Carol Dawson: The Unforgotten

I know this sounds like an old story: a woman goes missing and it seems like a cover-up. But when Shelley Watkins’ body was discovered in 1993, floating in a Texas river, her murder really upended the town of Corsicana. Journalist Carol Dawson worked with my buddy Wes Ferguson on the hit podcast, The Unforgotten. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
One morning over coffee, she said, I know things about
the Watkins that would get them into very big trouble,
at which point her sister said, you cannot tell any
of this.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
You could be in danger. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a
nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas. I'm also
the co host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right,
and throughout my career, research for my many audio and

(00:45):
book projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words,
I sit down with the people I've met along the way,
amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and
reported on notorious true cases. This is about the choices
writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep
dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. I know

(01:11):
this sounds like an old story. A woman goes missing
and it seems like a cover up. But when Shelley
Watkins's body was discovered in nineteen ninety three floating in
a Texas river, her murder really up into the town.
Of course, A Canna journalist, Carol Dawson, worked with my
buddy Wes Ferguson on the hit podcast The Unforgotten. Is

(01:32):
this your first podcast? Endeavor?

Speaker 2 (01:35):
This is I've been a guest on podcasts before, but
I have never done a podcast before. So the act
of creating a podcast was just an entirely new concept
to me. I was not a path I ever thought
I would go down. I was very, very lucky because
I was working on a book that is the basis
for this podcast, and it's a nonfiction book obviously combination

(01:58):
out of true crime history and memoir about my hometown, Corsicana, Texas.
While I was working on that book, I sent the
first draft off to an agent in New York who
said this book would make a great podcast. I reported
that conversation to a couple of my dear friends, Sarah

(02:20):
Bird and Steve Harrigan.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Let's give contact. Sarah Bird, I think a gifted novelist
and Steve Harrigan a gifted historian sort of. I feel
like almost the unofficial historian of Texas history in some ways.
So these are friends with depth, is what you're saying. Well,
he's kind of official, you know.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
After the ut Press published his History of Texas, which
is astonishing and is structured in a beautiful way. I mean,
it's just fabulous at any rate I talked with them.
I talked with two journalists friends, Joe Holly and Laura Taly,
and said, it's been suggested to me that I should

(02:59):
be turning this book into a podcast as well as
a book. And they said, you've got to talk to
Wes Ferguson. So I drafted an email with the header saying,
these friends, mutual friends of ours, have suggested I contact
you with this story. We met for lunch at the
Hyde Park Bar and Grill I started telling him the

(03:21):
story about this murder victim and then what happened to
her and then what followed that, And as West puts it,
I was in before the food hit the table because
it's such a twisty.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Twisty story. I mean, it's really bizarre. So the teas
to this story, because I definitely want to dive in now,
the teas to the story of the description that I
read was essentially, police know who did it? Police have
the evidence, and the question, you know, it's always good
when we do a nonfiction, especially with true crime nonfiction

(03:55):
books and nonfiction podcast is what is that question that
you we are posing at the beginning that you hope
to provide listeners or readers with an answer to by
the end. And it sounds like it's a not who
did it or the evidence that's lacking. It's really more like,
why has something not happened yet? Is that right? Am
I nailing matter? No?

Speaker 2 (04:16):
I think that's absolutely correct. It is why has justice
been subverted in this particular case? Why has it taken
so long for the case severe back around to the
original pursuit in the original premise, And the answer to
that is quite complex and it's very very frustrating.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Well, let's dive right into those frustrations. Where does it
make sense to you? I want to know about the
place Corsicana. I've never been there before the time period
ninety three, and certainly we want to know about the victim,
Shelley Watkins, and what her life was like before she dies. Corsicana,
Texas is my hometown.

Speaker 2 (04:58):
I was born there. I grew up there until I
went to boarding school in Dallas. That is where I
attended school. I grew up with the people involved in
this case, as did my siblings. Shelley Watkins came to
Corsicana in the nineteen eighties because she had moved to
Texas originally from Ohio, where she was born and grew

(05:21):
up in a family that was very middle class. Her
dad was a pharmacist. He wound up owning a pharmacy.
Eventually they moved to Michigan, where she attended high school.
After high school, she married her boyfriend, who was a musician,
and when they got married, they moved to Florida. In Florida,

(05:44):
she and her husband separated and divorced. She moved to Dallas,
where she got a job.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Working as a representative for a tool company, so Corsicana,
which is just fifty miles southeast of Dallas in her territory,
and Watkins Construction, which is owned by Jerry mcwatkins these days,
but at the time was a family business founded by

(06:11):
his father, Carmackwatkins was of course the perfect place to
call on to sell tools, or so she assumed she
got there. She had met Jerry's older brother, Ronnie, who
was ten years Jerry's senior, when she had called on him,
because he too had a construction and remodeling company, but
it was far more building oriented. Not know major sort

(06:35):
of text dot excavation and concrete work, and then eventually pipelines.
So while she was calling on these folks, Ronnie allegedly
brought her over to meet his father and his brother.
She and his brother Jerry immediately lighted each other's fires.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
Okay, so she was an outsider making an incursion into
what is, after all, a very insular community. Corsicana is
a bubble. It is a very interesting town. In my book,
I call it the most Gothic small town in America,
and I have very good reason for saying that, But
it is, oddly enough, very enclosed. I've said that people

(07:20):
born in Corsicana quite often get born with homing devices
in their brains, so that even after they've gone to
college elsewhere, or even spent an entire adult career in
another place, they wind up coming back. It's a deeply
rooted place. It was the site of the very first
oil boom west of the Mississippi in eighteen ninety four,

(07:41):
which means it has a lot of old money. Now,
the Watkins were not old money. Carmack Watkins was what
they call a dirt farmer. They were a rural family
living in a little, tiny agrarian community outside of Corsicana
until in nineteen fifty seven Carmack decided to found a
construction company. And he started his company with one single

(08:05):
backo and got his first contract with what is now
text dot, the Texas Highway Department, fixing a bridge. From there,
he grew the company and grew it and grew it,
and he wound up making a great deal of money
in one way or another.

Speaker 1 (08:23):
You say that a little ominously.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
I say it ominously because he was very interested in
acquiring vast amounts of real estate, which he did in
the course of his life. One of our interviewees referred
to him as he was known in the law enforcement
community as the Godfather. So that has certain suggestions. We've

(08:45):
heard a lot of things that we haven't included in
the podcast because of course, many informants prefer to remain
off the record or anonymous. At any rate, Carmack did
very well. He had three children, all of whom were
born and brought up to a certain point in that
little tiny country community and farmhouse, and then eventually he

(09:05):
built a house in town. And by the time Jerry
Mack started junior high as it was as middle school,
was known. Then they had moved into town, so they
were no longer taking the bus into the elementary school
from that rural community from whence they'd come. So Jerry Mack,
the youngest of the three siblings, grew up a very

(09:26):
sort of I call him the crown prince of the family,
and he was adored by his mother and essentially grew
up with a level of affluence that the first two
siblings did not enjoy, even though his older sister was
only two years his senior.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
So Corsicana in this time period we're starting with kind
of nineteen ninety three where Shelley ends up becoming a victim. Here,
what is Corsicana like? Is this a big small town.
I know you said there's a lot of old money.
The Watkinston have it. But he grew up, Jerry grew
up in privilege. But you know, obviously this is still
sort of like blue collar area. Is this a place

(10:08):
that welcomes strangers, new people? You know, what's the feel
of the town at the time.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
That answer would be no. Shelley, I think was always
regarded as an outsider. Corsicaina is like that. As I said,
it's very insular, it is a bubble. There is a
lot of old money, there is a lot of blue collar.
There is an interesting convergence between the two, and that
starts occurring, you know, from first grade, elementary school on.

(10:35):
So in an odd sense, it's very democratic in the
way that the different levels of society weave in back
and forth with one another. But in another sense, that
old regime, the old establishment, does keep itself aloof for
the most part. There are exceptions. For instance, you know,

(10:57):
one oil moneyed Prince Lane can marry the daughter of
a hairdresser, as did happen and wind up sustaining a
long marriage and having children and so reorganizing socio economic levels.
Happens within Corsicana, But there's not a lot of outside

(11:18):
connection to the rest of the world.

Speaker 1 (11:20):
Jerry, is he a big deal in high school growing up? No,
he was not.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
From what I understand, he was reasonably quiet. He was
in my younger brother's class. He did not have a
wide circle of friends. I have understood from someone who
literally grew up going in and out of the Watkins
farmhouse when Jerry and his sister were children out in
that small rural community, that he was very much a

(11:50):
bit of a hermit as a child that he just
spent a lot of time in his room. Jerry was
not a big social deal high school. He was not
a big athlete. No, he was very interested in and
trained in the machinery that his father had invested in

(12:12):
for the company. So that was really his deal was
going after and working with machinery from the time he
was quite young.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
Did he date? He said, he's quiet, But was he
sort of charming dater? Well, he was good looking. Okay,
he did date in high school. He had a high
school sweetheart, and then I think he had a second
high school sweetheart. And then he wound up marrying at
a very young age to a girl who was even
younger than he was, and she was his first wife. Okay.

(12:45):
Did they end up with any kids or No?

Speaker 2 (12:47):
That marriage did not last long because Jerry had an
eye for the ladies. The marriage and the relationship broke
up because he was still seeing his former high school
sweetheart and other girls as well.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
So on the day that Shelley meets Jerry, it's Jerry's
older brother, Ronnie who introduces them. Is that right, That's
what I've been told? Okay, and Sparks fly, He's good looking,
she's beautiful, you know all of that. How does their
relationship proceed once they meet? Is this a fast thing
or is there a lot of courting involved? Apparently it

(13:26):
was very swift. They just instantly fell for each other.
She went out to lunch with Jerry and his father, Carmac,
and shortly after that, I mean in a very short time,
they were living together and it wasn't too many months
after that that they got married. So Shelley became his
third wife. What are the ages of these two people

(13:47):
at the time.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Shelley was a year younger than Jerry, and Jerry was
thirty two at the time. Now is Jerry's mom in
the picture Carmac's wife?

Speaker 1 (13:59):
Oh? Yes, okay, sounds like a story. As my mom
would say, it is my understanding by people who prefer
to remain off the record, but were close to the
family and close observers, some of whom had very close
experience of this.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
Jerry's mother never liked any of his wives. She never
was happy with any of his wives. Now I know
quite a bit about his mother just through other people.
I never personally, I think I met her, but I
never really knew her, and we didn't cross paths, but
she was very much a classic domestic housewife when they

(14:44):
were children. She made all their clothes, She canned a
lot of their food, she did all the cooking. She was,
from what I understand, quite subservient to her husband, who
also had a reputation as a ladies' man. She was,
from what I can gauge, repressed and repressive for her

(15:06):
own daughter who grew up.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
In my class. How many kids are in the Watkins family? Three? Okay,
two boys and a girl. Okay, that's correct. And the
girl was in between the boys and you knew the
daughter then I did. I don't know the answer to this,
but was she involved with the podcast at all? Or No?

Speaker 2 (15:25):
Absolutely not, And I informed my partner Wes that I
did not want to contact her. She has moved away
from Texas. She was always a very quiet person. I
did not know her well. Some of my good friends
have been very close to her. I think she essentially
got the short end of the stick no matter what

(15:47):
in that family. She has gone through a lot of
health issues. She wound up literally holding the babies after
Shelley's death for a certain amount of time while Jerry
lived elsewhere. He went and stayed with his parents. The
two little girls stayed with her after Shelly's death, and

(16:08):
she had to contend with a lot, including reporters who
would lurk outside her home waiting for her own son
to leave the house to go to school, where they
would sort of pounce and ask questions. It was a
very traumatic time. And she is also.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
The person who became the main caregiver for both parents
when they started to decline in the past few years.
So she wants to distance herself from anything to do
with this.

Speaker 2 (16:38):
Obviously, absolutely yes, and I absolutely respect that. I did
not even give her a call, and I said to Wes,
we must not contact Janie. We must not, because I
understand enough of the dynamic around that entire situation to
know that not only would she not cooperate, it would

(16:59):
be harmful in her, hurtful to her. Yeah, in ways
that I can't condone.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
You know, this reminds me a little bit of I know,
you know Brian Burrow, who's a Texas writer that is wonderful.
So you know, I've had Brian on a couple of times,
and one of the times he talked about his audible book,
which you know detailed. I don't know if you listened
to it, but it detailed the story of how he
went to high school in Temple with a serial killer.

(17:24):
He didn't, of course, know it was a serial killer
at the time, and he journeys back to Temple where
he's from, and you know, draws comparisons between himself and
this young man, and I remember asking him, it must
be difficult for you to go back. I mean, it's
not like me going to Austin and doing a story
in Austin. We're going back to a smaller place where

(17:45):
the wounds are still really raw. And your story is
not that old. It's only ninety three. I say that
because I was in high school in ninety three, so
it really doesn't feel very old to me. So that
must not have been easy for you. There must have
just been a lot that you couldn't cross you and
had to make boundaries for yourself.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
The only boundary I have made is about Janice. Okay,
And I'll tell you why I feel deeply connected to
this story because I had been living overseas. I was
living in New Zealand when this occurred, and eventually I
moved back to the States and back to Texas and
straight to Austin of course, of course, and my father's

(18:24):
law office was in Corsicana, as it still is. And
I found out about this case and I was electrified.
I just went, I cannot believe this has happened in
our hometown with these results. It's just really shocking to me.

(18:46):
And I talked to my dad, because my dad's law
firm represented Jerry mcwatkins. My dad was at this time
not only still practicing law, but he was a law
professor at Baylor Law School. I said, look, this is
one hell of a story. And I am really upset

(19:06):
that this happened to a woman who entered Corsicana as
an innocent essentially and then wound up in this situation
and having this happen to her as an outsider. And
I'm outraged, and I'm outraged that you guys were representing
Jerry macwatkins. Well, it was actually my father's law partner

(19:27):
who had formerly been his student, who was Jerry Mac's
civil attorney, and who then became the person Jerry mac
came to first after this happened.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
There's a lot of connections. That's why I take it
to heart, or that's one of the reasons I take
it to heart. So at the time, my dad said
to me, Carol, you can't write about this. I know
you and you know I'd had books published, they had
been translated into Whether a Language is published Overseas.

Speaker 2 (19:55):
They were all novels at that time. And I said, Dad, Okay,
I accept that I cannot write about law firm business.

Speaker 1 (20:04):
Even though you don't like this situation.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
And you've made that clear to me that this was
not your doing, that this was your law partner's doing.
But I still am just absolutely riveted by this weird
plot line, this story. I want to write a mystery.
I've never written a mystery before. I really want to
write one. I read them all the time, and this

(20:29):
would make a great plot for a mystery. I want
to fictionalize everything, move it to another town, change the circumstances,
change the cast of characters. But I want to use
this plot. And Dad said, Okay, well, in that case,
go talk to Glenn. And Glenn was his law partner

(20:50):
who was very present throughout this entire case, even though
he was not the criminal defense mouthpiece for the case. Yes,
so I did, and I had a long afternoon of
sitting with Glenn in his dear ranch about eight miles
out of Corsicana that was called the Sanctuary, while Glenn

(21:14):
sat there smoking cigarette after cigarette after cigarette and just
telling me the whole inside story because he enjoyed it.

Speaker 1 (21:22):
And then you're back to a nonfiction book, right, I am. Now,
did everybody in the Watkins family like Shelley? And how
did Shelley's family feel about Jerry and the Watkins family.
I think that Ronnie could not stand Shelley. Oh why.
Shelley was a very direct person. Oh okay.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
She was someone who would always speak her mind. I've
heard this about her over and over. She was also
someone who absolutely refused to acknowledge hierarchies. She was not
interested did in the old social regime. Of course, Againna,
she wasn't interested in trying to enter that or social climb.

(22:08):
She made her own friends. She was interested in charity work,
and she did a lot of it and was active
in that sense. But she was also always willing to
get her hands dirty. One friend of hers describes coming
over to see her, and there she is out in

(22:29):
the front yard alongside the guy who her husband, Jerry
had sent over to dig holes for trees to plant
trees in their front yard, and she's out there just
digging away, just literally getting her hands dirty. That was typical,
very typical behavior. Most of all, she was quite outspoken.
She was a firecracker. This kind of behavior would not

(22:51):
have gone down well in the Watkins family. That was
something they were not used to. And I think eventually
that also really caused a very different kind of sparks
in her marriage with Jerry.

Speaker 1 (23:04):
Well I had thought about that. I mean, you had
described Jerry as a lady's man and blah blah, but
really ultimately sounds like he was quiet and passive, and
so maybe he needed a woman with Shelley's personality to
sort of balance him out or is that not right?
Maybe at first, so it sounds like maybe sparks flew
at the beginning. And then did Shelley know that he

(23:27):
was sleeping around? No, not at first or not for
a long while.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
I think I think their conflicts and arguments were of
a different nature from everything I've been told. And I
think that the fact that she started learning things about
the Watkins business and about the Watkins family that would
have jeopardized Watkins's freedom had they become known was an issue.

(23:55):
And I say that because she visited her sister in
Atlanta a few months before her death, and she and
her sister, Sandy were very very close. Sandy, originally, you know,
a Midwestern girl, had been living in Atlanta throughout her
marriage and adult life, as had their younger brother, Rob Salter,

(24:16):
who also worked and lived in Atlanta. So Shelley would
go back to visit her siblings and especially her sister
in Atlanta, and they would come to visit her of
course againa And during this last visit that Shelley made
to her sisters, one morning over coffee, she said, I
know things about the Watkins that would get them into

(24:39):
very big trouble. At which point her sister, who I
think was always very much a sort of peacemaker and
liked to keep the boat afloat and keep everything on
an even keel, said, oh, Shelley, you can never I
don't want to hear anymore.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
And you cannot tell. You cannot tell any of this.
You've got a good, strong marriage, You've got two small children.

Speaker 2 (25:04):
These people are very powerful. You could be in danger
if you talked about this. You cannot talk about this anymore.
Sandy essentially sealed that off. I mean, Shelley's attitude was
why the heck not? I mean, she was not one
to stifle her opinions. I'm surprised she married into a
family like that. I'm sure she must have sensed immediately

(25:28):
that this was a strong willed family that probably you know,
ran on a certain set of rules and women were
meant to be, you know, deferential towards men.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
If she's looking at her mother in law as a guide,
I wonder what drew her in Besides you know, Jerry's hot.
I mean, I don't know what else there would have been.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Judging for what I've learned about Shelley, she would not
have looked at her mother in law, Norma Jean Watkins,
and thought, oh, she's a guide. I think she would
have said, oh, well, but that's not me. That's not
who I am, and I'm not going to live that way.
And in fact, every week, Norma Jean would prepare a

(26:10):
dinner for the males of the family, Carmack, Ronnie, and Jerry,
and they would go to the parents' house one night
a week and have this male conference, this male meeting
over dinner. Women were excluded Shelley didn't like that. She
thought it was absolute bullshit that this should be happening.

(26:31):
And she said, I want to be there too, I
want to be included. Well that was off the table,
that there was no question of that happening, and she
really resented it, and she raised a stink about it.
She was somebody who was willing to raise a stink
about things that she objected to or that she thought
were inequitable. She was very friendly to everybody she met,

(26:54):
and as one person has told me, it didn't matter
if it was somebody working in a store or if
it was a homeless person without shoes on a street corner.
She was always willing to be very ready and friendly
and to extend herself. She was very generous. She was
not the usual Corsic canon.

Speaker 1 (27:16):
Well, they have a couple of kids, right, does that
happen quickly after they get married? The first one came
along pretty quickly after they got married. Okay, so two
young kids? Is that what she said? Yes? So when
do we think things take a turn in the marriage?
How quickly before we know that Shelley disappeared? I think

(27:37):
that a lot of conflict had already been brewing before
the second daughter, Lane was actually born, because I've heard
about arguments that became quite inflated and explosive before that
ever happened, and I think things just got fierier and fierrier.
Lane herself was only a year and a half old

(27:59):
when Shelley was murdered, and that was she's the second daughter,
Ashley was four shortly to term five when Shelley died,
she was six weeks short of her birthday. Set up
all of this, how do we even discover that she
is a murder victim? This is what happened.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
There had been obviously tension between Jerry and Shelley for
a while. Other people had observed it. Other people had
heard arguments. They had a lake house on Cedar Creek
Reservoir Lake that was about a thirty minute drive from
Corsicana itself from where they lived, and they often held

(28:36):
parties out there, big family parties, big collection of friends
on holidays, especially Memorial Day, Labor Day, fourth of July,
and that lake was a big recreational lake where a
lot of people would go and had properties there, so
they were having their usual lake house retreat that day.

(28:58):
On Labor Day of nineteen ninety three, September sixth. During
the course of the day, as witnesses would later retell
to law enforcement, Shelley did not seem herself. She seemed
very nervy. She was drinking a lot. She seemed agitated.
Two of the people who were president at that party

(29:19):
were her supposed close friend Kay Bryant and Kay's husband Dennis.
They had been neighbors formerly who lived just up the
road from Jerry and Shelley. By that time, they had
been living for several months in the town of Corsicana
itself instead of out at Beaton Lake Estates, where Shelley

(29:41):
and her husband lived, so they were no longer neighbors,
and yet Kay espoused to be one of Shelley's very
best friends, very closest friends. Shelley had a trio of
close friends, and Kay was one of them, and they
did a lot of socializing with Jerry and Kay, as
did other friends that day at the lake they were present.

(30:05):
Dennis actually was working for Jerry and his company as
a sort of on call carpenter and fix her handiman
at the time, and Kay herself was a stewardess, a
flight attendant at American Airlines so they were out at
the lake along with this group of friends, and Shelley

(30:28):
became more and more agitated at the course of the day.
There was supposedly a big argument at the end of
the day. At the end of the evening between Shelley
and Ronnie, the older brother, who was also present with
his wife and teenage daughter Brandy. Shelley and Brandy had
gone out on jet skis, supposedly run out of gas.

(30:49):
They were out after dark. This upset Ronnie. This was
the reason given for the argument at the lake house
that day. In fact, I have been told by other
people who prefer to remain off the record, that the
big tension was between Jerry and Shelley, and was probably

(31:11):
about the fact that Jerry at that time seemed to
be having an affair with Kay. So at the end
of the long day in which a lot of alcohol socializing,
dining out at a local restaurant with the entire party,
where a lot of witnesses saw them there, Jerry took

(31:33):
both of the little girls, put them in his vehicle
and went home, leaving Shelley out of the lake. Now
we don't know how Shelley got home. We have never
been able to determine that absolutely. But one way or another,
she got back home somehow, and she didn't get home
until eleven o'clock that night. At that time, both little

(31:55):
girls were, of course tucked in bed, and Jerry came
outside to the garage to talk with Shelley. They had
a big altercation there, and this is according to Jerry's
own testimony. During the course of that altercation, Shelley made
it clear to Jerry that she was leaving him. She

(32:16):
was going to wake both the little girls up and
put them in the car and take them with her,
and this was it.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
This was the end.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
At which point Jerry professedly snatched her car keys away
from her so that she could not get into her
car and leave her car was a one year old
quite BMW. He snatched her car keys at which point,
according to Jerry, it's eleven thirty at night, and Shelley

(32:48):
stomps off into the darkness on foot in this area
outside the city limits, adjacent to I forty five, which
cuts through the town, and it's never seen a love again.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
Where does he say he thinks she would even go?
That just seems odd, He doesn't.

Speaker 2 (33:09):
He says that at that point what he did was
to go back into the house and go to bed
and go to sleep. Unfortunately for him, there were neighbors
who were awake throughout the night and who saw all
the lights on at the house and also observed activity

(33:29):
cars coming and going.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
His story is she leaves in a huff. He has
no idea where she is, right on foot in an
area she's not that particularly familiar with.

Speaker 2 (33:39):
Right, Well, she's familiar enough to have lived there for
several years in that house. But that house is in
this tiny little development outside of town.

Speaker 1 (33:48):
Yeah, there's nowhere to go. Essentially, there's nowhere to go. Okay,
how long is it before he says my wife's missing?
Is it twenty four hours or longer than that? According
to the first report that was published in the paper
that same night, he called his close friend, a policeman

(34:09):
named Louis Peylos, with whom he had grown up, although
Louis is eight years a senior in that same little
rural community far on the other side of Corsicana, and said,
Shelley's gone. She's walked off. This is what Lewis at
first said. That does not.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
Accord well with Jerry's story that he went inside and
went to bed and went to sleep. At any rate.
The next morning he makes some phone calls. One of
the calls he makes is at six forty five am
to Kay Bryant in Corsicana. She is no longer a neighbor,
and he says, Shelley's gone. She was telling me that

(34:49):
she was going to leave me and take the girls.
This is important about taking the girls. So I stopped
her and I took her car keys.

Speaker 1 (35:00):
She's gone.

Speaker 2 (35:01):
This is what Kay later reported in the search warrant
AFFI David to law enforcement. He then also called the
immediate neighbors and said, is Shelley there? And they all went,
huh no, no, she's not here. These are the neighbors
who lived directly across the street. I need to add

(35:21):
that the Walkins home was literally the first house on
the right as you left the I forty five service
road to enter Beaten Lake Estates, so it was very
close to I forty five. Then nothing happens in terms
of reports, any sort of excitement, anything except among concerned

(35:44):
friends of Shelley's who start saying, where's Shelley, Where is
she gone?

Speaker 1 (35:49):
What do you mean? She stomped off in the night.
That's insane. She would never do that. She would never
leave her kids.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
She would never walk away from you unless she came
over to my house across the street or to this
house of her other friend across the street. Nobody seen her.
Could she have gone out into the mesquite brush. We
need to look, We need to form search parties. Somebody
needs to be searching for her. And Jerry kept saying, Oh,

(36:15):
she's just gone off somewhere. She'll show up. He told
people that at his workplace, as well as the neighbors
who grew concerned that first day he went into work
and that's what he was saying. The next morning, he
drove Shelley's car, the fairly new white BMW, to Dallas,

(36:37):
where he got it completely detailed and brand new tires
put on it. The day after that, the car was
driven by his brother to College Station one hundred and
twenty six miles in the other direction to a dealership,
where the dealer was asked to replace the missing trunk

(36:59):
panels and carpeting that had already been removed from the
back of the car because, according to Jerry, his wife
had spilled paint in the back of the car. And
so she was away, and when she got back, he
wanted to make sure that she would be nicely surprised
by the new carpeting and trunk panels. We have interviewed

(37:22):
the guy who was in charge of the service area
of that car dealership and who has never forgotten this
car coming in because he had never before seen a
car that was already stripped out. If we're assuming, I mean,
we're going to assume that they're connected to this to
her disappearance, this seems like there would be better ways
to do. I mean, why not take it to a

(37:42):
chop shop than just get rid of it and just
say it was stolen or leave it in a bad area.

Speaker 1 (37:47):
I don't know. The removing the tires, the idea that
they would be able to trace tire tracks and they
needed new tires, is that kind of it? And these
days they'd be able to pull whatever the organic material
is from in the track to figure out if they
went to a particular kind of park or a forest.
So still, it seems a.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
Lot chemical analysis in the gravel, you know, that would
be caught up in the tires. I mean, so you
have to remember, as I said before, Jerry's closest friend,
or one of his very closest friends, was a Corsicana
police officer named Lewis Pelos. Lewis had until recently been

(38:27):
the interim police chief in Corsicana while cours Kana went
underwent some major racial upheaval due to the death of
a young man in the hands of the police. So
all that summer long, Corsicana had been having riots, serious
unrest marches from the KKK and the Dallas Black Panthers.

(38:49):
Huge deal. All of this happened right in the middle
of all that racial unrest. Lewis had already heard that
Shelley was missing, but he did not file a missing
person's report until the following Thursday, after the car had
gone to College station and gotten the trunklinings, etc. Replaced,

(39:14):
at which point he filed a missing person's report through
the Corsicana police system, but not using the usual protocol,
which was to write it up and send it to records,
who would then register and circulate this missing person's report

(39:34):
and then send it on through the proper pathways. Lewis
did all that himself. He was no longer the interim
police chief because a brand new police chief had been
hired from outside the community because of the racial unrest.
Whether he resented that or not, we will never know,
But he did not inform his superior that Shelley was missing,

(39:57):
and in fact it was not a and within the
jurisdiction of the police department. It was a county matter
because it was.

Speaker 1 (40:05):
Outside the city limits of course, at cana Wow.

Speaker 2 (40:10):
So it was not until the following Sunday, a week
after Shelley had vanished, that the police chief found out
that she was missing it all, at which point he
blew a gasket and he was, as he states it
in our podcast in our interviews with him, he was
absolutely livid with Lewis. He immediately turned the case over

(40:33):
to the Sheriff's department of the county, Navarro County, and
they immediately started investigating, checking with the two little businesses
up and.

Speaker 1 (40:43):
Down that area of I forty five to see if
they had seen anything of Shelley that night, checking to
see where she could have gone, checking all the motels
to see if she had registered somewhere. Her credit cards
had not been used at all, Her purse was missing,
she had evaporated, she had disappeared. When is she finally

(41:06):
discovered and how because this is just awful. I mean,
the discovery of where she is is just awful.

Speaker 2 (41:13):
Twenty four hours later, three fishermen were fishing in the
Trinity River, not terribly far from this one bridge that
bisects the two counties, because Navara County is on one
side of the Trinity River and Henderson County, the county
seat of which is Athens, Texas, is on the other
side of the river on this bridge. And the bridge

(41:35):
is not terribly far from the little farmhouse where Jerry
grew up until his thirteenth year, and where his cop
friend pay Loss had also been born and grown up.
Three fishermen are fishing in that part of the Trinity
when all of a sudden they happened to see in
the evening light this package that's drifting towards them, and

(41:59):
they don't know what it is, so they hook it
and they pull it towards where they are, and they
had been on the Henderson County side of the river,
and they discover that it is a woman's body wrapped
in black plastic construction tarp and sealed all the way
round with silver duct tape and chained and roped to

(42:24):
two concrete construction blocks, two cinder blocks, and the body
has risen from where it obviously had been dropped in
and anchored under the surface of the trinity. Wow, because
decomp gases have finally brought it to the surface.

Speaker 1 (42:41):
I don't think people understand that. I talked to Paul
Holes on Buried Bones about that. Sometimes, you know, like
I mean, even even concrete weighing it down. When your
body decomposes and it fills with gas, it pushes it
up to the surface. It just does. It's very powerful.
So I don't think people think that through sometimes when
they think water is going to be the perfect way

(43:02):
and the personal just sink to the bottom and that's it,
they almost always come to the top, guess, And in
this particular case, it could have been avoided. Shelley was
a very tiny woman.

Speaker 2 (43:11):
She was not a large woman at all, and so
I'm sure they assumed this is going to take care
of it. Yeah, they obviously they being whoever killed her,
and whoever then helped the killer dispose of her body
by preparing it so carefully.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
They had obviously received really.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Good, almost professionally you might say, forensic advice. Except for
one detail and that is if they had penetrated the
abdominal cavity with some sharp object, those decomp gases could
have been released and the body would not have surfaced. Okay,
so she is discovered, and I am assuming her brother

(43:53):
and sister are just wrecked in Georgia and Atlanta, right.

Speaker 1 (43:57):
And her mother and her father and her grandmother who
lives in Florida. They are all freaking out because she
has vanished. They don't know where she is.

Speaker 2 (44:08):
They have been calling and calling and calling constantly. At first,
Jerry had called her sister and let Sandy know that
Shelley was missing. But then after that crickets. So they're frantic.
They're absolutely frantic. And then finally after Shelley's body is

(44:29):
discovered on this Monday evening, a week and a day
after she vanished, and the authorities have been alerted and
her body is taken to Dallas to the medical examiner
there for autopsy, and her cause of death is being
analyzed and she has been identified with through dental records.

(44:49):
You know, absolutely ascertained this is Shelley Watkins. Finally, on Wednesday,
Sandy gets a phone call from Carmack, Jerry's father and
she answers the phone, and she has put in call
after call to Watkin's construction, to Jerry, to Carmack, to
the home, everybody that she could talk with, and has

(45:12):
gotten nothing. Carmak finally calls her, and she picks up
the phone and answers it. Right is her own six
year old daughter, who has just started first grade, is
entering the house from her day at school, and who
sees her mother answer the phone and sees her mother's
face as Carmack says to Sandy, goddamn, they found the body.

(45:36):
And that's how Sandy finds out what's happened to her sister.
That's awful and she is devastated. And her daughter, Courtney,
who is now a surgeon at Chicago Medical Center, has
been influenced her entire life, has been shaped her entire
life by this moment in her life when she saw

(45:58):
her mother absolutely cave and heard a sound come from
her mother that she'd never heard before.

Speaker 1 (46:04):
Have they figured out at any point a cause of
death for Shelley? Oh? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
The autopsy report was quite conclusive, even though the state
of decomposition made some things difficult. She had been struck
on the head violently a minimum of eight times on
the back of her head, so that she did not
actually have a skull fracture. But we have interviewed the

(46:30):
current medical examiner extensively who analyzed the entire autopsy report
for us, and he said that he thinks probably she
had a brain bleeds.

Speaker 1 (46:42):
So is the new sheriff, I mean must be of
course alarmed by this. First of all, he has you know,
payless not doing what he was supposed to do. And
now this turns out to be a murder victim who
has a tough relationship with her husband, and she's the
mother of two small children and her family is out
of town. Are the Watkins family immediately suspects in this case?

(47:06):
In short, yes, at this point it's not a new share.
He was a new sheriff, he'd only been a sheriff
for eight months. But the police chief was the real
newbie got it and he had already turned it over
to the county, so it wasn't his case. So they
immediately start asking questions in the twenty four hours if

(47:26):
they had the case. But the irony is that after
her body was discovered, it suddenly became the jurisdiction of
the next County over. Oh yeah, because the bridge, stupid bridge, right,
not just the bridge, but for the simple reason that
these three fishermen towed her over to the Henderson County side.

(47:49):
I think that at that point.

Speaker 2 (47:50):
In fact, I know for a fact because I've talked
to someone who was working there. The entire Navara County
Sheriff's Department breathed a huge sire of relief because the
level of nepotism and influence that would have been present
had they had to continue investigating this case on their own,

(48:11):
would have been appalling.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
Because Corsicana is in Navara, right county. Corsicana is the
county seat of Navara County. Does Henderson County have any
strong ties to the Watkins family only in the sense
that the Watkins, you know, do jobs there, construction jobs
there from time to time. Okay, so we have Henderson
now in charge, and the Watkins family's response to all

(48:36):
of this is what Jerry says. We got into an
argument and she took off, and I really don't know
anything else after that, and there's no physical proof of anything,
so that's it correct.

Speaker 2 (48:47):
So what happens after that is that the circumstantial evidence
starts mounting up the fact that he'd already gotten the
car grooms the way he did, the fact that he
went to two different cities in order to get that,
taken care of the fact that she wasn't reported missing
for so long, the fact that, you know, after vanishing

(49:09):
so utterly, his explanation for what probably happened to her
was that she must have gotten picked up by somebody
on I forty five and they did this to her,
which happens because the I forty five killings are famous.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Oh yeah, and that happens in this section, not in
this section. And therefore nobody, because this was before viper
got established with the FBI, nobody was cross communicating about
the serial deaths happening in that part of I forty
five and this particular killing which happened right next to
I forty five, So there was no there was no

(49:46):
sort of inter information going on, pulling the information going
on as would occur later, and no real county to
county communication going on at the time either. And just
a quick note when we say the killing fields, it's
well known in Texas. It's a kind of a cord
of the I forty five corridor. I think around Houston,

(50:06):
the Houston area and which since the seventies have been
more than thirty bodies female bodies have been found. It's controversial,
is this the responsibility of one person or however many
you know, there's just so many theories up in the air.
But it's very famous that phrase, the killing fields of
I forty five and the.

Speaker 2 (50:24):
Big difference between that particular series of murders where bodies
were simply left in the fields, left in the ditches,
just completely dumped, abandoned, with no preparation. Nothing was that
Shelley was discovered prepackaged. Yeah, the kind of body.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
Disposal using materials commonly found at a construction company. Nothing
unique though, right, there was nothing that they could pull
directly from Watkins Construction Company.

Speaker 2 (50:52):
Okay, no, Unfortunately, because these materials were commonplace, Watkins Construction
Company was right to cross I forty five from the
Watkins house. Hmm hm, that's where it's located to this day.

Speaker 1 (51:07):
Tell me the evidence, you know, we have the circumstantial evidence,
which is they had a bad marriage that you know,
they argued, he admitted, you know, he gave inconsistent stories
that the White BMW underwent a huge overhaul this material
that could have been found at their place. Nobody else
probably had acrimony with Shelley, and I'm sure there were

(51:29):
people who would be willing to talk about that. The friend,
the cop paylists, who went through the wrong channels to
report her missing and delayed reporting her. Missy and Jerry
didn't report her missing for days and days and days.
But there's no physical evidence, right, there's no blood, there's
Is there anything that could tie directly to him, Yes,

(51:51):
but it's murky.

Speaker 2 (51:53):
So the fact of that delay is unconscoonable because that delay,
of course cloud any sort of quick investigation trying to
trace her, trace anybody who might have done this to her.
The delay you really could look at as deliberate, as
a deliberate sabotage of any traceable materials.

Speaker 1 (52:15):
The fact that all the house lights.

Speaker 2 (52:17):
Were on all night, and when I say the house lights,
we're not just talking about the house, We're talking about
the floodlights outside, the lights around the pool, etc. It
has been suggested to me by a law enforcement officer
who had close connection to this case that they were
making sure they hadn't missed anything, but they did apparently

(52:40):
miss something. It took two months for the Henderson County
investigator and the Texas Ranger who were the chief investigators
for this case, to gather enough circumstantial evidence to be
able to get a search warrant and go search the
Watkins home.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
How long did it take to two months? Why? Because Henderson,
the why is such a big question, but that is
that is what it took. And that was after That
was after extensive questioning of witnesses, neighbors, all kinds of people.
That was after gathering, you know, having another Texas ranger
go speak to the car dealership in College Station and

(53:22):
questioned the service manager there. That was after a lot
of footwork that these two guys did, and they finally
had gathered enough circumstantial evidence to justify a search of
the Watkins house because Jerry had absolutely refused any search
of the house up until then. Now, during that interim,

(53:48):
Jerry had not been living at the house. He had
left his two daughters with his sister in Corsicana and
he had been staying with his parents. Apparently, people will
go and check on the house, including his brother Ronnie,
but nobody was actually living there. However, during that period
between Shelley's recovery retrieval and the search warrant getting executed,

(54:13):
The garage floor got repainted and the circular driveway got
re cemented. That must have infuriated the Texas Rangers because
they're independent, I mean, they're brought in usually when the
local agency can't handle it and they need a bigger
you know, they need a bigger presence, they need more
resources and stuff, and so that must have just really

(54:34):
pissed them off.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Well, it did piss them off a whole lot. But
they did bring in luminol. Okay, they searched the house.
They could not find anything, of course, because you know,
after two months, what were the chances. But luminol detected
blood spots beneath the newly painted surface of the garage.

(54:57):
It also detected a blood smear by the front door,
the door knob. Now, what I was told was that,
and I've interviewed a luminol expert, done a lot of
research on this, but what I was told was that
because the blood had obviously been cleaned before the garage

(55:18):
floor surface was repainted and the luminol was detected under
the paint, the luminol wound up diluting the blood stains
enough so that now I don't know if Bluestar does
that now or not, that the degree of dilution and deterioration,
you know, would cause a problem, But it was enough

(55:39):
so that they could not determine exactly how old those
blood spots were.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
And they can't test it for DNA, can they? Well
back then, no, no, oh, yeah, you're right ninety three?
Well okay, And he could have just said, I cut myself.
What do you want me to do? I mean, you know,
I work with tools, that's my job. The bottom line
was that at that was not going to be very
serviceable for a trial. However, the witness who by then

(56:08):
had come forward and said that he had seen a
white expensive car on the bridge at four thirty that morning,
the same bridge that spans the Trinity River, and that
there was a guy outside the car, and he described
the guy, and he looked at a photo lineup and

(56:28):
picked out Jerry Mack, who was a very distinctive looking person.
I have to say, he's quite tall, so he was identified.
It sounds like as positively as you can. But four
in the morning, four thirty, he's on his way to work.

Speaker 2 (56:42):
Yeah, he's driving by and he passes his car, and
he sees the car in the distance. He gets up
upon it on the bridge, he sees the guy. He's
doing something. He can't tell what the guy's doing. And
then he keeps going to work because he works on
the Henderson County side of the river.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
And he identifies Jerry. Suddenly there's an eyewitness. But a
defense attorney could say it was dark, he didn't know
what he was looking for. He didn't know Jerry, like
he couldn't say, I know that guy. He went to
my wedding kind of thing. So a defense attorney could say,
how good dry sight? Were you wearing glasses? Were you distracted?
But I know what you're saying. But that seems like
a good piece of evidence, But I'm thinking of the

(57:19):
way a defense attorney would handle.

Speaker 2 (57:21):
It, which is exactly why they were having to really
be careful about that witness, because the defense attorney who
had been hired was famous for making a practice of
ripping eyewitnesses apart on the stand. The defense attorney was
this guy named Jack Zimmerman from Houston, very famous lawyer.

(57:43):
He had defended some really high profile clients, and suddenly
he was the mouthpiece for Jerry mcwawkins. So the prosecution
was very aware that this could be a problem. Nonetheless,
when the case finally went for the last time before
the grand jury in December of nineteen ninety three, they

(58:05):
indicted Jerry macwatkins on the murder charge of his wife
on the basis of all that circumstantial evidence and a
lot of different witnesses and witness testimony in the grand jury,
there's a.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
Bombshell and there was no trial.

Speaker 2 (58:22):
What happened was that the fairly new newly elected district attorney,
whose name was Eray Andrews, was really pushing for the
indictment and really pushing for the case. Meanwhile, he himself
was a real problem guy. He had a lot of
bad habits and as it turns out, he was very corrupt.

(58:42):
So the following July, the case was slated for August
fifteenth of nineteen ninety four. That was the date Jerry
mack was going to trial. In the previous month, the
DA got involved in a potential bribery scheme to make
the case go away. And because the bribery scheme and

(59:05):
the two adulthood guys who were supposedly his accomplices and
supposedly had lured him into this as a means of
making a whole bunch of money to pay off his debts,
of which he had many. They wound up contacting Jerry Mac.
Jerry Mac wound up taking this to the FBI. The

(59:27):
FBI got involved the bribery scheme wound up causing these
two guys to get arrested. But the DA had already
told them that he could no longer be involved in
the bribery scheme because the Texas State Attorney General was
requiring him to step down from his office and resign

(59:48):
on August fifteenth, the same day the trial was supposed
to start for other malfeasance. Is that he had already
been caught.

Speaker 1 (59:57):
Wow, I mean, is there no good politician in Texas
in this time period? Good question.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
So consequently, the DA had to step down, and that
gave Jack Zimmerman the opportunity to claim that the case
was tainted and that the indictment should be quashed. And
that was one of his claims, on the grounds that
the DA had been pursuing the case in the first
place in order to make money.

Speaker 1 (01:00:26):
Yeah. So then is it my guest that whoever takes
over being the DA declines to file charges again or
gets another indictment.

Speaker 2 (01:00:34):
It has not yet gone to another indictment. We are
hoping that that's going to happen. Well, I saw Carmack
died six years ago. Carmack did, But Jerry Mack's very
much alive. What about Norma Jean? Is she still around?
She's gone? Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
And then Ronnie, that's a big question. Ronnie's out of
the picture.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Ronnie's I mean, this is Jerry Mack Okay and his
fourth wife Kay.

Speaker 1 (01:00:58):
Do they have the kids or no? Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
Kay had always wanted children, she couldn't have them. She
had always been so sad, so sad that she couldn't
have children. She had made it clear that she would
love to raise Ashley and Lane should anything ever happen
to Shelley.

Speaker 1 (01:01:20):
Wow, did you guys get any shit for this podcast
or for your book or anything? I mean, this must
have been really polarizing for Corsicana. It's very polarizing.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
There are a few people who are very much pro
Jerry and pro Jerry and Kay, and then there are
people who absolutely have believed this. So there are people
who very much would like to see consequences finally occur,
But the nature of Corsicana has kept everybody very close mouthed.

(01:01:52):
They're afraid of retaliation, or that they've got businesses that
the Watkins who have an enormous amount of money, enormous
amount of money, the businesses that they patronize. You know,
nobody wants to risk any of that. Yeah, and the
town's been gaslighted for a very long time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:11):
If you were a betting woman, what would you say,
the chances are that this is going to end up
at trials someday.

Speaker 2 (01:02:19):
I am at the moment betting yes, And I'll tell
you why they have DNA.

Speaker 1 (01:02:25):
Oh good on what.

Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
Back in twenty nineteen, Body Hillhouse, the current sheriff of
Henderson County, attended a sheriff's conference here in Austin and said,
I've got two cold cases that have been bugging me
and have haunted my predecessor, who was the sheriff ranger
on the case and then became the sheriff and I
was his deputy, And can you suggest ways in which

(01:02:52):
we can keep pursuing these cases? The other sheriffs he
consulted said, if you still have all the evidence, you
need to send it off to this lab in California. Well,
the lab has been finally able to retrieve touch DNA
from the evidence.

Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
They have a profile.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
They took Jerry max DNA researched him. His profile does
not match the DNA profile found in the evidence. We
think very strongly. I think most people think that it
matches the DNA of somebody, a particular person who they

(01:03:31):
had not yet gotten DNA from. I've had a recent
conversation with the current investigator on the case, and it said,
you need to go get this person's DNA. Other things
have now arisen enough interesting conversations have occurred between this
person and other people in bars. This person's life is

(01:03:51):
an example of having spent the thirty years deeper and
deeper into alcohol and not able to get beyond the
you need to retrieve his DNA.

Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
Is this somebody we've talked about? This is somebody who
is very close to Jerry himself. Okay, well, this has
been a hell of a journey, Carol, good Lord. I
mean for a painter, turn novelist, turn nonfiction, you know,
turn podcast or you've been so busy and this sounds
like you and Wes have done just a tremendous amount

(01:04:24):
of research and reporting on this story.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
Well, thank you, Yeah, we have. We've done a huge
amount of digging. We are still getting information coming in daily.
We have completed episode ten of our ten episode podcast,
and yet literally all day long, every day, people are
continuing to come forward, and we ask and beg them
to please do so, because every little bit helps. We

(01:04:50):
have gotten all kinds of new leads. There are more
people who know things, and we are receiving indications of that,
and that's all I can say for now.

Speaker 1 (01:05:11):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast, Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.

(01:05:35):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark. Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold More Wicked,
and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod.