On a spring morning in southeastern Georgia, Sonny Graham drank some coffee and headed out the door for another day in the family landscaping business and to take his 9-year-old stepson to the dentist. But Graham made a detour to the backyard shed that he had built.
There, the 69-year-old picked up the 12-gauge Remington shotgun he had taken on so many quail- and dove-hunting trips, pointed the muzzle at the right side of his throat and pulled the trigger.
It was April Fool’s Day, almost exactly 13 years since another man’s suicide gave Graham a second chance at life.
That man was Terry Cottle. When he ended his life, Graham got his heart.
But it was not just an organ that connected Graham and the 33-year-old donor. Nearly a decade after the transplant, Graham married Cottle’s young widow. And now Graham had made her a widow again.
Cottle’s sister thought Graham’s death was less about her brother’s heart than about Cheryl — the woman with whom both men had chosen to share it.
A wonderful start
Terry Cottle and Cheryl Sweat were married in May 1989. At first, things seemed wonderful. Terry adopted Cheryl’s two sons, Christopher and Timmy. A daughter, Jessica, was born. Cottle worked while his new wife studied for her nursing degree.
In late 1994, the couple graduated from a single-wide trailer to a new doublewide in Moncks Corner, S.C.
On March 15, 1995, they got into a huge argument. Cheryl told Terry that she couldn’t stay married to a man who made less money than she did. By morning, they had agreed that Cottle should leave.
As he prepared to depart, Cottle went into the bathroom. There was a gunshot.
On March 20, after four days in the trauma unit at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, Cheryl agreed to take Terry off life support and donate his organs.
About 60 miles to the southwest, 57-year-old Sonny Graham got the call he had been waiting more than a year for.
Waiting for a donor
In 1994, Remus T. “Sonny” Graham contracted a virus that damaged his heart muscle. About 5 p.m. March 20, Graham learned that a heart had become available. Cottle’s was close to a perfect match.
Three years later, he and his wife met Cheryl Cottle for dinner at a restaurant in Charleston. Graham couldn’t keep his eyes off the 30-year-old widow. “I fell in love with Cheryl the first time we met,” he would later confess in a letter.
The feeling was apparently not mutual — at least, not at first. That April, Cheryl married husband No. 3, George Watkins. Sonny Graham gave away the bride.
Both couples later separated, and shortly after a judge declared the Grahams’ 38-year marriage over, in October 2001, Cheryl and Graham moved into a mobile home. The domestic bliss did not last long.
In May 2002, Cheryl left — and Graham promptly sued, accusing her of reneging on some loans and refusing to return a diamond ring. She alleged in a counterclaim that when she told Graham their relationship wasn’t going to work out, he “became more possessive” and threatened her.
In the midst of the court case, she married again. Husband No. 4, John B. Johnson Jr., was a corrections officer at a Georgia prison. But within a year, that marriage too began to crumble. By the time their divorce was final in August 2004, Johnson said, Cheryl was already wearing Graham’s ring.
They married Dec. 8, 2004.
Cheryl Graham did not respond to repeated requests seeking comment. But those who know her say she did not act like a grieving widow.
Family members noticed that shortly after Graham’s death, she posted a man’s photo on her MySpace page identifying him as her “new boyfriend.” A flirtatious message on the man’s Web page, from her account, was dated March 26, six days before Graham’s death.
The coroner ruled Graham’s death a suicide; authorities still haven’t closed the case.
