For an entire year an Army medic was living carefree in Hawaii while his caged lover faced the music for slashing the medic’s wife to death.
That changed Wednesday night when the feds swarmed the 36-year-old widower’s Honolulu flat to capture the man, who authorities say masterminded the plan to off his wife.
Now Sgt. Mike Walker joins Ailsa “Lisa” Jackson, 25, in facing justice for allegedly plotting an end to his 38-year-old wife, Catherine Walker, back on Nov. 15 of last year. He has pleaded not guilty in federal court.
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First came the lust. Then, authorities allege, murder.
At some point in the couple’s 11-year marriage, Mike Walker strayed.
Sources told Hawaii News Now that Walker had been cheating on his wife with “other women and men” and that the couple failed to expand their family despite borrowing “money from family to undergo in vitro fertilization.”
Jackson, a civilian who had been staying with relatives who were military personnel based on the island, began exchanging romantic missives with Walker. The emails and texts were laden with hot and heavy innuendo, yet peppered with sinister directives that authorities believe meant to take out the one woman that was preventing the pair from being together.
According to the federal indictment, Walker was keen on dodging divorce (his wife was a devout Mormon). Instead, his “greatest desire” was “to have his wife gone.”
The medic, who military officials confirmed had been posted at Tripler Army Medical Center since July 2013, floated the idea of staging her demise by making “it look like a burglary,” according to the indictment.
Ailsa Jackson apparently wanted to know how bloodthirsty Walker truly was. In an an email to her lover on Sept. 20, 2014, Jackson wrote that she needed to know “how serious you are about what we talked about.”
Walker replied: “I’m dead serious,” the papers say.
A day later, according to the indictment, Jackson followed up with a question via text about the end game, asking, “Why do you want your biggest desire to happen.”
The philandering husband allegedly wrote back, “Just not something I want to answer in a text or over the phone.”
The two apparently met and solidified the plans.
Two weeks later, the charges paint Walker as a horny dog ready to explode, when he writes to Jackson, “I want you so bad… If only someone was out of the way!”
Was that someone Cathy Walker?
The pair carried on this teasing death talk some more. On Nov. 3, 2014, according to the indictment, they graduated to a game plan. “We need to go over the details,” Jackson allegedly wrote in an email. “At least what will happen before and after…I’m trying to be good. The anticipations is exhausting. The thrills is faltering. I’m growing impatience, tired and hungry for action.”
She went to say that she would be ready to move when Walker said so, according to the indictment. “I will not act until you need my help,” she wrote. “Until your permission is given.”
Walker cryptically gave the go-ahead: “…you have my permission,” he allegedly wrote in an email response. “The sooner the better.”
Over a week later, Walker put on the charm to his girl on the side.
“I need you!!! I want you,” he texted, according to the indictment. “I need my desire taken care of soon. I’ll go crazy!”
Apparently Walker’s wife was set to be executed earlier than Nov. 15, but Jackson was dealing with what she called “an access problem.”
The issue seemed to be resolved after Walker advised his lover and wife’s alleged assassin that he would leave “instructions as to how she would know which method of entry” would work to do the deed, according to the indictment.
The night chosen was especially good, the papers say, because it gave Walker an alibi: He would be on the clock at the hospital.
Jackson proceeded to go forward, allegedly using the instructions and a key left in gravel “near the rear of the house,” located on the Aliamanu Military Reservation. Just after midnight, according to the indictment, Jackson “grabbed a knife from the kitchen,” hustled upstairs, where Cathy Walker was sleeping, and “stabbed her multiple times,” in the neck and gut, “killing her.”
Walker appeared before a federal judge and pleaded not guilty before being remanded into custody. Jackson had been arrested on first-degree murder charges in Fort Wayne, Ind., in April and moved to Honolulu, where she’s been awaiting a December trial.
Walker’s attorney, Birney B. Bervar, told The Daily Beast that his client’s arrest was directly pinned to a plea deal Jackson apparently made. “She’s made statements to authorities that have resulted in charges to my client,” he said, adding that Walker, whom he only just met two hours before the hearing, was “distressed.”
One member of Walker’s family who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity said the relatives were shocked. “We don’t bring it up,” the family member said. “Cathy was beautiful, and I don’t know what was going on in his head.”
Since his wife’s murder, Walker has apparently kept quiet. “My whole family, we don’t discuss it,” the relative said, adding that Walker’s father told family members, “‘Don’t ever ask me about it, and if you ever ask me about it I won’t answer.’”
The source went on to say that Mike and Cathy Walker had lived like hermits in Hawaii. “They went off to Hawaii and they were Mormon. They lived in a whole other universe,” the relative said. “They were not really part of this family.”
Cathy Walker’s legacy lives on in the memory of friends who remember the woman as “the kindest, nicest, sweetest, giving, funny, caring woman,” according to her friend Nikita Long, and “an angel on earth” according to another pal, Zac Pennebaker.
Her uncle Bill Chapman wrote that his niece may have been a “devout Mormon,” but her best friend Jessica “was Jewish.” “The point here is that Cathy cared about and accepted everyone for who they were regardless of what they believed or thought.”
That Jessica is likely Jessica Benson, who added her own online note about how she and Cathy Walker shared over three decades of “countless sleepovers” and “never stopped sharing everything.” She even remembered fondly a time when her friend scarred her. “I still have the scar on my pinky when she burned me with a candy apple,” Benson wrote.
Her friend Kate Garner said she will “miss her beautiful smile and her soft sweet voice.”
For Amyjean Lamento, it was Cathy Walker’s gutsiness. Lamento was supposed to visit Cathy in Hawaii this past summer. The last time they met, the two hugged and as they parted, Lamento wrote, Walker “turned and had this look like she had so much more she wanted to say…”
Lamento told her “‘it’s ok’ and that we will talk soon and see each other during the summer. I love her so much and will miss her more than anyone could ever know.”
