Author: Wild | Wild About Trial
In the quiet lakeside town of Holland, Michigan — where windmills turn and everything is supposed to smell like tulips and virtue — Katie Lee broke a promise that never should’ve been made. On the eve of her son’s 18th birthday, she ended his life — and whatever was left of hers along with it.
Lee stood before the judge this week and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, torture, and assaulting the police officers who had to face her that night. Her trial was supposed to begin on October 28. It won’t. There will be no courtroom theatrics, no jury gasps, no “not guilty” fantasies. Instead, there will be a sentence — 60 to 90 years — a lifetime and then some, behind cold iron and colder stares.
The night of February 21 was supposed to be just another frozen Michigan Friday. But inside the Bay Pointe Apartments, things went horribly wrong. Police arrived to find Lee armed with a knife, defiant and unreachable. When they finally subdued her, they found her son, Austin Dean Pikaart, dead inside. The autopsy said what the scene already screamed: a deep wound to the neck. Homicide.
But it’s the 911 call that makes your stomach twist. In her own voice, Lee told the dispatcher that her son “wouldn’t stop breathing.” She said things “got way out of hand.” Said she’d made him a promise — and kept it.
Her son was turning 18 the next morning. He didn’t want to. Lee said they’d both taken pills — Tylenol PM, hydroxyzine, whatever cocktail of sleep and sorrow they thought would do the job. When it didn’t, she used the knife. Three cuts — his throat and arm. She told the dispatcher he begged her not to call for help.
The police arrived moments later. You can hear it in the recording — the final, doomed instruction: “Drop the knife.”
Katie Lee didn’t just kill her son that night. She killed the line between mercy and madness, love and horror — and left the rest of us to stare at what happens when that line disappears.
She’ll be sentenced January 19.
