Speaker 1: On a steamy summer night in nineteen eighty seven, Susan
Speaker 1: Woods's father parked outside her little white bungalow. Susan was
Speaker 1: thirty years old, quiet and shy, and just starting to
Speaker 1: get her life back together after a messy breakup with
Speaker 1: her husband. She'd missed a couple of shifts at work,
Speaker 1: so her dad went to check on her, and inside
Speaker 1: the house he discovers something no parents should ever have
Speaker 1: to see. Susan had been strangled and her naked body
Speaker 1: was crouched on the bathroom floor with her hands tied
Speaker 1: behind her back.
Speaker 2: I think I started screaming, he did it, he killed her.
Speaker 3: Everyone just knew it had to be Mike.
Speaker 1: This was in the Texas town of Stephenville, which calls
Speaker 1: itself the Cowboy Capital of the World. Like a lot
Speaker 1: of small towns, everyone kind of thought they knew one another,
Speaker 1: and everyone immediately thought they knew who killed Susan Woods.
Speaker 1: But there's another thing about small towns.
Speaker 2: Sometimes I guess intuition is not your.
Speaker 1: Friend, and sometimes things just aren't what they seem.
Speaker 2: Because in the interview, they asked, Michael, what do you
Speaker 2: think happened to your wife? Well, the correct answer would
Speaker 2: be I have no idea, but that's not what Michael said.
Speaker 1: And when Michael didn't know, what nobody knew was there's
Speaker 1: a lot more going on here than just the murder
Speaker 1: of a young woman.
Speaker 2: This Lieutenant millerst Denville Police, I need to talk to
Speaker 2: you about Susan Woods. Hecauid. I really don't want to
Speaker 2: talk to you. I said, you don't have to, but
Speaker 2: I think you want to hear what I've got to say.
Speaker 1: This is the story of killing from back in the
Speaker 1: day and the secrets that kept it unsolved for so long.
Speaker 2: I can't tell you why the Grand Jerry didn't indet,
Speaker 2: but I can tell you looking at those pictures, it
Speaker 2: made no sense.
Speaker 1: The happiness turn to anger. Now you want me to
Speaker 1: talk about this story, how dare you? It's also a
Speaker 1: on how tragedy and despair can light the path that
Speaker 1: leads to the truth. He just he kept telling me,
Speaker 1: you know that I'm special. I'm a special one that's
Speaker 1: still today's shivers through my spine.
Speaker 2: We've got to hit on your fingerprints, we got to
Speaker 2: match on the mirror, and we've got to match off
Speaker 2: of a coke can.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the truth comes from an entirely unexpected place.
Speaker 2: So I call him, he said, I bought his RV,
Speaker 2: and as I'm cleaning out this RV, I'm finding all
Speaker 2: kinds of crazy stuff. He said. There's pictures that you got,
Speaker 2: some sort of a manifesto.
Speaker 3: I had read once that the most terrible of lies
Speaker 3: is not that which is spoken, but that which has lived.
Speaker 3: I must admit that up to this point that had
Speaker 3: been the story of my life. Now what do you
Speaker 3: make of that?
Speaker 2: He's a very mean, brutal person. The victims I know
Speaker 2: about are a smidget of what he did.
Speaker 1: My name is Brian Burrough, raised in a Texas town
Speaker 1: a lot like Stephenville. To me, what happened there has
Speaker 1: always been about more than one tragic killing. It says
Speaker 1: something about the way we live in Texas, about who
Speaker 1: gets to matter and who gets to fit in, and
Speaker 1: especially about how we treat those who don't. From Texas Monthly.
Speaker 1: This is Stephenville coming June twentieth