TEXAS KILLING FIELDS Ep. 1 | “1970s: Galveston 11”

In the summer of 1971, outside of Houston, Texas, Claire Wilson is six minutes late to pick up her 13-year-old daughter, Colette, after band practice. In those six minutes, Colette Wilson disappears. Weeks of frantic searching reveal nothing. For the next six years, girls vanish from the area between Houston and Galveston with frightening regularity. As their dead bodies begin to appear, they become known as the Galveston 11. Go to Incogni.com/infamous or use code INFAMOUS at checkout to get 60% off an annual plan with Incogni! Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/infamousamerica Thanks to our sponsor, Rocket Money! Use this link to start saving today: RocketMoney.com/InfamousA Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com or @blackbarrelmedia on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:11Speaker 00

  At lunchtime on June 17, 1971, Claire Wilson was at the problem-solving stage of her situation, not the panic stage. Panic was lurking in the background and threatening to creep in, but she was holding it back for now. It was 12:36 PM, and Claire Wilson's 13-year-old daughter Colette was not at her designated pickup spot. Colette had a passion for music. She played clarinet in her middle-school band, and even though it was summer and the students were out of school, she attended regular band camp sessions at Dulles High School in Sugarland, Texas. Sugarland was about 25 miles from Colette's home in Alvin, and Colette was one of 10 kids in the Wilson family.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  Colette's father, Tom, was a dentist, so he was gone all day at work. That left Colette's mother, Claire, at home to wrangle 10 kids. In the summer, when the kids weren't in school, the house must have been chaotic. The band camp sessions ended at around noon, and it was impossible for Claire to break away in the middle of the day to make the 50-mile round-trip drive from Alvin to Sugarland to pick up Colette. Luckily for the Wilsons, there were other families who were in the same situation, and the band director was a generous guy. He organized a drop-off-and-pick-up system with some of the families. It was like a private school bus route.

• 1:34Speaker 00

  He dropped off kids at designated spots where their parents met them and took them home. For Colette Wilson, her drop-off spot was at the intersection of Highway 6 and County Road 99, about 2 miles from her home in Alvin. The band director dropped her off at 12:30 PM, and her mother, Claire, arrived at 12:36.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  When Claire Wilson arrived at 12:36 PM, her daughter was nowhere to be found. Claire thought quickly. She tried to solve the problem before she allowed panic to overwhelm her like a flood. If the band director had arrived at 12:30, as usual, then six minutes didn't seem like enough time for Colette to decide that her mother wasn't coming and to start walking to a friend's house. That was the plan if Claire was ever late. Colette would walk to the home of a friend. Logically, in problem-solving mode, Claire's next step was to drive to the friend's house. Along the way, she scanned the streets for Colette. Colette was a small, dark-haired girl who was wearing shorts and a Mickey Mouse t-shirt

• 2:43Speaker 00

  and carrying a clarinet case. She should have been easy to spot, but Claire saw no sign of her daughter. When Claire arrived at the friend's house, she hurried to the door. The family reported bad news. They had not seen Colette. And that was when the panic started to claw at Claire Wilson. She raced home and called her husband Tom at his dentist's office. Tom called the police, and Claire put the other kids to work, calling all of Colette's friends. As they accumulated the same response, no one had seen Colette, the worst possibility imaginable became a reality. Their daughter had vanished. Colette Wilson would soon be viewed as the first of 11 girls who went missing from communities

• 3:25Speaker 00

  along the 50-mile stretch of Interstate 45 between Houston and Galveston Island. It was the beginning of waves of fear and violence that gripped those communities for nearly 30 years.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and in this mini-series, we're telling the stories of the unsolved cases of young girls and women who went missing or were found murdered outside Houston, Texas, from the 1970s to the 1990s. Their stories are collectively known as "The Texas Killing Fields." This is episode one, 1970s, The Galveston Eleven.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  Today, Alvin, Texas, has a population of about 30,000 people. It's straight south of Houston and just outside of the sprawl of the greater Houston metro area. In 1971, Alvin was in the middle of its population boom. While Colette Wilson grew up in the 1960s, the small town around her doubled in size, from about 5,000 people to about 10,000 people. That growth was happening in virtually every small city in the orbit of Houston in the 1960s and 70s. The booming oil and gas industry was headquartered in Houston. The NASA space program was headquartered in Houston. And a massive hospital system called the Texas Medical Center

• 5:00Speaker 00

  had been adding facilities steadily for 15 years to its campus in Houston. Construction was everywhere, as businesses and housing developments scrambled to keep up with the influx of new workers. For families, the small city of Alvin offered the perfect compromise: a lower cost of living and an easy commute to Houston. It was considered safe, neighbors knew each other, kids played outside, no one locked their doors, and all of that changed in the summer of 1971.

• 5:35Speaker 00

  When Claire Wilson left the pickup spot and drove toward the friend's house, where she hoped her daughter would be, she noticed something that she later believed was important. She didn't see her daughter walking toward the friend's house, but she did see a man sitting in a parked car on the side of the road. In that split second, she took note of the man in the old car, but she didn't focus on him. She thought he was probably just having car trouble. After the friend's family said they hadn't seen Colette, the unknown man in the old car suddenly mattered. Most people in the area knew each other, but Claire didn't recognize the man or his vehicle. At worst, he was a kidnapper. At best, he might have seen something useful.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Claire raced back to the spot where his car had been parked, but he was gone. After that, she rushed home, called her husband, and then she and her kids started calling Colette's friends. When Tom Wilson called the police, he insisted foul play was involved. When Claire spoke to the police, she emphasized that she had only been six minutes late. Colette was a responsible girl. Colette would not have wandered off after just six minutes. And even if she had, for whatever reason, she was 13 and she was carrying a clarinet case. She could not have gone very far in such a short time. And there was the man in the old car that had appeared broken down but vanished moments later. He was the only person nearby.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  At least one newspaper reported that Claire said she saw a dark-haired female in the backseat of the car. Years later, Claire Wilson summarized her initial exchange with police for author Catherine Casey. Claire said, "The police weren't worried. They said she was probably taking drugs or something, that she'd run away. We knew Colette. We knew that wasn't true, but they wouldn't listen." Colette Wilson's parents were lucky in one respect. They had money to hire a private investigator. While the police continued to believe that Colette was a runaway, the Wilsons hired a private investigator and organized their neighbors to search the area.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  Two days into the search, the police accepted the idea that Colette had been kidnapped, and they added their resources. For the next three weeks, legions of people scoured the area, and police helicopters circled in the skies. They found no trace of Colette or the car with the man in it that Claire Wilson had seen. The case of 13-year-old Colette Wilson was classified as a missing person case. It remained open and active, though hope for her safe return was fading. And at the three-week mark of the Colette Wilson investigation, the body of a 14-year-old girl was found floating 25 miles away in Galveston Bay. The 1970s would soon prove to be a scary time to be a teenage boy or a teenage girl

• 8:30Speaker 00

  in the Houston area.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  The small but influential beat generation of the 1950s evolved into the hippie generation in the 1960s, which expanded exponentially in the 1970s. Teenagers and young adults were more free-roaming than they had ever been. Genuine runaways were more common, and the practice of hitchhiking, which had always contained an element of danger but had mostly been viewed as innocent, exploded in popularity and became seriously dangerous. Those factors and more caused the reports of missing persons to skyrocket in the 1970s. Police and families were in difficult situations. Police departments couldn't possibly dedicate all the necessary resources to every report of a missing person.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  There were simply too many reports. In terms of teenagers specifically, no one knew if they were actual runaways who had left home to start new lives somewhere else, or if they had just hitchhiked to the next town over to see a concert, or if they had been abducted and were in extreme danger. And when the vast majority of cases resolved themselves innocently, with the missing person returning home after a few hours or a couple days, it led many police departments to adopt an informal 24-hour waiting period before they took a missing person case seriously. Over time, that informal practice ended up infecting and affecting the collective mindset of the general public.

• 10:09Speaker 00

  There was not then, nor is there now, nor has there ever been, a rule in any law enforcement agency which requires the agency to wait 24 hours to investigate a missing person case. And there has never been, nor is there now, a national, state, or city law which requires people to wait 24 hours to report a missing person. In terms of reporting, the opposite is true. If friends or family members think someone is missing, they should report the person missing immediately. In the 1970s, as the informal 24-hour waiting period became more prevalent at police departments, the concept crept into the wider American consciousness. When it did, it naturally found its way into movies and TV shows.

• 10:53Speaker 00

  After that, people started to believe that the waiting period was an actual rule or a law, that the police couldn't act for 24 hours, and people shouldn't report a person missing in the first 24 hours. Both of those assumptions were wrong, especially when it came to missing persons under the age of 18. If the missing person was 18 or over, it was a messy case for the police. At age 18, a person is an adult and capable of traveling on his or her own and living on his or her own. But with a case like that of 13-year-old Collette Wilson, who was supposed to be picked up by her mother at a certain time at a certain place, even the informal waiting period didn't make sense. Tom Wilson, Collette's father,

• 11:38Speaker 00

  called the police probably less than an hour after Collette went missing. And Claire Wilson had seen a suspicious car, which could have been critically important. But they searched on their own for more than a day, and then with police help for three weeks, and they found no sign of Collette. At the three-week mark, the family of Brenda Jones endured a similar but shorter situation.

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  A 14-year-old black girl named Brenda Jones lived on Galveston Island, 25 miles down Interstate 45 from Collette Wilson's home in Alvin. On July 1, 1971, Brenda took the bus to the local hospital to visit her aunt, but she didn't return home at the expected time. Brenda's family started making calls. They learned Brenda made it to the hospital and was on her way home. The bus driver confirmed he dropped her off at a stop only a few blocks from her house that afternoon. Brenda's sister Phyllis tried to report Brenda missing that evening, but the police said she had to wait. If Brenda didn't come home the next day, the family could file a report and the police would take action.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  But the following morning, only halfway through the informal 24-hour waiting period, the police were on Phyllis's doorstep. There would be no need for a formal missing person report because Brenda's body had been found in Galveston Bay.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  A painting crew discovered her at 10:30 a.m., floating nude in the bay at the end of the pier. Her hands and feet were bound. The autopsy revealed she'd been strangled just a couple hours before she'd been dumped in the water, likely between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. The killer had kept her alive throughout the afternoon, evening, and night, while Phyllis was waiting at the instruction of the police to file her missing person report.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Brenda's family was shattered. Two cases didn't make a pattern, but the similarities were clear. Both girls were close in age, both vanished in broad daylight near their homes. And whether it meant anything or not, both girls, Colette and Brenda, loved music and played the clarinet. They disappeared within three weeks of each other and about 30 miles apart. Up in Alvin, the search continued for Colette Wilson. Down in Galveston, Brenda Jones' case was essentially closed. Water had washed away vital evidence, and the police moved on to other things. So, a killer roamed free along Interstate 45 between Galveston and Houston.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  Almost exactly one month later, two more girls, the same age as Brenda and Colette, vanished in Galveston.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Colette Wilson disappeared on June 17, 1971. Brenda Jones disappeared on July 1 and was found on July 2. On August 4, Sharon Shaw, 13 years old, and Rhonda Johnson, 14 years old, did not come home from a trip to Galveston Island. The girls lived in Webster, Texas, a small city right along Interstate 45, about halfway between Houston and Galveston. Webster is basically the home of NASA. NASA Mission Control and the whole NASA campus is right next to Webster. And Webster was one of the three communities next to Interstate 45, which would become collectively ground zero for the story of the Texas Killing Fields.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  On the other side of the interstate from Webster is Friendswood, which would suffer its own tragedies soon. And straight south of Webster is League City, the home of the infamous Calder Road Field, which would become the most well-known part of the story. But the story of the Texas Killing Fields is much bigger than the murders associated with Calder Road. And the fear that started to rise among families of teenage girls along Interstate 45 between Houston and Galveston also started to rise for the families of teenage boys in Houston proper. From 1970 to 1973, one of the most depraved and vicious serial killers in American history, Dean Corle, preyed on teenage boys all around Houston.

• 15:55Speaker 00

  He, along with the occasional help of two accomplices, killed at least 28 boys and young men between the ages of 13 and 20. Corle's first known victim was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Texas who was hitchhiking home to his family's house in Houston. One year after that young man disappeared, Sharon Shaw and Rhonda Johnson tried to do the same thing: hitchhike home from Galveston to Webster. The girls loved to surf the waters off of Galveston Island. On August 4th, 1971, they did what they always did on a summer day.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  They climbed into a car with their friend Glenda Willis and drove to Galveston. But when they arrived, they were disappointed. The whipping winds and choppy waters made it too dangerous to surf. Sharon and Rhonda, who went by her middle name Renee, wanted to stay and spend the day in Galveston, but Glenda, who was 17 and owned the car, needed to head back to Webster. Sharon and Renee said they'd find a ride home when they were ready. Hitchhiking was something the girls did regularly. If no one in the surfer community was heading toward Webster, they would hitch a ride with whomever was going in that direction. There are multiple versions of what happened next. Maybe Sharon and Renee stayed in Galveston.

• 17:17Speaker 00

  Maybe they hitchhiked home to Webster and then back to Galveston. Either way, the last time Glenda Willis saw them, they were in Galveston. When they hadn't returned home that evening, their parents started talking. Neither family had seen the girls, so they reached out to Glenda. When Glenda heard they weren't home, she wasn't alarmed. They could still be having fun in Galveston. Or, they could be well into a hitchhiking adventure to California. The girls were obsessed with the hippie culture of San Francisco and the legendary California Waves. California may have seemed like a pipe dream to many teenagers, but it felt reasonable for Sharon and Renee. Friends described the duo as "tomboys" and "fearless",

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  and a member of the surfer community added "street smart" to that list. To the girls' social circle, Sharon and Renee were undoubtedly fine. But their parents weren't convinced. They filed missing person reports. And Renee's grandfather, who was a city councilman in Webster, pushed for answers. But there were none to be had. Three long, slow months passed with no leads or revelations. And then, in November 1971, the dam burst. Two more girls went missing from Galveston, and bodies started appearing in communities along Interstate 45.

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson were basically 15-year-old versions of Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson. Debbie and Maria lived in Galveston, they were best friends, and they were surfers like Sharon and Renee. Debbie and Maria's routine included a daily stop at Baskin Robbins Ice Cream Shop, where their friend Cindy worked, and then a walk to Doug's Dive and Surf Shop. The shop was a popular hangout spot for teenage surfers. The owners, the staff, and the customers all knew each other at Doug's. Monday, November 15th, was a school holiday, so students had the day off. Debbie spent the three-day holiday weekend at Maria's house, and the girls left the house

• 19:26Speaker 00

  on Monday at 9:00 a.m. to relish their last few hours of freedom before Debbie had to be home at 3:00 p.m. They went to Baskin Robbins and chatted with their friend Cindy Thompson. Since surf season was over, the girls told Cindy they planned to hitchhike to Houston instead of heading to Doug's Dive and Surf Shop.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Cindy watched from the Baskin Robbins window as Debbie and Maria stood outside and waved at passing cars. Eventually, a man in a white panel van stopped to pick them up. The van was a construction-style vehicle, sometimes called a painter's van, with a sliding door on the side and two windows in the back. The girls talked with the driver, moved quickly to the sliding door, and climbed inside. They were off on their adventure, in a vehicle that was not yet heavily associated with predators.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Two days later, on November 17th, a man who was fishing at Turner's Bayou in Texas City, 14 miles northwest of Galveston, spotted a body floating in the water which turned out to be Maria Johnson. In the water, decomposition happened fast, and officers had to identify Maria by her t-shirt and jewelry. Like Brenda Jones three months earlier, Maria was nude from the waist down with her hands and feet bound. The next day, searchers found Debbie Ackerman floating face down 150 feet from Maria's location. Debbie's body was in the same condition as Maria's. Unlike Brenda Jones, who had died from strangulation, Debbie and Maria had been shot in the head.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  And the horror of November 1971 wasn't finished. One week after Debbie Ackerman was found, a man with a metal detector was scanning a densely wooded area near Addicks Reservoir west of Houston. The man in the woods, a simple hobbyist with a metal detector, stumbled upon a human skull, and then a decomposing body. He contacted the police, and the grim process of identification began. It had been five months since Colette Wilson had gone missing. It had been three and a half months since Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson had gone missing. And the remains in the woods west of Houston turned out to be none of them. Dental records confirmed the remains belonged to 19-year-old Gloria Ann Gonzalez.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Gloria worked as a bookkeeper for a local grocery store. Her roommate had reported her missing from Houston one month earlier. But during the process of identification, the medical examiner discovered that one of the teeth with the remains didn't fit Gloria's jaw. It was from someone else. The police hurried back to Addicks Reservoir with cadaver dogs. Three days after investigators found Gloria's remains, a second pile of bones turned up in the woods just thirty-five yards away. The police didn't wait for the medical examiner to do the usual dental identification process. They brought Tom Wilson, Colette's father, to the scene. Tom was a dentist, and more importantly, he was Colette's dentist.

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  Tom examined the teeth in the remains, the fillings and the other dental work, and he knew immediately they belonged to his daughter.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  The remains of Colette Wilson were found five months after she disappeared and thirty-five miles from her home on a straight line. Counting Colette, seven teenage girls had gone missing between Houston and Galveston. With the discovery of Colette and Gloria Gonzalez, five of the seven had been found. All had been murdered. Most were badly decomposed when they were found. None had provided the police with any viable leads on the murder or murderers. And two girls, Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson, were still out there somewhere, though not for long. On January 3rd, 1972, thirty-eight days after the discovery of the remains of Colette Wilson and Gloria Gonzalez,

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  two young boys were fishing in a small boat in Clear Lake, which sits next to the communities of Webster and League City, right in the heart of Ground Zero of the Texas Killing Fields. The boys spotted something bobbing in the water, like a volleyball. As they paddled closer, the volleyball took on a new form: a human skull. More remains lay scattered in the marshy banks nearby. A few weeks later, in February, a second decomposing body was found in the same area. Five months after they went missing, Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson had been found. All seven girls who disappeared between June and November 1971 were accounted for.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  The remains of Sharon and Renee had been near their hometown of Webster, so Renee's grandfather, who was a Webster City councilman, pushed hard for answers.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  In May of 1972, the Webster City Council changed the leadership of the investigation. It appointed Donald Morris, the new chief of police, and Tommy Deal, assistant chief. Both men were former state troopers, and they both worked in the Webster Police Department. They were young for their roles: Chief Morris was in his early 30s, and Assistant Chief Deal was in his early 20s. They were under pressure to achieve a result, and Chief Morris quickly decided on a suspect: Michael Self. Morris had had run-ins with Self in the past. When Morris was a security guard in an apartment complex, he accused Self of peeking up girls' dresses.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Self agreed to attend psychiatric sessions so that no formal charges would be filed. While Morris was with the Webster Police Department, he suspected Self of stealing gasoline from the fire trucks of the Webster Fire Department. The Webster Police Department and Fire Department were in the same building, and Michael Self was a volunteer fireman. And, one week before Morris became chief, he questioned Self about possessing marijuana. At that time, 23-year-old Michael Self worked the night shift as an attendant at a local gas station. He was a shy young man who had no history of violence, but he quickly became Chief Morris's top suspect.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Three weeks after Morris and Deal took over the Webster Police Department, Assistant Chief Deal and another officer went to the gas station where Self worked. Self agreed to go to the Police Department when he finished his shift. On June 3, 1972, after working all night, Michael Self faced a three-hour, early-morning interrogation without a lawyer. At the end of it, he signed a confession in which he admitted to the murders of Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson. From there, Michael Self's case became incredibly complicated. He later alleged he had been threatened with violence multiple times by Chief Morris during the interrogation.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  Self gave a second confession, but there appeared to be multiple errors in the confessions, things which did not match the facts of the case. Michael Self eventually went to trial for the murder of Sharon Shaw, and was convicted based solely on his confessions. He went to prison and spent the next 25 years appealing his case. While he did, the murders of teenage girls continued, and the stories of Webster Police Chief Don Morris and Assistant Chief Tommy Deal took surprising turns.

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  On January 3rd, 1973, seven months after Michael Self was arrested, 16-year-old Kimberly Pitchford vanished from her high school parking lot in Pasadena, Texas, a community on the southeast side of Houston. She was supposed to call her mom from a nearby payphone after her driver's education class, but she never made the call. Her body, nude from the waist down like many of the other victims, was found in a canal two days later. On September 6th, 1974, while Michael Self was in prison as a convicted killer, 14-year-old Georgia Greer and 12-year-old Brooks Bracewell disappeared after leaving a local bar in Dickinson, Texas, where teenagers played pool.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  The girls were only one mile from home, and Dickinson was squarely in the middle of the Interstate 45 corridor between Webster and League City. The girls' remains were found seven years later near Alvin, Texas, the hometown of Colette Wilson. On May 21st, 1977, 12-year-old Suzanne Bowers, known as Suzie, was with her grandparents in Galveston when she asked her grandfather to drive her home to get her swimsuit. The cloudy morning had cleared, and Suzie wanted to join her friends at the beach. Her grandfather told her to walk home for her swimsuit. He thought the exercise would be good for her, and it was only a mile to her house. Suzanne Bowers vanished during the walk.

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  Her remains were found two years later, also near Alvin, Texas. A killer or killers had taken the lives of 11 girls between the ages of 12 and 19 during a six-year period from 1971 to 1977.

• 28:51Speaker 00

  The last four were kidnapped and killed while Michael Self was in prison. It was still possible that Self had murdered Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson. But if all of the murders were the work of a serial killer, a term that was about to be created by the FBI, then Michael Self could not be the killer. Another, more likely candidate, was about to announce himself in dramatic fashion.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Edward Bell co-owned Doug's Dive and Surf Shop in Galveston. It was the town's premier hangout for teenagers. And as co-owner, Bell knew Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson, the 15-year-olds who visited regularly in the summer of 1971. In November of 1971, when they disappeared from Galveston, Bell owned a white van, identical to the one the girls entered for their ride to Houston while their friend Cindy Thompson watched from the Baskin Robbins window. If Bell had approached in his van, the girls would have recognized him from the surf shop and felt safe accepting a ride. Bell also had a long history of exposing himself to young kids, which was how he became

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  a suspect for the murders in 1978. A 26-year-old man named Larry Dickens was at his mother's house in Pasadena, southeast of Houston. Larry and his mother watched a man park a pickup truck across the street. The driver got out and exposed himself to kids who were playing across from the Dickens house. Larry's mother called the police while Larry ran to the man's pickup and snatched the keys out of the ignition. The driver, Edward Bell, grabbed a handgun from his truck and chased Larry onto the driveway. When Larry refused to surrender the keys, Bell shot him five times while Larry's mother watched from the window. Larry was badly wounded, but not dead.

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  Bell walked back to his truck, grabbed a rifle, returned to Larry, and shot Larry in the head. Bell took his keys and fled the area, but the police quickly captured him. Despite facing murder charges, Edward Bell's bail was set at $125,000. Bell liquidated his assets, posted bail, and fled the country. He remained on the run in Central America for 14 years until his story aired on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. A tip led the authorities in Panama to arrest him in 1992. The FBI dragged Bell back to the US where he received a 70-year sentence for the murder of Larry Dickens.

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  In 1998, after serving six years in prison, Edward Bell wrote letters confessing to the murders of the girls who are now known as the Galveston 11. In Edward Bell's confession letters, he described the murders of Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson in vivid detail. He also named Collette Wilson, the first victim, and Kimberly Pitchford, who vanished from a Pasadena high school, the same area where he murdered Larry Dickens. He described the other nine girls by their appearances and provided murder dates. Bell claimed "brainwashing drove him to kill 'the 11 who went to heaven,' as he called them.

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  He blamed his actions on childhood abuse by his father." In 1998, Bell's confession letters were deemed not credible by authorities, who felt Bell was crazy. The letters were finally investigated in 2011, but by then, too many years had passed and no evidence remained which could corroborate Bell's story. In 2017, investigative journalist Lisa Olson interviewed Edward Bell for the A&E documentary, "The 11." But Bell completely reversed course and denied murdering the girls. At that point, he claimed he'd never met or heard of any of the victims, though in the same conversation, he also denied killing Larry Dickens in broad daylight in front

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  of multiple witnesses and being caught by police moments later. In a separate 2017 interview, Bell explained why he confessed to killing the 11 girls and then later denied the confession. He said he felt suicidal in 1998, and he thought confessing to murders he didn't commit would prompt the state to execute him. Law enforcement found abundant circumstantial evidence to arouse suspicion, but they never found any physical proof to support Bell's confession letters. Edward Bell died in prison in 2019. He was never convicted of the series of murders known as the Galveston 11, but he remains the primary suspect.

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  The case of Michael Self ended the same way. After Michael Self was convicted in 1973 of the murder of one of the Galveston 11, he spent two decades appealing his case. All of his appeals failed, despite the fact that there was no physical evidence against him and that the top two officers who built the case against him turned out to be far bigger criminals than he was. Webster Police Chief Don Morris and Assistant Chief Tommy Deal didn't stay in their positions for very long. They were appointed in the spring of 1972, and by 1975, Morris was a highway patrolman

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  and Deal was a manager at a sporting goods store. And they were both bank robbers. Just one year after Morris and Deal took over the Webster Police Department, they started robbing banks with a former sheriff's deputy. In 1975, Morris, Deal, and the former deputy, George Marshall, were arrested and charged with five robberies. They went to federal prison, and the courts continued to deny the appeals of Michael Self. As Self toiled in prison, his lawyer tried to give him a way out. The lawyer told Michael that, due to the laws at the time, his signed confession, even if it was coerced, could not be thrown out during the appeals process. That was why he kept losing his appeals.

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  So if Michael simply said his confession was true, if he said he really did commit murder, and he showed genuine remorse, he'd have a good chance of winning parole and getting out of prison. But Michael refused. He never wavered and responded again with, "But I didn't do it. I didn't kill those girls." Michael Self died in prison in 2000 at the age of 52, two years after Edward Bell wrote his confession letters.

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  In the Eleven documentary in 2017, retired Galveston Police Detective Fred Page stood over Michael Self's grave and reflected on the tragedy of Michael's life. Detective Page said, falsely arrested at the tender age of 24 by bank robbers masquerading as police officers, and 28 years later, passed away in prison. In the documentary, detectives and judges remain split on Self's involvement. Most believe Michael Self was innocent. Others think he might have been involved, but no one could or would definitively declare his guilt. The closest anyone came was a former officer saying he was 85% sure Self had some involvement.

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  Whether Michael Self had some involvement or whether Edward Bell had full involvement, the pattern of murders seemed to stop in 1978 after Bell fled the country. In the 1980s, parents started warning their children more strongly against hitchhiking, and the practice eventually fell away to nearly nothing. But predators still prowled the communities along Interstate 45 between Houston and Galveston, and at least one would use an overgrown field in League City to dispose of his victims.

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Next time on Infamous America, in 1983, women and girls start to go missing again. When some of their bodies turn up in a field on Calder Road, the crimes give the story its name: The Texas Killing Fields. New suspects emerge, but justice remains elusive. That's next week on Infamous America.

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  To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  This episode was researched and written by Mandy Wimmer. Additional research and writing by me, Chris Wimmer. Original music by Rob Valier. Thanks for listening.

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• 38:43Speaker 02

  This December, the magic of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol returns to Virginia Repertory Theater in downtown Richmond. Experience the transformation of Ebenezer Scrooge as he's visited by the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future, and rediscovers the joy and true meaning of the holiday season. Performances run November 18th through December 27th. Tickets on sale now at virginiarep.org or by calling 804-282-2620.