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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 Geesy Bundy Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good Evening. Deborah Sue Williamson was a newly married young woman living in Lubbock, Texas. On August twenty fourth, nineteen seventy five, one night, while her husband was away at work, she was brutally stabbed seventeen times in the carport of their home. Many suspects were investigated, but no one was charged. The case went cold until the mid nineteen eighties when Henry Lee Lucas, a man notorious for admitting to murders he didn't commit, confessed to her murder. It was profiled
in the Netflix dock series The Confession Killer. There was only one problem, he didn't kill her. Her mother and stepfather proved Lucas didn't end Debbie's life, and the case went cold once more. True crime author and investigative journalist George Jared teamed with his friend and former Army counterintelligence officer and university professor Jennifer Bouscholtz to study the case in depth. The two became acquainted while trying to solve
the unsolved murder of Rebecca Gould. In that case, they were able to lure the man now charged with the twenty two year old woman slaying onto a Facebook page. Then her interactions with him prior to his arrest garnered national attention. Their goal was to do the same in this case. Follow Their year long journey, they took them from the mountains of Colorado to the deserts of West Texas.
Their investigation led them through roe crop fields of the Mississippi Della and into the Rolling Ozark Kills in Missouri. The tandem was able to track down nearly every witness, person of interest, and suspect in the case. Along the way, they created a massive team of citizen detectives that have brought resources to bear on a case that is now forty seven years old. The team created an investigative file
many times larger than the original police file. The goal was to create a web that the killer could not escape. Silent Silhouette is an in depth look into the work that was done, complete with full interviews of every key player in this real life tragedy. One thing became clear as the investigation unfolded, this case is solvable and it's only a matter of time before this killer is behind bars.
The book that we're featuring this evening is Silent Silhouette Who Killed Deborah Sue, with my special guesting investigative journalist and author George Jared Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview.
George Jared Dan thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much. Nice to have you back, and
congratulations on Silent Silhouette. Let's start off immediately with what happens August twenty fourth, nineteen seventy five, and when you're explaining the Sunday night August twenty fourth, nineteen seventy five in Lubbock, Texas, introduced Bob Lemon, his wife Joyce Elizabeth Liz who's eight years old, and Deborah Sue Debbie Sue Williamson, and she had just married her fiance, Doug earlier that summer, so if you could, and they also had spent that
summer in Buffalo Spring near Buffalo Springs Lake. So tell us about all these friends and the family connections and what they did the day before with some of those same people introduced some of those people.
Sure, So, Debora Sue Williamson was eighteen years old. She was a newlywedged She had just married her husband, Doug in June of that year, and so they were married for roughly ten weeks. The day before the murder, they had gone out to Buffalo Springs Lake. It's this it's a recreational area just outside of Lubbock, Texas. Debbie was an avid water skier and so they went out. They had some friends that were with them, another couple Mike
and Dorothy Coffin. They were recently married as well. They had a guy named Paul who Debbie had sort of dated before Doug, and Paul was also good friends with Doug. They had been friends for years. And there was another guy named Lex. He was just another friend. Debbie and he had actually gone to prom together, I think maybe when she was a junior. But they went his friends
who is kind of a friend thing. And so there was a group of people out there, and there were more people out of the lake, but those are the primary people that we know of. They were all out there water skiing. So fast forward to the night of the murder, around seven o'clock that night, Debbie is picked up at her house by her stepdad, Bob Lemons, and
her mother Joyce, and her sister Elizabeth Liz. They decided to go to the Pizza Inn where Doug is the manager and Paul, the friend actually had just been hired as a cook there. So they go around seven o'clock. At one point they get a little busy and they needed change for the registered so Debbie actually left and went and got changed from. We're not sure where she went to go get the change from, but she brought the change back and then around eight point fifteen ish
she leaves with her family. They take her back to her house. Her and Doug lived in a house on the south end of town. It was kind of a rural area, but it was in the city limits. The house was actually the house that Doug grew up in. His parents had moved to another house, and when they got married, they gave his childhood home to them as a house to live in. And so they drop her off around probably eight thirty ish. They go back to
their house. Around nine o'clock, Doug calls and says, hey, we're getting pretty busy, and she was supposed to return to the Pizza Inn that night anyway, because Doug had borrowed one hundred and forty dollars from the cash register
earlier in the week by a Cebee radio. Now there, it was kind of like an IOU system there, and it was acceptable to do that, but the money had to be the register had to be reconciled before the end of the business week, which the business week would have ended that Sunday night, And so she had one hundred and forty dollars in her purse that she was supposed to take back up there, and it was also inventory night, so he left Paul, Doug and Debbie were
supposed to do inventory that night, so she was gonna come back and help with that. So she told Doug when he called that she was going to finish watching her show, which we believe is the movie The Odd Couple. That's what the TV was turned to. It ended around nine thirty that night, But Danie'll remember, back in those days, you would have the feature movie of the week and then normally the movie would actually end around nine fifteen ish.
Then they would have a very long commercial break and then they would preview the movie or whatever was going to be shown the next week, and so that's kind of how it was back in those times. So realistically, around not nine fifteen, she could have been walking out the door. Well, ten o'clock comes, no Debbie. Doug starts calling, calls his house, Mike. He calls Mike and Dorothy, the couple that they'd gone out with, the day before. He calls Bob and Joyce. No one knows where Debbie's at. Again,
it's nineteen seventy five, there's no cell phones. Obviously, it's a different time. You know, people could be out of pocket and it wouldn't have been suspicious, you know. But then eleven o'clock comes, she doesn't show up. Midnight comes, they shut the store down, and then finally at one o'clock he tells Mary and the waitress who's been working with him all night, I'm going to go home and check on Debbie. I gotta see what's going on here. So he leaves. As he's leaving, Paul Head is coming
back to the pizza in. Paul had asked to leave earlier to go on a date, so he left around eight forty five that night, and so as Doug leaves, Paul is coming back in and then their friend Lex had been there probably for about an hour and a half, just waiting, and Lex didn't work at the pizza in Lex would come and help them do things at the store, and they and then Doug would like give him a pizza. It's one of those kind of arrangements, so it's just kind of helping a friend out and then he would
get a free pizza out of the deal. So Mary and the waitress, Paul and Lex a there. Doug drives to his home. He immediately notices something that is amiss. The back door is wide open, so he gets out of his pissed car. He starts to walk up to the backstep and he stumbles upon Debbie's body. She had been stabbed seventeen times, her pants had been pulled down, and her shirt had been pulled up to make it look like she'd been raped, but later her autopsy indicated
that she had not been sexually assaulted. The kitchen window right above or right near the porch had been knocked out with a garden hoe. It was kind of strange because the back door was left wide open, and this window most like human, an average sized man, it'd be really hard for him to fit through there, and it's kind of high, so it'd be hard to get in there. And then if you do go through the window, you're gonna there's a kitchen sink right there, So that was
obviously a ruise. It was just just trying to throw the investigators off, especially since there's also a sliding glass door right there. If you're going to shatter a door, you could shatter that and walk right through it. So Doug panics. He gets back into his car. He drives back to the pizza ind which the pizza end was only about probably four minutes away, so it wasn't that far.
He comes back, he goes inside and he tells them Hi, he said Debbie's been raped, and so he gets on the phone and he tells the dispatcher that his wife has been raped and that he needs a police officer now. Lex and Paul jump into Lex's car. They drive out there and Lex actually checks Debbie for a polse and of course she's obviously dead, and then Doug arrives moments later, and then they wait for the police. A little bit later that night, not much later, Bob and Joyce show up.
Interesting thing about Bob is Bob at this point in his life was legally blind. He couldn't even drive, and as soon as he finds out that something's happened to Debbie, they're trying to keep him away. He quite literally knocked two police officers to the ground and rushed to her. And then he said, he said for the rest of his life. He immediately regretted that decision because he saw her. And so that's how this odyssey started.
Paul Neil, Let's go back to Doug who he was the assistant manager. Paul Neil, but he had only been working for a couple of weeks with Doug. He had spent the summer and missed the wedding between Debbie and Doug, and some question that he'd been working out of town. But it was odd some people thought that he had missed this wedding. At eight o'clock he had asked Doug if he could leave and go on a date. He had shown up for work, clocked in after five o'clock.
Tell us about why he was asking to leave and the timeline of when he actually did leave.
So, Paul Neil, he was he dated Debbie and then she split up with him to go out with Doug and it was pretty obvious that he was upset by this. It was it was in the contemporaneous police reports that we were able to get our hands on that they talked to him about this several times. Joyce the mom had said, you know that Paul that At one point Paul even asked, Joyce, you know, why doesn't Debbie love me?
And so there was obviously some friction there when she decided to date one of his best friends, and so he was not invited to their wedding. I guess it had been contentious enough. Even Actually, since we wrote the book, we've actually had a couple more witnesses approaches that we didn't even know about, who could speak to it a little bit more. And so Paul was out of town all summer working I think, like in the ool fields
or something like that in Texas well. A couple of weeks before the murder, he comes back to town and Doug hires him to be an assistant manager slash cook at the Pizza Inn, and so on the night of the murder he's there cooking. Well, at eight o'clock he asked Doug. He said, hey, can I leave early? I've got a date with a woman named Tina, and Doug says that's fine, And Doug didn't have a problem with it because the
manager's bonus there. This way the system worked, he got a bigger bonus every month depending on how much money he saved on labor. So letting him go on a Sunday night was actually perfect because they're normally not busy. So when Paul's interviewed by police a couple of days later, they asked him, they say, so when did you leave? He said, I left at nine to ten, and then he arrived for his date with Tina at around ten o'clock.
The problem is is that we got a copy of his time card, and his time card said he clocked out at eight forty three, and so there's that's a difference of almost thirty minutes. Another thing happened right around the time that he ended up leaving too. Remember I told you that Doug had called Debbie to tell her that they were busy and that he may need some help if she needed to maybe come early. Well, there was one other thing that Doug had to talk to
her about. Paul asked Doug if he could take a shower at their house, and his reasoning was was that Debbie and Doug's house was much closer to Tina's house, the woman he was going on a date with, and so he wanted to know if he could go by there and take a shower. Well, Doug told Debbie this, and this is one thing we don't know for certain. We don't know if because Paul said at the time he said, well, if she's there by herself, I don't
want to go there. He said that, But we don't know that Debbie knew that he wasn't coming, because we think Doug just told her, Hey, Paul's going to swing by and take a shower. And so this detail really jumped out to us because we thought it was very odd.
I've asked a lot of people, and again not blaming anybody, not saying it that he had anything to do with it, but I haven't found anybody who who could plausibly come up with a reason why an ex boyfriend would be coming over to take a shower to married woman's house.
You talked to Tina McBride the date that he went on that night, and it was a very enlightening conversation you had with her. Tell us what she noted and what was the timeline for her when he had called her about the date. Give us those details and the description of his appearance and his behavior by Tina Sure.
So tracking her down was a challenge. She lives, I hate to say it. She lives in the middle of nowhere. She lives out in the Texas desert. So we I mean, at one point when we went to Lewck in August of twenty twenty one, she was on not at the top of our list of people, but she was one of the people that we really wanted to talk to, right And so we finally found an address for her. And it was out in the middle of nowhere. Like
I drove my car like eight miles down. It's not even gravel road, it was a trail, and there were oil jacks bobbing up and down. There was you know, I don't know what was the terms prop vista. You know, it was like it was like a desert, you know, pumbleweeds, one eyed, Susan's everywhere, cows everywhere. So we get to their house and her husband was outside playing with a dog in their front yard, beautiful ranch style house, and he looked at me kind of weird. He was looking
at my car. I know he was thinking. He was thinking, how in the world did you get this card here? And so we said, can we talk to Tina? And he goes, well, yes, she's inside making lunch. And so we opened the door and as soon as she sees us, she says, you want to talk about Debora c. Williamson, don't you? And we said yes, and she goes and you want to know how Paul Neil acted that night? And we said yes, And so she invited us into her home and we sat and talked to her for
a couple hours. She said she was very agitated that night. And Dan, the thing of it is is that told Jennifer this later, I said, you was watching her body language, and even all these years later, I could tell that she was aggravated that he was late picking her up because they were supposed to go on a date. It wasn't it. He was supposed to arrive before ten o'clock and he didn't. And when he did arrive, she said he was covered in water. It was so like he
had just got out of the shower. And she said he didn't smell at pizza at all, like he had really scrubbed himself. Off, and so they get in this car and they're driving around and he did not want to go. Like, she worked part time at that pizza Inn and she was getting ready to go to college at Texas A, and m like, we're going to leave the next week. So she wanted to go by there. And you know, it was a thing to do in the seventies, you go hang out parking lots at you know,
restaurants and stuff like that. And so she wanted to go to Pizza Inn because she knew people there and people who hung out around there at night. He wanted to go to the McDonald's down the street, and he would not go to the Pizza Inn. So that was aggravating her. And she also said that he was acting very very nervous.
You talk about too, that the timeline that he told her or she said that he had called and said he was still at work, was nine thirty. So very very interesting development there.
Yes, I forgot about that detailed Dan. So he called her at nine thirty and said that he was still at work. That's correct, and so and again this was
in the contemporaneous police report. You know, one advantage that we had in this case was because of the Henry Lee Lucas fiasco that you noted at the beginning, the Lobboit Police Department or the DA, not the Loved police department, but the DA in the case got really aggravated with Bob Lemmons because they had fought so hard to prove that Henry le Lucas didn't kill the daughter.
Right.
Well, there was a moment where Bob was sitting across a desk from the DA, and the DA had the entire case file sitting in front of him, and he pushed the entire thing to Bob and says and says something to the effect of, well, if you don't think we can solve it, maybe you can. And so Bob took the entire case file and so the family has had this case file since then. So this provided us access to the original reports.
Now the Lubbock, Texas how police responded to this is obviously part of your investigation. Almost all the people that you were able to interview were interviewed by police, but as you write that, despite anything, they were never reinterviewed again. People like Tina was interviewed once, and some of these interviews were very brief, and so tell us about your investigation, and as you write, there was how you and Jennifer
and your relationship plays into this. So explain your working relationship with Jennifer Bousholt and how it contributed to this investigation greatly.
So Jennifer and I became friends back in twenty nineteen. She was a counter intelligence agent in the US Army. Her job was basically to she worked in Afghanistan and South Koreas some places like that, and her job was to vet people who work on these bases to see if they're terrorists or not. And she was very good at
what she did well. When she got out of the Army, she became a professor of criminology at AMU University in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and she had heard me on a podcast talking about the Rebecca Gould murder case, so she contacted me. Her and I became fast friends, and we noticed that like I'm an investigative journalist, I'm a true crime author. I have certain skills like she has, like her skill sets exactly the opposite of mind in a lot of ways. So we actually we're pretty good partners
like that. So we formed a Facebook page in Rebecca's case to make a long story short, and we were able to lure a guy named William Miller onto this page. Rebecca was a twenty two year old college student who was murdered on September twentieth, two thousand and four, Melbourne, Arkansas.
The case went unsolved for sixteen years. Well, we earned this guy onto the page and he started communicating with us and again, to make a long story short, and it turns out that this guy was the first cousin of her sort of ex boyfriend and she was actually murdered in the sort of ex boyfriend's home. She was kind of an on again, off on again, off again relationship.
She had stayed the weekend at his house. Well, Monday morning, she took the boyfriend to work allegedly and then returned to his home to get her dog and her clothes and all this other stuff so she could make her return trip to college. And that's when she vanished. And so this guy was talking to us, and we pretty quickly knew there was something off with this guy. And this went on for probably about eight or nine ten months.
We sent the messages to the police. Well, they started looking at him as a serious candidate, you know, like someone who might be involved in the murder. And then on November seventh, twenty twenty, a detective flew to Oregon and interviewed him. He was he was visiting his mom and brother there. William Miller actually lived on a plantation in the Philippines, get married a Filipino woman, and so he moved there. He worked on woling gas riggs around the world, and so he would rarely come back to
the United States. But during this visit, this police officer interrogated him and he confessed to the murder. And so in twenty twenty one, we were asked to do a presentation at Crime con about our interactions with William Miller on our Facebook page. And at this point, you know, he's been charged with murder. He's in fact, we're getting ready for his trial. It starts on Halloween Day here in a couple of weeks. And so our idea was, you know, and Jennifer was like, well, Rebecca's case, it's
kind of in limbo right now. Do you want to try to do this with some other case? And so we had him and I said yes, like we thought maybe we could lure this person out of hiding or lure somebody who knows something out of fighting. And so we were approached by Debbie's sister Liz, and she gave us all of the contemporaneous files and we decided, Okay, if we're going to do this, we're going to go all the way. We went to love it for a week, and we actually went on the week of the anniversary
of the death. So we actually went to the house the night of the murder and we were there the actual moment when it happened. The homeowner was the homeowner
was gracious let us in, let us do experiments. We know, we we took measurements because we're trying to figure out, you know, like could we possibly figure out how tall the perpetrator was based on the wound pattern on our body, you know, but hard to do that without And it was so ironic because when we went there, it was all the original stuff, Like the doorframe was the same on the back porch, nothing had changed. It was the
same concrete, same flower bed. I will say this the homeowner before we actually talked to him, we were outside, like in the alley, and it was dark, and he did have a rifle pointed at us at one point for a while, so I had to. I took him a night give basket the next day to tell them thank you for not shooting any of us. So that's
that's kind of how we got this start in. So we created a spreadsheet of every single person that the police had interviewed originally, And originally they had honed in on on Debbie's brother because he had some hands a drug a drug history, and apparently he had smacked her on the face the year before. But the problem with with it was, and Jennifer is an expert in behavioral analysis, and the first thing that she said, she goes, I don't think a brother is going to pull his sister's
pants down and pull her shirt up. I just can't see him doing that. I said, I think you're right. And also, you know, he had a pretty solid alibi.
He had three other alibi witnesses, and two of them were married women who had a lot I mean, they it seems as if they would have a lot of reason or reason to lie about where they were, you know, because they obviously were not hanging out with their husbands and so but they told they said that where they were at they were out bar hopping that night, and we we kind of feel like they just honed in on him just because he was a criminal and he
was close to her, you know what I mean. And he did have a very troubled life, and he ended up taking his own life in nineteen ninety. He did have a lot of trouble with drugs. And unfortunately Debbie's own mother actually after that Netfolk series, The Confession Killer, right after it had aired, she took her life as well. So they have some of that in their family. And
so we created a spreadsheet. We tracked down I mean, you know, we tragged down Dougs, the girl that Doug went out with right before he went out with Debbie, because she was very hurt that we're going to get married. And then Doug split up with her and they ended up getting with Debbie, and there was some consternation there, and we went to her house, her husband, We sat down, We sat down, talked to her and we said, look,
you're an app you would be a natural suspect. And she goes, oh, I know, she goes, I talked to the police and she goes, she goes, I cared very deeply about Doug, but I could never do that to someone else and her story checked out. I mean, she had a pretty solid alibi as well, so we were satisfied with that. You know, one of the things that we noticed in our analysis is we got a knife
expert and the wounds on our body. We're not saying that a female couldn't have done it, but it's very likely that it was a male who stabbed her, and so that kind of helped us narrow our focus a little bit. Are a knife expert also told as soon as he saw the wounds, we showed him the autopsy photos. Does he saw the wounds? He said, I know exactly what knife was used. And we're like, well, what was it?
Because it's a military style dagger that was that was made by the US military from nineteen forty three to nineteen forty six, and a lot of guys who served at Normandy were issued this particular type of dagger. It has a very special kind of hilt, and just so people know what a hilt is, that's the stopper, like when you have a knife, it's the thing that stopped your hand from going down the blade when you're stabbing something. So we so we started looking at all the people
who were interviewed as original suspects. Do they have any connections to the US military and did they serve in World War Two? Well, it turns out that several of these people, you know, including you know, guys like all and last and all those guys, they all had relatives, you know, dads and uncles and whatnot who served, some of them actually at Normandy. So these knives would have been you know, readily accessible to a lot of different
people in this case. And you know, when one thing about like a military style dagger, when when you're getting stabbed, you know, a question that we would get often was did anybody show up with like wounds on their hands or arms, because that's very common when you're stabbing someone, blood gets on it, it starts getting slippery. Think about military style dagger though it's designed with that in mind.
It's a killing weapon and so and it's designed to where it's more sturdy because and Dan, you know this, and a lot of stabbings, the blade will will break off in the victim, you know, as they're being stabbed. So and none of that was a fact in this case. So we tracked those people down. We tracked down the best man and his wife, you know, from the wedding, he had never been interviewed by police. To this day,
they've never talked to him. And we couldn't believe it because he was friends with all the people that they were talking to, and he's also the best He's Doug's best friend at the time, and so we feel like, you know, if there was something going on, you know, that we would he might be someone that Doug might have confided something to, you know what I mean. So we tracked him down. He had never been interviewed by police.
And it was interesting too because I was talking to him and he said that when they figured out now, when Debbie's purse got taken during the attack. Inside her purse was a little it's like a proof book of their wedding. And back in those days, you would you would have these little proof books and people would look
through them and then they could order pictures. Right well, the day before the funeral, they decided that they needed to get some wedding photos from the house and so this best man and Lex and Paul they go back to the house because Doug can'ts he told me, said, I was too out of it because I don't want to go in there. It just bothered me so bad. So they go and that's when they figured out that
this little like proof book was missing. And so during in and we found police report because they said they the best man said that they went and found a police officer because they were scared to go on the house. We found a police report where the police officer actually was at a donut shop, just like the best man said. So his recollection was spot on with what contemporaneous report
from nineteen seventy five. Another person that we obviously wanted to track down was Doug, and so I got a cell phone number for him and I called him and I said, Doug, my name is George Jared. I'm an investigative journalist and true crime author, and my investigative partner and I Jennifer Bouscholtz. We're looking into your former wife's murder case. And he was very receptive to that. We started chatting, and ironically enough, he actually moved to after
Debbie's murder. He moved to a town in the Mississippi Delta as a town called Jonesboro. When he went to Arkansas State University and got a teaching degree there, and he was on the bowling team with a guy named Bob Trout. Well, I worked at the Jonesborough Sons as a reporter for years, and the Trouts actually owned that newspaper for a very long time. And I asked, Doug, you know, when I was talking to him the first
time I noticed his he had a Missouri number. And I said, Doug, dude with a Missouri and he goes, yeah, he goes, I live in a little town you've never heard of. It's called Donovan. Well, I've been. I've been to Donovan many times. I've been through there a lot. And I said, well, you're only about an hour and fifteen minutes for me right now. So I actually took my podcast producer night a week later, actually went to his house and interviewed him for several hours, and you know,
we asked him about all of these people. And I'll say this, Dan, he acknowledged that he was the primary suspect from the like at the very beginning. And he goes, and I understand why, because I'm the husband. He goes, it makes total sense. He took a polygraph, he passed it. And then also his alibi, you know, was that he was at work all night. Well, that was supported by a couple of things. Number One, mary Anne actually tracked us down the waitress right and she told us she
said he did not leave. He could not have left because it was only the two of us at that point. I could not have cooked, ran the register and waited on tables. There's no way I could have done it. He didn't leave. And I asked, Marian, you know some tough questions, you know, And one of them was, Okay, what was your relationship with Doug? Did you have some type of romantic relationship with him where you might have covered for him? And she said absolutely not. She said
they only worked together for about a month. She said he was always very nice to her, that he always been at Debbie, would come up there periodically and sit and wait on him, and she said they were just a nice, nice little couple. And she said no. And also there was something else on the police reports that also supported the hypothesis that Doug didn't leave. There was no deposit made. They required in that company to do
a nightly deposit around nine point thirty. Well, the deposit wasn't made, so at the very least if he left, he would have done a deposit, so he we're pretty confident that he did not leave that night.
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com slash murder. Once again that ZipRecruiter dot com slash m r der, zip recruiter the smartest way to hire. Now you talk to Doug, and again it seems plausible that he can't be involved because he didn't even leave, and then his reaction was very ordinary. They some people talked about that he as soon as he came back to that pizza in he said, Debra has been raped. But you explain that that's not so uncommon for people to underestimate the magnitude of what they have just witnessed.
But let's talk about some serious suspects in this based on their behavior, based on discrepancies when you spoke to them, and this one being Paul Neil, And tell us about because you talk about that Bob Lemons was able to go inside that house and found a couple of wet towels in Debbie's home. And the other idea was that he said to police that he had showered at his parents' home, but they weren't there. But we're his parents question.
And now when you mentioned about the knife and the military connection, would have it been interesting for the police to check if there was any connection with the knife and Neil's father in this case.
Yeah, to our knowledge, his parents were never interviewed. And it's really a slip up in the original investigation because essentially he alibi himself for the time of the morning, and which is you know nowadays that could never happen. But as far as we know, they were never interviewed. So his story is that he didn't go to debian Dougs, that he went to his own home, his parents' house, that he showered there, nobody was home, and then he
went from there on the day with Tina. Now, the problem is is that it took him He basically arrived at Tina's house at the same time as if he didn't take off early from work, and you know, because he gets there around ten, well, he was supposed to his ship ended at ten, so he didn't really save any time, even though he took off an hour and seventeen minutes early, So that's that's problematic. And again we're not accusing him of anything, but this is a discrepancy.
And also he told the police one thing and a time card says something else, so that's a discrepancy. Another discrepancy with him is when he and Lex go back to them to check on Debbie after Doug arrives at the pizza end, he says that they go into the house to see if the killer or killers are still
in there. Well, Lex and his police reports said they didn't go in the house, so automatically, within twenty four hours of the murder, you've got two witnesses at the scene who are telling two different stories, and going into the house or not going into the house is a pretty dramatic difference. And also another interesting little tidbit with Lex is that for some reason, when he was interviewed by police, Paul says he clocked out at nine to ten.
They asked Doug. They said, Doug, when did he leave? And he Doug said, I think he left around nine. Well, then they asked Lex Brown, who doesn't work there by the way, They said, when did Paul leave? The pizza in and he said eight forty five. So of these three guys, two of the three worked there. One of them is the person Lex knew exactly when he left, and we couldn't still haven't quite figured out what happened, because there's only a couple of possibilities. Was he there
when Paul left? Well that they according to the original police sports, Lex didn't arrive until around ten thirty or eleven. Did you look at his time card? You know, which would be just odd? I mean, why would you be looking at a time card for someone who works at a you know, a business that you don't even work at. Or maybe during their conversation, Paul had told him he left around eight forty five. So we don't know. So that was one of the mystery that we still haven't
been able to unravel. And so the towels are interesting because we believe that they we believed they were collected in evidence. And I had a theory dan early from early on that because there was no reports of anybody with any blood, no bloody clothes, none of that stuff from anybody that night in Loving, Texas. And so I was sitting there thinking to myself, Okay, she stabbed on
the back carboard. She the back doors open. Is it possible that the killer went into the house and took a shower because there were wet towels in the guest bathroom and those towels were collected, So is it possible that the killer's DNA is on those towels? You know, and I'm friends with Jared Bradley, who's the you know, the CEO of mt DNA testing and towels, you know, I've talked to him several times, and towels would be you know, a great place to collect you know, skin DNA.
So it is possible if those towels are still in evidence that the killer's DNA if they went in the house and took a shower, which I think they did, that could explain a lot of that.
You talk about all kinds of behavior and and odd statements to other people. But also when you interviewed Paul Neil, and that was in regards to whether he entered that house or not, tell us what he asked you in regards to whether the killer went into the house or not, and what you think that really represents in terms of why he is asking that question.
So we interviewed him twice. Actually, the first time Jennifer called him at work out of the blue, and he answered, and one of the first things that he wanted to know was if the police were ever ever able to determine if the killer had actually gone in the house. And he asked us several cots and we didn't know
why he was asking it, but he was. And then later on when he called me, he actually called me and asked me the same question he goes and he said something, well, they've obviously already DNA tested all that stuff, and I said, no, Paul, haven't tested anything yet. We're working on that right now to get everything tested. And so one thing that he didn't tell me, there was a couple of inconsistent things he said. Number one, he
said that he didn't date Debbie. He said they might have went out for a drink or something like that. And I was like, well, no, that's not true. You guys were in high school. You know, she graduated high school in May of that year, and when you guys had sort of dated, you guys weren't legally you would of leeal aged to drink. So that did happen. When he tried to deny that he had a relationship with her. That was very odd to me because it was clearly
obvious that they had a relationship. Another thing that he told me that I thought was odd was that I did a podcast episode where I talked about the touch DNA possibly being on the towels and all this other stuff. Well, shortly after I do that episode, he actually called me. I had tried to call him and text him several times and he would not respond to any of my messages.
And then so after this podcast episode comes out, I get a call from him, and during this conversation he tries to I said, so, did you ask to go take a shower the night before? And he denied. He said, I can't remember. I don't you know, I don't know what you talk about, blah blah blah. Then he tells me a story about how he took a shower in that house the day before, on August twenty third, nineteen seventy five, and his direct quote to me was I'd
been in that after many times through the years. I spent a lot of time in that bathroom And that was his direct quote. Yeah, And I was like, so, how did you remember taking a shower there the day before, but you didn't remember asking to take a shower there the night up. And the reason that it was odd to me was because the police asked Doug. They said, so, your friend wanted to take a shower at your house. Doug's response in the police reports was well, he had
just taken one there yesterday. He's done this all the time. All Dug says, well, I'm not sure why he would want to take a shower there. He didn't say any of that other stuff, because you would think if he had just taken a shower there the day before, he'd said, well, he did it yesterday. And Dan, this is going to sound a little creepy, but I actually know where he took a shower. On August twenty third, nineteen seventy five, years before I was born, he actually took a shower
at Debbie's parents house. They had a cabin on Buffalo Lake. And after they all got done waterskiing that they the whole group of them went back to that house and got cleaned up, and then Paul and Doug actually went to the pizza into work that Saturday night.
Now you talk about lex and very interesting why either one of these people would want to go to the crime scene. After Doug said, listen, Deborah has been raped. And then one other thing that you mentioned in the book as well is that Lex was told something by Doug, and Paul asked Lex what Doug had said? What was that detail that was mentioned?
When Doug came back into the pizza in and I asked Doug about this too, I said, Doug, you knew she was dead, right? He goes, oh, yeah, I knew, he said. There he said, I may have said that she was raped, but deep downside, I knew that she was gone. And I said, okay, And that's call and Dan, you know this, that's very common action when when a child is kidnapped, when the nine woman calls made, the parent doesn't go, my kid's been kidnapped, because kidnapped has
a connotation of never seeing the kid again. It's my child is missing. I can't find much out, you know, well, other than John Binna Ramsey's case, I guess because her parents did say that she was kidnapped. But anyway, that's a whole nother story. So when he comes into the piece of inn, Doug says that she's been raved and then Paul askedlects, what did Doug just say, And so that's when the two of them jump in the car and then they head over to where her body is.
And another interesting little tidbit that came out that we found in the original contemporaneous reports. About a week after the murder, Doug reports that a spare set of keys that belonged to Debbie had gone missing from Joyce's purse. Joyce kept his spare It was like her car, her spare car keys, house keys, all these keys and so on. I think it was September fourth, maybe this report is made that these keys are missing, we can't find them anywhere.
And then on September tenth, Doug and Paul go back go to the Lemon's house. They go, they're sitting on the couch in the living room. They get up and leave. The next morning, Joyce finds that set of keys underneath a cushion where Paul was sitting, and they immediately go to the police with it. Immediately go down there and said that they found these keys. And I asked Paul about it, and he goes, yeah, I don't really remember that. I mean, he really didn't seem to remember anything you
know that pertained to him. He didn't tell me that he he had taken a couple of polygraph tests. He knows he failed one. He's not sure how he did on the other one. You know, I'm going back to Tina. You know, she didn't see him for about a month after the murders because she went to college. Well, she came back for a football game and she ran into him and she said he looked like like he lost
twenty five or thirty pounds. So he was always under a great deal of stress in September of nineteen seventy five because he was being questioned by the police, actually several times. Also, another interesting thing that Tina told us was that his dad would call her when she was in college and would record her telling the story of what happened that night over and over again. And it was just really odd, you know. And he told her and she said he was really nice. I said, had
you ever met this guy? And she goes, no, I never met him in my life, did not know him, never met him. And I said, how many time do you think you called you? She goes, oh, at least half a dozen times. And he told her that he was recording it, and he told her that, you know the reason he was doing that was because she might bump her head sometime and forget you know what happened. So we thought that was very odd as well. What do police?
What do you find police make of this discrepancies and polls In Paul Neil's timeline, he leaves at eight forty three. Officially he calls Tina, and he calls her and she says at nine point thirty. They're supposed to be the date she picks He picks her up at ten, He drops her off at twelve, but he shows up for the inventory. Curiously, Pizza in closes at twelve, but he shows up for inventory after Doug leaves almost immediately right
at one am. So what do police make of Paul Neil's statements and as a result, what do they do?
What did you as of right now? I mean, we have been in constant communication with the head of the CID division with the Lubbock Police Department. He's always been very responsive to our emails. We gave him a jump drive with every bit of our investigation, every interview we did, every person we tracked down, We even gave him. We've had people analyze like her autopsy report and the stabbing pictures.
We actually made a second trip to Lubbock in March of this year, and we took a dummy that was proportional to like Debbie's height and size, you know, just to see if we could figure anything out. Because Dan, I'll tell you something interesting about the wound pattern on our body. Most of the wounds were cleaned, meaning there was no jagged edge to them, meaning she was either unconscious or subdued. Most of the knife wounds when she was stabbed. Interesting, So we couldn't figure that out, like
why was she not fighting off her attacker? Well, when we did the dummy experiment, we figured out something pretty quickly. There's one wound to her body that could would be fatal in and of itself. Without actually examining her body, we couldn't know for certain, but she was stabbed underneath her armpit, on her left arm pit, and it is very possible that that knife got in between her the bones in her upper chest. It could It's very possible,
and it could have pierced her heart. And so we started studying that a little bit because we're like, did the killer did he actually deliver the fatal blow with the first one. And what's interesting is is we know the attack started by the back porch and she ran about twenty five feet and then collapsed at the end of the car port at the end of her car
because there's a large pool of blood there. Then the killer dragged her back through the through the back porch where he I guess the only way to say it is displayed her when we did the dummy experiment, we figured out what if she was confronted coming out the door, someone is confronting her, she sticks her left hand up
say get away from me, don't talk to me. I don't want anything to do with you, and the killer has that knife along the alongest fore arm, and our knife expert showed us exactly how you could conceal a knife, and Dan it was actually I was almost scary how easy it was to conceal such a large knife. But he could have done it. And then that person stabs her through the armpit and delivers a fatal blow, and then she can And then of course we did some
research on it. She could have gotten if that went down like that, and we found cases where that's happened, and usually the person can get twenty twenty five feet away and then they collapse. They just pass out.
The other thing is the when you talked about her being posed and displayed with her genitals exposed, with their breast exposed. That's also a sort of a retribution of revenge towards someone as well. And you say likely the killer would know that Doug would find her, and Doug had made statements as well to say that the killer certainly must have known that he was at work the routine and familiar with the property itself, again pointing to
Paul Neil. But in this regard as well, you had to speak to everybody, and Lex being a friend of everyone, including Paul and Doug and everyone else, you try to contact him. Very very interesting denials he made in terms of not being able to speak, but you did communicate somewhat through a text, through text messaging, very very interesting the statements that were made via that texture. Can you explain sure?
So we tried to get a hold of Lex a lot. It's not just us because we understand if he doesn't want to talk to me, I'm an investigative journalist. You know that can be a turnoff for a lot of people. You know Jennifer, you know, she's a criminology professor. He doesn't know us. We get that. The problem is is that he refuses to return calls from family members. And so we were getting I don't want to say aggravated, but we was getting it was just weird and suspicious
that he wouldn't talk to us. So this person who is related to him, when we refer to her in the book or him in the book as the texture, because we don't know if it was him texting or someone else, we just know that that phone legally belongs
to him. We verified that, and so this person was texting us and saying, well, he told the police everything back in nineteen seventy five, and if they didn't do their job, that's not his fault, right, And so the implication is is if the police had done their job, then there would have been an arrest and it would be pertained to something at left said or you know, something to that effect. So he will not contact us. And what's interesting is that we actually talked to a
person who knew him for years after the murder. And Debbie's murder is kind of a famous murder in that town unsolved, and this person contacted us and said, you know, I had a really weird conversation with him one time where you know, we were talking about the murder of Devas Williamson and he never once mentioned that he was friends with her and actually was the one that checked her for a pulse when she was found. And this person vividly remembered all the people that were involved in
the conversation. And this person said he never said a word about it ever, and we were just like, really, that is so bizarre, and so I mean, Lefs and Paul were best friends at the time. And again we're not accusing him of anything. He may know nothing. It's very possible. It's just there's a behavior pattern here that we can't understand.
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Explain about the keys as well, pointing to Paul Neil in terms of the stolen spare car key and house keys and where they were found and explain this.
Sure, so there was the set. There was a set of car keys, spare set of keys that was reported missing. Joyce had an inner purse. It went missing. They looked everywhere. And Dan, you you you remember this. You know, back in the seventies, eighties, even nineties, if your car keys were missing, the first place you looked was the cap right, I mean sure, and that's where you say all your extra change and car keys. I mean, that's just the
way it went back in those days. And so we know that they looked all over for these keys before they reported them missing to the police. So when Doug and Paul visit on September tenth, six days after the keys are reported missing to the police, and we have the police report, Doug and Paul sat on the couch. Well after they leave that night from the Lemon's home, Joyce finds the keys underneath the cushion that Paul was sitting on. And again we're not accusing anybody of anything,
but it's just a weird detail. So they immediately go to police and say this was found under the cushion that he was sitting on, and Paul denied taking the keys. He said he had no idea why they would be under cushion where he was sitting. But it is a detail. I think that is important because, as like I said, you wouldn't report those keys missing if you hadn't to looked everywhere in the first place.
Now, with all the information that you brought forward, did you talk about the meetings that you had with Lubbitt Police Department which included family members Liz and Paula and also Jennifer as well. Tell us about these meetings and how supportive were they in your endeavors and what did they state that they were or they would do in cooperation with the evidence that you were bringing towards them in terms of retesting.
So they said that they would try to track down all the evidence or case. I don't think they have all of it now, they wouldn't tell us specifically what they had. I don't think they had it all in one location because this has been handled by multiple agencies, Okay, and so I think that you know, the Texas Rangers had it for a while, Levet PD had it for a while, the Texas I can Department of Public Safety, it's essentially another like you know, police agency there in Texas,
they had it. So what they told us was that they would try to track down all the evidence and then they would try to get as much of a tested as its possibly good for DNA. Now, they did tell us, you know, from the beginning, hey, you know, we probably won't be able to really release the results to you guys, and we were fine with that. We said, just as long as you're doing it, we don't care. And to this point we haven't gotten anything back from them.
I mean, we would assume they would at least tell us that the testing had happened, and that hasn't happened yet. I mean, we communicated with the head of the cide to the yesterday quite literally, send him an email yesterday about you know, we did form a Facebook page and there are people who comment on there, and Paul Neil admitted to me that he's on there under an alias, so he's on there. We know all the other you know, players and people who are connected. This is what we know.
We send everything to the Loving PD and we just hope that they are working on it and do the right thing. As of right now, we know that they've on the periphery talked to a few people like they've done some they've called and done some interviews. We don't know how extensive that he is yet because for obvious reasons, a lot of these people won't talk to us anymore, and which is fine, probably wouldn't talk to us either after all this, So we don't know where the state
of the investigation is. We're hopeful. And this is the thing, Dan, this case is probably going to be solved through good old fashioned police work. It's going to be a detective pounding the dirt, going out and figuring out whoever killed debor Sue Williamson has told someone else someone knows and what we have to do is we have to figure out a way to capture that person and get them to tell the story to police.
How obvious though I'm reading this book, how right from the very beginning, Paul Neil seems to be my main suspect. And with this, with the interview that you had with him and then which is included in the book, he becomes more and more suspicious. When you spoke to many people, including Tina McBride. Also Joyce had something to say about a very odd conversation concerning Debbie and how she felt
about him. Tell us just about a couple of these kinds of conversations that kind of reinforced my idea that he's a very very good suspect.
Well, the interesting thing about Joyce's statements to police about him was that she said that he would bring Debbie like little gifts and that he was very he was very in love with her, and at one point, when Debbie split up with him, he asked Joyce, he said, why doesn't she love me? And Joyce said, I don't know, let me talk to her. So Joyce goes and talks a Debbie. And this is all on the police report.
And Joyce says that when she asked Debbie about it, that you know, she considered, you know, Paul just a friend to go do things with, like go to the movies or just hang out with. She didn't take it. She said, there's nothing about my relationship with him that is serious at all. So she didn't consider him a serious, like a viable like boyfriend material, and he obviously viewed her much differently. Now, again, that doesn't prove anything in
and of itself. Lots of people are, you know, attracted in to other people and they get rejected and it doesn't culminate with one of them being stabbed to death. But it is interesting that that even Joyce back in nineteen seventy five was telling police and I mean and the thing about it is we're talking about like people that she dated. The police really were on him for a while, Like there's lots of police there's lots of reports of them interviewing him and what he said and
all this other stuff. And the fact that he denied even dating her after being grilled by the police multiple times. See Dan, That's the thing is that ninety nine percent of people in this world are never going to be called into an interrogation room and grilled in a murder case. I've never known anybody who was who didn't remember every detail of it, I mean, like vividly. And for him to even deny that he dated her, I thought was
just it was a little beyond the pale. And of course, and I was honest with him, you know, I told him, I said, look, we're looking at you. I mean, you know, it's you know, you were a love interest of hers. Plus I didn't tell him this, but I already he didn't know I had the police reports. So when he told us these you know, fabrications, he didn't know that I already knew the truth. And so the fact that he just kept lying about all this stuff was really concerning.
And we have expressed this to the Love It PD. You know, we sent them everything, all the stuff that the texture, all the text message that the texture sent us, and all this the fact like Paul won't even take a call from anybody in Debbie's family, Like they've repeatedly tried to call him, and he won't returning to their calls. So all of this stuff taken together is very very suspicious.
You talk also that when police asked why he might not want to have gone to take a shower while Debbie was there, despite them being friends, was that he said, well, we get along, but sometimes she ignores me. That was very very strange. And also you write, you know, as a psychological profile somewhat seventeen wounds, but she was posed face up. Many people wouldn't be able to handle that. So very very angry person evidently with this as well,
so with Paul Neil, What else do you think? What is your idea about him as a suspect.
This is whenever I get involved in one of these murder cases as an investigative journalist, what I try to do is we create a list of people and we don't ever even call them a suspect. We call them people of interest, people who could possibly have some connection, you know, to the murder victim, because nine times out of ten, someone gets murdered by someone that is relatively close to them. So you're looking at family, friends, people
in that space. And this is what I noticed. In all cases, you start investigating and then somebody who like in this case, we'll just use an example, Duck. Okay. When we started this, we're like, okay, so what iful waitress says he was at work all night. We don't believe that he might not have been at work. He might have left and did this, and we went back
to work. But then we start digging on Duck. And one question I asked Doug, I said, Doug, when you took the polygraph test, was there any question you failed? He goes, oh, yeah, he goes, I did fail one question? And I go on, question was that? And he goes, well, was when they asked me if I kill him? And he said, but they told me that if I But they said, I would have to have failed a lot
of other questions for that to be relevant. And so he answered it exactly the way a truthful person would, because if he if he was trying to conceal that he just wouldn't tell us and we would have no way of knowing. So I felt Jennifer afterwards, I said, he's telling the truth, and so that so that so like that kind of leads us away from him because
we know he's being truthful. Also, you know, as we dig was we dug in on him, like I said, we found other pieces of evidence that corroborated the fact that he stay at work. So it got to the point where, Okay, is it possible that Doug had it orchestrated or knew about it, Those things are all possible, but for him directly be involved, who is now in the category of probably not. And so that's kind of how it goes. And so we were able to do
that because things lined up. You know, now you get to other people in other cases where things don't line up. In fact, as you drill down on them, things get more confusing and get the stories, get the lies, and the stories and everything else get crazier, you know what I mean, Like they don't add up. And so a lot of things with Paul obviously don't add up. And it's not because a lot of it is his own doing, because he just wouldn't tell the truth.
So this investigation continues. As we said in the introduction, you believe this case is solvable and it's only just a matter of time. We didn't mention the podcast that you have, and Jennifer has a different podcast. Can you mention those podcasts and the Facebook page where the Unsolved Murder of Deborah Williamson tell us about ways that people might find out more about this case and about this book.
So we do two separate podcasts. I do a podcast called Diamond State Murder Board and she does a podcast through AMU University called Break the Case. We do updates on both. The AMU podcast is a little bit more We're in the Diamondstate Murder Board podcast, we just have a conversation, you know, one on one conversation. We'll bring in experts like like the knife expert. We brought in things like that, and we just played the whole conversation. Am U is a little bit more produced, I guess
is the best way to put it. So they're different. Basically found that there's some people like the format that I use in Diamond State and people like ball format, so we do both ways and then you can join our page the Unsolved murder of Debor Sue Williamson. Uh, you know, we we we post updates on that page. I don't want to say daily, but i'd say probably three to four times a week we post there, and we always have something new to talk about. We'll get
a new witness. I talked to a lady that was friends with Paul and Debbie back in high school just a few weeks ago. She didn't know about us, we didn't know about her, and so she called me up and we had probably a two hour long conversation, and she had some very vivid memories of both of them. And so that's kind of the connectivity that we get
out of this, and that's what we're after. We just got to find that one person, Dan, there's somebody out there who knows enough to get justice for this woman, even after nearly half a century. And I tell people all the time, I covered a case one time that was fifty four years old and a guy got arrested and he was in his late sixties, early seventies, and he went to prison for murdering this guy back in night. I think it was nineteen sixty four. So it can't happen.
Absolutely. I want to Thank you very much, George Jared for coming on and talking about your new book, Silent Silhouette Who Killed Deborah Sue? Thank you so much, George Jared. Do you have a great evening and good night.
Dan you do the same. Thank you, thank you,