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