BANFIELD: Those are the kinds of videos we all take with our kids. That`s Cindy Seratte`s niece, Crystal McDowell, in better times with her children.
And Aunt Cindy joins me live now from Houston. Aunt Cindy, you know, we look at those videos and Crystal isn`t just a photograph anymore or a name.
She`s a real personality and she seemed like such a spitfire. We didn`t get the sense she was under threat, that she was scared. We never got the
sense that she feared Steve in the way that Steve has confessed to having done what he did to her, if ,in fact, the confession is true.
Did you ever get the sense that Crystal felt that Steve threatened her in any way?
CINDY SERATTE, CRYSTAL`S AUNT: He did. We`ve talked about their family life on numerous occasions. Doing her hair, you know how that goes, you
talk about everything. And in the past, she`s made a few remarks about how he would kill her, you know, if she left and how he wanted, you know, their
life to be different and how she wanted just to make his life peaceful and maybe he could find somebody and go on.
And I really honestly just blew it off. I thought, you know, everybody says sometimes things they don`t mean, and so I really didn`t take it for
anything that it was worth.
And then I guess what`s really terrible is about, must have been about, like, August the 9th was, like, the last time that I did her hair in the
salon. And she was telling me about, you know, the new boyfriend that she had and that she was happy and that she was moving forward and telling a
little bit about the house and what she had done to it. And basically, she just gave me the phone and was showing me pictures of Paul, the guy that
she`s with, and his little girl.
And there was some -- there were several hair stylists in the salon at the time and they were younger, so I took the phone from her and took it over
there to basically see if they had known who the man was, and she grabbed the phone really fast and basically yelled in the salon, No, Aunt Cindy, he
will kill me. I need to keep this private.
And of course, I had never seen fear until that day and I was -- I feel bad. I mean, I look back on it and that`s all I -- I just see is her face.
She was just full of fear. And then everybody started questioning her and putting their two cents in. And then I didn`t see her again for about a
week to cut the kids` hair, and I didn`t hear from her after that. So yes, he has.
