December 10, 2025 • 46 mins
Small-town rumor and speculation seem to dominate discourse in Weatherford. Phelps has to ask: is Wendy Robinson’s murder connected to Vincent and Shelly’s? When Wendy’s case is finally solved, serial killers are in the mix, Phelps realizes the cases need to head into a new direction if answers are the goal. Until a bombshell out of nowhere is dropped into his lap.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Please check out my weekly podcast, Crossing the Line with
m William Phelps, where I delve into a new missing
person and cold case murder each week. Wherever you get
your favorite shows. He called Texas a place of unpeopled horizons,
(00:21):
a land of American bleakness, brazenly adding that culturally, socially,
and intellectually, Texas is empty. He also won an Oscar
for his script Broke Back Mountain and is considered the
most well known best selling author to come out of
the lone star state. The late great Pulitzer Prize winning
(00:45):
novelist Larry mcmurtury, who gave us Lonesome Dove, The Last
Picture Show, and hud to name only a few of
his thirty plus best selling books. Mcmurtury had a love
hate relationship with it home state, and often focused on
that bleakness, depicting his characters as corrupt, broken, and easily
(01:07):
swayed by the devil's offerings. As I traveled throughout Parker County,
developing sources, building trusting relationships, I began to understand mcmurcury's passive, aggressive,
brashness for the place he called home. Many of those good, honest,
caring people I met, and even those I had reported on,
(01:30):
felt as if they'd walked straight off the pages of
a mcmurchury novel. If I was to find any answers
in these cases, I would need to appreciate that the
testimony from those I spoke to and even those I hadn't,
was inherently their own, and that a deeper truth can
(01:50):
often emerge from what is a fractured, scorned, and broken
space inside of people. And truth, as I have said before,
is akin to a mountain standing tall all on its own,
unmovable and even unshakable. Yet the issue I kept running
into was getting to the summit of the mountain without falling.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I can't even tell you. She loved that horse a
lot more she loved me. She spent more time with
the answer than you know. When she was home, she
was out there missing with answer. He was green broke,
So green broke means that you're kind of broke. Yeah,
And so when she would ride, I would have to
(02:36):
ride first to get him warmed up and such, and so,
oh gosh, she love it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Hearse what could be more innocent or western? Exemplifying that
nostalgic image of Texas Larry mcmurcury paint so vividly than
a teenage girl on her horse under a Texas sky
on a summer day.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
A big memory I have of her is one day
she was walking the fence line, you know, with Dancer,
and I said, I hollered at him. I said, Shelley,
I said, pull him up. I said, he's going to sleep.
I said, I'm telling you he's asleep. And she looks
at me. She goes, shh, you know, like, don't wake
(03:26):
him up. But you know, he could have woke up,
and he could have just threw her right off. But
everything was okay. But I just had that That's just
embedding the way she looked and told me.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
To sh as. Janetta says, Ronnie Colliflower bought Dancer, the
horse Shelley named and loved so much. And so when
I hear an anecdote such as the one Janetta just
shared along with how Ronnie liked to sit and watch
his stepdaughter ride even though the guy was ducking me
(04:03):
and had acted a bit sketchy throughout the years. According
to some I spoke to, there is no way I
can believe Ronnie could have had anything whatsoever to do
with killing Shelley or her boyfriend. That accusation has no
place on the mountain next to me, but rather fits
conveniently into a fictionalized version of this case some have created.
(04:30):
Ronnie Colliflower raised that girl as if she was his own,
and her death had broken the man to the point
where for decades he refused to even talk about it.
Forgive me for this, but so Ronnie was with you
that weekend you were gone. Yes, what if some people
(04:50):
say Ronnie had something to do with it? What would
you say? Not a chance that he got somebody to
do it or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
No, I believe that in my heart with the a
Please ask me that I believe that.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Bha.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That's the first thing, Nancy.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
When a murder wraps a family in a cocoon of
emotional hell, those who have not lived through the experience
could never understand the totality of that loss. They say
the day a child dies crushes a parent's soul, but
that's not true. It's every day after their child is
(05:29):
still gone that hurts the most. There's also a physical
toll the weight of a child's murder places on the
backs of parents. As you have heard throughout genetic holieflower.
Smith suffers still to this day because of a loss
shattering every aspect of her life. She's broken like a
(05:52):
piece of glass. In a similar fashion, Vincent Tjerina Senior
worked tirelessly every day of his life searching for the
answers to his son's murder. He did not stop. Some
say he was obsessed. How could a parent in his
position not be? The guy badgered the Weatherford Police and
(06:17):
pushed them to not give up, even as the years
passed and the case felt as though it would never
be solved. Here's Raymond t Jerina once again, Vincent's brother,
whom you have heard in previous episodes. This must have
destroyed your brother. Tell me about that if you can.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
Well, he wanted so bad for you know, either him
to find the killers or the police to find their
killers and prosecute him whatever he's been done. And here's
forty two years later and nothing still. But I'm gonna
say that that's what it was to me, That's what
it was, sure sim And they all covered it up.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
He was never the same after this happened. Iakin imagine.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
It took his.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Life away him, that it was on his sign, and
it was sixteen years old, I mean got him mind
it in the time of his time.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, horrible.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Yes, he told him all to hell and it was
not the same. And he talked to me a lot,
you know, he would just try to get some of
the steam out of him and stuff like that. And
he talked to me a lot every time I saw him,
and stuff. And he came up and saw me, you know,
came to see me and stuff like that, had and
we talked and stuff like that. I kept telling him,
giving him hope that they will find him, you know,
(07:40):
I will find him.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
The longing and the need for answers eats away at
apparent like rust on an old farming tractor out in
a pasture. I will never stop saying it. The ripple
effect of murder reverberates like a perpetual echo, generation after generation. So, Vincent,
(08:03):
your brother h two Texas rangers started to talk to him.
Is that true?
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yes, tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Nothing was done, and my son hired a private investigator
and the police one in cooperating it all with him
and stuff like that. And so they summoned the type
of friends to come in and investigate it. Because they
kept saying that it was out an inside out, okay,
what you call it? Police, and they were covering up.
But the rangers came and they could never find nothing.
(08:34):
You know, the police, I'm sure didn't cooperate with it.
Damn with him, that's what I heard. Police wouldn't do nothing.
I mean, we all went and talked to him. You know,
they were not hearing any kind of information all this stuff.
One officer came in and called us in, called me
and called my brother in law, which was married to
my sister, and we went and talked to him, and
(08:55):
they didn't have it. My stink to tailed us that
they just had been who's student, some guy that had
left town. I don't know whether he was around the
place anything or anything like that or what, but he
left town right after that night. I believe he left
for the Northern States and Ohio somewhere up there in
(09:15):
that northern part. And they were chasing him for two
weeks and then he finally came in and on his
own and took up potty tests and ran it and
he was questioned a lot and everything, and it's determined
he wasn't in it, so let him go. And they
had no leeds of any kind in anything.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
That's what they told us. Several sources told me the
person Raymond mentioned, a schoolmate of Vincent and Shelley's, was
up on Piss Hill that night. It was ten thirty
pm when he and a family member with him heard
three gunshots and right afterward saw a young man one
(09:56):
of the names I have censored throughout the podcast standing
near Vincent's car. The schoolmate left town right after the
murders because I was told his life had been threatened.
He was eventually located out of state by investigators and
agreed to take a polygraph, which law enforcement says he passed.
(10:21):
I'm so sorry this happened to your family. Ramon, Yes, yes,
I am my brother.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
He never was the same. He started deteriorating and he
had been discharged from medical discharge from Nolan Me. So
he just started deturating, deteriorating.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
He was young. Yeah, I believe. Here's another Tajerina family
member you heard from earlier in the podcast, and as
you'll hear utterly implicit in her voice, there is that
generational ripple effect. I mentioned.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
What they did to not just our family, that many
other families, you know, like Wendy's family, and there were
a couple of you know, young African American boys that
were killed and murdered for no reason. There were just
so many, so many things, and so many that were
not even written about that we know about, that we're.
Speaker 6 (11:21):
Missing, you know.
Speaker 5 (11:23):
So I just hope that they can stop the chain
of murdering then it goes on over there. It's unbelievable
today in time that they're still allowed to do all this.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
It's unbelievable to me.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Vincent Senior kept the secret from most everyone in the family,
including Vincent Junior, throughout all of this. He was very ill.
Then on February twenty third, nineteen eighty six, not quite
three years since his son's murder, at just thirty eight
(11:58):
years old, Vince died from complications of a lung issue
he'd struggled with for years, never knowing what happened or
who was responsible for the murder of his son.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Because he'd been working in the commercial painting industry back then.
Of course, the lead based paint ended up getting getting
him health wise, but he really warned himself down trying.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
You know, so hard to get information. He would not
let up.
Speaker 5 (12:29):
He was constantly at the police station. He was constantly
talking to newspapers, anybody that would listen to him, trying
to get answers. Even on this you know, deathbed. He
was just like, you know, I'm gonna be with my
son now, and so was everything to him because he's
(12:50):
a great kid.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Previously on page for Ghosts.
Speaker 7 (13:01):
There's a man that worked on that ranch that found her,
Bobby laying there. He had gone to enter the ranch
and that's when he discovered her.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
It appeared that she had been sexual assaulted. She had
been bound by the hands and feet. She had like
her bathing suit top on and some shorts on, and
then she had been bludgeoned in the head. And they
believe it may have been a rock.
Speaker 8 (13:26):
Yeah, you're you're spot on.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
We opened up at some point, you know, a hot line.
I say a hot line. It was just a direct.
It was my extension.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
People were calling me left and right.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
A lot of it was the stuff I had already
heard before.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
But people wanted to, you know, they wanted to do
their part. My name is em William Phelps. I'm an
investigative journalist and the New York Times bestselling author of
dozens of true crime books. This is season five of
pay Per Ghosts, The Texas Team Murders. Cruising through Parker
(14:22):
County on a clear day, it feels as though you
can drive directly into the sky. The flat land and
horizon appear endless. At dusk with the sun backlighting the heavens.
Certain hues of purple, pink, orange, and yellow will make
a believer out of even the most ardent skeptic. This
(14:44):
tranquil friendly country life residents were used to living had
been darkened by not one or two murders, but a
rash of homicides. As the eighties ended, in the nineties
crept up with Wendy Robinson's section ruol assault and Vicious Murder.
Just like Vincent and Shelley's still unresolved, the community had
(15:08):
been scarred forever by the evil nature of innocent kids
just starting out in life, stricken down in the most
horrific fashion, and in Wendy Robinson's case, particularly the idea
that someone law enforcement had bought into Ricky Lee Green's
masquerade admission heightened the lack of respect already felt for
(15:32):
law enforcement, and what's even worse, allowed her rapist and
killer to walk the streets of Freeman with the possibility
of doing it again.
Speaker 7 (15:45):
On July the ninth of eighty seven, there was a
robbery at the Petro gas station in Wetherford and the
person who was assaulted was a trucker. He gave them
a vague description on both people and they did a
sketch of them. So then on November the sixteenth, the
(16:06):
police talked to two women that owned a restaurant at
Lake Weatherford and asked them if they recognized either of
these two people.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
To be clear, I want to point out that in
the previous episode we focused on Ricky Lee Green, the
man Patricia Springer, the author investigating Wendy's case, just described,
is a different guy, Ricky Lee Adkins. Adkins is a
bony looking dude with a scruffy goateee of peach fuzz,
(16:40):
close set, dark beady eyes, long hippie like knotted black hair.
He was a known sex offender rotten to the core,
not to mention, as they like to say in Texas
Dark as coffin air, the lead they developed about Adkins
(17:00):
doesn't come until twenty sixteen, and not until as Patricia
touched on in the previous episode, Adkins's daughter called the
Weatherford police and reported he had confessed Wendy's murder to her.
From there, they backtracked and began looking into Adkins' life,
(17:21):
And wouldn't you know, investigators had had their eye on
Adkins as far back as nineteen eighty seven. In the
months just after Wendy's murder.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
They found out that Atkins was in Arizona in custody
on a burglary or robbery case there, so they extradited
him back to Weatherford and he came back to Texas
on November the twenty eighth of eighty seven. Then they
started talking to him, but they only talked to him
about From my notes that I've gathered, they only talked
(17:57):
to him about the robbery at Petro. He has to
see if they could get in to confess that, then
they could get him on the murder. He denied that entirely.
They talked to him twice and each time he denied it.
The third time they tried to talk to him, he
refused to speak to them any longer, and they didn't
speak to him after that.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
I was interested in Wendy Robinson's vehicle, which seemed to
share a few consistencies with how the Monte Carlo Vincent
drove was found, including the fact that it was the
same exact car.
Speaker 7 (18:32):
When they went to the wall to see what was
left there, her car was there. It was unlocked, but
her purse and her radio and her keys were gone,
so they thought she had just gone off with someone.
She knew at that point that she had just taken
off and decided to go get a coke or something.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Remember, they had never found the keys to Vincent's car.
Ellwood Hohertz is on record saying he thought that two
cases were linked, Wendy Robinson and Colliflower Travino. Why would
he say something like that, you think.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
Oh, I think probably because both cases about young people.
Both cases were murdered. Although the similarities are not alike.
I mean, they're totally different, different circumstances.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Entirely based on all the available evidence, In addition to
what Patricia tells me next, I don't think we can
link Wendy's case to Shelley and Vincent's murders. Adkins was
indicted in twenty sixteen for the capital felony murder of
Wendy Robinson. In twenty eighteen, he was convicted and sentenced
(19:49):
for thirty five years in prison. But that was far
from the end of Wendy's case, because Adkins then implicates
to other men in Wendy's rape and murder.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
He told me, as I've interviewed him to that Michael
Deadman and Grady Bruce Deadman both raped Wendy and of
course he didn't do any of that, you see, Yeah,
we can believe that, and that then Grady said we
can't leave her alive, and that Grady is the one
(20:25):
that actually crushed her skull with the rock.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
They all put it on the other guy.
Speaker 6 (20:30):
They all put it on the other guy.
Speaker 7 (20:31):
Now, unfortunately Atkins is the only one who has been
convicted of that.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
The other two are still free.
Speaker 7 (20:40):
Yes, it was determined that they didn't have any evidence
against the other two, only Ricky Atkins' word for it,
and they didn't think that was good enough to take
to a jury. That you know, any good defense attorney
would be able to turn that around.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 6 (20:57):
Well, I was not happy about that.
Speaker 7 (20:59):
I have a good friend who was a prosecutor in
Terrant County, and I called him and asked him what
the procedure would be to get a special prosecutor to
take on the case because I couldn't get the prosecutor
here to even return my calls. He said, it's almost impossible,
and not with this case, you know. He said that
(21:21):
it just wouldn't fly. And so nothing was ever done
with the other two. I did speak with Grady Deadman.
He's scary out of all of them, he was the
biggest and mean, and Ricky said that a lot. Ricky
Adkins told me over and over again how mean Grady
dead Man was and he was afraid of him. Now, Michael,
(21:44):
who is Grady's brother, the last the police knew of him.
He was homeless and living on the streets in Houston,
now Grady's last I talked to him. He was in
Fort Worth when I spoke with him, he was at
a halfway house.
Speaker 6 (21:59):
He had just got out and out of jail. He
was going into a VA facility to live.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
What do you think? Do you think all three of
them did it?
Speaker 6 (22:07):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
You believe Ricky Atkinson.
Speaker 7 (22:10):
I think he participated. I don't know whether he held
her down. I don't know what he did, but yes,
I think he participated.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
So these three are just kind of bumming around doing drugs, drinking.
They come upon her and they say let's have a party.
Speaker 7 (22:24):
Yes, Now, I think Ricky Atkins was smart enough not
to want to pile any more charges on him, because
his claim was that she got in the truck with
them of her own accord, and that they took her
to Fort Worth to get beer.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
Because Parker County at that time was a dry county.
I know Wendy. I felt like I knew her pretty well,
certainly knew her parents well.
Speaker 7 (22:46):
I didn't believe that for one moment, but I think
that he wanted to get out of a kidnapping, rap,
capital murder.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
At that point, you're right in Texas, you're going to die.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Do you think they have the right guy for Wendy's murder?
Speaker 7 (23:00):
I think yeah, eventually they did. They got one of
the three. There are two out there.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
You definitely think those three did it.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
Oh?
Speaker 7 (23:07):
Yes, Like I said, I've spoken to Atkins. I have
a stack of letters from him describing everything to me. Yeah,
Grady was gruff enough and scary enough for.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
Me to believe that he would kill someone.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So Ricky described murdering her and everything.
Speaker 6 (23:24):
Yes, that Grady is the one that did that, and
how it was done, and.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
He talked about binding her and everything.
Speaker 7 (23:32):
He told me that the bindings came from the leather shoelaces,
bootlaces out of Michael Deadman's boots, and that that's what
they used for the ligatures.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Did that check out with the crime scene reports of leather?
Speaker 6 (23:47):
Yes, Yes, they were leather ligatures.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So that checked out.
Speaker 6 (23:51):
Yes, that checked out.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So he couldn't have known that.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
No.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I asked Patricia about the names I have been censoring
throughout the podcast. She had reviewed every piece of paper
in Wendy's case and interviewed scores of sources over a
forty year period. Within all of that time, I wondered
had she ever come across the names as being connected
(24:21):
to Wendy's case, Vincent and Shelley's case, or any other murders.
Speaker 7 (24:27):
It was never mentioned in any of the case files
or at anybody that I interviewed. People may have thought
that it could have been the same person, but because
they were so different, I also think that they realized
that it probably wasn't. The theory was that it was
somebody within the Sheriff's department that had done this, or
(24:50):
it had been someone related to someone in the Sheriff's
department that had done this because the crime scene was
evidently very contaminat by the authorities.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Patricia brings up another name I have heard quite a
bit as someone being connected to Shelley and Vincent's murders,
and how this person, right after the murders disappeared from
public view and became a recluse, which I touched on
in a previous episode.
Speaker 7 (25:30):
It's my understanding, and never left his house after that,
and so that even brought on more speculation that.
Speaker 6 (25:38):
He was involved in some way.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
This type of cold case can become dizzy with so
many rumors, so many names, so much speculation, if you
allow it to. In my experience, keeping it simple is
the most productive way to go about finding new information
in getting closer to the truth. As of the production
(26:06):
of this episode, law enforcement has failed to produce anyone
willing enough to step into a grand jury and point
a finger at those names I have censored. That doesn't
mean they were not involved. It tells me, within the
scope of a cold case investigation, that there isn't enough
(26:27):
hard evidence tying these men to the murders, or for
whatever political reasons, law enforcement flat out just refuses to
go after them. Still, every time it felt as if
I could exclude these guys, I landed on a source
who changed my mind, and one woman, someone who knew
(26:51):
most everyone involved, including the names I have censored, steps
up and drops a bombshell.
Speaker 9 (27:31):
I was born and raised in Weatherford all my life.
Weatherford's always been a safe town, and when the murders happened,
it was really it really put everybody on edge because
nothing like that had ever happened in Weatherford before. It
was kind of a at the time, a once in
a lifetime thing that, you know, none of us said
(27:53):
it had ever experienced in our little town. Of course,
Wetherford's a lot bigger now, but at the time it
was small.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
My source was in her late twenties back in nineteen
eighty three. She had heard all the rumors, of course,
during those days after the murders, the names everyone has
been connecting to the case, but she didn't really put
much steak in town gossip, most of which had been
generated by a bunch of kids at the time. After all,
(28:24):
people could say whatever they wanted, blame whomever they chose.
Hearsay is cheap, and it gets you nowhere. But for
this source, however, all of that changed one day when
she heard it straight from the Horse's mouth.
Speaker 9 (28:45):
I stopped at a convenience store and I saw this
friend of mine that I hadn't seen from high school,
and we were just trying to catch up, and she
said she was going to a party that night and
asked me if I wanted to go with her, and
I said, sure, no problem. So she picked me up
and we started driving down to the river area, the
(29:06):
Horseshoe Bend area, and we got to this house, and
I mean there were people everywhere inside outside, and we
went in.
Speaker 10 (29:16):
She wanted to get some weed.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Horseshoe Bend is about a twenty minute ride south of Weatherford, and.
Speaker 9 (29:27):
So we went in the house and she was looking
for him, and I was just kind of sitting there,
you know, watching everything. I'm a people watcher, so just
watching everything that's going on, and.
Speaker 10 (29:41):
That's when I saw. I didn't know who he was
when I saw.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Him, but it was.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
There was another guy with him. That second name I
have been censoring. The same guy others have reported began
living in seclusion right after the murders. Yet the guy
my source didn't really know all that well, the one
connected to someone in law enforcement. During that party she
(30:10):
was at.
Speaker 9 (30:11):
He started mouthing off the thing that caught my attention
because I wasn't really paying any attention to him, but
then all of a sudden, I heard him say we
killed those kids, and that immediately got my attention and
(30:34):
it scared me, and I started looking for my girlfriend
and I said, did you just hear what was going
on and what he said?
Speaker 10 (30:43):
And she said I heard him.
Speaker 9 (30:45):
I said, I want to get out of here. I
don't want any part of this, So we got in
the car and left. It wasn't long after that a.
Speaker 10 (30:54):
Girlfriend and I were working at Dairy Queen there in
Weatherford on South.
Speaker 9 (30:58):
Maine, and it was it happened to be one of
those nights we were having a banana split cell and
we sold so many banana.
Speaker 10 (31:07):
Split cells that night. We were hot and sticky.
Speaker 9 (31:09):
It was so we decided we wanted to go. I
guess it was later in the summer because we went
to the lake and went swimming. And followed us out
there and we were in the water swimming. It was
my girlfriend and myself and her brother, just the three
of us, nobody else, And told us to.
Speaker 10 (31:30):
Get out of the water. So we got out of
the water.
Speaker 9 (31:33):
You know, we didn't know what was going on, and
my friends, now her brother that was with us, asked
did He said, what's going on and took the butt
of his gun and helped my friend's brother in the stomach.
Speaker 10 (31:48):
I mean, immediately a big old well come up on
my stomach. He said, y'all follow us to the sheriff's office.
So we got in our van and we drove to
the sheriff's office and all of us had I mean,
you know, that was back in you know, the eighties.
Speaker 9 (32:05):
We wore bikinis when we went swimming, but he we
had towels, but he wouldn't let us cover up. He
made us take the towels off. Then he got on
the phone and called my daddy and told my daddy
that he caught me naked out at the lake with
a bunch of boys. And I mean, after that, I
was just you know, everybody in town was scared of
(32:26):
them because of their reputation, and I was one of them.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
So there it was again the same accusation, But here
was a witness claiming she overheard the actual suspect himself
admitting to killing Shelley and Vincent while using the pronoun
we implicating someone else. This is the type of testimony
(32:53):
grand juries want to hear. A credible witness, uninvolved sitting
at a party overhearing someone admit to a murder, yet
nothing was ever done about it. Her story, like so
many I have heard, got sucked into the vacuum of Weatherford,
which had essentially been cleaning up this case for more
(33:15):
than four decades. As time passes. What are you hearing
about suspects, anything else you're hearing.
Speaker 10 (33:23):
In town other than those two, I'm not hearing anything.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Was there any talk in town about it being some
sort of love triangle?
Speaker 9 (33:31):
We never heard that. The Only thing we ever heard
was that it was a drug deal gone bad and
that had killed them.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
In this case, perhaps more than any other I have investigated,
motive becomes the main piece of the puzzle. I am
in search of why, because if you can nail down
a motive, it will lead you to an answer. The
one promising lead in the case serial killer oddist tool.
(34:07):
As I mentioned in the last episode, a serial killer
who had admitted to law enforcement he committed the murders.
Was another letdown as tool was ultimately ruled out completely
by impartial evidence proving he was nowhere near Weatherford at
the time of the murders. Not to mention, he and
(34:30):
Henry Lee Lucas became known for false confessions, dozens and
dozens of them. So, circling back to my main point,
if this is not a serial killer case, and I
don't believe it is, there has to be a direct motive. Love, money, revenge,
(34:50):
one of only three basic motives for murder. All killers
are effectively driven by. To me, after being stuck in
the weeds of this case for you years, the only
logical motive feels awfully like what people have been saying.
Speaker 9 (35:08):
From the time we first heard about it until you know,
all these years later, I'm still hearing the same thing.
But see, nobody ever knew any other details. People would
go up there to park all the time. Everybody was
relating all of it to drugs. I really don't know
(35:28):
a lot, you know, I wasn't in high school, so
I don't know a lot about what was going on there.
The main thing I know about is what I heard
him say, you know, at the party. I can't imagine
him bragging about killing kids if he didn't actually do it,
you know, And I was kind of afraid of that
family after that. Took me forever to convince my dad
(35:50):
that I wasn't at the lake naked with a bunch
of boys.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
And you think did that because of what you heard.
Was he sending you a message?
Speaker 10 (35:58):
I think he was trying to Yeah, I think he
was trying to scare me.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
I asked my source if any of those names I
have censored had ever approached her again or threatened her.
Speaker 10 (36:14):
No, not at all.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Ever felt like you've been followed or watched or anything
like that.
Speaker 10 (36:23):
No, because I moved out of weather for not long
after that.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
As I dug into the meth trade aspect of the case,
seeing that everyone I spoke to mentioned drugs as a
motivating factor in some form or fashion, I developed information
which quite honestly began to paint somewhat of a clearer
picture regarding what might have been going on here. I
(36:59):
touched on this prely, but Ronnie Colliflower's brother Ernest Alfred
Colliflower fifty six at the time known by everyone as Frosty,
was arrested in twenty fourteen with ten others, including first
officer on the scene up at Piss Hill, Robert Hardin's
son in connection with a large meth distribution ring working
(37:23):
out of Parker County, an operation run from a property
just a few miles south of Piss Hill. Everyone I
spoke to called Frosty the meth cook. Every major dealer
wanted cooking for them. Frosty was the breaking bad Walter
White of his time, and I was told Parker County's
(37:47):
Gus Fring, the breaking bad drug kingpin, wanted Frosty to
cook for him, but Frosty rebuked his offers. So this
now gave me a direct connection between one of the victims,
Shelley's uncle, Frosty, the meth trade, and one of the
names I have been censoring, the man Frosty refused to
(38:12):
cook for. Within all of that, a monumental motive emerges. Okay, Frosty,
you won't cook for us. The first opportunity we get,
we will show you that you need to rethink your position. Yeah,
(38:34):
I have no doubt frost knows everything. That's mel Mitchell again.
She even asked Frosty's brother, Ronnie Colliflower about him.
Speaker 10 (38:43):
Frosty was like one of the big wigs back then.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
When you know, he's a Walter White of Parker County
when it came to you know, cookie methamphetamy. So Frosty
was very well connected to all of this and he
would have had his own people work theunneath him. And yeah,
he went out there. He was actively looking to find
out who shot A. Shelley because you know, Shelley was
his niece. So I have no doubt that he found out.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
As Mel started digging around, when she came to Frosty's
Facebook page, what she saw made even more sense, really.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Interesting with Frosty's pages and he has gosh, like two
thousand people in there. But the highlight though, is it's
like das and investigators and PD you know, and most
time you don't like lifelong dope words, you're not going
to have police on your Facebook page.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Mel and I decided we needed to find Frosty put
it all to him directly. Word was that he had
been placed in hospice and closing in on his seventies,
was dying, so we agreed it was time to find
out if he wanted to talk to me for the podcast,
maybe get anything off his chest before the lights go out.
(39:55):
I was in the process of doing the same for
the names I have been censoring, reaching out to them
and giving both an opportunity to speak for themselves. Mel
mentioned the name Alan. You've heard briefly from Alan Carter
(40:16):
in this podcast. I reached back out to him again
and I asked him about Frosty, and what he had
to say added more depth and construct to the consistent,
most popular motive in this case. As novelist Larry McMurtry
(41:06):
once wrote, the hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
What I appreciate about guys like Alan Carter, maybe because
in some very small way they remind me of myself,
is how unafraid they are to speak their truth and
say what they feel. In this business of gathering information
(41:30):
in ice cold murder cases. You cannot help but to
respect that there are not a lot of those people
left in the real world.
Speaker 8 (41:42):
Okay, the girl's name.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Was Califlower, her uncle was Frosty Cauliflower.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
That was my knee, well, my kine.
Speaker 8 (41:50):
And we're cheating because they're both trying to sell built
in the same area.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
So and Frosty we're at odds with each other.
Speaker 4 (42:00):
Ah, he is where it gets twisted. Frosty wouldn't cook them.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Okay, okay, but the big ape.
Speaker 8 (42:10):
That got out of the car, it's a whole lot
like it, No kidding, Because they asked me who I
thought it was.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
I thought it was.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
No shit. Allan then tells me law enforcement paid him
a visit as recently as late twenty twenty three.
Speaker 8 (42:29):
Well, see the top pin in my house here, and
they're accusing me of well, for wong they started changing everything,
and I said, well, for y'all get all hung and
all of a sudden, you would need to understand that
I took a pulley about passed and I passed it
playing colors.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
So let's don't get to assume the thanks here.
Speaker 8 (42:46):
Because they said, well, you know it was.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Said that you and uh the name he mentions, there
is someone connected to the sausage King, Weldon Kennedy. When
they came to you last year. They were interested in well.
Speaker 8 (43:00):
They were asking me all times of questions about it,
and I told him that one I said, well, the
same gun, apparently the same gun that he was caught with,
the same gun that killed the.
Speaker 10 (43:13):
People on the hell.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
So here is a source telling me that one of
those names everyone is mentioned, the guy who now lives
in seclusion, had been caught with the murder weapon. If
you recall from the beginning of the podcast, Alan Carter
said he saw a dude in a cowboy hat driving
(43:42):
a law enforcement vehicle parked behind Vincent's car up on
Piss Hill on the night the kids were murdered, close
to the time most think the murders occurred.
Speaker 8 (43:55):
Maybe you do, but I mean, but I know what
I saw again on the car and then uh, when
I started mentioning it, but somebody said talking on Facebook,
and I said, well, y'all, I need to talk about
you on Facebook and say, well, I's come over there
and see me. And I said, you don't want me
to come see you.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
I said I don't like you, and he GOI, well,
I'm coming to see you.
Speaker 8 (44:18):
And I said, you better not be caught over here.
You're at your just diction and you ain't got buddies
over here.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
I said, I ain't playing with you.
Speaker 5 (44:26):
I said, I don't told you.
Speaker 8 (44:27):
And now y'all stay away from me. I'm going to
think you're trying to hurt me. And the reason is
is because right after all this started coming down and
then became the murders and all that.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
A lot of the people started.
Speaker 8 (44:40):
Disappearing, getting killed, weird accidents.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
All kinds of stuff coming up in the next episode
Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 8 (44:57):
But somebody told them that me and him we're out together.
Oh man, what I'm here?
Speaker 4 (45:03):
He failed his polygraph? I failed, Bob.
Speaker 8 (45:07):
That's why when they were asking me on no he
looks like when they asked me that on a polygraph,
I said.
Speaker 4 (45:12):
That I pad.
Speaker 8 (45:13):
I still thank you cooling, Neil, thanks you strengthly Caldi
with he couldn't stand and see him Mexican.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
He is a white girl.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
I did tell him. I was like, well, I was like,
through some fact channels, we'll leave it there now. I
did get a copy of actually's on TOOS report and
he's like, okay. So we also found out that we
were missus balming or you know, shells.
Speaker 10 (45:38):
In Pommery for it.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Paper Ghost season five is written and executive produced by
me and William Phelps. Script consulting by iHeartMedia executive producer
Catherine Law. Production by toc Boom Productions are audio mastering
and mixing by Brandon Dickert. The series' theme number four
(46:05):
four two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and
Tom Mooney.
Please check out my weekly podcast, Crossing the Line with
m William Phelps, where I delve into a new missing
person and cold case murder each week. Wherever you get
your favorite shows. He called Texas a place of unpeopled horizons,
(00:21):
a land of American bleakness, brazenly adding that culturally, socially,
and intellectually, Texas is empty. He also won an Oscar
for his script Broke Back Mountain and is considered the
most well known best selling author to come out of
the lone star state. The late great Pulitzer Prize winning
(00:45):
novelist Larry mcmurtury, who gave us Lonesome Dove, The Last
Picture Show, and hud to name only a few of
his thirty plus best selling books. Mcmurtury had a love
hate relationship with it home state, and often focused on
that bleakness, depicting his characters as corrupt, broken, and easily
(01:07):
swayed by the devil's offerings. As I traveled throughout Parker County,
developing sources, building trusting relationships, I began to understand mcmurcury's passive, aggressive,
brashness for the place he called home. Many of those good, honest,
caring people I met, and even those I had reported on,
(01:30):
felt as if they'd walked straight off the pages of
a mcmurchury novel. If I was to find any answers
in these cases, I would need to appreciate that the
testimony from those I spoke to and even those I hadn't,
was inherently their own, and that a deeper truth can
(01:50):
often emerge from what is a fractured, scorned, and broken
space inside of people. And truth, as I have said before,
is akin to a mountain standing tall all on its own,
unmovable and even unshakable. Yet the issue I kept running
into was getting to the summit of the mountain without falling.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I can't even tell you. She loved that horse a
lot more she loved me. She spent more time with
the answer than you know. When she was home, she
was out there missing with answer. He was green broke,
So green broke means that you're kind of broke. Yeah,
And so when she would ride, I would have to
(02:36):
ride first to get him warmed up and such, and so,
oh gosh, she love it.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
Hearse what could be more innocent or western? Exemplifying that
nostalgic image of Texas Larry mcmurcury paint so vividly than
a teenage girl on her horse under a Texas sky
on a summer day.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
A big memory I have of her is one day
she was walking the fence line, you know, with Dancer,
and I said, I hollered at him. I said, Shelley,
I said, pull him up. I said, he's going to sleep.
I said, I'm telling you he's asleep. And she looks
at me. She goes, shh, you know, like, don't wake
(03:26):
him up. But you know, he could have woke up,
and he could have just threw her right off. But
everything was okay. But I just had that That's just
embedding the way she looked and told me.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
To sh as. Janetta says, Ronnie Colliflower bought Dancer, the
horse Shelley named and loved so much. And so when
I hear an anecdote such as the one Janetta just
shared along with how Ronnie liked to sit and watch
his stepdaughter ride even though the guy was ducking me
(04:03):
and had acted a bit sketchy throughout the years. According
to some I spoke to, there is no way I
can believe Ronnie could have had anything whatsoever to do
with killing Shelley or her boyfriend. That accusation has no
place on the mountain next to me, but rather fits
conveniently into a fictionalized version of this case some have created.
(04:30):
Ronnie Colliflower raised that girl as if she was his own,
and her death had broken the man to the point
where for decades he refused to even talk about it.
Forgive me for this, but so Ronnie was with you
that weekend you were gone. Yes, what if some people
(04:50):
say Ronnie had something to do with it? What would
you say? Not a chance that he got somebody to
do it or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
No, I believe that in my heart with the a
Please ask me that I believe that.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Bha.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
That's the first thing, Nancy.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
When a murder wraps a family in a cocoon of
emotional hell, those who have not lived through the experience
could never understand the totality of that loss. They say
the day a child dies crushes a parent's soul, but
that's not true. It's every day after their child is
(05:29):
still gone that hurts the most. There's also a physical
toll the weight of a child's murder places on the
backs of parents. As you have heard throughout genetic holieflower.
Smith suffers still to this day because of a loss
shattering every aspect of her life. She's broken like a
(05:52):
piece of glass. In a similar fashion, Vincent Tjerina Senior
worked tirelessly every day of his life searching for the
answers to his son's murder. He did not stop. Some
say he was obsessed. How could a parent in his
position not be? The guy badgered the Weatherford Police and
(06:17):
pushed them to not give up, even as the years
passed and the case felt as though it would never
be solved. Here's Raymond t Jerina once again, Vincent's brother,
whom you have heard in previous episodes. This must have
destroyed your brother. Tell me about that if you can.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
Well, he wanted so bad for you know, either him
to find the killers or the police to find their
killers and prosecute him whatever he's been done. And here's
forty two years later and nothing still. But I'm gonna
say that that's what it was to me, That's what
it was, sure sim And they all covered it up.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
He was never the same after this happened. Iakin imagine.
Speaker 2 (07:06):
It took his.
Speaker 4 (07:07):
Life away him, that it was on his sign, and
it was sixteen years old, I mean got him mind
it in the time of his time.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Yeah, horrible.
Speaker 4 (07:18):
Yes, he told him all to hell and it was
not the same. And he talked to me a lot,
you know, he would just try to get some of
the steam out of him and stuff like that. And
he talked to me a lot every time I saw him,
and stuff. And he came up and saw me, you know,
came to see me and stuff like that, had and
we talked and stuff like that. I kept telling him,
giving him hope that they will find him, you know,
(07:40):
I will find him.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
The longing and the need for answers eats away at
apparent like rust on an old farming tractor out in
a pasture. I will never stop saying it. The ripple
effect of murder reverberates like a perpetual echo, generation after generation. So, Vincent,
(08:03):
your brother h two Texas rangers started to talk to him.
Is that true?
Speaker 4 (08:08):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Yes, tell me about that.
Speaker 4 (08:11):
Nothing was done, and my son hired a private investigator
and the police one in cooperating it all with him
and stuff like that. And so they summoned the type
of friends to come in and investigate it. Because they
kept saying that it was out an inside out, okay,
what you call it? Police, and they were covering up.
But the rangers came and they could never find nothing.
(08:34):
You know, the police, I'm sure didn't cooperate with it.
Damn with him, that's what I heard. Police wouldn't do nothing.
I mean, we all went and talked to him. You know,
they were not hearing any kind of information all this stuff.
One officer came in and called us in, called me
and called my brother in law, which was married to
my sister, and we went and talked to him, and
(08:55):
they didn't have it. My stink to tailed us that
they just had been who's student, some guy that had
left town. I don't know whether he was around the
place anything or anything like that or what, but he
left town right after that night. I believe he left
for the Northern States and Ohio somewhere up there in
(09:15):
that northern part. And they were chasing him for two
weeks and then he finally came in and on his
own and took up potty tests and ran it and
he was questioned a lot and everything, and it's determined
he wasn't in it, so let him go. And they
had no leeds of any kind in anything.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
That's what they told us. Several sources told me the
person Raymond mentioned, a schoolmate of Vincent and Shelley's, was
up on Piss Hill that night. It was ten thirty
pm when he and a family member with him heard
three gunshots and right afterward saw a young man one
(09:56):
of the names I have censored throughout the podcast standing
near Vincent's car. The schoolmate left town right after the
murders because I was told his life had been threatened.
He was eventually located out of state by investigators and
agreed to take a polygraph, which law enforcement says he passed.
(10:21):
I'm so sorry this happened to your family. Ramon, Yes, yes,
I am my brother.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
He never was the same. He started deteriorating and he
had been discharged from medical discharge from Nolan Me. So
he just started deturating, deteriorating.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
He was young. Yeah, I believe. Here's another Tajerina family
member you heard from earlier in the podcast, and as
you'll hear utterly implicit in her voice, there is that
generational ripple effect. I mentioned.
Speaker 5 (11:01):
What they did to not just our family, that many
other families, you know, like Wendy's family, and there were
a couple of you know, young African American boys that
were killed and murdered for no reason. There were just
so many, so many things, and so many that were
not even written about that we know about, that we're.
Speaker 6 (11:21):
Missing, you know.
Speaker 5 (11:23):
So I just hope that they can stop the chain
of murdering then it goes on over there. It's unbelievable
today in time that they're still allowed to do all this.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
It's unbelievable to me.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Vincent Senior kept the secret from most everyone in the family,
including Vincent Junior, throughout all of this. He was very ill.
Then on February twenty third, nineteen eighty six, not quite
three years since his son's murder, at just thirty eight
(11:58):
years old, Vince died from complications of a lung issue
he'd struggled with for years, never knowing what happened or
who was responsible for the murder of his son.
Speaker 5 (12:14):
Because he'd been working in the commercial painting industry back then.
Of course, the lead based paint ended up getting getting
him health wise, but he really warned himself down trying.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
You know, so hard to get information. He would not
let up.
Speaker 5 (12:29):
He was constantly at the police station. He was constantly
talking to newspapers, anybody that would listen to him, trying
to get answers. Even on this you know, deathbed. He
was just like, you know, I'm gonna be with my
son now, and so was everything to him because he's
(12:50):
a great kid.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Previously on page for Ghosts.
Speaker 7 (13:01):
There's a man that worked on that ranch that found her,
Bobby laying there. He had gone to enter the ranch
and that's when he discovered her.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
It appeared that she had been sexual assaulted. She had
been bound by the hands and feet. She had like
her bathing suit top on and some shorts on, and
then she had been bludgeoned in the head. And they
believe it may have been a rock.
Speaker 8 (13:26):
Yeah, you're you're spot on.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
We opened up at some point, you know, a hot line.
I say a hot line. It was just a direct.
It was my extension.
Speaker 4 (13:34):
You know.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
People were calling me left and right.
Speaker 8 (13:36):
A lot of it was the stuff I had already
heard before.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
But people wanted to, you know, they wanted to do
their part. My name is em William Phelps. I'm an
investigative journalist and the New York Times bestselling author of
dozens of true crime books. This is season five of
pay Per Ghosts, The Texas Team Murders. Cruising through Parker
(14:22):
County on a clear day, it feels as though you
can drive directly into the sky. The flat land and
horizon appear endless. At dusk with the sun backlighting the heavens.
Certain hues of purple, pink, orange, and yellow will make
a believer out of even the most ardent skeptic. This
(14:44):
tranquil friendly country life residents were used to living had
been darkened by not one or two murders, but a
rash of homicides. As the eighties ended, in the nineties
crept up with Wendy Robinson's section ruol assault and Vicious Murder.
Just like Vincent and Shelley's still unresolved, the community had
(15:08):
been scarred forever by the evil nature of innocent kids
just starting out in life, stricken down in the most
horrific fashion, and in Wendy Robinson's case, particularly the idea
that someone law enforcement had bought into Ricky Lee Green's
masquerade admission heightened the lack of respect already felt for
(15:32):
law enforcement, and what's even worse, allowed her rapist and
killer to walk the streets of Freeman with the possibility
of doing it again.
Speaker 7 (15:45):
On July the ninth of eighty seven, there was a
robbery at the Petro gas station in Wetherford and the
person who was assaulted was a trucker. He gave them
a vague description on both people and they did a
sketch of them. So then on November the sixteenth, the
(16:06):
police talked to two women that owned a restaurant at
Lake Weatherford and asked them if they recognized either of
these two people.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
To be clear, I want to point out that in
the previous episode we focused on Ricky Lee Green, the
man Patricia Springer, the author investigating Wendy's case, just described,
is a different guy, Ricky Lee Adkins. Adkins is a
bony looking dude with a scruffy goateee of peach fuzz,
(16:40):
close set, dark beady eyes, long hippie like knotted black hair.
He was a known sex offender rotten to the core,
not to mention, as they like to say in Texas
Dark as coffin air, the lead they developed about Adkins
(17:00):
doesn't come until twenty sixteen, and not until as Patricia
touched on in the previous episode, Adkins's daughter called the
Weatherford police and reported he had confessed Wendy's murder to her.
From there, they backtracked and began looking into Adkins' life,
(17:21):
And wouldn't you know, investigators had had their eye on
Adkins as far back as nineteen eighty seven. In the
months just after Wendy's murder.
Speaker 7 (17:35):
They found out that Atkins was in Arizona in custody
on a burglary or robbery case there, so they extradited
him back to Weatherford and he came back to Texas
on November the twenty eighth of eighty seven. Then they
started talking to him, but they only talked to him
about From my notes that I've gathered, they only talked
(17:57):
to him about the robbery at Petro. He has to
see if they could get in to confess that, then
they could get him on the murder. He denied that entirely.
They talked to him twice and each time he denied it.
The third time they tried to talk to him, he
refused to speak to them any longer, and they didn't
speak to him after that.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
I was interested in Wendy Robinson's vehicle, which seemed to
share a few consistencies with how the Monte Carlo Vincent
drove was found, including the fact that it was the
same exact car.
Speaker 7 (18:32):
When they went to the wall to see what was
left there, her car was there. It was unlocked, but
her purse and her radio and her keys were gone,
so they thought she had just gone off with someone.
She knew at that point that she had just taken
off and decided to go get a coke or something.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
Remember, they had never found the keys to Vincent's car.
Ellwood Hohertz is on record saying he thought that two
cases were linked, Wendy Robinson and Colliflower Travino. Why would
he say something like that, you think.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
Oh, I think probably because both cases about young people.
Both cases were murdered. Although the similarities are not alike.
I mean, they're totally different, different circumstances.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
Entirely based on all the available evidence, In addition to
what Patricia tells me next, I don't think we can
link Wendy's case to Shelley and Vincent's murders. Adkins was
indicted in twenty sixteen for the capital felony murder of
Wendy Robinson. In twenty eighteen, he was convicted and sentenced
(19:49):
for thirty five years in prison. But that was far
from the end of Wendy's case, because Adkins then implicates
to other men in Wendy's rape and murder.
Speaker 7 (20:02):
He told me, as I've interviewed him to that Michael
Deadman and Grady Bruce Deadman both raped Wendy and of
course he didn't do any of that, you see, Yeah,
we can believe that, and that then Grady said we
can't leave her alive, and that Grady is the one
(20:25):
that actually crushed her skull with the rock.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
They all put it on the other guy.
Speaker 6 (20:30):
They all put it on the other guy.
Speaker 7 (20:31):
Now, unfortunately Atkins is the only one who has been
convicted of that.
Speaker 1 (20:37):
The other two are still free.
Speaker 7 (20:40):
Yes, it was determined that they didn't have any evidence
against the other two, only Ricky Atkins' word for it,
and they didn't think that was good enough to take
to a jury. That you know, any good defense attorney
would be able to turn that around.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
What do you think of that?
Speaker 6 (20:57):
Well, I was not happy about that.
Speaker 7 (20:59):
I have a good friend who was a prosecutor in
Terrant County, and I called him and asked him what
the procedure would be to get a special prosecutor to
take on the case because I couldn't get the prosecutor
here to even return my calls. He said, it's almost impossible,
and not with this case, you know. He said that
(21:21):
it just wouldn't fly. And so nothing was ever done
with the other two. I did speak with Grady Deadman.
He's scary out of all of them, he was the
biggest and mean, and Ricky said that a lot. Ricky
Adkins told me over and over again how mean Grady
dead Man was and he was afraid of him. Now, Michael,
(21:44):
who is Grady's brother, the last the police knew of him.
He was homeless and living on the streets in Houston,
now Grady's last I talked to him. He was in
Fort Worth when I spoke with him, he was at
a halfway house.
Speaker 6 (21:59):
He had just got out and out of jail. He
was going into a VA facility to live.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
What do you think? Do you think all three of
them did it?
Speaker 6 (22:07):
Absolutely?
Speaker 1 (22:08):
You believe Ricky Atkinson.
Speaker 7 (22:10):
I think he participated. I don't know whether he held
her down. I don't know what he did, but yes,
I think he participated.
Speaker 1 (22:18):
So these three are just kind of bumming around doing drugs, drinking.
They come upon her and they say let's have a party.
Speaker 7 (22:24):
Yes, Now, I think Ricky Atkins was smart enough not
to want to pile any more charges on him, because
his claim was that she got in the truck with
them of her own accord, and that they took her
to Fort Worth to get beer.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
Because Parker County at that time was a dry county.
I know Wendy. I felt like I knew her pretty well,
certainly knew her parents well.
Speaker 7 (22:46):
I didn't believe that for one moment, but I think
that he wanted to get out of a kidnapping, rap,
capital murder.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
At that point, you're right in Texas, you're going to die.
Speaker 3 (22:55):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Do you think they have the right guy for Wendy's murder?
Speaker 7 (23:00):
I think yeah, eventually they did. They got one of
the three. There are two out there.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
You definitely think those three did it.
Speaker 6 (23:06):
Oh?
Speaker 7 (23:07):
Yes, Like I said, I've spoken to Atkins. I have
a stack of letters from him describing everything to me. Yeah,
Grady was gruff enough and scary enough for.
Speaker 6 (23:19):
Me to believe that he would kill someone.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
So Ricky described murdering her and everything.
Speaker 6 (23:24):
Yes, that Grady is the one that did that, and
how it was done, and.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
He talked about binding her and everything.
Speaker 7 (23:32):
He told me that the bindings came from the leather shoelaces,
bootlaces out of Michael Deadman's boots, and that that's what
they used for the ligatures.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
Did that check out with the crime scene reports of leather?
Speaker 6 (23:47):
Yes, Yes, they were leather ligatures.
Speaker 1 (23:50):
So that checked out.
Speaker 6 (23:51):
Yes, that checked out.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
So he couldn't have known that.
Speaker 4 (23:53):
No.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
I asked Patricia about the names I have been censoring
throughout the podcast. She had reviewed every piece of paper
in Wendy's case and interviewed scores of sources over a
forty year period. Within all of that time, I wondered
had she ever come across the names as being connected
(24:21):
to Wendy's case, Vincent and Shelley's case, or any other murders.
Speaker 7 (24:27):
It was never mentioned in any of the case files
or at anybody that I interviewed. People may have thought
that it could have been the same person, but because
they were so different, I also think that they realized
that it probably wasn't. The theory was that it was
somebody within the Sheriff's department that had done this, or
(24:50):
it had been someone related to someone in the Sheriff's
department that had done this because the crime scene was
evidently very contaminat by the authorities.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Patricia brings up another name I have heard quite a
bit as someone being connected to Shelley and Vincent's murders,
and how this person, right after the murders disappeared from
public view and became a recluse, which I touched on
in a previous episode.
Speaker 7 (25:30):
It's my understanding, and never left his house after that,
and so that even brought on more speculation that.
Speaker 6 (25:38):
He was involved in some way.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
This type of cold case can become dizzy with so
many rumors, so many names, so much speculation, if you
allow it to. In my experience, keeping it simple is
the most productive way to go about finding new information
in getting closer to the truth. As of the production
(26:06):
of this episode, law enforcement has failed to produce anyone
willing enough to step into a grand jury and point
a finger at those names I have censored. That doesn't
mean they were not involved. It tells me, within the
scope of a cold case investigation, that there isn't enough
(26:27):
hard evidence tying these men to the murders, or for
whatever political reasons, law enforcement flat out just refuses to
go after them. Still, every time it felt as if
I could exclude these guys, I landed on a source
who changed my mind, and one woman, someone who knew
(26:51):
most everyone involved, including the names I have censored, steps
up and drops a bombshell.
Speaker 9 (27:31):
I was born and raised in Weatherford all my life.
Weatherford's always been a safe town, and when the murders happened,
it was really it really put everybody on edge because
nothing like that had ever happened in Weatherford before. It
was kind of a at the time, a once in
a lifetime thing that, you know, none of us said
(27:53):
it had ever experienced in our little town. Of course,
Wetherford's a lot bigger now, but at the time it
was small.
Speaker 1 (28:01):
My source was in her late twenties back in nineteen
eighty three. She had heard all the rumors, of course,
during those days after the murders, the names everyone has
been connecting to the case, but she didn't really put
much steak in town gossip, most of which had been
generated by a bunch of kids at the time. After all,
(28:24):
people could say whatever they wanted, blame whomever they chose.
Hearsay is cheap, and it gets you nowhere. But for
this source, however, all of that changed one day when
she heard it straight from the Horse's mouth.
Speaker 9 (28:45):
I stopped at a convenience store and I saw this
friend of mine that I hadn't seen from high school,
and we were just trying to catch up, and she
said she was going to a party that night and
asked me if I wanted to go with her, and
I said, sure, no problem. So she picked me up
and we started driving down to the river area, the
(29:06):
Horseshoe Bend area, and we got to this house, and
I mean there were people everywhere inside outside, and we
went in.
Speaker 10 (29:16):
She wanted to get some weed.
Speaker 1 (29:18):
Horseshoe Bend is about a twenty minute ride south of Weatherford, and.
Speaker 9 (29:27):
So we went in the house and she was looking
for him, and I was just kind of sitting there,
you know, watching everything. I'm a people watcher, so just
watching everything that's going on, and.
Speaker 10 (29:41):
That's when I saw. I didn't know who he was
when I saw.
Speaker 4 (29:46):
Him, but it was.
Speaker 1 (29:49):
There was another guy with him. That second name I
have been censoring. The same guy others have reported began
living in seclusion right after the murders. Yet the guy
my source didn't really know all that well, the one
connected to someone in law enforcement. During that party she
(30:10):
was at.
Speaker 9 (30:11):
He started mouthing off the thing that caught my attention
because I wasn't really paying any attention to him, but
then all of a sudden, I heard him say we
killed those kids, and that immediately got my attention and
(30:34):
it scared me, and I started looking for my girlfriend
and I said, did you just hear what was going
on and what he said?
Speaker 10 (30:43):
And she said I heard him.
Speaker 9 (30:45):
I said, I want to get out of here. I
don't want any part of this, So we got in
the car and left. It wasn't long after that a.
Speaker 10 (30:54):
Girlfriend and I were working at Dairy Queen there in
Weatherford on South.
Speaker 9 (30:58):
Maine, and it was it happened to be one of
those nights we were having a banana split cell and
we sold so many banana.
Speaker 10 (31:07):
Split cells that night. We were hot and sticky.
Speaker 9 (31:09):
It was so we decided we wanted to go. I
guess it was later in the summer because we went
to the lake and went swimming. And followed us out
there and we were in the water swimming. It was
my girlfriend and myself and her brother, just the three
of us, nobody else, And told us to.
Speaker 10 (31:30):
Get out of the water. So we got out of
the water.
Speaker 9 (31:33):
You know, we didn't know what was going on, and
my friends, now her brother that was with us, asked
did He said, what's going on and took the butt
of his gun and helped my friend's brother in the stomach.
Speaker 10 (31:48):
I mean, immediately a big old well come up on
my stomach. He said, y'all follow us to the sheriff's office.
So we got in our van and we drove to
the sheriff's office and all of us had I mean,
you know, that was back in you know, the eighties.
Speaker 9 (32:05):
We wore bikinis when we went swimming, but he we
had towels, but he wouldn't let us cover up. He
made us take the towels off. Then he got on
the phone and called my daddy and told my daddy
that he caught me naked out at the lake with
a bunch of boys. And I mean, after that, I
was just you know, everybody in town was scared of
(32:26):
them because of their reputation, and I was one of them.
Speaker 1 (32:32):
So there it was again the same accusation, But here
was a witness claiming she overheard the actual suspect himself
admitting to killing Shelley and Vincent while using the pronoun
we implicating someone else. This is the type of testimony
(32:53):
grand juries want to hear. A credible witness, uninvolved sitting
at a party overhearing someone admit to a murder, yet
nothing was ever done about it. Her story, like so
many I have heard, got sucked into the vacuum of Weatherford,
which had essentially been cleaning up this case for more
(33:15):
than four decades. As time passes. What are you hearing
about suspects, anything else you're hearing.
Speaker 10 (33:23):
In town other than those two, I'm not hearing anything.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
Was there any talk in town about it being some
sort of love triangle?
Speaker 9 (33:31):
We never heard that. The Only thing we ever heard
was that it was a drug deal gone bad and
that had killed them.
Speaker 1 (33:43):
In this case, perhaps more than any other I have investigated,
motive becomes the main piece of the puzzle. I am
in search of why, because if you can nail down
a motive, it will lead you to an answer. The
one promising lead in the case serial killer oddist tool.
(34:07):
As I mentioned in the last episode, a serial killer
who had admitted to law enforcement he committed the murders.
Was another letdown as tool was ultimately ruled out completely
by impartial evidence proving he was nowhere near Weatherford at
the time of the murders. Not to mention, he and
(34:30):
Henry Lee Lucas became known for false confessions, dozens and
dozens of them. So, circling back to my main point,
if this is not a serial killer case, and I
don't believe it is, there has to be a direct motive. Love, money, revenge,
(34:50):
one of only three basic motives for murder. All killers
are effectively driven by. To me, after being stuck in
the weeds of this case for you years, the only
logical motive feels awfully like what people have been saying.
Speaker 9 (35:08):
From the time we first heard about it until you know,
all these years later, I'm still hearing the same thing.
But see, nobody ever knew any other details. People would
go up there to park all the time. Everybody was
relating all of it to drugs. I really don't know
(35:28):
a lot, you know, I wasn't in high school, so
I don't know a lot about what was going on there.
The main thing I know about is what I heard
him say, you know, at the party. I can't imagine
him bragging about killing kids if he didn't actually do it,
you know, And I was kind of afraid of that
family after that. Took me forever to convince my dad
(35:50):
that I wasn't at the lake naked with a bunch
of boys.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
And you think did that because of what you heard.
Was he sending you a message?
Speaker 10 (35:58):
I think he was trying to Yeah, I think he
was trying to scare me.
Speaker 1 (36:05):
I asked my source if any of those names I
have censored had ever approached her again or threatened her.
Speaker 10 (36:14):
No, not at all.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Ever felt like you've been followed or watched or anything
like that.
Speaker 10 (36:23):
No, because I moved out of weather for not long
after that.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
As I dug into the meth trade aspect of the case,
seeing that everyone I spoke to mentioned drugs as a
motivating factor in some form or fashion, I developed information
which quite honestly began to paint somewhat of a clearer
picture regarding what might have been going on here. I
(36:59):
touched on this prely, but Ronnie Colliflower's brother Ernest Alfred
Colliflower fifty six at the time known by everyone as Frosty,
was arrested in twenty fourteen with ten others, including first
officer on the scene up at Piss Hill, Robert Hardin's
son in connection with a large meth distribution ring working
(37:23):
out of Parker County, an operation run from a property
just a few miles south of Piss Hill. Everyone I
spoke to called Frosty the meth cook. Every major dealer
wanted cooking for them. Frosty was the breaking bad Walter
White of his time, and I was told Parker County's
(37:47):
Gus Fring, the breaking bad drug kingpin, wanted Frosty to
cook for him, but Frosty rebuked his offers. So this
now gave me a direct connection between one of the victims,
Shelley's uncle, Frosty, the meth trade, and one of the
names I have been censoring, the man Frosty refused to
(38:12):
cook for. Within all of that, a monumental motive emerges. Okay, Frosty,
you won't cook for us. The first opportunity we get,
we will show you that you need to rethink your position. Yeah,
(38:34):
I have no doubt frost knows everything. That's mel Mitchell again.
She even asked Frosty's brother, Ronnie Colliflower about him.
Speaker 10 (38:43):
Frosty was like one of the big wigs back then.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
When you know, he's a Walter White of Parker County
when it came to you know, cookie methamphetamy. So Frosty
was very well connected to all of this and he
would have had his own people work theunneath him. And yeah,
he went out there. He was actively looking to find
out who shot A. Shelley because you know, Shelley was
his niece. So I have no doubt that he found out.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
As Mel started digging around, when she came to Frosty's
Facebook page, what she saw made even more sense, really.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Interesting with Frosty's pages and he has gosh, like two
thousand people in there. But the highlight though, is it's
like das and investigators and PD you know, and most
time you don't like lifelong dope words, you're not going
to have police on your Facebook page.
Speaker 1 (39:33):
Mel and I decided we needed to find Frosty put
it all to him directly. Word was that he had
been placed in hospice and closing in on his seventies,
was dying, so we agreed it was time to find
out if he wanted to talk to me for the podcast,
maybe get anything off his chest before the lights go out.
(39:55):
I was in the process of doing the same for
the names I have been censoring, reaching out to them
and giving both an opportunity to speak for themselves. Mel
mentioned the name Alan. You've heard briefly from Alan Carter
(40:16):
in this podcast. I reached back out to him again
and I asked him about Frosty, and what he had
to say added more depth and construct to the consistent,
most popular motive in this case. As novelist Larry McMurtry
(41:06):
once wrote, the hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
What I appreciate about guys like Alan Carter, maybe because
in some very small way they remind me of myself,
is how unafraid they are to speak their truth and
say what they feel. In this business of gathering information
(41:30):
in ice cold murder cases. You cannot help but to
respect that there are not a lot of those people
left in the real world.
Speaker 8 (41:42):
Okay, the girl's name.
Speaker 4 (41:43):
Was Califlower, her uncle was Frosty Cauliflower.
Speaker 1 (41:47):
That was my knee, well, my kine.
Speaker 8 (41:50):
And we're cheating because they're both trying to sell built
in the same area.
Speaker 1 (41:56):
So and Frosty we're at odds with each other.
Speaker 4 (42:00):
Ah, he is where it gets twisted. Frosty wouldn't cook them.
Speaker 1 (42:04):
Okay, okay, but the big ape.
Speaker 8 (42:10):
That got out of the car, it's a whole lot
like it, No kidding, Because they asked me who I
thought it was.
Speaker 4 (42:18):
I thought it was.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
No shit. Allan then tells me law enforcement paid him
a visit as recently as late twenty twenty three.
Speaker 8 (42:29):
Well, see the top pin in my house here, and
they're accusing me of well, for wong they started changing everything,
and I said, well, for y'all get all hung and
all of a sudden, you would need to understand that
I took a pulley about passed and I passed it
playing colors.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
So let's don't get to assume the thanks here.
Speaker 8 (42:46):
Because they said, well, you know it was.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
Said that you and uh the name he mentions, there
is someone connected to the sausage King, Weldon Kennedy. When
they came to you last year. They were interested in well.
Speaker 8 (43:00):
They were asking me all times of questions about it,
and I told him that one I said, well, the
same gun, apparently the same gun that he was caught with,
the same gun that killed the.
Speaker 10 (43:13):
People on the hell.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
So here is a source telling me that one of
those names everyone is mentioned, the guy who now lives
in seclusion, had been caught with the murder weapon. If
you recall from the beginning of the podcast, Alan Carter
said he saw a dude in a cowboy hat driving
(43:42):
a law enforcement vehicle parked behind Vincent's car up on
Piss Hill on the night the kids were murdered, close
to the time most think the murders occurred.
Speaker 8 (43:55):
Maybe you do, but I mean, but I know what
I saw again on the car and then uh, when
I started mentioning it, but somebody said talking on Facebook,
and I said, well, y'all, I need to talk about
you on Facebook and say, well, I's come over there
and see me. And I said, you don't want me
to come see you.
Speaker 3 (44:15):
I said I don't like you, and he GOI, well,
I'm coming to see you.
Speaker 8 (44:18):
And I said, you better not be caught over here.
You're at your just diction and you ain't got buddies
over here.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
I said, I ain't playing with you.
Speaker 5 (44:26):
I said, I don't told you.
Speaker 8 (44:27):
And now y'all stay away from me. I'm going to
think you're trying to hurt me. And the reason is
is because right after all this started coming down and
then became the murders and all that.
Speaker 4 (44:39):
A lot of the people started.
Speaker 8 (44:40):
Disappearing, getting killed, weird accidents.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
All kinds of stuff coming up in the next episode
Paper Ghosts.
Speaker 8 (44:57):
But somebody told them that me and him we're out together.
Oh man, what I'm here?
Speaker 4 (45:03):
He failed his polygraph? I failed, Bob.
Speaker 8 (45:07):
That's why when they were asking me on no he
looks like when they asked me that on a polygraph,
I said.
Speaker 4 (45:12):
That I pad.
Speaker 8 (45:13):
I still thank you cooling, Neil, thanks you strengthly Caldi
with he couldn't stand and see him Mexican.
Speaker 4 (45:21):
He is a white girl.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
I did tell him. I was like, well, I was like,
through some fact channels, we'll leave it there now. I
did get a copy of actually's on TOOS report and
he's like, okay. So we also found out that we
were missus balming or you know, shells.
Speaker 10 (45:38):
In Pommery for it.
Speaker 1 (45:44):
Paper Ghost season five is written and executive produced by
me and William Phelps. Script consulting by iHeartMedia executive producer
Catherine Law. Production by toc Boom Productions are audio mastering
and mixing by Brandon Dickert. The series' theme number four
(46:05):
four two is written and performed by Thomas Phelps and
Tom Mooney.
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