Trying to unravel woman’s mystery
After bones were found in wall of house, questions about her remain
The question remains unanswered: Are the human bones found in the wall of Mary Cerruti’s home in the Heights actually hers?
She’d disappeared sometime in 2015, and the Houston Police Department sent out a missing person notice shortly after a bank foreclosed on her home that September.
Theories abounded among concerned neighbors about what might have befallen the eccentric 61-year-old who had spent eight years as a college student and finally ended up working in a coffee store. Had she been killed, or locked away in a mental institution? The internet buzzes with sometime ghoulish speculation, in part because Cerruti had been a determined opponent of a massive, upscale apartment complex that
had enveloped her neighborhood and surrounded her 1930s bungalow on Allston Street.
Medical examiners are still doing the forensics. Police remain mum about the extent of their 2015 search of the home.
What had been an obscure missing person’s case now swirls with unknowns — thanks to the discovery made March 4 by new tenants in her modest bungalow.
It’s easy to obsess over what could have happened to Mary. The possibility that she died where she lived has baffled neighbors, friends and extended family.
“This has hit me kind of hard, thinking about what happened to her,” said Joy Stewart, who employed Mary at House of Coffee Beans more than 30 years ago.
It’s harder still to pull together a detailed narrative of her life. Her parents died early. She married at least twice. She battled financial and health issues, as she held odd jobs along the way. Some people knew her only for a time.
Those close to her are guarded. A few fear she will be defined as a crazy cat lady because dead cats were found inside her home.
The bits of information that have surfaced don’t provide clues to how she might have died.
But they do offer a glimpse of how she lived.
Mary was born Mary Wootton Stewart on June 12, 1954, in Kingsville, a small city in South Texas with ranching roots, not far from Corpus Christi.
Her father, S. Boyd Stewart, chaired the English department and directed the arts and sciences division for what is now Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Her mother, Elsie Ruth Davis Stewart, participated in the Faculty Wives Club.
Neither lived to see their only child turn 20. When Mary was 13, her mother fell ill at home and suddenly died, according to news reports. Mary’s father died when she was 19 and in her second year at the University of Houston. He had a heart condition, recalled Nancy Stewart Stoddard, an elder cousin of Mary’s.
Stoddard, who lives in Amarillo, had few memories of time spent with Mary and her parents. She recalled her aunt’s slacks. Her uncle’s pipe. But she and her cousin had lost track of each other. When she recently embarked on a family genealogy project, she found the missing person poster online.
Stoddard had looked forward to reconnecting. Instead, she provided DNA for the police investigation. Analysis could take weeks.
In the meantime, Stoddard hopes anyone with relevant information will contact authorities. She also wants people to tell her more about her cousin, to fill in the missing years.
Mary spent eight years studying at the University of Houston but never earned a degree.
She moved among majors: biology, psychology, history.
In 1979, toward the end of her enrollment, 24-yearold Mary wed 31-year-old David Cerruti, whom she had met through mutual friends.
The Cerrutis listed their address as a two-story, 1920s home on Fargo Street. It sat on the fringe of Montrose, an area that attracted artsy, bohemian types. Mary had inherited the ramshackle place from her grandmother, said Stewart, who employed her at the coffee store. Water didn’t run in the kitchen sink.
Mary was remarkably thin in those days, with long, dark hair, remembered Stewart. She was quirky and funny and had a talent for photography. She also could be distant, with good days followed by bad ones.
Mike Mulloy, who later bought the store, remembered Mary as intelligent and ready to move on from the coffee shop.
“She just drifted away,” he said.
He raised a hand to his face in shock when he heard the news of what followed.
The same year the Cerrutis married, the Texas Junk Co. opened nearby. The shop became a local mainstay, known for eclectic finds, until it closed last year.
Mary befriended the Junk Co.’s owner, Bob Novotney. He recalled how she would bring fashionable books to his store to exchange for credit. How he would sometimes stop by her house, and she would grind beans to make coffee.
It was the foundation of a friendship on which Mary could depend. Novotney would take her to get injections to treat worsening migraines. He would help fix a leak in her attic. Once, when she wouldn’t open the door, he threatened to call the police.
Novotney saw Mary when he could. In later years, that meant going over for tea in the Heights — at the home at 610 Allston St., where she lived until she disappeared.
There, Novotney saw her health deteriorate. Her hands trembled. Her muscles lost mass.
Those who knew her mentioned a variety of ailments, including suicidal tendencies, lupus and the migraines.
“She was a little bit troubled,” he said. “That’s as far as I’ll go. She was troubled.”
Mary by then had hung tapestries to keep out peering eyes, Novotney said. The house was dirty. Her possessions numbered fewer and fewer. When she disappeared, he figured she would turn up — maybe in Utah, which she loved, or St. John in the Virgin Islands, where she had lived for a time with her husband.
Here are some of the items Mary owned at the end of 1990, when she and David divorced: a drafting table. An Eames chair. A typewriter.
Six weeks later, she married Roy Law Elliott.
The whirlwind wedding occurred on Valentine’s Day, 1991. Mary became Elliott’s sixth wife, he said. (He married the first four days after he met her.) It did not last.
Elliott moved out by the end of the next month, according to court documents. Contacted recently, he had few kind remarks.
And yet, after hearing that Mary had disappeared, Elliott went by her abandoned house in the Heights. He looked inside. He saw her photo equipment. He saw dead cats. Her mail had started piling up when she went missing, but the house didn’t look ransacked.
“I hate to see anything like that happen to anybody,” he said.
Mary kept moving forward. She had been living in a smaller home on Fargo Street. (As the story goes, a hoarder previously owned it.) It stood a few doors down from the larger one that had belonged to her grandmother, which she’d sold.
Summer of 1991, Mary bought back the bigger home. Fall of 1991, she started a pet care-taking business. Spring of 1992, she learned she owed $22,003.52 to the IRS — and then she paid it back.
There was another romance, too, one with Ellsworth Milburn, a founder of Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.
Milburn had been interested in a home Mary managed, said Milburn’s colleague, Richard Lavenda. One thing led to another, and a relationship blossomed. They lived together in the big Fargo home.
The pairing puzzled Lavenda. How could this woman, who seemed constantly sick, be Milburn’s match?
But Milburn supported Mary, perhaps even after the romance ended in 1997. His daughter, Lauren Remkes, said she thought it sweet how he had cared for her. (He died in 2007.)
Mary had shown her affection with gifts. To Lavenda: a rosemary plant. To Remkes: wire sculptures of a motorcycle, a bike. To Remkes’ children: a stuffed cat dressed up like a witch, ready to trick-ortreat.
Mary, after all, loved Halloween and Day of the Dead.
Mary’s love of the October celebrations stood clear to the owners of Casa Ramirez, a Mexican folk art store in the Heights, on the now-trendy 19th Street.
Mary worked in the store when they needed extra help, owner Macario Ramirez said. She appreciated the unusual, handcrafted items. And she joined in for in its annual Day of the Dead celebration.
Ramirez and his wife worried about Mary. Like Novotney, they helped with her health needs, taking her to get medicines.
Mary’s financial issues worsened over the years. Notice of the suit to foreclose on her house arrived in March 2015, around when she had last been seen. Someone signed illegibly in receipt of that document.
With Mary unreachable, her home sold at a foreclosure auction on Nov. 3, 2015. It went for $261,000 at 1:32 p.m. The new owner painted it blue, and today, the house is listed again for lease or sale.
The giant apartment complex Mary had fought against surrounds the house. She hadn’t been bashful about how much she hated it.
Among those who heard her complaints was Robert Anderson, who did Mary’s yard work.
In those later years, Mary went longer periods without hiring him, Anderson said. Spider webs accumulated. Then she stopped calling. But Anderson kept checking on her — until the day a neighbor told him she had vanished.
“She was a little bit troubled. That’s as far as I’ll go. She was troubled.” Bob Novotney, owner of Texas Junk Co. and a friend of Cerruti’s