User:Assyllablefromsound/Killer Catherine
"Killer Catherine" was the name attributed to Catherine Marie Anderson at six years old during the height of the media scandal about her and her family. It was printed in the local paper, The Harristown Horn with the subheading "ANDERSONS' DAUGHTER ADMITS TO BROTHER'S MURDER. POSSIBLE SATANISTS?" After lengthy court proceedings, The Harristown Horn published a retraction. Catherine Anderson was the subject of a thirty-minute Halloween special on the History Channel, which she has publicly denounced as sensational and cruel, "basically repeating the crimes done to me as an imaginative, vulnerable child. I no longer believe in freedom of the press. I think the press should be restrained, actually--locked up, maybe taken out back with a shotgun."
Murder[edit | edit source]
There was no murder. Catherine's older brother, Johnny, then 11, fell off the family's balcony and died of his injuries. An eyewitness, Edith Hamill confirmed that she'd seen Johnny fall, confirming as well that Johnny had been "horsing around," and that she did not approve of the Andersons leaving Johnny unattended.
Media Attention[edit | edit source]
Mark Daly wrote the piece accusing Catherine of murder in The Harristown Horn. He was new to the publication and subsequently fired, going on to become a physics teacher at nearby high school, Carraway Secondary. The story was picked up by the local news tv crew for a neighboring town, Ferris, where they were running a weekly segment on possible Satanic cults and ritualistic murders throughout the country, centered around several high profile accusations in California. The proximity of this case was appealing, so they focused on the "Killer Catherine" story for several weeks, airing photos of Catherine, her deceased brother, the outside of their home, and several complete strangers from Ferris who claimed to be neighbors who'd heard ritualistic chanting and deranged, childlike shrieking coming from the Andersons' upstairs window.
Parents[edit | edit source]
Allen and Marie Anderson made a single media appearance in which they stated that their six year old daughter had not murdered their son, whose loss was still very much painful for them, and that the media's willingness to tread on their grief was appalling. Catherine later reported that her parents spent several years in couples' therapy before ultimately divorcing in 1991.
Trials[edit | edit source]
Catherine was never put on trial because there was no reason to believe she murdered her older brother. The Andersons,' however, sued Mark Daly at The Harristown Horn. They settled out of court.
History Channel Special[edit | edit source]
Killer Catherine: Small Town Mysteries aired in 2007, borrowing much of the speculative footage originally aired by the nightly news team in Ferris before ultimately conceding the official cause of Johnny's death was his fall off the Andersons' balcony, before ending with an "actor reenactment" in which a small child dressed like Wednesday Adams comes up behind a younger boy and pushes him off the balcony, smiling. Catherine published her response in The Harristown Horn. It is unclear whether this was poetic or merely convenient.