The murder of Mary Horton Vail

This case was solved by a reporter and a mother, not by a single piece of forensic evidence. After Mary Vail's death in 1962 no charge was brought. The death was ruled an accidental drowning, and the district attorney said there was not enough evidence to prosecute. Accounts differ on whether a grand jury ever considered it. In 2010 the mother of Annette Craver Vail, who had disappeared in 1984, telephoned Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger and asked whether he would write about a serial killer living in Mississippi, according to Mitchell. She had collected records on all three women. His article of about 9,000 words ran in November 2012. The series quoted a pathologist who said photographs in Mary Vail's autopsy report indicated homicide, citing bruises on the neck and legs and four inches of a scarf in her mouth, and Mitchell then sent the autopsy to the forensic pathologist Michael Baden. Calcasieu Parish authorities reopened the case after a re-examination of the autopsy report. Coroner Terry Welke reviewed the photographs and classified the death a homicide. Felix Vail, who had moved to Canyon Lake, Texas, was arrested there in May 2013 and indicted in June. At trial in August 2016 the state relied on Welke, on Baden, who told jurors Mary was knocked unconscious and had a scarf tied around her neck and put in her mouth before she entered the river, and on three witnesses who said Vail had admitted killing her. The trial judge allowed the jury to hear about the disappearances of Sharon Hensley and Annette Vail, and the 3rd Circuit upheld that ruling in 2014. Prosecutor Hugo Holland credited Mitchell and Annette's mother with keeping the case alive. The jury convicted Vail on August 12, 2016. The 3rd Circuit rejected his appeal in December 2017, finding that his admissions taken together were confessions and direct evidence, and the Louisiana Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2018.