Cold case gets warmer
After 40 years, a slain Houston couple finally has been identified, but where is their missing baby?
Debbie Brooks was hard at work one day back in October when her husband told her two genealogists were trying to reach her.
It was urgent, he told her. Brooks, a senior planner at a semiconductor plant in Central Florida, was thinking it had to be a scam when she responded to the call.
The genealogists had a question:
Did she have a relative who’d disappeared a long time ago?
Of course, Brooks said. Her brother, Harold Dean Clouse, had gone missing more than 40 years ago.
Hundreds of miles away, Misty Gillis had news.
“We believe we found him,” she said. “He was murdered. His body was found in 1981.”
They’d also found the body of a young woman, whom they were still trying to identify.
When he left his home in Florida to build houses in Houston, life seemed promising for Harold Dean Clouse, said his mother, Donna Casasanta.
“Junior,” as she called him, had grown up in New Smyrna, a beach town in Central Florida.
He’d been a good student, earning decent grades. He had a penchant for taking care of people, Ca
sasanta said, recalling one time when his sisters stormed in after school, upset he’d picked up a hitchhiker on the drive home.
But he was sometimes prone to poor decisions, said Brooks, his older sister. In the mid-1970s, he’d run off and joined a cult. She said he’d dabbled with drugs.
It wasn’t until he’d returned from that misadventure that he met Tina Gail Linn, his brother-inlaw’s sister.
He’d started working as a finish carpenter for homebuilders all over New Smyrna and the surrounding region.
Soon, he’d become totally infatuated with Linn, Casasanta recalled. But she didn’t realize how serious it was until he’d walked into their home with news: They’d gotten married at the courthouse the day before.
They had Hollie soon after. Family photos from that time portray a smiling, young couple cuddling a young toddler. Clouse had a shaggy, roguish haircut and three-day stubble, while Linn had long, blond-brown hair and quiet eyes.
With responsibility for a family, Clouse told his mom that he was thinking about moving to Texas.
His bosses wanted to hire him to work full time in Houston with a well-paying job. “I can take better care of Tina and the baby!” she recalled him saying.
Casasanta agreed to let him borrow — and ultimately buy — her car. He packed the family’s belongings into the vehicle, and they headed west.
For a time, letters occasionally arrived in Florida from Clouse and Linn. Then, in late 1980, the letters ceased.
A few months later, Casasanta received a call from a group of people saying they had Clouse’s car and would drive it back to her from California for $1,000.
“This is strange,” she recalled thinking.
She agreed to pay the money — then talked to police who patronized the restaurant where she worked.
A trio of women showed up with the car, dressed in religiouslooking robes. One appeared to be in her 30s; the other two seemed younger.
Casasanta begged them to let her speak to Clouse, to give her some information about her son.
They couldn’t answer any questions about Clouse or Linn, Casasanta recalled, only told her that they’d joined a religious group and were cutting ties with the family.
“That was weird,” she said. “We really got frightened, and we started searching and searching.”
Unidentified remains
On a January day in 1981, a dog in north Harris County wandered out of the woods on a block near Wallisville Road. It carried a human arm in its jaws.
That grisly finding led police to the bodies of two people: a young man, beaten to death, and a woman, who died after being strangled. The remains suggested the two people had been dead for a couple of months. Both were 5 feet, 4 inches to 5 feet, 8 inches tall and had “beautiful teeth,” a forensic investigator told the Houston Chronicle in 2011. A pair of green gym shorts and a bloody towel were found discarded near their bodies.
Their identities were a mystery. At the time, medical investigators hired a pastel artist to create sketches based on photos of the corpses — and several other unidentified bodies that police were trying to name.
The move was “probably our last shot,” the now-deceased medical investigator, Cecil Wingo, said at the time.
But their efforts were fruitless. In Florida, months stretched into years, Casasanta and the couple’s other relatives waited and wondered. They registered the couple on lists of missing persons. At first, they startled every time the phone rang, wondering if the call contained news. Every time Debbie Brooks went shopping, she watched the people around her, wondering if one of them might be Clouse.
She found herself doing double-takes as she drove down the road while passing men who resembled her brother.
Was that Junior?
“You can’t lay it down, you can’t put it to the side,” Casasanta said.
After five years and still no information, they inquired with the Social Security Administration and the Salvation Army. They made sure the couple’s names were on annual missing persons lists.
“We always hoped for the best,” said Les Linn, Tina’s brother.
But they never got any answers. “We pretty much thought they had joined this religious group and didn’t want to have contact with us,” Linn said.
Years stretched into decades. Authorities in Harris County exhumed the bodies in July 2011 to extract DNA from them — part of a broader effort to close cases that were still open but had gone cold decades before. Investigators were hoping to determine if the two were related. But that still didn’t bring any breaks in the case.
The case remained stagnant until late 2021, when employees at Identifinders International, a California-based organization that performs genetic genealogy for law enforcement, contacted the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences and asked to test the remains.
In this case, the remains were in good condition and investigators had plenty of material to work with, said Misty Gillis, one of the Identifinders investigators who worked the case. They uploaded the information to Gedmatch.com, a genealogy site that allows users to share their genetic information with law enforcement agencies across the country. (Other sites, such as 23andme or ancestry.com, do not share their information with police.)
Soon, they were able to connect Clouse’s DNA to that of close cousins living in Kentucky.
It had taken her 10 days to track down the identity of a man who’d been nameless for 40 years. She began searching for contact information for Clouse’s cousins and other relatives, trying to find out if her hunch was right.
The break in the case was the latest in an increasing number of cold cases brought to resolution with the help of new genealogical testing. In recent years, millions of people have uploaded their DNA into genealogy testing sites such as Gedmatch.com or familytreeDNA.com. The information on the sites have helped people connect with long-lost relatives and learn about their origins.
Genealogy tracing has become an increasingly popular tool with homicide investigators attempting to close long-ago murders, especially after police in California used such techniques to identify the Golden State Killer, a former police officer who became a prolific serial killer responsible for the murders of at least 13 people and the rapes of 50 women between 1973 and 1986. Texas Rangers and police in Beaumont used advanced DNA testing techniques and genealogical tracing last year to help close the decades-old murder of Mary Catherine Edwards.
The investigative technique has helped bring closure to at least 40 cases in recent years, said Carol Schweitzer, with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
Genealogy doesn’t just help authorities identify remains of unknown victims — such as Clouse and Linn — but also could help families recover missing children who disappeared decades ago, Schweitzer said.
“A missing infant that was abducted to be raised by their abductor, or a child abducted by their non-custodial family member and taken to another country, could be resolved with a lead generated by genealogy efforts,” she said. “We strongly believe there are some long-term missing children out there, alive, waiting to be found, waiting to find the truth, and forensic genealogy resources could help finally reveal some long awaited answers.”
In Florida, Brooks listened over the phone as Gillis and her colleague Allison Peacock broke the news — investigators believe they’d identified her brother. She learned they were still trying to identify the body of a woman they’d found with Clouse.
On the phone, Brooks absorbed the news. The woman was likely Tina, she said, explaining that Clouse had been married.
Peacock used that information to track down Florida marriage records, where they were able to find Linn’s name — and then contact her relatives, whose DNA confirmed her identity.
“To think that, something not solved in 40 years — and in an hour, I know more than anyone,” Peacock recalled. “It was pretty amazing.”
When Casasanta finally learned the fate of her son, the news answered the question that has agonized her for decades but brought sharp new pain.
“I totally lost it,” she said. “I kept praying for God to show me what happened and where he died, but I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt my son and (his) wife. We’ve taken it very hard.”
Linn recalled his younger sister’s excitement at getting married and leaving the challenging home she’d grown up in.
“She was excited to see what the future was going to bring,” he recalled. That only made the news more heartbreaking. He felt confusion and guilt. Who would have inflicted such violence on his sister and her husband?
Brooks, meanwhile, had just one question: What about their baby?
“We know he’s gone and she’s gone and I know they are both in heaven.” Donna Casasanta
The missing child
She told Peacock and Gillis that Tina Linn had given birth to a daughter shortly after the young couple got married. The baby, Hollie Marie, was just an infant when the couple went missing.
The few photos from that time show a toddler with short hair, just learning to walk. That her body wasn’t found with the remains just raised more questions: Was she still alive? If she was, whoever took her likely had information about her parents’ deaths — or may have even been responsible for them.
If the baby is still alive, she would be turning 42 — although she likely doesn’t know anything about her true identity: her birthday, her parents, their deaths — or the dozens of relatives out there wondering what happened to her.
That will likely present significant challenges for investigators, experts said. Their best hopes likely would lie in finding a match in a genealogy database or if the child had committed a crime and had her DNA added to federal forensic databases, said Fil Waters, a former Houston police homicide detective.
“The process — especially with this DNA stuff — is only as good as the information inputted into the database,” he said. But there were other steps detectives could take.
“Unless these people were hermits, I would assume there was a person out there, who knows them, who knows they had a baby and might be able to give some information regarding the child,” he added.
Casasanta takes heart in the fact that she finally knows what happened to her son.
“We can lay it to rest. We know he’s gone and she’s gone and I know they are both in heaven,” she said.
But she still wonders about Hollie.
“I hope we can find her,” she said.