In May 1977, Glenna Kaye Catlin married Steven David Catlin and they settled in Fresno, California. She was his fifth wife. Steven, who had a history of forgery and theft, found work at a local garage. His fascination with cars had previously led him to a job on the pit crew for racer Glendon Emery, who was Glenna's stepfather. After their wedding, Steven enjoyed quick promotions at the garage and was soon managing a team of forty employees, but he also had expensive tastes that kept them short
on cash. The financial strain mounted, and by 1981, Steven was forced to resign after his employer discovered his criminal past during a background check.
The couple’s marriage was reportedly a rocky one. Steven considered it a marriage of convenience and was unfaithful, which made Glenna jealous. In early 1984, they were seen having a public argument. Shortly after, in February 1984, Glenna traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, to visit her mother. During the visit, she began to feel unwell, complaining of flu-like symptoms. She returned to her home in Fresno, where her condition worsened. Glenna was hospitalized with fluid in her lungs, and for 22 days, doctors struggled to diagnose her mysterious and rapidly deteriorating illness. On March 14, 1984, Glenna Kaye Catlin died in the hospital.
Initially, the cause of Glenna's death was a mystery. Her husband, Steven, showed grief at her funeral but was in high spirits immediately after. He soon had a new fiancée he had met while visiting Glenna in the hospital and collected approximately $57,000 from his late wife's life insurance policy. The strange circumstances surrounding Glenna's death raised suspicions, particularly for one of Steven's ex-wives, who followed the news and approached the sheriff in Bakersfield with her concerns. These suspicions intensified later that year. In December 1984, just months after Glenna's death, Steven's 79-year-old adoptive mother, Martha Catlin, died in Bakersfield after a brief, sudden illness with similar symptoms, including a sore, purplish throat. Steven ordered her body to be cremated immediately, but authorities intervened and postponed the cremation to perform an autopsy.
The autopsy on Martha Catlin provided the crucial breakthrough that unraveled a series of murders. Toxicological analysis of her tissue samples revealed she had been poisoned with paraquat, a highly toxic herbicide used to kill weeds. This discovery prompted investigators to re-examine Glenna's death. Analysis of tissue samples that had been preserved from Glenna's hospitalization confirmed that she, too, had died from paraquat poisoning. The investigation then reached back nearly a decade to the 1976 death of Steven's fourth wife, Joyce Catlin. Joyce had also died from a mysterious respiratory illness, and her body had been quickly cremated on Steven's orders. Fortunately, the hospital had preserved tissue samples from her autopsy, and when tested in 1984, they also showed lethal levels of paraquat.
The investigation zeroed in on Steven David Catlin as a serial killer who used poison to murder those closest to him for financial gain. He was the beneficiary of life insurance policies on both of his deceased wives and was the sole inheritor of his mother's estate. Investigators learned that Catlin had worked in agriculture and was well aware of the deadly effects of paraquat. The case against him was solidified when police found a bottle of the herbicide, with a cap bearing his fingerprint, in a garage he had shared with Glenna's father. A jailhouse informant later testified that Catlin had admitted to the killings, stating, "I killed the bitches."
On December 23, 1985, Steven Catlin was charged with the murders of Joyce Catlin and Martha Catlin. He was first tried for the murder of Glenna Kaye Catlin in a trial that was moved to Monterey County due to pretrial publicity. In April 1986, a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In 1990, he faced a second trial in Kern County for the murders of his fourth wife and his mother. The jury found him guilty on both counts and found true the special circumstances of murder for financial gain, murder by poison, and multiple murders. For these crimes, Steven David Catlin was sentenced to death. He is currently on death row in California.
