} One afternoon in 1994, unable to contain his grief any longer, Miller called Abel and said that he planned to kidnap him, take him to Las Vegas, and bury him alive in a sand dune outside of the city. }); As far as Im concerned, its a masterpiece.. He has been interviewed by detectives from neighboring towns. Nows Your Chance. Inside were a series of photos of the places where each body had been found. But Abel became furious and very defensive. However, as the show portrays, the investigation soon led to Robert Abel, who was considered a suspect for a long time. Even Ive sat up at nights, wondering if he could have done it., Until this year, despite his pariah status, Abel remained in League City. 2023 National City and Regional Magazine Awards Finalists Announced, Texas Monthly Receives a Nod From the American Bar Association, HBO Max Releases Official Trailer for Love & Death, Get Out and Celebrate 100 Years of Texas State Parks, Two Assistant Editors Join the Texas Monthly Staff. Wikimedia Commons/formulanone. They were not Clyde Headrick, but 60-year-old Robert Abel - a former NASA engineer who owns a ranch near the oil fields. eventAction: 'click_adunit' Abel allegedly. Thats all I want to do., Abel is aware that the police and the FBI have studied every inch of his life. reporters on a platform technologically tailored to meet the needs of the modern reader. Still, perhaps because no other legitimate suspect ever emerged in the case, Abel never could erase the suspicions about him. For a brief period of time, there was another person of interest named Robert Abel. In 1997, Laura Smith was a 12-year-old girl living in Friendswood, Texas. Depending on whos counting, at least fifteen and perhaps as many as thirty young femalesall of whom resided in the fifty-mile stretch of coastal plain between Houston and Galvestonhave vanished or been brutally murdered since the early seventies. Coming here was my chance to keep working at NASA and be able to work some cattle on the weekends, he says. Since all of the Killing Fields victims were killed by the same unknown killer, his confession may have only been a way to improve his prison rep with other inmates. As long as Pat Bittner and these other police departments have that FBI profile, theyre going to do anything they can to make me fit it.. (The rest of the photos were of family, friends, and various people hed shot as an amateur photographer. Yesterday in another thread on this sub, u/talllongblackhair posted this very interesting long form article published in 1999 about Robert Abel, a suspect in the Texas Killing Fields murders. }) In July 2022, Tim Miller won a wrongful death lawsuit against Hedrick for $24 million in liability and damages that he filed in 2014. The medical examiner thought she had been beaten to death with a club. Three episodes make up the docuseries. I wish there was something I could do., He gave me another one of his long, lingering looks. In the 1999 Texas Monthly feature, Robert Abel was painted as the lead suspect. I had no reason to ask except out of curiosity, Bittner says. One afternoon on the phone, he said to me, I dont know if you know this, but I had torn rotator cuffs at the time some of those girls turned up dead. Matamoros Was Once Relatively Safe for Texans. One time she wrote about sports. } According to a . eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), So now, lets find out more about him as well as his alleged involvement, shall we? [2] I wondered if the police knew about this person I had read about, and I was going to send the article to them.. Speaking to Texas Monthly in 1999, Miller said: "There are many days when I think about driving over there, putting a gun to his head, and pulling the trigger. The first one was of 23-year-old Heide Fye, who went missing on October 10, 1983, only to be discovered almost six months later. There is a stretch of I-45 South between Houston and Galveston where police have found the bodies of more than 30 young women and children since the 1970s. Family devastated as mom and unborn baby tragically die after 'unexpected' medical emergency, Was Beckett Rex edited out of 'American Idol' Season 21? Johnny . 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. The Texas Killing Fields, an abandoned oil field, encompasses a roughly 30-mile span between Houston and Galveston along the I-45. I wanted him to know that I would never forget what he had done, says Miller, who several times a week had been driving out to the site where Lauras body had been found, standing before a wooden cross he had erected there in her memory. Over the years, various suspects have come and gone. Besides, they didnt even use a big enough backhoe, one that could get down to the bottom of the pond. With such a high-profile case, Texas law enforcement was desperate to find. Within a mere decade, the bodies of four women were recovered from a 25-acre marshland along Calder Road in League City, Texas. And if I did kill her, I couldnt have carried her out of my house. It was as if he was giving me a scenario of how one of the murders had happened. In League City, where Abel has lived for sixteen years, officers have searched his home and questioned his friends and family. And I understood why everyone was so desperate to hunt down the bogeyman: so they could tell themselves they were safe again. All I want to do is prove my innocence, he said. At the bottom of the box I saw a small photo album with the words Robert Abel printed on the cover. In his own way he was very charismatic, says an ex-girlfriend. Of course hed want the murders solved. When I later asked Abel directly about the photo album, he acted surprised that I was suspicious. We had our rounds, our arguments and fights. When she went missing, the police suggested to her father that she had run away from home. And, indeed, one former girlfriend did tell me that Paula had contacted her, asking that she, too, go to the police and talk about Abels behavior when she had dated him. He lived next to an oil field in League City that is infamously known as the Killing Fields. For three decades, the marshy stretch off I-45 between Houston and Galveston kept turning up dead . Bittner, meanwhile, insists that a pathological serial killer with no remorse could easily pass any lie detector test. Patricia Sharpe writes a regular restaurant column, Pats Pick, for Texas Monthly. The monkier is chilling enough, but once you delve into the Texas Killing Fields' murderous history, it's easy to fall down a true-crime rabbit hole. When Im near him, I feel like Im in the presence of evil., Yet there are problems with the allegations against Abel: Not a shred of physical evidence has ever been found linking him to the four women found dumped in the oil field, no evidence has been uncovered by any police department that can connect him to the murders they have been investigating, and no witness can place him with any of the teenagers or women before they were found dead. I told him about the clothes that Miller had dug up and that after a subsequent search no evidence of a body had been found. As it turns out, Tim Miller might have found an old garbage dump.. Texas Monthly interviewed Abel in 1999. Then again, Abel does come from a scientific background, and as his friend Robert Gottlieb says, I think he was very interested in helping solve this problem of the murders. eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), She had been reported missing by her family in . Apocalypse Sow: Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion? It remains unclear if Abel had taken his own life. He seems almost shyhe tends to put his hands in his front pockets when he speaksand has the soft Texas drawl of a small-town high school civics teacher. Two years ago, FBI statistics showed Texas leading the nation in unsolved serial highway homicides. Heides father, who had worked as an automobile tire salesman, hunted for her himself, walking the fields around League City almost every day. With the passing of the years, its harder to deny the probability that a serial killer has been at work since as far back as 1971, when seven young women were murdered over a four-county region in twelve months time. Sometimes, at night, the wind would begin to blow, and the house would start to shift, and the bed in Lauras room would start to squeak, says Laura Smithers mother, Gaye, a gentle woman who sometimes swallows when she talks, trying to keep her voice in control. However, he was never arrested because there was never enough evidence to incriminate him. And she was ready to talk. One of Netflix's latest true-crime docuseries, Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields, tells the story of the unsolved murders of four Texas women that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s in League . After Tim Miller read the affidavit, he started parking outside Abels League City home at night. eventCategory: event.slot.getSlotElementId(), Miller, his eyes wild with excitement, put the backhoe into gear and started scooping up earth over a ten-square-foot area. He suggested that Abel left the womens bodies on the pastureland because he knew theyd be ravaged by animals. Audrey had disappeared from the Houston area around December 1985, whereas the Nassau Bay resident Donna had gone missing in July 1991. (Paula and Cindy would not be interviewed, but they have not retracted the sworn statements they gave Bittner.) }); The first body discovered in Calder Road Field (aka The Texas Killing Field) was 25-year-old Heide Fye, whose skull was found by a dog. window.googletag.pubads().addEventListener('impressionViewable', function(event) { He turned part of it into riding stables. What made Abel a suspect was that he owned the property right next to the land where the bodies were found. Was I the one being paranoid? On a stiflingly hot afternoon in late August, at an abandoned oil field twenty miles south of Houston, more than a dozen people hunted for the bodies of dead women. I couldnt have overpowered her and gotten her into my car. In 1999, Texas Monthly reported that a police detective in a sworn affidavit painted Abel as a "serial sexual offender," who displays the violent behavior seen in serial killers. So in November, Bittner presented an affidavit before a state district court judge outlining Gomezs profile and reporting the statements made by two of Abels ex-wives. Not exactly the response Id get if Id been beating them, he said. Is that right? he said. During this week in true crime history, Suzanne Rene Richerson was reported missing after she disappeared while working at a Galveston resort in October of 1988. Paula also said that she had seen several photos of nude women in his desk drawer at the house, and that Abel not only owned handguns but also carried one with him during the later months of 1991. Born November 25, 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee Last seen in December 1985 Believed to be around age 30 at time of death Lived in the Houston/Channelview/Heights areas of Texas in the years leading up to her death Worked as a mechanic for a golf cart company in Houston, Harrison Equipment Company in Houston, and Balloon Affair in Houston. Suppose youre such a confident killer that you think youre smarter than the police, he says. None of the dead womens clothing or jewelry was found. if(document.querySelector("#adunit")){ What drew him there, he explains, was Galveston Countys lower tax rate, but he also appreciated the availability of nearby pastureland: He leased about a thousand acres at the edge of town roughly three miles from his house. But Mr. Abel doesnt want to come down here any more to answer them. Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields is streaming on Netflix now. Several of Abel's ex-wives and partners had accused him of being aggressive, as well as beating animals, all of which Abel denied. "Shy" NASA employee The modest and calm Abel was at NASA right after the university - he helped create the Saturn series of rockets that delivered Apollo teams to the moon. But she never made it. Tim Miller, whose sixteen-year-old daughter, Laura, was found dead in the killing fields, is so convinced of Abels guilt that he has left threatening messages on his answering machine, demanding that he confess. Eventually, in 2019 the remaining bodies, Jane and Janet Doe were positively identified as that of Audrey Lee Cook and Donna Prudhomme, respectively. Sales hit $250,000 in 1991, he says. The man is linked to deaths of four women but was never convicted, according to Newsweek. At one point in the 1990s, former Nasa engineer Robert Abel was a suspect in the Texas Killing Field murders. . I know I had my doubts. By Dan Girolamo November 18, 2022. Police say the original investigations into these. The medical examiner said she was between 22 and 30 years old and perhaps had been shot to death by a .22-caliber weapon. Somethings down there, Miller shouted as people came running with their flashlights. 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