Crime Immemorial

The summer of 1971 would be notable for the first disappearance of a young girl near the twenty-five-acre area of south Texas bordered by League City and the Calder Oil Field. From 1971 all the way into the mid-2000s, this desolate stretch of land would serve as the final resting place for the murdered bodies of at least thirty women and girls, and in more recent times, has been given a rather ghastly yet appropriate appellation. This is the horrifying saga of the Texas Killing Fields.

Thirteen-year-old Colette Wilson was a lovely, black-haired little girl who played in her school band. On June 17th, 1971, in fact, she had been at summer band camp, and subsequently, her band director gave her a ride to a bus stop at the corner of Highway 6 and County Road 95. She was never seen alive again, though her fate would be unknown for five long months.

Prior to the discovery of what had happened to Colette Wilson, however, another young girl would vanish in the same area only weeks later.

On July 1st, 1971, fourteen-year-old Brenda Jones was on her way to Galveston General Hospital to visit her aunt, who was ill. She never made it there.

The following day, Brenda’s body was discovered floating in Galveston Bay, not far off of Interstate 45, a road between Houston and Galveston which had been ghoulishly nicknamed the Highway of Hell due to the numerous automobile accidents occurring along its length. It appeared that now, the nickname had an even more sinister connotation.

Brenda had been killed by a single bullet wound to the head, and her murder would tragically have many analogs in the months and years to come.

On August 4th, 1971, fourteen-year-old friends Sharon Shaw and Rhonda Johnson were last seen in Houston, strolling along Seawall Boulevard. They vanished shortly thereafter, two more victims swallowed up by the Texas Killing Fields. Their remains would not be discovered until early the following year.

Late October and early November would see two more young women falling prey to the mysterious murderer or murderers who lurked in the area. On October 28th, 1971, nineteen-year-old Gloria Gonzales was seen walking along the street near her home in Houston shortly before vanishing without a trace. She would not be found for nearly a month.

And on November 9th, twelve-year-old Alison Craven would be reported missing by her mother after she disappeared from the family’s apartment near Interstate 45. Press reports noted that her teeth and several bones from her arm and hands were discovered not long after she went missing, but the remainder of her body would not be found for three more months.

On November 15th, fifteen-year-old friends Maria Johnson and Debbie Ackerman were hitchhiking near the infamous Interstate 45 in south Texas. Witnesses later stated that the girls accepted a ride in an ice cream shop parking lot from someone driving a white van. They disappeared thereafter.

Two days later, their bodies were discovered in Turner’s Bayou near Galveston, Texas. They both had their hands and feet bound, had been stripped of clothing below the waist, and had been shot in the head.

On November 23rd, the remains of nineteen-year-old Gloria Gonzales, missing since October 28th, were discovered in Addicks Reservoir. Three days later, the body of thirteen-year-old Colette Wilson was also found, less than a hundred yards from Gloria’s. Colette had been missing since the previous June.

Like the prior victims of the so-called I-45 Killer stalking the Texas Killing Fields, both young women had their hands and feet bound, and had been murdered by a single shot to the head.

Though at this point it was becoming clear that the south Texas area was being preyed upon by what was most likely a serial killer, several later developments suggested that there was most likely more than one perpetrator using the site as a dumping ground.

On January 3rd, 1972, the Killing Fields would reveal a partial answer to a five-month-old mystery. The skeletal remains of missing fourteen-year-olds Rhonda Johnson and Sharon Shaw, who had disappeared from a Houston street on August 4th, 1971, were found in Clear Lake. Sharon’s skull was found alongside Rhonda’s bones, though the rest of her body was discovered in a nearby marsh.

And late February would bring tragic resolution to another missing persons case in the midst of the Texas Killing Fields.
Twelve-year-old Alison Craven, who had vanished from her apartment the previous November and whose partial remains had turned up not long after her disappearance, was finally made whole when the remainder of her body was discovered in a field approximately ten miles from her home on February 25th, 1972.

Later that same year, a Galveston gas station employee and convicted sex offender by the name of Michael Lloyd Self was taken into custody on suspicion that he had murdered Rhonda Johnson and Sharon Shaw back in August of 1971. After several hours of interrogation, he eventually confessed, and was subsequently convicted of Sharon Shaw’s murder and given a life sentence. However, prior to the case going to trial, Self retracted his confession, claiming he had been subjected to torture and coercion. Nonetheless, he remained in prison until his death in 2000, even though the police chief and deputy who had elicited the confession from him were later convicted of torturing suspects in order to attain confessions.

Nearly a year went by with no significant developments in the Texas Killing Fields case, and seemingly no disappearances or murders that could be linked to the growing series. But then, on January 3, 1973, sixteen-year-old Kimberly Pitchford was attending a driver’s education class at Frank Dobie High School in Houston, Texas. Sometime after the class ended, she disappeared.

Two days later, on January 5th, her body was found in a ditch in Brazoria County, apparently another victim of one of the murderers lurking in the vicinity of the Texas Killing Fields.

It would be another long span of time before any more crimes in the series occurred, but eventually, the Killing Fields would claim more victims. Twelve-year-old Brooks Bracewell and her friend, fourteen-year-old Georgia Geer, were last seen at a U-Totem convenience store off of I-45 in Dickinson, Texas on September 6th, 1974. They vanished shortly afterward, and their bodies would not turn up for more than six years.

On May 21st, 1977, the notorious Killing Fields would swallow up yet another young girl. At a little before eleven in the morning, twelve-year-old Suzanne Bowers was walking from her home on Avenue S in Galveston to the home of her grandmother on Avenue P, a distance of only a few blocks. She was reportedly going to pick up a swimsuit that she had left there. She never arrived, and her fate would remain unknown for nearly two years. On March 25th, 1979, her remains were discovered; it appeared that Suzanne had been killed by several gunshots to the head.

Though Suzanne Bowers was the last of the so-called Texas Killing Fields victims of the 1970s, the ensuing decades would bring an alarming number of further casualties of the cursed location.

April 3rd of 1981 would bring a grim resolution to two missing-persons cases that had baffled police since the mid-1970s. The bodies of twelve-year-old Brooks Bracewell and fourteen-year-old Georgia Geer, who had last been seen at a convenience store in Dickinson, Texas in September of 1974, were discovered in a ditch in Alvin, Texas. The girls were only the latest in a long list of victims dumped in the area, a list that had by no means reached its end.

In the early summer of 1982, a red-haired teenage girl would climb out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night and turn up dead exactly one month later, though her body would remain unidentified for more than thirty years.

Michelle Garvey was, in 1982, living with her family in New London, Connecticut, but by all accounts was something of a troubled girl. She had run away from home a few times before, and was once later found at a relative’s house.

But on June 1st—two days before her fifteenth birthday—Michelle decided to leave once again, perhaps to return to her native New Jersey, a destination she had mentioned on several occasions. It is believed that she snuck out of her window in the wee hours of the morning, and perhaps got a ride with someone passing by, or maybe a friend with whom she had planned the whole escapade.

At any rate, when her parents discovered her absence, they duly reported her missing, though decades would pass before they received any closure on what had ultimately become of their daughter. On July 1st, 1982, however, a set of human remains was recovered in Baytown, Texas. The victim, unidentified at the time, was a white female believed to be between fifteen and twenty, standing around five-foot-one, with blue eyes, curly red hair, and a scar on one foot. She was clad in corduroy pants and a brown, long-sleeved shirt with embroidery on the pocket. Because the shirt was unbuttoned and no bra or shoes were discovered, investigators assumed that she had been sexually assaulted before being strangled to death.

Incidentally, the spot where the victim was buried lay very close to the site where two other murder victims—known initially as the Harris County Does but identified in 2021 as a married couple named Dean and Tina Clouse—were found in January of 1981.

It took many years before the girl found on July 1st, 1982 could be matched with a known missing person, largely due to the distance between the site where the body was found and the location from which the girl had vanished. But in 2014, after some detective work by amateur investigators on the Websleuths internet forum, it was revealed that the remains belonged to fifteen-year-old Michelle Garvey, who had run away from her home in Connecticut a month prior to the body being found. How she came to be murdered more than 1,700 miles away in Texas was a puzzling conundrum, and it is generally suspected that her death may be linked to the Texas Killing Fields murders.

Most detectives working the case surmise that Michelle must have been attempting to hitchhike to some unknown location and got into a car with the wrong person at some point, but further than that, there have been no new developments in the case since Michelle’s identification and her subsequent laying to rest by the Garvey family.

In October of 1983, the cursed parcel of land known as the Texas Killing Fields would swallow up yet another young woman, though her remains would not be found until the following year.

Twenty-three-year-old cocktail waitress Heide Villareal-Fye was, like earlier Killing Fields victims Brooks Bracewell and Georgia Geer, last seen leaving a convenience store, where she had gone to use a payphone, though the store in this particular case was in League City, Texas. Heide disappeared on October 10th, and her whereabouts would be unknown until the spring of 1984.

Later that same month, the predator stalking the Killing Fields seemed to strike again, though the victim in this instance has yet to be located.

Fourteen-year-old Sondra Ramber was last seen at her home in Santa Fe, Texas, but what happened to her after that was anyone’s guess. When her parents returned to the house on the late afternoon of October 26th, they found the front door standing wide open, food cooking in the oven, and Sondra’s coat and purse still in her room.

Authorities believe that her disappearance is likely linked to other Texas Killing Fields crimes, but as of this writing, no definitive connection has been made, and the victim’s body has not been found.

On April 4th, 1984, in League City, Texas, a dog returned to its owner’s home on Calder Road after a brief exploration of the neighborhood. The animal carried a human skull in its mouth. Tracing the dog’s movements back, the remainder of the body was discovered, and quickly identified as belonging to twenty-three-year-old Heide Villareal-Fye, last seen using a payphone at a League City convenience store on October 10th, 1983. The victim had been beaten severely with some blunt, heavy object, resulting in broken ribs and a fractured skull that was most likely the cause of death.

The blighted area of the Lone Star State known as the Texas Killing Fields would, in September of 1984, consume yet another young victim in the form of sixteen-year-old Laura Miller. On the 10th, she was talking to her boyfriend on the phone—incidentally the same convenience store payphone in League City that Heide Villareal-Fye had used shortly before disappearing back in October of 1983. Laura would vanish shortly afterward, and the whereabouts of her remains would not be revealed until more than a year later.

Before that, though, in December of 1985, a thirty-year-old woman named Audrey Cook would likewise disappear from the Galveston area of Texas. Her remains were found in early February of 1986, and authorities theorized that she had been shot in the back with a small caliber weapon approximately six weeks prior to her body being discovered. The woman was unidentified at the time her body was found, but was finally restored her identity through genetic genealogy in 2019.

In the exact same area, on the following day, the remains of sixteen-year-old Laura Miller, who had disappeared from a League City convenience store after using the payphone to call her boyfriend in September of 1984, were finally found. It turned out that not only had Laura last been seen alive at the exact same place as previous Texas Killing Fields victim Heide Villareal-Fye, but her body was found only sixty feet away from where Heide’s had been discovered in April of 1984.

Later on in 1986, another young woman would go missing and be presumed dead, though in her case, her probable assailants were eventually brought to justice.

Nineteen-year-old Shelley Sikes left her waitressing job at Gaido’s seafood restaurant in Texas City on the evening of May 24th, 1986. The following day, her blood-spattered Ford Pinto was discovered stuck in the mud off an I-45 access road near Dickinson, but Shelley herself was nowhere to be found.

Though the whereabouts of her remains are still unknown, two men confessed in 1987 to running Shelley’s car off the road before abducting and killing her: Gerald Peter Zwarst and John Robert King. Zwarst drew police a map to where they had buried her body, but authorities were unable to locate it, thus the suspects could only be charged with aggravated kidnapping rather than murder.

King died in prison in 2015. Zwarst applied for parole in 2007, 2012 and again in 2017, and was denied all three times. He remained incarcerated in Huntsville, Texas until his death in November of 2020. It is not known whether either man is responsible for any of the other Texas Killing Fields homicides.

In the autumn of 1988, the same doomed region would devour yet another victim, whose body has likewise never been found. Twenty-two-year-old Suzanne Rene Richerson worked as a night clerk at the Casa Del Mar Condominiums in Galveston. When her shift ended at six a.m., she left the premises, and was never seen again. The only trace of her that remained was a single shoe in the parking lot. It was October 7, 1988.

In September of 1991, the remains of an unidentified woman turned up in a field in the 3000 block of Calder Road, near where the bodies of Heide Fye, Laura Miller, and Audrey Cook had been discovered previously. The victim was believed to have died approximately six weeks prior to her body being found. In 2019, she was finally identified as thirty-four-year-old Donna Prudhomme, of Nassau Bay, Texas. In 2013, convicted kidnapper Mark Stallings confessed to her murder, and he was also a suspect in the killing of earlier victim Audrey Cook, though he has yet to be charged with either of the crimes.

Following the finding of Donna Prudhomme, the Texas Killing Fields seemed to fall fallow for several years, but eventually, the crimes would begin again, and two more young girls would be snatched from the world.

It was February 1st, 1996, and fourteen-year-old Lynette Bibbs was attending an event at a teen club in Houston with her fifteen-year-old friend, Tamara Fisher. The pair was reportedly seen in the company of a twenty-two-year-old man who was thought to be a friend of theirs; this man told police that he had been with the girls at the club, and then had dropped them off at a motel on Old Spanish Trail.

Two days later, on February 3rd, the bodies of both girls where found lying on the side of a dirt road in Cleveland, Texas. Both had been shot, though police suspected that there were two assailants, one of whom shot Lynette, and the other who shot Tamara. It was the first Texas Killing Fields-adjacent crime in a long while, but there would be a handful of others before the 1990s ended.

On March 5th, 1996, thirteen-year-old Krystal Baker had an argument with her grandmother, and stormed out of her Texas City house. She went to a nearby convenience store to call a friend on the payphone, to ask her to come pick her up. Before the friend arrived, however, Krystal was abducted. Two hours later, her raped and strangled body was discovered, having been dumped over the I-10 Trinity River Bridge.

Unlike many of the homicides under the Texas Killing Fields umbrella, however, the murder of Krystal Baker was eventually solved. In 2012, her killer, forty-five-year-old Kevin Edison Smith, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Another of the Texas Killing Fields murders that would ultimately be solved was that of Laura Smither. On the morning of Thursday, April 3rd, 1997, the twelve-year-old told her mother that she was going for a short run along their street in Friendswood, Texas, a suburb of Houston. Laura was an aspiring dancer, had just been accepted to a prestigious ballet school in Houston, and had read that running was a great way to strengthen the leg muscles. She set out before breakfast. A handful of witnesses spotted her on her jog, but at some point, she vanished. Her parents immediately panicked when their daughter did not return home, and reported her disappearance to police.

Her grim fate would not be discovered for nearly three weeks. On April 20th, the body of twelve-year-old Laura Smither was found by a father and son who were walking past a retention pond in Pasadena. The site lay approximately fourteen miles away from where the victim had last been seen jogging along her own street in her hometown of Friendswood.

Less than a month after Laura’s remains were discovered, a nineteen-year-old pregnant woman named Sandra Sapaugh was kidnapped at knifepoint in Webster, Texas after she discovered that the tires on her car had been slashed. She was thankfully able to escape by throwing herself out of her abductor’s truck, and later identified her assailant as thirty-eight-year-old William Lewis Reece.

Police suspected that Reece might have also been responsible for the murder of Laura Smither, but had insufficient evidence to charge him with the homicide. He would later be convicted on the kidnapping charge, however, and as the years went on, it came to light that Reece was responsible for several more murders than authorities first surmised.

Later in the summer of 1997, the Texas Killing Fields would again make headlines, though in this case, the victim would not be found for nearly two decades. Seventeen-year-old Jessica Cain had been hanging out with friends on the evening of Saturday, August 16th, and the group of them apparently ended the night with a meal at the Bennigan’s restaurant in Clear Lake, Texas, near the Baybrook Mall. According to her companions, she left the restaurant at about one-thirty a.m. on Sunday, August 17th and got into her father’s truck, which she had borrowed for the night. She subsequently disappeared.

After the truck was found abandoned along South Interstate 45 in Tiki Island, with Jessica’s purse still inside, a massive search commenced, but for almost twenty years, no sign of Jessica Cain could be found.

In 1998, a convicted murderer and sex offender named Edward Harold Bell, who was serving a seventy-year sentence in a Huntsville, Texas prison for the 1978 murder of a Marine named Larry Dickens, confessed that he had murdered seven unnamed teenaged girls spanning a period from 1971 to 1977, and also claimed to have killed four more people, calling his ultimate tally, “The Eleven That Went to Heaven.”

In letters he wrote to Harris and Galveston County prosecutors, Bell initially took credit for several of the murders that had been included in the Texas Killing Fields total: those of Colette Wilson, Debbie Ackerman, and Maria Johnson, and also perhaps those of Rhonda Johnson and Sharon Shaw, whose slayings were attributed to the possibly wrongfully convicted Michael Lloyd Self.

Though Edward Bell was never charged with these particular murders due to a lack of physical evidence, there was some circumstantial evidence tying him closely to at least the Ackerman and Johnson killings. Both girls had last been seen, for example, accepting a ride from someone driving a white van. Bell had owned a white Ford van at the time of the girls’ disappearance, which he later burned after he was arrested in it in 1972 for flashing a teenaged girl while he was on a business trip in Louisiana. Further, he also had a financial stake in a surf shop that both Debbie and Maria were known to frequent.

Bizarrely, Bell claimed that he had committed all the crimes he was suspected of because he was brainwashed into it by a loose conglomeration of family members and authority figures throughout his life, who were all part of the conspiracy that he termed “the program.”

Bell also later seemed to claim responsibility for Kimberly Pitchford’s death, telling police that he had kidnapped a red-haired girl he called “Pitchford” near Gulfgate Mall in 1973. As mentioned previously, Bell was only convicted of one murder—that of Larry Dickens from 1978—but authorities suspected his involvement in many other crimes, including several that fell under the Texas Killing Fields umbrella. Edward Harold Bell died in prison in 2019, and his involvement in the case remains unclear.

Nearly four years after the disappearance of Jessica Cain in August of 1997, a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Tot Harriman vanished from the same area of Texas, as she was driving from League City to Corpus Christi on Highway 35 in her 1995 Lincoln Continental on July 12th of 2001. Neither Tot nor her vehicle was ever found.

Exactly one year later, on July 12th, 2002, twenty-three-year-old Sarah Trusty was riding her bicycle near her home in Algoa, Texas when she likewise went missing. Her bicycle was found in the foyer of the Algoa Baptist Church, but her body would not turn up until two weeks later, when fishermen discovered her remains in the Texas City Dike.

Then, on Halloween night of 2006, what is believed to be the last of the Texas Killing Fields crimes took place, when sixteen-year-old Terressa Vanegas disappeared from the Green Caye subdivision in Dickinson, Texas. On November 3rd, her body was found in a field opposite Dickinson High School. She had been raped and strangled, and her hair had been cut off.

A decade later, on March 18th, 2016, suspected serial killer William Lewis Reece, who was serving time on rape and kidnapping charges at Huntsville State Penitentiary in Texas, suddenly informed police that he would lead them to the bodies of two women he had murdered in Houston. Reece had already been the prime suspect in the killing of twelve-year-old Laura Smither, kidnapped from her own street in Friendswood, though there had never been enough evidence to charge him.

With Reece in tow, authorities finally unearthed the body of Jessica Cain in a field on East Orem Road in Houston, not far from Hobby Airport. Reece also led investigators to another of his victims, a twenty-year-old woman named Kelli Cox, who had vanished while using a payphone at a gas station in Denton, Texas in 1997. And in 2015, DNA evidence confirmed Reece’s involvement in yet another slaying, that of eighteen-year-old newlywed Tiffany Johnston, who had gone missing from a car wash in Bethany, Oklahoma in July of 1997.

In September of 2016, a grand jury indicted William Reece on two counts of murder, stemming from the deaths of both Jessica Cain and Laura Smither. A month later, he was transferred to Oklahoma to stand trial for the killing of Tiffany Johnston. Though the trial was initially supposed to begin on October 22nd, 2018, it was postponed until June 17th, 2019. Finally, however, in August of 2021, the Oklahoma County District Court sentenced him to death. Reece was then extradited to Texas to stand trial for the other three murders in March of 2022; he pled guilty, and was sentenced to life in prison.

Although a handful of the victims falling within the Texas Killing Fields tally have finally received some measure of justice, many more of the disappearances and murders remain unresolved. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the small, seemingly inconsequential, twenty-five-acre area of south Texas where all of these women and girls met their grim ends is the way it seems to have attracted multiple serial killers, like some kind of way station of the damned, a place whose evil seemed to call to those who recognized it. There is a reason that this patch of Earth has been termed “a perfect place for killing somebody and getting away with it,” because several unidentified monsters, at least so far, clearly have done just that.