Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

As Arlington Police Crimes Against Persons Detectives Mike Leyman and Sgt. Mike Adair continued to investigate the January 30th, 1974, murder of 18-year-old Cheryl Ann Callaway, answers seemed to get more and more elusive. Interviews with friends, family, and coworkers provided virtually no potential motive. An exhaustive search of VIN numbers of cars matching the suspect vehicle provided by witne...

One detective called the slaying of Cheryl Ann Callaway “the most vicious murder in Arlington’s history.” Arlington Police Crimes Against Person Unit Detectives Sgt. Mike Adair and Mike Leyman call it the one that got away. On January 30th, 1974, just months before she was to be married, 18-year-old Cheryl’s life was taken. The murder was brutal and unimaginable, and the killer, it seemed, came ou...

In July of 1991 26-year-old Don Tate took his 5-year-old daughter Boston on a camping trip to Big Bend National Park in Brewster County, Texas. The day after they were supposed to have returned but had not, Boston’s mother and Don’s ex-wife asked Rangers at the park to issue a request to locate. Don and Boston never came out of Big Bend, not alive. Later that day, Don’s brutalized body was found....

On the last day of September 1991, off-duty Harris County Sheriff’s Deputy Roxyann Allee took the evening to do some shopping. After buying and browsing, she headed back to her minivan to return home. Little did she know, two men had followed her. As she approached her vehicle, the men accosted and abducted her. Later, her minivan was discovered ablaze on a secluded North Houston street, and later...

After the Christmas Day 1980 murder of Cheryl Lynn Springfield, her unclothed strangled body found lying by the Christmas tree, Fort Worth Police Detectives quickly theorized her killer was someone she knew. Upon learning the criminal record of the boyfriend of Cheryl’s roommate Cindy, they set their sights on parolee Barry Dean Kelly. However, evidence was lacking, and Cheryl’s murder went cold....

Scott and Cheryl Springfield married young, and although they were divorced by the time the 1980 Christmas season rolled around, he was having second thoughts about wanting his freedom. They’d always gotten along, even after the divorce, so things were patching up nicely. Cheryl decided it would be nice if her ex-husband and their boy, Scotty, spent Christmas Moring together, so both arranged the...

There are more than one viable possibilities as to what happened to 13-year-old Blanca Elisa Roberson when she disappeared on August 6th, 1989. Though the initial investigators had their primary suspect, and for good reason, Private Investigator Richard Norgard isn’t so sure. He’s uncovered information that suggests several different possibilities and even recently released new details in order to...

In 2016, Elisa Roberson’s case saw the most activity it had since 1989. First, Texas Equusearch came to Aransas Pass to search property once owned by original detectives’ prime suspect. But nothing was found. Then, police took a different approach and used ground penetrating radar and jackhammers, presumably, to break up concrete in the garage under the former Roberson home. Although it was report...

When 13-year-old Elisa Roberson went missing in August of 1989, an incorrect detail was assigned to the narrative, and it continued to be reported for decades: the time in which Elisa’s disappearance occurred. Through the dozens of years since Elisa’s missing persons case began, leads were few, and far in between. But some years, like 1994, produced at least a dozen. None offered anything substant...

Aransas Pass Police Lt. Linda Thompson was making up for lost time on the morning of August 7th, 1989. The evening before, 13-year-old Elisa Roberson vanished, but the Lt., and the department’s Chief of Detectives Mike Thompson, weren’t notified. A bloodhound was quickly brought in from Rockport and widespread searches got underway. But as days turned to weeks, nothing was panning out. When the de...

On the late afternoon of August 6th, 1989, 13-year-old Blanca Elisa Roberson, known to most by her middle name, left her home in Aransas Pass and headed to meet a friend halfway between their houses. But Elisa never showed up. Searches for Elisa by friends of the family turned up nothing. Not a clue where Elisa might have gone could be found. After the sun went down, a police report was called in...

In the Fall of 1988, everything was headed in the right direction for 31-year-old Cathy Thom. After a childhood and then young adulthood that kept her on the move constantly, she was finally settling into a new job that promised to keep her home in Arlington, Texas with her favorite person in the world – her 10-year-old son, Danny. But in mid-November that year, Cathy vanished without a trace. For...

On Halloween, 1989, 30-year-old Sylvia Salinas, owner of Salinas Food Store in Galveston, Texas, stayed behind to stock the shelves while her folks returned home for lunch. At 1:23 PM, police were informed by the company who handles the alarm service for the small grocery, that the silent alarm had been tripped. When a patrolman arrived at the scene, he found Sylvia in a pool of blood, stabbed thr...

On Halloween Eve 2006, 16-year-old Terressa Lynn Vanegas bounced around between friend’s houses. Though she was supposed to spend the night with one of them, those plans fell through unbeknownst to her family. Terressa had other plans, anyway, and the teenager was seen that night by several folks who knew her in her hometown of Dickinson, Texas. But the following day when she didn’t come home from...

In 2013, 24-year-old Lauren Bump was brutally killed while jogging through San Antonio’s O.P. Schnabel Park, on the city’s northwest side, generally a safe, middle-class area and during the day. The stabbing murder was completely random; it was the act of a sociopath who simply wanted to cause pain and kill. Luckily, he was apprehended and eventually convicted of Lauren’s murder. The terrible crim...

On February 23rd, 1953, two men asked workers at the Lyles Buick Company Service Station in Sonora for help; they’d ran out of gas and were stranded just east of town, the strangers said. 17-year-old Raul Arevalo filled up a gas can, grabbed the keys to the company pickup, and drove the men back to their vehicle. But he never returned. For six days, Raul’s family searched for him, as did Texas Hig...

On April 16th, 1968, in the Arellano’s packed in the family’s Buick and headed away from their Villa de Fuente, Mexico home to San Angelo, Texas to visit an expecting family member. The car was packed tight with a mother, a father, a young child, a toddler, a sister, and a baby. Though the trip wasn’t anything new to the family, they visited Texas and the US often, an unfortunate and horrific seri...

Part 2 of 2. Years after pathologist Dr. Ralph Erdmann was discredited – found to have falsified countless autopsies all over West Texas and the Panhandle, Plainview Jane Doe was buried after her remains had been shuffled around for 11 years. Her grave was marked, simply, “Jane Doe 1982.” When she was exhumed in 2015, however, the mystery began unraveling. And the truth was nothing like anyone tho...

When the partially frozen, headless body of a woman was found off a deserted road in rural Hale County just outside of Plainview in 1982, the case was cold from the start. Months later, when a skull was found in Maricopa County, Arizona, it was sent to Texas and determined to belong to the headless woman by pathologist Ralph Erdmann. When Henry Lee Lucas was arrested the following year, he confess...

If there’s one thing that’s certain about the missing person’s case of Jared Wayne Chavis, it’s that absolutely nothing is. As if dealing with conflicting stories from the friends who were with Jared that cold January night in 2018, the missing young man’s family also feels that at the get-go, the Houston Police were less than enthusiastic about investigating. Add to that their failure to procure...

Jared Wayne Chavis went missing January 12, 2018, in Houston, TX. His family fears that something tragic has happened to Jared due to the circumstances surrounding his disappearance. Witnesses report that Jared was in the back seat of a black Ford Fusion when an argument broke out and shots were fired by a young man in the front of the car. Jared's friend was able to run out, but Jared never exite...

When Debra Wilt married Robert Reiding in November of 1978, they immediately moved to Austin, Texas from Choteau, Montana to escape the brutal Winter. Robert had a relative that could give him work, and although it left much to be desired money wise, Debra found work at a restaurant near their apartment. But just shy of two months into settling in the Texas Capitol City, the newlywed 18-year-old w...

In February 1975, Austin was rocked with a savage and senseless crime that disturbed even the most experienced homicide detectives when 21-year-old Phyllis Butto was stabbed to death in her home. The murder baffled police. The following June, when a markedly similar crime took place, Austin Homicide Investigators scrambled to find clues. 25-year-old Martha Read was also riddled with stab wounds. T...

In October 1993, Thurgood Marshall School of Law student Dawn Williams vanished without so much as a trace. Fellow students, friends, and family searched everywhere but no clues were found. Houston Police, too, failed to find anything at all. The following month, a crew cleaning trash from an area in rural Montgomery County found the 25-year-old women’s body buried in a shallow grave, partially un...

As Wood County Sheriff’s Office Criminal Investigations Captain Mike Chilson continued looking at the 2007 murder of 19-year-old Brittany McGlone, evidence against the prime suspect was stacking up to the point where an arrest seemed imminent. Chilson discovered physical evidence that was hard to ignore and reinterviewed witnesses who’d had some fairly damning recollections of the suspect on that...