Transcript of The Mushroom Mystery

Tonight on "Dave Live." He loved cycling.

I was like, man, he could have been riding and got hit. Looking at the body, they were like, there was foul play.

That's the sad part.

We knew.

We were like, Dave, you're in danger.

Where David's body was found, it was really difficult to know what had happened.

Any obvious sign of trauma? Gunshots, stabbing, anything like that?

No.

Everything seemed very strange.

We spoke to his wife, Katrina.

I don't know what to do.

She guided us to who could could have been suspects.

He came to my door 3 times threatening David.

David had had some sort of relationship with a woman, a possible love triangle out there.

A theory starts to emerge of a very unusual murder weapon.

Yes, a toxic mushroom.

It could be fatal.

How stunning is it to see something like this?

A real-life case, it's very rare.

The mushroom angle just threw this into left field.

It's like you were watching your friend walk into a trap in slow motion.

It's a game, one big unfortunate game. Just flat-out conniving and evil.

Dangerous mushrooms and devious lies. Did a sickening mix lead to murder? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Ah, here's Blaine Alexander with the Mushroom Mystery.

This place was her refuge, a respite from a weary world.

How often do you walk this road?

Weather permitting, almost daily.

This is your normal route?

Yes, it is.

It was mid-April 2020, the early days of the COVID pandemic. The world felt chaotic, but this stretch of road in Noblesville, Indiana offered peace for Jenny Thomas.

So typically, what is it like? I mean, lots of cars, lots of traffic?

It's rural. It is a country road.

Friday, April 24th, a beautiful, picturesque day. Ginny was on her usual walk when she happened upon something horrific. You knew immediately what it was?

Oh, definitely. Definitely did. I knew. It was obvious.

It was a man's body on the side of the road.

Like right in here?

Yes.

Was this body buried at all or obscured or just kind of right there in the open?

He was just there laying on his side like you would think he was asleep. I stood here for a second thinking, can I help this person? But it was obvious it was too late for me to help him. That's when I knew I needed to go, and I ran.

Jenny took off up the street toward the nearest house. She found a neighbor who hopped in his truck to go look for himself.

He's the one who called 911.

911, what's the location of your emergency?

There's a dead body laying in the ditch. They're completely black and blue. Look at the guy, it's a male. I'd I don't know, older, 30s, 40s, maybe 50s. And it's got a dog collar around his neck.

OK. We will have an officer dispatch there just as soon as possible.

Dispatch calls me and says, we've got a dead body.

And I was like, is this something, like, real? Do we need to come out there? And he's like, yeah, get in your car and start this way.

Greg Lockhart and Chris Yates have worked together for more than 20 years at the Hamilton County Sheriff's Office. But this was Yates's first death scene as a detective. So Yates followed Lockhart's lead as they looked for clues. What condition is the body in?

He didn't have a shirt on. He had gray sweatpants on. Until we moved him, we didn't notice the shirt that he had, but he had a shirt— looked like it was tied around his left wrist.

But he wasn't wearing a shirt.

He was not wearing the shirt.

One theory quickly came to mind. Here in Indiana, the spring season brings a very specific pastime.

My mind immediately went to, since it was April in Indiana, mushrooms are a big thing that people go out and hunt for. So my assumption was maybe it's a mushroom hunter that's collapsed while out hunting.

I have to stop you. Mushroom hunting?

Mushroom hunting. So morel mushrooms are edible. Uh-huh. And people fry them. I don't know how many other different ways you can eat them, but they're very good.

It's not mushroom picking, right? Why is it called mushroom hunting?

Because they're very hard to find. So you have to know, like, a specific area.

Detectives wondered if the victim could have been one of those mushroom hunters, but a quick look at the body revealed that was probably not the case. For starters, he wasn't wearing any shoes.

You noticed something else that's draped across his body. What was that?

So it was a rifle sling.

For those who may not be as familiar with guns as you are, describe a rifle sling.

So imagine a big backpack strap, uh, 3 or 4 foot long, adjustable. Just would fit on the top of a rifle and the bottom of the rifle. You can throw it over your shoulder or carry it in the woods. We determined it's an Uncle Mike's brand.

No shirt, no shoes, and a rifle sling? None of it made sense. But one thing was clear. Officers could tell from the condition that whoever this was had been dead for a few days. As you look at him, is there any obvious sign of trauma? Like, can you look at him and immediately tell?

What happened? Gunshot? Stabbing? Anything like that?

No.

It was so strange to me. As we started, when the coroners got there and we started to move the body, there was no apparent trauma.

At any point did you think maybe this was a hit and run?

No, because you would generally have signs of trauma with that.

Another theory popped up.

And we start thinking, man, was it— was it an overdose death? And then somebody didn't know what to do, and so they just dumped this body here.

Jenny had walked the same route the previous day and didn't notice anything. So investigators thought if the body had been dumped there, It happened the night before. They hoped an autopsy would tell police if they were on the right track, but the results were inconclusive.

We didn't have a cause of death, and everything seemed very strange and about to get even stranger.

If somebody eats enough of it and doesn't get any sort of medical help, then it could be fatal.

Yes, she kind of clutched her chest and then fell back against the wall.

You could feel the anger radiating off of him.

Yeah, you could almost feel the heat.

Just looking at her thinking, what? These are the craziest stories I've ever heard.

And they find that none of it's true.

Nothing's adding up.

Indiana detectives were trying to identify a man found dead on the side of the road, a victim without a name, until Once we got him to the morgue, we fingerprinted him.

Came back David Michael Fouts.

David Michael Fouts. So you got a name.

Got a name. We found out he lived in Pendleton, Indiana.

About how far away is that from where he was found?

I think it's 9.5 miles.

Detectives learned David Fouts was 50 years old. He worked as a senior consultant at the massive technology company Salesforce.

He was always trying to help other people in the sport.

Matt Tanner met David Fouts years earlier at a cycling event.

It was always exciting going to the finish with Dave because he was all grinning ear to ear because we were the fastest guys and he loved it.

So initially it was literally your shared speed that brought you two together.

Yeah, for sure.

When Matt started his own cycling group, Dave was one of the first to join. What kind of community, what kind of feel were you trying to build here?

So honestly, like initially we were very race focused. It was called Roll Fast and we wanted, we wanted fast cyclists.

You wanted to win.

Yeah.

And then we felt like there was more we could do with the club. We kind of decided, let's, let's focus on what we call mental fitness.

Did Dave fit into that?

Yeah, very much.

Matt's wife, Chris, was the group's driver and cook.

That's really how I got to know Dave is because Dave was always like behind the scenes helping and working. Like he'd come in the kitchen with me while I'm cooking for the team and he'd be like, can I help? And yeah, sure. I'd put him to work. And so he was the mechanic for when they would go on their camps. And so sometimes Dave would stay behind and not even ride. While I'm cooking and preparing lunch or dinner, you know, he's in there repairing a bike that fell apart the day before. So, wow, he was always in the position of helping people.

In fact, his friends say Dave was truly a Renaissance man.

He had so many other just interests. And, you know, he would bring us eggs from his farm because, you know, he's like, oh, my chickens are laying crazy eggs, you want some of them? And we're like, yeah, we'd love that. And He never had children of his own. And so he created a life that was very fulfilling. And I thought that was super cool.

That's notable.

Yeah.

In the blur of all that activity and movement, the friends say David often kept his personal life personal. He divorced his college sweetheart in 2018.

Did you know much about their divorce, about their split?

It happened quickly, and I would say quietly.

By 2019, he was married again to a woman named Katrina. She'd grown up in a town about an hour away where her father owned a roofing business. She'd been married once before and had several grown children. Katrina and David first met through cycling.

He was so passionate with her, and we had never seen that side of him before.

And he wanted to be a provider for grandkids and kids that he didn't have. And, um, he loved her kids.

He loved her kids.

When did you first find out that something had happened to Dave?

I believe we saw it on the news. I also thought where they found him was like a road that was plausible you could be riding on and get hit. It was a road that I've ridden on a lot. Yeah. Um, wasn't that far from his house that I was like, man, he could have been riding and got hit.

But police already knew this was no biking accident. It was late that night when they left the scene to break the news to David's wife.

Hi, Katrina. My name is Craig Walker. I'm a detective with Houston County.

They first needed to make sure they had the right house.

Do you have a recent picture of David?

Let me go get my cell phone.

Okay.

Katrina went inside to retrieve her phone. When she returned, detectives looked at the photo and gave her the news.

We have reason to believe at this point that he is dead. Uh, we found him today.

How did she respond?

She kind of clutched her chest and then fell back against the wall. Stay up here with me for a second. And we need to talk about everything and try to figure out what's happened in the last couple days.

Katrina thought she knew.

He's threatened suicide multiple times. And I've called the police a few times. There was nothing they could do unless they said he admitted it.

We just need to figure out things with him and figure out what's going on.

I don't know what to think. I don't know what to feel right now because this situation is— I love my husband no matter what he's done.

She invited them inside.

I don't know what to do.

Well, I mean, we'll try to help you walk through some stuff.

It's all my fault.

I didn't do enough.

Can I turn on the light?

Yeah.

There we go. Do you mind if I have this? I got To have a cigarette.

She explained that she and David had been going through a rough patch. He was staying at another apartment and she hadn't spoken to him for days.

Yeah, I physically spoke to him on Tuesday.

On the phone or in person?

In person.

She said she'd worried about his mental state that last time she saw him and that he'd been talking about suicide.

He just didn't want to be in here anymore. My skin's crawling. I feel like I got bugs coming out of my skin.

Was there anything to indicate to you that he possibly died by suicide?

No, nothing at all.

The detectives knew her theory couldn't be right. David wasn't wearing any shoes, and yet—

bottom of his feet are clean, so he didn't walk there and collapse, uh, anything like that. So that means that he didn't die in that location.

Whatever happened didn't happen here, correct?

He did not miracle himself into that ditch. So there's no way.

Detectives needed to know, did David have any enemies? His wife certainly thought so.

He came to my door 3 times threatening David.

24 hours into their investigation, All Hamilton County Sheriff's detectives had was a growing list of what didn't happen to David Fouts. They knew it wasn't a biking accident. Didn't look like suicide either. So they took a closer look at David's personal life. And sure enough, Katrina told detectives her husband had been having an affair.

He wasn't the type of person I would expect to be involved with a woman like this.

David had had an affair with their housekeeper. Hmm. And David had bought her a new car. David had allowed her to use his address in Pendleton so her kids could go to Pendleton schools.

Oh, wow.

And that David was sending all this money to this girl.

He owned up to everything. I wasn't mad. But I did a forensic accounting, you know, And I'm like, and you spent $8 grand on a car and spent over $30,000. I'm sorry. I know. I'm sorry.

I'll stop.

I'll stop. I'll stop.

But Katrina said he didn't. The infidelity continued. And then a man showed up at their doorstep with a threat.

Do you know who this guy was?

I've never seen him in my life.

Okay. Did he say who he was?

No, and I didn't ask.

Was this one of the woman's partner, a spouse, a husband?

Katrina alluded that it was a father of one of her children.

Who was, she's saying, upset with David?

Yes.

Because of this affair?

Yes.

She described him very well dressed, wanted to speak to David. David was never there, but this unknown gentleman went out of his way to tell Katrina, "You're in no danger.

I'm not gonna harm you." "My issue is with David." Katrina said she wanted to call the police to report the man, but David stopped her. "He wouldn't let me call the police about the man that came to the door and threatened to kill him 3 or 4 times." The housekeeper told Dateline she and David were not having an affair, and when police interviewed her, she said he was just helping her out.

He did not buy her a car, according to her, and he really hadn't given her that much money.

Okay.

But he had allowed her to use his address for her kids.

Does she give you names of her children's fathers?

Yes.

The housekeeper didn't think anyone she knew had threatened David, but she gave them 3 names. Detectives tracked them down.

All 3 males were accounted for. Uh, 2 of them were in prison and 1 lived in Florida.

Okay.

So, and the one in Florida had, had an alibi.

So that road turned out to be a dead end and detectives were back at square one. On finding David's killer and finding out what killed him.

The forensic pathologist said, look, I know there's not a glaring cause of death, but it is not natural. He did not have a heart attack. He did not have a stroke. This is some kind of other death.

However, detectives did have— well, maybe not quite a lead, but during the autopsy, the pathologist discovered something in David's stomach.

What do you guys find?

The only thing that was really there, it looked like little chunks of mushroom.

Mushroom?

Mushrooms.

Those mushrooms led them to Purdue University and the lab of Dr. Katherine Aime, a professor of mycology.

Help me understand what a professor of mycology is. What do you study?

We study fungi. All aspects of fungi, actually, in my lab.

You get a phone call essentially asking to help police solve a murder.

Yes, yes, I was happy to see if I could help identify the mushrooms.

That had to have been a surprising phone call, to say the least.

It's a little outside of my normal realm of day-to-day activity, yeah.

So Dr. Rame got to work using DNA sequencing to identify the mystery mushrooms.

What kind of mushroom was this?

It was something called, uh, Leucocebe conatum.

And what happens if you eat that kind of mushroom?

Well, this is where science is a little uncertain. There are reports of people eating this mushroom without problem. There are other reports of people having toxicity from eating this mushroom, that it has a toxin called muscarine in it. It makes people sweat and salivate and cry and basically excrete most of their liquids.

Would very, very quickly, leaving someone dehydrated and weak.

Do we typically see cases of people dying from muscarine poisoning?

No, we do not.

So toxic but not necessarily deadly. No real answers there. Maybe another conversation with David's wife could shed light on what happened. Or maybe not.

She said that she surfed with her husband and Her husband died in her arms. And while she was surfing, she had— her arm was bitten off by a shark.

It's fanciful, just weird stories.

When police first spoke with David's wife, Katrina, she was overwhelmed with emotion. Emotion.

I don't know what to think. I don't know what to feel right now.

A few days later, they wanted to talk to her again, so she came down to the station.

You want a glass of water or some coffee or anything?

Uh, black coffee.

Black coffee.

Detectives noticed a few things right off the bat. Katrina liked to talk a lot. Then it tells you how much you got left, often adding details they didn't ask about.

And then we were located to Limeira, Brazil, state of São Paulo. I had uterus cancer. Greyhounds, they have their own way of doing things.

It was hard to get her to answer direct questions. She would break off into a tangent and still never really answer your question.

Katrina told them stories of a rather high-profile profession as a fashion designer with big-ticket clients.

We made all Lil Nas's touring clothes last year. We got Kardashians wearing our freaking clothes right now. Did you watch this?

I think they're a pretty big deal, aren't they?

To the detective's ears, the stories sounded far-fetched. It's a pattern David's friends had noticed from the jump. Not long after they met, Chris and another RollFast wife took Katrina to lunch. David had introduced her by a nickname, Edie.

In that lunch, Edie explained and talked about her life and had the craziest stories I've ever heard. Like, in my 57 years, I've never had a luncheon like that.

Wow.

She knew about me and my first husband who had passed away, and I don't know if that was a catalyst for her to say crazy things, but she said that her first husband died in her arms, um, and that she was from Brazil. That's where she lived, and she surfed with her husband, and her husband died in her arms. And while she was surfing, she had— her arm was bitten off by a shark. Now we're both looking at her, she has two arms, so I don't know what the follow-up question for that is. So these are the craziest stories I've ever heard.

So did Katrina just like to spin tall tales for fun, or were her lies dangerous? Detectives started digging into her past and were shocked by what they found.

I was assigned to Superior Court 1 at that time.

Adrienne Champagne was a deputy prosecutor with Hendricks County, Indiana. She first crossed paths with Katrina in 2011 after Katrina reported to police that she'd been raped by a friend of her then-boyfriend's.

She gave him a ride back to his house. She went inside with him. She was going to use the bathroom. And that at that time, he grabbed her and assaulted her.

She said that the attack was so brutal, it hurt to sit for too long.

Because of these traumatic injuries that she had sustained from the attack.

Did she go to the hospital or the ER?

She did go to the hospital.

She was checked out?

She was. The police followed up, of course, with the medical providers. They told the police, no, she did not have traumatic injuries.

She said she almost didn't report the assault because of what she did for a living.

She told them that she was a a photographer for celebrities and famous magazines and that it would damage her reputation, uh, to be in this situation.

And she told more stories about herself that to investigators just seemed off.

She said that she owned houses. I believe she said several houses in Indiana, that she also had property or house in Florida. They could not find any evidence that she owned any of these properties. They also did not find any evidence that she had any source of income for the previous 3 years.

So—

So police look into all of this.

Right.

And they find that none of it's true.

Nothing's adding up.

Most crucially, the details of the assault weren't adding up. The accused man denied raping Katrina and told police he had a witness another woman who was part of the entire encounter.

So they talked to her?

Yes.

What does she say?

They bring her in and she corroborates everything that the male said. It was consensual the entire time.

So when police go back to Katrina, what does she say? What's her explanation?

Her response was, I think I need an attorney.

Police charged Katrina with false informing and dropped the investigation into the man.

The level of crime he was looking at, at that time, it would have been a B felony rape, which would have carried up to 20 years in prison. This is a very serious allegation.

This is more than just a little white lie.

Correct.

As a prosecutor, you know that women coming forward in sexual assault cases can be extremely difficult anyway. There's a question of believability. How How upsetting is it to see something like that?

It is upsetting, and I think what's very upsetting about it is that you want to believe the victim when they come forward, and I think she was banking on that when she came forward with this lie.

Katrina was sentenced to almost a year of probation and ordered to pay about $6,000 in restitution. As they dug further into her background, detectives investigating David's murder tracked down Katrina's family, an ex-boyfriend, and even her ex-husband. They admitted she could be charming and was always down for a good time. "Anything you wanna say?" "Um, I'm really excited and, um, all I can say, people, is you have to be there." The investigators learned that, aside from sometimes helping at her father's roofing company, there was no evidence that Katrina had worked a day in her life. In fact, she seemed to lily pad from one relationship to the next.

How is she getting by?

Wherever the money was is where she stayed. She was all about money.

As you're talking to more and more people, this pattern is starting to develop about Katrina. One, financially, but two, making allegations against her romantic partners.

Correct.

She reported her first husband to police saying he hit her. She pressed charges. He denied hitting her but pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct. Once married to David, Katrina accused him of shoving her. David pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor domestic battery charge. Detective Lockhart looked at all of this. He dug into David's past and couldn't find any history of David being physically abusive.

As you're looking at this, did you believe that he pled guilty because because he in fact was guilty of this, or because it was the path of least resistance?

I think it was the path of least resistance. Sometimes in the legal system, it's easier just to bite the bullet and move on past it, so to speak.

Months later, Katrina told police he pushed her again, but this time David said Katrina was lying. David's attorney told Detective Lockhart phone records show David was nowhere near Katrina when the alleged assault took place.

According to his attorney, he was going to fight that case, but he passed before the case came up.

To hear abusive—

no, does that sound—

I've never seen Dave violent with anybody, anyone.

David's friends, the Tanners, believe Katrina was lying when she told police he was suicidal. They never saw that, but they did see a dark side to the marriage. They remember talking to David for hours one night about his relationship.

It was kind of the same thing over and over, but at some point he said, if I end up dead, she, she killed me.

He said this words, right?

And, and we looked at each other and we're like, Dave, you have to, you have to leave, get rid of her.

And yet in the same breath he's saying he wants to go back to her.

He said, I can't. He said, I can't leave her.

Can't leave her.

He loves her.

Matt and Chris looked back on that conversation and became convinced Katrina killed their friend. And they shared that with detectives. Detective Lockhart would now put Katrina's words under a microscope, starting with where she was when David went missing.

I meet Terry over at the country house. Terry?

Who was that? Detectives had more questions for David Fountz's wife Katrina, starting with a key one: where was she the night David was murdered? She told detectives she'd been with a man named Terry Hopkins, a longtime family friend.

Pops or Hoppy.

Okay.

Uh, father from another mother. These are all things that she told me about Terry.

Nicknames.

Nicknames between the two.

Clearly the two of them are close.

Very close.

Him and my dad are lifelong Masons. Okay, and best friends.

Katrina said she'd met up with Terry at a house she rented in the country.

I meet Terry over at the country house because we were gonna grab some food because he said he was in the mood for Chinese. We were gonna spend some time together, watch a movie.

And you said this was 6 to 7 at night? Yeah, somewhere in there.

Yeah, it wasn't even dark yet.

Katrina said she stayed there through the night. The next day, she went back to the home in Pendleton she shared with David. Police needed to speak with Terry, but he refused, so they detained him and tried to get him to answer some questions.

Are you willing to give us a statement and talk to us about this? My good sense tells me that I need to wait and request for an attorney. If you change your mind, you want to talk to us, you have our number, okay?

Police had to let Terry go, but they kept digging.

So he doesn't talk to you?

He doesn't answer any questions other than to tell me he called me one time and told me what a pathetic job I was what I was doing with my investigation and that he was going to sue me.

Terry wasn't spooked by law enforcement. He'd spent 33 years with the police department in a nearby county where he'd worked his way up to captain.

How was he as an officer?

Oh, he was good. He had a good sense of humor, but also a compassion for people, especially the underdogs.

This is Deb Hopkins, Terry's ex-wife. Terry wasn't talking to police. But Deb certainly was.

He asked me numerous questions about Terry and Katrina.

Deb told investigators she'd been Terry's wife for 45 years, and their life together was mostly good.

I could start a sentence, he could finish it. And it was just so easy, so relaxed, so comfortable.

But Deb says their happy marriage unraveled after Terry retired.

He would get very upset very quickly. And he would cry, and he never cried, you know, over the slightest thing. We had a neighborhood cat that died, and he just bawled.

It was a sudden change, so concerning they went to see a neurologist.

And that's when we found out that he had had a frontal lobe stroke. A stroke?

Yeah.

He didn't even know it. I thought strokes made your face sag or your arm— you lose— a frontal lobe stroke does none of that. It affects your mind. It affects your judgment. It affects your ethics. It affects your reasoning, your empathy.

Deb says Terry was never the same after his diagnosis. He became verbally abusive and started having an affair.

I said, I'm leaving. Hardest thing I ever did up to that point.

After the divorce, Terry moved in with his friend Katrina's father, and he started spending a lot of time around Katrina. He was still in touch with Deb too. She noticed that whenever Katrina's husband David came up in conversation, Terry would fly into a frenzy.

He would talk about David with such venom.

You could feel the anger radiating off of him.

Yeah, you could almost feel the heat.

So Katrina's alibi for the night her husband was killed was a man who openly hated David. That was suspicious, and so was this.

On the night police tried to question Terry, 4 days after the body was found, he had a Band-Aid on each hand and one big one on his forearm. And the initial thing that drew my attention is where his glasses sat, there was some blood. It was a wound. And I thought, you know, these look like he could have been in a fight.

Detective Lockhart requested a search warrant to collect Terry's DNA and take pictures of his body.

So he had a cross up here.

And it looked like a tattoo or a necklace.

Uh, necklace.

Necklace.

There was a bruise that looked just like that cross, like he had held something against his chest really tightly, but his whole chest was bruised.

Katrina told police she was not only with Terry the night David likely died, but she also admitted to being with Terry 2 nights later on a Thursday, which is also the night we believe that the body was dumped. When police dug through Terry and Katrina's phone records, they learned the two were in constant contact except for that night.

Their cell phones got shut off on the night that the— we believe the body was dumped for a period of like 4 hours when they had this long communication string talking all the time, and all of a sudden both phones shut off.

But Detective Yates discovered that didn't necessarily mean the two weren't in communication. When he searched their cars, he found a walkie-talkie in each.

Like a small walkie-talkie that you could, you know, use as a kid, or you might see, you know, at some big box store that they talk on.

And Detective Yates noticed other things in Terri's car.

A lot of different types of knives, tools, zip ties, tarps.

It's like a perfect murder cover-up kit.

Yes.

Investigators now believed Katrina and Terri worked together to kill David. But why?

What did Katrina stand to gain? From David's death?

Everything. A half-million-dollar life insurance policy, the $40,000 from Salesforce as like a severance pay, the house, the two motorcycles, the three cars, well, more cars than that, his specialized bicycles that were, I mean, tens of thousands of dollars expensive. Literally everything.

She would've had a very lucrative payday from David's death.

Yes.

But Detective Lockhart knew means and motive were not enough to make an arrest. To make a murder case, they needed to nail down a cause of death. Maybe the clue they needed was this.

There was a screenshot of a death cap mushroom.

You can learn a lot about a person by looking through their phone. And when detectives reviewed the contents of Katrina's photo roll, they stumbled upon one very telling picture.

There was a screenshot of a death cap mushroom.

After speaking with mushroom expert Dr. Aime, they learned the death cap mushroom is, as its name implies, deadly. The Elkanatum mushrooms found in David's stomach are considered a less toxic variety. But it turns out the two look a lot alike.

They're both tall, stately, pure white mushrooms, big white cap, white gills. So very, very similar.

Is it possible that if someone were going out trying to gather mushrooms, that they may mistake one mushroom for the other, try and grab the deadly one but get the other instead?

Yeah, I think that's a very reasonable hypothesis.

So maybe the detective's first inclination was at least partially correct. Maybe the crime did involve mushroom hunting after all, but it was Katrina and Terry who'd been on the prowl, planning to kill David with the lethal death cap mushroom but accidentally grabbing the less toxic one instead. Detective Lockhart explored this theory while Katrina seemed to explore a friendship with him.

Hey there, good afternoon.

So how are you?

All of stress, Katrina.

How often is she reaching out to you guys?

Oh my goodness, daily, hourly.

Are your parents still living? I'm assuming they are.

To say what?

Talk about life, living, pursuit of happiness.

I just want you to know, Greg, I appreciate you.

But at the same time, you are getting—

I mean, growing mountains of evidence that make you fairly certain that she's the person who killed her husband.

Yes.

How do you square those two?

Well, it's a game. This is one big unfortunate game that we have to play. I have to be nice to her and not let her know what I know and keep her talking to me.

Detective Lockhart wasn't sharing with Katrina that mountain of evidence he'd been collecting against her and Terry.

The DNA results came back 5 months after the murder, and Terry's DNA was on the shirt that was still on the body of David.

This is a horrible piece of evidence for Terry.

Very damning.

The report also showed David's DNA was found in the back of Terry's car. After reviewing the evidence, Hamilton County Prosecutor Andre Mischka developed a theory.

So in our theory, the mushrooms were an attempt to kill him, but because they were an Amanita venenosa and not an Amanita virosa, they did not.

Weakened him in some form, right?

They weakened him in some form. Now, he was dehydrated. But then they had to pivot and go a different tact. And so we believe that in the early morning hours, that that's when the asphyxiation occurs.

Part of that theory, that David likely died by strangulation. That would also explain those injuries detectives saw on Terri's hands and chest. Prosecutor Mischka thought that after strangling David, Katrina and Terry drove out to the country to dump his body. And as for that rifle sling found around David's neck, they thought that was to help roll him into the ditch.

We believe is a means of helping to give something to grab onto in that part of his body.

The prosecutor thought this would be the best the case was going to get. It was now or never.

You arrest Terry. Tell me how that happens.

So we had the NAF State Police police SWAT team descend upon him. They were trying to call him out, and it took 10 to 15 minutes.

Police found Katrina driving her car, and then our SWAT team took her down. When they searched her car, they found $40,000 in cash and a burner phone.

On her cell phone, she had searched how to disappear and never be found, how to get fake IDs.

She searched that specifically?

Yes.

In September of 2020, Katrina and Terry were charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. With two defendants awaiting trial in jail, investigators couldn't help but wonder if one of them might flip.

Terry was interviewed in an attempt to do a plea agreement.

He was in bad shape, battling heart and memory problems, but he told them a story.

He said that Katrina had used mushrooms to poison him and cook them, put them on a pizza or something. David was very lethargic from eating the mushrooms. Terry presented himself, there was a scuffle, and Terry said, I put my arm around him as he was fussing and just squeezed for a few minutes and then strangled him and killed him.

Yes.

Terry died a few months after talking to investigators. Then in February of 2022, Katrina went on trial. Detective Lockhart says Terry's statement wasn't wasn't presented to the jury as evidence because Terry had been sick and mentally diminished when he talked. And the judge threw out that screenshot of the death cap mushroom found on Katrina's phone because those weren't the kind of mushrooms found in David's stomach.

That piece, he thought, was just too far of a reach to, uh, to be relevant to present to the jury.

The defense argued the state's story was just that— a fiction with a gaping hole at the center of it. If prosecutors couldn't say exactly how David was killed, how could they tell the jury who killed him? After a week of trial, which was recorded on audio, the jury reached a verdict.

We the jury find the defendant Katrina Louise Fouts not guilty of murder.

There's the sudden sinking feeling of, oh gosh, this might go sideways.

But on the conspiracy charge, we the jury We, the jury, find the defendant, Katrina Louise Fouts, guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.

Katrina was sentenced to 34 years in prison. She'll be in her 80s by the time she's released.

I was happy she went to jail and all, you know, the system worked, I guess. Doesn't bring Dave back.

Terry's ex-wife, Deb, believes Terry's stroke left him open to manipulation. Manipulation by Katrina.

I think she made herself out to be a victim of David's, and that's why he started hating him. She manipulates people, and she knew how to manipulate him.

You think Terry fell victim to it?

Oh, I know he did.

Do you think that if Terry had never had this stroke, he would have ever been a part of this?

No, he would not.

No question?

No question.

Deb says she's found a way to forgive Terry, but she doesn't condone what he She did. And David's family is always on her mind.

I've always regretted not reaching out to David's family and offering my condolences.

In case they are watching, what would you want to say to them?

I'm so sorry. I know I'm not responsible for it, but David, you know, he had a full life ahead of him, and I'm so sorry that it ended that way. She could have divorced him and could have gone on, but she didn't. And he died in such agony. And that breaks my heart.

In the years after David Fouts' death, Matt Tanner organized a memorial ride for his friend. The name, Dave Fast.

Yeah, it was a spinoff of Roll Fast and Dave.

Yeah.

We should have called it Fouts Fast.

We should have.

A lot of people came out.

First 2 years we had really good turnouts. A lot of them, I didn't know who they were and they showed up because they knew Dave.

Mm, they had great Dave stories.

How do you think he'd want to be remembered?

Somebody that would, would give up himself to, to make somebody else's day or ride or life better.

That's all for this edition of Dateline, and don't forget to check out our Talking Dateline podcast, in which we'll go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your your podcasts. We'll see you again next Friday at 10, 9 Central. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.