Some crimes close. Evidence accumulates, trials are held, sentences are handed down, and whatever small measure of resolution is possible begins its slow arrival. The wound does not heal, but it closes. And then there are the cases that never close. The cases where the evidence led nowhere, or was mishandled, or disappeared. Where the families spent the rest of their lives waiting for an answer that never came. Texas has more than its share of these.
The Texas Killing Fields
Along Interstate 45, in the corridor between Houston and Galveston, there is a stretch of land that law enforcement has been trying to understand for more than fifty years. Since the 1970s, the bodies of dozens of women and girls have been found along this stretch of highway, in ditches and fields and wooded areas that border the road. Many were young. Many had been reported missing months or years before they were found. Multiple killers are believed to have operated in this corridor over the decades. The bodies are still being found. The families are still waiting.
The Yogurt Shop Murders, Austin, 1991
On the night of December 6th, 1991, four teenage girls were found murdered inside an Austin yogurt shop where they worked. The fire had been set after the fact, apparently to destroy evidence. The girls were Amy Ayers, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, and Eliza Thomas. The youngest was thirteen. Four men were eventually arrested. Two were convicted. Both convictions were overturned on appeal. The cases were reinvestigated. No new charges resulted. The families of the four girls have spent more than thirty years fighting for justice inside a legal system that has not been able to give it to them.
The Murder of Irene Garza, McAllen, 1960
Irene Garza was twenty-five years old, a schoolteacher and a beauty queen, when she disappeared on Easter weekend in 1960 after going to confession at her local Catholic church. Her body was found in a canal several days later. For more than fifty years, the case was cold. A priest named John Feit, who had been the last person to see her alive, was questioned and cleared. He moved away. He continued his life. Other priests who knew him said later that he had confessed to them what he had done, and that they had said nothing. Feit was finally arrested in 2016, more than half a century after Irene Garza's death. He was convicted in 2017 and sentenced to life in prison. He was eighty years old.
The Lake Waco Murders, 1982
On July 13, 1982, the bodies of three teenagers were found near Lake Waco. Two men were convicted. One of them, David Spence, was executed in 1997. The original detective on the case came to believe before the execution that Spence was innocent. He spent years trying to reopen the investigation. He did not succeed. The question of what actually happened at Lake Waco on that July night remains, for many people who followed the case, genuinely and deeply unresolved.
