Episode Transcript
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Gone Coal. Podcasts may contain violent or graphics subject matter.
Listener discretion is advised. Saturday, June twentieth, nineteen fifty nine, Montoya, Texas.
The brown water of the Rio Grande River moves slow
through the upper valley outside of El Paso, almost silent.
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In the summer of nineteen fifty nine, the river ran high.
Cottonwoods lined the banks near the small farming settlement ten
miles west of the city. By mid morning, heat shimmered
above the water like smoke. At nine thirty a m.
An Elpaso couple sat on the bank with a fishing
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rod and a thermos, watching debris roll by in the current.
First came a cardboard box drifting lazily but steady downstream.
They paid it no mind. Then twenty minutes later, something
larger caught the sunlight. A black suitcase, expensive looking half
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submerged and bumping against reeds. The man, William Taylor, fished
it in with a stick. Then the odor hit him.
He flagged down the first passing car and asked them
to phone authorities. El Paso County Sheriff Bob Bailey had
been in law enforcement almost thirty years, long enough to
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think he'd seen everything. When he and his deputies arrived
at the scene and pried open that suitcase, he learned otherwise.
Inside lay the naked torso of a man, head cleanly
severed at the neck. Both hands were gone, one cut
at the wrist, the other at the elbow. The body
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had been skinned like a calf, deputies said, flesh from
the back, and the crotch was missing, the sexual organs mutilated.
Wrapped around the upper torso was the elp Asso Herald
post home edition from June nineteenth, a paper that had
rolled off the press the previous afternoon at two thirty pm.
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Sheriff Bailey called it one of the weirdest cases we've
ever seen. He mobilized every man. He had deputies, ten
county jail trustees, and a boat crew to search the
Rio Grande downstream from Montoya. It wasn't long before they
found more. Roughly two miles below where William Taylor made
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his find, searchers spotted a small, smaller cardboard carton lodged
against the river's east bank. Inside were feet and lower
legs neatly severed below the knees. Printed on the side
of the carton were the words Larry's Sandwiches ninety five
ninety five West Jefferson Boulevard, Culver City, California. Jumbo combo,
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another fifty feet downstream, hung yet another section of the body,
the lower torso and thighs, snagged in a branch. Justice
of the piece, Ben Mahea and Deputy Don Whitley examined
the grizzly pieces and confirmed what the mutilation already suggested.
This was no accident. Skin had been removed from the
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back in the pelvic region, the covering of the scrotum
stripped away, part of the penis cut off. Every joint
was cleanly separated, no sawing marks, as if by a
butcher's or surgeon's hand. The victim had likely been dead
several days, Bailey said, whoever killed him took the head,
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the hands, and the skin from the back to block identification.
The sections were sent to the Rodover Miller Funeral Home
in El Paso for autopsy, while deputies dragged the river
for the missing parts. That afternoon, the Olpasso Times and
Herald Post blared sensational headlines. Reporters called it the work
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of a sex fiend, and the sheriff admitted the mutilation
pointed that way behind closed doors. Bailey kept another thought,
whoever did this? New anatomy at rodover Miller pathologist doctor
Frederick Bornstein began the grim reconstruction. The remains belonged to
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an Anglo male twenty five to forty five years old,
with light brown hair. No gunshot or knife wounds showed
on the tissue that remained. A foot length of nine
and a half inches suggested a shoe size of six
and a half. It was small, the sheriff thought, especially
considering the musculature marked him as a large athletic man.
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Bornstein noted clean dissections, the absence of ragged cuts, and
that the skinning appeared deliberate, not frenzied, not hurried. By sunset,
deputies had searched the banks from Montoya through the upper
Valley to the country Club Bridge. They found no sign
of the head or hands. Two officers began checking motels
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and cabins along US Highway eighty for any traveler gone missing.
Sheriff Bailey put out a public call that evening anyone
who'd been near the Rio Grande between Anthony and al
Paso before daylight Saturday, anyone who'd seen a parked car
or stranger's loitering near the river should contact his office.
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He worked the obvious missing persons cases, first eliminating early
on that the body belonged to William Patterson, who, alongside
his wife Margaret, had disappeared without a trace from Elpasso
in nineteen fifty seven. The next days autopsy gave more
to work with. Bornstein estimated death at four to five
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days earlier, and the body had entered the water only
a short time before discovery. Bailey now believed the remains
were dumped near Venton, fifteen miles from El Passo, likely
from a bridge, just before dawn on June twentieth. There
were no tire tracks or footprints along the banks between
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Anthony and Smeltertown, nothing to mark a vehicle's approach. One
clue came from that sandwich cartan in which the feet
and lower legs were found. Investigators traced Larry's sandwiches to
a wholesale distributed in Culver City, California. Their product shipped
regionally by truck, including to Paul M. Rogers, a food
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broker at five oh six North Masa Street, El Paso.
Bailey's deputies confirmed the boxes were sold widely in retail
markets across the city. Hardly a lead that narrowed the field,
but it was a start. Inside the suitcase they had found,
along with the torso, a linen towel, possibly the kind
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used by a butcher or bartender, and a piece of
plaincloth with no markings. All were sent for laboratory examination
the paper in which the torso was wrapped. The June
nineteenth edition of the Herald Post fixed the earliest time
the torso could have been packed sometime after mid afternoon
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Friday by Sunday night. Sheriff Bailey told reporters this was
the most brutal murder in El Paso history, and unlike
most crimes, he had no name for the victim. There
was no missing person in town that matched, no motive known.
The first potential match came out of New Mexico on
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June twenty second, under Sheriff Floyd Stockton of San Juan
County there called El Paso County from Farmington. He had
a man missing since June twelfth, Don Cromer, forty two,
a foreman for Claude Carroll Drilling Company. Cromer was last
seen that night at San Juan hospital, getting six stitches
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for a cut across his nose. Two men had brought
him in, one blonde, one brown haired, both shorter than Cromer.
A woman had phoned ahead to warn the hospital that
an injured man was on his way. After treatment, Chromer
left and vanished. Stockton found what looked like blood on
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the gate post of Cromer's trailer home, and more inside
a friend's trailer next door. Cromer's wife had been away
on vacation and returned June fifteenth to find her husband
missing and his car, a nineteen fifty six turquoise Oldsmobile gone,
along with two pistols. Law Men thought he'd met with
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foul play. When under Sheriff Stockton heard of the dismembered
corpse in El Paso, he called Sheriff Bailey. Cromer five
feet eight, one hundred and sixty five pounds, brown hair
turning gray, carried more than twenty tattoos, and wore size
seven and a half shoes, larger than the victim's six
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and a half. Still, the timeline fit too neatly to ignore.
Bailey compared notes, and both men agreed to send samples.
Blood from Farmington and tissue from El Paso to the
FBI lab in Washington. Meanwhile, deputies in Texas scoured the
Rio Grande again looking for the dump site. They tested
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bridges for stains Venton, Canetillo Borderland, but found only false leads.
Investigator Jack Millis dropped a test box weighted with rocks
from the Venton bridge. It floated the one in three
eight miles to Borderland bridge in about thirty minutes at
three to four miles an hour. The current supported the
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theory that the body had entered the water near Ventin.
Through June twenty third and twenty fourth, new questions multiplied.
Sheriff Bailey wondered aloud whether two bodies might be involved.
The feet seemed too small for the torso. Bornstein, the pathologist,
said he was almost certain all of the parts matched,
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but admitted a sliver of doubt. Everything the suitcase, boxes, newspaper,
and cloth was sent to the FBI for analysis. In Farmington,
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New Mexico, under Sheriff Stockton's deputies turned up more evidence.
Bloodstains spattered a friend of missing man Don Cromer's trailer
and pickup the friend and his wife vacationing in the
Midwest claimed it was from a domestic fight. Still, Stockton
collected hair samples from Cromer's home for comparison. Elpaso County
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Sheriff Bob Bailey ordered river control gatekeepers at Smeltertown to
watch for anything unusual. He still needed the missing head
and hands. They could be snagged on a sandbar anywhere
between Vinton and the diversion dam. By June twenty fourth,
another name surfaced, Terry Lee Stokes, thirty nine, from Kerrville, Texas.
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He'd boarded a westbound bus April twenty third, bound for
San Leandro, California, but never arrived. The driver remembered him
leaving the bus in Pacas, about two hundred and ten
miles to El Paso's east. Stokes five nine, one hundred
and fifty five pounds, light brown hair, hazel eyes fit
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Bornstein's profile almost exactly, except for time. Two months separated
his disappearance from the river discovery. El Paso police added
his file to the growing stack. Bailey's men were now
checking nearly one hundred missing persons cases across Texas and
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New Mexico. He and doctor Bornstein both agreed the odds
of two bodies were extremely remote, but without a head
or fingerprints, certainty was impossible. The next day, June twenty fifth,
Border Patrol officers found a decomposing cloth jacket near the
International Diversion Dam by Smeltertown. It was smeared with what
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looked like human blood. Sheriff Bailey and Sergeant Whitley bagged
it for the FBI. They researched eighteen miles of riverbank
from Anthony to Smeltertown, and even chased rumors of buzzards
circling over Ventin. They found nothing. Bailey kept chromer in
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his mind. The descriptions still matched close enough to consider.
Blood samples from Farmington were shipped east, waiting on laboratory results.
The lawman told reporters he was checking every tip. By
early June of nineteen fifty nine, the Rio Grande Torso
investigation had run dry. The sheriff was still fielding phone
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calls from across the southwest, truck drivers, travelers, and ranch
hands who thought they'd seen something or someone near the
bridge's west bel Passo, but none of the leads held.
Then came a break, not in Texas, but across the
state line, eight miles east of Tularosa, New Mexico, two
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young Native American boys were riding horseback along a deserted
dirt road just off US Highway seventy. The date was
July sixth. The desert there was empty scrub and hard
packed sand, with the Sacramento Mountains raised in the distance.
When the boys spotted a cardboard box in a dry Arroio,
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curiosity got the better of them. Inside they found a
pair of human hands and intestines. The boys rode straight
out to inform police. New Mexico Patrolman Sam Chavez and
Richard de Baca arrived first. The box, they noted, had
been used to ship canned grapefruit. Inside the box was
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a zippered plastic garment back, the kind meant to hang
clothes in a car. Slit open down one side. One
hand lay inside the bag, the other was outside, but
still within the box. They had been severed cleanly at
the wrists, shriveled from time and heapd When Otero County
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Sheriff Jim Herndon got word of the discovery, he called Opasso.
Within hours, Sheriff Bailey was on the road north to
confer in person the hands. Bailey thought could finally identify
his victim. The grisly package was shipped in dry ice
to the Federal Bureau of Investigation laboratory in Washington, d C.
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But the desert wasn't finished giving up its secrets. The
very next day, July seventh, a County Greater operator named
Ray Marr, was working that same dirt road east of
Tularosa when his blade snagged something half buried. It was
a cereal box containing another plastic bag, this one filled
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with more human remains, internal organs, and sections of skin
from the lower body. The find was less than half
a mile from the first box. Otero County Sheriff Herndon,
State Police investigator Tuffy Tafoya, and FBI agent Ray Cassia
scoured the rugged foothills around Round Mountain for more. By
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July ninth, search teams from Las Crusis were back in
the Round Mountain area, widening the grid. They didn't find
a head, but they did find evidence that a killer
had been busy there. On the second day, officers dug
into the embankment and unearthed a Mexican style serapi, a
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pink and white single bed bedspread an oilcloth like the
kind used on kitchen tables, a window curtain, and another
empty plastic bag. The items were clean, as though they'd
been discarded only recently. Scattered among them were two blood
stained newspapers. El Paso Herald post editions dated June sixteenth
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and June seventeenth. District Attorney Dan Sosa of Las Crusis
told reporters he believed all of it was connected the
same killer, the same body. The hands and flesh matched
the missing portions from the torso that had floated out
of Texas. One of the plastic bags, he said, was
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nearly identical to those found with the blankets and papers.
Part of the torso pulled from the river had been
wrapped in a June nineteenth Herald post. The newspapers created
a chain June sixteenth, June seventeenth, June nineteenth, each closer
to the day the suitcase was dropped and the river.
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Only the head was still missing. Week Bailey received preliminary
word back from the FBI. The tissue and bones confirmed
the earlier findings. Anglo mail thirty five to forty years old,
about five foot six, no metallic implants, no surgical pins.
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The blood samples from Farmington, New Mexico. Those taken at
missing person Don Kromer's trailer were two degraded for comparison,
there was still no match. On July sixteenth, the FBI
Fingerprint Division reported that the prints taken from the two
LaRosa hands did not match don Kromer. One of the
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hands was so decomposed that fingerprinting had been nearly impossible.
The other produced only two partials, enough for comparison to
specific suspects, but not for a national file search. The
report didn't rule out that the hands in Torso belonged
to the same victim, but it eliminated Chromer. Sheriff Herndon
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of Otero County, New Mexico took the news in stride.
At least we have the fingerprints to work with, he
told the press. Sooner or later, we'll match them with someone.
The following day, the El Paso Herald Post published a
summary of the investigator's latest reasoning, six hard points built
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from the facts they had. First, the torso and hands
almost certainly came from one man, a white male in
his late thirties who was probably not a laborer. His
feet and hands were smooth, without callouses. He likely worked
indoors Second, whoever carved him up knew how to cut
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meat adept perhaps at butchering animals. Third, the boxes used
for disposal were standard grocery shipping cartons. Also, the body
appeared to have been stored cold for one to six days,
possibly in a walk in freezer or lay large cooler.
Some pieces were wrapped in small, zippered plastic shoebags, which
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suggested at least to some a female hand in the disposal. Next,
the slayer likely hadn't driven far with the remains. The
stench would have made long travel dangerous. The murder site
was probably within one hundred miles of Alamogordo or Las Crusis,
the police theorized, and finally, the mutilation seemed less about
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hiding identity than about sadism. None of the body parts
were buried, they were meant to be found. The next step,
Herndon said, was to pinpoint where the murder had happened,
determined if there was more than one victim, and find
the head. As the summer stretched on, the Ol Paso
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Torso case, as it became known, was a maze of possibilities.
Every sheriff's office from El Paso to Los Crusis to
Ala Mogordo had its own theories. El Paso County Sheriff
Bob Bailey believed the killer might live near the Rio Grande.
Some New Mexico authorities thought the murder scene could be
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up in the Sacramento Mountains. The FBI advised diligence and patience.
In late July nineteen fifty nine, New Mexico Attorney General
Hilton Dixon assigned a special investigator, Raymond Padillo, to coordinate
the tangle of reports across state lines. Padillo met with
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District Attorney Dan Sosa in Las Crusis and began reviewing everything.
The suitcase, the boxes, the fingerprints, the items found partially buried,
The head was still missing, and identification was still the
key d By December, Bailey received what he called the
most promising lead yet. A Methodist minister in San Diego,
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Reverend Willie Hazel, contacted him on behalf of a Lubbock family.
Their son, Elvin Martin Brusher, an oil field worker, had
vanished months earlier after leaving home to look for work
around Brownfield, Texas and Hobbes, New Mexico. His father had
read about the Torso case and was struck by the similarities.
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His son's car, a nineteen fifty five model, had later
turned up abandoned in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Sheriff Bailey checked, learning
that Elvin had once been arrested on a minor charge
in Lubbock, meaning his fingerprints were on file. The FBI
lab was notified to compare them. The prints were not his.
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January nineteen sixty brought bones in the New Mexico Sandhills
west of El Paso. A brasero named Arturo Velasquez was
gathering firewood near Strauss and found a skull and scattered
bones in the Mesquite. Sheriff Bailey, ever hopeful for a breakthrough,
drove out personally. The skull had a gold capped front tooth,
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diamond shaped cut in the center, and at first glance
he thought it might be the missing head, But when
he saw the other bones, a collar bone, thigh, pelvic
and some vertebrae, he knew it wasn't related. Still, Bailey
couldn't help but remark if this desert could talk, it
could spin stories that would go on for years. By
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the summer of nineteen sixty, reporters at the El Paso
Times revisited the case for its first anniversary on June twentieth. Bailey,
weary but still determined, again walked them through that morning.
A year earlier, when William M. Taylor had pulled the
suitcase from the Rio Grande near Montoya. The paper described
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the scene in full, the headless torso, the skinned flesh,
the cardboard box that followed, and then the July discovery
near Tularosa, the hands and organs packed in a plastic
bag and box. The FBI had since confirmed those remains
belonged to the same body. The partial fingerprints still hadn't
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matched any file. What remained missing, above all, was the head.
Bailey now had his own theory. He believed the killing
had happened somewhere in the Sacramento Mountains, maybe near Cloudcroft,
where El Pasowins went to escape the summer heat. The murderer,
he reasoned, had likely driven down the old Mescalero Highway,
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a rough washboard road through round Mountain, and dumped the
first box of enterds when the smell became unbearable. Then
he'd driven south through Alamogordo and Las Crusus, crossing into
Texas before dawn and tossing the rest into the Rio
Grande from a bridge near Venton. The FBI's forensic analysis
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had turned up a small but curious clue, red and
white cattle hares embedded in the towel, the suitcase, and
even the tissue itself. The killer, Bailey thought, had cut
up the body in a barn or shed, someplace where
cattle or hides were kept nearby. He was equally convinced
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that the victim wasn't local. After circulating bulletins to every
law agency within five hundred miles twice, no one recognized
the description. But the small town populations of Hobbes, Carlsbad, Artesia,
and Las Crusus were too tight knit for a man
to disappear unnoticed. Bailey insisted it wasn't the perfect crime,
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not yet, there were still loose ends. Two days after
that anniversary article, Bailey thought he might finally have his name.
A woman in Saint Petersburg, Florida, wrote that her son,
Bruce Hunt, had been missing since May nineteen fifty nine.
He'd left home for White Sands Missile Range in New
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Mexico to look for work as a truck driver and
never returned. Hunt was thirty eight five foot four, close
enough to the victim's estimated height and age. The timing fit.
He disappeared in May and the murder occurred mid June.
Bailey requested his fingerprints, the FBI reported back negative. Again,
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Hunt was not the victim. It was another dead end.
That December, New Mexico authorities found themselves facing a new
horror that drew instant comparisons to the Torso case. On
December sixth, nineteen sixty, thirty two year old Charles Kock,
a well liked school teacher and organist from Martesia, was
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reported missing. Two days later, farm hands near Dexter found
his body in a cornfield, dismembered and mutilated. His legs
had been cut off just below the thighs. His torso
had been disemboweled. Cox, single and respected, had last been
seen around ten pm Saturday at the Nixon Hotel in Roswell,
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eating a hamburger and drinking beer. His white and red
Chevrolet El Camino pickup was still parked outside, untouched. Pathologists
told investigators that Cox might not have been dead when
his legs were severed, though he was likely unconscious from
repeated blows to the head. Assistant District Attorney Robert Spretcher
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and State Police Lieutenant A. J. Smith led the inquiry.
The brutality shocked even the most seasoned lawmen. Hoarders called
the killer a sadist. The similarities dismemberment, apparent, sexual mutilation,
a careful cutting of limbs sent a shiver through every
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sheriff's office between Artesia, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas. There,
Sheriff Bailey, though cautious, acknowledged the resemblance, but there was
one key difference. Cox had been identified almost immediately. The
sheriff's victim, on the other hand, remained headless and nameless.
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Then came another shock, this time out of Mina, Arkansas.
On December thirtieth, nineteen sixty, residents discovered a man's dismembered
torso sunk in a rural well. At first, police thought
it might be linked to the Texas, New Mexico murders.
Within days, however, that case took a different turn. A
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woman arrested for forgery in Covington, Louisiana, was found with
blood station wagon and soon after with body parts in
the vehicle. Her name was Norma McDonald, young, fifty years old,
and ex wife of E. G. McDonald, a seventy five
year old farmer and former marine. The remains were his
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young later pled guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.
Whatever similarities the murder had with Elpaso's Torso case ended there,
but for Sheriff Bailey it was another grim reminder that
the brutality he'd witnessed on the Rio Grande was not unique.
On April twenty second, nineteen sixty one, nearly two years
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after the first discovery, a fisherman near Round Mountain north
of Alamogordo, spotted something pale along the Tularosa riverbank, a
human skull partially buried in the sand. It was found
not far from where the boxes of hands and organs
had turned up in July nineteen fifty nine. For a
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few days, hope flickered that it might be the missing head.
The skull was alone, no other bones nearby. It was
sent to Olpasso for study. No identification could be made. Then,
in nineteen sixty one, another name surfaced, not as a victim,
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but as a suspect in a separate killing that bore
eerie similarities. California police arrested fifty one year old Darlington W. Shaw,
a gaunt cabinet maker and ex convict, for the murder
and dismemberment of his wife, Hildreth Shaw. Her body parts
had been found across three California counties, ahead in a
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thermos box near Garden Grove, a leg in Angelus National Forest,
and a torso in box Canyon, Ventura County. The case
so closely mirrored the El Paso County torso mar that
Bailey and New Mexico District Attorney Dan Sosa immediately took notice.
Sosa pointed out Shaw's method dismemberment, scattering plastic wrapping. It
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all fit almost perfectly. Investigator Raymond Padilla was dispatched to
California to interview Shaw. The suspect claimed innocence, saying his
wife had left him in New Mexico while they were
traveling to San Antonio, but detectives in California found blood
in his bathroom and in the garbage disposal, and the thermos
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box that had contained his wife's head was traced to
a store where Shaw had been one of only seven purchasers.
Opasso's hopes of a confession or connection evaporated quickly. The
California murder proved its own closed circle. Shaw was charged
there and the Opasso file went back into storage. In
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the spring of eineighteen sixty one, Sheriff Bob Bailey's file
cabinet drawers were thick with paper maps of the Rio Grande,
photographs of bridges, FBI correspondence, lists of missing men from
Texas to Florida. The Torso legs and feet pulled from
the river, the hands and organs found in the New
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Mexico desert, the Serapi curtains, plastic bags, and newspapers. None
of it yielded a name. Every theory had come and gone,
several missing men each ruled out one after another. The
FBI had long since finished its analysis, the fingerprints remained unmatched,
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the head was still nowhere to be found. For a while,
it seemed the horror might never repeat itself, But by
early nineteen sixty two, another body, this time down near Cleveland, Texas,
would have investigators reopening the file. That's next time on
Gone Cold Texas True Crime. If you have any information
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about the nineteen fifty nine Torso case out of Elpaso County,
please contact the Sheriff's office there at nine one five five, three, eight, two,
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