[eerie guitar music playing]
[Kathryn] In 1991…
there was this couple out on horseback going through the Killing Field.
And they can smell something.
-The police are called. -[police sirens wail distantly]
And another decomposing body's found
underneath a tree in the Killing Field.
[reporter 1] A fourth body found in the same location.
She is unidentified at this time.
We know she is a white female, approximately five foot two inches tall.
Police believe this latest victim, they're calling her Janet Doe,
was somewhere between 30 and 50 years old.
[Kathryn] You'd already had these three girls
who'd been found in the Killing Field,
and you had this questionable death with Ellen Beason.
And it's like déjà vu. It's happened again.
It was shocking another body was found.
[reporter 2] The body is one of four that turned up in this League City field
between 1983 and 1991.
[Skip] Some killer was creating a kind of tour of his own personal graveyard.
What was going on?
[Richard] Had a serious impact on the community.
Especially young women.
[Marla] It did make you scared.
I can remember watching the news crying one night
because I didn't want to grow up.
I didn't want to get any bigger, because I was scared.
Bodies keep showing up. The girls keep disappearing.
And we got to do something.
[Nina] This person's still walking around, still snatching ladies up.
Why?
The fear was actually palpable.
It looked like a work of a brilliant but depraved serial killer.
[ominous music playing]
[birds tweeting]
[somber music playing]
The Killing Field cases on Calder Road were kind of a black eye for League City,
having these unsolved homicides.
But Tim Miller had a few ideas about who he thought may be responsible
for the death of his daughter and the other three victims.
[Tim] Clyde Hedrick worked for a contractor on Calder.
I mean, Clyde hung out in League City a lot,
at the Texas Moon and all the different bars.
[director] Was Clyde ever looked at as a suspect
in the Calder Road killings at the time?
I couldn't answer that because of the nature of the open investigation.
There's really not much that I can say.
I can tell you generally that
the police are not quick to eliminate suspects.
[Richard] As an investigator,
we can't just take the word of somebody and…
run full speed at that person.
We have to do methodical investigation and continue to follow the evidence.
[ominous music playing]
[Skip] The first three bodies were discovered within a period of two years,
all within 50 yards of each other.
About five years later,
a fourth body was found on that same patch of land,
but it was a hundred yards away.
Is she connected to the other three, or is she some other killer's victim?
Somebody who read about the Texas Killing Fields
and decided to add his victim to the pile.
Girls' bodies were found in an advanced stage of decomposition.
They used dental records to identify Laura Miller
and Heide Fye.
But Jane and Janet Doe didn't match with any missing person cases in the area.
[Lise] League City had very few resources, small police department.
They couldn't seem to identify her.
And despite the fact that in 1991,
there is DNA evidence that could be tested,
the evidence is not kept very well by League City Police.
They don't have anything to test.
[reporter 1] For now, the key to solving the Killing Field murders
may lie with these two reconstructed heads.
[Richard] The League City Police Department
tried a number of different techniques
to identify Jane and Janet Doe.
One was rebuilding the skull,
try to put clay on the skull to see what they might've looked like in life,
hoping that would be something to generate leads.
[reporter 2] If you have any information,
if Jane or Janet Doe look familiar, call the League City Police Department.
[Lise] A lot of people are really outraged that these women aren't even identified.
And how can it be that no one can figure out who killed them?
The attention did have the effect of putting more pressure
on the League City Police to do something about those cases.
[newscaster] Tonight, investigators take a closer look at the similarities
in the cases, and they take their case to the FBI.
The fact that it was a serial killing case gave the FBI the authority to investigate.
I went and interviewed the head of the FBI's task force in Houston.
Now, if you're a reporter, you never get into the FBI offices.
Why was I being invited to go talk to the FBI director?
Because these guys didn't know what to do.
They were stuck.
The basic hope was to get out some publicity
that someone would come forward and say,
"I know who's doing all this."
[reporter] Profiling is a technique where special agents dissect a crime scene.
They use the information to identify the killer's characteristics.
The FBI pulled together a profile of the Killing Fields killer.
It, in many ways, fit this guy who lived on Calder Road.
[Skip] The profile that the FBI made
suggested that the killer probably lived close to the Killing Field,
that he kept clippings from newspapers of the case,
that he had a superior attitude,
and that he had troubled relationships with women.
The League City Police said,
"We've got a man that owns these two properties adjoining the Killing Field."
"Who's bright, who's had bad relationships, who's hit animals."
And the FBI agent said, "He could be your guy."
League City Police Department called me.
And they said, "Hey, we've been looking towards this one guy Clyde Hedrick."
"But we've got another guy on the radar now, Robert Abel."
Robert Abel was this brilliant former scientist for NASA.
He had helped create the modern Saturn rocket
that got astronauts to the moon.
[Lise] By the time Janet Doe's body was found in 1991,
Robert Abel owned the land where the Killing Fields was.
He turned part of it into riding stables.
Robert drew suspicion because he was really cooperative.
He offered to help police, provide equipment, clear brush,
do whatever he could.
[Kathryn] He kept insinuating himself into the investigation,
which is something that sometimes killers do.
[Lise] And there were some things about Robert Abel's history
that made him suspicious.
[Skip] He had three ex-wives.
One ex-wife said that he said he would kill her
if she did not provide him sex like he wanted.
[Kathryn] His ex-wives had said that he used to beat the horses,
and that when one of the horses would die,
he would leave it out in the field to rot
the way the girls' bodies had been left out in the Killing Field.
[ominous music playing]
Come on.
[Kathryn] Tim had really been looking at Clyde Hedrick
because of the Ellen Beason case.
And he had talked to the police about him.
[Lise] Now, Clyde has always denied
that he committed any of the Calder Road murders.
The momentum to try to investigate him for the other crimes wasn't there.
[Kathryn] Because of the FBI profile, when Janet Doe was found,
Clyde Hedrick was kind of put on the back burner.
Everybody thought at that point that Abel was the better suspect in the case.
[Tim] All of a sudden, a person I had really suspected,
it's like, "Oh my God. I wonder if I was wrong."
[reporter] Supported by an FBI profile and testimony from two former wives,
police said the killer was Robert William Abel.
[Skip] The League City Police Department writes an affidavit that goes public,
that Robert Abel, the NASA scientist,
could actually be a sexual serial killer,
who had done these killings to these four young women
in the Killing Fields next to his trail ride business.
And what happened,
because there'd been so much publicity at this point about these killings,
in police departments up and down the I-45 corridor,
detectives were wondering if Abel was the guy
who had done one of their unsolved killings.
Are you responsible for the four bodies that were found on this property?
Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
[Skip] A team of officers go over his property,
trying to find trophies, locks of hair,
something that would no doubt connect Abel to the crimes.
[Kathryn] And they found odd things.
Old newspaper articles about the Calder Road killings.
They found human teeth…
with gold crowns.
And there was a gun found, a .22 caliber gun.
And Jane Doe had been shot by a .22 caliber gun.
But when the autopsy was done,
the Galveston County medical examiner, Dr. Korndofer, had boiled the bullet
when he boiled the bones.
And it had stripped it of any evidentiary evidence,
so they couldn't match it up with the gun.
I don't think there was a smoking gun that said Robert Abel didn't do this.
I think it was just that they didn't find any evidence that he actually had.
The police couldn't do anything.
I wanted to meet this NASA scientist who'd been accused in a court document
of being a serial killer.
So, I called him, and I assumed he would hang up on me.
And he says, "Come on down."
[Robert] Back in this area here
is the site of the Laura Miller discovery.
[Skip] We went out to the Killing Fields and went from one grave to another.
That girl, Heide Fye, was allegedly discovered right here.
[Skip] He had a notebook full of clippings
and four photos he had taken of where the bodies were found.
And I said, "A lot of people would suggest you're showing me your trophies."
And he said, "No, I'm showing you
the research I've done to try to help out."
[Robert] All of a sudden, these people come along and say I fit some profile
of a criminal, a specific criminal.
The serial killer on these four girls.
[Skip] And he just seemed…
haunted as I was.
And I thought,
"Is he putting on a show for me?"
Or is he just being a scientist,
looking for evidence to try to prove what happened?
What was going on on his property?
At the end of the day,
the police had no evidence that Abel had done any of this.
[man] He's a suspect.
He may not be responsible for killing these women,
and he may be responsible for killing these women.
So he's still in the pool.
He's still swimming in the pool of suspects.
[Skip] In League City, he continued to be a suspect.
But what happened? Nothing.
The nightmare, in many ways, is that the parents still grieve.
I can't tell you how many times I searched this property
just hoping I could find Laura's clothes or Laura's little necklace.
I would go out there during lunchtime. I'd go out at night.
I was out there the middle of the night screaming at the top of my lungs.
I said, "I am out here. Come and get me, you coward."
I shot six times in the ground.
[gunshots]
Hopefully somebody would call the police.
Nobody came. Nobody came.
[dramatic music playing]
I remember going out there many, many times,
and walking up to that cross and saying, "Laura, please don't hate your daddy."
"I can't come out here anymore."
"I have to say goodbye. I have to put my life back together."
Literally, I'd be walking away and…
I'd just hear a little voice say, "Dad, don't quit. Please don't quit."
That was kind of like the beginning of,
"Maybe I can do something to help these families
when they have a missing loved one."
[Kathryn] Once I got out to the EquuSearch office,
he spent the whole day with me,
talking about Laura's death and what it'd done to him and his family.
And also, you know, why he had founded EquuSearch.
He was doing what he was doing to try to save others.
Why don't you just walk away from it, man?
Just walk away from it.
Everybody knows me as Tim, Mr. EquuSearch.
And I've lost my identity. I don't know who Tim Miller is.
But I haven't quit.
It's taken its toll, but I haven't quit.
I tried to say goodbye.
Can't do it.
I made that promise to God and Laura I'd never leave a family alone.
I just didn't know it was going to be this many.
[crickets chirping]
[ticking]
[Bob Smither] My daughter went, uh, on a run this morning.
And she's been gone a lot longer than I expected.
[911 dispatch] She left at 9:00, and it's 10:04?
[Bob] Right. And she can't run this long.
[Skip] In April of '97, Laura Smither, a 12-year-old ballerina,
went jogging from her Friendswood home
and completely disappeared.
She was supposed to be back in 20 minutes because we were making pancakes.
She was gonna be home for breakfast. She wanted exercise before breakfast.
[Gay] We were so naive back then.
I immediately started making some phone calls to call people to say,
"Laura's missing. We can't find her. Please come help us search for her."
Everything was upside down.
Nothing made sense.
We had no idea where she was.
Couldn't find her. Couldn't find her.
[reporter] The day began with this heartbreaking sight, Gay Smither,
drenched by rain,
passing out flyers and hoping someone would stop and listen and help.
[Gay] The days after Laura first went missing,
they're kind of a blur
of real terror in my mind.
It's not something that anybody wants to admit has happened.
I was just hysterical.
Walking, searching, and just screaming Laura's name.
Laura!
We didn't find her.
She was almost 13.
[reporter] Residents say things like this don't happen in their small community.
This was a town called one of the ten safest places to live.
People did not lock their doors.
[Lise] Friendswood is one of these little towns
along the I-45 corridor.
It's a particularly safe town by reputation.
It was founded by Quakers,
by people who believe peace is the way, right?
So when this 12-year-old disappears while jogging,
there is a huge outcry.
[Jared] If you are responsible,
I speak for this team when I say
there is a maximum commitment
to find you and do everything the law permits.
[dramatic music playing]
Usually, in these cases, it's the, "Well, your daughter's a runaway."
This was the unusual case where the police jumped on it right away.
[Tim] Friendswood Police Department, Harris County Sheriff's Department.
And now the FBI was involved.
When she went missing, our task force stopped our narcotics work
and began searching for her.
It was a major, major event in our community.
[officer] Try to form a line.
[reporter] Friendswood community has banded together to help in the search.
Volunteers are combing through the thick brush, the mud.
[barking]
[Gay] Whoever has her could take another child.
We don't want your families to go through this.
[Skip] The town came together,
and 6,000 people went on a search for her.
Within days, 6,000 people,
including a contingent of Marines.
[woman] I guess it's the fear of the unknown, what you'll come across.
This poor family,
they need an answer.
[dramatic music playing]
Well, we brought our dogs out
and was gonna run them right around, you know, for exercise around this pond.
We picked up a, you know, foul odor.
And we thought it was a dead animal in the water or something like that.
And my son, Jason, he says,
"Animals don't have socks."
[Jared] The evidence at the scene includes a… silver ring bearing her initials,
and it is apparent that the young woman wore braces.
It is the opinion of my department the young woman found
is Laura Kate Smither.
[Gay] She went missing on April the 3rd, 1997.
And it was on April the 20th.
So, 17 days…
of hell.
[clocks ticking]
[mournful music playing]
Been a while since we looked at this one.
-Look at that little face. -Oh yeah.
[Gay] So sweet.
I love that picture.
[laughs]
I do see God's hand in my life, that I was meant to be Laura's mom.
That was the very first little recital.
And she had four costume changes that production.
Yeah, I remember.
[Gay] Laura was a year old.
And her mom had died with breast cancer.
Her dad, Bob, he was an emotional wreck, obviously.
It was just a very, very hard time in his life.
So, one of the grandmothers said, "We need to help him find a nanny."
That's how we met.
Laura captivated me immediately, and we bonded.
I remember sitting on the floor with her that day that I met her.
It was just a connection.
I just loved her right away.
Little Red Riding Hood, probably.
[Gay laughs]
[ticking]
Four months later, we were married.
Whirlwind.
[laughs]
And I look back on that and think I was crazy.
I was crazy.
I adopted her the following year.
She was touched by light.
I feel honored to this day to have been Laura's mom.
I just wish it…
had not been cut short the way it was.
When this happened to us,
we were given a life sentence.
Laura's murder is our life sentence too.
[reporter] Laura's murder is only one of at least 35 still unsolved cases
in a three-county area involving missing or dead young women.
[Gay] The search for Laura had shone a spotlight
on our area for the missing.
[camera shutter rapidly clicking]
It awakened so many questions
about what was happening and how things were being done.
[Lise] A reporter at the Houston Chronicle writes about those unsolved murders.
She ends up publishing a map, and she includes
unsolved cases all along the corridor,
really to draw attention to a larger issue,
which is women being treated as prey,
and that their murders too often don't get enough attention.
We had learned by then that there were other cases
that didn't get any help at all.
[busy signal beeping]
[Nina] It really made us feel bad
that my aunt Heide was being portrayed the way that she was.
Hitchhiker, runaway, cocktail waitress.
Those all tend to have, like, a negative spin on it.
They really reacted as though
she was not important enough to use the resources to find her.
[dial tone humming]
[Tim] I never forget some things
that League City Police Department said about the girls.
Heide was a drug addict, Laura was a known runaway,
and Jane and Janet were just drifters.
Guess that's given somebody a license to kill them?
They're throwaway children? I said, "No, Laura wasn't throwaway."
[Lise] Teenagers who are engaged
in some sort of criminal behavior or just using drugs,
their disappearances will not be taken as seriously
as someone who is younger,
who is believed to not be doing that kind of risky behavior.
That's still true today.
It's implied that that person did something that caused their murder.
They were a person who, for one reason or another,
who is less important to our society.
[Skip] Laura Smither just seemed so vulnerable.
She was a good girl from a good family and a good neighborhood.
The reaction was so much stronger.
There was this sense of despair,
that if you couldn't save Laura Smither, who could you save?
These men that come to get our children, these men who come to get our daughters
cannot be stopped.
[reporter] Flags fly at half-staff as nearly the entire town of Friendswood
is in mourning over the loss of the 12-year-old.
This is now a homicide investigation.
[Kathryn] When the news breaks about Laura Smither…
everybody's talking about the Killing Field again.
And then everybody's talking about I-45.
And everybody's talking about why these girls keep dying
and why they can never figure out who's killing them.
There is somebody that's taking children, that is murdering little girls,
and… and it's gotta stop.
It's affected my daughter very much. It's affected our entire town.
Um, how can it not?
[Richard] It had been six years
since any of the bodies had been found on Calder Road.
And so there was a fear that, "Oh my goodness, the person's back."
Women are being abducted again.
No one's being held accountable for it.
So there was a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety.
If your child ever disappeared,
do you have a sample of their DNA and fingerprints?
Friendswood was so panicked
that the school district passed out this kit
where parents could fingerprint their own children and put a lock of hair,
so that if the child went missing,
they would at least have fingerprints and hair evidence to use
to help identify the body.
[reporter 1] Who killed 12-year-old Laura Smither and why?
It's a question that haunts police chief Jared Stout.
The community needs to get their level of awareness up.
[reporter 2] Police and firefighters work on the task of draining the pond.
They're looking for anything that will place them closer to the elusive suspect.
[Kathryn] The police ran a list of all of the sex offenders
in Galveston and Harris County and the adjacent areas,
and they ended up with a couple thousand or more.
[Gay] I didn't even have that term in my vocabulary, "sex offender."
It just wasn't part of my reality.
Well, it became my reality.
The volume of sex offenders that were in our area was huge.
[Marla] Especially being a female…
your parents talk to you about safety, being careful,
going out with your friends,
being on the road when you did come of age to drive.
[inhales and sighs sharply]
I can remember when my mother got married to Clyde,
my dad asked me if Clyde had ever hurt me or my brother.
And at the time, I really didn't understand.
[gasps] This is them.
When my mother lived at the apartments in Dickinson,
we would go there to visit.
[gasps]
And there's the pool.
Clyde had taken me and my brother swimming.
My brother was on one end of the pool, and I was near Clyde.
And he's like, "Hey, go underwater. I gotta show you something."
And, "Okay."
[thunder rumbling]
So, I went underwater.
And that's when he pulled his pants down and exposed himself…
underwater.
And I ran back to the apartment.
My brother ran right after me. I ran into the apartment.
[door opens]
I told my mother.
They got into a fight.
Clyde denied it.
My mother believed whatever he said to her.
And it hurt because it didn't matter.
I'm done…
with this place.
[Lise] If we look at the characteristics of the people who are the suspects
in the cases along the I-45 corridor,
we do see some themes.
We see men who were dominant, violent people who were transient.
People like Clyde Hedrick.
Hedrick fits the profile of some of the people we've been talking about
who were attracted to Houston in the '70s and '80s
by the construction boom.
He had already done time in prison in Florida.
He was accused by various ex-wives and ex-girlfriends
of being very abusive and violent.
[Marla] There it is.
That was it.
This place has changed a lot. That was never there.
The trailer was there.
I just hate saying his name.
You have no idea what it does.
I moved out after I graduated high school.
And my mother told me that she had left him.
My mother came to where I was living,
and she said she wanted to show me what he had done.
So, my uncle and my mother asked me to go back to the trailer
down in Galveston.
It was absolutely destroyed.
But that's not what they really wanted to show me.
My mother pointed out a certain spot on the wall.
She explained that there was a hole in the wall.
And Clyde would look through the hole,
looking in on me.
All those times that I felt like somebody was watching,
I wasn't actually crazy.
My uncle took me and my mother
to the police down in Galveston with the photos that he developed.
One man in his office
took my statement and then sent me on my way.
I did my part.
They could have arrested him.
I could have testified
about all the things that he was doing.
And nobody did anything.
[ominous music playing]
To me, when a man has seriously harmed a child,
they should never have the opportunity to harm another child.
And yet, the man who had taken and killed Laura was still out there.
[Kathryn] It was the beginning of a really bad year.
[dramatic music playing]
[Jan] It was just like any other day.
My daughter Kelli, she did drop Alexis off.
I remember saying,
"I love you, honey. Have a good day. I'll talk to you this afternoon."
And those were the last words that I spoke to her.
[reporter] Kelli Cox is a mother, a daughter,
and she has mysteriously disappeared.
[Kathryn] In July of 1997,
unbeknownst to everybody in Houston,
a woman named Kelli Ann Cox disappeared up in Denton, Texas.
[Jan] She was going on this tour of the city jail
with her criminal justice class.
When she got out to her car,
she couldn't get the key to work. She couldn't get into the car.
[reporter] Kelli used this phone to call her boyfriend
to bring an extra set of keys.
This is the last place anyone heard from or saw Kelli.
I mean, it's like she was there one minute, and then she was gone.
[dramatic music playing]
[reporter 1] Detectives searched her car,
but leads in this mystery seem very limited.
[reporter 2] Police say while she still hasn't made contact with her family,
they can't say for sure if a crime happened.
I think it's really premature to speculate on whether or not there are any suspects.
What are you doing? What are you doing?
[Jan] And then it was like almost a month to the day after Kelli's disappearance,
Jessica Cain disappeared.
[dramatic music playing]
[reporter 3] The Tiki Island teenager was last seen leaving a Webster restaurant.
Her truck later found abandoned on the Gulf Freeway,
her purse still inside.
[woman] She would not go somewhere without calling.
She'd call one of us at least.
And that's why we know something's wrong,
and we gotta find her.
[Jan] Jessica Cain was with her theater group.
After she left, it was like, poof, vanished.
[Tim] We just started out on horses.
They asked me to run down there where Jessica Cain's vehicle was found
and see if we can find a spot for a command center.
Another huge search.
[reporter] Grieving parents, Bob and Gay Smither, joined the search.
[Gay] I'll never forget seeing Jessica's dad.
I knew exactly what he was going through.
Of course, at that point, I was just hoping for a different outcome.
[Marla] In '97, when Jessica Cain disappeared,
my dad lived on Tiki Island.
She was my brother's ex-wife's good friend.
She was her good friend.
I joined in the search party.
We'd wear vests, and we had walking sticks.
Lost a lot of sleep when Laura Smither disappeared.
Lost a lot of sleep when Jessica Cain disappeared.
Lost a lot of sleep in the last 38 years.
[dramatic music playing]
[Skip] No matter what they tried to do
and no matter how much of a police presence there was…
My heart is breaking today.
[Skip] …someone was able to get through the lines.
[officer] The search for Jessica will continue.
How do you explain it?
[newscaster] There's somebody amongst us, or something, some monster there.
How do we stop him?
Of course I was feeling,
"My God, it's the same person that got our girls out there on Calder."
You know, how could there be this many serial killers in one area?
You know, all kind of crazy stuff's going through your head.
[reporter] The Tiki Island teenager has been missing since early August 17th.
[Kathryn] When you have a suspicion growing in a community,
when you have people looking over their shoulder all the time
and wondering who really is the killer,
it kind of eats away at you.
[Marla] I was in the area of searching in Jack Brooks Park for Jessica Cain.
She was a young female,
going home from being out.
She was clearly alone.
It made me think of…
what happened to my mother.
All the things that he did to her.
I know partly she was scared, but when he left,
he would take off,
and she would always let him back.
One time, he came back,
and he was covered in blood and had a bloody knife.
And he…
He told my mother, "I did it again."
[ominous music playing]
After what happened to Ellen Beason,
and with his criminal history,
and what he did with me,
I don't know.
[crickets chirping]
[Richard] We didn't know if Laura Smither, Jessica Cain, and Kelli Cox
connected with the Calder Road killings.
But of course, we had to consider the possibility that they were.
If it was the same person,
why would there be such a lapse of time from '91,
when Janet Doe was found, until '97?
He's now utilizing a different M.O.,
not putting the bodies in a field.
We had a lot more questions than we had answers.
[Gay] After Laura went missing,
thousands of leads were called in to the Friendswood Police Department.
They had a lot of serious suspects that they were looking at.
But they had nothing to link them or eliminate them.
[reporter] With the recent killing of Laura Smither
and the ongoing search for Jessica Cain,
Robert Abel has been worried police will try to connect him to the crimes.
Police claimed that he remains a suspect in the four League City killings.
[Lise] There was still a lot of talk in the community about Robert Abel.
So, it's understandable that Tim Miller thought Robert Abel had to be the killer.
We had every reason to think that, "My God, it could be connected."
[Skip] No one worked harder at trying to prove Abel was a killer than Tim.
[Tim] That was that metal building back there.
[Skip] He wanted there to be lots of excavations
and digs throughout Abel's property.
He wanted the police to interrogate him harder.
[Kathryn] That 17 months when he didn't know where Laura was
absolutely tore his heart out.
And the idea that other families are going through that…
and the knowledge that the police often don't do what they need to do
in order to find people and find those bodies is so…
hard for him to accept.
So he goes out, and he does it himself.
[Skip] A lot of his frustration and grief
got channeled into this kind of vengeance toward Abel.
And he decided he was gonna torment Abel.
And he'd call him, leave voicemails.
I have a person that was gonna come out there and take you
to Las Vegas and beat your ass all the way up there,
and kill you.
And then put you in a sand dune.
Tim was convinced he was on the righteous path.
[Tim] All right, put a mark--
Put a mark right at the fence line right there.
I searched that property so many times,
thinking now maybe there's some more bodies that are buried out here.
He got out this sort of ragtag army of volunteers to do a dig.
We are sifting through every grain of dirt.
[Skip] He had borrowed someone's backhoe.
Somebody brought a group of cadaver dogs that could smell dead bodies.
The dogs were let loose, and they all converged on one spot.
[dogs barking]
They'd found something.
And so, everyone began digging right around the area.
And they uncover a woman's purse and women's clothes.
Tim thought that they were items belonging to another victim.
But he couldn't prove it. No one could prove it.
Finally, Abel was so horrified and scared
that he filed for an order of protection to keep Tim away from him.
Abel spent years living this tragic life.
He was the pariah of League City.
Abel finally said enough is enough.
He shut down his Stardust Trail Rides.
Moved back to his family ranch in another county in Texas
to get out of League City altogether.
[ominous music playing]
[Richard] In the summer of '97,
there was still no arrest made in the Calder Road cases.
And now we've got two other young women abducted,
Kelli Cox and Jessica Cain.
I know someone knows something.
Anyone who knows about Jessica, please take this pain from our heart.
[Richard] And the murder of Laura Smither.
We're coping as best as you can.
Every agency in the area was helping. It wasn't from a lack of effort.
Houston Police Department came down to help.
There was-- Everybody was pitching in, and just couldn't catch a break at first.
[911 dispatcher] Webster 9-1-1.
[woman] Yes, ma'am. Y'all need to come to Waffle House.
Somebody just came in and said that someone was abducted.
[Kathryn] It was all over the news.
A woman had been at a convenience store that night.
A man was standing there, kind of watching her.
She got back in her van to leave.
And her car started to act up on the road.
She pulled over.
And the guy from the convenience store
walks up with a smile on his face and says,
"You've got a flat tire. Can I help you?"
And the next thing she knew was that he was behind her
and that he had a knife at her throat.
He forced her into his truck and gunned the engine,
and he started down I-45.
[911 dispatcher] They're at the Waffle House?
[woman] They're outside in the parking lot.
She needs an ambulance. She can't walk.
[police sirens wailing distantly]
They got her out of the middle of the freeway, they said.
The woman's name is Sandra.
What Sandra did was the turning point of the investigation.
[911 dispatcher] Need units to route to 959 West Nasa Road.
Female jumped out of a white dually.
Unknown LP, last seen headed 45 northbound.
[ominous music playing]