She thought he might be cheating—what she found out was far more disturbing.
When Catherine Herring’s husband Mason brought her breakfast in bed one day in April 2022, she wanted to believe it was a romantic gesture. The pair had been fighting—they were currently living apart at his request—but were in marriage counseling, hoping to work things out.
She had recently learned that she was pregnant with their third child, and their counselor suggested spending spring break together to process. They had spent the last week snuggled up on the couch, watching movies and saying “I love you,” Herring said. So when the breakfast tray came in, she wanted to assume the best. But Herring says she sensed something was off. Along with a biscuit, her husband brought her a tall glass of water that he urged her to finish, telling her she needed to hydrate more for the pregnancy. As the minutes went on, he became more and more forceful—almost angry—pushing her to finish the water before he left for the office. “He starts urging me, like, ‘Chug it, I need to go,’ and he kind of had anger in his voice,” she told The Daily Beast. “All of a sudden I was like, ‘Something weird is going on,’” she added. “And that’s when I looked down into the cup and saw that the water wasn’t clear.” What Herring found in that cup would catapult her and her now-estranged husband into the headlines and raise questions about how men and women are treated underlaws. But the full story of how she uncovered her husband’s secret—how she collected evidence and mounted a case right under his nose—is even more breathtaking than court documents and previous news coverage suggest.Herring, 39, was born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana and attended college in Texas, where she met her future husband through mutual friends in his law school class. The two got married in 2010 and moved into a quiet, verdant Houston neighborhood, where they soon had two children. Mason established a successful personal injury law firm while Herring stepped down from her job as a nonprofit executive to raise the kids, working as a grant writer on the side. A life-long painter, Herring also ran a small business selling hand-painted stationery: cards and gift tags emblazoned with cheery watercolor flowers and colorful pumpkins. On her business Instagram she posted photos of her husband and kids, the four of them forming the perfect picture of a happy, well-adjusted family. “I always knew you’d be a great Dad,” she wrote in one post, alongside a photo from their first month of dating. “What I didn’t know then… was how special it would be to see how much our kids ADORE you … We are grateful for everything you do for us and hope you have a wonderful Father’s Day!!!” But in February 2022, after more than a decade of marriage, Herring says, her husband suddenly informed her he wanted a separation. She had recently caught him lying about his whereabouts and texting a former female colleague with whom he claimed to have cut contact, she later told police officers. When she confronted him about the situation, she told The Daily Beast, he told her he needed to work on himself and moved out. “He just started acting really weird and wouldn’t tell me what was going on,” she recalled. Still, Herring thought he was committed to salvaging the marriage. He was unhappy about the pregnancy—in a personal statement filed in their divorce case, Herring says he told her he “wanted a divorce and would look like a jerk for leaving me when I was pregnant”—but agreed to spend spring break with her and the kids. Despite their issues, she said, she believed they would make it work.About 30 minutes after Mason left for work that day, Herring began having painful stomach cramps and explosive diarrhea, according to an indictment filed by the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. On her third trip to the bathroom, she realized she was bleeding heavily from her vagina, like she had her period. Fearing she had been poisoned, Herring rushed to the emergency room, where the urine sample she gave was almost black, she told later police. She kept bleeding even after she left the hospital that night. Unnerved, Herring called her mother and asked her to stay with her, saying she was having pregnancy complications but never revealing her true fear: that her husband was behind her medical crisis. “I just wanted desperately to be wrong,” she told The Daily Beast. “I wanted there to be another explanation, because this is your husband who you love and adore and have children with.” “But my instinct was, ‘Something’s wrong, I need to protect myself,’” she added. “And I just need to make sure he doesn’t know I’m onto him. Because I really felt like that was the only way I could collect evidence.”When Herring returned home from the hospital, her husband continued plying her with more drinks, all of them containing an “unknown substance,” according to the indictment. She did not drink any more of the beverages, but stashed the cups and bottles away for safekeeping. On March 21, she brought them all to a private investigator she had hired a week before her hospitalization in hopes of figuring out why her husband had suddenly requested a separation. “I walked into the PI’s office and I said, ‘Something weird is going on,’” she said. “And he just snapped into action.” The PI, a former state tax fraud investigator named John Moritz, sent the containers to a lab for testing. While they waited for the results, and her husband went on vacation, Moritz taught Herring about collecting evidence. They installed video cameras on her doorbell, along the exterior of the house, even in the air ducts of the kitchen. Moritz urged her not to be alone with her husband; to keep friends and family around whenever he was in the house. As soon as Mason returned from vacation, so did the drinks. He handed one of them to her in front of two friends she had invited over for a “meeting,” even though she had already had two beverages in front of her. Both friends observed the familiar “unknown substance” floating in the one he brought, she told police. The cameras in front of the house also turned up something suspicious. On April 24, Mason cleaned out his truck and brought the trash bags to the curb—something Herring dryly told police was “out of character… because he does not do chores around the house.” When she looked through the bags, she found something that made her shudder: a blister pack of Cyrux, a generic version of misoprostol, the drug most commonly used to induce an abortion. Two days later, the cameras in her kitchen air ducts caught Mason taking out a plastic baggie full of white powder, removing the substance, and putting it into her drink. She had a friend with her that night, to avoid being alone with him, she said. “But he just stood in the kitchen, had a whole conversation with us, and then left for the night as if nothing had gone on.”Texas has some of the strictest abortion laws in the United States, many of them on the books even before the U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning. A 2021 law allows anyone in the state to sue someone they suspect of performing or “abetting” an abortion after six weeks’ gestation. Since the fall ofWhile the law allows for exceptions for life-threatening medical emergencies, doctors worry about performing abortions in such cases, for fear of losing their medical license or going to jail. More than 20 women have sued the state of Texas, claiming doctors denied them an abortion during life- or health-threatening pregnancies. Attorney General Ken Paxton has made it clear that prosecuting abortions is a priority. He personally vowed to prosecute any doctor who performed on abortion on a 31-year-old woman who asked the state to let her terminate her high-risk pregnancy last year, and later convinced the state Supreme Court to block her from receiving the procedure, forcing her to travel out of state. Paxton has targeted abortion pills like misoprostol, strongly cautioning manufacturers and major pharmacies not to distribute the drugs in Texas. Last February, he sued the Department of Health and Human Services for directing pharmacies to continue supplying the drugs for other conditions like autoimmune disorders. He declared that Texas had “dutifully passed laws to protect the unborn,” and that the state was “not going to back down just because unelected bureaucrats in Washington want to create illegal, extremist federal policies.” But when Herring told Houston Police that she believed her husband was trying to force an abortion pill on her against her will, it took nearly a month for an arrest. She felt more encouraged after speaking with then-District Attorney Anthony Osso, who seemed eager to prosecute, she said. He gave interviews to local media about the arrest—the first in Harris County under a 2017 “felony assault to induce abortion” statute—and called her husband’s actions “a pretty heinous act.” But a few months later, the DA’s office told Herring that Osso would no longer be on the case because he was leaving for the private sector—specifically, for Cogdell Law, the firm defending her husband. The move struck Herring as odd. “He was the face of the case, he was the one speaking to the media about it just a few months before,” she said. “, ‘That seems weird.’” Osso said in an email that he and Cogdell “always kept discussions on the case separate from any discussions of working together,” and that he “never made any substantive decisions about the case after legislature is very caught up in telling women what to do with their bodies, and here is a man who’s doing the same thing but way worse—and not his own body—and it feels like a slap on the wrist,” he said. Herring is still angry with the sentence her ex-husband received, but lately she has started turning her attention to more hopeful avenues. “All I can do is speak up for victims of domestic violence and call out injustice, and I’m happy to lend my voice if I can,” she said. “I can’t change anything now, but I just hope that no one should ever have to go through this again.”
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