The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (37 page)

Sex offender William Lewis Reece was suspected of involvement in the murders of Laura Smither and Jessica Cain. Convicted of rape in Oklahoma some years before, Reece worked at a construction site near the Smither home and left his work as a bulldozer operator because it was raining and too wet to work, around the same time Laura Smither disappeared. Later he was arrested for the abduction of Sandra Sapaugh.

On 16 May 1997, the 19-year-old Sapaugh was fixing a flat tyre on NASA Road 1 in Webster, across the I–45 from Friendswood, when Reece stopped. But instead of helping her he pulled a knife on her and forced her into his truck. As he drove at 70 miles an hour down I–45, he ordered her to undress. Instead she opened the passenger door and jumped out of the fast moving truck. She was rescued by another driver. Pregnant at the time, she sustained serious injuries but both she and the baby survived. Five months later she picked Reece out of a police line-up. She believed that he was responsible for her flat tyre in the first place.

Reece was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to 60 years imprisonment. He appealed on the grounds that there was a conspiracy to arrest him for the abduction of Sandra Sapaugh because there was no probable cause to arrest him in the Laura Smither case. But on 20 July 2000, his appeal was rejected and the conviction and sentence upheld.

Reece admitted he drove down the street where Smither was jogging but returned to the job site and his boss saw that he was alone in his truck. According to Reece, he then went home and did laundry. After a search of his home and truck turned up nothing, a lie detector test proved inconclusive. Reece’s pick-up truck was examined for possible fibres, blood or other clues. But problems with the post mortem also surfaced. The medical examiner’s report indicated that African-American hairs found on the girl’s body were contaminants and that they did not come from the crime scene. The police even went as far as to dig up a pile of horse manure at the Diamond B Ranch. Reece was boarding a palomino at the stables there and occasionally shoed horses for other owners there.

Jessica Cain’s disappearance was quickly related to that of Sondra Kay Ramber, who disappeared from her home five miles away in Santa Fe, Texas, on 26 October 1983. The door to her home was left open and and biscuits were baking in the oven. It was first thought that she had gone to the store, but she had left her purse and coat in the house. It was only when she had not returned the following morning that her father filed a missing person report. The authorities initially classified her as a runaway. She had just completed modelling school and wanted to becoming a model.

There was another suspect in the Jessica Cain case – Jonathan David Drew. On 29 November 1998, Drew attended a birthday party at a bar in Seabrook, Texas. He was introduced to 23-year-old blonde waitress Tina Flood at the party. He bought her drinks, and they were seen kissing. When the bar closed and the party ended at 2 a.m., several people went to a Holiday Inn hotel. Because Tina was too drunk to drive to the hotel, she and her friend Justin Chapman rode there with other people. Her car was left in a parking lot next to the bar. When they attempted to check into their room, Chapman, who was a Holiday Inn employee, realized he had left his employee discount card in Tina’s car and they decided to go back and get it. Outside they saw Drew sitting in his pick-up truck in the hotel parking lot and accepted his offer to take them back to the bar. Tina sat in the middle next to Drew, who was driving, while Chapman sat in the passenger’s side of the front seat. When they arrived at the parking lot next to the bar, Chapman got out of the truck and held Tina’s purse while she got out as well. But as Tina attempted to scoot across the front seat to the passenger door, Drew grabbed hold of her and drove away.

Chapman was between the open door and the body of the truck and held onto the door as the truck drove away. He heard Tina screaming for Drew to stop. As the truck pulled out of the parking lot, the door slammed shut, knocking Chapman into a ditch. He picked himself up, ran to the bar and began beating on the front door.

At 2.52 a.m., Seabrook Police Officer Marc Hatton was on patrol when he saw Chapman beating on the bar’s door and stopped. Chapman’s trousers were covered in mud and he was hysterical. He told Hatton that his friend had just been kidnapped. He gave a full description of Drew’s maroon, full-sized, single-cab Chevrolet truck. The description of the appellant’s truck was broadcast to other officers in the area.

At 3.49 a.m., Harris County Deputy Constable Sean Kitchens spotted Drew’s truck and pulled him over for failing to maintain a single lane of traffic. Deputy Kitchens asked Drew for his licence. But when he leant over to retrieve his licence from the glove compartment, Kitchens noticed a bloody foot lying on the seat. When Kitchens asked who it belonged to, Drew said: “That’s my friend Tina. She’s knocked out over there.”

Investigating further, the deputy found Tina Flood lying unconscious in the foetal position against the passenger’s door. She was naked except for her skirt, which was bunched around her waist. Her panties and blouse were later found in Drew’s truck. She was bloody, bruised and scraped, and there were abrasions on her leg, buttocks and arms.

Kitchens called for back-up. When it arrived, Drew was asked to step out of the truck. Deputy Kitchens noticed a scratch on Drew’s right arm, three scratches on the back and side of his neck, and what looked like blood on his shirt collar.

Tina Flood was rushed to the Clear Lake Regional Medical Center. Emergency Room nurse Christine McFall conducted a sexual assault examination. According to McFall, Tina repeatedly cried out: “Please help me. Please help me. Don’t hurt me.” And Emergency Room nurse Mary Jane Heady heard Tina say: “Please don’t rape me.”

A CAT scan showed that Tina had sustained a skull fracture, which caused her brain to swell and haemorrhage. She was rushed into surgery. Tina died a day and a half later because of swelling in her brain.

The medical examiner found at least two distinct fractures to Tina’s skull, the result of one or possibly two separate acts of blunt trauma. A considerable amount of force was required to cause those fractures. There was an abrasion on the back of Tina’s head and a bruise on the back of her brain immediately below the point of impact. On the opposite side of her head, there was a massive amount of bleeding, but no external bruising on her skin. Such an injury is typically found where a moving head strikes a stationary object. Tina’s ear was swollen and there was a bruise behind the ear. This bruise could be related to the skull fracture, but the swelling of the ear indicated the injury was probably caused by a separate impact. The medical examiner said that the injury to Tina’s ear was more consistent with something striking her or her head striking something on that side.

The abrasions and contusions on Tina’s shoulder, shoulder blade, elbow, lower back and buttocks were consistent with being dragged on a rough surface, such as concrete. The wrinkling or crumpling of the skin on Tina’s back was consistent with the skin having been stepped on. The abrasions were not consistent with those that might result from jumping out of a moving vehicle. Further, there were small oval contusions on Tina’s lower legs, ankles, and upper right arm, consistent with finger impressions. There were also abrasions on Tina’s knuckles and the meaty part of the thumbs of both hands, suggesting defensive injuries. Drew had scratches on his right arm and neck.

The medical examiner also found bruising in the soft tissue of both sides of Tina’s neck. This, he said, was caused by direct external compression often seen in manual strangulations. The anal swabs taken during the sexual assault examination contained Drew’s DNA. While there were no obvious abrasions or tears in the vagina and anal area, the area was a little darker than normal, which suggested trauma.

The State tried Drew for capital murder, but the jury found him only guilty of felony murder and he was sentenced to life in prison. He appealed, but on 14 February 2002 both the conviction and the sentence were upheld.

Drew was also suspected of several sexual assaults and possibly the murder of Jessica Lee Cain. A search of his former home in League City, where his parents still lived, unearthed a vial containing several human teeth. League City was the home of the famous “killing fields” murders, but Drew would have been too young to have committed them, though it is thought that he did rape other women in the area.

Another case bore a similarity to Jessica Cain’s disappearance. It involved 17-year-old Michelle Doherty Thomas, who was last seen leaving her family’s home in Alta Loma, Texas, less that two miles from Santa Fe, on 5 October 1985. She was planning to meet friends at a nightclub on Galveston Island later in the evening, but she never arrived and has not been heard from again. Her family reported her missing on 7 October 1985, two days after her disappearance. She had served as an informant during a drug bust in 1985 and the police believe that she could have been abducted and murdered as a result.

Another young woman went missing from Galveston County in 1988. Twenty-two-year-old Suzanne Rene Richerson was a student at Texas A & M University in Galveston and was employed as a night clerk at Casa Del Mar Condominiums on Seawall Boulevard. She was last seen at work at around 6 a.m. on 7 October by the resort security guards. Another employee who was sleeping in the room above Richerson’s office woke up to hear a woman scream shortly after the guards left the vicinity. Then came the sound of a car door being slammed shut, accompanied by another scream, and the sound of a car racing from the parking lot shortly after. A guest arrived at Richerson’s office to check out at about 6.30 a.m. and discovered the desk unattended. There were no signs of a struggle and Suzanne’s purse, school books and car were left at the resort. One of her shoes was found in the parking lot later that morning, but Suzanne Richerson has never been seen again. There was a suspect in the Richerson case named Gabriel Soto. But he died on 31 July 2002, aged 39, from a drug overdose. Soto was charged with intimidating witnesses in the case, though never charged for the abduction. However investigators believe he played a role in Richerson’s disappearance.

The FBI set up Operation HALT – standing for Homicide-Abduction Liaison Team – to investigate the disappearances. At first, they thought they were looking for a single serial killer and were hopeful that they could put him behind bars. But they soon realized that they were looking for a number of killers whose crimes overlapped. Typically victims have disappeared while out alone, only to be found dead in a remote spot weeks or months later, leaving no hint as to their attacker’s identity or motive.

The small towns and country roads in that part of Texas have proved an easy place to hunt victims. The patchwork of jurisdictions makes it easy for killers to hide their activities. Over the past 40 years a huge influx of people have settled in this fast-growing corner of Texas. The refineries and ports draw transients. And the bayous shrouded with long-leafed pine, beech and oaks have served as a dumping ground for killers from Houston as well as local predators. In some cases the victim is unknown. In early 1999 a small boy went out for a walk with his dog in some marshy woods. The dog found a bone, and then the boy saw a skull. Nearby, the police would later find earrings, shreds of clothing and a belt tied around a tree. Investigators believe the killer used it to bind the young woman while she was sexually assaulted.

Evidence pointed to a serial killer long ago when two girls disappeared from the same convenience store in the 1970s. Then four bodies were found between 1984 and 1991 in a overgrown patch of land next to Calder Road near League City off I–45 dubbed the “killing fields”. In the 3000 block of Calder Drive was the abandoned League City Oil Field, tucked away between houses, strip joints, a few rundown businesses and Star Dust Trail Rides, run by retired NASA engineer Robert Able. All four victims were laying nude on the ground, face up and under trees with their arms crossed. They had been sexually assaulted and were placed within a hundred-yard radius of each other. One investigator who studied the scene thought the killer had used a footpath to view the bodies. The metal gates across one part of Calder Drive and adjacent Ervin Street are locked blocking access by automobile. Clearly the killer had had prior knowledge of this secluded area.

FBI profiler Mark Young said that there were at least four serial killers working the I–45 corridor. The picture was further confused by killers who only claimed a single victim. Few cases can be definitively linked as the method of abduction, cause of death and dumping ground often varies wildly. It is possible that a smaller number of killers is at work, who constantly change their modus operandi. However, it is very unusual for so many “low-risk” victims – that is, women not involved in drugs, prostitution or other illegal activity – to be murdered or go missing in such a relatively small geographic area without a number of serial killers being responsible for the majority of the crimes. Computer analysis of the evidence also indicates multiple murderers are at work. One killer has a preference for slim, short brown-haired women. Another killer has distinctive habits in the way he disposes of bodies.

Of particular interest were the “killing field” murders, which were the only cases publicly linked together by authorities. The first body to be discovered was that of 23-year-old cocktail waitress Heidi Villerial Fye, who vanished on 10 October 1983, after leaving her parents’ home to use a payphone in a convenience store at Hobbs and West Main Street in League City. Her remains were found on 4 April 1984 when a dog carried her skull to a nearby house. She had been beaten with a club. She had several broken ribs and probably died from blunt force trauma to her head.

Then on 2 February 1986 four boys riding dirt bikes across the area smelled a foul odour. This led them to the skeletal remains of a female about 50 yards from where Heidi Fye had been found. They called the police. Never identified, she had died between six weeks and six months before she was found. She had been shot in the back by a .22 calibre weapon. But the post mortem also revealed healed fractures of the ribs. She was about 25 years old, weighed between 140 to 160 pounds and was between 5 feet 5 inches to 5 feet 8 inches tall. She had light reddish-brown shoulder length hair and had a distinct gap between her upper front teeth. But no one answering that description was listed as missing.