Dateline: Who was Kate Waring and what happened to her? Disturbing details of the 2009 homicide, revisited

Dateline Season 3 Episode 18, titled Strangers on a Train, followed the disappearance of Kate Waring and how eventually her gruesome murder case was solved. The official synopsis of the show mentions,

“When beautiful twenty-eight year old Kate Waring mysteriously disappears after an encounter on a train, her family hires detectives to investigate. The Waring family investigators fear their chief suspect might flee and must find a way to keep tabs on them.”

Born on May 5, 1981, Kate was a good-humored person who loved nature. While she loved to travel to different places and explore them, in 2009, she came back to Charleston, her birthplace, to get re-enrolled in college. However, her return proved fatal for her, as she went missing while taking care of the house as her parents were away.

Kate’s family filed a missing person’s report on June 15, 2009, and eventually the mystery of her disappearance was solved. Let us now explore Kate Waring’s case in detail as shown in Dateline.

Kate Waring suddenly disappeared from her home as shown in Dateline

After Kate’s parents did not hear from her for a few days while they were vacationing, they got worried. After they came back, they could not find their daughter at home or anywhere nearby, which led them to file a missing person’s report. However, initially, the police could not find anything relevant to the case that would point them to a suspect.

The possibility of Kate going out of town without telling anyone was ruled out, as too many of her personal belongings were at home. After talking with her parents, investigators came to know about Kate’s friend Ethan Mack, with whom she had dinner before she went missing.

Ethan was a good and long-time friend of Kate, and he was interviewed at his home in Johns Island. He told the police that he did have dinner with Kate on June 12, 2009, and his fiancée, Heather Kamp, was also with them. However, after having dinner together, they dropped her home and went back.

Ethan’s interview did not leave any further open clues to follow through, and the investigation slowed down. Frustrated with the way things were shaping up, Kate’s parents took matters into their own hands and hired Andrew Savage III, an attorney who worked with a group of qualified people to solve Kate’s murder.

Ethan and Heather murdered Kate as shown in Dateline

As the attorney hired by Kate’s parents delved deeper into the case, Ethan and Heather came up as primary suspects, as their statement to the police did not match with their phone records. It was eventually revealed in the Dateline episode that Heather had a history of criminal activities, which included fraudulent medical practice without any valid medical degree and assault, for which she was arrested in February 2009.

As Ethan and Heather realized that the investigators were closing in on them, they admitted to the Charleston police that they were stealing from Kate. However, when Kate told them that she would contact their parents if they did not pay back, Ethan got angry.

Heather further informed the police that on June 12, 2009, after they had dinner, all three of them went back to Ethan's apartment and eventually he hit her with a wine bottle and killed her by drowning her in the bathtub. She also told them where to find the remains of Kate, and the police unearthed her body from that location.

As the two were charged with Kate’s murder, Ethan and Heather were sentenced to 25 and 39 years of jail time, respectively.

Dateline can be streamed on Peacock.

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