The Murder of Betty Ann Thomas

In April 1988, the quiet lakeside community of Lakeway, Texas was shaken when 45-year-old Betty Ann Thomas vanished from her home on Cold Water Lane. A violent scene inside the residence suggested a targeted attack, and two days later, Betty was found in the trunk of her Jaguar outside an Austin hotel, bound, gagged, and executed. Her murder became the first, and still the only, homicide in Lakeway’s history.

As detectives uncovered Betty’s life story and examined her home for clues, an eerie parallel emerged: her father-in-law had been murdered in a similarly cold-blooded fashion eight years earlier. Though investigators explored every possibility, including motives involving money and past associations, the case ultimately went cold.

Decades later, advancements in forensics, including an unidentified male DNA profile and recent fingerprint matches, have reignited the investigation. Nearly forty years on, Betty’s family and the Lakeway community continue to wait for justice.

If you have any information about the murder of Betty Ann Thomas, please call the Lakeway Police Department at [phone].

Sources: The Austin American-Statesman, The Seguin Gazette-Enterprise, The San Antonio Express-News, The Houston Chronicle, The Clinton Eye, The Clinton Daily Democrat, The Lawrence Journal-World

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Gone Cold. Podcasts may contain violent or graphics subject matter.
Listener discretion is advised. A white jaguar sat in the
parking lot of the Hilton Hotel at six thousand Middle
Fiskville Road, just north of downtown Austin for two days.
No one thought much of it. Guests came and went,

(00:23):
Suitcases rolled across cracked asphalt, while traffic on the interstate
hummed in the background. Austin in the late nineteen eighties
was a city caught between two worlds, recovering from the
oil bust that had drained Texas through the early part
of the decade, while not so quietly paving the groundwork

(00:44):
for the eventual unofficial city slogan keep Austin Weird. It
was a place of contrasts, part quirky college town, part
rising capital city. Sixth Street pulsed with live music, and
neon South Congress was still rough around the edges. Downtown

(01:04):
was a mix of bankers, politicians, students, and musicians trying
to make rent. The Hilton Inn at Highland Mall had
been one of the city's crown jewels when it opened
in nineteen seventy five, with three hundred and thirty two rooms.
It stood out as a modern landmark where traveling executives

(01:24):
and celebrities checked in when they came through town. By
nineteen eighty eight, however, the glamour had faded, the hotel
had been sold, and that April it was facing foreclosure
over a twenty five million dollar loan default. Guests were
mostly business travelers, truckers, and families passing through. It was

(01:47):
in that same parking lot, beneath that same faded glow,
that a hotel guest finally noticed the white jaguar parked
too long in one space. When police opened the trunk,
they found a woman wrapped in a rose colored comforter,
still wearing a light pink terry cloth robe. Her wrists

(02:07):
and ankles were bound with duct tape. She had been blindfolded, gagged,
and shot through the back of the head. The woman
in the trunk was identified as forty five year old
Betty Anne Thomas. Elizabeth Ann Hedrick, better known as Betty,

(02:50):
was born on June fourth, nineteen forty two, in Coldwater, Kansas,
to William and Mildred Hedrick. She was the thirteenth of
sixteen children, six brothers and nine sisters in a family
that lived with constant financial strain. Her father drove trucks,
often long hours and long distances, trying to provide for

(03:13):
so many mouths. By the time Betty reached middle school age,
the household was stretched past what her parents could manage.
Around nineteen fifty three, when she was about eleven, the
Hedrich children were separated and placed into foster care. It
was a decision made out of poverty. The family simply

(03:34):
couldn't afford to raise sixteen children, and siblings were divided
across Kansas and Missouri. Some were adopted, some fostered, and
contact between them faded over time. Betty was adopted by
Elsa and Marion Holmes in Lawrence, Kansas. Lawrence offered stability,

(03:56):
but it also marked a sharp divide from the world
she'd come. Elsa Holmes was a chief chemist for Cook
Paint and Varnish Company and the Midwest Research Institute. He
served as a state director for the AARP's Volunteer Income
Tax Program and belonged to numerous scientific and engineering societies.

(04:20):
The Holmeses had no biological children of their own, but
adopted three, two girls and one boy, creating a structured,
academically minded household, far from the hardship Betty had known.
She thrived there by her senior year at Lawrence High
in nineteen sixty, Betty was active and involved. She joined

(04:43):
the pep club, leaders club, choir, sports, and school dances.
Her life in Lawrence was a stark contrast to the
instability of her early childhood. On January twentieth, nineteen sixty,
while still a high school, seventeen year old Betty married
Reverend Francis Wilson Hirsch at North Haven Methodist Church in Dallas. Hirsch,

(05:09):
originally from Lawrence, was ten years older and had been
ordained as a Methodist minister in nineteen fifty eight after
attending the Perkins School of Theology. By the time of
their wedding, he was pursuing further studies at Southern Methodist
University in Dallas. After the wedding, the couple moved to Jonestown, Arkansas,

(05:32):
where Betty earned a degree in sociology from the University
of Arkansas. Her sisters would later say the field suited her.
Betty had a natural interest in people, their patterns, their motivations,
what shaped their choices. She could read a room easily,
listen without judgment and find humor in even difficult moments.

(05:57):
She never worked formally in sociology, but understanding people was
something she carried throughout her life. Betty and Francis welcomed
a son, Todd, two years into their marriage, but by
the summer of nineteen sixty five that marriage had unraveled.
Betty filed for and was granted an uncontested divorce. The

(06:20):
court record cited indignities, a fault based legal term describing
a pattern of conduct that makes espouse his life intolerable
verbal abuse, habitual rudeness, neglect, or behavior that creates ongoing alienation.
Not long after the divorce, Betty married John Harold Ferrish

(06:42):
of Dallas. They had a daughter, Lisa, and Farrish later
adopted Todd as his own. The marriage lasted into the
mid nineteen seventies before ending in divorce. Afterward, Betty returned
to Lawrence with her children for a time, rebuilding her
life again in the city where she had once found stability.

(07:05):
Those who knew her said she carried her early hardships
with a kind of quiet strength. She didn't dwell on
the past, but understood it clearly. That steadiness, Knowing where
she came from without letting it define her was part
of what people loved about her. Everything changed once again

(07:26):
on a vacation in Alcapulco. That's where Betty met James
bo Thomas, a San Antonio native seven years younger than
she was, with a life already marked by early responsibility
and heart experience. Bo had graduated from Lee High School,
served as a marine in Vietnam, where he reached the

(07:48):
rank of corporal, and married at nineteen. He had two
daughters from that first marriage, which ended in divorce in
nineteen seventy six. By the time he crossed paths with Betty,
he was repairing his life and working as a home builder.
Their connection was immediate. The relationship moved quickly, and the

(08:10):
two were married in Las Vegas not long afterward. They
lived for a short time in Colorado before settling permanently
in the Austin, Texas area. By then, he was working
for a building contracting firm there. Betty's friends described her
as magnetic, warm, funny, quick witted, and generous. She never

(08:34):
needed attention, but drew it naturally. She stayed active, loved
the lake, and traveled wherever she could. She once called
herself a born wanderer, and her life reflected it. Even
years after living in different states and building a life
of her own, Betty found her way back to the

(08:54):
family she'd been separated from as a child. In nineteen
seventy nine, she helped organize a Hedrick reunion, the first
time many of the siblings had seen each other in
more than twenty years. It was a gathering filled with
relief and emotion, a kind of homecoming that had been
postponed for far too long. She began planning another reunion

(09:19):
not long after. To her siblings, Betty became the thread
that tied everyone back together, the one who understood the
past without letting it define her. They remembered her as lively, curious,
and full of light. Life for Betty had settled into
a piece she had fought hard to earn, a piece

(09:41):
that did not last. In the early nineteen eighties, Bo
Thomas began building in Lakeway, just northwest of Austin. The

(10:03):
town was still young, then, part resort, part retirement escape,
part frontier for developers who saw potential in the hills
below Lake Travis. Fewer than one thousand people lived there,
an incorporated village perched on the edge of the Arkansas
Bend Park. Lakeway had started in the nineteen sixties as

(10:25):
a private resort built around a golf course and a
small airstrip, advertised as an idyllic hill country retreat where
you could park your plane, play eighteen holes, and sip
a gin rickey while the sun slid behind the limestone cliffs.
Over the past two decades, those weekenders became full time residents.

(10:47):
Retired oil executives from Houston Airline, pilots stationed at Bergstrom
Air Force Base, and Austin's rising class of professionals all
settled along the coves of Lake Trebis and the bends
of the Colorado River. The community was comfortable, self contained,
and quietly proud of its isolation. Bow was one of

(11:11):
the builders who helped shape that new lakeway. As lots
came onto the market, he snapped them up and began
constructing luxury homes to sell. By nineteen eighty three, he
and Betty had completed their own house on Coldwater Lane,
a modern hill country home tucked between Cedar and Oak,

(11:32):
settled so naturally into the landscape that it looked like
it had always belonged there. From then on, the Thomases
were firmly rooted in Lakeway. Bow continued building homes, and
Betty worked part time at the Lakeway Boat Brokerage, played tennis,
and spent time on and around Lake Travis. She slipped

(11:55):
easily into the town's social rhythm, the steady hum of
a community small enough for neighbors to know one another
by name. The house on Coldwater Lane became home for
the three of them, Betty Bow and Bo's teenage daughter Amy.
Like many families in Lakeway during that era, their days

(12:17):
revolved around work, the lake, and the routines of a
quiet hill country existence. For Betty, it was a good life.
After years of moving, she had finally found a place
that felt settled. There wasn't much in Lakeway then, no
shopping centers, no nightlife, not even a proper grocery store.

(12:40):
If you needed anything, you drove to b Cave. If
you wanted to hear sirens, you headed into Austin. Travis
County recorded around sixty homicides a year in those days,
but Lakeway's police blotter read like a small town bulletin
traffic stops, loose dog, and the occasional teenage prank that

(13:02):
made its way into the weekly report. Chief Tom Evans
ran the Lakeway Police Department with ten officers and a
single detective. Their approach was preventative, their budget modest, their
equipment dated. The assumption was simple. Serious violence just didn't
happen here. That assumption died on April thirteenth, nineteen eighty eight.

(13:27):
The murder of forty five year old Betty Ann Thomas
shattered the town's sense of safety. A community that had
never recorded a homicide suddenly found itself overrun with investigators
from the Travis County Sheriff's Office and the Texas Rangers. Lakeway,
the place that sold itself on privacy, calm streets and

(13:49):
perfect sunsets over Lake Travis, woke to the reality that
violence had arrived at its doorstep. In the early hours
of Monday, April eleventh, nineteen eighty eight, bo Thomas and
his fourteen year old daughter Amy, left their home on
Coldwater Lane bound for Tyler, Texas, to address a custody issue.

(14:13):
It was a four hour drive. Forty five year old
Betty had originally planned to go with them, but changed
her mind late Sunday night. Instead, she told them she
would leave for Houston later that morning to visit her
daughter and newborn grandchild. It was a simple plan, the
kind families make without thinking twice. Bo and Amy pulled

(14:37):
out of the driveway around three am, expecting to return
to the usual calm of their home. They drove back
up to the house at about four forty five that afternoon.
The first sign that something was wrong was the garage door.
It stood open. The white Jaguar, Betty's everyday car, was gone.

(14:59):
Inside the house felt off, not just empty, but wrong.
Then they saw the purse Betty's handbag, lay dumped in
the hallway, Its contents spilled across the floor, as if
someone had gripped it by the straps, turned it upside
down and shaken out every last thing. Her driver's license,

(15:21):
a makeup bag, a few folded notes, and torn scraps
of paper, receipts from Errand's long forgotten the debris of
an ordinary life scattered in an unnatural way. Betty wasn't careless,
She didn't leave messes behind. Someone else had done this,
and whoever it was, had been in a hurry. Farther inside,

(15:45):
the office told the rest of the story. Papers from
the household safe were strewn across the den floor in
wide desperate arcs, tax forms, insurance documents, and folded bank statements.
Items usually tucked neatly away, lay trampled and bent, as
though someone had waded through them searching for something specific.

(16:08):
The safe itself hung wide open, its heavy door tilted
toward the room, exposing empty shelves inside. Several thousand dollars
in cash were gone, but that was the least of
bo and Amy's worries. Near the desk was something else,
something final. A dark pool of blood had soaked deep

(16:30):
into the carpet, now dried to a dull, sticky maroon.
It wasn't an amount of blood someone walked away from.
It wasn't a cut or a fall. It was volume
evidence of a severe injury. On the floor, officers later
recovered a pillow with a bullet hole punched straight through

(16:51):
the fabric. The staining around it was so heavy it
had seeped through the stuffing. Whatever happened had happened here
in this room, and it had not been quick or clean.
There were no signs of forced entry, no broken window,
no damaged lock, nothing overturned, aside from the papers spilled

(17:14):
from the safe and Betty's purse, jewelry sat where it
always sat. Electronics remained in their places. Betty's wallet still
held her cash and credit cards. Whoever had come into
the house had taken only three things, Betty, her car,
and the cash that had been locked in the safe.

(17:36):
Lake Way Police immediately issued a statewide alert from the
missing car, a nineteen eighty five white four door Jaguar.
Officers fanned out across the neighborhood, knocking on doors, asking
the same questions again and again. Had anyone heard anything unusual,
seen anyone unfamiliar, noticed a car that didn't belong. Neighbors

(18:01):
said no, no shouting, no barking dogs, no hurried footsteps
or idling engines, nothing that interrupted the quietness in a
community where even a new lawn guide drew attention. No
one had seen a thing that mattered. By the next morning,
the case had already grown beyond Lakeway's ten man department.

(18:24):
Unmarked sedans and county cruisers rolled in. Investigators from the
Travis County Sheriff's Office, the Texas Rangers and DPS crime
scene units converged on Coldwater Lane, a street that hours
before had just been another quiet Lakeway cul de Sac
was now a hive of movement, gloved hands, camera flashes,

(18:47):
evidence bags, and the low, steady murmur of law enforcement
coordinating a homicide investigation the city had never expected to face.
Every surface inside the Hull home was documented. Blood swabs
were taken, hair strands collected. Fibers were lifted from carpet,

(19:08):
bedding and furniture. The pillow, the safe, the scattered paperwork.
Anything that might later make sense was logged and sealed.
In nineteen eighty eight, DNA testing wasn't something most law
agencies had access to. Blood typing was as far as
the science went, as far as forensics were concerned, but

(19:31):
investigators gathered up everything anyway, hoping that one day when
technology caught up, the evidence would still be waiting, quiet, preserved,
and finally ready to speak. Two days after Betty and

(19:57):
Thomas disappeared, leaving behind a pool of blood and a
partially ransacked home, her body was found in the trunk
of her Jaguar in the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel,
just north of downtown Austin, about forty three miles away
from Lakeway. She was bound at a wrists and ankles
using duct tape, Betty was blindfolded, gagged, and had been

(20:21):
shot through the back of her head. Due to a
lack of evidence or perhaps lack of forensic advancements, and
arrest was far from imminent, and the investigation continued. As
detectives began branching out from her immediate family life, they
found an unsettling echo, one that pulled them eight years

(20:42):
backward and forty five miles south to Guadalupe County. Bo Thomas,
Betty's husband, had been through something like this before. On
October seventh, nineteen eighty, his father, William Lamar Thomas, a
San Antonio roofer and handyman with a long arrest history,

(21:03):
was found shot to death on a hunting lease near Kingsbury.
William had driven his plymouth out to the Pat Baker
ranch to check his lease, something he did often enough
that no one thought twice when he didn't return right away.
It wasn't until a ranch hand noticed his car sitting
motionless for hours beside a small shack that anyone approached

(21:26):
inside the scene was stark. William Thomas had been executed
two nine millimeters shots to the back of the head
at close range. Powderburns surrounded both wounds, and there were
signs that William had tried to defend himself. Nothing had
been stolen, His wallet was still in his pocket, his

(21:48):
watch still on his wrist. Tire tracks suggested a second
vehicle had been there. Guadaloupe County Sheriff Pete Cally's and
his deputies processed the but the conclusion came quickly. Whoever
killed William Thomas had been someone he knew, someone he
trusted enough to turn his back on his past offered possibilities.

(22:13):
William's criminal record reached back decades and crossed counties. He
had multiple arrests for burglary, a theft conviction, and various
other run ins with law enforcement, often tied to property
crimes or bad debts, and often landing him in jail.
He wasn't a hardened criminal, but he lived the kind

(22:36):
of life that made enemies, or at least the kind
of life where favors and debts blurred into danger. But
there was something else. When investigators reached one of William
Thomas's sons to notify him of the death, the conversation
left an impression. The son did not ask how William died,

(22:56):
whether a suspect existed, or even what it had haden.
At the scene, officers described the voice on the other
end of the line as flat, unmoved, offering little more
than acknowledgment. In a case this strange, it became one
more detail. Investigators never forgot one they wrote down. It

(23:18):
wasn't evidence of anything, but it stuck with the officers
who documented it. When a man is executed on a
ranch road in the middle of the day, most sons
react with shock or questions. This one did not. Whether
that meant estrangement, resignation, or something else entirely, perhaps guilt.

(23:41):
No one could say the case went cold. There were
no suspects, no arrests, not even a clear motive. It
was a clean, deliberate killing, carried out with precision, and
in nineteen eighty eight, after Betty's murder, investigators compared notes
between counties. The parallels felt impossible to ignore. To Thomas

(24:05):
family members eight years apart, both shot in the head
at close range, both killed with calm, practiced efficiency, no witnesses,
no weapon recovered, but ballistics ruled out a match. The
gun used on William was not the same gun used
on Betty. There was no evidence at all that the

(24:27):
crimes were connected, only gut feelings felt by investigators who
had learned to be wary of coincidences. Through nineteen eighty
eight and nineteen eighty nine, detectives chased every lead they
could find. They examined Betty's phone records, bank activity, and
insurance policies. Her will, written in nineteen eighty three, left

(24:51):
everything to her husband, three houses, two additional lots in Lakeway,
and personal property, totaling about three hundred ninety two thousand dollars.
Life insurance policies added roughly another three hundred thousand dollars,
a total equivalent to almost two million dollars. In twenty
twenty five, investigators subpoenaed the family's medical and financial records,

(25:17):
along with the guest logs from the Austin hotel where
Betty's car and Betty were found. None of it pointed
them toward a suspect. Bo Thomas eventually sold the Coldwater
Lane house and moved to Anderson Mill. By nineteen ninety one,
Police Chief Tom Evans told reporters that investigators had a suspect,

(25:40):
someone outside the family, but added that the evidence wasn't
strong enough for charges. With no arrests, the case slipped
out of the headlines for the next two decades. The
box labeled Thomas Betty Ann sat in Lakeway's evidence room,
aging like everything else in the building. Lakeway grew around it,

(26:04):
a small resort town turning into a bustling suburb, but
the murder stated exactly where it had been left unsolved.
In two thousand and eight, Sergeant Jason Brown assumed responsibility
for the cold case files. By then, Lakeway had grown
to nearly twenty thousand residents, but Betty's murders still defined

(26:26):
the department. Brown reopened the case, reevaluated the evidence and photographs,
and sent previously untested items to the DPS lab. In
two thousand and nine, scientists developed a partial mail DNA
profile from one of those items. It didn't match anyone

(26:47):
in Texas databases or in the National CODIS registry. It
was a breakthrough and a dead end at the same time,
proof that the killer had left something behind, but no
name to attach to it. Still, the profile was preserved, uploaded,
and stored for the day technology would catch up. That

(27:09):
day came sixteen years later, in early twenty twenty five,
nearly forty years after Betty and Thomas was killed. The
Texas Department of Public Safety's upgraded fingerprint matching system triggered
an unexpected hit. Two latent prints collected at the Thomas
home in nineteen eighty eight now matched known individuals who

(27:31):
had never been connected to the case. Neither man was family,
neither was a friend. Neither had any documented link to
Betty or Bow. Lakeway detectives moved quickly. They filed search
warrants to collect DNA from both individuals. According to those warrants,

(27:52):
the latent fingerprint matches came from items inside the Thomas
home that had been collected as evidence in nineteen eighty eight,
objects purchased around the time of the killing. Investigators noted
that neither man had any known connection to the family
or the case. The new DNA samples were rushed to

(28:13):
the DPS lab for comparison to the unknown male profile
developed in two thousand and nine. If the DNA matches,
it could solve the only homicide in Lakeway's history. If
it didn't, investigators planned to move forward with forensic genealogy,
tracing relatives through public databases until a name surfaces. Either way,

(28:37):
the case is no longer idle. Over the decades, rumors
swirled in Lakeway. Early reportings suggested the killing resembled a
professional hit, and investigators even explored whether Betty's murder was
connected to the nineteen eighty execution style killing of her
father in law. Both theories led nowhere, but the speculation

(29:02):
lingered in the community. Somewhere in those microscopic traces lies
the truth about who walked into the house on Coldwater
Lane on April eleventh, nineteen eighty eight. Betty's family has
carried that uncertainty for nearly four decades. Her daughter, the
one who had just given birth the same day her

(29:23):
mother was killed, still answers investigator's calls with the same
hope for those who remember Betty, not the victim in
the headlines, but the sister, the mother, the woman packing
her jaguar to meet her first grandchild. The hope is
simple and unchanged, that the evidence will finally speak, that

(29:44):
the name behind her murder will no longer be unknown,
and that justice will prevail. If you have any information
about the murder of Betty Ann Thomas, please call the
Lakeway Police to Apartment at five one two two six
one twenty eight hundred if you'd like to join con

(30:08):
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(30:31):
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