Solved cold cases in Texas
8 documented cases.
Carla Jan Walker
Carla Jan Walker, 17, was abducted on February 17, 1974 from a bowling alley parking lot in Fort Worth, Texas, and her body was found in a culvert near Benbrook Lake three days later. The case stayed cold for 46 years until DNA from her clothing was analyzed by the forensic lab Othram, which used forensic-grade genome sequencing and genetic genealogy to identify Glen Samuel McCurley. McCurley was charged in September 2020, pleaded guilty in August 2021, was sentenced to life without parole, and died in a Texas prison in July 2023.
Diane Maxwell
Diane Maxwell, a 25-year-old Southwestern Bell telephone operator and single mother, was abducted on December 14, 1969, as she arrived for work in Houston, Texas. She was forced into a nearby shack, raped, strangled, and stabbed to death; her killer fled in her Ford Mustang, which was abandoned about a mile away with the keys still in the ignition. Houston police lifted several latent fingerprints from the car but never matched them, and the case went cold for more than three decades. The victim's brother, David Maxwell, who became a Texas Ranger, pushed for the file to be reopened. On July 23, 2003, Texas Department of Public Safety latent print technician Jill Kinkade submitted the prints to the FBI's national IAFIS database; within five hours the system returned 20 candidates, and Kinkade identified the number-one candidate, James Ray Davis, a career criminal who had been released from prison just days before the murder. Confronted with the fingerprint evidence and crime-scene photographs, Davis confessed; DNA testing later confirmed he had also raped her. He was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to life in prison on November 24, 2003, and died behind bars on June 14, 2007. The FBI later honored the investigators with its 2011 Latent Hit of the Year Award.
Inez Deaton
Inez Deaton, a 20-year-old wife and the mother of a two-year-old girl, was found dead on the slope of a bayou in Houston, Texas, on May 27, 1979. She had been stabbed with an ice pick and sexually assaulted. A few days earlier she had stopped at a house next door to where Danny Paul Bible lived to use the telephone, and a neighbor saw her go into Bible's house. Around the time of her funeral, Bible left. The killing went unsolved for about twenty years. In November 1998 Bible attacked a woman in a hotel room in Louisiana and was arrested in Florida. In December 1998 he told Louisiana detectives that he had killed Deaton, then gave two tape-recorded statements, the first confessing to her death. Harris County indicted him for capital murder in March 2001. A federal judge later wrote that, apart from his behavior after she vanished, only his confession connected him to the killing. A jury convicted him in June 2003 and sentenced him to death. Courts rejected his appeals, and he was executed by lethal injection in Huntsville on June 27, 2018, at 66.
Irene Garza
Irene Garza, a 25-year-old second-grade teacher, drove to Sacred Heart Church in McAllen, Texas, for confession on the evening of April 16, 1960, the night before Easter, and never came home. Her body was found in a McAllen irrigation canal five days later. An autopsy found she had been struck on the head, raped while unconscious and suffocated. The visiting priest who spoke to her that night, John Feit, then 27, was the main suspect within weeks, but he was never charged at the time and his religious order moved him out of Texas. In 2002 a former monk and a retired priest each told investigators that Feit had admitted the killing to them in the early 1960s. A 2004 grand jury declined to indict. After a new district attorney took office, Feit was arrested in Arizona in 2016, and on December 7, 2017, a Hidalgo County jury convicted him of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison and died in custody in February 2020, aged 87, while appealing.
Jessica Cain
Jessica Cain, 17, of Tiki Island, Texas, left a Bennigan's restaurant in the Clear Lake area after a theater cast party on August 17, 1997 and never made it home. Her vehicle was found abandoned on Interstate 45 with her wallet inside, and volunteers searched for weeks. Tiki Island investigators soon had leads pointing to William Lewis Reece, an Oklahoma parolee who had kidnapped a 19-year-old woman in Webster that May, but nothing to charge him with. Reece got 60 years for that kidnapping in 1998, and the Cain case went cold for nearly two decades. In 2014 Oklahoma investigators retested DNA from the body of Tiffany Johnston, murdered near Oklahoma City in July 1997, and in September 2015 Reece was charged with her murder. Facing the death penalty, he began talking to the Texas Rangers. Under a deal that took death off the table in the Cain case if he led investigators to her, Reece was brought in shackles to a field in southeast Houston in February 2016. Bones were found there in March and the Harris County medical examiner identified them by DNA as Jessica's; Kelli Cox's remains were found in Brazoria County the same way. A Galveston grand jury indicted Reece on September 1, 2016. After an Oklahoma jury sentenced him to death in 2021, he was returned to Texas and on June 29, 2022 pleaded guilty to murdering Jessica Cain and Laura Smither, taking a life sentence for each.
Jim Craig Martin
Jim Craig Martin, 39, of Normangee, Leon County, Texas, vanished in early August 2007 after a night spent with Hollis Willingham and others. His silver Honda Accord was found burned out and abandoned the next day, and his body has never been found. The Texas Rangers believed he was killed and left in a rural area of Leon, Madison or Brazos County. For years there were witnesses and rumors but no charge. The Rangers featured the case in August 2018 and raised the reward to $6,000. On July 22, 2020, according to the Rangers, a Leon County grand jury indicted Willingham, then 44, of Hearne, and he was arrested. At a trial in Centerville in March and April 2022 the State relied on a woman who was in the car that morning, two jailhouse informants, a woman Willingham ran over in Normangee, and people who had heard him talk about getting rid of bodies. The State did not seek death. On April 4, 2022, a jury convicted Willingham of capital murder, and he was sentenced to life without parole. In August 2023 a Texas appeals court affirmed the conviction, finding errors in the jury charge but no harm.
Krystal Jean Baker
Krystal Jean Baker, a 13-year-old from Texas City, Texas, left her grandmother's home on the afternoon of March 5, 1996, after an argument and was abducted as she looked for a way to a friend's house. She was sexually assaulted, beaten and strangled, and her body was found that same afternoon under the Trinity River Bridge on Interstate 10 in Chambers County, roughly two hours away near the Louisiana border; she remained a Jane Doe for about two weeks before being identified. DNA from a stain on her dress could not be analyzed with 1996 technology, and the case went cold for 14 years. A Chambers County evidence officer resubmitted the dress for testing in 2009, and a usable male profile was developed. On January 14, 2010, Kevin Edison Smith was arrested on a drug charge in Livonia, Louisiana, and a DNA sample was taken under that state's collection statute and entered into CODIS; on September 15, 2010, investigators were notified that Smith's profile matched the crime-scene DNA. He was arrested for the murder on September 22, 2010, and on April 26, 2012, a Chambers County jury convicted him of capital murder in less than 40 minutes; he was sentenced to 40 years, the equivalent of life without parole under 1996 Texas law. The case inspired the Krystal Jean Baker Act, allowing DNA collection from certain felony arrestees.
Naomi Michelle Miller
Naomi Michelle Miller, a mother of two in San Angelo, Texas, was killed in December 2005, and for about a decade almost nobody asked where she was. Her husband, Robert Lamar Miller, told friends and family that she had run off with another man, and her last recorded contact with authorities was a traffic ticket on July 19, 2005. In May 2015 a relative contacted the Tom Green County Sheriff's Office, and an investigator, Billy Fiveash, began working what the sheriff's office later called a missing person case that turned into a murder investigation. Miller's own family told Fiveash that Miller had made comments about killing Naomi and hiding her body, and in June 2015 cadaver dogs alerted at a former residence, but no remains were found. On March 1, 2017 investigators interviewed a woman who had lived in the home in 2005. Miller was arrested on March 2, and on March 8 volunteers with a cadaver dog found a body about 40 inches down at the former San Angelo Speedway, which Miller had leased. A woman who had lived with the Millers, LuDonna Gail Yoder, gave a written statement describing the killing and burial and was charged on March 14. Both pleaded guilty: Miller in July 2018 in exchange for 38 years in prison, and Yoder to a sentence reported as 35 years.