Sonny got a heart transplant from a suicide victim… then he married his donor’s widow and took his own life, too. Now questions are being asked over whether the ‘cursed’ heart was to blame

For retired US Air Force veteran Sonny Graham, the overcast spring day in 2008 had begun like any other.

At about 7.30am, he had gone to his local store in Vidalia, Georgia, to buy supplies for his landscaping business and, on returning home, made himself a coffee and took it out to his shed.

But after placing the mug on a table next to him, Sonny shot himself dead.

For his family, their shock and grief were compounded by disbelief that he had chosen to end his life in the same way as 33-year-old Terry Cottle – the man whose suicide 13 years earlier had given Sonny a new chance of life.

Suffering from a diseased and enlarged heart as a result of a viral infection, Sonny received a transplant from Terry, whose family had agreed to his organs being donated after his death.

Sonny had been immensely grateful. ‘He said he was very blessed and lucky to have such a young heart,’ Marcy Beach, his former work colleague remembers. But despite this, he had followed Terry to his grave in exactly the same manner.

More extraordinary still, this was not the only way in which his life would mirror his donor’s. For, just two years after the transplant, he had sought out and fallen in love with Terry’s widow Cheryl, turning his back on his 38-year marriage to be with a woman he had known for only a few months.

What made Sonny take such actions? Was the heart transplanted into him somehow cursed – carrying with it Terry’s memories and character traits and driving him to end his life in the same way? Those were the questions asked by millions of TikTok viewers after Terry’s daughter Tiffany posted a video about the men’s shared fate in 2023. Now the story is the subject of Heart, a fascinating eight-part series available on Apple Podcasts.

Drawing on moving interviews with the men’s families, it considers whether an organ like the heart really can carry aspects of our personalities.

When the world’s first heart transplant was carried out in 1967 – a medical milestone which made surgeon Christiaan Barnard a global star – the wife of his patient Louis Washkansky is said to have tried to discourage him from having the operation. She was worried that, with a new heart, he wouldn’t love her any more.

In the following years, there were many claims made about heart transplants ‘transforming’ their recipients. One concerned a female schoolteacher who received a male heart and turned into ‘a beer-chugging, cigar-smoking, pro-wrestling fanatic’.

Another recipient, a lesbian activist, supposedly became heterosexual and, suddenly repelled by the smell of meat, stopped eating her favourite McDonald’s hamburgers. Her donor was a heterosexual vegan.

Far-fetched though these stories sound, there are convincing theories as to the mechanisms which might be at play.

Conventional science holds that memories are stored in the brain’s nerve cells, or neurons. But Dr Thomas Verny, a psychiatrist, author and former Harvard University lecturer, believes other cells in the body may have ‘memories’ of their own.

‘The differences between neurons and other cells in the body are really not that great, so whatever the neurons can do, the rest of the cells can do too,’ he says.

In his book The Embodied Mind, which explores the relationship between bodily processes and psychological experience, he describes how, in 2007, doctors examining a French civil servant, 44, discovered that most of the space inside his skull was occupied by fluid, leaving a comparatively thin layer of brain tissue. Yet he was married, had two children and held down a job.

How, Dr Verny wondered, could someone with so little brain tissue function so well?

He came to believe that cells throughout the body might act as a kind of biological backup system, storing information and contributing to memory and consciousness.

If any of this is true, might Terry Cottle’s heart have ‘remembered’ his feelings for Cheryl and could this explain the speed with which Sonny Graham fell for her as well?

A respected figure in the community of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, which lies about 130 miles east of Vidalia, Sonny had a big personality. Until he contracted the viral infection that left his heart dangerously enlarged, he had been a strapping fellow who loved hunting and fishing. He was also happily married with two children.

But following his transplant, Sonny decided that he would like to get in touch with the family of the donor who had made his second chance at life possible.

In January 1997, less than two years after his surgery, he and his wife Elaine arranged to meet Cheryl at a restaurant in Charleston, not far from the home she and Terry had shared in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.

Sonny later described the electricity of that first encounter. ‘She gave me that big smile, and I felt like I had known her for years,’ he said.

In the podcast, Sonny’s granddaughter Lauren dismisses this as ‘just an older man being captivated by a younger woman’.

But might there have been more at play? Could the heart now beating in Sonny’s chest have somehow been passing on echoes of Terry’s feelings for Cheryl? And if so, might this have initially blinded him to what both families regarded as her highly troubling behaviour?

In the years since her husbands’ suicides, Cheryl has refused to give interviews and did not reply to an invitation by the podcast’s producers to do so.

But one thing is clear: the woman described by one newspaper reporter as ‘a petite beauty with auburn hair and hazel eyes’ has certainly had an unusual marital history. Her marriage to Sonny was her fifth; and public records suggest that, after he died, she married at least once, possibly twice, again.

Her first marriage was in 1985, when she was 18. She and her husband had two sons but, by 1988, the marriage had been annulled. That year she met Terry Cottle, who had started working for her father’s building firm in South Carolina. Then 27, Terry was married – to his high school sweetheart Tammy, with whom he had two daughters, Sheree and Tiffany.

Terry appears to have fallen for Cheryl extremely quickly, marrying her in May 1989 – just nine days after his divorce from Tammy.

At first, they seemed happy. Although Terry had left school without any qualifications, he took whatever jobs he could find, while Cheryl trained to become a nurse. He adopted her two boys from her previous marriage and they went on to have a daughter together.

But then, according to Terry’s sister Tammy, Cheryl berated him for not earning enough. ‘Cheryl was just never happy,’ she says. ‘He told me he was out mowing the lawn one time and she came out on the porch and said: “That’s all you’re going to be able to do the rest of your life, mow lawns.” That broke him.’

But even before he met Cheryl, Terry had suffered depression, exacerbated by losing his mother to cancer when he was just 16 and then the death of his best friend a few years later.

On March 16, 1995, he went into the bathroom of their home and shot himself with a revolver.

He did not die immediately but was in hospital for four days until his family reluctantly agreed to have his life-support machine switched off and his organs were donated to help others.

Following Sonny’s heart transplant, those around him noticed changes in his behaviour. They ranged from the trivial – a newly developed taste for hotdogs, Terry’s favourite food – to the more dramatic. Sonny ‘wasn’t the charismatic person he once was’, says his colleague Marcy Beach, adding that the changes were even more noticeable when Cheryl came on the scene. ‘Sonny cowered down to her,’ she says. ‘Something I’d never seen him do with anyone before.’

Whatever attracted Sonny to Cheryl, it seems to have been somewhat one-sided at first. During the next seven years, Cheryl married and divorced two other men, with one of whom she had another son. But all the while, she continued her relationship with Sonny.

‘It was weird,’ says Terry’s sister Tammy. ‘Did she ever think about making love with Sonny, and that being Terry’s heart?’

For Sonny, his new relationship meant losing much that was dear to him. In 1999, his daughter Michelle found out they were having an affair and threatened to tell her mother unless he did.

Forced to come clean, he destroyed not only his marriage – which ended in divorce two years later – but also his relationship with Michelle. She sent him a letter saying she wanted nothing further to do with him. ‘My real father died in March 1995,’ she wrote, referring to the date of his transplant.

By December 2004, when Sonny and Cheryl married, his relatives had long felt that their worst fears about the relationship were being realised.

‘She loved to go through some money,’ says his granddaughter Lauren. ‘She always had to have a newer, nicer car. She always wore the best clothes.’

Sonny’s friend Carl Drury agrees: ‘He had some money and I’m sure he lost almost all of it because he kept wasting it on her. Sonny bought her anything he thought would please her.’ But in the months leading up to his death, Sonny had other worries. He had suffered a recurrence of the skin cancer he had been diagnosed with several years previously, and he was also convinced that Cheryl was having an affair.

All in all, there seemed to be plenty of reasons why, on April 1, in 2008, Sonny took his own life.

But both the Cottle and Graham families dismiss the idea that the two men’s shared heart somehow doomed Sonny to suffer Terry’s fate. ‘I do not believe that’s possible,’ says Sonny’s son Gray. While Terry’s eldest daughter Sheree Huebner goes further, describing the idea as ‘goofy’.

And they are backed by mainstream scientists, including Dr Basil Baccouche, whose book The End Of Death chronicles the history of heart transplantation.

He points out that the immunosuppressant drugs which early patients had to take were ‘toxic’ and the consequences could be ‘terrifying’, resulting in hallucinations and persecutory delusions.

‘Even today, many immunosuppressants that recipients take after surgery do have a side-effect of depression or anxiety,’ he says.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation concluded that Sonny had committed suicide – a ruling which was upheld two years later when his family asked for the case to be reopened.

But those closest to Sonny, including his son Gray, still refuse to believe that he took his own life. ‘My dad would always say that if somebody told me that he had killed himself, I should have it investigated. “There’s nothing worth killing yourself over”, he said.’

Marcy Beach also remembers Sonny, a Baptist, saying that suicide was ‘the one unforgivable sin. He would tell me that if you do that to yourself, you’ll never go through the pearly gates.’

But is there a way of reconciling the forensic evidence of suicide with the family’s conviction that the Sonny Graham they knew before his transplant would never have taken that final step?

Believers in the theory of ‘cellular memory’ might argue that there is – raising the chilling possibility that the heart which extended Sonny’s life also drove him to end it.