On January 12th, 1981, a dog sniffing around a privately-owned, wooded area near Houston, Texas discovered the partially buried and decomposed bodies of two probable teenagers who remained unidentified until very recently.
The victims had apparently been murdered about two months previously, and the amount of time that had passed since their deaths meant that their faces were unrecognizable. The female, thought to be white, Native American or a mixture thereof, was aged anywhere from fifteen to twenty-five years old, stood between five-foot-four and five-foot-nine, had long, reddish-brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and a noticeable gap between her front teeth. She wore no clothing, though a bloody towel and a pair of green jogging shorts were discovered near the body. Her cause of death was believed to be strangulation; it did not appear that she had been sexually assaulted.
The male victim, likely her companion, was possibly white, aged between fifteen and thirty, and around the same height as the female. He had brown eyes, and wavy brown hair that extended nearly to his shoulders. He also had prominent eyebrows and evidence of a former injury in the region of his upper vertebrae. Like the female, he had excellent dental health, but unlike her, he had been bound and gagged before being beaten to death, leading some to speculate that he had been the target of the killer’s attack, and that the female had possibly been murdered simply to eliminate a witness.
For years, the victims were simply known as the Harris County Does, but in early 2022, the couple was finally identified via Gedmatch as Harold Dean Clouse and his wife, Tina Gail Linn, who had married in 1979. The pair initially hailed from New Smyrna Beach, Florida, but had moved to Lewisville, Texas in the summer of 1980, accompanied by their six-month-old infant, Holly Marie.
Harold, known by friends and family as Dean, was a cabinet maker, and hoped to find work in the building boom occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area at the time. Not long after the move, Dean got a job with D.R. Horton homebuilders, and everything seemed to be going along fine.
In October of 1980, though, the Clouses stopped communicating with their families back in Florida. Dean’s mother, Donna Casasanta, became worried and reported the couple missing in 1981, but because members of a nomadic religious cult had returned the Clouses’ vehicle to their families in Florida at some point prior to the report, authorities suspected that Dean and Tina had joined this group voluntarily and had therefore deliberately cut off contact with their relatives. Because of police disinterest, the families of both victims undertook some investigation of their own, but no leads were forthcoming.
Although the victims have been identified, it’s still not clear how they turned up dead in the remote, swampy area where their remains were found, and who was responsible for killing them. Equally troubling, at least for a time, was the fate of their baby daughter, Holly Marie, whose whereabouts were unknown for more than four decades. Happily, a forty-two-year-old Holly Marie was discovered alive and well in Oklahoma in 2022, though she of course had no memory of what had happened to her parents. Her adoptive parents were never considered suspects in the murder case.
Authorities are still pursuing the investigation, and are particularly interested in the religious cult the Clouses may have joined prior to their murders, which occurred sometime between October 1980 and January of 1981. A woman known only as Sister Susan, along with several other members of the sect, met with members of Dean and Tina’s families at the Daytona Racetrack in Florida before the discovery of their bodies, in order to return the Clouses’ car and explain that the couple had joined their group and had no wish to maintain contact with their relatives. The pair’s families were very suspicious of this story, however, as they did not believe Dean or Tina would have joined a cult; Dean was somewhat involved with a few religious sects in the 1970s, but apparently lost interest after meeting and marrying Tina.
Interestingly, it’s thought that members of this same religious group, and perhaps even the same individuals who had returned the car, dropped Holly Marie off at a church in Arizona, after which she was taken into custody and subsequently adopted.
The case remains open and active at this writing.
Crime Immemorial 