Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

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...

When a new Wood County Sheriff’s Office Administration took charge in 2021, the new top lawman Sheriff Kelly Cole made good on his promise to conduct an intense investigation into the murder of 19-year-old Brittany McGlone. With Captain Mike Chilson as lead investigator, the renewed investigation began – new interviews, evidence inspection, and scrutiny of suspects got underway. Though none of the...

In Wood County, Texas on May 4th, 2007, Brittany McGlone was murdered, seemingly as she slept, in her boyfriend’s home while everyone who lived in the house was away. Nothing else in the home was disturbed and there were no signs of forced entry. Alibis for everyone who lived in the house were checked out and verified, apparently, but whoever violently bludgeoned Brittany to death most likely had...

On Wednesday, January 9th, 1980, in the North Loop neighborhood of Austin, a man witnessed a young woman’s abduction. The following day, the body of that woman, 25-year-old University of Texas student Susan Leigh Wolfe, was found slain in an alley more than 4 miles away. Because the witness to the abduction was in the auto business, he was able to give Austin Police Detectives what might have been...

On Thursday, November 27th, 1986, 28-year-old Connie Jane Bibb returned home after a holiday dinner at a friend’s house. It was her senior year at the University of Texas Austin as a special education major, and the religious woman looked forward to a life of teaching and missionary work. But senselessly, her life was cut short. All nine of Connie’s roommates were either attending the Longhorns V....

Nearly a year after the murder of Father Patrick Ryan of Saint William Catholic Church in Denver City, Texas, a confession call came into Albuquerque, New Mexico 911. The confessor had already been interviewed by Odessa Police Detectives and eliminated as a suspect, but frustrated detectives and politically motivated prosecutors were chomping at the bit to close the case. Though the only evidence...

As Odessa Police Detectives investigated the December 21st, 1981 murder of Father Patrick Ryan, violence against other men of the cloth continued in the south and southwest United States, among other places. When a fairly similar attack or slaying of a priest occurred, the cops were on it, but they failed to make a connection every time. Was the violence related or were the holy men simply easy ta...

When Father Patrick Ryan disappeared from Denver City, Texas on December 21st, 1981, his congregants thought he’d gone to help someone or was called away to Plains, the other Yoakum County town where he was priest. By Christmas Day, however, after missing three Masses, they were worried and reported Father Ryan missing. Meanwhile, 85 miles to the southeast, police detectives in Odessa were investi...

Almost immediately upon the San Antonio Police taking to social media to try and get the word out about missing child Lina Sardar Khil, things got ugly. Completely fabricated details about what happened that supported bigoted theories, victim blaming, and unhinged conspiracy theories that had everyone from the founder of Eagles Flight Advocacy & Outreach to the assistant to United States Senat...