Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

At about 3:18 PM on January 13th, 1996, in east Arlington, Texas, 78-year-old retired machinist and WW2 Veteran Jimmie Kevil dialed 911. He’d just witnessed a man in a pickup truck kidnap a little girl, he told the operator. The girl was 9-year-old Amber Hagerman. Police responded and a search began. Folks in the neighborhood, too, came out to look for her and the black truck her abductor drove. B...

When Amber Hagerman was born, her parents’ relationship was still relatively new. In spite of the many challenges her mom Donna faced, particularly after becoming a single mother, Amber and her brother Ricky were happy with strong emotional stability and love in their lives. By the time Donna was ready to give the kids’ father a chance to continue to be in their lives, she’d agreed to take part in...

Within a year of the abduction and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, several vastly differing factors came together to create the Amber Plan, known today as the Amber Alert. From the idea of a concerned parent who mourned for Amber’s relatives to Amber’s family, and then from an association of radio managers to state and local authorities, the little girl’s long-lasting legacy came to fruition...

In July 1970, the body of 26-year-old Eula Mae “Kay” Miller was discovered inside her apartment at the Hilltop Apartments in Odessa, Texas. What initially appeared quiet and undisturbed soon revealed a brutal killing, one that had gone unnoticed for days in the sweltering West Texas heat. As investigators worked backward through a shrinking window of time, they were confronted with a case already...

After the discovery of the burnt car that belonged to millionaire Houston oilman Ed Baker, speculation was abound. Though the medical examiner finally ruled that the body found inside was indeed Edward Gerald Baker’s, some folks didn’t buy the ruling. They insisted the oilman had faked his own death and skipped country to avoid the lawsuits against his company or worse – jail time. Harris County S...

Below the Surface is a true crime podcast covering a variety of strange and bizarre cases with one common theme; a water connection.   The show features both solved and unsolved cases, some of which are well known, while others have received little attention. In this special preview of episode 1, we explore the puzzling case of journalist Kim Wall who was Best known for her articles in the Guardia...

In November of 1985, rice farmers harvesting crops just north of the Texas small town of Katy found the smoldering remains of a car in one of the fields. Inside the vehicle, Harris County Sheriff’s Deputies found a badly charred and disfigured body. Later that day, it was discovered that the burnt car belonged to millionaire Houston oilman Ed Baker. As the investigation progressed, the murky water...

In January of 1985, siblings Michael and Pamela Mayfield were last seen getting into a vehicle willfully on their way home from school. The six-year-old and five-year-old, respectively, were never seen again. Efforts to locate the two children were relatively extensive. The Missing Children Milk Carton Program was new and gaining momentum fast, and the Mayfield Children were featured there, on nat...

On January 24th, 1969, one of Gregg County, Texas’s most cold-blooded and savage murders occurred: that of 17-year-old Longview High School senior Leslye Dian Koon. The slaying prompted one of the city’s most extensive and intensive investigations in its history. What you might call a taskforce was created that included the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney’s Office, and Longvie...

In April 1974, 16-year-old Danita Ann Cash drove to the abandoned Trinity River Bridge, better known in local lore as “Screaming Bridge,” to pick up her brother from target practice. But instead of finding the boys, she encountered a stranger with a shotgun who forced his way into her car. What began as a routine favor turned into a harrowing abduction attempt that Danita survived only through cou...

On Halloween morning in 1984, a masked gunman lay in wait inside a garage in the tiny Stephens County community of Caddo, Texas. When oilman and civic leader Sammy Martin Rogers went to investigate a report of a prowler, he was confronted at gunpoint and fatally shot in front of his family. Rogers was widely known and deeply respected, a self-made oilman, school board trustee, hospital board membe...

In July 2010, twenty-nine-year-old Heather Leann Pope left her mother’s home in Royse City, Texas, telling her she was going to visit a friend. She never returned. Days passed without a call or message, something that immediately alarmed her family, who knew Heather always checked in. Nearly two weeks later, while searching the Quinlan area of southern Hunt County, Heather’s father and a family fr...

In April 1988, the quiet lakeside community of Lakeway, Texas was shaken when 45-year-old Betty Ann Thomas vanished from her home on Cold Water Lane. A violent scene inside the residence suggested a targeted attack, and two days later, Betty was found in the trunk of her Jaguar outside an Austin hotel, bound, gagged, and executed. Her murder became the first, and still the only, homicide in Lakewa...

This is a preview of Of Hell: Texas True Crime, a narrative investigation into the darkest crimes committed on Texas soil. From the creators of Gone Cold, each episode dives deep into cases where violence leaves a permanent scar on the land and the people who call it home. This clip features the haunting case of Nancy, a beloved mother taken from her home and brutally tortured and murdered. What b...

On the morning of November 13, 1992, Suzanne Marie Hummel, a 39-year-old mother of two, parked in the busy lot of Rice Epicurean Market at Kirby and West Alabama in Houston, a familiar spot she used to wait before work. While eating breakfast in her car, she was approached by a woman demanding her purse. Within seconds, a .22-caliber shot tore through Suzanne’s arm and chest, and the assailant fle...

On August 28, 1989, 24-year-old Jana Carol Simpson walked into her portable classroom at Glen Park Elementary School in southeast Fort Worth for her very first day of teaching in the district. Not long after, she was found dying on the steps of that classroom, stabbed seventeen times in broad daylight. Her purse and jewelry were untouched. There was no sign of sexual assault. And yet the young tea...

In February of 1983 23-year-old Austin mother Cindy Davis Rendon vanished from her parents’ home in Northeast Austin. It was a normal Tuesday morning — Cindy fed her baby daughter, spoke briefly with her parents before they left for work, and planned to head to her shift at the Internal Revenue Service later that afternoon. But when her estranged husband arrived to pick up the baby, he found the f...

In May of 1992, 42-year-old Christine “Starrine” Byrd vanished from her home in west Tyler, Texas. What began as a missing-person case soon turned into something far darker – and more disturbing – than anyone could have imagined. Starrine was a beloved mother of four, a woman of faith whose home was always filled with music. She disappeared without a trace; the front door left open, food still coo...

On the night of March 28, 1980, twenty-one-year-old Kathryn Ann “Kathy” Stembridge was attacked while closing up the C&M Laundromat on Paluxy Road in Granbury, Texas. Stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen, she managed to crawl more than 170 feet across a vacant lot to the porch of her neighbors, Bill and Mary Lou Carney, where she collapsed after telling them, “I’ve been stabbed.” Despit...

In August 1970, 26-year-old schoolteacher Linda Jane Phillips, daughter of Kaufman County School Superintendent Jimmy Phillips, vanished while driving home from a Dallas wedding party. Two days later, her mutilated body was discovered in a hedgerow near Post Oak, Texas. The case shocked Kaufman County—a quiet, rural community east of booming Dallas—and became one of North Texas’s most haunting uns...

In the early hours of June 23, 1985, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Leigh Day opened Preston Road Donuts in North Dallas for her usual Sunday shift. She brewed the coffee, stocked the shelves, and rang up her last customer at 6:20 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the shop was silent. Jennifer’s purse and jewelry sat untouched on the counter, her apron on the floor, and the cash drawer still full. Three day...

In June 1964, a Fort Bend County farmer discovered a headless, handless torso in a roadside ditch — a killing so cleanly done that investigators said only someone trained in anatomy could have done it. Sheriff “Tiny” Gaston and the Texas Rangers searched for weeks, but the victim was never identified. Then, just months later, another scene shocked Texas — Room 636 of San Antonio’s Sheraton Gunter...

Three years after a suitcase containing a man’s torso surfaced in the Rio Grande near El Paso, another horror emerged—this time in the pine woods of East Texas. On February 3, 1962, two brothers seining minnows in a roadside ditch off U.S. Highway 59 north of Cleveland discovered two cardboard boxes wired together and packed with cement. Inside was the severed torso of a woman. Her head, arms, and...

In June of 1959, a fisherman on the Rio Grande west of El Paso pulled a black suitcase from the slow, muddy current near Montoya, Texas. Inside was a headless, handless torso — mutilated, skinned, and wrapped in the previous day’s newspaper. Within hours, El Paso County Sheriff Bob Bailey was standing over what he’d later call “the most brutal murder in El Paso history.” What followed was a multi-...

On April 5, 1985, 29-year-old Kathleen “Kathy” Ranft finished her shift at Lippe Tire Center in Seguin, Texas, and headed into the weekend. She was in the middle of a separation, moving into a new apartment, and trying to build a fresh start for herself and her three sons. That night, Kathy was supposed to meet friends at the Country Cabaret, a small nightclub off FM 467. She never made it. The ne...