Inside the Texas Crime Lab That’s Cracked Hundreds of Cold Cases

Allison Brocato last saw her sister alive on the afternoon of January 13, 1995. It was a Friday, and Catherine Edwards, Allison’s 31-year-old identical twin, had just gotten off work at Price Elementary School, in Beaumont. On her way home, Edwards stopped to pick up her beagle, whom Brocato had been dogsitting. She lingered a few minutes to chat and to play with Brocato’s infant daughter. “She seemed kind of sad that day,” Brocato would later recall. “I think she had had a fight with an ex-boyfriend the night before.”

Brocato and Edwards considered themselves best friends. After graduating from Lamar University, they both got jobs as public school teachers and moved into a modest town house in west Beaumont, where they lived together until Brocato got married. The sisters looked so alike—a bit shy of five feet tall, slim, with pale skin and shy smiles—that their high school yearbook had mixed up their photos. Later, as teachers, they would occasionally fool their students by pretending to be each other. 

The two women spoke again by phone that evening, as they usually did before bed. Edwards had decided to break off all contact with her ex-boyfriend. The sisters both planned to be at the family’s traditional Saturday lunch the next day at their parents’ house, but Edwards never showed up. When her parents drove to her town house to check on her, they found their daughter’s body in the second-floor bathroom, slumped over the tub. She was nude from the waist down, and her wrists were handcuffed behind her back. Her father sounded frantic when he told Brocato what they’d found. “He said, ‘Your sister’s dead, your sister’s dead.’ ” 

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