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Speaker 8: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 8: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 8: written about them. Gacy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 8: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking infamous
Speaker 8: killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host
Speaker 8: journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 4: Good Evening.
Speaker 9: Critically acclaimed author Catherine Casey delivers a riveting account of
Speaker 9: the brutal murders of young women in the ive forty
Speaker 9: five Texas killing fields over a three decade span. More
Speaker 9: than twenty women, many teenagers, died mysteriously in the small
Speaker 9: towns bordering Interstate forty five, a fifty mile stretch of
Speaker 9: highway running from Houston to Galveston. The victim was strangled,
Speaker 9: shot or savagely beaten. Six met their demise in pairs.
Speaker 9: They had one thing in common, being in the wrong
Speaker 9: place at the wrong time. The day she vanished, Collette
Speaker 9: will Wilson waited for her mother after ban practice. Best
Speaker 9: friends Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson loved to surf and
Speaker 9: were last seen hitchhiking. Laura Kate Smither dreamed of becoming
Speaker 9: a ballerina and disappeared just weeks before her thirteenth birthday.
Speaker 9: In this harrowing true crime exposition, Award winning journalist Katherine
Speaker 9: Casey tracks these tragic cases, investigates the evidence, interviews the suspects,
Speaker 9: and pulls back the cloak of secrecy in search of
Speaker 9: elusive answers. The book that we're featuring this evening is
Speaker 9: deliver Us, Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the
Speaker 9: Infamous I forty five Texas Killing Fields, with my special guest,
Speaker 9: journalist and author Katherine Casey. Welcome back to the program,
Speaker 9: and thank you for agreeing to this interview.
Speaker 4: Katherine Casey, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 3: Dan, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much.
Speaker 9: It's always a pleasure to have you on the program
Speaker 9: and your one of the audience favorites. I've got to say,
Speaker 9: but that's just based on some fantastic books over the
Speaker 9: last few years since this program has begun. Now, let's
Speaker 9: get to this infamous Texas Killing Fields and tell us
Speaker 9: about I forty five and the area that we're talking
Speaker 9: about encompassing this three decade long story. So tell us
Speaker 9: about the Texas Killing Fields. Where is this area that
Speaker 9: they're referring to. Tell us a little bit about this
Speaker 9: Interstate I forty five.
Speaker 3: Well, I forty five runs all the way from Dallas
Speaker 3: down to Galveston, and the area where I'm looking at
Speaker 3: in the book is south of Houston through a suburban
Speaker 3: area going on to Galveston Island. It's about a fifty
Speaker 3: mile stretch and over a period of three decades. Actually
Speaker 3: it extends longer than that. But in the book, I
Speaker 3: looked at three decades, the seventies, the eighties, and the nineties.
Speaker 3: There were twenty girls who disappear heared in and around
Speaker 3: that area who were murdered, and I back in the
Speaker 3: nineteen nineties, the Houston Chronicle and the Galveston Daily News
Speaker 3: started running pictures of the girls. I live in the
Speaker 3: Houston area, and I started seeing them, and as a journalist,
Speaker 3: I was just intrigued. I wanted to know what happened
Speaker 3: with them, so I started doing some investigating. But this
Speaker 3: area is a transient area Galveston Island. There are a
Speaker 3: lot of vacationers. There's a lot of partying. There's the beaches,
Speaker 3: there's spring break. The area farther up, going a little
Speaker 3: bit north, there are a lot of small communities. There
Speaker 3: are about eleven different law enforcement agencies in this area
Speaker 3: between all the different cities with their police departments, three
Speaker 3: different county police sheriff's offices, and then DPS and other
Speaker 3: branches of law enforcement. So it's a kind of a
Speaker 3: hodgepodge of a small town that over the years, as
Speaker 3: Houston has grown, they've grown. But back in the seventies
Speaker 3: when this book began, when the cases in this book began,
Speaker 3: the first ones, this was rather a quiet area filled
Speaker 3: with a lot of small towns.
Speaker 9: Now you basically start this incredible story tragedy April twenty seventh,
Speaker 9: nineteen seventy one, sixteen year old girl sunbathing on East
Speaker 9: Beach tell us about this first incident in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 3: Well, this was just to mention I found in the
Speaker 3: Galveston newspaper, and the girl was attacked on the beach
Speaker 3: that day. She escaped. But after that it seemed as
Speaker 3: if things started to build, as if there was a momentum,
Speaker 3: as if this attack were kind of a foreboding event
Speaker 3: in what was to come. It wasn't long after that
Speaker 3: but Collette Wilson disappeared. That was on June seventeenth, nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy when she was in Alvin, Texas, on the mainland,
Speaker 3: a little farther up, and she was waiting for her
Speaker 3: mother after band practice. It wasn't wasn't unusual back in
Speaker 3: the seventies, you know, Dan, Nowadays we don't let our
Speaker 3: children do many of the things that kids did back
Speaker 3: in the seventies. In the eighties and nineties, we're more protective,
Speaker 3: we know more about these things. But back then, in
Speaker 3: small town Texas, small town USA, small towns around the world,
Speaker 3: a lot of parents didn't really understand that there were
Speaker 3: dangers out there. So when Clara Wilson let Collette stand
Speaker 3: on the side of the road for five minutes, she
Speaker 3: didn't foresee that there was any danger involved in them.
Speaker 9: Now, like I say, it was a different time. They
Speaker 9: had a big household, she had literally left her. It
Speaker 9: was a time perodod of six minutes, even back in
Speaker 9: those days when they were well we consider careless today.
Speaker 9: Six minutes and their father Tom, So what does Tom
Speaker 9: do at this time when they they believe that their
Speaker 9: daughter is missing.
Speaker 3: Well, they reported Collect missing almost immediately, and the police
Speaker 3: just didn't respond very well, which would become kind of
Speaker 3: universal in a lot of these stories. They immediately assumed
Speaker 3: the police immediately assumed that Collette was a runaway, or
Speaker 3: that Collett had wandered off with a friend and would
Speaker 3: be back. So they did very little. They Claire remembers
Speaker 3: them standing out on the highway where collettad disappeared, talking
Speaker 3: as if they were waiting for the person who had
Speaker 3: taken Collect to bring her back. So little was done
Speaker 3: by law enforcement, so Tom started his own search as well.
Speaker 3: Was the neighbors in the area. A lot of them
Speaker 3: came to the aid of the Wilsons, who were very popular,
Speaker 3: very well loved in the Alvin area. Tom was a
Speaker 3: local dentist. Unfortunately they found they didn't find any clues,
Speaker 3: but Tom never stopped looking. He kept looking for collepse.
Speaker 9: Now a month later, in July nineteen seventy one, talk
Speaker 9: about a crew on a scaffolding painting near Pelican Island
Speaker 9: Bridge discovered something. So tell us what they discovered.
Speaker 3: They saw something bobbing in the water and the waves
Speaker 3: on the distance, and they watched it float in and
Speaker 3: when it got closer to the bridge they realized that
Speaker 3: it was a body. They called police and the body
Speaker 3: of Brenda Jones, fourteen was pulled out of the out
Speaker 3: of the water. She'd been reported missing the evening before
Speaker 3: by her family. Brenda had gone up to visit her
Speaker 3: aunt at the hospital and had not returned home.
Speaker 9: Now, with the continuing with Claire and Tom, what is
Speaker 9: the how does to show the incredible grief that Tom
Speaker 9: and Claire are experiencing.
Speaker 4: What lengths does Tom go to look for his daughter?
Speaker 3: Well, he gets to a certain point and he decides
Speaker 3: the police aren't looking. So when the Leeds come in
Speaker 3: in Louisiana in different areas, Tom goes and he at
Speaker 3: night the family gathers around the bed and they pray
Speaker 3: for Collette and they ask Saint Michael to bring her home.
Speaker 3: And the whole family is just eaten up by what's happening.
Speaker 3: But they feel helpless, as most parents would. It seems
Speaker 3: that there's just so little they can do. They do
Speaker 3: come up with a reward. There was also a reward
Speaker 3: put up for Brenda Jones by people in the galves,
Speaker 3: but you know, no real leads came in.
Speaker 9: How is Brenda found? We just passed over that, and
Speaker 9: I think it's very important. How was Brenda found? In
Speaker 9: terms of her hands in her and her and her ankles.
Speaker 3: She had been she was nude from the waist down
Speaker 3: and her they had taken she had She was wearing
Speaker 3: what was very popular in those days. They were kind
Speaker 3: of these Roman sandals with long straps that laced across
Speaker 3: her up to her knee and then tied in the
Speaker 3: front right. Someone had torn those off of her shoes
Speaker 3: and used them to bind her hands and her ankles.
Speaker 9: So how do police police do admit that there's a
Speaker 9: kidnapping likely with Collette Wilson, So how do police proceed
Speaker 9: with this investigation? And the Brenda Jones. Obviously there's no
Speaker 9: connection made at this earlier point.
Speaker 4: But tell us how police proceed.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, they didn't connect them for a variety
Speaker 3: of reasons. One was that Collette was white and Brenda
Speaker 3: was black. Brenda was on Galveston Island, Collette was up
Speaker 3: in the mainland in Alvin. So No, they didn't tie
Speaker 3: them together for quite a while, and police tried to,
Speaker 3: you know, send out flyers. They did start the reward,
Speaker 3: but the families really felt that there wasn't the effort
Speaker 3: made that they wanted to see, especially Brenda's family. They
Speaker 3: felt that since they were you know, lower income and
Speaker 3: lived in the projects in Galveston, that Brenda's disappearance didn't
Speaker 3: get the attention it should.
Speaker 4: Now you talk about you've introduced.
Speaker 9: Of course, we have a host of characters that you introduced,
Speaker 9: and you talk about a character named Johnny Wicks. Tell
Speaker 9: us about this gentleman and his relation to this case
Speaker 9: so far.
Speaker 3: Well, Johnny was actually a woman and she was married
Speaker 3: to Sam and they had the ski shop in Galveston
Speaker 3: where kids would go and they would water ski. They
Speaker 3: had an old boat off the back of the house
Speaker 3: and they would take them skiing. And off it's by you.
Speaker 3: And the next two girls who disappeared, Sharon Shaw and
Speaker 3: Ronda Renee Johnson, were last seen at the Wicks' ski
Speaker 3: shop that day. They had gone in and they had
Speaker 3: been there, not frequently, but off and on over the
Speaker 3: over that summer. And they went wanting to water ski
Speaker 3: but the water was too rough and and mister Wicks
Speaker 3: told them to know they couldn't go out, and so
Speaker 3: the girls took off and they were seen walking towards
Speaker 3: sixty first Street, which is one of the main streets
Speaker 3: that goes down to the Gulf. They were they were
Speaker 3: talking about going down the beach to meet some friends
Speaker 3: and they just disappeared.
Speaker 4: Now what have their parents? So what was their response
Speaker 4: to this? To the two girls missing?
Speaker 9: The two separate families' responses to the girls missing, Well.
Speaker 3: Sharon and Ronda had talked off and on about running
Speaker 3: away to Malibu. The girls were kind of on the
Speaker 3: edge a little bit. They had been getting into a
Speaker 3: lot a little bit of the nineteen seventies counterculture that
Speaker 3: was going on, and so they were a little bit
Speaker 3: on the wild side and they were having a pretty
Speaker 3: phone summer. They were both fourteen years old, and so
Speaker 3: when they disappeared, the parents were really concerned, but the
Speaker 3: friends thought that they had probably that Ronda and Sharon
Speaker 3: had just gone off to Malibu, as it always said
Speaker 3: they would, and they were there surfing somewhere. So there
Speaker 3: was no really big search mounted, except by Sharon's mom,
Speaker 3: who spent quite a bit of time driving one of
Speaker 3: their friends around looking at the places the girls frequented
Speaker 3: trying to find her daughter. But it was tamia Vail.
Speaker 3: There were no clues, nothing came up. Again, it was
Speaker 3: if the girl. It was as if the girl had
Speaker 3: just disappeared.
Speaker 9: Now was there a white van spotted at that time
Speaker 9: by witnesses or is this the next two girls that
Speaker 9: have the witness testify that there was a white van
Speaker 9: possibly in the area.
Speaker 3: That's the next two girls. A girl named Gloria Gonzalez,
Speaker 3: a nineteen year old grocery store bookkeeper. She worked at
Speaker 3: a Kroger store, disappeared in October nineteen seventy one. She
Speaker 3: was the next to disappear. So at that point, over
Speaker 3: from June to October, there are five girls that have
Speaker 3: gone missing in and around the Galveston South Houston area.
Speaker 3: And then in November Maria Johnson and Debbie Ackerman had
Speaker 3: left the house that morning. Debbie was staying over at
Speaker 3: Maria's house, and they went to a basket in Robin's
Speaker 3: ice cream shop in Galveston Island. Debbie had her little
Speaker 3: suitcase with her because she'd been at Maria's house the
Speaker 3: night before, and they had a brief conversation with a
Speaker 3: girl they knew worked in the shop, and that girl
Speaker 3: saw them outside hitchhiking afterward, and the girl saw her,
Speaker 3: saw the two girls saw Debbie and Maria get into
Speaker 3: a white van with a peace sign on the back.
Speaker 9: Interesting, now, what did please do with that information? And
Speaker 9: was there a composite done for the was a witness
Speaker 9: being able to make a composite of the driver of
Speaker 9: that vand at all?
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, no, Dan the driver wasn't seen at all by
Speaker 3: the witness, just the van. And there were some conflicting
Speaker 3: reports immediately. There were some things came in that weren't true.
Speaker 3: There'd been a girl a few weeks earlier who'd been
Speaker 3: accosted by a driver in a green pickup truck, and
Speaker 3: so a report went out for a green pickup truck,
Speaker 3: and no one really put two and two together. They
Speaker 3: started looking for Debbie and Maria the following day. Their
Speaker 3: parents started that night, actually started making phone calls. But
Speaker 3: they were reported missing by both families the next day.
Speaker 3: And in this instance, police yes said that, you know,
Speaker 3: it could possibly be that the girls had run away,
Speaker 3: but they did start to look.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 3: It wasn't then until a few days later, though, that
Speaker 3: things became pretty serious, and that's when the girl's bodies
Speaker 3: were found floating in a bi north of the area
Speaker 3: where they disappeared.
Speaker 9: Now, tell us who they've found and what was the
Speaker 9: condition and what was the likely or the evident murder
Speaker 9: method when with those bodies that were found.
Speaker 3: The girls were found. Maria and Debbie were found in
Speaker 3: a place called Turner Bayou and it's a lonely area.
Speaker 3: It's kind of oil land. There's a lease out there,
Speaker 3: there's a well, and they were found in a in
Speaker 3: the bayou which had water in it, and they were
Speaker 3: underneath a bridge. They found Maria's body first, and she
Speaker 3: was right at the foot of the bridge. She still
Speaker 3: had on her jewelry, she was still wearing the top
Speaker 3: that she'd had on the day before, but she was
Speaker 3: nude from the waist down and her hands and ankles
Speaker 3: were tied, just as Brenda Jones's had been months earlier
Speaker 3: when she was found floating near the Pelican Island Bridge.
Speaker 3: They mounted a search. After Maria was identified, they mounted
Speaker 3: a search and they found Debbie Ackerman's body just a
Speaker 3: short distance away on the bank of the Vayu and
Speaker 3: she was in similar conditions. Her body was also bound
Speaker 3: at the legs, at the ankles, and at the rest.
Speaker 3: Both growth had been shot.
Speaker 9: Now, tell us a little bit about Debbie Ackerman's funeral.
Speaker 3: Well, Debbie had been born on the island they call
Speaker 3: it b o I in Galveston and so, and the
Speaker 3: family had a lot of friends, so she had a
Speaker 3: very large funeral. A lot of the kids showed up.
Speaker 3: By then, we've got seven missing kids or girls and
Speaker 3: you know, have disappeared and or been murdered in the area.
Speaker 3: So people were really on edge. The families, the parents
Speaker 3: were not letting their kids out. There was a lot
Speaker 3: of talk of somebody they called the purple passion killer,
Speaker 3: because both Maria and Debbie had been wearing kind of
Speaker 3: maroon or burgundy sweaters when they disappeared, and Collette Wilson
Speaker 3: had on purple shorts. The girls themselves, the teenage girls
Speaker 3: who showed up kind of took refuge or trick solas
Speaker 3: in what they saw as the girls being in situations
Speaker 3: they shouldn't have been in, like Maria and Debbie, who
Speaker 3: are hitchhiking at the time. So, you know, there's an
Speaker 3: uneasiness when something like this is going on. No one
Speaker 3: knows quite what's happening, why it's happening, who's doing it.
Speaker 3: They don't know who will be next, but you know,
Speaker 3: they try to tell themselves it won't be them. You
Speaker 3: know that they're saved.
Speaker 9: You introduced an interesting character that inadvertently becomes really involved
Speaker 9: in the case, in that sheriff Buster Kern, and he's
Speaker 9: interested in this case. Uh, tell us about what he uncovers.
Speaker 9: And again before we talk about this relentless search undergone
Speaker 9: by by Tim Wilson.
Speaker 3: Well, Uh, the sheriff went out. Uh it was in
Speaker 3: January the following year, so it's about two months after
Speaker 3: the Ackerman and Johnson girls' bodies were found. Another body
Speaker 3: was found. This time it was remains, it was skeletal remains,
Speaker 3: and it was in another bayou near Taylor Lake, which
Speaker 3: is farther north near Seacrest, not far from the shoreline
Speaker 3: the beaches going in the Gulf, and it was identified
Speaker 3: as the as the remains of Sharon Shaw. And then
Speaker 3: they were up there looking for the remains of Renee
Speaker 3: Johnson and he helped, he helped find those remains.
Speaker 9: Now these again, it's it's interesting how you the the
Speaker 9: police doubt that at first that these girls are runaways.
Speaker 4: The families are adamant.
Speaker 9: That these girls would not have run away for any
Speaker 9: reason whatsoever, and they have these relentless searches. Tell us
Speaker 9: about this ongoing search that where police initially searched, Wilson
Speaker 9: believes that that they should be searched again and his
Speaker 9: effort to get that done.
Speaker 3: Well after after Debbie, after the girls disappeared, Collect's dad,
Speaker 3: Tom Wilson, keeps looking for Collect and goes off into
Speaker 3: the woods, often with the neighbors in the area looking
Speaker 3: but really not you know, finding any evidence until later.
Speaker 3: Her body is found near the Attics Reservoir outside Houston,
Speaker 3: along with the body of Gloria and Gonzalez, the Kroger bookkeeper.
Speaker 9: Right, and Gonzalez has found strangled, as opposed to the
Speaker 9: other girls that have been found shot is that correct.
Speaker 3: Uh, Collette Wilson is they believe that she was hid
Speaker 3: in the head they found when they found her skull,
Speaker 3: they found that that part of her skull was crushed
Speaker 3: with Gloria and Gonzalez. They believe that, yes, she was strangled.
Speaker 3: The body was decapitated when they found it, but they
Speaker 3: believed it was from decomposition, not from anyone doing that,
Speaker 3: not from the killer, uh, you know, decapitating her after
Speaker 3: her death. So, yeah, the girls were not all killed
Speaker 3: in the same way, but they were killed over a
Speaker 3: very brief period of time. I mean, you're looking from
Speaker 3: just in nineteen seventy one, there are seven girls in
Speaker 3: the area who die.
Speaker 9: Right now, you talk about the public reaction, and then
Speaker 9: you also talk about the media reaction with iconic journalists
Speaker 9: like Walter Cronkite interviewing the sheriff Kern. So tell us
Speaker 9: a little about the public reaction and the meati reaction
Speaker 9: to these missing women being found.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the fear bills throughout the entire area,
Speaker 3: and not just in Galveston County or South Houston, but
Speaker 3: throughout the Gulf Coast. People started to worry about their daughters.
Speaker 3: So there was a lot of pressure being put on
Speaker 3: local law enforcement, and it wasn't long before people started
Speaker 3: to notice. I mean, you have, as I said, you
Speaker 3: have these seven girls who disappear in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 3: and they're all around the same ages. The oldest one
Speaker 3: is Gloria and Gonzalez, but the other girls were all fourteen,
Speaker 3: fifteen or sixteen year old, and there was so they
Speaker 3: got together and all the law enforcement agencies started to
Speaker 3: get together to talk about the cases, and pretty soon
Speaker 3: the national media picked it up, and it ended up
Speaker 3: on the evening news with Sheriff Kerrent saying that he
Speaker 3: believed he'd found the man that they were going to
Speaker 3: make an arrest. Well, it would turn out to be
Speaker 3: a bad lead. As many as all the leads did
Speaker 3: that came up. He was chasing a lot of shadows.
Speaker 3: He was looking into shadows, chasing ghosts and not getting anywhere.
Speaker 9: You talk about fifteen suspects were given lie detector tests
Speaker 9: during this time, and.
Speaker 4: You had good suspects.
Speaker 9: There was various suspects, So you named the suspects that
Speaker 9: police named at that at that time.
Speaker 4: Harry Lanham Anthony Napa Junior.
Speaker 9: Tell us a little bit about a couple of the
Speaker 9: suspects and why they were suspects.
Speaker 3: Well, Glantham and Napa were picked up for another murder
Speaker 3: of a woman that they were tow truck drivers and
Speaker 3: they'd given a woman a lift after her car broke
Speaker 3: down at a convenience store and they ended up killing her.
Speaker 3: And while he was in prison after he was convicted,
Speaker 3: Latham started talking about having committed some of the other crimes,
Speaker 3: saying that he was responsible for the other girl's death.
Speaker 3: Law enforcement went in and talked to him and walked
Speaker 3: out and didn't believe him. They didn't believe that he
Speaker 3: was actually guilty. And then Collette's dad, Tom Wilson, went
Speaker 3: over there and talked to him too, sat down, and
Speaker 3: he came home that night and he told his wife.
Speaker 3: He told Claire that the man in prison was not
Speaker 3: the one who killed their daughter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's an incredible point in your book. It's very.
Speaker 9: Incredible story. And what's interesting too is four years later,
Speaker 9: heartbroken Tom Wilson, as they say, died at forty two
Speaker 9: years of age. He had never stopped looking and he
Speaker 9: died of a heart attack.
Speaker 3: After that, his wife believes he died of a broken heart.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't be surprised. This is so hard on these families, Dan,
Speaker 3: I mean, it just rips them apart. And you know,
Speaker 3: it's a club no one ever wants to join. It's
Speaker 3: just heartbreaking what they go through.
Speaker 9: So tell us about Glinda and Renee Johnson and Sharon Shaw.
Speaker 9: Tell us a little bit more about how the case
Speaker 9: progresses with police and the investigation.
Speaker 3: Well, when the girl's bodies are fine, when Sharon and
Speaker 3: Renee's bodies are found up in Taylor Lake up around
Speaker 3: Taylor by you, Glinda, who had been their good friend,
Speaker 3: is called in to look at the jewelry. Well, the family,
Speaker 3: the friends were so convinced that the girls had run
Speaker 3: away to Malibu and that they were surfing and had
Speaker 3: probably ended up up in Hayte Ashbury up in San
Speaker 3: Francisco because this was the time of the whole hippie
Speaker 3: movement everything that when she looked at the jewelry, she
Speaker 3: looked at it and said, oh, yeah, that's theirs. Where
Speaker 3: are my friends? And the officer had to tell her
Speaker 3: repeatedly that they were dead, And it still took a
Speaker 3: long time for it to sink, and she had a
Speaker 3: hard time believing it. The families at that point. Rene's
Speaker 3: Ronda Renee Johnson. Her family was very well positioned in
Speaker 3: the small town of Webster, and her grandfather was a
Speaker 3: city councilman up there, and he was instrumental in pushing
Speaker 3: to get a new police chief in the area in
Speaker 3: order to try to find out what happened to his granddaughter.
Speaker 4: And who was that new police chief that he pushed for.
Speaker 3: Well, he hired a DPS trooper and he was somebody
Speaker 3: who probably who had a little bit of a reputation
Speaker 3: in the area as being difficult with suspects. And he
Speaker 3: came in and there were two of them at that
Speaker 3: point that within no length of time at all, focused
Speaker 3: their attention on a guy who worked at a local
Speaker 3: gas station. Was this is back in the days before
Speaker 3: self serve gas, where people had where there were attendants
Speaker 3: at the gas stations, and Mike self was an attendant
Speaker 3: at a local gas station. He was a little slow,
Speaker 3: you know, he was he'd had a minor brain injury
Speaker 3: when he was a kid, and it was just a
Speaker 3: little slow. And he was a little bit of a
Speaker 3: law enforcement hanger on who liked to hang around at
Speaker 3: the police office. And he and the new police chief
Speaker 3: had gotten headwords in the past, and suddenly Mike's self
Speaker 3: was suspect number one in the murders of Brenee Johnson
Speaker 3: and Charnshaw.
Speaker 9: What was the reason why he did become even a
Speaker 9: possible suspect for the police.
Speaker 3: Well, he'd had this run in with the police chief,
Speaker 3: the new police chief before, and he'd had a brief
Speaker 3: history where he'd been picked up as a peeping tom.
Speaker 3: So that was one of the things that they looked
Speaker 3: at at the time. But he was brought in for
Speaker 3: questioning and the questioning went on throughout the morning, and
Speaker 3: before long he had signed a confession saying that he
Speaker 3: had murdered the two girls.
Speaker 9: Now, in that first confession, just to show or tell
Speaker 9: our audience how things proceeded, did he ask for a lawyer?
Speaker 4: Was he advised about a lawyer?
Speaker 9: And we're talking about there was one confession And according
Speaker 9: to that confession in review when they reviewed it, how
Speaker 9: close did it correspond with the physical evidence? And you
Speaker 9: can then tell us about the second confession.
Speaker 3: Well, there were problems with that first confession. It didn't
Speaker 3: really correspond very well with the evidence. There were a
Speaker 3: lot of things in it that couldn't have happened the
Speaker 3: way the physical evidence said that said that things happened.
Speaker 3: Mike was appointed right after it was a rain. He
Speaker 3: was appointed an attorney named Dewey Meadows, and Dewey called
Speaker 3: the police department and told them not to talk to Mike.
Speaker 3: But by the time Dewe got to the police station,
Speaker 3: Mike had already signed that first confession. So then when
Speaker 3: they got it alone in the room with Dewey and
Speaker 3: Mike and Mike's mom, Mike started saying that he'd been
Speaker 3: that he didn't kill the girls, and Dewey said, well,
Speaker 3: why did you sign the confession? And he said, because
Speaker 3: that police chief is crazy and I was afraid he
Speaker 3: was going to kill me. He pulled up his shirt
Speaker 3: and he showed a red spot on his abdomen where
Speaker 3: he said that he'd been struck with a billy club.
Speaker 3: And then he started saying that the police chief had
Speaker 3: played Russian roulette with him in order to get him
Speaker 3: to sign the confession.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's very interesting too. Now there's a second confession.
Speaker 9: In that second confession, how does it look compared to
Speaker 9: the first one.
Speaker 3: Well, after a couple of days they noticed that the
Speaker 3: confession didn't match the evidence the first one. So Mike
Speaker 3: was brought back in for more questioning and he signed
Speaker 3: a second confession, this time again Dewey's Meadows was not
Speaker 3: told that is that his client was being questioned, but
Speaker 3: it did. The new confession more closely matched the physical evidence.
Speaker 3: Mike was then taken down or taken up rather taken
Speaker 3: north to Taylor Lake and Taylor Bayou, where he pointed
Speaker 3: out where he said he left the girl's bodies. The
Speaker 3: problem with that was that there had been a hurricane.
Speaker 3: There's been actually two hurricanes in the year and the
Speaker 3: year the year before, the fall before after the girls
Speaker 3: disappeared at the end of the summer, and it seemed
Speaker 3: as if the bodies had probably floated into the position
Speaker 3: where they were found. But Mike pointed at at the
Speaker 3: position where the Sharonshaw's body skeleton was found on the shore.
Speaker 3: So it was still dubious, but it more closely matched
Speaker 3: the evidence.
Speaker 9: His Interestingly, historically, at that time the death penalty was
Speaker 9: in nineteen seventy three was deemed unconstitutional and good thing
Speaker 9: for Mike self, and that stood until nineteen seventy six
Speaker 9: and factors into this case. So now we had a
Speaker 9: life sentence. So tell us about now, the people that
Speaker 9: interviewed Mike's self and got this elicited this confession. Where
Speaker 9: Don Morris and Tommy Deal. So tell us in nineteen
Speaker 9: seventy three, or pardon me, nineteen seventy five, what happened
Speaker 9: with Don Morris and Tommy Deal to cast some doubt
Speaker 9: on maybe their interrogation techniques.
Speaker 3: Well, it was a really interesting turn of events, Dan,
Speaker 3: I mean, you could not have if I put this
Speaker 3: in a novel, people wouldn't believe it. And yeah, within
Speaker 3: a little more than a year after Mike's self entered
Speaker 3: the prison on a life sentence, the two men who
Speaker 3: put him there are the only ones who said that
Speaker 3: they took that they took his confession were arrested for
Speaker 3: robbing banks in Texas. They were picked up and prosecuted
Speaker 3: and ended up in federal prison as bank robbers.
Speaker 9: So you would think that given those circumstances, those events,
Speaker 9: that Mike Self's confession and conviction might be more easily overturned.
Speaker 4: So tell us about what happens with that.
Speaker 3: Well, you sure would think so, wouldn't you. And they
Speaker 3: did pursue appeals for Mike. There were two or three
Speaker 3: different attorneys over the years, he tried to get Mike
Speaker 3: out of prison, but the courts ruled at one point
Speaker 3: it was actually a magist. It had ruled that there
Speaker 3: was not enough evidence and that the confessions were unreliable
Speaker 3: and could not be used. And he ruled that if
Speaker 3: they wanted to try mike'sself again, they could, but they
Speaker 3: needed to release him and then retry him, and they
Speaker 3: couldn't use the confessions in the new trial. Well, without
Speaker 3: the confession confessions, they had no evidence against Mike self,
Speaker 3: so they I'm sorry, I've got a little bit of
Speaker 3: a cold. So they continued to you know, the state
Speaker 3: continued to push the case higher court reversed that decision,
Speaker 3: sent it back down, and Mike's self never did end
Speaker 3: up getting out of prison. He ended up dying in
Speaker 3: prison many years later. He could have gotten. One of
Speaker 3: the interesting things is he probably could have gotten out
Speaker 3: on parole if he'd been willing to say that he
Speaker 3: was sorry for killing the girls that he had, you know,
Speaker 3: that he regretted taking Sharon Sean Renee Johnson's life. But
Speaker 3: when Dewy Meadows, his first attorney, pointed that out to
Speaker 3: him one day, Mike just answered, but I didn't kill
Speaker 3: those girls.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I thought that was the most one of the most
Speaker 9: poignant parts of your book. This wrongfully convicted man while
Speaker 9: serial killers or a serial killer is running around for decades.
Speaker 9: Incredible that Mike's self dies in prison after he others
Speaker 9: that he could have been released, but it just wouldn't
Speaker 9: admit that he did kill the people he was accused
Speaker 9: of doing a killing.
Speaker 3: You know, it really compounds the tragedy of the girl's killings,
Speaker 3: don't you think.
Speaker 4: Yes, I think it does.
Speaker 9: And really, anybody that can argue the death penalty after
Speaker 9: this case, I like to hear it well.
Speaker 3: You know. And the other thing is that while Mike
Speaker 3: was in well, he was in jail awaiting trial. While
Speaker 3: he was while the trial was going on, and in
Speaker 3: the following years when he was already in prison, girls
Speaker 3: continued to die up and down. I forty five the killer.
Speaker 9: Yes, And now with that admission that you've just made,
Speaker 9: and you put, you know, in your dramatically in your book,
Speaker 9: you talk about Kimberly Ray Pitchford, sixteen years old, disappeared
Speaker 9: after driver's ed. Now that being said, was what was
Speaker 9: the police at that time with this I forty five
Speaker 9: Texas killing field as it was being described.
Speaker 4: Tell us what connections.
Speaker 9: They did make, what did they think they had, and
Speaker 9: what kind of number of victims they had which could
Speaker 9: be attributed to a serial killer. Tell us what their
Speaker 9: conclusions were at that time.
Speaker 3: Well, at the end in nineteen seventy one, the other
Speaker 3: lawn enforcement agencies had gone into interview myself about their cases,
Speaker 3: but came away not believing that he was responsible for
Speaker 3: any of the other killings. So they had the two
Speaker 3: girls cases, Sharon and Ronda's murders that were allegedly solved,
Speaker 3: and then they had five other girls who'd been murdered
Speaker 3: during nineteen seventy one that they were still investigating. And
Speaker 3: then Kim Pitchford walks out of driver's ed and disappears. Well,
Speaker 3: this is in a little bit of a different area.
Speaker 3: It's around the same area, but it's a little bit
Speaker 3: farther north, closer into Houston. And again her family reports
Speaker 3: her missing that night. Her dad told me that they
Speaker 3: called the police right away that evening, and really nothing
Speaker 3: much was done until sometime the next day. She was
Speaker 3: a little bit older at sixteen, and again the initial
Speaker 3: response from the police officers was that she must have
Speaker 3: been a runaway.
Speaker 9: Now they're in close succession or soon after there are
Speaker 9: two other girls found as well or all pardon me, yes,
Speaker 9: tell us, tell us who's found?
Speaker 4: Next?
Speaker 3: Two girls, Famed Brooks brace Well and Georgia gear disappear.
Speaker 3: Brooks was twelve years old and Georgia was fourteen, and
Speaker 3: they were they skipped school in September nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 3: They were last seen at a convenience store and they
Speaker 3: just disappeared again. They like the others, Like the others,
Speaker 3: they just seemed to have vanished.
Speaker 4: At that time.
Speaker 9: You also mentioned historically that the term serial killer has
Speaker 9: been coined and everyone's attention is on the serial killer,
Speaker 9: enigmatic serial killer, Ted Bundy. So tell us why he's included.
Speaker 9: And the effect at that time with the release of
Speaker 9: the information about Ted Bundy, well, you know.
Speaker 3: People didn't really realize that there were serial killers in
Speaker 3: the United States, and Bundy really woke up a lot
Speaker 3: of people and they started to understand that this wasn't
Speaker 3: just Jack the Ripper back in you know, the olden
Speaker 3: times in the UK, that this was happening here in
Speaker 3: the New world in the United States, and that there
Speaker 3: were people dying, and so they started. There was a
Speaker 3: big debate going on about these cases. There were some
Speaker 3: people in law enforcement who believed that they were related,
Speaker 3: that it was one killer. There were other ones who
Speaker 3: thought that these were crimes of opportunity and there were
Speaker 3: multiple killers. But certainly the majority of people had started
Speaker 3: to believe, and a lot of it based on the
Speaker 3: fact that they now understood that there were guys like
Speaker 3: Ted Bundy in the world, that there was a great
Speaker 3: possibility that there was some type of that there was
Speaker 3: a serial killer haunting this part of Texas.
Speaker 9: Now you talk about in April seventy six they find
Speaker 9: the skulls of Brooks, Bracewell and Georgia Gear. There was
Speaker 9: floods in the area complicated the searches, but there was
Speaker 9: clothing found, teeth and bones found. This was blunt force
Speaker 9: trauma was to their heads. So this is two years
Speaker 9: afterwards they're finally found. And then in May nineteen seventy
Speaker 9: seven you talk about Suzanne Susie Bauers going missing. So
Speaker 9: tell us about the discovery and then tell us about
Speaker 9: Susie Bowers.
Speaker 3: Well, the Bracewell, end and Gears bodies were found and
Speaker 3: they were really not that far away from where Collette
Speaker 3: Wilson and Gloria Gonzalez's bodies had been found. Their remains
Speaker 3: had been found, which is in another area with water.
Speaker 3: A lot of these bodies were found in and around
Speaker 3: water in the Attics Reservoir outside of Houston. And Susie
Speaker 3: Bowers was twelve. She was living on Galveston Island. She
Speaker 3: was supposed to go to the beach that day. It
Speaker 3: was Memorial Day weekend, but I remember correctly, and she
Speaker 3: was planning to spend the day at one of the
Speaker 3: popular beaches in Galveston with her friends. She left her
Speaker 3: grandmother's house and was heading home to pick up a
Speaker 3: bathing suit to go down to the beach, and she
Speaker 3: never arrived at the house. She never made it home
Speaker 3: to get that bathing suit. By that evening, her entire
Speaker 3: family was looking for and her friends were starting to
Speaker 3: get worried. She was reported missing. But and I know
Speaker 3: this is difficult to believe because at this point we've
Speaker 3: got eleven girls who have disappeared in this area over
Speaker 3: a period of six years. But the police initially told
Speaker 3: the parents and grandparents that they believed Susie had run
Speaker 3: away the grandmother pointed out that she'd left behind the
Speaker 3: money that she'd been saving to go on a choir trip,
Speaker 3: and that she hadn't taken any of her clothes or
Speaker 3: anything from her room, and that she was a good kid.
Speaker 3: She'd never been in any trouble. There was no strife
Speaker 3: in the family. There was no reason for her to
Speaker 3: have run away, but the people in law enforcement didn't
Speaker 3: look for initially because they thought that she was a runaway.
Speaker 9: It's interesting too, from anybody that's a true crime fan
Speaker 9: knows the name Henry Lee Lucas. Henry Lee Lucas made
Speaker 9: a claim about Susie Bauers. Tell us briefly what happened
Speaker 9: there and the result of that.
Speaker 3: Well, at one point, when they were bringing Himryly Lucas
Speaker 3: around Texas and he was claiming a lot of killings,
Speaker 3: they brought him down to the Galveston County and he
Speaker 3: said that he thought he remembered that he had picked
Speaker 3: up Susie Bowers and that he had killed her. Years
Speaker 3: later he recanted that, and there really was never any
Speaker 3: evidence tying him to Susie's death. The evidence that he
Speaker 3: did give police the account of what happened didn't match
Speaker 3: the evidence of that they did have about her disappearance.
Speaker 3: So it's just one of those things. At that point,
Speaker 3: they were actually, you know, Lucas had a laundry list
Speaker 3: of killings he was claiming. And one of Susie's friends
Speaker 3: actually wrote to Lucas in prison and said, did you
Speaker 3: kill Susie? And he said, no, I didn't. There's a
Speaker 3: quote from that letter in the book, and he talks
Speaker 3: about how he was confessing to these crimes just to
Speaker 3: get privileges like cigarettes and be able to watch TV
Speaker 3: and not be in prison for a little while while
Speaker 3: they took him around.
Speaker 4: Yes.
Speaker 9: Now, another fascinating development in this book is Alfred Fred Paige.
Speaker 9: Debbie Ackerman's mother d had insisted or called Page and
Speaker 9: begged him to investigate. And so we're talking about another character,
Speaker 9: Carla Costello. So tell us about Edward Harold Bell and
Speaker 9: Alfred Fred Page and d Ackerman and how this story unfolds.
Speaker 3: Well, this is really an interesting tale. And in the
Speaker 3: book I call it the Cop and the Killer. Fred
Speaker 3: Page is a dogged police investor gator in the Galveston
Speaker 3: area and back then he was a detective and he
Speaker 3: was called it as you mentioned he got a personal
Speaker 3: plea to go out and investigate the murders of Maria
Speaker 3: Johnson and Debbie Ackerman. So he goes to Texas City
Speaker 3: and visits Carla Costello, who's a very wonderful woman who
Speaker 3: was working there at the time, and she had taken
Speaker 3: upon herself after there's been a task force to compile
Speaker 3: all of the evidence in files from these different cases.
Speaker 3: So he goes there to get the Johnson and Ackerman
Speaker 3: files and starts talking to Costello and he says to Carla, so,
Speaker 3: did you ever have anybody you liked for any of
Speaker 3: these cases? And she says, well, yeah, there was this
Speaker 3: guy ed Bell. She said he wrote a letter. Well,
Speaker 3: it turned out that Edward Harold Bell, who was a
Speaker 3: grad student at Texas Tech University when he was found
Speaker 3: when he was sent to the hospital, a psychiatric hospital
Speaker 3: in Galveston for exposing himself to young girls, and who
Speaker 3: was in prison for the murder of a guy named
Speaker 3: Larry Dickens after he had exposed himself in front of
Speaker 3: a group of children and Larry had tried to stop him.
Speaker 3: Had twice written letters, once to the District Attorney in
Speaker 3: Galveston County and once to the District Attorney in Harris
Speaker 3: County confessing and saying that he had murdered all eleven
Speaker 3: of the girls in Galveston Island. Well, Fred Page's interest
Speaker 3: is immediately piqued and he starts to look into it,
Speaker 3: and he takes the evidence. He takes the letters that
Speaker 3: Bell has written, and he compares it, and lo and behold,
Speaker 3: he discovers that Ed Bell has described the angle of
Speaker 3: the shot skill into the body and some of the
Speaker 3: other things that happened that you know accurately in the
Speaker 3: murders of Ackerman and Johnson. So Fred begins an investigation,
Speaker 3: starts looking into the cases. He finds a lot of
Speaker 3: ties between Bell and the girls. Bell was a part
Speaker 3: owner and a surf shop a lot of the girls
Speaker 3: that the missing girls frequented on the island during the
Speaker 3: nineteen seventies. He owned land near where some of the
Speaker 3: bodies were found. He had a trailer park near land
Speaker 3: where Maria Johnson and Debbie Ackerman's bodies were found. There
Speaker 3: were a lot of indications that perhaps he could be
Speaker 3: the right guy.
Speaker 9: There was an interesting you had the we've mentioned the
Speaker 9: Wicks ski shop that was mentioned previously, and this one
Speaker 9: was the Doug's Dive in surf shop. But tell us
Speaker 9: about the proximity of these two places.
Speaker 3: Everything's really close to on the island. The island is
Speaker 3: a small place, and when in the ski shop and
Speaker 3: the surf shop were just blocks apart, so the girls,
Speaker 3: often the kids in the area often walked between these
Speaker 3: different areas. Bell was also living in a house he'd
Speaker 3: rented a room on the island along with his wife.
Speaker 3: He married a woman he met in the psychiatric program,
Speaker 3: and the person he leased the house from, who also
Speaker 3: lived in the property, was a coach for some of
Speaker 3: the kids in the area, so a lot of the
Speaker 3: kids would stop over at the house.
Speaker 9: He hasn't an extensive psychiatric record, so tell us about
Speaker 9: before we get into what he says. What is the
Speaker 9: official record of his history psychiatrically.
Speaker 3: Well, he's been in and out of psychiatric institutions. He
Speaker 3: was in and out, and it's for what he called
Speaker 3: his problem, which was, you know that he was exposing
Speaker 3: himself to young girls for a very long time. It
Speaker 3: started when he was at Texas A and M University
Speaker 3: and continued up until the time he ended up in
Speaker 3: Galveston Island and through the time he was arrested for murder,
Speaker 3: which was in nineteen seventy seven, right about the time
Speaker 3: the last murder occurred. Susie Bauers died in May of
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy seven. It wasn't long after that that Ed
Speaker 3: Bell was arrested for Larry Dickens murder. He surprisingly, i think,
Speaker 3: for you know, a murder charge like that, was released
Speaker 3: from prison on bail while he was a raiting trial,
Speaker 3: and he fled and he just missing for a long
Speaker 3: period of time. He was arrested in the early nineties.
Speaker 9: It's interesting too, he was on I hate the term
Speaker 9: chemical castration because it's not a castration, but he was
Speaker 9: on Depo provera and yeah, and was interesting too when
Speaker 9: he was on this bill that what they found later
Speaker 9: was he just sold all his boats except one and
Speaker 9: jump bill. He had about one hundred and forty thousand
Speaker 9: dollars in his pocket. And many years on the run
Speaker 9: and extradited from Panama finally.
Speaker 3: Well and brought back to Texas to stand trial on
Speaker 3: Larry Dickens's murder. And he's tried and convicted. One of
Speaker 3: the sad things at the trial was that his brother
Speaker 3: came up to Larry Dickens's sister and apologized, and his
Speaker 3: brother had tears in his eyes and he said, I'm
Speaker 3: so sorry. Ed wasn't always like this.
Speaker 9: Was there some witness or indication that he also had
Speaker 9: a white van at one time?
Speaker 3: Well, when Fred Page was pulling all of this together,
Speaker 3: he found police records showing that Ed was in Louisiana
Speaker 3: not long after Maria and Debbie disappeared, And as we
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier, they were last seen getting into a white van,
Speaker 3: and in that police record for exposing himself to a
Speaker 3: girl in Louisiana, it says that he was driving a
Speaker 3: white van at that time.
Speaker 9: Now, were there jailhouse inmates that spent time with Bill
Speaker 9: that had anything to say about anything.
Speaker 4: He had to say?
Speaker 3: You know, that didn't really come forward. What happened was
Speaker 3: that Fred began pulling all of these things together and
Speaker 3: trying to piece it together. And then I ended up
Speaker 3: actually going into the prison and talking to Ed, which
Speaker 3: was quite an experience. That was something I will absolutely
Speaker 3: never forget.
Speaker 9: Yeah, tell us about the in prison what Bell had
Speaker 9: said for justifying what he did?
Speaker 4: Tell us his tale.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm not too sure, you know, I'm not privy
Speaker 3: to ed Bell's medical records, but my impression is that
Speaker 3: he suffers from some sort of mental illness, perhaps you know,
Speaker 3: multiple personality disorder or you know, there's something that Definitely,
Speaker 3: during my time with him, he was very volatile. He
Speaker 3: seemed to be having auditory hallucinations he was trying to block.
Speaker 3: He was telling me that you know, people were there
Speaker 3: was a mass conspiracy against him, and that he'd been
Speaker 3: put in a program the day he was born. I
Speaker 3: understand he wasn't like this when he was trying to
Speaker 3: convicted of Dickens killing, and the people in Galveston don't
Speaker 3: remember him this way. But somewhere along the line, something
Speaker 3: went wrong for ed Bell. And he told me that
Speaker 3: he killed twelve people. And when I asked him, and
Speaker 3: that was Larry Dickens and the eleven girls. And when
Speaker 3: I asked him why he killed the girls, Dan, it
Speaker 3: was just chilling. It was as if he was transported
Speaker 3: back to that time and place, and he started talking
Speaker 3: about all of the frustration and the anger, and he
Speaker 3: had described being you know, physically abused by his parents
Speaker 3: when he was a child and everything, and it was
Speaker 3: like he was back in that moment and he said,
Speaker 3: he just blew. That something had to give, and he
Speaker 3: just blew, and you know, the sad result was that
Speaker 3: the girls died.
Speaker 9: Was one of the most fascinating parts of your book
Speaker 9: is that you have Officer Page talk about his conclusions
Speaker 9: as to Bell's guilt and he says, you know, very unbiased.
Speaker 9: He says, well, Collette's purple shorts and Mickey Mouse t
Speaker 9: shirt was what Bell remembered forty two years later, that
Speaker 9: not even her mother could remember the detail that this
Speaker 9: Bell remembered.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was really pretty amazing. The problem is, well,
Speaker 3: the one problem is that ed Bell has some type
Speaker 3: of mental illness. The other thing is that there's no
Speaker 3: evidence remaining from these cases that anybody's been able to find.
Speaker 3: I think there's probably some someplace in a box and
Speaker 3: a room waiting to be discovered, but at this point
Speaker 3: they don't have any of the physical evidence, like the
Speaker 3: girl's clothes or anything to run any DNA testing on. Plus,
Speaker 3: most of these girls were found, as I mentioned earlier
Speaker 3: in our in water, which tends to destroy evidence. But yeah,
Speaker 3: it's he did. The other thing is that most of
Speaker 3: the things ed Bell talked about ran in the newspaper
Speaker 3: at one point when the girls disappeared. Now it's hard
Speaker 3: to imagine a forty years later, he remembers things like
Speaker 3: the Mickey Mouse Koalette Wilson's T shirt. I mean, and
Speaker 3: as you mentioned Claire Wilson, Collette's mom didn't remember that,
Speaker 3: but it was reported at the time, so it's not
Speaker 3: something that only the killer could know.
Speaker 9: What's interesting in your book, too, is that for those
Speaker 9: law buffs. What's interesting is previous to this story, a
Speaker 9: confession by a killer could lead to some kind of conviction,
Speaker 9: but the law had been overturned and the confession alone,
Speaker 9: without corroborating other evidence, couldn't stand alone for a conviction
Speaker 9: of murder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it is. It's really sad that Mike's self
Speaker 3: went to prison with no evidence against him, and here
Speaker 3: Ed Belle is in prison but has never been tried
Speaker 3: for these other cases, you know, because of the change
Speaker 3: of the law.
Speaker 4: Yeah, very disturbing.
Speaker 9: Now you talk about the nineteen eighties in your book,
Speaker 9: and we won't get to everything, but we want to
Speaker 9: get to another fantastic and fascinating character. But now again
Speaker 9: someone that doesn't die Early Tim Miller and with his
Speaker 9: daughter Laura, and so tell.
Speaker 4: Us about.
Speaker 9: Laura and the other girls, Heidi Phi, Laura Lynn Miller,
Speaker 9: as we mentioned, Jane Doe, Shelley Sykes, and Janet Doe.
Speaker 9: Tell us about this Texas killing field has then been
Speaker 9: referred to, and the eighties and these victims and before
Speaker 9: where we talk about Tim Miller.
Speaker 3: Well, the girls we've talked about thus far all died
Speaker 3: in the nineteen seventies. The books divided into the three
Speaker 3: different decades. In the nineteen eighties, there's a failed off
Speaker 3: Calder Road in Lake City, which is just off I
Speaker 3: forty five. It's just shining distance to I forty five
Speaker 3: and another one of the small towns, and four girls'
Speaker 3: bodies were found there. The first one was Heid five,
Speaker 3: who disappeared. She disappeared in nineteen eighty three. Then as
Speaker 3: you said, Laura Miller, she was sixteen years old. She
Speaker 3: disappeared in September nineteen eighty four, and her body was
Speaker 3: found along with a Jane Doe in February nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 3: And then the last one is Janet Doe, who's found
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety one. The girls were killed in different ways,
Speaker 3: but many believe the first three were killed by the
Speaker 3: same killer because their bodies found positioned underneath trees in
Speaker 3: very similar ways. It's believed that Janetdoe, the fourth girl,
Speaker 3: may have been left there by another killer. But this
Speaker 3: again is a very remote area. It's an area that
Speaker 3: floods during you know, tropical storms and hurricanes, and the
Speaker 3: bodies laid there for a long period of time before
Speaker 3: they were found.
Speaker 9: Now you have incredible access to this. This character, Tim
Speaker 9: Miller and his daughter Laura, like you says, was disappeared
Speaker 9: in September eighty four. So just give us a little
Speaker 9: bit of again this sad background of what happened to
Speaker 9: Laura that day and change the Miller family forever. Well.
Speaker 3: When Laura disappeared, Tim began looking for within a short
Speaker 3: period of time and couldn't find her. Tim Miller is
Speaker 3: just an amazing guy. At the time, he was running
Speaker 3: a construction company here in Houston, and he Bradley admits,
Speaker 3: he was not the best father in the world. He
Speaker 3: hadn't been terribly involved and didn't pay a lout of attention.
Speaker 3: And then Laura disappears, well, it tore Tim apart. And
Speaker 3: for the last thirty years since Lord's disappearance, Tim has
Speaker 3: been fighting to keep these cases alive and to find
Speaker 3: out who murdered the girls who were found in the
Speaker 3: Texas killing field.
Speaker 9: And to what efforts he's done. He's created this equo
Speaker 9: search or equal search, and you talk about thirteen hundred cases,
Speaker 9: one hundred and seventy bodies, including Kaylee, Anthony and Natalie Holloway.
Speaker 9: So tell us about how he goes from this grieving
Speaker 9: parent to this again somebody energetic advocate, victim advocate.
Speaker 3: Well, Tim was so torn up by Laura's death. I
Speaker 3: think at one point if he hadn't done something, it
Speaker 3: would have just eaten him up alive and he never
Speaker 3: would have come out the other side. And he started
Speaker 3: trying to make sense I think of all that had happened.
Speaker 3: And he spent a lot of time out in the
Speaker 3: field at night, all alone in the dark, and just
Speaker 3: you know, grieving for his daughter. Well, one night he
Speaker 3: heard he turned his back and said, Laura, I have
Speaker 3: to leave. I've got to go. I can't keep this up.
Speaker 3: You have to let your dad go. And as he
Speaker 3: was walking away, he heard her say, don't give up,
Speaker 3: don't give up. And he ended up swearing that he
Speaker 3: would never let another family go through what he and
Speaker 3: his wife and his other daughter had gone through for
Speaker 3: those seventeen months when they were looking for Laura, and
Speaker 3: they didn't know what had happened to her. So Tim
Speaker 3: founded over the years Texas Equisearch, which is just an
Speaker 3: amazing group of volunteers. They've gone all over the world
Speaker 3: looking for missing people. And he has worked on the
Speaker 3: Kaylee Anthony case, the Natalie Holloway case, a lot of
Speaker 3: the big cases that have happened in the last decade
Speaker 3: or two. And he's done a lot of good for
Speaker 3: a lot of families. He's here on the Gulf Coast.
Speaker 3: He's in the news all the time. Just last week,
Speaker 3: they were pulling a body out of one of the
Speaker 3: lakes here in Houston and in the Houston area, and
Speaker 3: Tim was there along with the equi Search volunteers. They
Speaker 3: use all kinds of advanced scientific methods now And this
Speaker 3: has all been done because of what happened to his daughter,
Speaker 3: and his love for his daughter and his grief and
Speaker 3: he's and the title of the book talks about murder
Speaker 3: and redemption. And there are other parents in the book
Speaker 3: who have come around and has done amazing things. But
Speaker 3: one of the reasons redemptions in the title is because
Speaker 3: of Tim Miller.
Speaker 9: Now part of the redemption is also again you talk
Speaker 9: about turning his grief and alcohol and drowning his sorrows
Speaker 9: to doing something for good. And there's a person that
Speaker 9: comes into as a suspect is Robert Abel, a retired
Speaker 9: NASAU engineer who seemed to have some kind of interest
Speaker 9: in the case. So tell us how he becomes a
Speaker 9: viable suspect and how does Tim find this out and
Speaker 9: what does he do as a result.
Speaker 3: Robert Abel had a horse ranch that backed right up
Speaker 3: to the Texas killing Field off Calder Road where these
Speaker 3: bodies were found. And it came to Tim's attention that
Speaker 3: the police were looking at him, and there was a
Speaker 3: search warrant that was written, and there was a lot
Speaker 3: of very incriminating things put in there based on an
Speaker 3: FBI profile saying that Robert Abel, who was actually a
Speaker 3: very brilliant man and engineer with the Space program which
Speaker 3: is headquartered down in this area this part of Texas,
Speaker 3: that that it matched, that the profile matched Robert Abel.
Speaker 3: So Tim started just harassing Robert Abel. He waited for
Speaker 3: him at the post at the mailbox at night. Excuse me,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. He did his best to make Robert uncomfortable,
Speaker 3: hoping that he would confess. And uh.
Speaker 4: So with that sorry, uh with me.
Speaker 9: With Robert, With Robert Abel, what was the reaction from police?
Speaker 9: And obviously he didn't enjoy being harassed, So did he
Speaker 9: go to police and what was their reaction?
Speaker 3: The police did become involved and Tim tried to hang
Speaker 3: back over the years, but then never really did just
Speaker 3: control it, kept going after him in the end. At
Speaker 3: one point Tim says that he actually threatened Able with
Speaker 3: a gun. And at that point Tim checked himself into
Speaker 3: a hospital and his minister came to talk to him,
Speaker 3: and it was after that that Tim became so involved
Speaker 3: with the search for the missing.
Speaker 9: It's interesting too that Tim receives receives a letter with
Speaker 9: a six sixty six on it and says, I am
Speaker 9: the serial killer.
Speaker 4: More bodies and more bones.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, that was after Robert Abel's death. Robert
Speaker 3: drove a you know, like a golf cart type vehicle
Speaker 3: down onto the railroad tracks. No one really knows if
Speaker 3: it was suicide or an accident, but he died. And
Speaker 3: right before that he and Tim had kind of made peace,
Speaker 3: and so then they went on. Not long after Robert's death,
Speaker 3: Tim gets this letter which is made up of all
Speaker 3: these letters that are cut out of magazines, and as
Speaker 3: you said, it says, you know that Robert abel was
Speaker 3: not the Satan, and that he whoever wrote it, said
Speaker 3: that he was still alive and he was in that
Speaker 3: there were more bodies.
Speaker 9: Another character that's in your book as well as Shelley
Speaker 9: Sykes is again another girl that goes missing. And then
Speaker 9: Eddie Sykes goes on this mission too to search the
Speaker 9: road and he found her vehicle and tell us a
Speaker 9: little bit about this Eddie Sykes and his search for
Speaker 9: his daughter.
Speaker 3: Well, Eddie's a you know, Eddie was another dad who
Speaker 3: was just put in a position of trying to do
Speaker 3: what law enforcement wasn't doing, what he didn't believe that
Speaker 3: they were doing. He started He called and talked to
Speaker 3: John Walsh after Shelley was reported. After Shelley disappeared, Shelley
Speaker 3: was driving home from her job as a waitress on
Speaker 3: the island, going actually to visit her boyfriend and was
Speaker 3: run off the side of the road and everybody knew
Speaker 3: immediately something was wrong. There was blood on the side
Speaker 3: of the car, there was blood inside and so Eddie
Speaker 3: had contacted John Walsh and said what do I do?
Speaker 3: And John said, you know, get it in the news
Speaker 3: and keep it there. What he said is keep the
Speaker 3: police officers out of the donut shop and working put
Speaker 3: on public pressure. So that's what Eddie did, and Eddie
Speaker 3: mounted a campaign. He and his ex wife, Shelley's mom,
Speaker 3: and his current wife at that time were all over
Speaker 3: the media and they were trying to find their daughter,
Speaker 3: and they continued to put on pressure, continued to put
Speaker 3: on pressure. Shelley was missing for about a year and
Speaker 3: then they ran for the one year anniversary, they did
Speaker 3: another big push and it was after that that they
Speaker 3: found a suspect, a guy who was down in I'm
Speaker 3: really sorry, my throat's are not doing too well. Here
Speaker 3: a guy named John Robert King who was down on
Speaker 3: the Texas border and I had tried to commit suicide
Speaker 3: because he'd felt as if he was being hunted by
Speaker 3: all of the pressure that the psych's family was putting on.
Speaker 4: It's interesting that that pressure.
Speaker 9: You know, if people think that it doesn't matter, these
Speaker 9: stories staying in the press really does matter. As a
Speaker 9: dramatic example of what does happen this psychopathic, heinous killer,
Speaker 9: John Robert King writes the suicide notes, implicating his friend
Speaker 9: Gerald Peters worst. King testifies that he and Gerald were
Speaker 9: smoking pot raced with PCP, and of course, in the
Speaker 9: initial statement is blaming, putting the blame on his partner.
Speaker 9: But tell us essentially what these two dastardly, heinous psychopaths
Speaker 9: did in regarding this murder.
Speaker 3: Well, they picked up Shelley up. They noticed Shelley. Shelley
Speaker 3: was very cute, It's a tiny little thing. And they
Speaker 3: noticed her in her car that evening. She'd pulled true
Speaker 3: at a McDonald's to get a hamburger on her way
Speaker 3: to her boyfriend's house. And they began flirting with her
Speaker 3: and began flirting with her. She didn't respond the way
Speaker 3: that they'd hoped, and they were all, as you said,
Speaker 3: drugged up and everything drunk, and they started running her
Speaker 3: off the side of the road after they right out
Speaker 3: and right near the causeway going into Galveston, and then
Speaker 3: John King wrapped a took his fist and broke the
Speaker 3: window and dragged her out of the car. She had
Speaker 3: a small car, and put her in the pickup truck
Speaker 3: that they had in the on the floor of the
Speaker 3: pickup truck. People saw this, they pulled over and he
Speaker 3: shouted at him and acted like he had a gun
Speaker 3: and said that it was a domestic dispute, and they
Speaker 3: took off, and sadly none of nobody had cell phones.
Speaker 3: Now remember we're back in the nineteen eighties. But they
Speaker 3: didn't go to the police station, they didn't report it.
Speaker 3: Nobody reported anything until after it was reported that Shelley
Speaker 3: was missing and it started hitting the media the next day.
Speaker 3: Where they took Shelley that night, nobody knows, but King
Speaker 3: made references to perhaps the fact that they had buried her,
Speaker 3: and perhaps the fact that maybe she was still alive
Speaker 3: when they did it, and that they had hit her
Speaker 3: with a He said he was heard mumbling and saying
Speaker 3: things about her moving him, and that he had hit
Speaker 3: her with the shovel. But the thing is, they were
Speaker 3: both tried and they were both convicted, but they actually
Speaker 3: were tried for kidnapping, not for murder because they didn't
Speaker 3: have the body. They never found Shelley's body, and the
Speaker 3: prosecutors wanted to keep open the potential for a murder
Speaker 3: charge if Shelley's body has ever found. But all these
Speaker 3: years later. Now you're looking at this. This happened in
Speaker 3: of nineteen eighty six, and all these years later, Eddie
Speaker 3: Sykes is still looking for his daughter's body. He has
Speaker 3: a shovel in his trunk and he told me he's
Speaker 3: still Sometimes will think about he'll see a place and
Speaker 3: he'll think, well, I haven't looked there, and he'll get
Speaker 3: out of the car and walk around and start digging.
Speaker 3: They did look for Shelley's body for many years. They
Speaker 3: tried to work out in agreement with Dwarst and King
Speaker 3: to find out where she was buried, but to this
Speaker 3: point in time they haven't been able to find her.
Speaker 3: There's that thing you know, Dan about wanting to bring
Speaker 3: your child home and barrier.
Speaker 9: Absolutely well, it's it's not much, but I think if
Speaker 9: that's what parents cling to, that little semblance of dignity,
Speaker 9: then that's certainly if that's important to them, That certainly
Speaker 9: seems to ring true through all the books that I
Speaker 9: have read that that's seems to be one of the
Speaker 9: most important things in having not to say closure, that's
Speaker 9: that's just some sort of cliche.
Speaker 3: But I don't think that ever happens. But it's the
Speaker 3: idea that it's the last thing I think that they
Speaker 3: can do for their child. You know that their child
Speaker 3: is gone, their child is dead, and this is the
Speaker 3: last thing they can do. Yeah, it's very difficult for
Speaker 3: the families when the well, it's always difficult for the families,
Speaker 3: but the fact that the body isn't found adds another level,
Speaker 3: you know, it's another it's another source of grief.
Speaker 9: Now, well, just we don't have enough time to cover everything.
Speaker 9: But I just want to cover one last thing in
Speaker 9: this incredible book because it does tie in for people
Speaker 9: that have been listening so far with Robert Abel and
Speaker 9: a gentleman named Stallings. So basically, let's go just a
Speaker 9: little bit back to there obviously were some more murders,
Speaker 9: and we're talking about the Texas moon bar and Clyde,
Speaker 9: Hedrick and Ellen Beson together tell us a little bit
Speaker 9: about this case.
Speaker 3: Well, Tim was actually instrumental in getting them to look
Speaker 3: at the murder of Ellen Beson, which had happened the
Speaker 3: same year that his daughter Laura Miller disappeared, and the
Speaker 3: case at the time Ellen Ellen's body was found, Clyde
Speaker 3: was the last person with her. He claimed at the
Speaker 3: time that she had drowned the autopsy had come back
Speaker 3: as undetermined, and so he was tried at the time
Speaker 3: back in the nineteen eighties for abuse of a corp
Speaker 3: and served a short sentence and was let go. But
Speaker 3: based on evidence that came forward when they exhumed Ellen's bodies,
Speaker 3: Clyde was retried on Ellen Beson's killing, tried with murder
Speaker 3: for Ellen Beson and he was convicted in about two
Speaker 3: years ago and he was of manslaughter and he is
Speaker 3: in prison now. And Tim believes that, and Tim believes
Speaker 3: that Clyde Hedric is a really viable suspect in the
Speaker 3: murders of the first three girls in the killing field,
Speaker 3: Heidi five, Tim's daughter, Laura, and the Jane Doe that
Speaker 3: was found there. When Laura was found, they all knew
Speaker 3: each other. Laura was as Tim investigated. As he's continued
Speaker 3: to look into these cases, He's discovered that the bar
Speaker 3: that Clyde frequented, the Texas Moon Club, was the same
Speaker 3: one that Heidi went to and Laura. Tim has some
Speaker 3: evidence or some eyewitnesses who say that Laura had gone
Speaker 3: to Clyde's house along with friends who were there to
Speaker 3: buy pot at different times. So there's some indication that
Speaker 3: perhaps he's a good suspect in these cases.
Speaker 9: What's fascinating too, is when you talk about, we talked
Speaker 9: about this tragic, wrongful conviction of Mike's self, we also have,
Speaker 9: you know, just the players that are in here that
Speaker 9: despite overcoming overwhelming evidence, you talk about doctor Corndorfer and
Speaker 9: his relentless disagreement with the other corner right up to
Speaker 9: his death. So tell us about doctor Corndorfer and how
Speaker 9: he is very important to this story and why he
Speaker 9: was the I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: He was the medical examiner in Galveston County in the
Speaker 3: nineteen eighties when these girls were disappearing, when the ones
Speaker 3: in the killing field were found, and he did an
Speaker 3: autopsy on Ellen Beason and at the time he came
Speaker 3: up with the undetermined, which was the reason that Clyde
Speaker 3: was not prosecuted for murder at that time. And when
Speaker 3: the trial happened, when Clyde was eventually actually tried on
Speaker 3: Ellen's case, he came in and still maintained that he
Speaker 3: had cleaned Ellen's skull and had not seen any evidence
Speaker 3: of the fracture to her skull. But there were two doctors,
Speaker 3: two bone specialists, bone men from different universities in the area.
Speaker 3: And that's all they did was look at it. And
Speaker 3: one of them actually testified that when he had gotten
Speaker 3: the skull after Corndorf had looked at it, it was
Speaker 3: still covered. It had not been cleaned, and that was
Speaker 3: the reason that doctor Corndorff did not fight and did
Speaker 3: not see the fracture in ellen Beason's skull. So it
Speaker 3: was a fascinating trial. And Clyde Heydricks, it was really,
Speaker 3: you know, it was really these three doctors battling it
Speaker 3: out on the stand. It was just fascinating.
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Speaker 4: You have Mark Rowland Stallings.
Speaker 9: He was a hired hand on Robert Abel who we
Speaker 9: now talk about who had passed away, but was a suspect.
Speaker 9: But he worked on Robert Abel's ranch and while in
Speaker 9: prison he confesses to other killings and about in the
Speaker 9: in the killing field, so but no charges, so tell
Speaker 9: us he seems to be a prime suspect with Janet
Speaker 9: Doe the last victim, and maybe a couple other killings.
Speaker 9: So tell us about Stallings and how he met Abel
Speaker 9: and what you were able to find out.
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Speaker 4: What about this team stallings En.
Speaker 3: Apple Mark says Mark Stallings told me that he killed
Speaker 3: Janet Doe along with a couple of other women, and
Speaker 3: he said that he placed the body behind out in
Speaker 3: the killing fields behind ables ranch because he was angry
Speaker 3: and able for firing him Stalling's work for him is
Speaker 3: kind of a ranch hand for a period of years,
Speaker 3: a couple of years around the time of these killings,
Speaker 3: and they had been he'd been bringing prostitutes back to
Speaker 3: the ranch. And he claims that Robert Abel killed one
Speaker 3: of the prostitutes and that he killed another and left
Speaker 3: the bodies out in the woods behind the ranch. Stallings,
Speaker 3: I've been told by police that his accounts matched the
Speaker 3: physical evidence, and there's at least two police departments, the
Speaker 3: one in League City and the one in Fort Bend County,
Speaker 3: who have told me that they believe that he is
Speaker 3: in fact a serial killer, and they believe that he
Speaker 3: has committed multiple murders in the area. My interviews with
Speaker 3: him were very chilling, as I go into in the book,
Speaker 3: they were very frightening. He uh, he had absolutely no remorse.
Speaker 3: I asked him, uh, at one point, if you know,
Speaker 3: if it bothered him at all, if anything that he
Speaker 3: had done bothered him, and he just looked at me
Speaker 3: with a kind of a cold stare and said, no,
Speaker 3: that the women deserved.
Speaker 4: What they got, and why is that.
Speaker 3: Well, he said that they were prostitutes and if they
Speaker 3: didn't respect their bodies, then they had no right to
Speaker 3: tell him what to do to them, and he could
Speaker 3: do anything he wanted.
Speaker 4: Amazing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's these are chilling stories. I guess we're not
Speaker 3: going to get into the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 4: Well we can.
Speaker 9: If you're broken, handle, if you're throken, handle a little
Speaker 9: bit of the nineties, because we've again, I mean, it's
Speaker 9: such a sad story, but there are a couple. Again,
Speaker 9: there's just bright spots of this when you talk about
Speaker 9: Sherry Wilcock and the heroic, well heroic Sherry Wilcox, and
Speaker 9: also Sue Dietrich. So again, if you can handle it,
Speaker 9: tell us a little bit about what happens in the nineteen.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the nineties. You know, it's incredible because these cases
Speaker 3: just continued throughout this area. I don't know if it's
Speaker 3: because it's such a transient area. I don't know. There's
Speaker 3: a lot of industry up and down Galveston Bay. But
Speaker 3: Crystal Jeane Baker was the first who disappeared in the nineties,
Speaker 3: and it was March in nineteen ninety six, and she
Speaker 3: walked out of her grandmother's house. They'd had an argument.
Speaker 3: She wanted her grandmother to take her to a friend's
Speaker 3: house to get her high heels. She had her first
Speaker 3: pair of up high heels. Krystal was thirteen and she
Speaker 3: tried to get her dad to take her, a mom
Speaker 3: to take her, and all of them had said no. Well, Crystal,
Speaker 3: as thirteen year old can be with pretty darn heads strong,
Speaker 3: and she just went off down the road, and as
Speaker 3: the girls did, all of these girls in this book,
Speaker 3: she just vanished. The police were looking for in no
Speaker 3: time because her grandmother called in and said, you know,
Speaker 3: my granddaughter took off and I want you to bring
Speaker 3: her home. And they couldn't find her, and it was
Speaker 3: sadly they didn't. The family didn't know what had happened
Speaker 3: to her for a matter of about of three weeks
Speaker 3: as I remember it. But Crystal's body was actually found
Speaker 3: within hours farther north up near Anniwak, Texas, and it
Speaker 3: was underneath the bridge, a highway bridge that ran over
Speaker 3: the Trinity River, and she had been she was badly bruised.
Speaker 3: It appeared that she'd been sexually assaulted and she'd been strangled.
Speaker 9: Now enter in Sherry Wilcox. She's a officer and she
Speaker 9: the mother had always kept pushing and so that's the
Speaker 9: adamant parent that keeps keeping the spirit of their dead
Speaker 9: child alive or the missing child alive. And so we're
Speaker 9: talking quite a bit later, but there are DNA advances
Speaker 9: and Cherry Willcox is looking and considering this evidence and
Speaker 9: a stain that she saw on Crystal's panties. So tell
Speaker 9: us what she does with this fixation and her job
Speaker 9: as evidence officer and what does she do and how
Speaker 9: far does she go to try to solve this.
Speaker 3: Well, she brings Crystal's clothes to the DPS lab and
Speaker 3: they take and they take a look at the envelope
Speaker 3: and it's marked as having already been tested back in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six when Crystal disappeared, and at that point
Speaker 3: they found no DNA. Well, according to protocol, it wasn't
Speaker 3: eligible to be tested again unless they had a suspect,
Speaker 3: and they didn't have a suspect. So the DPS clerk
Speaker 3: told Sherry to go ahead and take them back to
Speaker 3: the Chambers County Sheriff's department put him back into the
Speaker 3: evidence room. So Cherry brings them back, but doesn't put
Speaker 3: the file away and keeps it out And a little
Speaker 3: while later she removes the items and puts them into
Speaker 3: new envelopes and takes them back to DPS as if
Speaker 3: it's a new case. They process the clothing and they
Speaker 3: find seamen stains around the neck of Crystal's dress. They
Speaker 3: pull DNA from it and they have a DNA profile
Speaker 3: of Crystal's killer. This is Crystal died in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 3: This is about twoenty ten, so this is fourteen years
Speaker 3: after her death. Then, but a few months later, six
Speaker 3: months later or so, Sherry gets a call and they
Speaker 3: have a match with a guy named Kevin Edison Smith,
Speaker 3: a welder who'd worked along the golf course, traveled all
Speaker 3: throughout this area for decades, working in the different plants,
Speaker 3: and he'd been picked up in Louisiana, and Louisiana has
Speaker 3: a law that anybody pulled in and booked on any
Speaker 3: type of felony charge. He was actually picked up for
Speaker 3: having some prescription drugs in his car after a traffic
Speaker 3: stop that their DNA has processed. Interesting, Texas doesn't have
Speaker 3: that law, but had happened in Texas, this wouldn't have happened.
Speaker 3: And when they ran the DNA, they got a match.
Speaker 3: So come twenty twelve, Kevin Edison Smith is tried for
Speaker 3: Crystal Jean Baker's killing.
Speaker 9: Again, you talk about this, Quannell X, just briefly tell
Speaker 9: how he's involved and in this confession.
Speaker 4: In the Smith confession, Quanell.
Speaker 3: Is a very prominent African American advocate in the Houston
Speaker 3: in the Gulf Coast area, and he often goes in
Speaker 3: to work for families when they believe that their family
Speaker 3: members being unjustly accused because of racial bias, and Kevin
Speaker 3: Edison Smith's family asked them him to go in and
Speaker 3: talk to Kevin. So Quannell asked, Kevin Smith, are you
Speaker 3: guilty of these crimes? Of this crime? And at first
Speaker 3: mister Smith denied it, but Quannell said to him, well,
Speaker 3: they've got your DNA. And at that point it became
Speaker 3: a pairant that Kevin Edison Smith was worried about the
Speaker 3: death penalty and that his DNA could be He indicated
Speaker 3: that there was the possibility that his DNA could be
Speaker 3: found on other bodies. So Kwanelle asked him if he
Speaker 3: wanted him to talk to the prosecutors about taking the
Speaker 3: death penalty off the table in exchange for telling the
Speaker 3: truth about what had happened to Crystal and Kevin Smith
Speaker 3: agreed and confessed to having murdered Crystal Jane Baker.
Speaker 9: Now we don't have much time, but I want to
Speaker 9: touch on the Susan Dietrich and also Jessica Kane. So
Speaker 9: tell us just a little bit about Susie Dietrich, the
Speaker 9: kind of character she was, and how she got herself
Speaker 9: in a position to do so much in this case.
Speaker 3: Well, a young girl named Laura Kate smither Is twelve
Speaker 3: years old. She was the would be ballerina who were
Speaker 3: jogging and disappeared. This is April nineteen ninety seven. She disappeared.
Speaker 3: There was a huge, massive search throughout the entire area
Speaker 3: for Laura. I mean, it was just a it's a
Speaker 3: major case in this part of Texas. And not long
Speaker 3: after that, a young girl named Jessica Kane who was seventeen,
Speaker 3: left a cast party in August of nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 3: and her truck was found off the side of the
Speaker 3: road on I forty five. And Jessica had just just disappeared. Well,
Speaker 3: the main suspect was a guy named William Lewis Reeve,
Speaker 3: but they couldn't tie anything to Rees and they didn't
Speaker 3: have any evidence, just that he was in the area
Speaker 3: at the time. Well Suit was brought in on another
Speaker 3: case a woman who had jumped out of a speeding
Speaker 3: out of a truck going down the highway after she'd
Speaker 3: been abducted, the Sander say Peal case, and during the investigation,
Speaker 3: she was brought in as a hypnotist. She'd been a
Speaker 3: former detective at that time. She was the police chief
Speaker 3: Antiqui Island, which is the community that Jessica Kine lived in.
Speaker 3: But she was brought in as a as a hypnotherapist
Speaker 3: or a hypnotist to forensic hypnotist to work with a suspect,
Speaker 3: to work with Sandra say Pal and try to figure
Speaker 3: out who had abducted her off the side of the
Speaker 3: road in I forty five. After she did that interview
Speaker 3: with Sandra say Pal, sud Trick began to think about
Speaker 3: the description she had of the you know, the kidnapper
Speaker 3: in that case, and it dawned on her that the
Speaker 3: description fit that of William Lewis Reese, who was the
Speaker 3: main suspect in the abduction and murder of Lauracate Smither,
Speaker 3: the twelve year old. So she called the police department
Speaker 3: investigating the say Pal case and suggested that perhaps they
Speaker 3: talked to the other police department that was investigating the
Speaker 3: Laura Kate Smither case, saying that there was the possibility that,
Speaker 3: you know, they'd be able to help them. And when
Speaker 3: they did, there was a lineup that was done, and
Speaker 3: Sandra say Powell, the woman who had survived, the one
Speaker 3: who had jumped out of the moving truck on I
Speaker 3: forty five, picked William Lewis Reese out of a line
Speaker 3: and he was later tried for that abduction and convicted
Speaker 3: and is now an in Texas prison. And he rema
Speaker 3: the main suspect in Laura Kate Smither's abduction and murder.
Speaker 3: Interesting they hadn't been for Sue Dietrich putting two and
Speaker 3: two together and suggesting that the two police departments talk.
Speaker 3: It's very likely that Bill Reese would never have been
Speaker 3: arrested on that Sander S. Paul case. And if he
Speaker 3: truly is a serial killer, which many people believe, he
Speaker 3: would have been free to continue.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Well, it's been a fascinating interview, Catherine, and for a
Speaker 9: incredibly fascinating book, deliver Us three Decades of Murder and
Speaker 9: Redemption in the infamous I forty five Texas killing fields.
Speaker 9: I want to thank you very much for those that
Speaker 9: may want to contact you or find out more about this.
Speaker 9: If you have a web page or a Facebook page,
Speaker 9: could you tell us a little bit about that before
Speaker 9: we go.
Speaker 3: I have both of them. My websites Katherine Kasey dot com.
Speaker 3: It's k A T h R Y n C A
Speaker 3: s E y dot com and I'm reachable through a
Speaker 3: contact there, and I do have a Facebook page. If
Speaker 3: you Google me, it'll come up, I believe absolutely.
Speaker 9: What is your next project? Do you have anything penned
Speaker 9: for or released soon? I know you're a very, very
Speaker 9: busy and prolific person. So what's up next?
Speaker 3: Well, I have two books I'm working on. I'm finishing
Speaker 3: up one on what's called the Stiletto murder here in Houston.
Speaker 3: It was the amateur heo case. The victim is Stefan Anderson,
Speaker 3: the Swedish professor who and a medical researcher. And I'm
Speaker 3: also working on the Kaufman County killings. The justice of
Speaker 3: the piece there was convicted late last year murdering the
Speaker 3: district attorney, the district jorney's wife, and the chief prosecutor
Speaker 3: in the office.
Speaker 9: Incredible so another another couple book offerings. I can't wait
Speaker 9: because we'll have to have you back on and talk
Speaker 9: about those fascinating books. What I want to thank you
Speaker 9: again for coming on and talking about your latest deliver us.
Speaker 4: A fascinating interview. Thank you very much, Catherine, and have
Speaker 4: a great evening.
Speaker 3: I enjoyed it. Thank you, good night.
Speaker 7: The sweet aromas of the apple fetter, cinnamon roll and
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Speaker 7: without reaching in your McDonald's bag is no easy task,
Speaker 7: but nothing worth doing is easy.
Speaker 5: Bottom up and participating McDonald's deep.
Speaker 12: Grab the shoveler, get the driveway clear, Wait a minute,
Speaker 12: the meet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, our natural gas meter.
Speaker 13: It can be a safety hazard if it's covered in
Speaker 13: snow and dice.
Speaker 5: Ah, and that's not nice. Let's keep our meter clear.
Speaker 13: Through out the Keep a clear path and use a
Speaker 13: soft brush to keep your natural gas meter free of
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Speaker 10: You might not think that a few simple words could
Speaker 10: make you crave McDonald's breakfast sandwiches, But if you listen
Speaker 10: closely to the sound of me you saying macriddos, but Muffin,
Speaker 10: you might be wrong. Bottom up, deep wind.
Speaker 12: He grab the shovel, Deer, keep well, cheers here, get
Speaker 12: the driveway clear.
Speaker 2: And don't for the meter.
Speaker 4: Dear, wait a.
Speaker 2: Minute, the meter. Yeah, our natural gas meter.
Speaker 13: It can be a safety hazard if it's covered in
Speaker 13: snow and ice.
Speaker 5: Ah, and that's not nice.
Speaker 12: Let's keep our meter clear through out their.
Speaker 13: Keep a clear path and use a soft brush to
Speaker 13: keep your nature your gas meter free of snow and ice.
Speaker 13: Find more essential tips at enbridgegas dot com slash winter