healed parts of me that you broke. And your sons, your sons are extraordinary. Smart, funny, talented. They became beautiful people despite you. Not because of you. Despite you. I wonder what it feels like to be an old man and look back on all that destruction. Does she haunt you? Do you close your eyes at night and see her face? Do you remember what life looked like in her eyes? Do you remember her voice? How about her smile? Do you ever think that she was not just your wife? That she was a daughter, a sister, a mother, and she was mine. You thought you could disappear from the story. But I found the pieces. I found the names. I found the documents. I found the timelines. And I found the children you left behind. So no, you cannot put me in the basement and lock the door anymore. You cannot throw me into a field and expect me to stay lost. You cannot count on fear to keep me quiet. I am not that little girl anymore. I am a grown woman. I am a mother who loves her children loudly, fiercely, and without condition. I ask questions and I speak up. I do not submit to silence. I am my mother's daughter. And this time, it is my turn to speak. Can you tell if someone died by a pillow just by looking at them? If you ask a modern forensic pathologist that question today, they will give you a clinical, chilling answer. It is nearly impossible. Smothering someone with a soft object like a pillow leaves no shattered bones, it leaves no deep lacerations, it doesn't create defensive bruising from a jagged weapon. Most of the time, it leaves absolutely no external marks on the human face. It is a quiet, low-pressure death. The victim simply slips away from a lack of oxygen, a medical state known as pure hypoxia. To prove a smothering was foul play in the modern era, you need a meticulous, exhaustive, forensic autopsy. A medical examiner has to step into a sterile, bright-lit laboratory. They have to carefully pry back the eyelids of the decedent to look for batichiae, microscopic pinpoint red dots caused by capillaries bursting under intense pressure. They have to run advanced chromatography to quantify exactly how many nanograms of sedatives are in the bloodstream. What happens when forensic standards across America are fractured? When death scenes reports are typed out on manual typewriters based on free-form notes dictated into a handheld tape recorder? What happens when a local county's coroner's office operates not on rigid medical science, but on handshakes, professional courtesies, and political favors, allegedly. In 1986, if an official investigator's report said absolutely nothing about the eyes, it didn't necessarily mean that the eyes were clear. It could have meant that they were checked and there was nothing to be found, or they might not have been checked at all. And in the mid-1980s, that silence was a perfect weapon. It was a silence that could bury a murder. For nearly 40 years, I believe a silence just like that hid the truth of what happened to my mother. My name is Chelsea, and this is Cold and Blue. And we have to look at the exact words written down by the men who walked into that room while my mother laid there, cold and blue. Let's look directly at the official narrative. I have the transcript of the coroner's investigative report right here in front of me. It is a document frozen in time, dated July 15th, 1986. The coroner's office was called on 715 86 at 6.12 p.m., being requested at 4615 Southern Drive Erie, PA. On arrival at 6.33, I met members of the West Ridge Fire Department who responded to a call at this address at 5.57 p.m. and arrived at 6.04 p.m., where they found Kathleen A. Smith, 35 of this address, lying dead in bed and had been dead for some time, as Rigor Mortis was present in the body. We talked to Kathleen's husband Charles, who stated that when he left the residence at 8 15 a.m. today, his wife was still in bed. He left her pills and some water and a glass on the stand beside the bed. He stated that her health had not been good for some time and that she was released from St. Vincent Health Center at the end of July. Several times during the day, Charles had tried to reach his wife by telephone, but there was no answer. Her father had been there earlier this morning and had taken the children to his home because of Kathleen's ill health. However, he did not check on his daughter. When Mr. Smith arrived home from work, he found his wife dead in bed and the fire department was called. On its surface, to an untrained eye in 1986, it reads like a routine medical tragedy. A sick wife passes away at home while her hard-working husband is at the office. But when you take that 1986 transcript and hold it up to the unyielding laws of forensic science, the entire timeline collapses. Let's first talk about the clock of death. Forensic pathology dictates that the human body follows a predictable biological timeline after life departs. One of the most reliable anchors of that timeline is rigor mortis, the chemical stiffening of the muscles. Rigor mortis does not happen instantly. After the heart stops, the muscles remain entirely loose and limp for the first few hours. Stiffening typically begins in the small muscles of the face, jaw, and neck between two to four hours after death. From there, it slowly spreads downward into the arms, the torso, and finally the legs. For a human body to reach full rigor, to be completely entirely stiff from head to toe, it takes an average of 12 hours. Think about the math of July 15th. The fire department touches my mother's body at 6.04 p.m. The transcript explicitly states that rigor mortis was not just starting, it was present to the point that they could immediately tell that she had been dead, quote, for some time. If my mother had, quote unquote, fallen asleep, or just fallen asleep, like Chuck said that morning, and passed away peacefully after my father left for work at 8:15 a.m., she would have been dead for less than nine hours. In a cool indoor bedroom, her body would have been in the early partial stages of rigor. Her limbs would have still been pliable. The fact that she was already profoundly rigid by 6 p.m. means the clock of death was pushed back. She hadn't died at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m. She had been dead for hours. Before Chuck ever claimed to leave that house at 8:15 a.m. And then there is my grandfather. The transcript notes that earlier that morning, my grandfather had come to the Southern Drive house to pick up my brother and I. But the file notes a highly unusual detail. The grandfather did not check on his daughter. Chuck took the time to say that. He was actively stopped from checking on her. He was steered away, he was kept at the front of the house, on the porch, and hurried out with my brother and I. Why? Because I believe inside that bedroom my mother was already gone. Remember what my brother saw that morning. He saw something having to do with a pillow being used in a way that a four-year-old could not understand, but could never ever forget. Coroners were elected officials. They didn't have to be forensic pathologists, they could be local funeral directors, businessmen, or individuals with local connections. If a deputy coroner stepped in, they relied entirely on a baseline of trust and the paperwork in front of them. And that is exactly how the process started. My mother's body was released to the funeral home. Before her body was processed, a single blood sample was pulled and sent to Regional Clinical at ACL. The results came back the following day. It showed acetamenethen level 18.2 micograms per milliliter. Report also noted that codeine was also actively found in her system. Let's dissect what that toxicology actually means. The blood draug happened a full day after her death. In a living human being, the liver acts like a metabolic clock. But the second my mother stopped breathing, everything changed. Her body stopped metabolizing, her liver stopped processing, the clock, biologically speaking, stopped. So when her blood showed an acetamenophil level of 18.2, that wasn't just some meaningless leftover trace from the night before. Because acetamenophil and codeine don't just vanish after death. An 18.2 sits at the high end of what you would expect from a therapeutic dose. So this doesn't sound like someone who took one pill hours and hours earlier and simply went about her day. It suggests she still had a significant amount of active medication in her system when her life ended. And then there's the codeine. Codeine is an opiate. It can make you drowsy, it can make you slow down, it can depress your breathing, it can make you feel heavy and groggy and disoriented. Harder to wake, harder to move, harder to fight back. So when I look at those numbers, I don't see some vague medical footnote. I see a woman who may have been deeply sedated. I see a woman whose body may have already been slowed down. I see my mother possibly asleep, possibly impaired, possibly defenseless. At the exact moment someone else decided whether she got to take another breath. Now I want to step back for a moment and look at this file as objectively as I possibly can. Let's play devil's advocate against everything we think we know. My mother was 35 years old, but she also had a serious history of Crohn's disease, and she lived with a clostomy bag. My grandfather always said that she hadn't been in the hospital, but according to the transcript, it says that she had been recently released from St. Vincent's, presumably with surgery. There is no one left alive to ask. I cannot get the medical records. They are destroyed, so we're just gonna have to go with what we know. So when someone with that kind of medical history is found in bed appearing to have simply fallen asleep and died peacefully, there are legitimate medical explanations. In forensic medicine, a peaceful looking scene can point to a rapid internal crisis, something that caused a person to lose consciousness quickly without a long or visible violent struggle. There are several natural scenarios that investigators in 1986 could reasonably have considered. She could have suffered an internal gastral hemorrhage, which says on the death certificate, bleeding into her digestive tract, without ever vomiting blood onto the bed. She could have developed septic shock from a small bowel perforation, becoming increasingly weak, and slipping into unconsciousness. She could have suffered a pulmonary embolism or a fatal cardiac arrhythmia, either of which could have killed her within minutes while leaving her body in what appeared to be a sleeping position. Or she could have experienced a severe electrolyte imbalance from dehydration, something capable of disrupting the heart's rhythm and causing sudden death. There is the medical logic. It is possible that my mother suffered a natural medical emergency. And as her daughter, part of me really wants to believe that version. I do want to believe that she simply fell asleep. I want to believe that she felt no fear and no pain. And I guess that's why her doctors signed the death certificate. That is why the people who responded to the scene may have accepted the explanation they were given, because medically, it was plausible. But as a person now investigating her death, I am trapped between two possibilities that can look almost identical from the doorway of the bedroom. A sudden internal medical crisis can leave behind a quiet, bloodless scene. But so can a smothering with a soft object. And that is where the medical explanation collides with the timeline. Because even if we accept that my mother could have died naturally, we still have to account for the hours surrounding her death. Chuck claimed that before leaving work, he placed water and pills on her nightstand. That's directly in the transcript. But according to the estimate of Rigor Mortis timeline, my mother may have been already dead or very close to dead, closer to six that morning. So Chuck's version requires us to believe that he walked into the bedroom, approached the bed, placed medication and water beside his wife, and noticed absolutely nothing unusual. I don't know if too many people out there have been in a room with a dead body, but I can assure you it is very obvious that they are dead. That is my personal opinion. If she had already been dead for any meaningful amount of time, she would have not looked like a woman casually sleeping. Her body would have been cooling, stiffness may have been beginning, her skin color probably was definitely changing. And yet, according to his story, he saw nothing concerning. He left the house as usual and went on about his day. Then he claimed that he repeatedly called her from work and became concerned when she did not answer. But what did he do with that concern? Did he call her father and ask him to go inside and check on her? No. Did he contact a neighbor? Did he call one of her doctors? Did he leave work and come home? No. He says he called and called, but took no meaningful action to find out why his seriously ill wife, according to him, was not answering the telephone. And that is difficult for me to reconcile. Because Chuck was not miles away, with no one nearby who could help. My grandfather was there that morning. He wanted to see his daughter, and he was effectively cut off at the door and pushed out. If Chuck was generally worried that Kathy was too sick or unconscious to answer the phone, why would he not call her father and say, please go back, something is wrong. Can you check on her? Why would a concerned husband wait until the end of the workday? Of course, this does not prove anything. It's just something to note. Because it does force us to question whether his account of that morning is truthful. I reached out to the Erie County Coroner's office and spoke directly with Lyle Cook, the longtime coroner associated with the infamous pizza bomber investigation, featured in Evil Genius, on Netflix. Mr. Cook was incredibly kind to me, but he was also completely unyielding. He told me plainly that he believes the 1986 natural death ruling was correct and that he would stand behind it today. During our conversation, Cook dismissed the toxicology finding involving codeine. He explained that the amount was so low that it was not even considered significant enough to record as a specific number on the paperwork. But my question was never whether the codeine itself was present at a fatal level. It did not necessarily need to be lethal. A therapeutic amount could still have made her drowsy. It could have deepened her sleep or reduced her ability to wake and respond. And if someone placed a pillow over her face of a heavily sleeping person, sedation could have made resistance less likely. That's my theory. It's not something the toxicology report can prove, or really anyone can prove. But it is also not something that can be dismissed simply because the coding level was not lethal by itself. But then our conversation took a strange turn. I had written an email to Mr. Cook asking him a few more questions, and he wrote back and he asked me why I was bringing up the name of the deputy coroner that was on duty that night. He wrote, A doctor signed the certificate, so I do not know how the deputy coroner got involved or why his name would be on the certificate. The deputy coroner was a funeral director who was a per DM part-time deputy coroner. Mr. Cook was looking at the case from an administrative standpoint. A physician signed the death certificate. The deputy coroner's name did not appear on the final signature line. So, from that perspective, why did that name matter to me? But of course, I brought up the name because of the human element. The deputy coroner at the time was not some corrupt official conspiring to cover up a death. By all accounts, he was a really great man. He was a local funeral director and he was the part time deputy coroner. And by Mr. Cook saying that he was not on duty the night that my mother Died by default, it's pretty clear that this particular deputy horner was in fact the one filling out the paperwork. And as we know, he was also reportedly a friend of Chuck's. And when he walked into that bedroom, he may not have seen a crime scene. Well, he certainly did not see a crime scene. He saw his friend. He saw a grieving husband standing beside a bloodless bed. And I'm sure he saw two small children and realizing that this man was going to be left alone to raise them, not knowing, of course, that he had a mistress the whole time. Chuck had medical explanations ready. He had doctors who knew about her Crohn's disease. He had a story that sounded very believable. And when a decent, trusting person enters a room already believing that he is looking for a natural death, he begins interpreting everything in that room through that belief. I intentionally left in the transcript that typo about being released from St. Vincent Hospital at the end of July, because that's what's actually written. But since he's writing this report on July 15th, he obviously meant the end of June. But to me, that just shows how little detail he was putting into the report. The system may not have failed because anyone was cruel or corrupt or intentionally negligent. It may have failed because good people were given a plausible medical story by someone they trusted, and no one stopped to test that story against the timeline. No one asked why a husband who claimed to be worried all day never sent anyone to check on his wife. No one asked how he could have stood beside her that morning and noticed nothing unusual if she was already dead. And no one asked whether the quiet, peaceful looking bedroom proved that she died peacefully, or whether it simply made everyone less likely to look closer. And 40 years later, those are the questions that I am still left with. Today marks 40 years since my mother died. 40 years. I will turn 43 in September, which means I have now lived almost an entire lifetime without her. My brother Jonah died 18 years ago, and with him went his firsthand account of what happened inside that house that morning. My grandfather died in 2013. What I have left of his account comes from my own memories and from what he told his niece before he died. One by one, the people who were there have disappeared. And I know that after 40 years, I may never find the smoking gun. I may never uncover the one document, the one witness, or the one piece of physical evidence that tells me beyond doubt exactly how my mother died. But I did uncover something really important. My mother did not die of an overdose, and my mother did not kill herself. For decades, those stories followed her. They reduced her death to pills, or depression, or some reckless decision she supposedly made alone in that bedroom. But the evidence does not support those stories. She did not do any of those things. And honestly, I am proud that I was finally able to clear her name on that. So, we are left with two possibilities. The first is that my mother died naturally, and Chuck was simply the luckiest, most oblivious man alive. We would have to believe that he approached his wife's bed that morning, left pillows and water on her nightstand, and somehow failed to notice that anything was wrong. We would have to believe that he unintentionally gave an inaccurate timeline of that morning. We would also have to believe that for some unexplained reason, he created a version of events in which my grandfather came into the house but did not check on his own seriously ill daughter. We would have to believe that Chuck called and called throughout the day, growing increasingly concerned when she did not answer, yet never called her father, never asked a neighbor to check on her, never contacted a doctor, and never came home. Then, through another extraordinary stroke of luck, he quickly fell in love with another woman after my mother died. He was suddenly free to leave Pennsylvania, take the children and disappear in the middle of the night and begin an entirely new life. And then, not long afterward, the abuse inside that new life became so severe that the state sought the immediate removal of his children. But that was not his intention, of course. He just wanted us to have a new mother. That is one possibility. The other possibility is that Jonah was telling the truth. I cannot prove that today. I really, really wish I could. But I also cannot ignore the pattern simply because a final piece of evidence is missing. Maybe every strange detail was an innocent coincidence. Maybe every contradiction had an ordinary explanation. Maybe Chuck truly noticed nothing, lied about nothing, concealed nothing, and benefited from an unbelievable series of accidents that all happened to work out in his favor. I do not believe in that many coincidences. Most of the time, people are exactly who their actions show them to be. Forty years ago, my mother lost her life. Jonah carried part of her story until he lost his life too. My grandfather carried what he knew until he died. Now, the entire story and legacy belongs to me. And I may never be able to tell you with absolute certainty how my mother died in that bedroom on July 15th, 1986. But I can tell you what did not happen. She did not overdose, and she did not take her own life and willingly choose to leave two small children behind. She was a 35-year-old mother whose death deserved more questions than it received. And 40 years later, I can be grateful for what I was able to accomplish throughout this podcast. So now it's all out there. Everything that I know lined up perfectly. So now that you can see it, I'm curious. What do you think happened? Thank you all so much for listening. And again, to those of you that took the time to reach out to me. It means so much. Cold and Blue is written and produced by me, Chelsea, executive produced by Lisa Sidney. A special thank you to Mr. Cook for his assistance in helping me understand the coroner's report. And to everyone out there trying to solve what feels like an unsolvable crime. To anyone still asking questions when everyone else has stopped listening, keep going.