HIGHWAY OF HELL IN HOUSTON

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
But we're gonna be looking at something happening over in Texas.
It's a stretch of interstate from Houston down to the
Gulf called the Texas Killing Fields. It's also dubbed the
Highway to Hell. This is a story from ABC thirteen.
The writers Courtney Fisher. More than seven hundred people are
missing from Houston, Texas and the surrounding town. Women under
thirty five years old make up a third of that,

(00:22):
so two thirds are not women. You've never heard of
most of them because their stories don't make the headlines.
Hope Ann Moore disappeared decades ago, leaving behind a husband
who detective thinks knows more than he's letting on. Princess
Blue is a woman with no name, just bones, and
remains in a high school class ring someone misses her.

(00:43):
Someone knows what happened. Then there's also Augrey Lee Cook,
who murdered and dumped in the infamous Texas Killing Fields.
And these women are missing, just like all the other
individuals down there in the Killing Fields. It's been since
gen women began turning up dead off the stretches of
I forty five between Houston and Galveston. A marshy desolate

(01:07):
region near the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty bodies have been
discovered there since the nineteen seventies, again about third female,
two thirds males. Then eighties and nineties tragically saw new
waves of bodies, and some of these cases formed the
focus of a new Netflix series investigating what has become
the Texas killing Fields. Tim Miller has been looking for

(01:31):
answers since his daughter disappeared in eighty six, even founding
an equine search group that has assisted in hundreds of cases.
The father of victim highty five, also whose body was
found months after her nineteen eighty three disappearance, devoted himself
to his own detective work, recording hours and hours of interviews.
He turned it over to the FBI after his heart

(01:52):
has broken death. The mother of twenty twelve year old
Lois Smither, who was murdered in nineteen ninety seven, one
long time suspect was Robert Abel, was fatally hit by
a train in what might have been a suicide. Despite
being cleared by police, and despite apologies from mister Miller,
for example, who thought him guilty for years, ongoing tragedy
and horror weave unrelenting paths of the Decus series. The

(02:13):
Killing Fields themselves, however, constitute another character, and a very
foreboding one, and that was deliberate according to the program's creators.
So you can see some of this on the Netflix special.
So the possibility of more than one killer has been considered,
and given recent developments, appears to be probably the reality
of it. There's been eleven girls that vanished in the

(02:35):
nineteen seventies and the majority of those cases remained unsolved.
Forensic Genealogy named some of them, Audi Lee Cook, Donna
Prudholm who were killed in the eighties and found in
the calder Road area of the Killing Fields. And there's
a lot more. They believe there are more bodies out there.

(02:56):
Each decade has its own you can say serial killer.
It's not like there was actually three killers operating over
thirty years, and maybe there was. It's like one in
the seventies, there's one in the eighties, there's one as
the nineties. That's possible, very possible. The police obviously know
more about the modus operandi that was used, so they
would know to be able to see if this is
actually the same killer or not. The signatures would kind

(03:18):
of give them that in clue of what's happening, so
they'll probably know more. So it's very possible that at
the killing fields there are probably multiple serial killers, but
again we don't really know. We do find that in
one case in nineteen ninety seven, a nineteen year old

(03:41):
Texas woman, Sandra Sepal sap aug H, was abducted by
a man posing as a Good Samaritan, which she got
a flat tire, he forced her into his truck a
knife point in Florida down I forty five. Mister Paul
threw herself from the moving vehicle, believe it or not not,
to the highway, where passerbys picked up the injured young mother,
who evidence put William Reese behind bars for kidnapping for

(04:02):
sixty years. DNA evidence later connected him to the nineteen
ninety seven murder of Tiffany Johnson, which landed him on
death row in that state, and we did see this
pattern decades ago about serial killers using highways to find
their victims. He also confessed later to the killings of
Laura Smither, Kelly Cox, and Jessica Kaine, leading authorities to
the latter two girls' bodies. Resentleaded guilty to all three murders, though, however,

(04:27):
he was in prison during the eighties when Heidi villarel
Phi and Laura Miller, and then unidentified Adderley Cook and
Donna were discovered suspicion instead Senator another man, Clyde Hedrick,
who was convicted of the nineteen eighty four killing of
a thirty year old woman. Hedrick lived in the same
street as the Miller's and was known to frequent the
bar where Heidi Fi worked in crime Scene, the Netflix

(04:47):
special his ex wife's daughter outlines Hedrick's prepredatory behavior. Hedrick
served only eight years of a twenty year sentence for
Miss Beeson's death. He was paroled last year at sixty seven,
actually a bet four years ago. Tim Miller fully believes
the convicted killers responsible for his Dallar's murder and won
in one wrongful death suit against him in twenty fourteen,
but Hendrick has never faced charges in connection with any

(05:10):
killing Field's deaths, So again, there's a lot going on.
FBI special agent Renaissan has been looking at the cases
since he began as a career in laws enforcement. He
seems haunted by the unsolved deaths as well. The twenty
nineteen identifications of the latter two victims to spend decades.
Jane and Janet Doe offered hope of new revelations and

(05:32):
I think with the genealogy in the DNA, they'll be
able to find these killers eventually