Man Who Received Heart Transplant From Suicide Victim Later Dies by Suicide

For retired US Air Force veteran Sonny Graham, the grey spring morning in 2008 had started routinely enough.

At around 7.30am, he drove to a local shop in Vidalia, Georgia, to pick up supplies for his landscaping business. Once home, he made a coffee and carried it out to his shed.

He placed the mug on a nearby table. Moments later, Sonny shot and killed himself.

His family was devastated. But their grief was deepened by the startling fact that Sonny had died in the same way as 33-year-old Terry Cottle, whose suicide 13 years earlier had indirectly given Sonny a new lease on life.

Sonny had been suffering from an enlarged, diseased heart caused by a viral infection. After Terry’s death, his family agreed to donate his organs, and Sonny received Terry’s heart in a transplant operation.

Sonny was profoundly grateful. “He said he was very blessed and lucky to have such a young heart,” recalls Marcy Beach, a former colleague. Yet, despite that gratitude, he ultimately followed Terry to his death in precisely the same manner.

That was not the only striking parallel between their lives. Just two years after the transplant, Sonny tracked down Terry’s widow, Cheryl, and fell in love with her. He left behind his 38-year marriage to be with a woman he had known for only a few months.

What could have driven Sonny to make such extraordinary choices? Was the transplanted heart somehow carrying Terry’s memories, personality or emotional traits—and did it influence Sonny’s decision to take his own life? Millions of TikTok users posed those questions after Terry’s daughter, Tiffany, shared a video about the men’s shared fate in 2023. The story is now explored in Heart, an eight-part series available on Apple Podcasts.

Through emotional interviews with relatives of both men, the series examines the enduring question of whether a transplanted organ—particularly the heart—could carry aspects of its donor’s personality.

When the first human heart transplant was performed in 1967, surgeon Christiaan Barnard became an international celebrity. The wife of his patient, Louis Washkansky, is said to have tried to dissuade him from undergoing the procedure because she feared that a new heart might somehow change his feelings for her.

In the years that followed, stories circulated about heart transplant recipients undergoing dramatic personality changes. One account involved a female schoolteacher who received a male donor’s heart and supposedly became a beer-drinking, cigar-smoking fan of professional wrestling.

Another story concerned a lesbian activist who allegedly became heterosexual after her transplant. She was also said to have developed an aversion to meat and stopped eating her favourite McDonald’s hamburgers. Her donor, according to the account, had been a heterosexual vegan.

Although such anecdotes may sound implausible, some researchers have proposed theories about how these apparent changes might occur.

The established scientific view is that memories are held in the brain’s nerve cells, known as neurons. Dr Thomas Verny, a psychiatrist, author and former Harvard University lecturer, has nevertheless argued that other cells in the body might possess forms of “memory” too.

“The differences between neurons and other cells in the body are really not that great, so whatever the neurons can do, the rest of the cells can do too,” he says.

In his book The Embodied Mind, which explores the links between physical processes and psychological experience, Dr Verny discusses the case of a 44-year-old French civil servant examined by doctors in 2007. Scans showed that most of the space inside the man’s skull was filled with fluid, leaving only a relatively thin layer of brain tissue. Despite this, he was married, had two children and maintained a job.

Dr Verny questioned how someone with so little brain tissue could function so effectively.

He eventually proposed that cells throughout the body might serve as a form of biological backup system—retaining information and helping to shape memory and consciousness.

If any of this is true, might Terry Cottle’s heart have ‘remembered’ his feelings for Cheryl and could this explain the speed with which Sonny Graham fell for her as well?

A respected figure in the community of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, which lies about 130 miles east of Vidalia, Sonny had a big personality. Until he contracted the viral infection that left his heart dangerously enlarged, he had been a strapping fellow who loved hunting and fishing. He was also happily married with two children.

But following his transplant, Sonny decided that he would like to get in touch with the family of the donor who had made his second chance at life possible.

In January 1997, less than two years after his surgery, he and his wife Elaine arranged to meet Cheryl at a restaurant in Charleston, not far from the home she and Terry had shared in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.

Sonny later described the electricity of that first encounter. ‘She gave me that big smile, and I felt like I had known her for years,’ he said.

In the podcast, Sonny’s granddaughter Lauren dismisses this as ‘just an older man being captivated by a younger woman’.

But might there have been more at play? Could the heart now beating in Sonny’s chest have somehow been passing on echoes of Terry’s feelings for Cheryl? And if so, might this have initially blinded him to what both families regarded as her highly troubling behaviour?

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In the years since her husbands’ suicides, Cheryl has refused to give interviews and did not reply to an invitation by the podcast’s producers to do so.

But one thing is clear: the woman described by one newspaper reporter as ‘a petite beauty with auburn hair and hazel eyes’ has certainly had an unusual marital history. Her marriage to Sonny was her fifth; and public records suggest that, after he died, she married at least once, possibly twice, again.

Her first marriage was in 1985, when she was 18. She and her husband had two sons but, by 1988, the marriage had been annulled. That year she met Terry Cottle, who had started working for her father’s building firm in South Carolina. Then 27, Terry was married – to his high school sweetheart Tammy, with whom he had two daughters, Sheree and Tiffany.

Terry appears to have fallen for Cheryl extremely quickly, marrying her in May 1989 – just nine days after his divorce from Tammy.

At first, they seemed happy. Although Terry had left school without any qualifications, he took whatever jobs he could find, while Cheryl trained to become a nurse. He adopted her two boys from her previous marriage and they went on to have a daughter together.

But then, according to Terry’s sister Tammy, Cheryl berated him for not earning enough. ‘Cheryl was just never happy,’ she says. ‘He told me he was out mowing the lawn one time and she came out on the porch and said: “That’s all you’re going to be able to do the rest of your life, mow lawns.” That broke him.’

But even before he met Cheryl, Terry had suffered depression, exacerbated by losing his mother to cancer when he was just 16 and then the death of his best friend a few years later.

On March 16, 1995, he went into the bathroom of their home and shot himself with a revolver.

He did not die immediately but was in hospital for four days until his family reluctantly agreed to have his life-support machine switched off and his organs were donated to help others.

Following Sonny’s heart transplant, those around him noticed changes in his behaviour. They ranged from the trivial – a newly developed taste for hotdogs, Terry’s favourite food – to the more dramatic. Sonny ‘wasn’t the charismatic person he once was’, says his colleague Marcy Beach, adding that the changes were even more noticeable when Cheryl came on the scene. ‘Sonny cowered down to her,’ she says. ‘Something I’d never seen him do with anyone before.’

Whatever attracted Sonny to Cheryl, it seems to have been somewhat one-sided at first. During the next seven years, Cheryl married and divorced two other men, with one of whom she had another son. But all the while, she continued her relationship with Sonny.

‘It was weird,’ says Terry’s sister Tammy. ‘Did she ever think about making love with Sonny, and that being Terry’s heart?’

For Sonny, his new relationship meant losing much that was dear to him. In 1999, his daughter Michelle found out they were having an affair and threatened to tell her mother unless he did.

Forced to come clean, he destroyed not only his marriage – which ended in divorce two years later – but also his relationship with Michelle. She sent him a letter saying she wanted nothing further to do with him. ‘My real father died in March 1995,’ she wrote, referring to the date of his transplant.

By December 2004, when Sonny and Cheryl married, his relatives had long felt that their worst fears about the relationship were being realised.

‘She loved to go through some money,’ says his granddaughter Lauren. ‘She always had to have a newer, nicer car. She always wore the best clothes.’

Sonny’s friend Carl Drury agrees: ‘He had some money and I’m sure he lost almost all of it because he kept wasting it on her. Sonny bought her anything he thought would please her.’ But in the months leading up to his death, Sonny had other worries. He had suffered a recurrence of the skin cancer he had been diagnosed with several years previously, and he was also convinced that Cheryl was having an affair.

All in all, there seemed to be plenty of reasons why, on April 1, in 2008, Sonny took his own life.

But both the Cottle and Graham families dismiss the idea that the two men’s shared heart somehow doomed Sonny to suffer Terry’s fate. ‘I do not believe that’s possible,’ says Sonny’s son Gray. While Terry’s eldest daughter Sheree Huebner goes further, describing the idea as ‘goofy’.

And they are backed by mainstream scientists, including Dr Basil Baccouche, whose book The End Of Death chronicles the history of heart transplantation.

He points out that the immunosuppressant drugs which early patients had to take were ‘toxic’ and the consequences could be ‘terrifying’, resulting in hallucinations and persecutory delusions.

‘Even today, many immunosuppressants that recipients take after surgery do have a side-effect of depression or anxiety,’ he says.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that Sonny had committed suicide – a ruling which was upheld two years later when his family asked for the case to be reopened.

But those closest to Sonny, including his son Gray, still refuse to believe that he took his own life. ‘My dad would always say that if somebody told me that he had killed himself, I should have it investigated. “There’s nothing worth killing yourself over”, he said.’

Marcy Beach also remembers Sonny, a Baptist, saying that suicide was ‘the one unforgivable sin. He would tell me that if you do that to yourself, you’ll never go through the pearly gates.’

But is there a way of reconciling the forensic evidence of suicide with the family’s conviction that the Sonny Graham they knew before his transplant would never have taken that final step?

Believers in the theory of ‘cellular memory’ might argue that there is – raising the chilling possibility that the heart which extended Sonny’s life also drove him to end it.