Brush Girl: The Murder of April Dawn Lacy

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 parents lost to alcohol and drugs, shuffled between motels and friends’ homes, desperate for stability. Five days after storming out of a seedy motel room following a fight with her mother, she was dead. Strangled. Dumped. Forgotten by many, but not by all.

This episode follows April’s life, disappearance, discovery, and identification, and examines how her murder fits into a chilling pattern of killings along interstates in Texas and Oklahoma — crimes later tied to long-haul truckers like John Robert Williams, the so-called “Big Rig Killer.”

Nearly three decades later, April’s grave still bears no headstone. Her case remains unsolved. But her story is more than a case number — it is a call for justice, and a reminder of the children who slip through the cracks.

If you have any information regarding the 1996 murder of April Dawn Lacy, please contact the Wise County Sheriff’s Office at [phone].

Sources: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Houston Chronicle, The Daily Oklahoman, The Bryan-College Station Eagle, The Tyler Morning Telegraph

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Gone Cold. Podcasts may contain violent or graphics subject matter.
Listener discretion is advised. October eighth, nineteen ninety six, Wise County, Texas,
a rancher near the small community of Slydell walked out
to check his land. Dove season meant hunters had left

(00:22):
beer cans, spent shotgun shells, and trash scattered around the
brush piles. At first glance, the heap of dead cedar
and mesquite branches looked ordinary, just another spot where refuse
had been dumped. But something pale caught his eye, something
out of place. He stepped closer. It was the body

(00:45):
of a girl. She had no identification, no clothing, no name.
In the reports that followed, investigators would call her brush girl.
For more than two years, that's all. She was a
Jane Doe, a case number, and a filing cabinet until persistence,
forensic artistry, and a match in dental records revealed the truth.

(01:09):
She was April don Lacy, just fourteen years old, and
whoever strangled her and left her in a pile of
brush has never been brought to justice. April Don Lacey

(01:45):
was born in nineteen eighty two in a suburb of
Oklahoma City, and into a family already marked by instability.
Her father, Dale, struggled with alcoholism and spent time in jail.
He was absent from her life. April's mother, Jacqueline, battled
a crack cocaine addiction. She admitted openly that she supported

(02:08):
her habit through sex work. Whether or not Jacqueline forced
her daughter into prostitution is disputed. She later said in
an interview from prison that while she admitted to performing
sex for money herself, April was never present and never
took part. But even investigators had their doubts. Wise County

(02:30):
Sheriff's Captain David Walker later told the Fort Worth Star
Telegram that Jacqueline was involved in prostitution and drugs heavily,
and from what the department had learned, April was as well.
What is certain is that April grew up surrounded by addiction, poverty,
and transience. Neighbours remembered her scavenging, collecting cans to help

(02:53):
support her family. Friends recalled being told she was made
to shoplift at her mother's direction. One story stands out.
Her mother allegedly told her to steal a chicken from Walmart,
reasoning that if April was caught, the punishment would be
lighter since she was a juvenile. When April was caught,

(03:14):
Jacqueline slapped her across the face in front of strangers. Humiliated,
April later cried that wasn't part of the deal. She
wasn't supposed to slap me. Despite this chaos, April found
stability elsewhere. She became close with her best friend, Ashley
Qualls and Ashley's mother, Kathy Marion. To April, they weren't

(03:38):
just friends, they were family. She often stayed at their home,
slept in her own bed in Ashley's room, and celebrated
Christmas with them. She was a good person, Ashley remembered.
She didn't want to go back home. She wanted her
last name changed to my mother's. She was the only
friend I've ever had that's never judged me. Cathy, who

(04:01):
had a master's degree in child's studies, saw how April
thrived in her household. She even began custody proceedings. At
one point, she asked April to draw a family picture.
April sketched a big house and off to the side
three stick figures with oversized frowns. On the back. She

(04:23):
scrawled in her childish hand. The reason I am not
in this picture because I'm never around and they don't
care whether or not I'm with them or at my
best friend's house. The drawing spoke volumes about how April
saw her place in her own family, or rather how
she didn't see herself there at all, But ultimately the

(04:44):
custody effort failed. One day, Jacqueline appeared with police officers
and took April away. Ashley opened the door and saw
her best friend being escorted back to a life she
didn't want. It was the last time I saw her,
he recalled. By nineteen ninety six, April and Jacqueline were

(05:05):
living in motels, again, scraping by week to week. The
last place April lived was the Drover's Inn motel in
southeast Oklahoma City. The weekly rent was nineteen dollars. It
was seedy, unsafe, and no place for a child, yet
it was the only roof over her head. April was

(05:27):
just fourteen. She should have been in school, worrying about
grades and friends, maybe crushes or homework. Instead, she was
living in a motel with a mother deep in addiction,
in a world where survival meant scrapping. Cans, shoplifting, and
staying invisible. This was April's life in the months before

(05:48):
her disappearance, unstable, unsafe, and marked by fleeting glimpses of
love and family, always overshadowed by neglect. By the fall
of nineteen ninety six, April and her mother, Jacqueline, were
staying in Room fourteen of the drovers In motel in
southeast Oklahoma City. It wasn't much more than a box

(06:11):
with thin curtains and a door that opened straight into
a parking lot. The rent was to be paid in cash.
The motel sat along a strip frequented by truckers, sex workers,
and folks living on the edge. On the morning of
October third, nineteen ninety six, mother and daughter argued it

(06:32):
wasn't unusual. Fights in that motel room came, often, sometimes
about money, sometimes about April's reluctance to return home after
staying with her friend Ashley. But that day things spiraled.
Neighbors later recalled the fight spilling outside. Jacqueline got into

(06:52):
a car, threatening to leave. April shouted after her, if
you leave, you'll never see me again. It was the
kind of thing a teenager might say in the heat
of a fight, but in April's case it was prophecy.
She walked away from the motel and never came back.
When Jacqueline returned to the room later, April was gone.

(07:15):
Her purse was still there, so were her cigarettes and
her makeup, small things she always carried. It didn't make
sense that she'd leave without them. Still, Jacqueline thought April
was just cooling off and would return before nightfall. But
night came and April didn't appear. Jacqueline filed a missing

(07:36):
person's report that same day, October third. She described her
daughter's height, weight, and dyed blonde hair. She said April
had stormed off after a fight and hadn't returned. To police,
it sounded like a runaway case. They were common. Fourteen
year olds get angry, leave home, and come back a

(07:57):
day later. The report went into the system, but there
was no immediate search party, no urgency. Her father, Dale,
didn't even know she was missing. He was living elsewhere
in Oklahoma City, drinking heavily. When Dale finally did realize
something was wrong, the clock had already run out. I

(08:19):
was not available, then, he would later tell reporters, I
was not around. I didn't even know she was missing
until most of a week had been lost. At that time.
I was a severe alcoholic. There could have been a
lot of things I could have done differently, not drinking
as one of them. Maybe she'd still be alive if
I wasn't drinking. He filed his own Missing Persons report,

(08:44):
a duplicate case that muddied the timeline further from October
third to October eighth. April's whereabouts remain a mystery. No
confirmed sightings have ever been reported in that window. She
might have left the hotel and walked into the arms
of someone who offered her a ride, or crossed paths

(09:04):
with a trucker at one of the nearby stops. Perhaps
she was lured away by someone she already knew. Whatever
the case, the answers never came, and because April was
from a background that police often dismissed. The daughter of
an addict and sex worker living in a motel already
treated like a runaway, her case did not draw the

(09:27):
kind of immediate attention that might have saved her life.
There were no news broadcasts calling for the public's help,
no flyers on telephone polls, and no searchers combing the
streets April vanished in plain sight. Few people noticed. Those
five days are the darkest, most unknowable stretch of her story.

(09:50):
By the time she was seen again, April was already dead.
October eighth, nineteen ninety six, Wise County, Texas, near Slidel,

(10:11):
a small unincorporated community about one hundred and sixty miles
south of Oklahoma City, a rancher went out to check
his property. It was dove hunting season, and the ground
was scattered with spent shells and beer cans. As he
walked near a brush pile of cedar branches and mesquite scrap,
he noticed something significantly lighter in color than the rest

(10:35):
of the surroundings. At first, he thought it might be
an animal, but as he got closer, the shape resolved
into a human body, a female. She was nude, her
right arm stretched outward as if it had been used
to drag her. Her face was purpled evidence of strangulation.

(10:56):
Branches and debris had been thrown over her a crew
to attempt to hide her, but not enough to truly
cover her. It looked more like someone had dumped her
there in a hurry. The rancher called the Wise County
Sheriff's office. Deputy David Walker, just months into his law
enforcement career, arrived at the scene. He took in the

(11:19):
brush pile, the drag marks, and the dirt the spent
ammo littered across the ground. Deputy Walker began collecting everything,
shotgun shells, cloth scraps, even tire tracks that he cast
in plaster. He didn't know what would matter later, so
he preserved it all. The body was transported to the

(11:41):
Terrant County Medical Examiner's office in Fort Worth. The autopsy
confirmed strangulation as the likely cause of death, but the
condition of the remains complicated things. An entomologist studying insect
activity placed the time of death somewhere between seven days
and three weeks earlier. The medical examiner also added that,

(12:05):
based on bone development, the victim's age was between twenty
and forty years old. It would turn out to be
a markedly detrimental error, one that sent investigators chasing missing
women in their twenties and thirties for months. The Jane
Doe was entered into the system, but she had no

(12:25):
clothing or belongings that might help a loved one find her.
For most of the next two and a half years,
the body found in the Wise County brush pile was
not April down Lacy. She was Brush Girl, a name
given to her despite her estimated age of between twenty

(12:45):
and forty years old. That's the name investigators wrote onto
their notes and deputies used when they talked about the
Jane Doe in storage at the Tarrant County Morgue. It
was shorthand easier than repeating the unidentified female found near
Slide l on October eighth, nineteen ninety six. But it

(13:06):
also spoke to how little anyone knew about her. She
was a body in a brush pile, now a morgue,
no name, no history, no one to claim her. Captain
David Walker, the young deputy who had been first on
the scene, became her advocate. He kept her case close,

(13:27):
even as other files piled on his desk. He had
cast plaster molds of the tire tracks he found near
the site. He collected every beer can, every shotgun shell,
every scrap of cloth, anything that might matter later. Walker
preserved it all, even when colleagues wondered why. He didn't

(13:49):
know what piece of evidence might prove useful, but he
knew he owed it to the girl in the brush
to keep her story intact. In the months that followed,
Captain Walker chased hundreds of leads. Missing persons reports came
across his desk from Texas, Oklahoma, and beyond. He compared

(14:09):
every one of them to the Jane Doe. Time after time,
the comparisons failed. Nothing matched the medical examiner's estimate of
the victim's age. That mistake, in particular, would misdirect the
search for years. Walker entered Brush Girl's information into NCIC,
the National Crime Database. Tips trickled in, each one, raising

(14:35):
a flicker of hope, only to be hastily extinguished. A
missing mother from Dallas, a runaway woman from Houston, a
case out of Tulsa. One by one, they were ruled out.
In nineteen ninety seven, desperate for progress, Wise County reached
out to the Texas Department of Public Safeties forensic artist

(14:58):
Karin T. Taylor. Taylor was no ordinary sketch artist. She
had pioneered a method of two dimensional facial reconstruction, using
photographs of a skull and anthropological measures to sketch an
approximate face. Her reconstructions had solved other unidentified cases across

(15:19):
the state, and she taught her method at the FBI Academy.
If anyone could put a face back on brush Girl,
it was Taylor. Working from photographs of the skull and
using tissue depth markers, she drew a young woman's face,
soft features, blonde hair, the approximate image of who the

(15:40):
Jane Doe might have been in life. The drawing was circulated,
printed in newspapers, and shared with law enforcement. It was
entered into missing persons databases. For months, nothing happened. Then
in April nineteen ninety nine, and Oklahoma County Sheriff'sie Office

(16:00):
investigator named Tim Luhman noticed the reconstruction. He had been
reviewing missing persons cases when he remembered a fourteen year
old girl reported missing from a Cedy motel in southeast
Oklahoma City back in October nineteen ninety six. The description
was close, and so was the timing. He pulled the

(16:22):
girl's dental records. When the dental X rays were compared
to brush Girl's remains, the match was undeniable. Forensic anthropologists
added sinus passage comparisons unique enough to serve as fingerprints.
Brush Girl was no longer nameless. She was April Don Lacy,

(16:44):
an injury April sustained above her right eye after falling
off her bicycle as a child, which required stitches, also
matched the victim. Later, DNA would provide the final confirmation.
News broke quickly. The Associated Press carried the story. In
April nineteen ninety nine, a fourteen year old girl missing

(17:08):
from Oklahoma City had been identified as the Jane Doe
found in Wise County nearly three years earlier. April's parents
reacted with disbelief. Her father insisted the sketch looked nothing
like her. Her mother demanded DNA before she would believe it.
Both parents were incarcerated on drug charges by then. Both

(17:33):
had been suspects early on, as those closest to victims
usually are, but no evidence tied them to April's death,
and neither had answers investigators could use. Still, the identification mattered.
For two and a half years. April had been a
case number. Now she was a child with a name,

(17:56):
a face, and a family, albeit a shattered one. Investigators
hoped the identification would bring new leads. Maybe someone who
had seen her in those five missing days would now
connect the dots. Maybe a trucker remembered offering a ride
to a small blonde teenager. Maybe a motel clerk remembered

(18:18):
her walking out the door, but the leads didn't come.
The trail had gone cold. April's body remained unburied in
the Arrant County morgue while her parents finished their prison sentences.
It wasn't until June twenty eighth, twenty twenty two, nearly
six years after her murder, that she was finally laid

(18:41):
to rest in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma, beside her grandmother. The
grave was simple and unmarked by a headstone. The identification
had been a victory for forensic persistence. Taylor's sketch, the
dental comparison, the sinus stone, and the DNA confirmation had

(19:02):
given April her name back, but justice was still out
of reach. By the time April was finally buried in
June of two thousand and two, nearly six years after

(19:24):
her body had been found, her story had already become
part of a larger, darker conversation. She wasn't the only
female found nude, strangled and discarded near highways in Texas
and Oklahoma in the nineteen nineties and two thousands. Investigators
in both the states began to see patterns. April had

(19:47):
disappeared from a motel in Oklahoma City. Her body was
found along a rural road in Wise County, Texas, just
off Interstate thirty five, one of the busiest trucking corridors
in America. The details in April's case were disturbingly familiar
to others. By nineteen ninety seven, law enforcement officers from

(20:09):
seventeen different agencies had met in Oklahoma City to compare notes.
They were looking at a string of unsolved murders of
young women, many of them teenagers, stretching from Oklahoma, through
Texas and as far away as Tennessee. Some of the
cases were clustered around truck stops. Other bodies were found

(20:31):
under bridges or on back roads near interstate highways. The
women were almost always found nude, strangled, and discarded in
remote locations. Wise County Sheriffs Captain David Walker acknowledged openly
that April's case pretty closely matches the criteria of all
these other Oklahoma cases. Young women from Oklahoma, vulnerable, many

(20:56):
of them involved in sex work, all stripped of clothing,
strangled and thrown away near interstates. For investigators, the question
was not whether there were multiple victims, it was whether
there was one killer. The Houston Chronicle captured the fear
in a two thousand and four article about the grim

(21:17):
lives of sex workers working truck stops along interstates. Reporters
noted the frightening regularity with which women turned up dead
in rural ditches, brush piles, and creek beds along Interstate
Highways thirty five and forty. To police, it looked like
the work of a predator or several moving along the

(21:39):
highways and targeting the most vulnerable. One of the later
victims was Casey Joe pipe Stem, a nineteen year old
seminole team who drifted into truck stop sex work between
Oklahoma and Texas. In late January two thousand and four,
Casey vanished. Her body was discovered beneath a bridge along

(22:03):
Highway three sixty in Grapevine, Texas, just miles from Interstate
thirty five. She had been raped, beaten, and strangled. Like
April don Lacy, she was nude. Also like April, she
had left Oklahoma City and ended up dead in North Texas.

(22:25):
Years later, investigators charged a long haul trucker named John
Robert Williams with Casey Joe's murder. Williams was already serving
time in Mississippi when information from prison interviews linked him
to multiple murders. By then, detectives were calling him the
Big Rig Killer. He admitted to strangling Casey Joe and

(22:49):
was suspected in more than a dozen other killings nationwide.
Williams is known to have killed five other women besides
Casey Joe, including Vicky Anderson, whose body was also found
in Texas in rural Gray County. His method was simple
and devastating. Pick up vulnerable young women at truck stops,

(23:11):
kill them in his cab, and dump their bodies along
highways far from where he'd met them. The parallels between
Casey Joe's murder and Aprils are impossible to ignore. Both
were young Oklahoma girls, Both were last seen near truck corridors.
Both were found nude, strangled, and discarded in North Texas.

(23:37):
There were other girls and young women linked to this
web of cases. Throughout the late nineteen nineties and early
two thousands, bodies of young women, many of them from Oklahoma,
continued to surface along interstate highways in Texas. Each new
discovery revived speculation about a serial killer working the truck stops.

(24:00):
Some investigators believed there were multiple predators, each using the
highways as cover. Others insisted the similarities were too sharp
to be coincidence. Meetings between agencies produced shared files and
task forces, but few definitive answers. What is certain is

(24:20):
that April's murder fits the mold a disappearance near Interstate
thirty five in Oklahoma, discarded near a rural approach to
the highway. For April's friends like Ashley Qualls and her mother,
Kathy Marion, the speculation about serial killers is a reminder

(24:41):
of how endangered April was. They had tried to rescue
her from instability, tried to give her a stable home,
but the system failed. By the time she vanished from
the Drover's Inn motel, April was already a child slipping
through the cracks. Her identification in nineteen ninety nine gave

(25:02):
her a name back, but it didn't bring her killer
into the light. By the time long haul truckers like
John Robert Williams were being investigated for their patterns of murder,
April's trail was already three years old. Witnesses had moved
and memories had faded. Her burial in two thousand two

(25:25):
offered her family a ceremony but no resolution. April's murder
remains unsolved today, but in the pattern of truck stop killings,
in the story of Casey Joe, Pipe Stem, and in
the investigations into long haul predators like Williams, what happened
to her becomes harder to dismiss as random. No charges

(25:48):
have ever been filed against Williams in April's case, and
investigators have never confirmed he was responsible, but they have
never ruled it out either, and April's murder has long
been discussed along Casey Joe's as part of the same
chilling pattern. He was twenty years old at the time
of April's murder, so if she was one of his victims,

(26:11):
she was likely one of the first. Williams confessed to
more than thirty murders in total, though only the six
have been officially attributed to him. When you strip April's
case down to its core, the fixed points are heartbreakingly simple.
She was only fourteen years old. She argued with her

(26:34):
mother outside a ceed, Oklahoma motel on October third, nineteen
ninety six, and walked away, leaving behind her purse her
makeup and her cigarettes, the small things she never left without.
Five days later, a rancher in Wise County, Texas, one
hundred and sixty miles to the south, found her body

(26:56):
dumped in a brush pile. She had been strangled. She
was nude. She had no identification. For more than two years,
she was known as brush Girl A Jane Doe in
the Arrant County Morgue a case number, a sketch on
a bulletin board. In nineteen ninety nine, through the persistence

(27:17):
of Captain David Walker, the artistry of Karen T. Taylor,
and the science of dental and head X rays, SINUS comparison,
and DNA, she was identified as April Lacey, a daughter,
a friend, a girl who wanted to change her last
name to Marian and live with the only family who

(27:37):
made her feel safe. She was finally laid to rest
in two thousand and two, beside her grandmother in Paul's Valley.
What we don't know is who killed her. The possibilities
have been investigated but never proven. There has been no
suspect named, no arrest, no trial. Nearly three decades later,

(27:59):
the remains open. What april story does show is how
systems failed her long before her death. She grew up
with parents consumed by addiction. Her father admits he wasn't there.
Her mother performed sex work to feed her crack cocaine habit,
and investigators believe she may have forced April into that

(28:22):
world too. Friends tried to step in, but the courts
sent her back to the home she didn't want. She
even wrote it out in a child's hand. They don't
care whether or not I'm with them. The child who
wrote that sentence ended up in a brush pile in
Wise County, Texas, and still her case barely made the news.

(28:46):
She was treated as a runaway, another missing kid from
a broken home, until a sketch on a skull and
a dental chart gave her humanity back. Forensic advances mean
cases like April can still move. New DNA testing, new databases,
new ways of connecting unidentified remains to missing persons, and

(29:09):
other evidence to perpetrators have solved cases decades old. The
Brushgirl file was once closed for a lack of leads.
Today April's case could be solved with one tip, one witness,
one piece of evidence matched against new technology. She was
more than the brush Girl. She was a child who

(29:31):
wanted to be loved, who wanted a stable family, who
should have had one thousand tomorrows. Instead, she was strangled
and thrown away like she didn't matter. But she does matter.
This is not the end of her story. It is
a call to memory, to action, to justice. If you

(29:54):
have any information regarding the nineteen ninety six murder of
April don Lacy, please contact the Wise County Sheriff's Office
at nine four zero six two seven five nine seven one.
If you'd like to join gon Cold's mission to shine
a light on unsolved homicides and missing persons cases, get

(30:17):
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