PORTERDALE, Ga. (Court TV) — A woman convicted of murdering, dismembering and burning a 19-year-old victim joked in jail calls the night before her sentencing that the prosecution had unleashed a “monster.”
A jury took less than an hour to convict Katelyn Goble, 30, of murder, felony murder, assault and other charges on Monday in the death of 19-year-old Morgan Bauer. Goble returned to court on Tuesday for sentencing, where her attorney pleaded for mercy and a chance for parole.
Katelyn Goble appears in court for sentencing on Sept. 1, 2026. (Court TV)
“Right now, the world sees her as a devil,” Goble’s attorney said. “But there’s people that know her as someone that’s genuine, that’s sweet, that’s kind, that’s a loving mother that takes care of her grandmother.”
Prosecutors urged Judge Joe Bishop to sentence Goble to life without the chance for parole, citing the brutality of the crime. Bauer disappeared in 2016; her remains weren’t found until 2023.
Goble’s co-defendant, Jonathan “Alex” Warren, confessed to his role in the crime at his arraignment in 2023 and asked for the death penalty. Prosecutors shared a portion of an interview with Warren in which he said that Goble instigated the killing. “Katie said, ‘I wanna kill her,'” Warren said. “She said, ‘I wanna cut her up … Come on, it will be fun.'”
Warren said the two tackled the sleeping victim. While he wrestled her and held her down, he said Goble was the one who took Bauer’s life. “I didn’t kill her. Katelyn did,” he told police. “I got the wind out of her. She probably would have been brain dead the rest of her life, but Katie actually killed her.”
Warren said that immediately after killing the victim, Goble sent him to get a utensil from the kitchen that she could use to dismember Bauer. “The whole idea of this was, ‘I want to cut somebody up, look what’s inside of them, know what it does. I want to cut somebody up.’ Well, here’s your chance to do it,” Warren said, telling investigators that he personally had no desire to dismember the victim.
“We will never be able to unhear, unsee or unknow the things that happened to her,” Bauer’s stepmother said at Tuesday’s hearing. “This has taken a huge toll on our mental health. Not just processing her death … over time, a wound will scab and heal. We’ve not been able to heal. The scab that was formed while Morgan was missing for seven years has been ripped off over and over and over again in the last three years since she was found. Salt poured in our wounds with every horrific detail that we had to hear.”
Goble’s fiance, Aaron Spicher, joined the hearing remotely and said he disagreed with the jury’s verdict. “She was, in my opinion, too gentle, quite frankly, as a parent, often caving into [her children’s] desires,” Spicher said. “It is my genuine opinion that she is too fragile of a person to commit a serious act of violence, even one that would be justified, for that matter. I worry about the experiences she could be exposed to in long-term incarceration.”
Prosecutors pressed Spicher on his statements in a recorded jail call after Goble’s conviction. “Are you the one who is on jail calls with Ms. Goble, saying it will be you who will bring unending misery to those who put her there by your own hands?” Spicher acknowledged making the statement, but said prosecutors had “miscontextualized” it.
Prosecutors played a portion of the jail call on Tuesday, arguing that it showed the defendant’s lack of remorse. “They scratched me, so now they get to see the monster that’s beneath the surface,” Goble can be heard saying. “The DA thinks that she was putting the monster away, and in reality she just created two or more, because my son and daughter are just like me.”
Bishop sided with the prosecution, sentencing Goble to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
