[1][2] Catherine Fuller was born in Georgetown in 1936 and lived her life with her aunt after her mother was tragically struck by lightning.
During her walk, she was sexually assaulted, beaten, and ultimately killed by a group in a vacant garage at the back of 800 block of H Street NE according to the police.
She was kicked, beaten, a metal pipe was shoved up her rectum, and suffered a torn liver and punctured ribs.
Her body was found by a street vendor in an alley full of litter, sexually assaulted, and beaten to death with a blunt instrument.
She became what The Guardian considers “the most savage and senseless killing in district history.” There were two lead detectives to the case, Patrick McGinnis and Ruben Sanchez-Serrano.
The theory was that the members of the 8th and H gang pushed her into an alley to rob her, attacked her, before sexually assaulting her with a pole 11 inches up her rectum.
The killing happened on a Monday during rush hour, on a road that was busy commercially and surrounded by houses where someone would have seen.
In late 1985, 8 of the 17 young men were found guilty of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.
He had claimed that he was home with his friend Kelvin Smith, however due to the murder being weeks prior, the men could not remember what they were doing that day.
The police continued to push that the 8th and H Street Crew was responsible for the murder and threatened to charge Watts herself if she did not.
She had received a letter from Chris Turner and was in the courtroom on the days of the trial and felt as though something was wrong.
The MAIP had deep pockets and began assembling relevant materials to help prove the defendant's innocence.
The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 2 that the men convicted for the murder of Catherine Fuller should not receive a new trial in the case named Turner v. United States in 2017.
[2] The case was the subject of an episode of the Netflix true crime documentary series, The Confession Tapes, which suggests that the confessions were falsified, and that the murder may have actually been committed by a convicted serial rapist and thief, James McMillan,[3] who lived and had been spotted in the area of the murder earlier that day.