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Speaker 1: By Thinking Sideways, the ideas I don't know, stories of
Speaker 1: things sympt the answer too. Well, Hey there, and welcome
Speaker 1: again to another episode of Thinking Sideways. I am Steve,
Speaker 1: of course, joined by and again this week we come
Speaker 1: to you with another mystery another Well this one's about
Speaker 1: the Texas Killing Fields some of my best work. Did
Speaker 1: I say that? Yeah, you gotta start saying these things
Speaker 1: out loud. Damnit. Um this story before we get into anything.
Speaker 1: This story is a listener suggestion was suggested by Greg
Speaker 1: quite a while ago. Just a quick word of warning.
Speaker 1: This story does deal with the murder of quite a
Speaker 1: few young women. So if you've got little ears around,
Speaker 1: or if that is something that makes you uncomfortable, I'd
Speaker 1: recommend turning this one off or skipping it for a
Speaker 1: later time to the little ones aren't around. So let's
Speaker 1: get into things. First off, most of you are probably
Speaker 1: wondering what are the killing fields? And it can get
Speaker 1: a bit confusing. And we're not the ones in Cambodia,
Speaker 1: by the way, the Texas Killing Fields, and it can
Speaker 1: get a little confusing when you're on the internet. So officially,
Speaker 1: the Texas Killing Fields are a twenty five acre piece
Speaker 1: of land that is on Calder Road, or just off
Speaker 1: of Calder Road, which is halfway between Houston and Galveston, Texas,
Speaker 1: on the I four forty five corridor. Like people who
Speaker 1: don't know as a freeway, it is the state that
Speaker 1: runs north and south. Essentially between the coast where Galveston
Speaker 1: is to Houston, which is about fifty sixty miles away,
Speaker 1: But bodies are being found up and down that stretch
Speaker 1: of road and in that area, which is why I
Speaker 1: said it's a little confusing when you do the reading,
Speaker 1: because there's an official killing fields and then there's a
Speaker 1: larger term that's applied to this area, which is why
Speaker 1: sometimes you'll see this called the Texas Killing Fields. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you'll see it called the I forty five killer Um.
Speaker 1: There was one other name that I saw it under
Speaker 1: the I can't suddenly think of. So there's a couple
Speaker 1: of different names, and really it all depends on who's
Speaker 1: making the list and the number of victims that they're
Speaker 1: going to include, because there's a whole lot of stuff
Speaker 1: going on in this area, and there has been since
Speaker 1: the early seventies. Yeah, the killing fields, it's like this
Speaker 1: that's just like this little part of an oil field
Speaker 1: that's next to the highway and like a band in
Speaker 1: oil field in marshes, whereas there's miles of highway that
Speaker 1: are not part of the killing fields where people can
Speaker 1: still toss a body out here and there. So that's
Speaker 1: the difference. I guess Yeah, we're gonna go through quite
Speaker 1: a few people's stories. So we're just gonna jump right
Speaker 1: into this, which is with the very first one, and
Speaker 1: we'll work our way forward from there. So the first
Speaker 1: victim story begins in June of nine. On the seventeenth
Speaker 1: of June, Collect Wilson, who was thirteen years old, was
Speaker 1: dropped off after band practice by her conductor at a
Speaker 1: bus stop your home. She didn't come home, and her
Speaker 1: body wasn't found until five months later, at which point
Speaker 1: they found her. She was about forty miles away and
Speaker 1: she had been shot in the head, and I believe
Speaker 1: that she was partially, if not completely, undressed. Uh, And
Speaker 1: this is gonna be something that we're gonna see in
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of these cases. Decomposition pretty
Speaker 1: extensive because it had been five months actually dumped five
Speaker 1: months ago. Now, yeah, she had been out in the open.
Speaker 1: So let's you know what. I was gonna talk about
Speaker 1: this later on, but let's do this now. All of
Speaker 1: these cases that we're gonna cover, there's a huge problem
Speaker 1: with the recovery of any kind of usable information. In
Speaker 1: other words, the bodies are so decomposed. Because we're talking
Speaker 1: about South Texas. We're talking about humid, hot, it's marsh land.
Speaker 1: The conditions are not conducive to a body being preserved
Speaker 1: for any length of time. Nature begins to work right away.
Speaker 1: So like things like DNA, we all just take this
Speaker 1: for granted that should be just all kinds of stuff,
Speaker 1: but that's not going to be the case. So knowing
Speaker 1: that as we go in here, and that's also helpful
Speaker 1: to know. You know, when we talk about sometimes we
Speaker 1: talk about stories where bodies were stored for five months
Speaker 1: and then dumped after the fact, and they you know,
Speaker 1: we're just but these these bodies were all dumped pretty after. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this this is not one of the guys that kept
Speaker 1: him around for an extended period. That's worth mentioning. No,
Speaker 1: these these were not that kind of trophy situation, I
Speaker 1: believe is what your is what you're referring to a
Speaker 1: lot of times when they're stored like that. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: so that's that's kind of scenario here, right. So first
Speaker 1: victim is is Collette years old. So moving forward in
Speaker 1: time two weeks later, and that's from the time that
Speaker 1: Collette disappeared, Okay, not heard, not the discovery of her
Speaker 1: correct Brenda Jones left her house. She was going to
Speaker 1: go visit a family member who was in the hospital.
Speaker 1: Her plan was to walk up I forty five. This
Speaker 1: was the first of July, and she didn't come home,
Speaker 1: and her body was found the very next day. It
Speaker 1: was in Galveston Bay and she had been shot once
Speaker 1: in the head and her a slip. It's always described
Speaker 1: as a slip. I don't know if it's hers or
Speaker 1: just a random slip had been stuffed in her mouth.
Speaker 1: We go forward in time another two weeks, so now
Speaker 1: we're in the middle of July and the killer. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of August. These guys not wasting any time,
Speaker 1: not at all. We go to August four and fifteen
Speaker 1: year old round Rhonda Johnson and thirteen year old Sharon
Speaker 1: Shaw disappeared at the same time. So these two girls,
Speaker 1: they had gone to the beach in Galveston to celebrate.
Speaker 1: I believe Rhonda's birthday was like the next week, She's
Speaker 1: gonna turn fourteen, and they were celebrating the big one. Um.
Speaker 1: But witnessssary that they saw them at the beach, and
Speaker 1: they saw them leaving the beach, but they never made
Speaker 1: it home. Part of Sharon's body was found in jail
Speaker 1: on j Anywary, third seventy one by two boys who
Speaker 1: were fishing in Clear Lake, where it's about twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty miles away at the most. It's hard for me
Speaker 1: to answer this because there's so many different victims away
Speaker 1: from the Galvison Beach, correct, correct, Yeah, so, so it's
Speaker 1: not right next door to where they disappeared from. And
Speaker 1: what part of her body, her head, her decomposed skull,
Speaker 1: it was floating in the water when they found it,
Speaker 1: or just under the surface, just the kind of thing
Speaker 1: you want to really and when you're after a day
Speaker 1: of fishing exactly. Um. The boys reported that, and then
Speaker 1: through searches, it took about it took several weeks. The
Speaker 1: rest of both Sharon and Rhonda's bodies were recovered in
Speaker 1: the marsh next to the lake, and it was several
Speaker 1: weeks or excuse me, it was several months after the
Speaker 1: recovery of the bodies that the police got a tip
Speaker 1: to look into a sexy fender who was in the
Speaker 1: area by the name of Michael Lloyd's self. And we're
Speaker 1: just gonna talk about self briefly because he's one of
Speaker 1: the few times that somebody gets charged with a case
Speaker 1: and there's some serious issues in it. I'm gonna ask
Speaker 1: kind of a question. I'm sorry I from jumping ahead here.
Speaker 1: Was Sharon decapitated or was it decomposition and then like
Speaker 1: an animal carried her? She was in a marsh, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean there's stuff, there's critters, and decomposition happens, as
Speaker 1: far as I am aware, Yes, I mean, if you
Speaker 1: think about it, the vertebrae, they're not exactly locked together
Speaker 1: very well, especially when the flesh and tendons are gone. True,
Speaker 1: So that's why it would have gone away. So self,
Speaker 1: Michael's Lloyd's self was picked up and eventually he would
Speaker 1: be charged with the murders of these girls. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of questions about that particular conviction because he
Speaker 1: said he was held and beaten by the local police
Speaker 1: and then he was threatened at gunpoint by the chief
Speaker 1: to confess to it, and he eventually gave in and
Speaker 1: he confessed. But then he continued to tell his story,
Speaker 1: but the details morphed and they didn't line up right
Speaker 1: with the crime all the way. The description I heard
Speaker 1: of the interrogation was and they made him. They gave
Speaker 1: him some paper and pen and they told him, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, he confessed, and he writes it out and
Speaker 1: then and then the police said no, no, no, you
Speaker 1: got that detail wrong. Changed that, and they kept making
Speaker 1: him modify his confession. So it's not surprising his details
Speaker 1: kept changing. Yeah, I don't think he ever did it. No, no,
Speaker 1: And that's the thing is he he said that he
Speaker 1: was innocent his entire time in jail. This was one
Speaker 1: He died in two thousand in jail, having fought this
Speaker 1: conviction the entire time. He died of cancer. There was
Speaker 1: a forensic files on this, well, not this specific, but
Speaker 1: it was a very similar case where this guy got
Speaker 1: convicted because he had quote unquote confessed and basically what
Speaker 1: they had found as the police had been sitting in
Speaker 1: the interrogation room and they'd said, you hit over you
Speaker 1: hit her over the head. Didn't you hit her over
Speaker 1: the head? And he'd say yeah, you know, after like
Speaker 1: fifteen hours of interrogation he said yeah, and they say
Speaker 1: what what'd you hit her with? And he said, I'm
Speaker 1: a fist and they said nope. He said a brick
Speaker 1: and they said nope. It hadn't been something like a
Speaker 1: bat or something. He goes, oh, a bat, and they
Speaker 1: go that work, and I was just like, oh my god.
Speaker 1: And unfortunately, and this is this is not to say
Speaker 1: that law enforcement intentionally does that today, but back in
Speaker 1: the day there there was a different rule book. And
Speaker 1: what really makes me question the conviction against Michael Lloyd's
Speaker 1: self is that two of the cops who pushed him
Speaker 1: into his confession were arrested three years later for bank
Speaker 1: robberies that they had been committing over the years. So like,
Speaker 1: these guys were crooked and dirty the whole way. So
Speaker 1: I really feel like self was probably never guilty of
Speaker 1: the crime. Yeah, it's a yeah, that's a great little
Speaker 1: i'd line. If you're a cop robbing banks, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean what you do is, you know, you run around
Speaker 1: the corner and you rip off your your mask and
Speaker 1: your your coat, and you're coming back back around the
Speaker 1: corner wearing your uniform to make sure not to be
Speaker 1: carrying the bag with which why did they go? Which?
Speaker 1: Why did they go? Yeah? Yeah, that that would be Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is perfect cover. It is, but but we should
Speaker 1: probably get back to the girl. I kind of like
Speaker 1: the robbery better. It's not questions. I know, I know,
Speaker 1: we've got we're gonna there's four more girls that would
Speaker 1: disappear that year. So they disappeared, and it was nineteen
Speaker 1: year old Gloria Gonzalez. She disappeared on the twenty eighth
Speaker 1: of October. She ended up being found thirty five yards
Speaker 1: from where Collette Wilson's body was found. The very first girl,
Speaker 1: twelve year old Alison Craven, disappeared on the ninth of November.
Speaker 1: She was found four months later. Fifteen year old Debbie
Speaker 1: Ackerman and fifteen year old Maria Johnson went to the
Speaker 1: mall on the eleventh of November, and then they disappeared,
Speaker 1: and their bodies were found in a body of water
Speaker 1: with their hands and their feet bound. And they had
Speaker 1: also both been shot in the head. I think what
Speaker 1: had been shot in the front, and one had been
Speaker 1: shot in the back of the head twice and then
Speaker 1: shot in the thigh. I can't remember which of the
Speaker 1: two girls. Um, So it's it's really strange that, you know,
Speaker 1: there's some of these bodies are shots, some are not.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a weird shifting pattern. Right at the
Speaker 1: very beginning, I was just gonna ask if Gloria Gonzalez
Speaker 1: looked younger. I believe she did, so that's that's okay.
Speaker 1: So that's that's a good question. And again I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say this later, but let's do it now. No, No,
Speaker 1: there's absolutely no reason that things that this bit of
Speaker 1: information needed to come up anywhere. In particular, we're talking
Speaker 1: so far about girls. Ignoring Gloria for the moment, we've
Speaker 1: talked about girls who were twelve fifteen years of age,
Speaker 1: and most girls at that age are very shortened stature,
Speaker 1: and they tend to be because they're a little girls.
Speaker 1: They're rather petite. They're just just hitting pubert, they're just
Speaker 1: hitting puberty. So those gross spers haven't happened. I believe
Speaker 1: if I remember correct, that Gloria was a smaller girl.
Speaker 1: There are several others as we come to them later
Speaker 1: on that I will point out who are older in
Speaker 1: terms of like Gloria, you know this nineteen twenty whatever
Speaker 1: it is, and they were rather small. So there does
Speaker 1: seem to maybe be a pattern in that. But you know, again,
Speaker 1: if there's so many random things as far as like
Speaker 1: mode of death, it's not necessarily and also they he
Speaker 1: probably couldn't afford to be ultra ultra picky, because when
Speaker 1: you think about it, he's got to find himself at
Speaker 1: least one or two girls and no witnesses or police
Speaker 1: anywhere around. Which what do you think about it? You know,
Speaker 1: finding that your ideal target plus nobody else around, to
Speaker 1: witnesses once or twice a month, Yeah that often. I
Speaker 1: mean he must have been like full time out there
Speaker 1: looking for victims, because yeah, yeah it is. It is
Speaker 1: amazing how rapid this is happening between girls. Um. And again,
Speaker 1: this is another thing that I was gonna talk about later,
Speaker 1: but let's do it now. You would think in this
Speaker 1: day and age today, this would be all over the
Speaker 1: news and this would be all over the internet, and
Speaker 1: we all know, but this is one the police departments
Speaker 1: don't talk to each other because it's all little towns
Speaker 1: with their own police departments. They don't talk to one another. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there was just this weird, complete and utter lack
Speaker 1: of communication between news and media outlets and people from
Speaker 1: community community and the cops themselves. So I mean, they're
Speaker 1: they're disappearing from rather close but not towns, but they're
Speaker 1: not the same towns, but they're getting dumped kind of
Speaker 1: in the same area. Some of them they're getting dumped
Speaker 1: in that same corridor. Yes, so you would think people
Speaker 1: would notice, but people didn't notice this. For sadly, many
Speaker 1: many years, the links were not made between a lot
Speaker 1: of these cases. That's intriguing that it could be an
Speaker 1: entirely random thing or somebody who's clever enough to know that,
Speaker 1: you know, I'll just hit a different municipality and let
Speaker 1: you know, bureaucratic and I fall through the cracks and
Speaker 1: all that stuff. Nail on the head, my friend, Yeah, somebody.
Speaker 1: I wonder if it was somebody like a policeman or something. Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's keep going. We'll get into that bit later, Okay.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna we're gonna keep moving on. So the
Speaker 1: last victims that we talked about were Debbie Ackerman and
Speaker 1: Maria Johnson. They went to the mall, didn't come home.
Speaker 1: Just over a year after that, sixteen year old Kimberly
Speaker 1: Pitchford left school on January three, three and she was
Speaker 1: never seen again. Her body was found two days later
Speaker 1: in a ditch and her cause of death was strangulation.
Speaker 1: So there was no gunshot in this particular one. And then,
Speaker 1: thankfully After that, things cooled off for a couple of years,
Speaker 1: at least according to what we know, we're or believe,
Speaker 1: because like I talked about, there's this lack of communication.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that was common practice at the
Speaker 1: time with the police department is if a young girl disappeared,
Speaker 1: the automatic conclusion by the police was that she ran away.
Speaker 1: She did a runaway. Sorry, mom and dad, your daughter
Speaker 1: ran away, so no investigation would take place. So there's
Speaker 1: there's possibly more. Actually, I know there's lots more than
Speaker 1: just a particular list that I'm using. I know, Joe
Speaker 1: you had printed out. When the list it's like seventy
Speaker 1: people long. There's a lot of people disappeared, and some
Speaker 1: of them turned up, but of course not necessarily the
Speaker 1: same killer, right, and and some of them are on
Speaker 1: these lists, some of their aren't. So it's it's hard
Speaker 1: to say that, oh yeah, a cool law for three
Speaker 1: years with any certainty, it could have continued and the
Speaker 1: links just weren't made. They may have been taken farther
Speaker 1: than the four corridor, or they could just their bodies
Speaker 1: could have just never been exactly I decomposed, not equal positioned,
Speaker 1: the accomposted. Yeah, decomposted, uh in you know, a bogger,
Speaker 1: an oil field or whatever. Yeah, it wasn't necessarily tossing
Speaker 1: everybody in the oil fields. No, no, there, Okay, So
Speaker 1: here's folks who have heard these kind of stories when
Speaker 1: I'm I'm running the mic and probably used to the
Speaker 1: fact that I will say, and there's X number more
Speaker 1: and then I would just leave it at that with
Speaker 1: maybe a couple of highlights, but to kind of drive
Speaker 1: home the enormity of this whole thing, I have a
Speaker 1: list and I had to resort to a spreadsheet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did, And I'm going to grab the spreadsheet and
Speaker 1: we're going to go through because we have just talked
Speaker 1: about eleven girls that have disappeared. I think eleven is
Speaker 1: what it is. The list that I have here has
Speaker 1: another eighteen on it. So my list is almost thirty
Speaker 1: girls long. And like I said, there's other lists that
Speaker 1: are bigger than that. But we're gonna go through this
Speaker 1: redsheet and I will keep this as brief as I can,
Speaker 1: with just what are kind of the big highlights where
Speaker 1: and when we need them. Suzanne Bowers disappeared on May one,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven. Uh and her body would be discovered
Speaker 1: in March of nineteen seventy nine in Alta Loma, Texas.
Speaker 1: Brooke brace Well, I don't know exactly when she disappeared,
Speaker 1: but her body would be found in April of nine one.
Speaker 1: She had been out with a friend that day, the
Speaker 1: day that she disappeared. Georgia Greer year. Yes, so Brooke
Speaker 1: was twelve, Georgia was fourteen. Both these girls bodies would
Speaker 1: be found in Alvin Swamp and then they had been
Speaker 1: beaten to death. Heidi Faye, she was twenty three years old.
Speaker 1: She disappeared on the tenth of October three. Her body
Speaker 1: would be found on the Calder Road property in April
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty four, and called. When I say they
Speaker 1: called the road property, that's the quote unquote official twenty
Speaker 1: five acre Texas killing field. So that's the the official
Speaker 1: sanctioned area. Sanctions the wrong word, but you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Yeah, if you actually easily find it, it's
Speaker 1: right behind that church. I can't remember the name of
Speaker 1: the church now, but it's on the highway there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean if you type in called the road and
Speaker 1: Interstate forty five, you'll find it pretty quickly. Uh. Moving forward,
Speaker 1: there's Santa Ramber, she was fourteen, disappeared on October twenty
Speaker 1: six three and it's still missing to this day. There's
Speaker 1: a Jane Doe that was found in this time in February.
Speaker 1: It's Sandra. They are pretty sure it's not Sandra. We
Speaker 1: don't know who she is or where she came from. Uh,
Speaker 1: she's what we've The term we used before was the
Speaker 1: missing missing. We don't nobody appears even though she's missing. Uh.
Speaker 1: Laura Miller, she was sixteen, disappeared on September tenth, nine
Speaker 1: four and was found on the same day as on
Speaker 1: the same Yeah. I was just suddenly that caught me
Speaker 1: off guard. It's on the same day. Um. So Laura
Speaker 1: Miller will talk about her briefly because she was last
Speaker 1: seen at a convenience store. There's two or three that
Speaker 1: we're seen at a convenience store. But what I want
Speaker 1: to talk about is Laura Miller is so, she disappeared
Speaker 1: and her body was eventually found and it was found
Speaker 1: on the calder on the actual killing field. But her dad,
Speaker 1: Tim is an interesting figure in this entire case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because Tim Miller, the man lost his daughter, and I
Speaker 1: get that, but he it's almost like he went on
Speaker 1: a crusade. He found a calling, he had to find
Speaker 1: the man who was responsible. And I'm not going to
Speaker 1: say anything against him having done that. He's done some
Speaker 1: great things. He started a company called Equisearch. They've gone
Speaker 1: all over the country, actually all of the world, using
Speaker 1: horses and boats to look for lost girls. Like they
Speaker 1: do good work. But Tim has also done some very
Speaker 1: not good things in the search for his daughter's killer.
Speaker 1: And he has pointed the finger at some people and
Speaker 1: made some very i would say, some very bad moves.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk about those our theories when we
Speaker 1: talked about ourselves that he has. It's not like the
Speaker 1: man just believes he's never done anything wrong. He's a
Speaker 1: human being and he gets it. But it's it's concerning
Speaker 1: to me some of his level involvement at times. Back
Speaker 1: to the list, we have Shelley Sikes. She was nineteen.
Speaker 1: She disappeared on May six, and she's still missing. Her
Speaker 1: car was found abandon on I forty five, and she's
Speaker 1: one of the ones I'll point out because she was
Speaker 1: four ft eleven and ninety pounds, so it would kind
Speaker 1: of look like the profile of a eighteen early teenager
Speaker 1: Suzanne renee Richardson disappeared on October seven, and she was
Speaker 1: twenty two years old. She's also still missing. She was
Speaker 1: five ft eight pounds. She's kind of an outlier here
Speaker 1: because I mean, yeah, I can't think of any like
Speaker 1: twelve year old girl that I've ever met that's also
Speaker 1: five eight. You know, I have a family member who
Speaker 1: at fifteen was about five eight or fight. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it just depends on the person, but yeah, she
Speaker 1: has a bit of an outlier in our general profile
Speaker 1: we're building here. We go to Lynnette Bibbs. She was fourteen,
Speaker 1: disappeared on February one of nineteen. She was found two
Speaker 1: days later. She was out with her friend tomaraw Fisher
Speaker 1: and Tomorrow. Both of the girls disappeared at the same time,
Speaker 1: and both of their bodies were found on the same day,
Speaker 1: which is two days later. They were found on the
Speaker 1: side of the road in Cleveland, Texas. Uh, I had
Speaker 1: got this one, well, this is this is the one
Speaker 1: that I got mixed up with the girls in the beginning,
Speaker 1: because it was Tomorrow who was shot in the head
Speaker 1: and Lynnette who was shot twice in the head and
Speaker 1: once in the leg. So I I incorrectly said that earlier.
Speaker 1: It's hard to keep. There's another Jane Doe and she
Speaker 1: was found in September of Crystal Baker. She was thirteen.
Speaker 1: She disappeared on March four, store from a convenience store
Speaker 1: and would be found the very next day. So the
Speaker 1: convenience store is just like Laura Miller and Heidi Faye. Um.
Speaker 1: Crystal was beaten, strangle, what's it? Also Brooks and Georgia
Speaker 1: Brooks brace well, Georgia Gear also disapparted. Yeah, you're right,
Speaker 1: You're right. Crystal was found, like I said, she's found
Speaker 1: the very next day. She was underneath and under highway
Speaker 1: overpass and she had been beaten and strangled and sexually assaulted.
Speaker 1: So this is a case where we obvious sexual assault
Speaker 1: because the body was found so fast. We moved forward
Speaker 1: another year and there's Laura Smither. She was twelve. She
Speaker 1: was found went missing on April three and would be
Speaker 1: found seventeen days later. She left her house to go
Speaker 1: jogging and just disappeared. I'm sorry, I'm just shaking my
Speaker 1: head because like, what twelve year old girl are we saying, like, yes,
Speaker 1: let's go out jogging by yourself. So she wanted she
Speaker 1: was she was a ballerina. She wanted to be a
Speaker 1: ballerina like for real life. And somebody said, you need
Speaker 1: to train, and one of the things you need to
Speaker 1: do to make your body stronger is to start running, right,
Speaker 1: That's why she started running. And this this unfortunately led
Speaker 1: to her to mind. She was found in a retention
Speaker 1: pond in Pasadena and she's actually, go ahead, is that
Speaker 1: in that area? Sorry? I just think of Pasadena, California, Pasadena,
Speaker 1: Texas again, it's within like a yeah. So Laura Smither
Speaker 1: is one of the first cases where there was enough
Speaker 1: media attention to the whole thing that the cops actually
Speaker 1: started talking to each other in all of those areas,
Speaker 1: and that's when they started putting this larger picture together
Speaker 1: and realizing there's a bigger problem than any one of
Speaker 1: us realized. Uh there, there's there's three more that I
Speaker 1: have here. One of them I was actually really hesitant
Speaker 1: to put on the list, and that is the next one,
Speaker 1: which is Taught Harriman. She's completely an outlier because though
Speaker 1: she just she disappeared on I forty five, because she
Speaker 1: was last seen driving on it and it was the
Speaker 1: twelfth of July of two thousand one. But she's fifty seven,
Speaker 1: so she she does not seem to match what we've
Speaker 1: been talking about so far in the demographic of these girls. Do.
Speaker 1: There is Sarah Trusty. She was twenty three, disappeared on
Speaker 1: July twelfth of two thousand and two and would be
Speaker 1: found just fourteen days later. She'd been less seeing riding
Speaker 1: her bike. She's another one five ft five pounds again,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of within the range more so than
Speaker 1: I would say with Tought. Yeah, more than taught, but
Speaker 1: still she's telling the outlier, and then the last one
Speaker 1: is going to be uh Teresa and Ajus. She was sixteen,
Speaker 1: disappeared on October thirty one of two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: So we've got what like twenty or thirties, almost almost
Speaker 1: thirty years of almost four that's thirty five years. If
Speaker 1: he goes from seventy one to two thousand six, that
Speaker 1: could have been more than one. It's possible that somebody
Speaker 1: like took over the reins and there were some gaps
Speaker 1: in there too. Yeah, there's totally gaps in there. And
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna have to talk about some of
Speaker 1: this stuff in terms of single versus multiple killers or
Speaker 1: a rapist or abductee abducteurs in the theory section, as
Speaker 1: I said, there's so little pattern between when they disappear,
Speaker 1: like it seems like the geography is one of the
Speaker 1: main things. Some are shots, some are not. Some have
Speaker 1: their hands bound and their feet bounds, some do not.
Speaker 1: Some are found fully clothed, some are found fully naked,
Speaker 1: some are completely decomposed. Some are just dumped so that
Speaker 1: they're able to be found the very next day. I mean,
Speaker 1: even the ones who disappeared from their cars, there's really
Speaker 1: no crime scene because though their car is there, there
Speaker 1: was no sign of real struggle. So it's it's extremely
Speaker 1: hard to figure out what in the hell is going
Speaker 1: on in this area something bad? And that's the interesting
Speaker 1: thing is that, well, you know, how do you get
Speaker 1: somebody twelve or fifty seven whatever do you trust you
Speaker 1: and get in your car? How do you do that?
Speaker 1: I don't always a total stranger, but I mean there's
Speaker 1: there's there's you know a couple of types of people
Speaker 1: who could get that, who could actually do that, like policemen.
Speaker 1: You know, there is that. Not that I want to
Speaker 1: anger any of our police listeners. I think what you're
Speaker 1: getting at, Joe is a figure of authority. There's a
Speaker 1: better way to say that. Could be a policeman, could
Speaker 1: be a fireman, could be a paramedic, could be any
Speaker 1: road service worker. I mean, there's anybody who looks like
Speaker 1: they should be able to they're responsible to help you
Speaker 1: or you know, a cop has an interesting position in
Speaker 1: a Sorry, we're like talking a little bit about theories
Speaker 1: right now, but you know, in the instances where cars
Speaker 1: were found abandoned, you say, you know, cop could have
Speaker 1: pulled them over and said you're under arrest and put
Speaker 1: them in the back of their car. And you know,
Speaker 1: most people aren't gonna resist too terribly much. There's not
Speaker 1: going to be much of which crime scheme. It's just
Speaker 1: going to look like there's a left behind car and
Speaker 1: then whoops. I mean, you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different stories you can tell as a cop. You can say,
Speaker 1: you know, i'm here, your parents sent me to take
Speaker 1: you home. You know she's twelve, or if she's you know,
Speaker 1: and in the seventies that was not something that most
Speaker 1: most kids knew was a bogus story. You know, there
Speaker 1: was a huge campaign in the seventies and eight e
Speaker 1: d s to not take candy from strangers and not
Speaker 1: let people tell you that your parents sent them to
Speaker 1: pick you up. Cop. Yes, I mean right, there's certain
Speaker 1: figures that have always been quote unquote trustworthy and that
Speaker 1: generally the population will do what they say. Yeah, yeah, usually.
Speaker 1: So Okay, now we've angered all our law enforcement Listen, No, no,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean it's again, it's it's a figure
Speaker 1: of authority or protection or help. That's I mean, that's
Speaker 1: really what that boils down to. Yeah, that's that would
Speaker 1: account for a lot, it would, but it still doesn't
Speaker 1: prove damn thing. It doesn't prove anything. So what we
Speaker 1: have here is we have a theory section. Well normally
Speaker 1: we would call this the theory section, but really today
Speaker 1: it's more of the suspects section. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: our suspects. And we have a huge laundry list of
Speaker 1: scumbags that we're going to talk about here. Basically, we
Speaker 1: had a long list of bodies, and we have a
Speaker 1: long list of scumbags. Yes, not not every single one
Speaker 1: of them is necessarily scumbag. Okay, there's at least one
Speaker 1: guy on here. Okay, the very first guy is not
Speaker 1: a scumbag. The rest of them I consider scumbags. Thank you, Joe.
Speaker 1: That's a good clarification. So let's talk about the very
Speaker 1: first guy. That is Robert Abele and he was brought
Speaker 1: to the attention of authorities. He lived in Texas. He
Speaker 1: lived in the in the area actually adjacent to the
Speaker 1: Calder Road killing Fields. And he was brought to him, Yeah,
Speaker 1: brought to authorities attention nine maybe, and that he was
Speaker 1: brought to them by his soon to be third ex wife.
Speaker 1: He owned a eleven acre property adjacent to the killing fields. Um,
Speaker 1: and that's where Laura Miller and three other bodies were found.
Speaker 1: He initially participated in the searches, at least one search
Speaker 1: for bodies, and he had a horse, stay Able, and
Speaker 1: he loaned horses to the police to use to search
Speaker 1: for bodies. So from all from the outside, it looks
Speaker 1: like this guy is trying to do good. Uh. By
Speaker 1: the way, the stable he ran was called Startus Trails,
Speaker 1: So he seems like a good guy. Able was a
Speaker 1: smart guy. I mean, he had worked for NASA for
Speaker 1: quite a few years and he was part of the
Speaker 1: team that figured out how to get the Saturn rockets
Speaker 1: into space, put rocket motors on him. That's what made
Speaker 1: the difference. Well, he was a literal rocket scientific he was,
Speaker 1: so that means he was actually very smart. I underlining
Speaker 1: the word very when I said it there so, but
Speaker 1: you know, I mean people are people. And he was fallible,
Speaker 1: and he was married several times, and each of his
Speaker 1: wives said that he had anger problems. So he wasn't
Speaker 1: a perfect human. So he did this thing, which is
Speaker 1: very bad, is he threatened to beat each of his wives.
Speaker 1: He did the good thing of actually, yes, he never
Speaker 1: actually struck them. Instead, he would always storm off and
Speaker 1: sometimes he was gone for hours. I believe there's at
Speaker 1: least one instance where he was gone for a day.
Speaker 1: So he just he just left, he got away. But
Speaker 1: he never actually hit them. But he did hit his horses.
Speaker 1: He apparently would use poles and chains on horses when
Speaker 1: they made him angry. Yeah, that's not standard operating procedure. No,
Speaker 1: absolutely not standard operating procedure with horses actually does not work.
Speaker 1: But generally standard operating procedure is never includes hitting things
Speaker 1: with chains or I would think, like I can't think
Speaker 1: of a thing. Well, I know a motor too that
Speaker 1: I've had, Like, you know, an actual combustion engine that
Speaker 1: I whacked it with a pole and it worked better.
Speaker 1: But that's the rare exception, all right, Yeah, speaking, I
Speaker 1: would not I would not whack a horse with anything,
Speaker 1: because they're bigger than I am, a lot bigger. Yes
Speaker 1: they are, they really are. Okay, So so he's he
Speaker 1: lives next to the property. He's a very very smart guy.
Speaker 1: He's known to have this anger problem, and he's known
Speaker 1: to strike animals and disappears when he's angry, and he's
Speaker 1: he can disappear when he's angry. Made him perfectly fit
Speaker 1: and FBI profile of the person who they believed was
Speaker 1: probably killing these young girls. I don't know it really would.
Speaker 1: And and this is where Tim Miller Um Laura's dad
Speaker 1: comes in because unfortunately Tim found out about this, this
Speaker 1: semi match of Able to the profile, and he latched
Speaker 1: on and he totally went off the rails, and he
Speaker 1: accused him to he made such a stink with the police.
Speaker 1: The police looked into Able. He made such a stink
Speaker 1: in the community that Able was ostracized. He went so
Speaker 1: far as to to mount these illegal searches and digs
Speaker 1: of the property around and then Abel's property and then
Speaker 1: actually went on too Abel's property and had people digging
Speaker 1: looking for bodies like he did. He did this, and
Speaker 1: police actually searched this house at least one time, and
Speaker 1: they really turned it upside down and this property. And
Speaker 1: for their part, the police did their job. They went,
Speaker 1: they investigated, and what did they find. Nothing squat So
Speaker 1: they stopped looking at him because there was nothing to
Speaker 1: support it. Tim Miller on the other end, he didn't.
Speaker 1: I mean this again. Tim Miller's has apologized. He said
Speaker 1: he apologized to Robert Abele for this behavior. But unfortunately,
Speaker 1: what it resulted in was able being isolated from the
Speaker 1: entire community. The man would walk down the street and
Speaker 1: people would yell killer and get their daughters out of
Speaker 1: his way. That is how bad it was, and how
Speaker 1: afraid people were of him because of everything that had
Speaker 1: been said and all that happened. Really that he just
Speaker 1: happened to live next to where some bozo dumped some bodies,
Speaker 1: you know, and he happened to be good enough to
Speaker 1: try to help. Yeah. Yeah. Also he'd beat his horse
Speaker 1: and he did bad things, but he didn't do them
Speaker 1: to these girls. I don't think so, Like I said,
Speaker 1: Tim Tim Miller, He says that he eventually apologized and
Speaker 1: that they talked and Able understood, but the damage had
Speaker 1: been done. In two thousand five, Robert Abel died. He
Speaker 1: was driving a golf cart and he drove his golf
Speaker 1: cart into the path of an oncoming train. That death
Speaker 1: was ruled an accident, though to me that smells quite
Speaker 1: a lot like suicide. But I don't know. But that's
Speaker 1: that's where everything about Abel ends. And he's one of
Speaker 1: the big ones that you'll hear about because he was
Speaker 1: we're officially saying stop it. Yes, Abel Abel was an
Speaker 1: innocent man and everything that I can tell. But if
Speaker 1: you if you do do a search on this particular topic,
Speaker 1: his his name will come up and headline, Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a there's a huge article. One of the first
Speaker 1: articles I read about him, I was like, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: why haven't they arrested this man? It was from like
Speaker 1: nineties six. It was a giant Texas monthly article. I
Speaker 1: can't remember the author's name, and it was called is
Speaker 1: Robert Able getting Away with Murder? And it's the first
Speaker 1: one you find, And I was like, Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: why aren't they And then I started reading everything after that.
Speaker 1: And realized, you know, that it was not what it
Speaker 1: appeared to be based on the information or the accusations
Speaker 1: that were made. So let's move away from Robert Abele.
Speaker 1: We're gonna very very very doubtful to me. We're gonna
Speaker 1: say like one on a scale of correct. Next up,
Speaker 1: we have Kevin Edison Smith. He's got a middle name.
Speaker 1: He gets my vote. So everybody in this story after
Speaker 1: Robert Abele I used their middle name killers. Yes, well
Speaker 1: actually homelinded for me. You remember Crystal Baker. She was
Speaker 1: the girl who disappeared in March of ninety six and
Speaker 1: then was found in under the overpass UH forty miles away.
Speaker 1: She got into a argument with grandma and then ran away.
Speaker 1: She was also she was seeing at the She's one
Speaker 1: of your ones, Joe, that was seen at the convenience store.
Speaker 1: She was using a pay phone to call her bomb.
Speaker 1: That's what she was doing. Well, because of what a
Speaker 1: screw up everything was between all of the local police departments,
Speaker 1: she was listed as missing for two weeks. Her family
Speaker 1: didn't know where she was for two weeks. Even though
Speaker 1: they had found her body the very next day, there
Speaker 1: was nothing that the police could find at the crime
Speaker 1: scene to indicate who had killed her, and they had
Speaker 1: no leads, and so her case was cold for fourteen years.
Speaker 1: Then fourteen years later, so that would be about two
Speaker 1: thousand and ten, there was an investigator somebody in the
Speaker 1: forensics office, and I cannot remember who this lady's and
Speaker 1: what this lady's name was, but for some reason she
Speaker 1: was looking at this case and she decided to send
Speaker 1: off the one I think was addressed that they had
Speaker 1: of crystals and send it to the lab to just
Speaker 1: screen it for d N A and lo and behold,
Speaker 1: they found actual usable DNA on it. And even better.
Speaker 1: At the same time, Kevin Edison Smith in Louisiana had
Speaker 1: been booked on charges if Louisiana law said, if you
Speaker 1: get booked and you get thrown into jail, we're going
Speaker 1: to take your DNA and drop your your DNA into
Speaker 1: the system. And he was. He was a match to
Speaker 1: this case fourteen years later, which is amazing. This is
Speaker 1: good he didn't get arrested like a month later in
Speaker 1: a different state. If you've been arrested in a different
Speaker 1: state that didn't have this law, we may never know this.
Speaker 1: So the Texas Police Department, they get involved in. They
Speaker 1: interrogate him about the case, and at first he he
Speaker 1: says that he doesn't have any knowledge of it, didn't
Speaker 1: know what they're talking about, but slowly, truly, and then
Speaker 1: eventually he admits to it. And he says he never
Speaker 1: sexually assaulted her, which we knows a lie because she
Speaker 1: was sexually assaulted. Well, I mean technically, technically, I guess
Speaker 1: she could have had sex prior to him killing her.
Speaker 1: Is that she could have been sexually assaulted, either be
Speaker 1: by you know, I don't know, he could have not
Speaker 1: killed her, I guess technically or something some really horrible
Speaker 1: human could have come along and been like, oh, a
Speaker 1: dead body and done necrophilia. Yeah, or you know, she
Speaker 1: could have been assaulted before it could have been Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're right, that would be rather opportunistic. I'm going to
Speaker 1: put my money on the fact that he's a liar. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's much if you're probably Okay, So I guess if
Speaker 1: you admit to murdering them, I don't know why you
Speaker 1: wouldn't also admit to sexually assaulting but whatever. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is why I'm putting my money on it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So he said that, like I said, he he says
Speaker 1: he never assaulted her, but he said he did of
Speaker 1: her a ride. And he admits that in that day
Speaker 1: and that not necessarily that day, but that time frame
Speaker 1: of his life, he was drinking a lot, he was
Speaker 1: doing a lot of drugs, and so he doesn't remember
Speaker 1: exactly what was going on, but he remembers that quote unquote,
Speaker 1: she started freaking out and hitting and punching him. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's yeah, that's kind of what I would think
Speaker 1: was going on. He probably wasn't driving when this was happening,
Speaker 1: and he said that his response was to strangle her,
Speaker 1: and then she was dead, and then he decided, I
Speaker 1: don't know what to do, so he dumped her body,
Speaker 1: and he drove her body many many miles away. So
Speaker 1: it almost makes you wonder like he had seen this
Speaker 1: spot before. It's a good place to dump body. It's
Speaker 1: a little funny that he took that that corpse so far. Again,
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying is like, I don't necessarily know
Speaker 1: why you wouldn't why you would say, yeah, I strangled
Speaker 1: her and then dumped her body, but but I didn't
Speaker 1: her Okay, Well, yeah, I mean the thing to do
Speaker 1: is there's DNA to say, yeah, I mean she was
Speaker 1: willing we had sex, you know, and then I dropped
Speaker 1: her off, and then now we had sex. Now we
Speaker 1: had sex, and then she freaked out and I had
Speaker 1: a strangler to death, and then I had to get
Speaker 1: rid of the body. No, no, the Devin's right. The
Speaker 1: smart money would be to be like, well, yeah, you
Speaker 1: found d NA who I was with her? And then
Speaker 1: I dropped her off and she said that was her stop,
Speaker 1: so I let her out and I drove on my way. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be another way. Yeah. Now, this guy, how
Speaker 1: you managed to avoid the death penalty I will not know,
Speaker 1: but he did manage to do so. So he is
Speaker 1: currently serving forty years in prison. Yeah, not even life. Okay,
Speaker 1: now it's a forty year sentence. Yeah, that's how long
Speaker 1: he's in there. But the thing that Joe has pointed
Speaker 1: out and we're gonna talk about now is the convenience
Speaker 1: story angle, because if you remember, Laura Miller back in
Speaker 1: also disappeared from the front of a convenience store, and
Speaker 1: there's a couple of other girls. Laura Miller actually disappeared
Speaker 1: from the front of the same convenience stores Crystal, but
Speaker 1: there's a couple others who disappeared from the fronts of
Speaker 1: convenience stores. And this guy, you know, he was strangling women,
Speaker 1: and he strangled this girl at least, and we know
Speaker 1: that he was in the area. We also know that
Speaker 1: he was living. Oh god, I think it was over
Speaker 1: the course of twenty years, he lived in seventeen cities
Speaker 1: in four different states. So he was he was a
Speaker 1: rambling man, is what I was gonna say. But he was.
Speaker 1: He was. He was roaming around doing work. So it's
Speaker 1: entirely possible that there are girls in this age bracket
Speaker 1: who were strangled in these cities where he lived, and
Speaker 1: he could be responsible. Unfortunately, to play the other side
Speaker 1: of the coin, there's girls in other cities where he
Speaker 1: did not live who were in this age bracket who
Speaker 1: were who died by strangulation. So just because that happens,
Speaker 1: we can't say it's him going on unfortunately, Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they are. They did run his DNA, and that's the
Speaker 1: hard part. Like we talked about, so many these bodies,
Speaker 1: they're in a marsh or they're in a ditch for months,
Speaker 1: there's no good DNA left. It's hard as hell to
Speaker 1: get anything that's usable. Okay, let's keep going. We've talked
Speaker 1: about Kevin Edison Smith enough, so let's talk about Henry
Speaker 1: Lee Lucas. That guy. Yeah, so Henry Lee Lucas, he's
Speaker 1: a self confessed serial killer. Yeah, he's thought to have
Speaker 1: exaggerated some of his the number of his kills just
Speaker 1: a little bit. Yeah, I I would agree with that.
Speaker 1: I believe we'll get through and we'll talk about here
Speaker 1: the number that he claims. But he was arrested in
Speaker 1: Texas in June of night three. That's when he really
Speaker 1: kind of came onto the radar in Texas for this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. When he was fifteen, he ran away
Speaker 1: from home. I mean, get me wrong. His home life
Speaker 1: was horrible. Um, his family was terrible, and his mother
Speaker 1: was a prostitute and she made him watch her with
Speaker 1: clients like this is not the good upbringing that a
Speaker 1: boy should have. Yeah, any child should have. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: I you can understand why the kid left. But he
Speaker 1: says that he killed for the first time in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty one when a girl refused his sexual advances. He
Speaker 1: then would go on in nineteen sixty to kill his
Speaker 1: own mother with a knife. He said he didn't realize
Speaker 1: he had stabbed her. She said, I know, I heard
Speaker 1: the story is like he he was like, you know,
Speaker 1: I just hit her. It on. Then I looked down,
Speaker 1: I saw the knife in my hand, and I was like, whoopsie.
Speaker 1: And that's essentially what that really was his story. He
Speaker 1: didn't say whopsie exactly. Yeah, I mean yeah, he uh.
Speaker 1: He did end up going to jail for that. In prison,
Speaker 1: he served ten years for that crime. Technically, he was
Speaker 1: supposed to serve one need to forty, but unfortunately the
Speaker 1: there was this push to early release because there's prison overcrowding,
Speaker 1: so he got out early. And the man who stabs
Speaker 1: his mother to death is really the best candidate released programs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they probably looked at it as an abusive situation, whereas
Speaker 1: he's not likely to go out randomly killing people left
Speaker 1: and right. Oh no. But the problem was his story
Speaker 1: didn't match up because he said, you know, like you said,
Speaker 1: he realized the knife was in his hand and he said, oh,
Speaker 1: look she's dead, and he ran away, except wasn't actually dead.
Speaker 1: His sister came and found their mother still alive, but
Speaker 1: she did not. She didn't live live long enough to
Speaker 1: get to the hospital. Like the guy. Yeah, it's it's yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a really nice guy, a really nice guy. So
Speaker 1: he gets out, This would be nineteen sixty, in nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: excuse me, nineteen seventy he went in and around nineteen sixty.
Speaker 1: He got out around nineteen seventy, and then in nineteen
Speaker 1: have any one, he was convicted of attempting to kidnap
Speaker 1: three girls. Uh, and after he gives and then after
Speaker 1: they let him out for a second time, thinking this
Speaker 1: guy is gonna just be real, rehabilitated, no problems. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And after he after he got out from the conviction
Speaker 1: of of trying to kidnap those three girls, he continued
Speaker 1: to beat and kill. He was arrested in night. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not really. He was arrested on charges of unlawful possession
Speaker 1: of a firearm and that actually quickly grew into a
Speaker 1: larger charge for the murders of both Frieda Powell. And
Speaker 1: Frieda was a girl that he had met. I believe
Speaker 1: he met her in Florida. She's described as having quote
Speaker 1: unquote intellectual impairments, So I don't know where she is
Speaker 1: on the range of impairments what that means. But he
Speaker 1: had convinced this girl to travel with him, and he
Speaker 1: treated her like a girlfriend until he grew tired of her.
Speaker 1: How old was he at this point? Oh he is,
Speaker 1: so he yeah, he's in his his early third Oh no,
Speaker 1: he's in his forties at this point. Old yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah absolutely so. So he's he's charged for killing free
Speaker 1: to Powell. He's also charged at the same time with
Speaker 1: killing a pastor who had given him work and allowed
Speaker 1: him to stay in a building that his religious movement owned.
Speaker 1: So he's all around just not a nice guy people.
Speaker 1: And this is where what Joe was talking about when
Speaker 1: we first talked about Henry Lee Lucas comes in, is
Speaker 1: that once he got arrested, he's and he confessed to
Speaker 1: the first ones. He started confessing to everything. His confessions
Speaker 1: initially at least seemed to be related to the crimes
Speaker 1: that he committed, but then he started and meeting involvement
Speaker 1: and guilt in crimes that were unsolved, and he seemed
Speaker 1: to be really good at filling in some details, so
Speaker 1: people kind of thought that it was him. Eventually, it
Speaker 1: seems like he's probably been discredited almost everything that he's
Speaker 1: admitted to because he claimed credit for like three hundred
Speaker 1: murders somebod Yeah, somebody who did the math on a
Speaker 1: lot of these murders, And it would have required him
Speaker 1: to like drive for like a year, drive to three
Speaker 1: hundred seventy miles a day to get around all these
Speaker 1: places to commit these murders. And obviously I'm sure it
Speaker 1: killed lots of people. He you know, not as many
Speaker 1: as he contested to. I hate to admit, you're right,
Speaker 1: he probably did kill a bunch of people. And he
Speaker 1: would have been traveling through the area between Houston and Galveston,
Speaker 1: So it's possible that he could be involved in one
Speaker 1: or two of the deaths. But it's really tough to say.
Speaker 1: And he's I mean, in a way, he's done a
Speaker 1: really great job of clouding himself in just disbelief. You know,
Speaker 1: nobody believes him. So when somebody suggests, oh, I wonder
Speaker 1: if he did it, everybody like, no, that guy admits
Speaker 1: he did everything. There's no way we can trust him
Speaker 1: to be usable. Yeah, So, I mean, there's there is
Speaker 1: a little game theory in that if you start claiming
Speaker 1: responsibility for everything, eventually people will not believe you in
Speaker 1: the time that you are actually responsible nobody will believe it.
Speaker 1: What's he got to lose or gain? I don't know.
Speaker 1: But these guys, guys like this are so weird because
Speaker 1: they started meeting this stuff. Just so then get the
Speaker 1: body count, the number to go down in history. Well,
Speaker 1: one thing I will just say is this is eight
Speaker 1: three right that he got arrested. That he starts admitting
Speaker 1: to a bunch of murders. Yeah, so like most of
Speaker 1: these women didn't really disappear. I mean, there's a slew
Speaker 1: of him in the seventies, there's But the thing is,
Speaker 1: remember he's but remember he's in jail. Yeah, so that's
Speaker 1: why I say he might be maybe culpable for one
Speaker 1: or two, but that's that's kind of stretching. Well, no,
Speaker 1: he was, he was out. Oh I don't know how
Speaker 1: long he was in jail for the kidnap of the
Speaker 1: three girls. I guess, Yeah, I don't have that here.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean I don't think he's I don't
Speaker 1: think he did it. But you know, it's hard to say,
Speaker 1: hard to say, let's kick him to the curb. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's kick him all very hard. Let's let's move on.
Speaker 1: We're going to move on to the one here that
Speaker 1: is titled Unnamed Man in one. Yeah. This okay, so
Speaker 1: I I again, this is one of the thoes I
Speaker 1: really hesitated to include, but dagnabbic we include them also, Okay.
Speaker 1: Ronna Johnson and Sharon Shaw, if you remember, those were
Speaker 1: the two girls who went to the beach in Galveston
Speaker 1: in seventy one and then never came home. And Michael
Speaker 1: self was the guy who was convicted of murdering these
Speaker 1: two girls. Well, according to Unsolved Mysteries and it's all
Speaker 1: it's like listed in their WICKI some man came forward
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty and went to the police and he
Speaker 1: admitted that he was the one that did it, and
Speaker 1: he gave details that weren't released, such as the fact
Speaker 1: that the girls were apparently bound with electrical cords. But
Speaker 1: according to this, they say, oh god, how do they
Speaker 1: describe him? They say that he they make a statement
Speaker 1: about his mental mental health, and I cannot remember the
Speaker 1: verbiage that is used, basically saying that he was um
Speaker 1: not having visions, but he was delusional. Okay, But my
Speaker 1: problem with that his a It came for months of mystery.
Speaker 1: So I don't and I haven't seen anywhere else. So
Speaker 1: I have a hard time with it. I mean, they
Speaker 1: actually did do their own independent investigations. Often they did,
Speaker 1: although it would be sometimes it's nice to spice things
Speaker 1: up a little bit not saying they did that. My
Speaker 1: my point is, if this guy had details like that,
Speaker 1: don't you think there would be record of it somewhere?
Speaker 1: If somebody like actually saying, oh, we're going to investigate
Speaker 1: this guy, Like, don't you think that uh self would
Speaker 1: have somehow heard of this and they would have tried
Speaker 1: to track down the records of this to exonerate that
Speaker 1: poor guy who still was sitting in jail at that
Speaker 1: point almost ten years for friend we didn't commit. I
Speaker 1: feel like there may have been some sense of, I
Speaker 1: don't know, this guy seems like he might not be
Speaker 1: totally mentally there, so realistically he's gonna get sent he's
Speaker 1: going to get committed, not sent to prison, and well,
Speaker 1: we've already convicted this guy of it, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: he might be guilty, even if there's some questions about it.
Speaker 1: And I there may just be a sense of like, well,
Speaker 1: we already got there's already somebody who's rotting for this case,
Speaker 1: so screw it. Yeah, I gotta tell you that as
Speaker 1: a taxpayer, if that's the opinion of the police force,
Speaker 1: with my tax dollars, is what we got somebody locked up,
Speaker 1: So screw it. We're not going to figure out if
Speaker 1: we did it right. That's not really a good attitude
Speaker 1: I would be. That makes me very upset. I agree.
Speaker 1: I'm just trying. Even if I weren't paying taxes, that
Speaker 1: wouldn't be happy about that. Frankly, well, I know there
Speaker 1: was a year or two that you didn't but sorry,
Speaker 1: iron rest listeners, I forget you heard that. Uh yeah.
Speaker 1: And as far as the detail about tying up with
Speaker 1: electrical cord, I mean, that's not that bizarre. It could
Speaker 1: have just been a major you know, you could have
Speaker 1: been delusional, confessed to a crime he didn't commit. We're
Speaker 1: gonna move to our next suspect in our laundry list
Speaker 1: of suspects. This is number five and this giant list
Speaker 1: that I created, Okay, we have William Lewis Reefs. William
Speaker 1: Lewis Reefs committed his first crime when he was caught
Speaker 1: and charged in night six h for picking up a
Speaker 1: nineteen year old girl in Oklahoma. He did that with
Speaker 1: pretense of giving her a ride. Instead, he abducted and
Speaker 1: raped her for several days in the sleeper cab of
Speaker 1: a semi Okay, first of all, let's just go ahead
Speaker 1: and say he probably didn't commit his first crime at
Speaker 1: that time. His first crime forgetting that he was caught
Speaker 1: for is the way that I meant to phrase, that's
Speaker 1: a better way to look at Yes, he uh, well,
Speaker 1: this this girl, she she managed to escape under the
Speaker 1: pretense of using a bathroom or something, I can't remember
Speaker 1: what it was. And then while and then he got
Speaker 1: charged for doing this crime. And while he was awaiting
Speaker 1: trial out on bail. Yes, well, he's out on bail
Speaker 1: for this rape case. He raped another woman that he
Speaker 1: had met in a bar. But this guy seems to
Speaker 1: have a compulsion. Maybe he was sentenced to twenty five
Speaker 1: years in prison for the first rape. I think that
Speaker 1: he was sentenced for. Maybe it was twenty five years total.
Speaker 1: I can't remember at the moment. Twenty five years done.
Speaker 1: Unless this guy should be locked up at kept away
Speaker 1: from the general populace, Yeah, not so much. He only
Speaker 1: served ten only served ten years of that sentence. He
Speaker 1: was then again put into jail in seven for kidnapping
Speaker 1: a woman, just like Kevin Edison Smith. When he was
Speaker 1: put into jail in nine seven, his DNA was put
Speaker 1: into the system and checked against other cases. And after
Speaker 1: that he started getting linked to other unsolved crimes and cases.
Speaker 1: So this guy he went about this, he wanted to
Speaker 1: avoid the death penalty because he was in jail if
Speaker 1: I remember right in Oklahoma, maybe it's Louisiana. I can't
Speaker 1: remember which what it was, but it has the death penalty.
Speaker 1: And his deal was, you don't put me on death row,
Speaker 1: you don't try me for murder. Uh and and I'll
Speaker 1: go ahead and I'll help you out. It's not well.
Speaker 1: And so he led investigators into the field and he
Speaker 1: took them to where the body of Jessica Caine was.
Speaker 1: She had disappeared in Yes, she was. She was one
Speaker 1: of the last ones we talked about in that that
Speaker 1: in that thirty person list. He also took them to
Speaker 1: where the body of a girl named Kelly Cox was.
Speaker 1: She had gone missing around the same time as Jessica,
Speaker 1: though she wasn't actually on our list. Kelly wasn't Jessica was.
Speaker 1: Jessica was the seventeen Yeah, okay, he is also believed
Speaker 1: to be connected to the disappearance of twelve year old
Speaker 1: Laura Smither. Yeah, the one who went jogging. Why is that?
Speaker 1: Why is he suspected of that? There are links in
Speaker 1: his pattern and his travels that make people think that
Speaker 1: he was in the area when it happened. But it's
Speaker 1: obviously it's nothing concrete because he has not been charged
Speaker 1: with her death, but they think that he might be
Speaker 1: involved in that. I mean, but I think about the guy.
Speaker 1: Was he was driving a truck. He was driving all
Speaker 1: over He was driving from Galveston all the way up
Speaker 1: into Oklahoma. What's the main city, Oklahoma City? Wow, Steve,
Speaker 1: good job. Yeah, he was driving all from north to
Speaker 1: south along that route, driving a truck all the time. Well,
Speaker 1: Interstate forty five is part is the route between Houston
Speaker 1: to Galveston, So he's on that road. And if he's
Speaker 1: he's just out and about stealing girls and raping and
Speaker 1: killing them, then again, just like we said before, it's
Speaker 1: possible that he could be involved with at least one
Speaker 1: or two others that are on our list that just
Speaker 1: didn't get any recomfortable d NA. Yeah, the ones that
Speaker 1: we're not out, we're outside the killing fields, but somewhere
Speaker 1: else along And we talked about this little bit before,
Speaker 1: and let's give a little more description of what's going
Speaker 1: on in terms of what it has to be like
Speaker 1: for these poor girls. Because you think, well, they're on
Speaker 1: the side of the road or there near the road,
Speaker 1: like they should be able to run and scream and
Speaker 1: get help there. Well, it's it's oil fields active and
Speaker 1: abandon its giant expanses. Apparently it is amazingly windy. So
Speaker 1: you can yell at somebody fifty feet away, say, and
Speaker 1: they'd have no idea. Cars are whizzing by on the
Speaker 1: interstate a couple hundred yards away. They're not going to
Speaker 1: see what's happening. I mean, one of the cops in this,
Speaker 1: in the Smither case, was talking about the fact that
Speaker 1: you could literally get off the freeway, drive off the
Speaker 1: the off ramp, down a dirt road, drive for five minutes.
Speaker 1: You are now in a complete and total seclusion, drop
Speaker 1: a body, drive back onto the freeway, and be on
Speaker 1: and no soul would be the wiser for months on end.
Speaker 1: And the only reason they would know is because they
Speaker 1: found the body you dumped. So this is this is
Speaker 1: the kind of situation. This is why. So I know
Speaker 1: some people are going, how is this possible? This doesn't
Speaker 1: make any sense. It is it's such a rural area.
Speaker 1: It's it's just a stretch of road that is a
Speaker 1: freeway with a couple of little towns dotting it, and
Speaker 1: then it's marshes and dirt roads. It's all it is.
Speaker 1: So it's it's why these girls are so hard to find.
Speaker 1: Um okay, So off of that soapbox or whatever it
Speaker 1: was that I was on there for the moment, I think, um,
Speaker 1: William Reese is a pretty good I think that this
Speaker 1: guy is probably responsible for a couple of the fact
Speaker 1: that he Okay, it didn't happen right away, but in
Speaker 1: watching what happened and it evolved, in his willingness to cooperate,
Speaker 1: I would call that a knee jerk reaction of Oh, hell,
Speaker 1: they're going to figure out all all the ones that
Speaker 1: I did. I'm just gonna I'm gonna roll over. He
Speaker 1: folded like a cheap suit, and he went ahead and
Speaker 1: he told him what he needed to make sure that
Speaker 1: they didn't kill him. Every single body, just a couple
Speaker 1: of them, right, I mean, but his ability to lead
Speaker 1: them to certain bodies, it sounds like definitely, you know,
Speaker 1: I it's probably likely that he's responsible for the majority
Speaker 1: of the Strangolds bodies and maybe not the shot ones.
Speaker 1: So that's the weird thing, is the ones that were shot.
Speaker 1: I've never I've never found anybody who followed that pattern
Speaker 1: of steal a girl and then once he has committed
Speaker 1: whatever whatever acts he was intending to commit with her,
Speaker 1: his method of getting to kill her was to shoot
Speaker 1: her in the head. Like, none of these guys that
Speaker 1: we're talking about match that. Yeah, but it's a it's
Speaker 1: a weird thing in the early pattern of of these deaths. Yeah. Man,
Speaker 1: By the way, the the shots to the head, what
Speaker 1: caliber of gun were they? They were smaller caliber if
Speaker 1: I remember. I want to say that I read once
Speaker 1: and it was a twenty two that they were shot
Speaker 1: in the head. But I cannot be sure of that, Joe,
Speaker 1: because I've been reading about this obviously for a while.
Speaker 1: And then four or five days ago, I was like, crap,
Speaker 1: what caliber was it that they were killed with? And
Speaker 1: I started going back and of course you know how
Speaker 1: this is. Suddenly you can't find it anymore because the
Speaker 1: Internet has deleted that information from itself, so that I
Speaker 1: cannot answer that question. I'll ask stupid Internet are Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the kool aid man should break in right now
Speaker 1: and say that, Oh yeah, No, there were a ton
Speaker 1: of suspects in this thing. I mean I was. I
Speaker 1: was compiling a list of my own and it looks
Speaker 1: like you didn't miss anybody, but my list was getting
Speaker 1: pretty long. Was wow, I almost had to go to
Speaker 1: a spreadsheet of suspects. Yeah, and that just rubbed me wrong.
Speaker 1: I don't wanted to make a spreadsheet at These people
Speaker 1: have hard enough time. I had him on my computer
Speaker 1: as it is. Okay, we're gonna go to the next guy,
Speaker 1: which is Edward Harold Bell got Bells a weirdo. Bell
Speaker 1: showed up in Pasadena, Texas on August. He was in
Speaker 1: a neighborhood. He got out of his truck in front
Speaker 1: of a bunch of children who are playing, and he
Speaker 1: didn't have any pants on. You thought it was a
Speaker 1: cartoon duck. Maybe no pants, No wonder where he he is.
Speaker 1: Just there's a phrase for when you wear only a shirt,
Speaker 1: and I'm actually not going to say that that's what
Speaker 1: he was doing. There's a guy by the name of
Speaker 1: Larry Dickens Larry's mom yells to him and says, listen,
Speaker 1: slow that guy down, don't let him get near the kids,
Speaker 1: in delaying long enough for the cops to get here.
Speaker 1: So Larry Dickens does that. He's a stand up guy,
Speaker 1: and he gets in his way. He eventually takes Bell's
Speaker 1: keys out of Bell's truck, at which point Bell loses it.
Speaker 1: He shoots Dickens a couple of times with a pistol.
Speaker 1: Larry Dickens runs away. He runs into the garage of
Speaker 1: his mom's house and he collapses. His mom is holding him.
Speaker 1: Bell comes up and demands the car keys or the
Speaker 1: truck keys back. Larry gives him the keys, at which
Speaker 1: point Bell shoots him point blank in the head while
Speaker 1: his mother is still holding him, and then walks back
Speaker 1: to the truck. And while this seems not normal, you
Speaker 1: would think at this point he would then get in
Speaker 1: his truck and drive away. No, he grabs a rifle
Speaker 1: and he comes back and he continues to shoot Larry
Speaker 1: in the face. Yeah. He then at this point he
Speaker 1: tries to get away and it takes not come back
Speaker 1: with the rifle if he want, Yeah, if he was
Speaker 1: trying to Yeah, that was that was a bit excessive,
Speaker 1: a bit yes, understatement of the year on my part.
Speaker 1: So he tries to get away, the cops catching me
Speaker 1: like twenty minutes that he didn't do any very good
Speaker 1: job at all trying to escape. But this is a
Speaker 1: part of the next part is what really puzzles me. Well,
Speaker 1: but the brutality of the case, because I mean, they
Speaker 1: bring him back and his sister, Larry's sister ideas him
Speaker 1: and you know, oh the release Okay, okay, yeah, they
Speaker 1: let this bozo go. They charge him and they release
Speaker 1: him on bail, and he's gone. What a surprise, shocking Yeah, yeah, no, no,
Speaker 1: I guano. He has gone, and he is at large
Speaker 1: for a total of fourteen years. Bell is eventually rest
Speaker 1: arrested in Panama. In there is a Panama Florida. Yea
Speaker 1: Panama City. I think Florida. Yeah, I think that's I
Speaker 1: think it is. It's Panama City, Florida. I just realized, like,
Speaker 1: not Panama of the country, was Panama of the city.
Speaker 1: And I believe it was in Florida. In and at
Speaker 1: that point he was sentenced to seventy years in prison,
Speaker 1: just seventy but a and he begins they begin look
Speaker 1: at his history and his pattern, and they believe that
Speaker 1: he might actually be the one who was involved in
Speaker 1: the murders of Rhonda Johnson and Sharon Shaw again, the
Speaker 1: girls who went to the beach. He's he's another one
Speaker 1: that this guy. He he fills in details and unsolved
Speaker 1: mystery or unsolved murders, and he starts confessing to things.
Speaker 1: And initially he claimed that he had killed seven girls.
Speaker 1: He then changed that number in two thousand eleven to
Speaker 1: eleven girls. And a guy like this who makes it
Speaker 1: makes his own catchphrase. I really god, I really worried
Speaker 1: that this guy is watching the Apprentice in prison to
Speaker 1: come up with a catchphrase like this, because his his
Speaker 1: catchphrase is the eleven that went to Heaven. It's I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's disturbing. But he also he makes again, this
Speaker 1: is one of those things, like these crazy lames. He begins,
Speaker 1: he's always actually said that it wasn't his fault. It
Speaker 1: was the government's fault. They brainwashed him, and they programmed him,
Speaker 1: and they forced him to be a flasher and to
Speaker 1: rape girls and to want to kill them. It seems
Speaker 1: like a good suspect for the girls that were shot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he did like to shoot people. Yeah, yeah, so, actually
Speaker 1: I guess I misspoke earlier. He is suddenly flailing firearms.
Speaker 1: You know who he actually makes me think of is
Speaker 1: reading his case. It made me think that maybe he
Speaker 1: was loosely the basis for the movie, Mr Wright, Either
Speaker 1: of you seen that it's a sam I have. It
Speaker 1: looks kind of intriguing. It's a Saram Rockwell movie and
Speaker 1: it is a lot of fun. I saw the description
Speaker 1: and I was really hesitant, and then my wife and
Speaker 1: I sat down and watched it. And normally in my house,
Speaker 1: I'm known for picking really bad Netflix titols. Why did
Speaker 1: you pick that movie? That was a horrible movie? She
Speaker 1: actually laughed through to the point she's like, okay, and
Speaker 1: that one was good. Well, I mean, he can't go
Speaker 1: wrong with saying Rocket who is you know who he is?
Speaker 1: Next up? Next up? Yeah, we have Clyde Edward Hendrick. Okay,
Speaker 1: so Hedrick, You're right, not hed So this one and
Speaker 1: the next one, I'm going to tell people, if you
Speaker 1: are in a position to do so, please pause and
Speaker 1: google this guy and look at his mug shot. He
Speaker 1: is a Texas resident and he looks like he has
Speaker 1: lived in the backwoods of Texas for many, many years.
Speaker 1: It's an amazing mug shot. But Clyde in five was
Speaker 1: questioned in the investigation of the death of a woman
Speaker 1: by the name of Ellen Ray Beeson. And initially they
Speaker 1: didn't know that she was murdered. They just knew that
Speaker 1: she died and something didn't add up. Uh, And then
Speaker 1: twenty years later, so they charged him with tampering with
Speaker 1: a corpse. And then twenty years later they exhumed her
Speaker 1: body and they reinvestigated the case, and they figured out
Speaker 1: what was going on. And here's what was going on.
Speaker 1: According to Hedrick, he and Beason had been out drinking
Speaker 1: and then they had gone to some place and she
Speaker 1: had gotten naked and went skinny dipping, and then she
Speaker 1: drowned and then a smile face killer thing could have been.
Speaker 1: When she drowned, he went in to help her, but
Speaker 1: when he got her body out, she realized she was dead.
Speaker 1: So he panicked and he threw her in the back
Speaker 1: of his truck and he looked for a place to
Speaker 1: dispose of her body and eventually dumped her body. Makes
Speaker 1: sense when they exhumed the body. This The description of
Speaker 1: the case says that when it was in the initial
Speaker 1: autopsy and body review done, she was not cleaned enough.
Speaker 1: I believed that that means they did not get enough
Speaker 1: brain out of her skull to be able to tell
Speaker 1: this stuff in the x rays. But when they exhumed
Speaker 1: her body, and they did a good job, they figured
Speaker 1: out that part of her skull was caved in because
Speaker 1: she'd been clubbed in the head with something, which means
Speaker 1: he had clubbed her in the head and killed her.
Speaker 1: And that's why he panicked and dumped her body. So
Speaker 1: why are we talking about this guy? Well, the problem
Speaker 1: the reason is is that what he did is where
Speaker 1: he dumped her body was near called her road, that
Speaker 1: called the road property, that the killing field. He threw
Speaker 1: her body. It's reported under a couch, but it's also
Speaker 1: another reporting said that it was actually just a bench
Speaker 1: car seat. The back seat of car is also a
Speaker 1: dumping ground for stuff other than bodies apparently, So I
Speaker 1: mean it's an abandoned chunker crown, so not really suprising. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's why he's he's brought up in this. I
Speaker 1: gotta tell you that there's not a whole lot of
Speaker 1: linkage in terms of him to this place other than
Speaker 1: that one thing. But he is one of the few
Speaker 1: people that I know of who got charged for the
Speaker 1: same crime twice and convicted in two different ways. So
Speaker 1: it goes down the books that way. But I don't
Speaker 1: think a guy that looked like him would have had
Speaker 1: an easy time. I've been trying to get girls to
Speaker 1: climb into his car. Not not in the later years
Speaker 1: of his life, not the twenty years later. But yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: well then let's go to one of our final ones here,
Speaker 1: Bobby Jack Fowler. Did you remember Bobby Jack. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: heard about Bobby Jack from my favorite murder. Yeah here
Speaker 1: in Portland. So this guy, this guy, actually I consider
Speaker 1: him a contender for best mug shot ever. Again, this
Speaker 1: is another one. Please google this guy's mug shot. You will.
Speaker 1: You will have a little fun at his expense. And
Speaker 1: that is perfectly okay given a kind of human Yes,
Speaker 1: but I don't know if he was a human, to
Speaker 1: be quite honest, I think he might have actually been
Speaker 1: a mole person or a retilion or whatever it is
Speaker 1: you want to call him, because he was another terrible
Speaker 1: human being. Oh yeah, he is a very prolific serial killer.
Speaker 1: He's one of the ones that's not so famous as
Speaker 1: like you know, we've all everybody's heard of Henry Lee,
Speaker 1: Luca Sinted Bundy. But this guy is a little more obscure.
Speaker 1: But he killed a lot of people. He did. He
Speaker 1: did a lot of killing. So Bobby Jack Fowler was
Speaker 1: a construction worker and he traveled across the US he
Speaker 1: looked for work. He also, apparently at the same time,
Speaker 1: was looking for women to have unconsensual sex with and
Speaker 1: then possibly kill. The man was all over this country.
Speaker 1: He He's known to have been in British, Columbia, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, Texas, Oregans,
Speaker 1: South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, and Washington State. Literally all over
Speaker 1: this continent, well the northern western part of it anyway,
Speaker 1: Well Louisiana is not and it's kind of easy, yeah,
Speaker 1: South Carolinas on the other coast. Okay, So, according to
Speaker 1: what I've read, he starts his criminal career in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine with a murder charge in Texas that didn't stick.
Speaker 1: And I don't I don't want to try and get
Speaker 1: into this guy's psyche, but it is said, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to emphasize the word said, because I don't know
Speaker 1: that he ever said this himself, but it is said
Speaker 1: that he believed that quote unquote women he came into
Speaker 1: contact with who were hitchy, hitch hiking and or hanging
Speaker 1: out in bars wanted to be sexually assaulted. That's some
Speaker 1: pretty ironclad reasoning. Yeah, so so this guy, I mean,
Speaker 1: obviously already you're it's pretty non Nobody likes this guy.
Speaker 1: He was put into jail for the final time in
Speaker 1: based on what happened on June when he was with
Speaker 1: a woman in Newport, Oregon. He was in a hotel.
Speaker 1: She jumped out of the second story window of the
Speaker 1: hotel to escape him. She still had a rope tied
Speaker 1: around her ankle. She got to the police, she told
Speaker 1: the police what was going on. Obviously she was not
Speaker 1: there under by her own choice. She was there under dress.
Speaker 1: And then they arrested him and it took his DNA.
Speaker 1: He thankfully died in two thousand six. He died in prison,
Speaker 1: but his DNA has linked him to several cases um
Speaker 1: all over the country. I know this one's on our list.
Speaker 1: But there is the high is it the Highway of tears? Yes,
Speaker 1: there's the Highway of Tears in Bridge? In Bridge, Columbia,
Speaker 1: and so he's linked to at least one case up
Speaker 1: there through d n A. He's also believed to be
Speaker 1: responsible for the death of four girls in a Newport,
Speaker 1: Oregon area back in I believe it's the mid eighties,
Speaker 1: or maybe it's the early nineties. Again, there's so many
Speaker 1: of these guys, it's hard to keep all of their
Speaker 1: various crimes straight. He liked to travel. I think he
Speaker 1: called himself a rambling man. I think that's where I
Speaker 1: got that phrase early. He likes to say he was
Speaker 1: rambling about. But he liked to travel, he liked rape,
Speaker 1: he liked to kill, he liked to drink. He was
Speaker 1: all around just a terrible guy. But guy, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: gotta hand it to him. Though he knew what he wanted,
Speaker 1: you know, and he just went out and got it.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say I've got to hand it to him.
Speaker 1: I would say, we need to take it away from you.
Speaker 1: Should have been doing what he was doing, absolutely now.
Speaker 1: He should have been putting the cage a lot earlier
Speaker 1: than he was. He got away with murder for a
Speaker 1: long time, no pun intended. Literally, yes, absolutely so. The
Speaker 1: fact he is he is a one that he's actually
Speaker 1: seems to be gaining some traction in terms of people
Speaker 1: knowing about him because of being linked to these things
Speaker 1: in various places. And I can't say that that he's
Speaker 1: not responsible for any of these things in Texas. Could
Speaker 1: very well be, but I can't see him really sticking
Speaker 1: around for years. You know, you might have been responsible
Speaker 1: for some of them, but that's why not the entire series,
Speaker 1: I don't think. Well, but they have such large gaps
Speaker 1: in between them. He was doing what he was doing,
Speaker 1: he just wasn't doing it in the same city and
Speaker 1: state the whole time. So the path is not connected
Speaker 1: to connecting the dots. It just never happens. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: hard to say. I'd really like to know how exactly
Speaker 1: how many people Bobby Jack did kill. I think that
Speaker 1: was just say Bobby Jack's the only one who will know,
Speaker 1: and you and he obviously wasn't got to talk, but
Speaker 1: he was in jail for a good ten years before
Speaker 1: he died, and he never spilled the beans, so no
Speaker 1: tell him. Um. So our final one is actually it's
Speaker 1: actually a theory though it's a very simple one, which
Speaker 1: is that it was all of these guys or it
Speaker 1: was none of these guys, or it was a single
Speaker 1: guy like this is this is the general discussion area.
Speaker 1: We don't normally do that, but I mean, yeah, if
Speaker 1: you think about it, it's entirely possible that each some
Speaker 1: of these girls were killed by the same person in
Speaker 1: the groups or clusters, and that accounts for all of them.
Speaker 1: It's possible that none of them were killed by these
Speaker 1: guys except for the ones who we know like Bobby
Speaker 1: Jack and um Ken whatever his name is. Yeah that yeah,
Speaker 1: that that we know by d n A. But I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe all the ones I've talked about so far, they're
Speaker 1: not maybe all of the other ones. This is the
Speaker 1: scariest story. The part of the story is maybe they're
Speaker 1: all the same guy and he's just doing it different
Speaker 1: all the time, or yeah, or Joe said he's some
Speaker 1: kind of authority figure, you know what. To be honest
Speaker 1: with you, it's scarier to think that they're all done
Speaker 1: by different people. That's even scarier to me that there
Speaker 1: are that many people, men or women, who during this
Speaker 1: time period, for whatever reason, kill young women and then
Speaker 1: just dump their bodies into swamps. Like That's the scariest
Speaker 1: theory to me is that there are thirty individual or
Speaker 1: what I guess twenty five if you did the couple
Speaker 1: that like, well, but but like Joe said earlier, you know,
Speaker 1: he looked at another list and I mean that list
Speaker 1: was fifty girls d something that none of them are
Speaker 1: really connected, and it probably is more than one person.
Speaker 1: I think some of the ms varied enough like that,
Speaker 1: you know, whoever did all the gunshots to the head
Speaker 1: probably probably the same person. You know, the strangulation is
Speaker 1: probably maybe somebody else. I would say it's probably like
Speaker 1: two or three. I like the idea that if it
Speaker 1: was a cop, you know, he's just like, you know, well,
Speaker 1: I don't like it in the sense that I enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Don't you like it? As a google? If there? Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so he's he's he's one wants to go do a
Speaker 1: little killing. So he goes to the evidence room and
Speaker 1: just grabs a gun there that's been checked into evidence,
Speaker 1: goes out and murder somebody with it, and that just
Speaker 1: brings it back and puts it back into evidence. You know,
Speaker 1: I mean it could have done something. I doubt that
Speaker 1: he would do that. That's taken a big risk, that's
Speaker 1: a giant risk. Actually, yeah, it's already in evidence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it kind of is. But still, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what a great way to get rid of your weapon.
Speaker 1: Yeh know what you're what you're talking about is I
Speaker 1: believe it was training day Denzel Washington. They had a
Speaker 1: gun that was dirty that had been used in the crime,
Speaker 1: but the cops were hanging onto that would be the
Speaker 1: gun in your scenario that would get used. It's a
Speaker 1: gun you've taken off of somebody that you know was
Speaker 1: used a different crime. That is another way to do it.
Speaker 1: It's like, if you take it off a criminal, you
Speaker 1: have lots of opportunities to do that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: You know. What's really scary to me, And and there
Speaker 1: are places like this is that what is it that
Speaker 1: makes it such a magnet? Like what is it that
Speaker 1: raws people that are going to commit these acts in
Speaker 1: such a concentration, Like what is it that they are
Speaker 1: looking for they like so much? Well, they live in Texas,
Speaker 1: So I'm not just blaming it on Texas for once.
Speaker 1: I'm not actually blaming Texas. Houston actually is a very
Speaker 1: very large city and it's very close to Houston. Yeah, away,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it is the feeder route from Galveston
Speaker 1: to Houston. But my point is like, Okay, if if
Speaker 1: it's just proximity to Houston, then why isn't the next
Speaker 1: fifty miles up the Inner State from Houston littered with
Speaker 1: bodies in the same way? Do you know what? You
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying that there are even distributed or
Speaker 1: even clustered a little bit closer to Houston. It's it's
Speaker 1: like there's the Highway of Tears and it's sing's like
Speaker 1: it's it's scary. It's like, what what is it? Why? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's hot, it's secluded, it's got bogs and
Speaker 1: body of water that you can a body will decompose
Speaker 1: quickly in. And I don't know, scary, I don't like it.
Speaker 1: Are you saying that it's kind of the perfect storm
Speaker 1: of the place to dispose of? That's what's drawing these
Speaker 1: guys is that they realized it's a good place. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess, I don't know I would, but I would. Sorry, well,
Speaker 1: I was gonna say if I was gonna get scientific
Speaker 1: about it, um, I would look at it to go
Speaker 1: to Texas Department of Transportation, get the credit Okay, uh,
Speaker 1: get traffic counts and just see what traffic counts are
Speaker 1: like along our stretch. It may be that maybe the
Speaker 1: traffic just five ten miles further north, closer to Houston,
Speaker 1: is a lot heavier, and that's that in itself makes
Speaker 1: it a more attractive place. But these girls also disappeared
Speaker 1: from places that were close to there. They didn't. They
Speaker 1: weren't disappearing from Houston. They weren't. You know, it's not
Speaker 1: as though it's a dumping ground for bodies from Houston.
Speaker 1: Could have been a local too. Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's it's all scary. There's no no good answer.
Speaker 1: It's just here answers. I mean, we can, we can
Speaker 1: step around this for the next ten minutes, asking the
Speaker 1: same question in different ways and giving the same answer.
Speaker 1: The whole, in the long and the short of it
Speaker 1: is it's disturbing. It feels like things have dropped off
Speaker 1: in the killing fields, in the Texas killing fields. And
Speaker 1: yet when I look at the list, I mean, like
Speaker 1: I said, I the list I used was curated by
Speaker 1: somebody else, and list that was curated by yet another
Speaker 1: individual has things that are in the twenty tens that
Speaker 1: are in that region. So I don't know that it's
Speaker 1: actually ended and I don't know. Well, story short, that
Speaker 1: area Yeah, yeah, if you live in the Galveston to
Speaker 1: Houston area, please move. Apparently is not a good area.
Speaker 1: Well it's um it may be that somebody's still killing
Speaker 1: with dumping somewhere else, because that area is not as
Speaker 1: desolate as it used to be. If you look at
Speaker 1: the area, it's a lot it is subdivision, a lot
Speaker 1: of subdivision development in the area right near by. I
Speaker 1: very close, but that actually really confused me. At first.
Speaker 1: I was like, what, how is this? How is this
Speaker 1: a great place to dump bodies? And then I know
Speaker 1: what we've talked about this before. I go on Google
Speaker 1: Earth and I go back to the satellite footage from
Speaker 1: ten twenty years ago, and suddenly you realize all the
Speaker 1: subdivisions just didn't exist, pretty recent stuff. Yeah, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: that might be one reason the bodies are going somewhere
Speaker 1: else nowadays. Yeah, okay, any last thoughts for either of you?
Speaker 1: And I know we've it occurs to me we haven't
Speaker 1: blamed Tuopy in a while. So you know, do you
Speaker 1: think it's the Chupacabra. Yeah, I think so, Okay, I
Speaker 1: think so. All right, Well, I don't think that's it,
Speaker 1: but we'll let it stand. Okay, we never we never
Speaker 1: turned away a theory. Okay, okay, Well, I will have
Speaker 1: links to some of the research for today's show on
Speaker 1: our website. Website, of course, is Thinking Sideways podcast dot com.
Speaker 1: On that website, you're gonna find a couple of things
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Speaker 1: escape my small brain today. I'm getting used to it.
Speaker 1: Wait till I screw up Twitter? What about the Twitter? Yes,
Speaker 1: the Twitter, so we have a tweet or wait, no,
Speaker 1: we do have a Twitter account. It is Thinking Sideways
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Speaker 1: all of the stuff that I have on my laundry
Speaker 1: list here today. So I'm going to say good night
Speaker 1: to everybody. Yeah, sleep well, yeah,