Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime features unsolved homicides, missing persons, & other mysteries from throughout the Lone Star State. #Texas #TrueCime #Unsolved #MissingPerson #ColdCase #TrueCrimePodcast Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/gone-cold-texas-true-crime--3203003/support.

Episodes

November 16, 2025 30 mins
In August 1970, 26-year-old schoolteacher Linda Jane Phillips, daughter of Kaufman County School Superintendent Jimmy Phillips, vanished while driving home from a Dallas wedding party. Two days later, her mutilated body was discovered in a hedgerow near Post Oak, Texas.

The case shocked Kaufman County—a quiet, rural community east of booming Dallas—and became one of North Texas’s most haunting unsolved murders. Investigators found h...
Mark as Played
In the early hours of June 23, 1985, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Leigh Day opened Preston Road Donuts in North Dallas for her usual Sunday shift. She brewed the coffee, stocked the shelves, and rang up her last customer at 6:20 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the shop was silent. Jennifer’s purse and jewelry sat untouched on the counter, her apron on the floor, and the cash drawer still full.

Three days later, construction workers discov...
Mark as Played
In June 1964, a Fort Bend County farmer discovered a headless, handless torso in a roadside ditch — a killing so cleanly done that investigators said only someone trained in anatomy could have done it. Sheriff “Tiny” Gaston and the Texas Rangers searched for weeks, but the victim was never identified. Then, just months later, another scene shocked Texas — Room 636 of San Antonio’s Sheraton Gunter Hotel, where blood coated the walls...
Mark as Played
Three years after a suitcase containing a man’s torso surfaced in the Rio Grande near El Paso, another horror emerged—this time in the pine woods of East Texas. On February 3, 1962, two brothers seining minnows in a roadside ditch off U.S. Highway 59 north of Cleveland discovered two cardboard boxes wired together and packed with cement. Inside was the severed torso of a woman. Her head, arms, and legs were missing.

San Jacinto Coun...
Mark as Played
October 19, 2025 33 mins
In June of 1959, a fisherman on the Rio Grande west of El Paso pulled a black suitcase from the slow, muddy current near Montoya, Texas. Inside was a headless, handless torso — mutilated, skinned, and wrapped in the previous day’s newspaper. Within hours, El Paso County Sheriff Bob Bailey was standing over what he’d later call “the most brutal murder in El Paso history.” What followed was a multi-state investigation that spanned Te...
Mark as Played
October 12, 2025 28 mins
On April 5, 1985, 29-year-old Kathleen “Kathy” Ranft finished her shift at Lippe Tire Center in Seguin, Texas, and headed into the weekend. She was in the middle of a separation, moving into a new apartment, and trying to build a fresh start for herself and her three sons. That night, Kathy was supposed to meet friends at the Country Cabaret, a small nightclub off FM 467. She never made it.

The next morning, her 1980 Chevy Citation ...
Mark as Played
In October 1996, a rancher in rural Wise County, Texas, stumbled on a body hidden in a brush pile. For over two years she was known only as “Brush Girl,” a Jane Doe with no name, no identity, and no justice. Eventually, persistence and forensic artistry revealed her true identity: 14-year-old April Dawn Lacy from Oklahoma City.

April’s story is one of poverty, addiction, instability, and systemic failure — a child caught between par...
Mark as Played
September 28, 2025 28 mins
In October 1987, a visiting nurse walked into a Tyler, Texas duplex and discovered a scene of unimaginable violence. Fifty-seven-year-old Mary Hooper, confined to a wheelchair after a long battle with illness, had been bludgeoned to death. Just steps away, her longtime partner, sixty-two-year-old Emmett Lynch, was found beaten in the bathroom. Nothing in the home appeared disturbed. Valuables remained untouched. The only thing miss...
Mark as Played
Most disappearances leave echoes—missing persons flyers, TV reports, police pleas for tips. But when James Robert “Jimmy” Farenthold vanished in the spring of 1989, there was only silence. No bulletin. No headlines. No public outcry. Just absence.

Jimmy wasn’t just anyone. He was the youngest son of one of Texas’s most prominent dynasties, a family bound by oil, politics, and power. But behind the legacy was a private story of grief...
Mark as Played
On June 6, 1972, the Gulf of Mexico gave back one of its secrets. The body of Randolph “Randy” Farenthold, 32 years old, oil money in his veins, and gambling smoke in his lungs, washed ashore on Mustang Island. His hands were bound, his body chained, his skull fractured. The brutal murder of the South Texas “sportsman” triggered one of the most intensive investigations in Nueces County history, pulling in local lawmen, Texas Ranger...
Mark as Played
Texas dynasties are remembered for oil, ranching, and politics. Their names are carved into courthouses and campuses—but behind the polished legacy of the Farenthold family lies a darker story. In this first part of our multi-episode series, we trace the family’s rise from European aristocracy and South Texas oil wealth into political power, before unraveling the tragedies that shadowed their name.

From the sudden death of a child t...
Mark as Played
September 7, 2025 29 mins
In October of 1989, ten-year-old Sheila Renae Finch left her grandmother’s home in South Waco, Texas, for what should have been a quick trip. She rode her pink-and-white bicycle to a corner grocery store to use the payphone and call her aunt for a ride to school. She made the call, hung up, and started the short ride home.

Sheila never made it back.

Two days later, her body was discovered on the banks of Lake Waco’s Speegleville Park...
Mark as Played
September 1, 2025 29 mins
On a cold night in February 2013, 30-year-old Maegan Hembree left her home in Smyer, Texas, and set out for Lubbock. She never arrived. Days later, her red Saturn turned up at a Lubbock apartment complex — but Maegan was nowhere to be found. The man last seen with her, Michael Todd Ramsey, was eventually sentenced to 80 years in prison on unrelated charges. He remains a person of interest in Maegan’s disappearance but has never bee...
Mark as Played
On November 10, 1984, six-year-old Bradley Eugene Gilbert was playing outside his aunt’s home in Chillicothe, Texas, with his three-year-old brother Jason. By early afternoon, Jason came running back to the house crying. Bradley had told him to run. When Jason turned back, his brother was gone. The search for Bradley was immediate and massive. Hundreds of volunteers joined law enforcement, Texas Rangers, and the FBI. Flyers, bloodh...
Mark as Played
In February 2001, 20-year-old Travoski Latraze Johnson vanished from Mount Enterprise, Texas. Two days later, his body was discovered in the trunk of his own car, parked on a desolate county road in rural Rusk County. The discovery sparked an investigation involving the Rusk County Sheriff's Office and the FBI—but despite the agencies involved, no one has ever been arrested. No one has been charged. And Travoski’s family is still w...
Mark as Played
Born into a tumultuous marriage between Emory and Elva Moad in the midst of the Great Depression, Neota Green’s childhood was marked by physical and emotional abuse. The shocking violence that Elva endured at the hands of her husband set the stage for the unraveling of the Moad family—and for the tragedy that would unfold years later.

The episode dives deep into the harrowing details of Neota’s death on March 24, 1963, a night that ...
Mark as Played
August 3, 2025 30 mins
One evening in May of 1978, Robert Pretty came home from work to a nearly silent house. Breakfast was still on the table, and all that could be heard was water dripping. As he looked for his family, he followed the drip. In the bathroom, Robert found his sons Mark and Scott deceased in the bathtub. In the master bedroom, he found his wife Karen also dead in the tub. Though the police tried to find evidence, they discovered almost n...
Mark as Played
In March of 2023, an investigation into the whereabouts of 6-year-old Noel Alvarez began. He’d already been missing for months. Noel had several siblings, but unlike them, he had special needs to attend to. His mother, Cindy Rodriguez-Singh, told the Everman Police that Noel had gone to live with his father in Mexico. But when investigators with Child Protective Services checked that out, his father, who had been deported before No...
Mark as Played
In Houston, Texas, the 1970s was a decade marred by violent crime. From high-risk adults to completely innocent children, the era saw little mercy. When 15-year-old Patricia “Pat” Humphreys, her sister Deb, and friends went to the Thunderbird Twin Drive Inn, it was supposed to be a carefree night. It was the first night, in fact, that Pat and Deb were given the responsibility of taking the family car out. But during intermission, P...
Mark as Played
Part 2 of 2. Two years after the murder of 32-year-old Lauren Whitener, a potential suspect emerged when the dismembered bodies of three people were found burning in a Fort Worth dumpster. The person who murdered them, Jason Alan Thornburg, was apprehended relatively quickly and readily confessed to two other murders as well. A few years before Thornburg’s conviction for the three murders, the prime suspect in Lauren’s murder, Rodn...
Mark as Played

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