Transcript of Unsolved Mysteries TV Show Episode
about the Paul Ferrell Case

Dennis Farina (Unsolved Mysteries host): Gorman, Maryland, population 200. It was a typical workday for 19-year-old Cathy Ford. She was a waitress at her family’s restaurant, The Old Mill. Around 2 o’clock [p.m.] Cathy received a mysterious phone call and she left work early. She never returned. Paul Ferrell, a former deputy sheriff, was convicted of her kidnapping and murder.

Ferrell: I did not kill Cathy Ford. I never hurt her in any way. They don’t have evidence that I did. They have evidence that I made some mistakes and I have admitted here that I did make some mistakes. I never killed Cathy Ford or harmed her in any way whatsoever.

Farina: Paul’s conviction was very unusual. Cathy’s body was never found. And there was no proof that she was actually dead. In fact two eyewitnesses claimed that they saw Cathy almost a year after Ferrell was convicted.

Paul Ferrell lived in Gormania, West Virginia, just across the Potomac River from where Cathy lived.

[Ferrell: Grant County Sheriff’s Department, this is Deputy Ferrell speaking.]

The month before Cathy Ford disappeared, Ferrell became a deputy sheriff in Grant County. He also rented a trailer just outside of town.

[Trailer on Bismarck Road]

Paul and Cathy were involved in a secret romance, even though each of them was seeing another person. Paul was seeing a local woman with two children. Cathy was involved with a man named Darvin Moon.

Ferrell: We loved calling because of our backgrounds and the fact that we both run businesses for our families and we talk a lot about how some people irritate us. We talk about that and she had a lot of plans, but she really could not do anything either because she was stuck there running the store for her family. Her family really depended on her.

Farina: The day Cathy disappeared she got a phone call at around 1 p.m. Some say it was a tip off. Supposedly the sheriff was cracking down on local bars and restaurants for selling alcohol to minors.

Pat Parker (Cathy’s co-worker): Her mother had asked her a couple of times where she was going and she said she couldn’t tell us. So Cathy left and went up to her house to shower and when she came back down she was dressed up and that’s the last I saw her.

Farina: Around 2 p.m. Cathy drove off in her father’s silver Bronco. At 8:30 that night, almost 7 hours later, Paul Ferrell met with friends at a local bowling alley. There he heard that a woman had been calling and asking for him.

Ferrell: I went over to a pay phone and made a call and Cathy Ford answered real quickly there and started saying that she wanted to see me and she seemed really upset. She was like crying and didn’t seem herself and I thought her voice was rather slurred and she mentioned that she really wanted to see me down at the trailer.

[Ferrell on a telephone: We can meet at the high school in the parking lot. I’ll be right there.]

Farina: Ferrell says he waited for Cathy at the high school parking lot for 20 minutes, but she never arrived. He had no idea that Cathy Ford’s parents had already called the police and reported her missing.

The next day Cathy’s family and her boyfriend, Darvin Moon, organized search parties and put up posters offering a reward. During the search, Darvin Moon talked to Paul Ferrell outside the Old Mill restaurant. There was a story going around. Cathy had been seen the day before near Paul’s trailer. Darvin also told Ferrell that smoke from some unexplained source had been seen near his trailer. To Paul Ferrell, it felt like an accusation. So he decided to look around for himself. According to Ferrell, he found Cathy’s burnt out car less than 200 yards from his trailer. At that point he made a critical decision. He wouldn’t tell anyone about the car. Ferrell says that it was simply a matter of fear.

Ferrell: Initially I was panicked. I was afraid to go close, afraid of what I might find. How do I explain this, you know? She’s dead and she’s dead in my backyard, you know. And all these people are searching and they are talking about these big searches and about the vehicles in someone’s backyard. It’s in my backyard.

Farina: Ferrell says he then made another mistake that made him look even more guilty. He wrote an anonymous letter to the Old Mill restaurant, pretending to be Cathy. The letter said that she had run away and that she wanted her parents to know that she was safe. Ferrell even enclosed $200 to help pay for the ruined Bronco. Initially he denied sending the letter, but in court an FBI handwriting expert proved that he had written it.

Ferrell: My idea was to stop the search for the vehicle, to avoid someone from going in there and finding that vehicle in my backyard. Or finding, what I thought, maybe a body was back there, too. I just panicked, I did an irrational thing. I don’t think it says guilt or anything else, but it was just something, looking back, I don’t have a real good explanation for it, just that I panicked.

Farina: Finally, almost three weeks after Cathy disappeared, Darvin Moon and Cathy’s brother, Rich, found the missing Bronco. The FBI searched the area and found no trace of Cathy’s body or any sign that she was ever there. Fire and rust had destroyed any fingerprints. Because the area around the Bronco was relatively uncharred, some people believe that the car was probably burned somewhere else. Paul Ferrell’s trailer was now the focus of the investigation.

Eight days later FBI agents tore up the newly laid carpet in Paul’s master bedroom. They found traces of blood on the floor, wall, and ceiling. The most experts can say about the blood was that it was a woman’s and that it was not inconsistent with the blood of Cathy’s parents.

Dennis DiBenedetto (Prosecuting Attorney, Grant County, WV): The blood was found in such places and in such quantities that it was obvious that some effort had been made to hide this particular evidence linked with the kind of search that was conducted, the kind of efforts that were put forth by law enforcement people to find Cathy Ford established that Cathy Ford was dead and that Cathy Ford was killed by some violent act.

Ferrell: They said, “We found blood in your trailer, Mr. Ferrell, what have you got to say about that? It’s all over the place, buckets of blood in there.” I said, and my reaction was bewilderment, I said, “Well maybe someone cut their finger.” I didn’t know what they were talking about, maybe a speck here, I said the trailer was 8 years old, maybe there was a speck or something.

Dan James (Ferrell’s Appellate Attorney): The blood analysis proved nothing, but the engaging mathematical wizardry that was presented to the jury made that blood look like it was Cathy Ford’s blood when in fact we have no idea whose blood it belongs to. It’s that simple.

Farina: Paul Ferrell was formally charged with kidnapping, arson, and murder.

Coming up, key witnesses claim the prosecution influenced their testimony against Paul Ferrell.

-- Commercial Break --

Farina: Nineteen-year-old Cathy Ford mysteriously disappeared after leaving work one afternoon. Paul Ferrell was her secret lover. When police discovered Cathy’s burnt out car near Ferrell’s home as well as blood in his bedroom, prosecutors charged him with murder. Now, it was up to the state to prove its case without a body. Ferrell’s trial began a little more than a year after Cathy disappeared. Prosecutors discovered that Ferrell made hundreds of crank sex calls to businesses in the area. He called book stores and libraries in several cities, pretending to be a doctor. He asked these women to read the same sexually explicit passage.

Ferrell: It was a phone sex type thing to me. It had nothing to do with her and me and what it would be more the same as calling a phone sex number. Just I couldn’t afford a credit card. I look back and it is wrong, but it was just something that had nothing to do with Cathy Ford or anything.

Farina: Other women testified that they had also received strange phone calls from a man who asked to meet him in various locations. Tamela Kitzmiller says that while she though Paul Ferrell might be the man who called her, she was never positive.

Tamela: Prosecutors, prior to the original trial date, they asked me not to elaborate on any doubts that I had, that they knew Paul Ferrell was the caller and they could prove that. So I stated the information briefly. I did not elaborate on any doubts and I waited for them to prove that Paul Ferrell was the caller and that did not happen.

Farina: Tamela also claimed that prosecutors told her that Ferrell had been connected to a series of murders in Yellowstone Park where he once worked.

Tamela: They told me that he was a sicko and he needed to be put away. I was very influenced by that, very influenced. You have people in official capacity who are telling you these things as if they are fact, and I waited for this information to come out in court and it never did.

DiBenedetto: I know what we did and I know we did not force anybody to say anything other than by subpoenaing them to come to court and testify.

Farina: As the trial progressed, the prosecution introduced some unusual testimony. An FBI expert said that during Ferrell’s interrogation, he gave Ferrell a hypothetical scenario about Cathy’s murder. As Ferrell was talking, the expert says that he saw signs of guilt in Ferrell’s body language.

Expert (voice, not shown): I told Mr. Ferrell that I believed that maybe something had happened, such as Cathy Ford had taunted him, teased him, something had caused him to lose his temper. He had responded emotionally as opposed to rationally, and Mr. Ferrell was nodding in this regard.

Ferrell: He said that I was basically nodding and agreeing with him, when I was simply telling to him I understood – I knew what he was saying, I understood what he was saying like you are shaking you head right there. That was an admission of guilt, that was a confession the way you shook your head just there.

James: This is the first time ever in the history of American criminal jurisprudence that this kind of evidence has ever been allowed to go to a jury that I am aware of.

Ferrell: The evidence that I killed or kidnapped Cathy Ford, there is no evidence there and they know it and that’s why they had to use the body language, that’s why they had to make up a complete fabrication of that blood evidence. You know, because he had no evidence against me.

Farina: Additional evidence against Ferrell came from his neighbor, Kim Nelson. Her home had a clear view of his trailer. She told prosecutors that she had heard screams coming from the trailer on several different occasions even before Ferrell moved in. She testified that one day she heard banging, a gunshot, and a woman’s scream coming from the trailer. Today, however, she said prosecutors distorted her account.

Kim: Well I told the cops that the only thing I heard was screaming and gunshots which is normal up there and that really I didn’t know nothing about Paul Ferrell killing anybody. That I didn’t see nothing or hear anything.

Farina: Kim says that before the trial she signed a statement typed up by the prosecutors without reading it. She later discovered that the statement said that she had heard screams on a specific day when in fact she never mentioned a specific day.

Kim: They were saying that if I did not say what was on this paper that I could go to jail. He goes that if a, that if Paul gets loose or he gets free, that he could come back and do harm to my kids and me.

DiBenedetto: No one in my presence, nor I at any time, ever tried to force her to say anything. I would have been totally out of my mind to have done that to a witness.

[Trial prosecutor: What was the nature of the screaming you heard?

Kim: It was a terrifying scream.]

DiBenedetto: She answered the question. She answered the questions honestly and I am still convinced that she was telling the truth. I think what’s happening to her now is that she’s just become involved in the aftermath of this whole thing and this refusal on the part of some of the family members and some of the community to believe that Paul Ferrell is guilty.

[Judge: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached your verdict?

Jury foreman: Yes, we have.]

Farina: Paul Ferrell was found guilty of kidnapping, murder, and arson. He was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years in prison.

DiBenedetto: The court acted properly in what it did. Counsel did what they had to do. Paul Ferrell got a fair trial. Basically the jury did what it had to do and that is it did justice and convicted Paul Ferrell.

Farina: Journalist Martin Yant has reinvestigated all the aspects of this case.

Yant: I don’t think that it was proved, certainly beyond a reasonable doubt, that Paul Ferrell killed Cathy Ford.

Farina: Yant says that he has found two witnesses who are positive that they saw Cathy a year and a half after she disappeared. The witnesses lived near Cathy’s home town, but they were traveling through Tennessee.

[Video shows a middle age couple in a restaurant recognizing a waitress before sitting at a restaurant table. The recognized waitress then talks to a second waitress who waits on the couple. The second waitress then talks to the recognized waitress who looks at them again and disappears into the kitchen.]

Yant: What impressed him was that she seemed to be disturbed at the appearance of this couple. That she recognized them also and when the waitress came over, she asked what he thought was a rather odd question for a restaurant right off the freeway, “You seem to be strangers here, where are you from?” When she went back, she whispered something to this woman who looked like Cathy Ford. She looked at them again and ran for the kitchen.

Rich Ford (Cathy’s brother): We know Cathy’s deceased. We would have heard something from her within a week, if she was able to call or get word to us in some way.

Farina: Paul Ferrell appealed his conviction twice to the West Virgina Supreme Court. But the court denied his appeals and ordered Ferrell to finish serving his sentence. He was finally released after serving 18 years.