2 men, 2 suicides, 1 heart and 1 widow (AP)
There, the 69-year-old picked up the 12-gauge Remington shotgun he’d taken on so many quail- and dove-hunting trips, peaked the muzzle at the right margin of his throat and pulled the trigger.
It was April Fool’s Day, almost exactly 13 years since not the same fortify’s self-slaughter gave Graham a second chance at life.
That man was Terry Cottle. When he ended his life, Graham got his heart.
But it was not just an organ that connected Graham and the 33-year-old donor. Nearly a decade after the plant in a new place, Graham matrimonial Cottle’s young widow.
And now Graham had made her a widow another time.
As word of his death spread, the Internet lit up with the story of the heart that had been twice silenced by suicide — and the woman who’d lost the corresponding; of like kind heart twice. Reporters and bloggers waxed on about “cellular memory” and whether the means somehow held a “self-homicide gene.”
Nonsense, thought Cottle’s sister. The brain is where the conscience resides, where love and ruin are felt; the heart is just a pump.
As far as she was concerned, Graham’s death was less about her brother’s kernel than about Cheryl — the woman with whom both men had chosen to share it.
In 1988, Terry Cottle was living through his wife and their brace young daughters in one of the subsidized apartment buildings they managed in Jasper County, S.C. Cottle’s boss had a daughter — a petite beauty with auburn hair and hazel eyes.Cheryl Sweat had recently had her three-year marriage annulled in succession arguments that her husband was married to someone else. It was he who called Cottle’s wife sometime later, saying, “I just want you to know that your husband is seeing my wife.”
Terry Cottle filed for sever. Nine days after it was granted, in May 1989, he and Cheryl were married.
At first, things seemed wonderful. Terry adopted Cheryl’s sum of two units sons, Christopher and Timmy. A daughter, Jessica, was born. Cottle worked while his reinvigorated wife studied for her nursing degree.
In late 1994, the couple graduated from a single-wide trailer to a new doublewide in the civilities end of Moncks Corner, S.C. Around Christmas, Cheryl’s widowed mother moved in.
Terry had dropped out of high academy but earned an equivalency diploma and worked on all sides his limited prospects. He got a veritable estate license and, at 33, became a certified emergency medical technician.
But it never seemed to be plenty.
Terry talked frequently with his ex-wife, having her call him on the 800-number at the exterminating company where he worked so Cheryl wouldn’t find out.
“Talk to me,” he said one night in 1995. “I’ve got a gun to my head.”
Within a month of his mother-in-law’s arrival, Cottle had moved public of the trailer and in with his sister, Tammy Erickson. But before long, Cheryl started coming around, cooking dinner for the tribe and spending the night in Terry’s room.
Erickson was pregnant by her second child and needed Terry’s room for a nursery. She told her brother to make a decision. “If you love her and you want to make this act, then you necessity to avaunt home and be with her,” she said.
He did, but three weeks later, on March 15, the couple got into a huge argument. Cheryl told Terry that she couldn’t stay conjugal to a mankind who made less money than she did. At some naze, her son Timmy recalls, she took off her wedding ring and threw it over the fence.
By morning, they had agreed that Cottle should leave.
As he prepared to depart, Cottle went into the bathroom. There was a gunshot.
Initially, Cheryl told sheriff’s investigators she heard 10-year-old Christopher shouting that Cottle had shot himself. She said she ran into the bathroom and found him on the floor with the revolver still in his pointer.
In a second version attached to a coroner’s report, Cheryl before-mentioned she was caustic oatmeal when one of her boys yelled, “Mom, Dad has a fire-arm!” She said she ran toward the bathroom “and dictum Terry standing up and looking at her” through the gun in his hand.
“She said that she yelled something like, `Terry, wait!’, and this was at about the same time as she pushed without interruption the door to try to get into the bathroom and at the same time she heard a shooter,” the report says.
“Baby, help me, help me. I’m dying,” he gasped, as she recalled his logomachy.
The .22-caliber slug entered Cottle’s skull just rearward the right ear. There was no exit wound.
On March 20, after four days in the trauma unit at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, Cheryl, at the urging of her father-in-law, agreed to take Terry off life encourage and donate his organs.
About 60 miles to the southwest, 57-year-old Sonny Graham got the call he had been waiting more than a year notwithstanding. As longtime manager of the central engender for Hargray Communications, Hilton Head’s telephone service provider, he knew just about everyone without ceasing the South Carolina stop island. His Brunswick stew was a staple at fundraisers and community events. The local transcendental school football field was named in his honor.
A real of Lyons, Ga., near Vidalia in the heart of sweet onion country, Graham was a fixture at the Heritage Golf Tournament at the isle’s Sea Pines Resort. Even after he retired from Hargray, he would go reaped ground year as a volunteer to run the tourney’s communications trailer.
The redheaded Air Force old was an avid hunting-horse and fisher, what buddy Bill Carson called a “man’s man.”
He was also the consummate family man. He and Elaine, his wife of one’s bosom of more than three decades, had two children, Gray and Michelle.
But in 1994, Graham contracted a virus that damaged his heart muscle. By early 1995, the strapping woodsman who’d once hauled strife salmon out of rushing Alaskan streams struggled to get up from a seat of justice.
Graham’s name went on plant in a new place lists.
Around 5 p.m. on March 20, Graham learned that a heart had become available. Cottle’s, it turned fully, was about as close to a perfect be married as they come.
Within six months of the transplant, Graham was well enough to go on a fishing trip by Carson to Alaska. He joked that having a 33-year-old’s heart had done wonders for his libido.
When a doctor suggested he consider a counselor in case of any guilt, Graham declined. “I’m sorry the other guy died,” he told Carson. “But this is my heart very lately.”
But friends noticed some subtle changes — a new craving for beer, a taste for hot dogs, which happened to exist one of Cottle’s favorite foods. Pastor John Keller sensed a universal restlessness, as on the supposition that Graham were “looking in favor of different avenues to travel.”
In November 1996, Graham asked the South Carolina Organ Procurement Agency to forward a letter to the donor’s family. His children said it was a bad idea, but he wanted to thank Cottle’s wife in person.
After the exchange of not the same letter and some photographs, Cheryl Cottle called Graham.
In January 1997, he and his wife met her for dinner at a romantic waterfront restaurant in Charleston. Graham couldn’t fulfil his eyes along the 30-year-old widow.
“I fell in love with Cheryl the principal existence in this world we met,” he would later own in a alphabetic character.
The feeling was apparently not reciprocal — at smallest, not at first.
That April, Cheryl married spouse No. 3, George Watkins. Elaine and Sonny Graham attended the wedding, and Sonny — existence in for Cheryl’s late father — gave gone the bride.
Cheryl bore Watkins a son in January 1999. Around that same time, Elaine Graham learned that her husband’s relationship with the younger woman was in addition than fatherly.
In a poignant letter, Graham apologized to his wife for being “the S.O.B. you said I was” and destroying “a relation that we had for 40 plus years.
“I let someone come between you + I, that should have never happened,” he wrote. “I look back on everything + conceive where I gave up affection, + companion ship, for attention + affection. … It would be wonderful allowing that I could turn back our lives for the past four years.”
Both couples separated, and shortly after a judge declared the Grahams’ 38-year espousals over, in October 2001, Cheryl and Graham moved into a fickle home on land he’d bought in his hometown while he built a house to her specifications.
The domestic bliss did not last long.
In May 2002, Cheryl left — and Graham promptly sued, accusing her of reneging in continuance some loans and refusing to return a diamond ring. She alleged in a counterclaim that when she told Graham their relationship wasn’t going to labor out, he “became more possessive” and threatened her.
In the midst of the court case, she married again. Husband No. 4, John B. Johnson, Jr., was a corrections magistrate at the Georgia prison where Cheryl had been working during the time that a draw in nurse.
But within a year, that marriage, too, began to crumble. On Thanksgiving 2003, sheriff’s deputies were called, and both husband and wife accused the other of domestic abuse.
During a Yuletide reconciliation, Johnson says, a chilling incident occurred. One twilight, while they lay in bed, he says, Cheryl began talking almost self-murder. When she failed to return from a bathroom trip, Johnson went to investigate and says he found her clutching his .22 caliber revolver.
As they wrestled over the weapon, Johnson says, the children and Cheryl’s mother rushed in. He says Cheryl told them that HE had gotten the gun and was threatening to discharge himself.
The couple separated. By the time the divorce was last in August 2004, Johnson says, Cheryl was already wearing Graham’s ring.
They married Dec. 8, 2004, at the Almost Heaven Resort in Gatlinburg, Tenn. He started a landscaping company and permit Cheryl’s couple oldest sons work for him.
A few days before their assist wedding anniversary, the couple attended an event on Hilton Head to honor the families of organ donors. The Island Packet ran a story under the headline, “A love story unlike any told …”
“It’s true what it says in the Bible,” Cheryl told the newspaper. “If you live God’s will and give with a happy heart, you be disposed reap the rewards.”
Graham said he’d “put my the breath of one’s nostrils in God’s hands,” and Cheryl was the answer to his prayers.
Right up to his death, Graham was making plans for the future. He’d invited friends down to fish and was talking about the upcoming golf tournament.
What nay one knew was that Graham had drawn up a will.
Larry Lockley says he went fishing with his uncle the last week of February, and afterward Graham showed him the will and asked if he’d be alternate executor.
“Ain’t nothing wrong, is there?” the nephew asked.
“Ain’t no thing wrong at all,” Graham replied. But, “You never know.”
He gave Lockley a copy and slipped another in a briefcase on a shelf at the back of the utility shed.
On March 20, the fêteday of his transplant, Graham left a playful message on his old pastor’s answering machine: “Do you remember where you were 13 years ago on this day?” When Keller called back, Graham said he and his heart were doing great.
That week, Carson went down to Lyons to fish for bream and bass through his old buddy. Graham didn’t complain about his nuptials — that wasn’t like him. But something just wasn’t right.
“He just wasn’t the happy-go-lucky fright I’d known all my life,” says Carson.
A few days later, Graham’s loaned heart would stop beating for good. Apparently, Graham had blown through his retirement funds and run up large debts — about triple his assets — trying, for the reason that he once present it, “to keep (Cheryl) in the style she wants to live.” His affairs were in such disarray that both of the men designated as his executors, including Lockley, declined.
“I always thought my uncle was in pretty good financial standing,” Lockley says. “It was just a shock to me that his finances were in that bad condition.”
Cheryl Graham did not respond to repeated requests seeking comment. But those who know her say she did not act analogous a grieving widow.
On her MySpace account — now deactivated — her photo changed from a sweetly smiling portrait to pictures of her on a lake or drinking beer with friends. Her screen designate changed, too, from simply “Cheryl” to “PrEttY LAdy,” then “BeaUtiFuL MeSs.”
Family members monitoring the account noticed that shortly after Graham’s death, she posted a man’s photo identifying him as her “new boyfriend.” A flirtatious message on the man’s Web page, from her account, was dated March 26 — six days before Graham’s death.
The man confirmed to The Associated Press that agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had interviewed him. He told them he no longer sees Cheryl.
Although the Toombs County coroner ruled Graham’s death a suicide in late May, the GBI still hasn’t closed the case.
Investigators have interviewed all three of Cheryl Graham’s surviving exes. Johnson wasn’t the only one with a gun story to tell.
During a 2005 dispute over custody of their grandchildren, first husband Isaac “Bo” Carter reported Cheryl called his North Carolina close and threatened to “blow my brains out w/her 38 pistol …” A protective order was granted.
Johnson, husband No. 4, says anyone who gets involved with his ex-wife is in for an emotional roller coaster ride.
“One day she hates you and some day she loves you and the next day she hates you,” Johnson told the AP. “I guess I am lucky to be alive.”
After 13 borrowed years, it appears Graham no longer felt that way.
