Mendon

Because before Kathy Swartz became a case number in a filing cabinet at the Three Rivers Police Department, She was a girl from a tiny farming village who loved horses, hunted with her dad, and dreamed about bigger things.

Twenty years before that bloody fingerprint ended up on a bedroom phone in Three Rivers, Kathy Sue Swartz was born on May 24, 1969, in Mendon, Michigan.

Mendon sits on a bend of the St. Joseph River in the southwest corner of the state, about 20 miles south of Kalamazoo.

and a short drive from the Indiana border.

It is the kind of place where everybody knows everybody.

Farmland stretches flat in every direction.

The graduating class at Mendon High School was so small it barely filled two pages of the yearbook.

Kathy grew up on a two-acre farm with her parents, David and Audrey Swartz.