How tyrant wife 'drove two of her five husbands to suicide' - after one was transplanted with heart of the other

And after spending all their cash on a lavish lifestyle



The suicides of Cheryl Graham’s husbands seemed an affair of the heart.

One shot himself in the head and his heart was donated to another man. Then 10 years later Cheryl married the man with the new heart.

The story took a bizarre twist when the second man – his new heart still pumping strongly – shot himself three years after the wedding, again in the head.

Affairs of the heart: Terry Cottle and Cheryl Graham on their wedding day in 1989. He shot himself in their bathroom - and his heart was donated to Sonny Graham, who would go on to marry Cheryl five years later



Headlines around the world asked: Had history repeated itself through the single heart shared by the two men? Was there such a thing as ‘cellular memory?’ Did the lonely heart carry a ‘suicide gene?’

But yesterday a less romantic reason for the tragic deaths emerged when it was revealed that police are still probing at least one of the suicides.

Cheryl Graham, they said, has been married five times, and had driven all her husbands to despair.

‘She’s a tyrant,’ said prison officer John Johnson, one of her surviving spouses.

‘One day she hates you and one day she loves you and the next day she hates you again. You either get out or you top yourself. I guess I’m lucky to be alive.’

Cheryl, aged 27, had already been married before when she met Terry Cottle.

He managed an apartment block in Jasper County, South Carolina, and she was his boss’s daughter.

Sonny Graham (centre) with daughter Michelle and son Gray in 2006. He fell in love with Cheryl as soon as he saw her and left his wife of 35 years. But three years after marrying her, he too shot himself in the head



Cottle was married with two young daughters, but he and Cheryl were soon involved in a passionate affair. Nine days after Cottle got a divorce, he and Cheryl were married.

Things became rocky between them because of Cheryl’s constant demands for a more luxurious life. One day, her son Timmy told police, 'Cheryl told Terry she couldn’t stay married to a man who earned less money than she did. She took off her wedding ring and threw it over the garden fence.'

They agreed to separate, but next morning as he was preparing to leave, Mr Cottle went into the bathroom and shot himself.

After four days on life support, the machines were switched off and his organs were donated for transplants.

Sonny Graham, 57, who lived 60 miles south on Hilton Head Island, got his heart. He met Cheryl, then 30, in 1997 after writing to her family thanking them for Terry’s heart.



Mr Graham had been happily married to Elaine for 35 years and they had two children, Gray and Michelle. But Mr Graham said later that he fell in love with red-haired Cheryl the moment he saw her.

As well as his attraction to Cheryl, the new heart gave Mr Graham a strange new craving for beer and hot dogs – Terry Cottle’s favourite foods.



But his love was not returned at first. That April, Cheryl married husband No. 3, George Watkins. Elaine and Sonny Graham attended the wedding, and Mr Graham – standing in for Cheryl's late father – gave away the bride.



Cheryl bore Mr Watkins a son in January 1999 at about the same time Mrs Graham discovered Cheryl was having an affair with her husband.

Cheryl’s marriage was annulled when she discovered Watkins already had a wife when he took her down the aisle.

Cheryl and Mr Graham did not marry at that stage and their life together was tempestuous.

In May, 2002, they separated with each suing the other for property.

In the midst of the court case, Cheryl married again. Husband number four was John Johnson Junior an officer at the Georgia prison where Cheryl had been working as a nurse.

Within a year, that marriage, too, began to crumble. In November, 2003, police were called as the pair accused each other of domestic abuse.

They tried a reconciliation – but ended up struggling over a revolver after Cheryl had spoken of suicide. Then Mr Johnson said, she told police he’d tried to shoot himself.

Mr Johnson said Cheryl was already wearing Mr Graham’s ring when their divorce became final. Cheryl married Sonny in 2004.



Three years later Mr Graham, by then 69, killed himself with a shotgun blast, again to the head.

An old friend of Mr Graham’s, Tomme Hitton, said that shortly after his death, Cheryl, now 40, had a new boyfriend and complained that her fifth husband had died broke, leaving her nothing.

Mr Hitton said: ‘He’d blown through his retirement funds and run up large debts trying, as he once put it, “to keep Cheryl in the style she wants to live".’

Georgia police said they were still investigating Mr Graham's death.

They had interviewed Cheryl Graham's latest boyfriend who had dumped her.

Mrs Graham refused to comment.



