The Murder of Linda Jane Phillips

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 her car abandoned along Farm Road 1641, its window shattered, her clothing scattered along the roadside for nearly a mile. Despite hundreds of volunteers searching and an intensive investigation led by Sheriff Roy Brockway, no suspect was found.

Over the following decade, a wave of similarly brutal killings of women swept across North and East Texas. Lawmen speculated about a single “lust killer” operating around Dallas, connecting Linda’s death to others in Garland, Irving, Plano, and Grapevine. Yet no pattern held.

Then, in 1984, serial confessor Henry Lee Lucas—already infamous for hundreds of claimed murders—pleaded guilty to Linda’s killing. Kaufman County briefly marked the case “cleared.” But Lucas’s confession later fell apart. Records showed he was still in Michigan at the time of her death.

Fifty-five years later, Linda’s murder remains officially unsolved. What endures is the picture of a kind, capable young woman caught between the growing city and the fading quiet of small-town Texas—and a reminder of how easily a search for closure can bury the truth.

If you have information about the murder of Linda Jane Phillips, please contact the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office at [phone].

Sources: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Tyler Morning Telegraph, The San Antonio Express-News, The Odessa American, The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, The Longview Daily News, The McKinney Courier-Gazette, The Austin American-Statesman, The Brownsville Herald, The Mesquite Daily News, and Henry Lee Lucas files

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Killers don't just take lives, They reshape everything they left behind.
A quiet back road, a busy stretch of highway, a
house that once felt safe now a shrine to everything
that went wrong. Across Texas, deserts, fields and bayous keep
their secrets buried, but not forever. From the creators of

(00:26):
Gone Cold. Comes of Hell Texas True Crime, a podcast
about the state's most depraved killers and the scars they
left on every town, every family, every mile marker they touched.
Stories that ask one burning question, were there more victims?
Some folks aren't just from Hell, they'reo it. Of Hell

(00:51):
Texas True Crime coming soon. Subscribe wherever you listen to
podcasts Gone Cold. Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter.
Listener discretion is advised. Dallas and Kaufman Counties exist shoulder

(01:11):
to shoulder, but can feel like different areas, stitched together
by two lanes of asphalt, river bends, and stretches of
dense woods. In the summer of nineteen seventy, the city
of Dallas was roaring forward, with oil and banking money
pooling into mirrors of glass downtown. The population just under

(01:33):
a million at that time. Kaufman County, just east down
Highways eighty or one seventy five, moved at a steady,
older rhythm. Farm to market roads cut between fields of
wheat and cattle. Courthouse squares set the tempo. Friday nights
were for football, and most folks recognized the sheriff on site.

(01:58):
The population sat at around thirty thousand, two different worlds
side by side, one chasing the future, the other anchored
to the land itself. In August of that year, those
worlds met in the worst possible way. In nineteen seventy,

(02:43):
Linda Jane Phillips was twenty six years old, a teacher
who'd earned her degree at North Texas University in Denton
and put four years into the classroom. Colleagues remembered her
as steady, patient and reliable, someone who stayed after school
to help a child who needed one more explanation. She

(03:05):
had taught at Forest Ridge in Richardson during the previous
few school years, and over that summer she had given
up her apartment in Dallas to spend time back home
in Kaufman with her parents. Her father, Jimmy Phillips, was
the superintendent of Kaufman Schools, meaning the family name carried

(03:25):
some civic weight across the county. Linda had grown into
an adult life of service that made sense to her
and the people around her. On the evening of Saturday,
August eighth, nineteen seventy, Linda was attending a wedding party
in North Dallas, near Cedar Springs Road. It was the

(03:47):
kind of summer gathering that stretched late into the warm night,
a swirl of friends and small talk and the chatter
of what the next school year might hold. Linda had
told her parents she'd stay nearby in Dallas with friends
of her brother's fiance, something relatively normal for her. She

(04:08):
discussed the same thing with friends at the party. Sometime
after two thirty am, now Sunday the ninth, Linda changed
her mind. She said her goodbyes and walked out to
her car to head southeast toward home. The route from
north central Dallas out to Kaufman was familiar, east on

(04:28):
Highway eighty, skirting Mesquite and Forny, then cutting down on
Farm Road sixteen forty one toward Tlty, the east fork
of the Trinity River on your left. As the road
bent through low country. It was a nocturnal drive that
a careful person might make in forty five minutes if
you caught all the green lights and kept a steady speed.

(04:51):
But Linda never arrived. By daylight, someone spotted a car
pulled off along FM sixteen forty one one between the
small towns of Tlty and Forny. The driver's window was smashed,
The glass inside the vehicle and scattered along the gravel.
Shimmered in the morning sun. Near the shoulder lay women's clothing.

(05:16):
The vehicle was soon identified as belonging to Linda Phillips.
Kaufman County Sheriff Roy Brockway and his deputies took one
look and opened a search that would swell into the hundreds.
Searchers quickly found more clothing, a shoe, pantyhose, slacks, and
half of a brazier. Some of the items were stained

(05:39):
with blood. The situation was urgent. After an initial search
of the immediate area, Linda was nowhere to be found.
At the scene of the car, there were no skid marks,
no gouges in the dirt to suggest a crash, and
nothing inside the vehicle to mark a struggle. Looked like

(06:00):
a stop, not a collision. That day, folks in Kaufman County,
Texas mobilized about three hundred people, law officers, citizens, ranchers
on horseback, DPS troopers, and eventually Texas Rangers fanned out
along creeks and hedgerows. They walked fence lines and ravines

(06:23):
and low spots along the bottoms. Between Forney and Kaufman.
The air was thick August heat lay on the land.
By four pm, the temperature had reached one hundred and
two degrees. Volunteers pushed through Johnson grass and holly, the
places where a thing can lay hidden in broad daylight,

(06:45):
through the afternoon and into the dark. There was no
sign of Linda. The next dawn. They went back out.
Late Monday morning, August tenth, a construction worker from Terrell,
Alfonso te Arena, was driving a gravel road near the
tiny community of Post Oak, just a few miles north

(07:06):
of Kaufman. He saw something light colored in a hedgerow
bordering a field, something obviously out of place. Alfonso stopped
his truck and walked closer. Shocked by what he'd found,
the body of a woman, he headed straight to the
Sheriff's office alongside deputies. Justice of the Piece Joe W.

(07:30):
Fowler came to the scene. He later estimated that Linda
had been dead about twenty hours, likely killed just before
dawn on Sunday. The death was a homicide. That much
was immediately certain. It was difficult for officers at the
scene to know the precise nature of Linda's wounds. She

(07:51):
had been stripped and mutilated and left along that green
narrow hedgerow, a place Sheriff Brockway ascertained, you'd only know
to use if you understood the back roads and knew
that the nearest farmhouse had just recently been vacated. Brockway
believed he was dealing with a killer who knew Kaufman County.

(08:14):
The autopsy at Parkland Hospital would eventually determine that Linda
died as the result of twenty six stab wounds, primarily
to the chest, throat, and abdomen. Pathologists confirmed sexual assault.
Whether certain acts were pre or post mortem would require
additional testing, the kind of lab work that in nineteen

(08:38):
seventy could take time and wouldn't always deliver clean answers.
The pattern of the wounds and the condition of the
body told lawman what the location already had. This was
a killing committed by someone who had time and the
privacy to do their worst. Back at the car on
FM sixteen forty one invests, instigators had already started to

(09:01):
form a narrow path of theory. The glass inside suggested
the window had been struck from the outside. On the road,
there were no tire marks, no sign of a forced runoff.
Sheriff Brockway believed Linda had pulled over for someone, maybe
someone she recognized, or someone who flagged her down convincingly.

(09:25):
What he didn't believe was that she'd have stopped for
a stranger on a lonely farm road in the middle
of the night. The idea shaped the first days of interviews.
Officers first stuck to the Dallas wedding party, list ringing
telephones and taking statements, building a grid of movement through

(09:45):
the early hours of Sunday morning. Nothing tracked to a suspect.
Some details had a peculiar gravity. Among Linda's clothing, one
item never turned up, a wig she war to the party.
Every other piece thrown along the road, as though pitched

(10:05):
one at a time from a moving vehicle, was eventually recovered.
The wig was not that missing article was the kind
of fact that anchor's theories for years, a trophy taken,
perhaps a piece the killer kept. The Dallas newspapers noted it.
Lawman did not dismiss it. The sheriff's office put out

(10:28):
what it had. Two days after the discovery, the press
asked straightforward questions. Was there anything to go on? Sheriff
Brockway's public answer was blunt, not a thing. He said
he and his deputies were working every thread. A Dallas
man reported that he and a friend had seen a

(10:50):
woman who fit Linda's description walking toward Kaufman along Highway
one seventy five in the Kleeberg area. He claimed his
friend gave her a ride to a truck stop and
that she mentioned a Dallas party, then left there with
three people, one a woman. It was examined and set aside.

(11:11):
It didn't hold. Nothing seemed to. On August fourteenth, nineteen seventy,
the case of the murder of school teacher Linda Jane

(11:31):
Phillips lurched forward when a forty six year old man
walked into the Little Rock, Arkansas Police Department and said
he feared he might have had something to do with
the killing. He told authorities that he'd been drinking heavily
that weekend and didn't trust his own memory. That led
Dallas County deputies to this man's companion, a thirty year

(11:53):
old man working at a drive in, who was hauled
to Kaufman and questioned. Both men were eventually released. The
motel room of the younger man contained pornographic materials, which
was what it was, but it didn't connect him to Linda,
to Kaufman County, or to any crime, even considering the

(12:15):
obscenity laws at the time. The brief flurry of hope
around and arrest evaporated. The Richardson Independent School District, where
Linda had taught, put up a five thousand dollars reward
to try and shake something loose. The account was opened
at First Bank and Trust in Richardson, and the reward

(12:36):
would go to anyone with information leading to an arrest
and conviction. It produced tips and talk, but no forward movement.
Officers spent entire weeks walking down the path of public
rumor and speculation, but it led nowhere. Reporters in the
Metroplex began to ask a different question. Was Linda's murder

(13:00):
connected to other unsolved killings behind closed doors? Area law
enforcement was way ahead of them. There were recent cases
with similar wounds and similar staging. Missus Earl Crossland in
Garland and Patricia An Mahaney in Oak Cliff, both stabbed
and slashed repeatedly among them. Sheriff Brockway's line, when asked,

(13:26):
was steady. Whoever did this was someone who knew Kaufman County.
The Crossland and Mahoney murders were city crimes. He discounted
a Dallas nexus in public, even as Dallas County investigators
compared notes, something that pointed to Brockway keeping an open
mind in the case. Both the Crossland and Mahoney killings

(13:49):
were ultimately proven unconnected. Beyond Kaufman, a pattern grew harder
to ignore. In nineteen seventy, about four hundred and thirty
miles to the west in Kermit, a husband arrived home
to find his wife, Nancy Mitchell gone. Her clothing slashed

(14:11):
and discarded, was found along the Kermit Odessa Highway. Texas
Ranger Captain Jim Riddles said aloud what others were thinking.
It looked a lot like what happened in Kaufman. Her
clothing was ripped and scattered like Linda's, and it was
an apparent abduction, but in Nancy's case, there was an

(14:32):
open question of whether she was alive or dead. The
next several months brought more bodies, those closer to home.
Linda's case was buried in the madness of it all.
In January nineteen seventy one, a nineteen year old from
Plano turned up in Ralet Creek after an anonymous call.

(14:54):
The autopsy wasn't shared immediately with the press, but investigators
said there oh bullet holes and no obvious strangulation marks.
Weeks later, in February, a young hospital worker from Irving
was abducted near a small grocery store on her way home.
Her body was discovered near Grapevine Lake, strangled, beaten, and stabbed. Suddenly,

(15:20):
Terrant County Sheriff Lawn Evans was saying the quiet part aloud,
Yes there might be a connection to Linda's case, and yes,
they were looking at women being followed in their cars
and attacked on the edges of towns. By March nineteen
seventy one, Dallas Assistant Police Chief Paul mccafferin told the

(15:41):
Austin American Statesman that at least four of the unsolved
slangs of Dallas area women had likely been committed by
the same man. Psychiatrists brought in by the department sketched
a profile of a young man early to mid twenties,
small to medium build, recently wounded by a failed relationship,

(16:02):
perhaps haunted and compelled to kill. He was someone who
performed a violent ritual and removed a personal item from
each victim. The missing wig and Linda's case fit cleanly
into that profile, but none of that produced what the
cops really needed a name. For a moment, there was

(16:26):
a suspect with a history that made detectives notice. In
March nineteen seventy one, as Cisco police moved in to
question a twenty five year old man named Nathan Curry
about an attempted robbery, Curry shot himself. Dallas detectives admitted
they'd hoped to question him in at least six unsolved murders,

(16:48):
including Linda's. Curry carried a past full of violence and
alleged nineteen sixty one church secretary stabbing murder. He had
beaten in court and Amarillo charges from nineteen sixty nine
for rape and robbery in coin operated laundries. The fact
that he'd been eyed. In the nineteen sixty eight Odessa

(17:10):
murder of Linda Cooget made the parallels darker. She was
taken from a laundrymat, but Curry's suicide left nothing but
questions behind. The Fall of nineteen seventy two brought a
different kind of echo. Along Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County,
just to Kaufman County's southeast, Geneva Brunner Midget, forty nine

(17:36):
years old of Scurry, turned up partially clothed and dead
near a public boat ramp off FM eighty five. Her
throat had been cut and there were slashes to her body.
Word of a brag in Kemp made its way to
law enforcement, and a construction worker named Edward Lee Staggs

(17:56):
was questioned and ultimately arrested. Officers recovered a switchblade and
took a statement, and then Kaufman County took a hard
look at him. For Linda Jane Phillips's murder. Staggs was polygraphed.
The results didn't satisfy Sheriff Brockway or Chief Deputy Carl Hall,
so they ran him again. Midget's case came first. Staggs

(18:21):
confessed to that killing, but denied knowing anything about Linda Phillips.
By late January nineteen seventy three, Brockway told the press
that a light detector indicated Staggs was not implicated in
the nineteen seventy Kaufman County murder. Staggs later pleaded guilty
in the Midget case and received a forty five year sentence.

(18:45):
Linda's file remained open. The early and mid nineteen seventies
in Texas collected unsolved murders of young women relentlessly and
seemingly without caution. In Collin County, Sheriff Jerry Burton had
four bodies of young women in nineteen seventy five, with

(19:06):
ages ranging from fourteen to twenty. Dallas County cases stacked
beside them. Patterns were plotted, age, hair, color, bodied dump
sites within a few miles of each other, and still
there was no unifying thread that could be tied to
a name, at least not at first. Linda Phillips case

(19:29):
and Kaufman County often sat on those comparative lists. The
statistics threatened to become the highest numbers the counties had
ever seen. For almost a decade and a half, suspects
in Linda's case came and went, but they seemed to
only materialize when apprehended and charged for other homicides. Then,

(19:52):
in June nineteen eighty three, a drifter named Henry Lee
Lucas was arrested in Montegue County as a fellow in
possession of a firearm. Not yet at the height of
his infemy, Lucas had already served a decade for the
murder of his mother. At the time of his arrest,
he was suspected in the disappearance of his elderly landlord,

(20:16):
Kate Rich. Once Lucas started talking, he did not stop,
especially if there was a soul in the room that
would hang on to his words. By January of nineteen
eighty four, Lucas had confessed to the murders of as
many as one hundred and fifty women across seventeen states,
including Linda Jane Phillips in Kaufman County. Shortly after Henry

(20:52):
Lee Lucas started confessing to multiple slangs, the Texas Department
of Public Safety convened multi state media a task force
was formed. Flowcharts bloomed across police station walls, his supposed routes,
interstate twenty, US seventy nine, sixty nine, and two seventy one,

(21:14):
stitched like a net over East Texas. Prosecutors and rangers
began securing cases, charging or clearing them with Lucas's help.
The number climbed until it swallowed belief. In the early stage,
some investigators were cautious, but many were not. Lucas was

(21:37):
a people pleaser, a chameleon who seemed to say what
anyone needed to hear. When lawman treated him well, he
rewarded them with details. When they brought him dummy cases,
he sometimes bought the premise and confessed to those. Most
famously in Dallas, Rangers and local officers moved him around

(21:59):
the state to walk scenes and to reenact crimes. Media
attention created a feedback loop. In that storm of confessions,
the murder of Linda Jane Phillips finally found a man
willing to say I did it. Lucas's narrative for Linda's
murder was simple and chilling. He said he'd been traveling

(22:23):
east on I twenty the night of August eighth, nineteen seventy.
There he spotted a lone woman in her car, followed
her off at a Kaufman turn, forced her off the
road at gunpoint, made her disrobe, and stabbed her repeatedly
before dumping her body outside town. Lucas said he'd been

(22:44):
driving a dark blue vehicle, which sounded tidy when matched
against a paint transfer found on Linda's car, a detail
hidden from the public until Lucas's confession. In May nineteen
eighty four, Kaufman came District Attorney Bill Conrad flew Lucas
in by helicopter from his cell in Georgetown before District

(23:08):
Judge Glenn Ashworth. The so called drifter pled guilty to
Linda's murder and received a life sentence. Conrad told reporters
Lucas new details. Only the killer would know the location
of the car when it was found, the wounds on
Linda's body, the paint scrapings. For families, a plea is

(23:32):
not the same as truth, but it can feel like
the closest thing the system offers. In nineteen eighty four,
some people in Kaufman County believed Linda's killer had finally
been named. The case appeared, in official terms cleared, and
yet even on the surface, cracks were showing. Even before

(23:54):
the plea deal Lucas had been paroled from Michigan in
June nineteen seventy. The prosecution leaned on that to fit
him into the Texas summer, but documentation later showed Lucas
probably didn't leave the rust Belt until January nineteen seventy one.
That winter, he shows up in Maryland applying for state assistance.

(24:19):
It's also unclear whether authorities ever stepped back to consider
the validity of the claim that Lucas first saw Linda
on Interstate twenty. Likely Linda never took this route. Lucas
eventually recanted most of his confessions in the years that followed,
keeping only three his mother, Kate Rich and fifteen year

(24:41):
old Becky Powell. The rest of the admissions, including Linda's,
generally collapse under scrutiny. The Lucas aftermath, the years in
which counties around Texas reopened files they'd solved on his
word landed differently in different plays. For some departments, it

(25:03):
was a public reckoning, for others, a quiet correction. In
Kaufman County, the official ledger had a plea and a sentence.
On paper, you could say the case of Linda's murder
was closed. In the hearts of investigators who had walked
hedgerows in August nineteen seventy and sat with the Phillips family.

(25:26):
The truth remained. The person who stopped Linda's car on
FM sixteen forty one before dawn, who scattered her clothing
along the road, who left her in hedges near Post Oak,
had never been proven by evidence you could carry into
a hard cross examination. The Lucas confession era had painted

(25:48):
over a mystery with a thin coat that could be
easily peeled. There are pieces from the original investigation that
keep human shape even after half a century. The farmer
who noticed the helicopters flying low that Sunday. The neighbors
who drove slowly past the crime scene and looked away

(26:10):
when they realized what they were seeing. The deputies who
spent days walking creek beds and then went home, trying
hard not to bring the details through the front door.
For the original investigators, the case likely reduces to a
handful of rural miles and a few hours in the dark.

(26:31):
Someone followed Linda out of Dallas, or intercepted her car
closer to home. Someone persuaded her to stop, or made
her stop in a way that left no rubber on
the road. Someone did their worst and then silenced her.
Someone took her clothes and flung them into the night,

(26:51):
one piece at a time, keeping only one item a trophy.
Perhaps the brief season when psychiatrists in Dallas stood at
podiums and described a lust killer also tells you something
about where investigations sat in nineteen seventy one. Early behavioral profiles,

(27:13):
comparative casework across counties, emphasis on wounds and ritual, and
the search for a single figure who tied it all together.
Sometimes that framework helps, Sometimes it encourages a kind of
storytelling that feels right but proves wrong. The last reliable

(27:34):
sighting of Linda Alive is at the Dallas wedding party
near Cedar Springs Road just after two thirty a m
early Sunday, August ninth, nineteen seventy Her car, with a
smashed driver's window is found on FM sixteen forty one
between Tlty and forty. Her body is found the next

(27:56):
day near Post Oak, north of Kaufman, in a spot
chosen with an understanding that the nearest farmhouse had recently
been vacated. The autopsy counts twenty six stab wounds. Pathologists
confirm sexual assault. Sheriff Brockway says publicly he believes Linda

(28:16):
would not have stopped for a stranger and tells reporters
that whoever did this knows Kaufman County's roads. Every theory
has to fit those facts. Fifty five years is a
long time for a small county to carry a question.
Some cases break when a family member or someone else
close to the victim speaks after a life lived half honestly.

(28:41):
Some break when advances in technology let a lab find
a thing the nineteen seventy forensics team couldn't. Some never break.
What is certain here is that Linda Jane Phillips lived
a careful, normal life and died in a way that
doesn't makes sense. She isn't the beginning of a pattern

(29:03):
or proof of a theory, or a bullet point on
a map. She is a daughter and a teacher whose
last drive took her from a Dallas apartment where people
were enjoying her company to a farm road that led
to a field where someone mad had left her. Everything
that matters in the file and everything that matters outside

(29:25):
it can fit inside that sentence. If you have any
information about the murder, of Linda Jane Phillips. Please contact
the Kaufman County Sheriff's Office at nine seven two nine
three two four three three seven if you'd like to

(29:46):
join Con Cold's mission to shine a light on unsolved
homicides and missing persons cases. Get the show at free
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(30:10):
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