SANTA ANA – Jean “Kitty” Hodges lay dying.

The year was 1994, and Kitty, 77, was lapsing in and out of consciousness in a nursing home in Grants Pass, Ore.

In her prime, the fair-skinned brunette had no problem attracting men, including her ex-husband, Liskie T. “Terry” Mabry.

But by the time she suffered the stroke that would kill her, Kitty was living alone, in a filthy house she shared with 87 cats. And during the older woman’s final moments, it was left to her granddaughter, Becky Herrera, to pray for her grandmother’s soul.

“At the end,” Herrera says, “all she talked about was that she wanted to know Jesus before she died.”

On her deathbed, Kitty was seeking some measure of redemption — for a past with Mabry that was as dark as any desert night.

BONES, CONFESSION

The two incidents seemingly were unrelated.

On Jan. 26, 1971, a person hiking in the open and rolling desert near Baker stumbled across some old bones — a piece of skull, two thighs, a jaw fragment.

The bones were believed to be that of an adult female.

Four years later, Mabry confessed to a murder. In 1946, he said, a woman had been killed in his Santa Ana home.

In Mabry’s version of events, Kitty had caught him sleeping with another woman — a beautiful, 27-year-old Texan named Beddie Walraven.

Mabry said Kitty was so enraged that she put a bullet in the back of the sleeping Walraven’s head.

Then, Mabry claimed, he and Kitty buried the body in the unforgiving Mojave Desert.

The location Mabry pointed out in person to authorities in 1975 was similar to where the hiker had found the bones four years earlier.

But authorities who checked out Mabry’s story didn’t find any bones. With no remains, and no dental records or X-rays on file for a person named Beddie Walraven, the case stalled.

Mabry and Kitty weren’t charged.

RESTLESS STREAK

Beddie Walraven grew up the youngest of 11 children on a farm near Hooks, Texas.

“I guess you would call her a good country girl,” says her brother, W.A. Walraven, now 87.

But Beddie had a restless streak. She was married and had a baby by age 18. After that baby died, and that marriage ended, she got married again, to a serviceman who was transferred to Germany. But she grew homesick, and moved in with a relative in Santa Ana.

That’s where Beddie, still married to the military man, met Terry Mabry.

At 5-foot-6, he was on the short side. But he was muscular, with dark, rugged good looks. That Beddie and Mabry were related – each had a parent who were half-siblings – didn’t stop them from becoming lovers.

W.A. Walraven met Mabry once.

“I drew a pretty bad opinion of him,” he says. “I didn’t figure him as a people-type person, if you know what I mean.”

When Beddie’s family in Texas lost track of her, W.A. filed a missing person’s report with the FBI. The case went nowhere, though, and eventually was closed.

And, for decades, that’s all anybody knew of Beddie Walraven’s fate.

A WARM GUN

A gunshot woke him up.

That’s what Mabry claimed in his 1975 confession of the Beddie Walraven murder — a confession made while he was locked up in Folsom State Prison for a different murder.

Mabry told authorities that in the early 1940s, while he was still seeing Beddie off and on, he’d struck up a second romantic relationship with Kitty, a divorcee from Silver City, N.M., with two small children.

Mabry said that on a night in late May 1946, Kitty came into his home to find him and Beddie nude in bed, asleep. Then, Mabry said, he woke to the sound of a shot and the sight of Kitty holding a gun and muttering the words, “Oh, Terry; oh, Terry!”

The gun – his own .25-caliber pistol, which he said Kitty fetched from the mailbox where he kept it – was still warm.

Kitty, shaken, darted out of the bedroom. Mabry said he followed her out and gave her a shot of whiskey to calm her down.

When he re-entered the bedroom, lit only by moonlight streaming through the window, Mabry said he saw Beddie take “a deep sob of her last breath.”

He didn’t call police.

Instead, Mabry said, he stripped the bloody pillowcase and sheets off his bed and burned them in his backyard incinerator. Then he and Kitty wrapped Walraven’s body in a blanket and placed it in his 1946 Packard.

They found a spot, about 1 ½ miles east of Baker, to bury Beddie 2 ½ feet below the arid desert floor.

Before they flung the last shovelful of dirt on her, Mabry said Kitty plucked the diamond wedding ring from Walraven’s finger.

Three weeks later, Kitty and Mabry got married in New Mexico.

LONG RAP SHEET

Between his first conviction – for car theft in 1936 – and his fatal shooting of a policeman in 1954, Mabry served six stints in prison, escaping twice.

For much of the time, Kitty remained at Mabry’s side. Jerry Heale, 71, Kitty’s daughter by an earlier marriage, recalls accompanying her mother several times to visit Mabry in prison.

He was soft-spoken, she says, but he had a menacing air about him.

Mabry sometimes beat Kitty, Heale says. And she says her stepfather once pulled a knife on Kitty after he’d grown frustrated looking for bullets for his gun.

In 1954, during a botched burglary in north Sacramento, Mabry shot Francis Rea, 48, a police officer. The crime went unsolved for many years, and Heale says Mabry threatened to kill Kitty and her family if she ever breathed a word of it.

In 1963, Kitty and Mabry divorced.

In 1967, Kitty, weary of Mabry’s threats, told authorities about the Rea killing. Her testimony helped earn Mabry a death sentence, but an appellate court later reduced Mabry’s sentence to life. On June 30, 1981, Mabry, then 67, was released.

For years, Kitty and her family feared Mabry would make good on his threats.

He never did.

Mabry died at age 89. His last known address was in Stockton. He spent the last two decades of his life a free man.

NAMING THE BONES

It wasn’t until December 2005 that investigators in San Bernardino County could even begin to try to identify the bones in the desert. They sent the highly degraded biological samples to the state attorney general’s DNA lab in Richmond.

Initial attempts to secure a profile were not successful, says San Bernardino County deputy coroner investigator David Van Norman. Twenty-five years of exposure to heat, cold, wind and rain had not been kind to the fragile DNA molecule.

Still, the DNA experts hammered away, attempt after attempt, until technological advances in profiling eventually caught up with them.

Meanwhile, Van Norman, 56 – aware that the bones may belong to Beddie Walraven, based on what Mabry told authorities in 1975 — was able to track down two of her relatives.

W.A. Walraven and Shawne Walraven, now 36, Beddie’s great-nephew and police chief of De Kalb, Texas, both provided saliva samples.

In May 2011, after 5 ½ years, DNA scientists developed a profile from the bones. On June 1, the remains were confirmed to be those of Beddie Walraven.

The bones, finally, had a name.

And Mabry’s story, finally, became tied to the bones found in the desert more than 40 years ago.

TYING THINGS UP

In August, Jim Garcia and Domingo Cabrera, cold-case homicide detectives with the Santa Ana Police Department, started poring over long-forgotten files and tracking down relatives of the victim and suspects.

It took a week for them to confirm that Kitty and Mabry were dead, and that there were no other suspects in the Walraven killing.

The case, they say, is closed.

It’s the oldest solved cold-case investigation in Santa Ana’s history, the detectives say, and the state’s oldest case resulting in a positive identification via DNA, according to Van Norman.

W.A. and Shawne Walraven feel some sense of closure.

So does Van Norman.

“Beddie,” he says, “now has a chance to go home.”

The deputy coroner is happy the bones were identified, but dozens more cases, he points out, remain unsolved.

“Every time we succeed on a case like this,” Van Norman says, “just after that brief moment of exhilaration, there’s a sobering realization that we should have done this sooner.”

HEAVEN OR …?

As Kitty lay dying, her granddaughter, Herrera, tried to comfort her, not knowing the real truth about her past. It was Heale, Kitty’s daughter, who grew up with stories, told by a drunken Kitty, about a body buried in the desert.

Heale never knew whether to believe her mother. Maybe, she thought, it was just the whiskey talking.

Heale now is convinced that her mother played a role in Walraven’s murder, although whether Kitty pulled the trigger – as Mabry claimed – will never be known.

Heale and Herrera wonder if other dark secrets died along with Kitty.

They wonder if she and Mabry are responsible, perhaps, for other bodies buried in the desert – for bones just waiting to be found and maybe, someday, even named.

They like to think, regardless, that Kitty got her deathbed wish.

“I believe she went to heaven,” Heale says.

“She was terrified of going to hell.”

Contact the writer: 714-704-3764 or ghardesty@ocregister.com