On the morning of January 13th this year, 42-year-old Kathleen Dawn West was found lying face down across the street from her house. She was partially clothed, had her cellphone next to her body, and a bottle of absinthe balanced on top of her. She had died of blunt force trauma to the head.
Before she passed away, West was known to most people as a wife and mother in her quiet Alabama town. However, in the days following her death, details of her secret alter ego began to emerge.
In her spare time, the suburban homemaker had been running a private Instagram account that had nearly 52,000 followers - some of whom also paid for her subscription-only adult website, on which she went by the name "Kitty Kat West".
Shortly after her death, at least two Facebook groups were set up and joined by thousands of people who were familiar with West, and they immediately began speculating about who may have killed her.
In a now-deleted post on one of the groups, a man who claimed to be a friend of West's husband, Jeff, said that the widower believed his wife had died as a result of excessive drinking.
"I was able to talk to my friend Jeff last night in length. In the upcoming days true facts will be coming out," the post said. "And everybody will find out that this was a terrible accident, that involved excessive alcohol consumption .... Absinthe!"
However, now more than a month after West's death, Jeff has been arrested and charged with murder.
Others on the Facebook groups had criticized police for not acting fast enough in Jeff's arrest, but Calera Police Chief Sean Lemley said that West's husband "was the suspect from the very beginning" - but the fact that she was found outside her home, semi-nude, confused officers for a while.
For a while, local residents of the area accused the Calera PD of not conducting a thorough enough investigation, and a neighbor of West's said that forensic teams didn't even tape off her household or driveway when looking for clues about her death. What's more, they never appeared to search local areas for other leads about the murder - not even the nearby woodland.
"I saw one officer searching Kat's yard with a flashlight - that was about it," said Kevin Wachs, the neighbor.
"The general consensus is everyone wants answers. We are all a little nervous, we are on edge: do we have a killer in the neighborhood? Is he going to strike again?
"I don't know if the police are in over their heads, or if they don't know what they're doing, or if it's a cover-up. If they just said they had a person that would settle everybody down."
Since his arrest, it is believed that Jeff West probably did know about his wife's alter ego, and his motivation for murder is not yet known. Kathleen is survived by her 12-year-old daughter, who was not at home at the time of the killing or her father's arrest.
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