Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

In the fall of 1996, Patty Vaughan separated from her husband JR after more than 10 years of marriage. While she worried about her children, the separation, which was likely leading to divorce, was necessary. She ran into an old flame while attending a rodeo, and an old romance started anew. Patty was lighter – and happier – than ever. On Christmas Day, she decided it would be best for her estrang...

My name is Steve Owens and I meet a lot of people; sometime in my travels, sometimes in my own home town. Several times (quite by accident), I have stumbled into what I consider to be fascinating stories. So after way too many got away, I decided to start recording them. Some of these conversations will be fascinating ONLY to me. Some will be fascinating to you too. In the end, I guess this podcas...

Part 2 of 2. Twenty-year-old Elizabeth Campbell’s family didn’t know how to find  their daughter, a missing person, but at first, they did a far better job than police. Still, the efforts led nowhere. After four years with nothing to show, physical evidence materialized out of the blue in Ozona, Texas in a lost and found box at the Crockett County Sheriff’s Office: Elizabeth’s purse. Only, no one...

Part 1 of 2. On a night in late April of 1989, 20-year-old Elizabeth Campbell and her boyfriend had a disagreement about studying. It turned into a full-blown argument, and Elizabeth stormed off on foot from his Killeen home, heading back to her home in Lampasas, some 28 miles away. A short time later, she called her boyfriend from a 7-11 store in Copperas Cove, a town in between Lampasas and Kill...

Part 4 of 4. Beginning in 1967, a series of murders in Fort Worth that had at least a few similarities began. Their obvious similarity: they all took place in the month of February. The first four were as follows: Mildred May in 1967, Becky Martin in 1973, Carla Walker in 1974, and June Ward in 1977. The murders became known by some members of law enforcement, and certainly to the press, as the Fe...

Ten years after the first so-called February Slaying took place, that of Mildred May, another young woman was taken. The fourth victim in this series of crimes, 26-year-old June Ward, presumably had car trouble. It isn’t known if someone posing as a “Good Samaritan” came along, or if June set out on foot looking for help and met with foul play. It is known that her murder was, perhaps, the most br...

Six years after the February 1967 slaying of Mildred May, 21-year-old Becky Martin disappeared. All she left behind were school papers scattered across the parking lot of Tarrant County Junior College and a car that showed definitive signs of a struggle. Though the Fort Worth Police wanted to wait 72 hours before any intensive search took place, Becky’s husband David, with the help of the top lawm...

With several other murders to follow, the series of Fort Worth crimes dubbed “The February Sl@yings” by newspaper reporters began in 1967 with victim Mildred May. When her husband left for Dallas on the night of February 3rd, 1967, Mildred had planned to stay in to nurse her headache. The ailment, however, must have passed, since she was seen at El Matador Club in West Fort Worth that night. After...

Part 9 of 9. Long after a Fort Worth Police special homicide task force was formed to investigate the murders of more than a dozen women and girls had come and gone, advancements in DNA technologies solved several area crimes. But none the task force was created to solve. Madmen such as Lucky Lamon Odom, Glen Samuel McCurley, Juan Meza Segundo, and Curtis Don Brown were identified as local killers...

Among the names on the list of cases assigned to the Fort Worth Special Homicide Task Force in the mid-1980s were Lisa Griffin and Ginger Hayden, two young women who, at their core, weren’t incredibly different from one another. Their deaths – though at the hands of violence – were very different, however, in almost every way imaginable. Their cases, too, would ultimately prove to be dissimilar. L...

If you like highly detailed and thoroughly researched podcasts, you will love DNA ID. The show has over 100 episodes available to binge on right now. One of those episodes, episode 122, covers the case of Patricia Stichler.  New Years’ Day 1985 should have rung in an exciting new year for Patti Stichler and her three young daughters.  Instead, in the middle of the night on January 1-2, someone sla...

Before the murders of Catherine Davis, Cindy Heller, Angela Ewert, and Sarah Kashka, all of whose cases were connected in some way to Fort Worth’s west and southwest sides, a series of murders took place that haunted the victims’ families and perhaps only inconvenienced the police department. Sylvia Hynes, Lorane Larkin, Margaret Maxwell, Vicky Chisolm, Jacquelyn Jones, Karen Strong, Angela Jones,...

In November of 1984, a brutal and shocking murder rocked the otherwise crime-free and exclusive Colleyville subdivision Tara Plantation. Judy Herron was a 37-year-old stay at home parent and was attacked and slain not long after her husband Lee left for work. Though Colleyville authorities enlisted the help of multiple outside jurisdictions, Judy’s killer slipped away without so much as a trace. L...

After the disappearances of Catherine Davis, Cindy Heller, and Angela Ewert, and the murder of Sarah Kashka, special homicide task force was created to investigate those crimes specifically. However, they were far from the only unsolved cases that had police stumped. Just days before Cindy Heller went missing, Twenty-nine-year-old middle school teacher Marilyn Hartman was brutally murdered in her...

In early December 1984, not long after the disappearances of 23-year-olds Catherine Davis and Cindy Heller, 21-year-old Angela Ewert spent an evening getting sized for an engagement ring. After leaving her fiance’s house to head to her home in west Arlington, Angela stopped for gas at a southwest Fort Worth 7-Eleven convenience store. She was never seen alive again. The following day, her father f...

A few days before Christmas in 1984, 26-year-old David Dale Larson and 21-year-old Regina Suzanne Grover went out for a dinner date at The Keg Restaurant and Bar off Camp Bowie in Fort Worth, Texas. Service industry workers themselves, they knew folks at The Keg, and those folks saw Regina and David leave around 11 PM. It was the last time they were seen alive. The following afternoon, David Larso...

In August of 1983, twenty-seven-year-old Mary Till left her Arlington apartment to head to work in Dallas. She never made it. For month, Mary’s parents agonized over their daughter’s disappearance. In early January of 1984 came an unfortunate end to their uncertainty when Mary’s skeletonized remains were found in a field of tall grass just outside a large, heavily-wooded area. The case appears to...

Less than a month after the disappearance of Catherine Davis, another 23-year-old woman vanished without a trace. In late October 1984, Cindy Heller stopped to help a stranded motorist. As genuinely friendly and caring as a person can get, she lived up to the term “Good Samaritan” and offered to deliver a note to the motorist’s friends after spending two hours waiting with her. The note was delive...

Catherine Davis came to Texas in 1979 from Oxford, Mississippi. Chasing a career in modeling and fashion, she first landed in Dallas but followed a boy to Fort Worth in 1982. In late September 1984, the twenty-three-year-old left her apartment with someone and forty-five minutes later, it was engulfed in flames. Catherine wasn’t inside. But she’d never be seen alive again, nonetheless. By December...

In December of 1984, fifteen-year-old Sarah Kashka travelled to Fort Worth from Denton to visit her best friend and hit a party. The party didn’t happen, and Sarah and her friend parted ways, each with their boyfriends. When Sarah’s boyfriend decided he needed to go home early, he says, he left her outside of an apartment complex where friends lived. Those friends turned out not to be home, and Sa...

On October 25th, 2004, four of the most brutal murders in the history of Lubbock, Texas took place; the murders of Ka'Diece, Ka'Sheim, and Mahogany Jasmine Allen and their mother, Tammy Cooper, shook even the most seasoned homicide detectives in the Lubbock Police Department to their cores. Even though the grisly scene and witnesses provided investigators with what is described as "plenty of evide...

On February 2nd, 1980, 19-year-old Kristy Lynn Booth and a friend were dropped off at a Midland, Texas nightclub. Kristy took off her coat and shoes and danced all night, the last time with a man no one seems to have known. When a friend who’d borrowed Kristy’s car returned to the club to pick her up, she was nowhere to be found. Five days later, her family reported her missing. It took several mo...

August 23, 1987. Saline County Arkansas. 16-year old Don Henry and 17-year old Kevin Ives head into the woods to do some late-night hunting, but never return. Hours later, the two boys are seen lying on some railroad tracks before they are run over by a cargo train and the medical examiner concludes they had fallen asleep after smoking marijuana and their deaths were accidental. However, Don and K...

After the brutal rape and murder of 18-year-old Teresa Branch, her family was left with the fallout – something that became increasingly difficult to live with. Outside the family, too, there were individuals whose life Teresa’s killer affected. It didn’t help that the investigation was at a crawl, with no actual evidence to work with, at least during the pre-DNA era in modern law enforcement inve...

This is a preview of Criminology podcast’s season 2; The Golden State Killer. Listeners of season 2 will hear about the crimes of this elusive predator who was ultimately unmasked as Joseph DeAngelo. In season 2, Hosts Mike Morford and Mike Ferguson break down DeAngelo’s crimes one by one using actual police reports, and they include interviews with victims, survivors, and investigators. Mike and...