Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

It was unusually cold in New Braunfels, Texas on February 4th, 2011 and the icy roads were brushed lightly with snow. That evening, 18-month-old Joshua JayVaughn Davis Junior went missing from his home. A massive search effort was conducted but the little boy was never found. The New Braunfels Police, having come up with a theory as to what happened to Little Joshua, didn’t sway much in their inve...

A suspect finally emerged in the January 1978 slaying of seventeen-year-old Lecia Ann McGee in 2009 – more than 30 years later. DNA linked the man to Lecia’s brutal death, but the Tarrant County District Attorney declined to bring the case before a grand jury, siting insufficient evidence as the reason. Fort Worth Homicide Detectives disagreed. Was the man a suspect in the initial 1978 investigati...

January 1978 was an unusually cold month in Fort Worth, Texas. Though the city would brag about falling murder rates that year, when it was all said and done, the year was just as deadly as many before it...and even more to come. One of the many homicides the city had seen in 1978 was the unthinkable killing of seventeen-year-old Lecia Ann McGee, a well-liked teenager who didn’t make enemies. Thou...

In January of 1996, Camille Norman, daughter of a popular 1960s revival evangelist, was brutally killed at her home in the Dallas suburb of Pleasant Grove. The day before, an elderly woman in the adjoining city of Balch Springs was also slain, a crime that detectives believed to be connected, if only for a short time. The Balch Springs case was cleared quickly by police but Camille’s murder was co...

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...

Port Lavaca, Texas isn’t on the short list of the most well-known town in the Lone Star State. Many have never even heard of the bay city, in fact, particularly those out of state. Perhaps everyone should have, though. Several mysteries that remain unsolved have taken place there. Unfortunately, crimes such as the multiple slayings at the Crossroads Tavern in 1981 received little press outside Por...

After Texas Tech University closed the 2000 school year, most of Stefanie Hill’s friends had gone on vacation or home to spend the summer with family. Stefanie stayed in Lubbock to work, however, and shortly after arriving home in the early morning hours of Monday, May 29th, Memorial Day, she was savagely murdered and set on fire in her own apartment. Because of the fire, there was little evidence...

On October 7th, 1988, when Texas A&M University senior Rene Richerson disappeared from her job as the night clerk at the Casa Del Mar Condo-Hotel Complex, signs of foul play were few and far between. Investigators, however, soon began looking a little closer and the 22-year-old’s disappearance could only be explained as an abduction. For years, tips from anonymous callers continued to point the fi...

Fourteen-year-old Sondra Kay Ramber vanished from her home without so much as a trace in 1983, not long after moving to the town of Santa Fe, Texas. Two years later, in 1985, seventeen-year-old Santa Fe resident Michelle Doherty Thomas disappeared after leaving with two friends for a night out in Galveston. Sondra and Michelle’s cases garnered very little media attention. Even when, in 1986 and 19...

When Lake LBJ was partially drained to make way for the construction of a thermal power plant in 1970, a new development was also made in a five-year-old mystery. That was when Charlene Frances Sigler vanished without a trace. After this discovery, Charlene was dubbed by the press as “The Lady in the Lake.” While Llano County Sheriff Porter Gale Ligon had thoughts on what happened, and tried to pi...

In the early morning hours of March 26th, 2001, a neighbor of 26-year-old Megan Curl smelled something burning. When they investigated, they discovered a fire coming from Megan’s apartment, smoke billowing from the bedroom window. When firefighters extinguished the blaze, they found Megan Curl’s body badly burned, and deceased, on her bed. The nature of her death was gruesome, and the young woman...

After leaving her house for a walk in the woods on the afternoon of October 19th, 2001, fifteen-year-old Jessica Sadler vanished. Though police deemed her a runaway, family and volunteers from all around came to Leverett’s Chapel Texas to aid in the search for her. Shortly after the FBI became involved, Jessica’s body was found at an illegal dump site under discarded construction materials. An eig...

Far worse can be imagined that the death of an innocent child at the hands of a predator. In 2019, luckily, Salem Sabatka’s fate was not death, thanks to a swift response by both the Fort Worth Police and the public. In the summer of 1998 in the Rosemont suburb of Fort Worth, however, 8-year-old Edna Rodriguez met a terrible fate, after disappearing from her home in the middle of the night. Virtua...

In April of 1988, the murder of a young, 19-year-old woman left the Harris County Sheriff’s Office horrified. Detectives then and in the years following were haunted by the excessive methods used by Jacqueline Graham’s killer. For some reason, however, the media failed to follow up much beyond the few articles published in the days after. Some investigators zeroed in on a suspect immediately, thou...

In the twilight hours of Saturday, August 23rd, 1983, Officer LC Tribble was gunned down in his patrol vehicle outside his Farmers Branch, Texas apartment after dropping off medicine to his ill two-year-old son. Virtually no evidence of who murdered LC could be found on the scene and eyewitnesses’ descriptions of men fleeing provided little to no help. Though LC’s slaying was reviewed time and tim...

On November 11th, 1970, Veteran’s Day, the bloody body of Doris Lorene Rivers was found in her El Paso apartment by her sister and 5-year-old son. Though the police were able to identify a suspect early in the initial investigation, the District Attorney refused to indict the men due to lack of evidence. The case was buried in El Paso Police’s cold case files for 43 years until, in 2013, Doris’s g...

After Holly Palmer’s brutal beating death on November 27th, 1988, Granbury Police and Hood County Sheriff’s Department Officers began looking anywhere and everywhere for someone who might have wanted to kill the young woman. They felt it was someone who knew Holly well, someone she trusted not to hurt her, but authorities were perplexed. It seemed no one had anything against her. Except, perhaps,...

Holly Palmer was a well-liked and much-admired resident of Granbury, Texas. At 23 years old, she had her entire life ahead of her and she was well on her way to living it. She was working while also pursuing creative interests that might prove in the future to be lucrative. Holly had a loving family and a lot of support, particularly from her close sisters, mother, and stepfather. Just after Thank...

In July of 1969 in the small town of Panhandle, Texas, Elsa Romo-Nickell was found murdered on her bed as the morning alarm that was meant to wake her buzzed loudly. Leads were scarce as the crime scene was contaminated but a couple months later in nearby Skellytown, another murder which bore similarities took place. Though that lead and the few others police had seemed promising at first, includi...

On December 27th, 2010, thirteen-year-old Hailey Darlene Dunn vanished. The media frenzy that ensued after her disappearance often seemed as if the girl herself had been forgotten. Billie Jean Dunn, Hailey’s mother, along with her live-in boyfriend, Shawn Adkins, were immediately under the scrutinization of police and the press. Though a few solid reasons to suspect Adkins’ involvement in Hailey’s...

Just after Christmas in 1993, the body of 38-year-old Latricia “Trish” White was found by her worried father who’d come to check on her. She’d been shot to death in her own bed. Her boyfriend, Lee “Dub” Wackerhagen, and his son, Chance Wackerhagen, were nowhere to be found. Police all but immediately came to the conclusion that Dub killed Trish in a rage and fled with Chance. For well over two dec...

When she dropped her husband back off at work after picking him up for lunch on Monday, December 10th, 1984, Sharon “Sarah” McCully had an errand to run. That evening, when her husband John returned home, Sarah was nowhere to be found. Two days later, her car was found. Exactly one week later, at practically the same time of day, another woman disappeared and was later found brutally murdered in h...

On August 7th, 1996, six-year-old Katherine Korzilius got out of her mother’s car to walk the rest of the way home. The walk was only about an eighth of a mile and when her daughter didn’t return, Nancy Korzilius was worried. She went looking for her daughter and found her lying unconscious in the road in the opposite direction from where she was walking. Katherine succumbed to her injuries later...

On July 4th, 1988, Sally McNelly and Shane Stewart disappeared sometime around midnight. Their bodies were found miles away from where they were last seen months later. Investigators had little to go on and, as was common at the time when no answers could be found, Satanism found its way into law enforcement’s theory. There was no evidence of devil worship or occult activities but the media, inclu...

On December 9th, 2007, sixty-seven-year-old Marianne Wilkinson was murdered by an assailant who shot her multiple times as she opened her front door. North Richland Hills Police Investigators were stumped; Neither Marianne nor her husband had enemies, no one who had a reason to want Marianne dead. When a neighbor called police and told them that she thought she knew the reason Marianne was slain,...