‘Deliver Us’

By Kathryn Casey. HarperCollins, 368 pp., $7.99

Weeks of storms soaked the tree-rimmed clearing in League City, carving puddles several inches deep. Yet Kathryn Casey ventured into the muck on a recent afternoon, braced against the rain and cold with a black raincoat and umbrella.

Her somber attire seemed appropriate as she trudged toward four crosses planted in the field, lonely memorials to the young women whose bodies were found nearby, decades ago.

This area off Calder Drive is known as the “Texas killing fields,” part of a swampy stretch along busy Interstate 45 where more than 20 girls and women died mysteriously during three decades. The Houston Chronicle and Galveston’s Daily News ran full-page charts with maps and photos of the female victims, mostly teenagers, who were strangled, shot or savagely beaten. These charts haunted Casey, a true crime and mystery writer who moved to the Houston area in 1981. She spent three years researching these murders for her new book, “Deliver Us: Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45/Texas Killing

Fields.”

Some parents of the victims told Casey their greatest anguish came from not knowing if their daughters were dead or alive. In those cases, finding the bodies offered families a terrible kind of relief. At least they knew their girls were no longer suffering.

“Deliver Us” describes 19 local murder cases, from 1971 through the 1990s. Although a few of the prime suspects have been imprisoned for other crimes, most of these murders remain unsolved, unresolved and untried in court.

“There were other murders I didn’t put in the book because I couldn’t find enough information about them,” Casey explains. “I tried to keep to the charts in the newspapers. ... I had to limit it because the sad truth is there are a lot of girls being killed out there, and a lot of boys, too.” Four corpses

The League City “killing fields” sit behind the Magnolia Creek Baptist Church on Calder Drive. Four female corpses were found here between 1983 and 1991, back when people dumped trash and building materials in the abandoned oil field. Tim Miller planted the first cross here around Christmas 1986, more than two years after his daughter, Laura Lynn Miller, disappeared after using a pay phone at a nearby convenience store. She was 16. Her body was found in the clearing in February 1986.

“They kept Laura’s remains for three years before we could bury her,” says Miller, 68, “so there wasn’t a cemetery plot or headstone. That was Laura’s little spot.”

Devastated by the loss of his daughter, Miller founded Texas Equusearch, a nonprofit whose mission is to return the missing back to their loved ones. In addition to searching with horses, the company uses boats, ATVs, helicopters, pretty much any vehicle at their disposal. To date, Equusearch has found 188 deceased victims and many missing persons still alive.

“I never wanted to start Equusearch,” Miller confides. “I really didn’t. I’d go out to that place on Calder Drive and I’d stand in front of her cross and break down and say, ‘Laura, I can’t come here anymore. I’ve got to get on with my life.’ I’d be walking away, and I’d hear a voice that said, ‘Don’t quit, daddy.’”

Last September, the 30th anniversary of Laura’s disappearance, Miller and his Equusearch volunteers wrapped the trees surrounding the crosses with gold ribbons tagged with the names of missing persons. The ribbons and tags still are here, weary survivors of the elements. Miller and his crew also planted crosses for the other three bodies found in clearing.

Heide Villareal Fye, a 25-yearold waitress and bartender, left her parents house in Dickinson on Oct. 7, 1983, to hitch a ride to Houston to see her boyfriend. The following April, her corpse was found in the clearing.

The other two bodies here have never been identified; their crosses read Jane Doe and Janet Doe. But Mark Roland Stallings, already sentenced to life behind bars for a series of crimes, remains a prime suspect in the Janet Doe murder and two other murders in Fort Bend County.

Stallings was one of three men Casey interviewed in prison for her book. He told her he killed the woman now identified as Janet Doe, a teenage prostitute he strangled and dumped in the clearing.

“He was terrifying,” says Casey, 64, who is married and lives in northwest Houston. “He’s kept in a small prison in Woodville. He just sat there and in a very matter-of-fact tone told me why he murdered these women. He said these women didn’t count. They didn’t matter. He felt entitled, and he was unremorseful.” Serial killer on the island?

In the 1970s, 11 murders of teenage and adolescent girls in Galveston left law enforcement and citizens wondering if a serial killer was stalking the island. Nearly all the bodies were found in or near water, which washed away evidence, and many were found with bound hands and feet, naked from the waist down. This was an era when girls and boys hitchhiked, when young people were more likely to venture off on their own. Although Michael Lloyd Self was convicted of murdering one of the teens — Sharon Shaw, last seen Aug. 4, 1971 on Galveston’s Seawall Boulevard with Rhonda “Renee” Johnson, who was also killed — many believe Self did not commit the crime. He died in prison in 2000.

But Edward Harold Bell, now serving a life sentence for the murder of a man named Larry Dickens (who intervened when he found Bell masturbating in front of a group of girls in Pasadena), told several people — including district attorneys, Casey and Houston Chronicle investigative reporter Lise Olsen — that he murdered as many as 11 girls in Galveston, starting with Colette Wilson in 1971.

“It did look like those 11 in Galveston were probably one killer, but you just don’t know,” Casey says. “These cases felt like I was walking on quicksand. I didn’t have solid footing. I would have to back up and say: What do I know? What I know is that Bell was there during that era, and he had mutual connections with these girls where they might have felt safe enough to get into his vehicle. And he says he did it. He told me what the girls were wearing. He remembered that Maria Johnson had on a maroon top. He remembered everything Colette had on the day she was killed; her mom couldn’t tell me what she had on.”

Galveston police officer Fred Paige pushed hard to reopen the case and try Bell, but as Casey writes: “Court decisions decreed that without corroborating evidence, a confession wasn’t sufficient evidence of guilt. What if the confessor was delusional?”

Bell, who was featured on the TV series “Unsolved Mysteries,” says he’s the victim of a brainwashing “program” that forced him to kill.

“I saw Bell twice and then we wrote for a year and a half,” Casey says. “He’s in his 70s now. It was kind of like interviewing a person who’s a cross between Anthony Hopkins in ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and Jack Nicholson in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ He was just totally out there but at the same time very frightening and very dangerous.” The dawn of DNA evidence

“Deliver Us” spans decades that have witnessed a revolution in the way law enforcement gathers and processes evidence.

“The first murder case I ever covered was back in the ‘80s; a body had been out in a field for two weeks, and they couldn’t even type the blood,” says Casey, a former journalist who wrote crime stories for national magazines before she turned to books. “Then for a long time they had to have a lot of remains in order to pull DNA. But now they can do it with little microscopic bits of it.”

One case Casey describes in the book was solved decades after the crime, thanks to a reexamination of DNA evidence and the tenacity of a Chambers County evidence officer named Sherry Willcox.

Krystal Jean Baker, 13, left her grandmother’s Texas City home on March 6, 1996, to walk to a friend’s house. Later that evening in Anahuac, the body of a young girl was found under the bridge where I-10 jumps the Trinity River. It took weeks for law enforcement agencies to put two and two together, but the killer remained at large for years.

“The first time they sent her clothing out, they didn’t find anything they could use on it,” Casey says. “The fabric reflected. It was hard to see anything. Back then they didn’t have the same solutions they have now to look for bodily fluids. It was really (Chambers County’s evidence officer) Sherry Willcox, who found a way to resubmit the clothing in 2009, who ended up solving the case. “

DNA found on Krystal’s clothing matched Kevin Edison Smith, who confessed to the killing and is now behind bars.

“You know there have to be remains from the other girls that could be tested,” Casey says. “I know Galveston has flooded repeatedly over the years, and I know they’ve moved things in and out to avoid flooding. It’s an unwieldly task to look for this stuff. But they have Ed Bell raising his hand saying ‘I did it.’ Not once, but repeatedly.”

Tim Miller believes he knows who murdered his daughter, Laura: Clyde Edwin Hedrick, who was sentenced in 2014 to 20 years for the manslaughter of Ellen Beason.

“It’s been a 30-year challenge,” Miller says. “I think about Laura every day. There will always be an empty plate at the dinner table.”

So many of the murders remain unsolved — or unresolved — because so many law enforcement agencies were involved, Casey says.

“Those little agencies that are all piled up around each other, they didn’t compare notes,” Casey says. “There were egos involved. They didn’t share information.”

That’s one reason Casey pulled all the details together and put them in “Deliver Us.” She hopes the book will help.

“This is my 11th book,” Casey says. “It was the hardest to write, and it took the longest. I’m proud of it, but I’m not always happy I did it. I think it changed me as a person. I’m more cautious. I’ve always been kind of a worrier but I worry more now. Every once in awhile I’ll see some girl walking along a highway, and I’ll want to pull over and tell her not to do that. But I can’t. They’d lock me up.”

maggie.galehouse@chron.com