At an Ohio rest area, patrolling law enforcement made a grisly discovery in the spring of 1998: A murdered man’s body, showing bloody signs of blunt trauma and strangulation, lay under a tarp in the bed of his abandoned red pickup truck.

It was the body of Richard Witte, known locally as a career mechanic and motorcycle enthusiast, as well as for being a devoted father to his extended mixed family with Kathleen Witte, his second wife, according to Snapped, airing Sundays at 6/5c on Oxygen.

Hours earlier at the rest area, police had noticed the parked truck with a driver inside. But after time had passed and they returned to investigate more closely, the driver was nowhere in sight. Clues at the scene suggested that Richard Witte had been killed somewhere else — and that someone had driven his body there and left it.

Inside the marriage of Kathleen and Richard Witte

With children from two marriages, there were several people in Richard and Kathleen Witte’s extended family. The couple had been married since 1981, having first met at a support group event for single parents.

Willow and James Witte — Richard’s now-adult children from his first marriage — say that their father had enjoyed a long and happy marriage with Kathleen until Kevin, one of three children she brought to the relationship from her previous marriage, entered his teenage years and developed a friction-filled relationship with his stepfather.

“Kevin, he had become violent,” said Willow of her 1990s decision to leave home, as seen on Snapped. “And so ultimately, feeling unsafe from him was the reason that I had moved out.”

After speaking with his supervisor at the local concrete business he worked at, law enforcement learned that Richard was last known to have been making one of his periodic trips from Columbus to Toldeo, Ohio to visit with his mother.

Kathleen also confirmed that account while providing an alibi of her own: She had been shopping with one of her children at the approximate time of Richard’s murder, according to Snapped.

Out of all the family members police questioned in the killing’s immediate aftermath, two people — Richard’s wife, Kathleen, and her 18-year-old son Kevin — raised suspicions with statements and behavior that didn’t seem to fit the traumatic circumstances.

“You could tell not only by her demeanor, but by the way she was saying it, that she was trying to downplay everything,” recalled retired Columbus homicide detective Edward Kallay on Snapped. “It really seemed Kathleen Witte would only tell half-truths, or she would stop before she would actually admit anything. So we knew she was hiding something.”

Kathleen Witte’s murder pact with troubled teens

Kathleen remained adamant under further questioning that she had nothing to do with her husband’s death. But police got more revealing information as they applied pressure to her son Kevin, who slowly began sharing key new details that eventually helped investigators identify a manner, a motive, and, ultimately, the culprits responsible for Richard’s murder.

“We could tell that he was on the right track, but we could tell that there was still some half-truths about what had actually taken place,” said Kallay on Snapped, recalling Kevin’s admission to police that he and a friend named Justin Coleman had struggled with Richard inside his home.

Though Kevin’s initial account of events attempted to frame Richard as the incident’s aggressor, he eventually told investigators a more complete version of what had happened, after police confronted him with incriminating information collected at the crime scene, as well as at the rest area where Richard’s truck had been abandoned.

“Kevin did finally admit that his mother, Kathleen, was more involved in the planning stages of this homicide,” said Kallay. “She was the one that was enticing the kids to actually commit the murder on her behalf so she could get rid of Richard.”

“As far as manipulating Kevin goes, that had been a very long process,” said Willow. “I believe that he wouldn’t have done it on his own.”

After piecing together the evidence combined with Kevin’s statements, investigators believed that Kathleen Witte had grown weary of her marriage to Richard and, in later years as Kevin grew into his troublesome teens, sought a way to restart her life without Richard in the picture. She had taken out a $100,000 life insurance policy on her husband only weeks before Richard’s murder — and as a search at her home revealed, had even led a hidden private life in the online world of BDSM sexual subculture.

“Kathleen had done some type of web page where she would advertise being involved in S&M,” Kallay told Snapped of evidence taken from laptop computers recovered from a BDSM-themed room inside Kathleen’s house. “To our knowledge, Richard was not involved in the S&M aspect of the relationship. It could have been [that] Richard did not like the fact that his wife was online doing these sexual activities — to where he may have wanted a divorce.”

As shown on video footage from Kevin’s police interview, he finally implicated not only himself and his friend Justin, but also his mother, Kathleen, in a three-way agreement to kill Richard Witte. Kevin and Justin would commit the crime while Kathleen went shopping to establish an alibi, and text her a coded pager message after the deed was done.

Kevin confessed to hitting Richard in the head with a frying pan, incapacitating him long enough for Justin to strangle him. Kevin told police that Justin was singing a hymn while he choked the life out of Richard, according to Snapped. Asked which hymn, Kevin responded to investigators: “Amazing Grace.”

At Kathleen’s 1998 trial, Kevin and Justin told a jury that she had enlisted their help in committing the murder by offering Justin a small amount of money so he could attend his upcoming prom, plus an assurance that each teen could live in her home — after Richard was gone — under favorable terms.

Kevin and Justin were sentenced to 13 years for their roles in Richard Witte’s murder, and have since served their time in prison and been released. After being found guilty for her role in her husband’s death — including a charge of complicity in aggravated murder — Kathleen Witte was given a 20 years-to-life sentence and will be eligible for parole in 2026.