We're all a little privvy to a good murder story.
It's terrible, yes, but somehow addicting. Whether your preference lies in a good podcast series or a well-made HBO documentary (or...both), those of us who love true crime are always on the hunt for something new. So why not dive into something that mysteriously happened in your own backyard? From unsolved murders to serial killers galore, here are some of our favorite tales of Texas True Crime - and where to hear more about them.
Contributed by Mariel Sofia
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Photo credit: Nick Simonite via Texas Monthly
The Unsolved Murder of Tom Brown
18-year-old Tom Brown had it all: he was both class president and school football star, liked by everyone in the Texas Panhandle town of Canadian. Well, almost everyone. He disappeared the week of Thanksgiving in 2016, his remains not found until a couple years later. The curious facts around the investigation into his death have even sparked a podcast, Austin-based Texas Monthly’s “Tom Brown’s Body,” in which the listener follows along with an investigative journalist working the cold case. Full of twists and turns, conflicting stories, and dismal, dishonest handling by law enforcement, the only thing clear is that someone has got to be lying. Is Tom’s murderer still living among them, undetected?
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The "Phantom Killer"
In the Spring of 1946 in Texarkana, Texas, the nocturnal “Phantom Killer” viciously attacked several young couples parked on popular lovers’ lanes in the small town. His last attack, however, took place at the rural home of a farmer and his wife, killing the former. The killings terrorized the local community, many of them stockpiling weapons and barricading themselves indoors after sundown. The grisly murder mystery made national, and even international, news headlines and has since sparked two Hollywood films: 1976’s The Town that Dreaded Sundown and 2014’s sequel by the same name. And while the killer is now widely assumed to be local petty criminal Youell Swinney, he was never tried for the case.
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Houston’s "Killing Fields”
Since the 1970s, 30 bodies of murdered victims, most of them girls or young women, have been found within the so-called “Killing Fields,” a patch of land south of Houston and bordering I-45. In the summer of 1984 alone, the mutilated, raped bodies of four young women and girls were found there, each displayed in the exact same manner. Investigators believe the murders to be related, the handiwork of an “organized” serial killer, someone of high intelligence who easily camouflages himself in public and is ritualistic in his carefully covered-up murders. But without a shred of physical evidence and no witnesses, the cases remain tragically unsolved. The haunting crime even inspired Hollywood, with 2011’s Texas Killing Fields, starring Jessica Chastain and Chloe Grace Moretz.
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The Yogurt Shop Murders
The then-mayor of Austin called the 1991 yogurt shop murders “the crime where Austin lost its innocence.” The murders were senselessly horrific, with four teenage girls found naked, bound and gagged, raped, and stacked in piles in a frozen yogurt shop inside a strip mall off of West Anderson Lane. The four girls had met up at the yogurt shop, where two of them worked, and were brutally killed sometime after the shop’s 11 P.M. closing time. Though investigators initially had plenty of suspects and leads, the killer has yet to be found. Local award-winning author Beverly Lowry has even written an extensive account of the investigations into the crimes, aptly titling the work Who Killed These Girls?
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The Origin of the “Amber Alert”
Ever received an “Amber Alert” on your cell-phone? This system was put into place in all 50 states following the horrific killing of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman in Arlington, Texas, as a grieving public sought to prevent further killings by abductors. Amber had been bike-riding in an abandoned parking lot when a witness saw a man jump out of his truck and grab and take the screaming child. He called the police, who arrived almost immediately and began searching along with the community. Four days later her body was found, naked and raped, near a creek. Forensic evidence had been washed away, leaving law enforcement without leads or suspects. To this day, the killer has never been found, though police refuse to give up looking for him.
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The Unsolved Murder of Carla Walker
In 1974, 17-year-old cheerleader Carla Walker went missing after a Valentine’s Day dance in Arlington, Texas. According to her boyfriend, they had been sitting in a car together at a nearby bowling alley after the school dance, when a man hit him, knocking him unconscious. When he awoke, Carla was gone. Her body was found a few days later, in a ditch, strangled, beaten, and sexually assaulted. For decades, the mystery went unsolved, her friends and family left to grieve without answers. Then, in September of this year, DNA evidence recovered from Carla’s clothing at the scene of the crime confirmed the guilt of longtime suspect Glen McCurley, now 77. He was charged with capital murder and currently awaits trial. Oxygen TV network explores the case’s investigation process in a recently released episode of The DNA of Murder with Paul Holes.
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Denton’s "Lost Innocence”
12-year old Suzie Mages, a loving and responsible honors student, was abducted from a Burger King in Denton, Texas, her body found ten days later submerged in water forty miles away from where she was taken. She was last seen by witnesses talking to a tall male stranger at the fast-food joint, and appeared to know him, chatting amiably. When her body was finally found, she had been re-dressed, indicating that there had been sexual assault. Chillingly, just days before her murder, Suzie had written a fictional story about a girl who was kidnapped and killed. Had Suzie had a supernatural omen about the fate that was about to befall her…? Texas-based Gone Cold podcast explores the case in its meaty details, dedicating three episodes to the mystery behind her unsolved murder.
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Photo credit: Danny Zaragoza via Texas Monthly
The “Serial Killer of Laredo”
In the fall of 2018, fear gripped the border city of Laredo, Texas as two young sex workers, both drug-addicted single mothers struggling to survive, were found dead, shot to death execution-style, on dirt roads. Then, one night the following month, a woman, also a sex worker, ran up to a state trooper and told him that a man was trying to kill her. Within hours, the police arrested the suspected culprit at the hotel where he was hiding, but he had already embarked on a murderous rampage, killing two more sex workers, after his escapee got away from him hours before. He was Juan David Ortiz, husband, father, and member of the U.S. Border Patrol and Navy veteran. He quickly confessed, even leading police to the deserted body of his latest victim. He admitted that he felt he was doing Laredo a favor by killing sex workers, calling them the “scum of the earth.” But investigators and acquaintances alike remain puzzled by Ortiz’s turn to evil, with Ortiz himself contributing the antipsychotics prescribed to him for PTSD as a contributing factor, causing him to feel “untouchable.”
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“The Candyman”
In the early 1970s, a mass murderer killed as many as 28 teenage boys in Houston, Texas. Upon capture, the monstrous killer was chillingly nick-named “The Candy Man” because he had previously owned a candy shop. He was Dean Corll, an electrician whose teenage accomplices helped him lure boys to his apartment, where he tortured and killed them. Then, in a shocking twist of events, one of his young accomplices killed him, claiming self-defense. He confessed to police, and led them to the mass burial sites of the many victims. True Crime All the Time podcast examines the killer in its “Dean Corll ‘The Candyman’” episode, asking, "How did he become so evil? How did he convince boys to help him kill?
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The "Austin Axe Murderer”
Long ago, in 1884-85, eight gruesome axe murders terrorized the still small Western town of Austin, Texas. The unknown murderer killed seven women and one man that dark year, always with an axe, and always displaying the corpses in the same manner, as if they were hanging on a Crucifix. Members of the local voodoo community believed that the culprit “had magic powers that enabled him to become invisible, as no dogs outside or in fenced-yards adjacent to locations where murders occurred were heard to bark or raise any alarm” Even more chillingly, some experts conjecture that the Austin Axe Murderer, having fled Austin and the country after his rampage, relocated to London and became the infamous Jack the Ripper. An Austin-based reporter investigates the mysteries surrounding the serial killer in his best-selling historical narrative “The Midnight Assassin.”
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