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Voids left in families of those missing

By Scott E. Williams

The Daily News

Published August 18, 2002

Fourteen years after his daughters disappearance, Clyde Richerson was still so consumed by it that he went to a memorial service for one of the suspects.

Bob and Gay Smither spend 20 hours a week volunteering at an organization named for their murdered daughter.

People who have lived through it say losing a child to a killer can be one of the hardest things a parent can go through. Parents whose children remain missing say they would find solace in knowing their child had been killed, claiming that knowledge is better than none at all.

Since 1971, 21 women and girls have been reported missing along the Interstate 45 corridor in Galveston County in cases that remain unsolved. Police have recovered the remains of 14 from fields, parks and bodies of water. Their killers remain at large. The other seven are missing, their fates unknown. The effects of those statistics are devastating on families.


Beating the Odds

A national survey conducted by social workers in 1985 ended with an estimate that 80 to 90 percent of couples who lose a child end up divorcing. In 1999, a national nonprofit group called the Compassionate Friends conducted a study of its own, asserting the rate was only 28 percent.

If the 1985 study is correct, then Bob and Gay Smither beat the odds. Their marriage withstood one of the most grueling experiences a parent can endure.

Their daughter Laura Kate Smither, 12, went jogging one morning in April 1997, four months before Jessica Cain vanished. She never made it home. Weeks later, her body was found near a pond in Pasadena.

I dont think theres any way to describe it, Bob Smither said. It devastated our family. This man took Laura, but we decided he wasnt going to take our marriage as well.

Jared Stout, Friendswood police chief at the time of Lauras disappearance, took the unusual step of publicly naming Floyd Reece, convicted in a Webster kidnapping case, as a suspect in her death. Reece is in prison on the kidnapping charge, but has never been charged in Lauras death.

Smither said the key to survival was tolerance. You have to let the other person grieve in the way they grieve, he said. Everyone expresses grief differently, and just because its a different way of expressing it than you might have doesnt mean its wrong.


Hoping for a Call

Hitchcock resident Candy Purl is a cousin of Sandra Romber.

Romber disappeared from her Santa Fe home in 1983. Her father told police that both front and back doors were unlocked when he got home, and food the 14-year-old girl apparently had prepared was in the kitchen, uneaten.

Romber was initially labeled a runaway, and police still believe she might be alive, living a new life in parts unknown.

I hope someday Ill just get a call from her, saying shes OK and shes just calling because she saw her name on a newscast somewhere, said Santa Fe police Capt. Keith Meenen, head of the police departments criminal investigation division.

I was in high school when it happened, Purl said. To this day, sometimes Ill think of the runaway story and Ill just stare at someone who has hair like hers, or reminds me of her. Other times, I think, My God, what if shes one of those girls they found off of Calder Road, the ones they havent identified?


Turning the Bad to Good

Some families even manage to turn their pain into a way to help others. League City teen Laura Millers was one of four bodies found in the field near Calder Road in League City in 1991.

Tim Miller, Lauras father, established Texas Equusearch, which uses volunteers on horseback to scour fields and other areas for missing persons.

The Smithers spend about 20 hours a week volunteering at the Laura Recovery Center, named for their daughter. The group also assists with searches for missing people.

Both groups exist solely through private donations. Those groups do more than we can say, certainly more than we have the resources to do on every case, said Capt. B.J. Miller, head of the Galveston County Sheriffs Office criminal investigation division. Theres no way we, or the community, could ever repay them.


Searching for Closure

Clyde Richerson is the father of Rene Richerson, who disappeared from the lobby of the Casa del Mar condominiums where she worked in 1988. Investigators believe she was killed, but never located her remains or made an arrest in the case.

Clyde Richerson said he and his family had been all but consumed by their inability to give Rene a proper burial, and he even attended a memorial service for one of the suspects in her disappearance.

He said he wished people would come forward with what they know about the missing and murdered.

I would put out a plea to anyone who knows anything about any of these cases, he said. Please let someone know, no matter how insignificant it may seem to you, because it might be that missing piece that will mesh with something else and at least give a family some closure. It just leaves such a void to have something happen to one of your children, and you never really know what happened to them.

Those groups do more than we can say, certainly more than we have the resources to do on every case, said Capt. B.J. Miller, head of the Galveston County Sheriffs Office criminal investigation division. Theres no way we, or the community, could ever repay them.



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2004 Galveston County Daily News. All rights reserved.

June 02, 2004

**** The I-45 Corridor Serial Killer
was profiled by SAM, a Texas Law Enforcement Officer,
Former criminal investigator, Crime scene investigator,
Death scene investigator, Homicide investigator.
Advanced Texas peace officer license.
20 years.****


I have completed my profile on the I-45 Corridor serial killer.
He is a white male between the age of 55 and 60. He has size and is strong. He is an opportunist and takes advantage of girls who may need a ride using a pay phone at convenience stores. He also uses a grab and snatch blitz attack or tricks some of his victims into a compromising position.

He is normal to above normal in intelligence. He is organized and works, has good reliable transportation. Most likely likes to drive a dark colored pick up truck.

Statistics on I-45 homicide victims.

Total of 18 victims that I think are linked to one serial killer and one attempted abduction.
All but one were between the ages of 12 and 17. All were white except for 2 . Note: two afro american girls who were killed at the same time may also be victims of this serial killer making the total 20.

40% were abducted from convenience stores tall;king on phone.

60% bodies were dumped in killing fields are in bodies of water in close proximity.

3 victims were mutilated.

6 victims were beat and strangled to death.

5 victims were shot to death most in the head.

Modes of death--since some of the vict have been shot and others severely beaten and strangled we have different modes of death. 4 victims were found in close proximity in a field called Calder Road field. 2 of the vict were shot the other 2 were severely beat and strangled to death.

Obviously the same killer was using this field as a dumping ground and sense we have different modes of death I'm including all strangulation cases and head shot cases to our victims list based upon age and geographical location of where the victims were abducted and recovered.

3 of these death were mutilation, in 1971 Alison Craver 12 years old was abducted. Her hands and arm along with some teeth were discovered 3 months later in a field called Pearlman field not far from her home.
The rest of her body was found not far away.

In 1997 12 year old Laura Smither was abducted. Her decapitated body was found in a retention pond located on Pearlman field.

So we have 2 mutilation involving 12 year old girls who bodies are located in close proximity 26 years apart. Now we either have more than one serial killer are one very sick puppy.

I think on these victims we have one serial killer. He obviously has different modes of killing demonstrated by the modes of death of the 4 vict in Calder Road Field.

I think our perp likes to torture by beating his victims then sexually assaulting them and strangling them to death. If they fight or he has a control problem then he shoots them in the head.

Some are mutilated by decapitation and other body parts dismembered.
I think our perp likes to experiment with the human anatomy in a sexual manner. He may re-visit his victims in the killing fields and have sex with them post mortem like Gary Ridgeway did the GRK.

He is very dangerous to young girls and woman. He is not in custody and will kill again. And I'm confused why this serial killer has not made the news big time. People who live and travel in this area should be aware of this killer.

NOTE: Some of the victims had artcles of clothing shoved in their mouth anus/vagina that's another way I used to link this sick perverted killer.

TEXAS MONTHLY

October, 1999

Pg. 126

Is Robert Abel getting away with murder?

Texas Monthly, October 1999, at 126

Lawmen think the retired NASA engineer could be responsible for the deaths or disappearances of several young women who lived in the coastal plain between Houston and Galveston. There's only one problem: They don't have enough evidence to arrest him. In fact, they don't have any.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


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.

"Right here," shouted Tim Miller, a grim, wiry building contractor who was at the controls of a large backhoe. "Let's start here." Nearby were a dozen search dogs, including four trained to detect the scent of decomposing human flesh. A few construction workers, employees of Miller's, were on hand to help, as were friends and even Miller's ex-wife. One man brought his thirteen-year-old son. "You see those high weeds?" Miller said. "That's where we need to dig."

It is known as the "killing fields," and it is a lonely, spooky patch of land: In the stillness of the day you can hear the yips of small wild animals and the distant rumble of traffic along Interstate 45 about a mile away. Many people who live in the surrounding towns and bedroom communities won't come near the place. Since 1984, the remains of four young women have been found here -- each one nude, on her back, under a tree, with her arms folded. Because they were placed within a thousand feet of each other, a private investigator who has studied the scene many times thinks the killer created a "walking path" for himself to "visually inspect his trophies one by one." Indeed, many police detectives and FBI agents are convinced that this is the personal graveyard of a vicious serial killer.

And they think they know his identity: Robert Abel. In the sixties Abel was one of NASA's great young engineers, part of the team that was instrumental in designing the rocket that would put the Apollo astronauts into Earth's orbit. "If we had any hope of getting man to the moon, we had to get the maximum Saturn payload into orbit," says Robert Gottlieb, a veteran aerospace engineer who now works at Boeing. "And Robert Abel was part of the little band of very bright men who figured out how do it." Today, however, a police detective suggests in a sworn affidavit that Abel is a "serial sexual offender" who displays the kind of rage and violent behavior that's often seen in serial killers. He is the prime suspect in the murders of the four women found in the oil field, which is next to property he owns, and his name quickly surfaces whenever a teenager or a young woman disappears or is found dead in the area.

In League City, where Abel has lived for sixteen years, officers have searched his home and questioned his friends and family. He has been interviewed by detectives from neighboring towns. Investigators have flown over his land in helicopters and brought in cadaver dogs to look for bodies. Mark Young, a highly respected FBI criminal profiler from the agency's Houston office, has talked with Abel, and a profiler from the behavioral sciences unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, has analyzed his relationships with women.

A slightly built sixty-year-old with thinning brown hair and a mustache, Abel walks stiffly because of a bad back, wears reading glasses, and takes pills for his high blood pressure. He seems almost shy -- he tends to put his hands in his front pockets when he speaks -- and has the soft Texas drawl of a small-town high school civics teacher. Yet he haunts people. In League City some mothers backpedal when they see him in the grocery store. Others push their daughters out of sight so that he can't get a look at them. One day a group of teenage boys, hoping to prove their courage when they spotted him cruising through town in his pickup, rolled down their car windows and shouted, "Hey, Killer!" Over the years, he has become such a focus of fear and hostility that in 1997, nearly two hundred people fanned out over his land without his permission, looking for the body of a pretty college student who had disappeared from a Bennigan's restaurant not far from League City and who to this day has never been found. Tim Miller, whose sixteen-year-old daughter, Laura, was found dead in the killing fields, is so convinced of Abel's guilt that he has left threatening messages on his answering machine, demanding that he confess. "There are many days when I think about driving over there, putting a gun to his head, and pulling the trigger," Miller says. "When I'm near him, I feel like I'm 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. What's more, he has never been arrested for any crime, nor is there any known record of a criminal complaint filed against him. "My life has been destroyed, my reputation ruined," Abel told me when I first met him earlier this year. "I didn't kill any of those girls. I wouldn't know how to kill."

Is it possible that Robert Abel is a cold, calculating murderer, one who is consumed by a twisted need to prey on young women but also patient enough to wait years between attacks -- and smart enough to leave almost no clues behind? Or is he a victim of overzealous police work and outright hysteria? For several weeks I tried to learn the truth about a brilliant but sometimes baffling man who, as one FBI agent told me, "is not your average social encounter." During that time, I headed down to the killing fields to see if Tim Miller -- who had become so frustrated with the police's inaction that he had launched his own investigation -- was going to find more bodies, as he had predicted, or whether he was merely chasing ghosts.

As it turned out, this was indeed a ghost story, but not the kind that I or anyone else really expected -- for just as the sun was setting that August afternoon, a few of the dogs went into a frenzy, barking and pawing anxiously at one particular clump of dirt. "Something's down there," Miller shouted as people came running with their flashlights. "Something's down there!"

YOU CAN SPEND A WEEK driving through the towns south of Houston, visiting the parents of murdered daughters. They greet you at the door, lead you inside, and pull out scrapbooks filled with photos: their girl posing in a soccer uniform, pushing dolls in a stroller, laughing at Showbiz Pizza. They often take you into their daughter's bedroom, many of which still look exactly as they did when the girls were alive.

"Just 20 days to my birthday," reads the note written by Laura Smither, an aspiring ballerina from the quiet town of Friendswood. Laura was only twelve years old when she jotted those words on a message board on the morning of April 3, 1997, a couple of hours before she went jogging through her neighborhood and disappeared. Seventeen days later her nude body was found at the edge of a retention pond in Pasadena. "Mom, I love you," reads a note on the nightstand in Krystal Jean Baker's bedroom in Texas City. Her body was found under a bridge by the Trinity River near the Louisiana border. Some young women have never been found: More than ten years after Rene Richerson, an achingly pretty college student, vanished from a condominium complex in Galveston, her parents are still paying a private detective to search for her. "All we know is that there was a terrible scream the night she disappeared," says her mother, Kathy Richerson. "The police tell us that she is probably dead, murdered like the others. But that doesn't mean we will stop looking for her. We just want the chance to tell our daughter good-bye."

It is impossible for an outsider to understand the shattered psyches of parents whose daughters will never grow older. "Sometimes, at night, the wind would begin to blow, and the house would start to shift, and the bed in Laura's room would start to squeak," says Laura Smither's mother, Gaye, a gentle woman who sometimes swallows when she talks, trying to keep her voice in control. "Even after all that time, I'd find myself running in there, calling her name, believing that she was back home with us."

The number of mothers and fathers left to grieve is staggering. Depending on who's counting, at least fifteen and perhaps as many as thirty young females -- all of whom resided in the fifty-mile stretch of coastal plain between Houston and Galveston -- have vanished or been brutally murdered since the early seventies. "There's no place in the country that has had to deal with something this heinous," says Don Clark, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Houston office. "All of the victims were young, all of them were attractive, and we think all of them were sexually assaulted before they died."

Law enforcement officials insist that many of the killings -- sometimes referred to as the "I-45 killings" because most of them have taken place within a few miles of Interstate 45 -- could have been committed by any number of men, from transients to sex offenders paroled from one of the area's prisons. In 1997 one police department ran a computer search of registered sex offenders living between Houston and Galveston, and more than 2,100 names popped up. Yet despite a variety of sometimes desperate measures -- one department followed leads provided by psychics, and another had police officers hide in trees at a cemetery to see if a suspect might visit the freshly dug grave of a murdered teenager -- no arrests have been made. With the passing of the years, it's 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.

According to the detective's affidavit, which was filed in a state district court, there is little doubt that a single person was responsible for the four bodies found in the old oil field located just off a rut-filled dirt road on the outskirts of League City. The first was discovered in April 1984, after a dog owned by a couple living several hundred yards away carried home a human skull and dropped it at the feet of their three-year-old daughter. After a long search, police officers discovered the rest of the body and identified the remains as those of Heide Villareal Fye, a 23-year-old cocktail waitress who had been reported missing six months earlier. At the time of her disappearance -- she had last been seen walking from her parents' home to use the telephone at a convenience store -- the League City police had conducted a cursory investigation, and they came across no clues as to where she might have gone or who might have wanted to abduct her. Heide's father, who had worked as an automobile tire salesman, hunted for her himself, walking the fields around League City almost every day. He grieved until the day he succumbed to cancer. "Even when he was on his deathbed," says Heide's sister, Josie Poarch, "he brought the family together and made us promise that we would never give up the search for her killer."

Nearly two years later, in February 1986, four boys riding their dirt bikes past the oil field smelled a putrid odor and came across another decomposed body about fifty yards from the spot where Heide Fye was found. The victim was never identified and became known as Jane Doe. The medical examiner said she was between 22 and 30 years old and perhaps had been shot to death by a .22-caliber weapon. (Part of a bullet turned up with her remains at the medical examiner's office.) As the police looked around the field for more clues, they came across the skeleton of Laura Miller -- Tim Miller's daughter -- a mere twenty yards away. Laura had been a straight-A student in elementary school in League City, but after she began to have seizures at age twelve, she grew depressed, made a couple of halfhearted suicide attempts, and started hanging out with a crowd of teenagers who used drugs. When she went missing, the police suggested to her father that she had run away from home. At the time, no one made the connection that she was last seen alive at the same convenience store where Heide Fye had last been seen.

"We had to search for suspects," says Pat Bittner, the League City detective who, at the tender age of 30, was put in charge of the murder investigation. Every day Bittner would sit behind his battleship-gray desk, flip through his case files, repeat to himself all the relevant details, and then stare at the autopsy photos, hoping that the dead women could tell tales. He went so far as to consider the possibility that the killer was Henry Lee Lucas, who was said to have wandered through this part of Texas.

Bittner came up with nothing, however, and he wouldn't for nearly five years, until a new set of decomposing remains were found in the field about one hundred yards from where the other bodies had been discovered. Like Jane Doe, this woman was never identified. The medical examiner thought she had been beaten to death with a club. Once again, without eyewitnesses and only scant physical evidence, the police were stuck.

But at least there was someone new for them to question -- a retired NASA engineer who had been leasing land on one side of the 25-acre oil field for nearly a decade and who, in 1990, had bought eleven acres adjacent to the field to open Stardust Trailrides, a small horseback-riding business. His name was Robert Abel, and he was so eager to assist the police the day the fourth body was found that he helped them clear brush in the area and let them use fourteen of his horses and his backhoe free of charge. "He was on me like a duck on a June bug," said an FBI agent who was there. "He even made suggestions about what we should be doing in our investigation."

"I TRIED TO HELP THE POLICE SOLVE A terrible crime, and now they think I was too helpful?" Abel asked me, seemingly bewildered.

"You might have been trying to deceive them, to provide false leads," I said.

"They think I wanted to mislead them?"

"A couple of detectives think you're talking to me because you want to draw attention to yourself," I told him. "It's your way of thumbing your nose at the police, telling them that they won't ever catch you."

Sitting across the table from me at a coffee shop, Abel bowed his head. "All I want to do is prove my innocence," he said. "That's all I want to do."

Abel is aware that the police and the FBI have studied every inch of his life. Descended from a family that came to Texas seventeen years before the Civil War, Abel was raised on a ranch in Bellville, a tiny town between Houston and Austin. After graduating from Bellville High in 1957, he married his sweetheart, Jane Ross -- they later had a daughter and a son -- and headed off to the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a degree in aerospace engineering. In February 1962 he took a job at NASA, and in the evenings he attended graduate school -- first at the University of Houston, then at UT-Austin, where he wrote papers with titles like "Analytic Solutions to Interplanetary Transfers."

NASA put Abel to work sizing the Saturn rocket: He determined how much weight should be in each of its three stages and then performed a trajectory analysis to determine the most efficient way to get the third stage and the payload into orbit. He also worked on lunar visibility studies (for which he received top-secret clearance) and regularly flew to Cape Canaveral to brief Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, and other Apollo astronauts on lunar landing and visibility. "When you met him, he came across as this country boy, a rancher's son with a thick accent," says Boeing's Robert Gottlieb. "But the fact was that he was one of the brightest people down there."

In 1978, after 21 years of marriage, the Abels divorced. (Jane told me that the split was amicable, "really just caused by us growing in different directions over the years.") Abel started spending his evenings meeting women at the little bars and restaurants around the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake; sometimes he'd stop by elan, Houston's hottest nightclub. Although he bought a Mercedes 380 SL convertible to go along with his pickup, he was hardly the portrait of the suave Houston bachelor: His front teeth were chipped, his sideburns were too long, and -- despite his vast intelligence -- he sometimes came across as more hayseed than scientist. Yet according to Gottlieb, Abel was successful with women. "In his own way he was very charismatic," says an ex-girlfriend. "He was romantic. At Christmas we'd go back to his old family ranch outside of Bellville, and he'd put together a scene from a Hallmark card -- we'd go out and cut down a Christmas tree."

In June 1983 Abel moved from Houston into a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in League City. (Heide Fye and Laura Miller lived less than half a mile away, but Abel told me he never knew them.) What drew him there, he explains, was Galveston County's 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. "Coming here was my chance to keep working at NASA and be able to work some cattle on the weekends," he says.

Neighbors liked Abel, though they were aware that he did not have much luck with relationships. In June 1989 he married Cindy Jacobs, a secretary for an accounting firm whom he had met earlier that year at the Hilton hotel bar. But she left him 41 days into the marriage -- Abel never told anyone why -- and the two quickly divorced. In 1990 he retired from NASA and married Paula Kay Myers, a pretty NASA secretary whom he had first met and dated three years earlier. Soon after, he purchased the eleven-acre property for sale next to the oil field and made preparations to open Stardust Trailrides. "I wanted kids and families to have the chance to be around horses like I did when I was a kid," he says. He offered discount trail rides to youth groups and charities, provided catered barbecue dinners, hired country music singers to perform cowboy songs, and often threw in free hayrides for toddlers.

By all accounts, Stardust Trailrides was an immediate success, drawing people from all over the Houston area, including a few couples who came to have their wedding conducted on horseback. Abel led many of the trail rides himself over the property and through his leased land. Sales hit $ 250,000 in 1991, he says. "And there's no doubt they would have kept going up" -- he pauses, shaking his head like a man under siege -- "if it wasn't for that so-called detective."

THAT SO-CALLED DETECTIVE WAS BITTner, who soon after the discovery of the fourth body asked Abel to come to the League City police station for a routine interview. Among the questions he posed was whether any bodies had turned up near the six-hundred-acre Abel family ranch near Bellville the way they had near his land in League City. They hadn't. "I had no reason to ask except out of curiosity," Bittner says. "But Abel became furious and very defensive. He wouldn't answer any more questions, left the building, and later went to the mayor and complained about me. I began to think, 'Why would he get upset over such a standard question?'"

"He was cocky, and I was offended by his tone," Abel told me, revealing for the first time a flash of what I had been told by some officers was a hostile temper. "Have you met this man? He seems like someone who should be washing windows instead of being a police detective."

In fact, Bittner is a bright young man who grew up in Ohio, received a degree in criminal justice from Michigan State University, and moved to Texas to be a police officer -- hardly the stereotype of the tobacco-chewing small-town lawman. He has received specialized training in homicide investigations and is familiar with the research conducted by the FBI's behavioral sciences unit in Quantico, which has been attempting to compile an accurate composite profile of the type of man who turns out to be a serial killer of women. By conducting lengthy interviews with many such killers already behind bars, the agents have come up with a list of common denominators seen in the killers' childhood, in their behavior as adults, and in the way they carry out their crimes. The League City killings appear to be the work of what the FBI literature calls an "organized" killer, someone who carefully plans his brutal acts. According to one FBI report, an organized killer is in the "bright-superior intelligence range and, therefore, potentially a skilled imposter" -- in other words, he's able to fit into everyday society without drawing any suspicion. Moreover, an organized killer prefers working in what the FBI calls a "comfort zone," an area very familiar to him where he receives little or no interference from outsiders.

Based on that information, Abel fit the bill, though nonspecific FBI profiling was all Bittner had to go on. Then, in the summer of 1993, he got a break: He received a phone call from Abel's wife, Paula, who told him they had separated the previous year. And she was ready to talk.

When they met, Paula told Bittner she was afraid of what she described as her husband's "fits of rage." Sometimes, she said, he would get so angry during their arguments that he'd leave the house and not return for as long as a week. Although he never hit her, she said she had watched him beat horses with pipes and chains until they submitted to his commands. Whenever livestock died on his pasture-land, she added, he left them out in the open so their rotting corpses could be ravaged by coyotes and other scavengers. 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. Before leaving, Paula told Bittner he needed to talk to Cindy Jacobs, the woman Abel had been married to for 41 days in 1989.

In her interview with Bittner, Cindy said that she decided to leave Abel during their honeymoon in Germany after they had a fight over sex. According to Cindy, Abel said to her, "If you ever deny me sex again, I'll kill you." Cindy also confirmed Paula's stories about a stash of nude photos and Abel's anger with horses. She said that before their marriage, when he had gotten angry with her, he went out and beat a horse named Lancelot.

Subsequently, Bittner contacted the FBI's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico and provided details of the League City killings to David Gomez, an agent who specializes in serial sexual homicides. Gomez told Bittner that the murderer probably lived close to the comfort zone and could very well have insinuated himself into the investigation, either to establish an alibi or to provide false leads. Gomez added that the murderer was in all likelihood preoccupied with the media accounts of the crimes and perhaps had kept newspaper articles about them; he also could possess jewelry or clothing from the dead women to serve as his "trophies." Gomez gave Bittner a list of other characteristics about the killer, including "superior attitude," "multiple sex partners," "a history of cruelty to animals," "usually described as a troublemaker," and "will act out his anger." Bittner was intrigued: Gomez could have been describing Abel.

Earlier Bittner had learned at a homicide seminar that a police department could get a court-ordered search warrant based solely on the FBI's psychological profile of the potential killer. If a local law enforcement agency could identify a suspect that fit the parameters of that profile, a judge could rule that there was sufficient reason to search for more evidence. So in November, Bittner presented an affidavit before a state district court judge outlining Gomez's profile and reporting the statements made by two of Abel's ex-wives. He suggested that Abel left the women's bodies on the pastureland because he knew they'd be ravaged by animals. Although he had no actual evidence, Bittner suggested that Abel was a "serial sexual offender." "We spent three weeks polishing that affidavit," Bittner told me. "As far as I'm concerned, it's a masterpiece."

ON NOVEMBER 12, 1993, WITH A search warrant in hand, Bittner and five other League City police officers showed up unannounced at Abel's home and conducted a twelve-hour search. They vacuumed the carpet, looking for hairs of the victims; confiscated three .22-caliber weapons to see if any of them matched the bullet found next to one of the bodies; hauled away more than 6,200 slides and photographs; took a gold tooth found on a dresser to see if it came from the mouth of one of the women; and clipped a cord off a curtain to see if it matched a strangulation mark.

Bittner and his team came up with nothing. There was no hair evidence. None of the dead women's clothing or jewelry was found. The gold tooth turned out to be from Abel's own mouth. Because of too much deterioration in the bullet the guns could not be matched -- in fact, no gun could. And although two photos were of a seminude woman, she later told the police that she had willingly posed for Abel when they were dating. (The rest of the photos were of family, friends, and various people he'd shot as an amateur photographer.)

The only thing that Bittner found justifying the search warrant was a collection of newspaper articles found about the investigation into the League City murders and one long Houston Chronicle story detailing the life of a serial killer. Abel told the police he had started keeping those articles because he was interested in their investigation. "Why wouldn't I be?" he asked me. "These were bodies found on land next to mine." As for the Chronicle story, he said, "I didn't know anything about serial killers. I wondered if the police knew about this person I had read about, and I was going to send the article to them."

Such comments might have sounded incredible to Bittner and his fellow officers. I know I had my doubts. During one of our meetings, Abel loaned me a box of legal documents about the case and about himself. At the bottom of the box I saw a small photo album with the words "Robert Abel" printed on the cover. Inside were a series of photos of the places where each body had been found. My throat suddenly went dry: Was I looking at a serial killer's scrapbook? And there were other occasions when I felt as if Abel talked a little too much about the allegations against him. One afternoon on the phone, he said to me, "I don't know if you know this, but I had torn rotator cuffs at the time some of those girls turned up dead. I couldn't have picked a girl up. I couldn't have overpowered her and gotten her into my car. And if I did kill her, I couldn't 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.

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. That's what he's good at -- solving problems. And remember, he had a new trail-rides business going. Of course he'd want the murders solved." When I later asked Abel directly about the photo album, he acted surprised that I was suspicious. He said the photographs had been taken by a private investigator hired by his attorney. "In case charges were ever brought against me, I wanted to know exactly what I was being accused of," he said.

But what of the accusations by his ex-wives? It's hard to gauge who's telling the truth. In our conversations Abel always denied every allegation they had made against him. (Paula and Cindy would not be interviewed, but they have not retracted the sworn statements they gave Bittner.) He told me he never mistreated animals -- "It's ridiculous to think that you can run a horseback-riding business with horses that are scared of human beings" -- and that he didn't carry a gun. It was Paula, he said, who had the fits of rage -- "I was scared to death of her at one point, to be honest with you, and I told the police that" -- and he said Cindy Jacobs was angry with him after the honeymoon only because he wouldn't put her name on his checking account and didn't let her see his will. And, indeed, one former girlfriend did tell me that Paula had contacted her, asking that she, too, go to the police and talk about Abel's behavior when she had dated him. "I'm not saying Robert was the perfect man," the woman said. "We had our rounds, our arguments and fights. But not once did I ever think there was anything to fear about him." When I asked her if he abused horses, she replied that she saw him hit one once, when the horse was raring and had her young daughter cornered -- "but he didn't beat the horse."

Still, the damage had been done. Because the affidavit about Abel had been filed in open court, it was available for the public to peruse. Detectives from other agencies, frustrated with their own unsolved murders, began calling the police in League City to ask about Abel. After Tim Miller read the affidavit, he started parking outside Abel's League City home at night. "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 Laura's body had been found, standing before a wooden cross he had erected there in her memory. "Every day since 1986 -- every single day -- I had been waking up thinking about the last moments of Laura's life. I wondered if she was on her knees, begging for her life. I wondered if she had the time to call out for me or her mother."

After Laura's death, Miller began drinking heavily; six months later, he and Laura's mother, Jan Miller, divorced. 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. A few days later Miller claims he showed up at Abel's house, dragged him out in the yard, and held a gun to his head. (Abel denies this ever happened.) "I was about to pull the trigger when I realized that it wouldn't have mattered," Miller told me. "There was nothing on his face -- no fear, no emotion, nothing. He had no conscience."

On the advice of another father whose daughter had been murdered in another town, Miller checked himself into the psychiatric unit of a hospital for ten days, promising when he left not to hurt Abel but vowing that he would keep pressuring him to confess. Abel, however, remained wary: He told me he still worried that Miller would drink too much one night and try to kill him. He was also worried about other private citizens who, he said, might be tempted to tell lies about him to get the reward money (now at $ 50,000) that the League City Police Department was offering for information leading to the arrest of the killer. One of Abel's friends, a man who sang cowboy songs at Stardust Trailrides, was approached by a private detective who asked several questions about him and then said he was working for one of his ex-wives. "Why would she still be paying money to a private investigator unless she wanted the reward?" Abel asked.

Although he refused to take a police-administered polygraph test about the killing fields murders -- he said he didn't trust the League City Police Department as long as Bittner was on the payroll -- he did take two lie detector tests conducted by private examiners, who say he passed. Still, perhaps because no other legitimate suspect ever emerged in the case, Abel never could erase the suspicions about him. Some law enforcement officials said the beta-blockers he took for his high blood pressure could have affected the results of those tests.

Bittner, meanwhile, insists that a pathological serial killer with no remorse could easily pass any lie detector test. He remains unapologetic about his investigation and the statements he made about Abel in the search warrant, despite his admission during a deposition that the bulk of his knowledge came "secondhand from [Abel's] wives." In 1994 Abel filed a lawsuit against him for slander, but it was quickly dismissed by a judge who said that he had only been identified as a suspect. "Look, there are still many questions that need to be asked," Bittner told me. "But Mr. Abel doesn't want to come down here any more to answer them. Just because no hard evidence was found during the search of his home doesn't mean he's exonerated."

Not everyone working on the case is convinced that Abel is guilty. Willie Payne, a respected private investigator hired by some of the parents to help locate their missing daughters, says he can't imagine that Abel "would have been dumb enough to leave three of the girls lying within yards of his property line." But Bittner has an answer for that too. "Suppose you're such a confident killer that you think you're smarter than the police," he says. "You wouldn't be intimidated by leaving those bodies in your own back yard."

Since Bittner's promotion to assistant police chief in April 1997, the new League City detective on the case, Marty Grant, has raised the money to put up a billboard along 1-45 asking for help solving the murders, and he has had a small retention pond on the old oil field drained because of a single comment Abel made last year when Grant paid him a courtesy call to tell him he was now running the investigation. Abel told Grant that if he had been in charge in 1991 when the fourth body was found, he would have searched a nearby pond because the killer might have thrown something in there. Grant sensed he was being given a hint and conducted a search. But nothing turned up, which Abel says should have been no surprise, "because what the hell did they think they were going to find after all those years? Besides, they didn't even use a big enough backhoe, one that could get down to the bottom of the pond. So who knows what's still down there?"

I had to wonder: Was Abel slyly providing another subtle suggestion about that pond? Or was he just trying to be helpful? Was I the one being paranoid? "Once you hear certain allegations about someone you've known for a long, long time, how do you get them out of your mind?" Gottlieb asks. "Even I've sat up at nights, wondering if he could have done it."

UNTIL THIS YEAR, DESPITE HIS PARIAH status, Abel remained in League City. But earlier this spring, he closed Stardust Trailrides ("Nobody was coming out any more to ride because they were scared of me"), gave up his lease on the thousand acres, sold his cattle, and moved most of his horses back to the family ranch near Bellville, and started spending most of his time there. "It's time to try to live out the rest of my life in peace," he says. "As long as Pat Bittner and these other police departments have that FBI profile, they're going to do anything they can to make me fit it."

But there would be no peace. What Abel did not know was that a new investigation was about to begin at the killing fields -- one conducted by Tim Miller. He had tracked down the owner of the 25-acre oil field and persuaded him to lease it for $ 10 a year. The cross he had put up for Laura had been knocked down, and he believed Abel had done it just to spite him. "If I have to, I'll dig up every inch of this property to find some new evidence," Miller told me.

Without informing the League City police department -- "They think I'm a little crazy" -- Miller borrowed a tractor and a backhoe and persuaded the Greater Houston Search Dogs team to join him in his first dig. As Miller drove his tractor past the cross that marked Laura's body, the dogs began to fan out. Whenever any of them stopped in a certain place and "alerted" (that is, barked to signify that they smelled something), Miller would head over there and dig. The whole thing seemed fruitless but understandable -- a way for a father to deal with his grief. I sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck with Miller's construction buddies watching the late-afternoon sun turn red and then a sullen orange before it began to sink beneath the horizon. "I don't think people here realize that ol' Tim will want to keep digging all night," one said with a grin as he popped open a beer.

A few minutes later two dogs began barking at the same spot by a tree. Then a beautiful black-and-white border collie named Jessi -- the best dog of the bunch -- rushed over and went into a kind of crazed conniption, whining and lying down.

Miller, his eyes wild with excitement, put the backhoe into gear and started scooping up earth over a ten-square-foot area. "Hold it!" one of the workers yelled, reaching down and pulling up the remnants of a purse. Then someone else saw a pair of women's pants with a drawstring waist, which was discolored and nearly shredded from decomposition. Out came a discolored shirt and then some socks. "Why would a whole set of women's clothes be buried way out here?" Miller said, turning off his machine.

For a moment, the only sound was the wind lightly rustling the trees and the low growl of diesel trucks changing gears out on 1-45. For weeks I had felt almost as if I had been part of some parlor game. Was Abel innocent, or wasn't he? But right then, as I stood over this remote patch of earth, I felt a chill. I suddenly understood why these coastal communities were linked by fear. I also understood why the parents of public school students in Friendswood had been given special kits to take their children's fingerprints and keep locks of their hair in the horrifying event that their remains were one day found and needed to be identified.

And I understood why everyone was so desperate to hunt down the bogeyman: so they could tell themselves they were safe again.

A FEW DAYS LATER I RETURNED TO League City. Abel was at the now-padlocked Stardust Trailrides waiting for me. He had wanted to check on the horses he still kept there, all of which came up and nuzzled him. "Not exactly the response I'd get if I'd been beating them," he said. 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. "It's doubtful the police can learn anything from the clothes," I said. "As it turns out, Tim Miller might have found an old garbage dump."

Abel shrugged, appearing neither anxious nor relieved. "Well, who knows what happened out here?" he said.

I added that Miller planned to keep digging with the assistance of the search dogs, which could easily smell decomposed bodies buried as far back as fifteen years ago. Again, Abel just shrugged. "Is that right?" he said.

We visited the exact locations where each body had been found. Perhaps we were following the very walking path that the killer had once used to inspect his trophies. For several seconds Abel was silent before each site, as if he were visiting a church graveyard. At that moment, with his back aching and his eyes squinting, he seemed like a kindly old man.

"I feel for these girls. I really do," he told me. "I wish there was something I could do."

He gave me another one of his long, lingering looks. Just before he shook my hand good-bye, he said, "Do I really look like a killer? Do I really look like someone who would want to kill pretty young girls?"

Then he turned, got into his pickup, and headed down the dirt road, away from the killing fields, disappearing behind the dust like a ghost.



www.law-forensic.com/cfr_abel_1.htm

Jan. 4, 2003, 10:50PM

From terrible grief, a noble quest

Daughter's murder led Tim Miller to start EquuSearch recovery team

By ALLAN TURNER

Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle


DICKINSON -- Midnights would find Tim Miller in the "killing field," a notorious dumping ground for murder victims just off Calder Road near League City. Wracked by guilt, out of his mind with grief, he'd stumble through the tangled brush where his daughter's skeletal remains had been found 17 months after her disappearance. From terrible grief, a noble quest E. Joseph Deering / Chronicle EquuSearch founder Tim Miller pampers Dusty, one of his horses, with a gentle brushing at a League City stable as Buddy waits his turn. The horses -- accepted by Miller as payment for a bad debt -- were the first used by the search and recovery group to hunt for missing persons. "I'd scream at the top of my lungs, `I'm here, you @#%$! Come and get me!' " Miller recalled of those nights. "I'd go crazy out there on that property. It was the worst time in my life." Haunted by his daughter's unsolved murder, Miller, a building contractor, drank heavily, divorced, buried himself in work and obsessed about the field. At one point, he leased the 25-acre site and paced it, foot by foot, in a futile search for clues. Eighteen years have passed since Laura Miller, 16, was abducted from a convenience store near her League City home, and her father slowly has pulled his life from the ashes. Two years ago, Miller -- moved by the ordeal of families like his -- founded Texas EquuSearch, a volunteer mounted search and recovery team, to assist law enforcement agencies in hunting for missing persons.
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Operating out of a cramped office behind a Dollar General store in a Dickinson shopping center, the group has participated in 135 searches, including the highly publicized hunts for Laura Ayala, Sarah Auzenne and Tot Tran Harriman. Ayala, 13, disappeared in March after she walked from her southeast Houston home to buy a newspaper for a school project. Auzenne, 16, has been missing since Nov. 1, 2001, after she failed to return home from Memorial High School, where she was a student. Harriman, 57, mother of three adult children, hasn't been seen since July 12, when she left her son's League City home en route to Corpus Christi. "Seventy-three or 74 of the missing people were found alive," Miller said of cases his group has investigated. "Twenty-four had remains -- our searchers actually found eight of them -- and the rest still remain missing." Summoned by police, sheriff's officers or members of the missing person's family, EquuSearch volunteers -- though working primarily in the Houston area and Texas -- have responded to cases as far away as North Dakota, North Carolina and Mexico. In the earliest searches, EquuSearch relied on two horses its founder had received as payment for a bad debt. Now, the group can bring as many as 50 mounted riders into the hunt as well as divers, pilots and volunteers trained in operating infrared and ground-scanning devices. During early outings, EquuSearch volunteers occasionally encountered police indifference or hostility, Miller said. "It was just that the arrangement was new," he said. "We had to clear the air. Now we tell them, `Hey, you get 500 calls per month and your plate is full. You're still the detective. Here's what we have to offer.' " Today, Miller's group is a welcome addition to missing persons investigations and has drawn praise from police around the nation. Typical was Houston police Lt. Larry Earls, head of the Juvenile Division's missing persons unit, who commended EquuSearch for the "professional response" it has demonstrated in helping find missing children, teens and elderly people suffering from dementia. "It is comforting to know that we can call for assistance when our own resources are overwhelmed," Earls wrote in thanking Miller for his help. As the volunteers become more known, their caseload often taxes their ability to respond. The group averages a search a week, but during one week in December, four searches were in progress. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think that we would have had 135 searches," said Miller, who has remarried. "I remember going to a funeral (of a victim for whom volunteers had searched) and it was the third weekend in a row I'd been to a funeral. My wife looked at me and said, `Remember Friday nights when we'd go out dancing or listening to music? Now every Friday night we're going to a funeral home.' " In almost every case, Miller joins his volunteers in the field. Since the group was formed, he's driven more than 125,000 miles on EquuSearch business. And the nonprofit group, totally dependent on donations, constantly struggles to stay out of the red, Miller said. Miller said EquuSearch fell $27,000 short of meeting last year's $68,000 budget. "A lot of our volunteers covered their own travel and motel expenses," he said. "EquuSearch owes Tim Miller some money, but I realistically don't ever expect to collect it." In out-of-town cases, EquuSearch often relies on local volunteers recruited through the media. Searching draws heavily on common sense, Miller said. Often volunteers will begin by flying over the target area. "You can't see

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a body from a helicopter," he explained, "but you can see isolated roads and other likely areas to search." Rarely, he said, do killers spend much time disposing of their victims. "We've never found one buried," Miller said. "They've all just been dumped off these lonely little roads -- like leaves you've raked off your lawn and dumped when you know the trash man's not coming." Sometimes, volunteers never get around to searching -- the case is resolved through publicity surrounding the team's arrival. In a recent Franklin, La., case, television appearances by EquuSearch representatives led to a police tip resulting in the rescue of a 15-year-old girl and the arrest of her four alleged rapists. EquuSearch's help had been solicited by the victim's grandfather, a sheriff's officer in a nearby parish, when little progress was made in the case. Not all cases have happy endings. In December, EquuSearch deployed members to San Antonio, where they joined other volunteer groups in a massive search for Susan McFarland, a young mother of three who had disappeared before Thanksgiving and was feared murdered. Over a period of four days, volunteers searched from dawn till dusk for the missing woman by land and air. Horses, tracking dogs, helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft were brought into the search, which finally proved futile. "It's always tough to call a search off before recovery of the victim, but several leads were generated," noted Jeff Ezell, a search leader. "We had to get back to our families and give them a big hug with a renewed appreciation that we could still do that." Miller said EquuSearch tries to respond to requests for help as quickly as possible. "Even if it's a runaway, it's OK," he said. "I feel as though the longer the runaway is out there, the more endangered he or she becomes. Let's go out and get that runaway home. Let's get the family in counseling and functioning again." That philosophy grew out of the founder's own experience with harried authorities. When Miller first reported the 1984 disappearance of his daughter, he recalled, local police were nonchalant. "Sixteen is the age girls start running away from home, they told me," Miller said. "I urged them to search that area off Calder Road -- another body had been found out there." But, he said, police countered that the first murder had been an isolated episode and no search was needed. An immediate, aggressive response might not have saved Laura's life, Miller admitted, but it might have revealed the crime scene while clues were fresh. No arrest has been made in Laura Miller's murder nor in the cases of three other victims whose bodies were found in the Calder Road field. Miller said an immediate response in Laura's case might have lessened the horrific stress his family endured. "Every time the telephone would ring, I'd get heart palpitations," Miller remembered. "Every time someone would drive slow by our house or pull into our drive to turn around, I'd think she'd come home." Once, believing Laura might be staying with a friend in Hitchcock, Miller drove to the residence and peered in the window. In the kitchen was a box of Trix, the missing teen's favorite cereal. Miller -- convinced that he had finally found his daughter -- was ecstatic. But his hope soon was dashed.
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"Believe me, when you lose a child, your life will never be the same," Miller said. Miller hit rock bottom about three years after his daughter's body was found. "I worked too hard and I worked too hard to calm my own guilt," he said. "I was living by myself in a little house on five acres and doing a lot of yelling and screaming. I will never forget this night. I came in from work, tired, and looked up and saw Laura's picture on the wall. I threw it hard. The glass shattered. I said, `Damn you!' And I fell on my hands and knees in front of it, crying." The memory of those years is revived every time EquuSearch gets a call. On searches, Miller said, "I try to show up at the family's house and hug them and say, `I'm that one person. I know how you feel and we're going to put every effort into finding them.' " Miller often finds himself drawn into the emotional lives of such families. His office, filled with horse memorabilia and the mundane clutter of missing persons posters, bears witness. Here in the corner is a victim's photograph given by a grieving family. There is a poem written by the father of a dead child -- "You were once my little girl, and now you're my shining star." More than once he has been asked to participate in funerals, and, on occasion, Texas EquuSearch has made small cash contributions for death-related expenses. Among Miller's most poignant cases was the Easter Sunday 2001 murder of Julie Sanders, a 23-year-old Henderson woman. Sanders was beaten to death with a baseball bat as she slept at her friend's home. Initially, her killer, Jason Blakeney, 26, was charged only with kidnapping -- the most serious offense that could be alleged without a body. Authorities had concentrated their search on an oilfield about 20 miles from Henderson at which Blakeney had worked. Miller shifted the focus to property owned by Blakeney's family. Within 20 minutes, Miller said, the victim's body was found. "Julie's father, Joe, was standing about 20 feet away," Miller recalled. "I walked over to him and said, `Joe, I've got some news. We did find her body.' "I'll never forget what happened. He put his arms around me and said, `Mr. Miller, you did it. You brought my Julie home.' " Blakeney's charge was upgraded to murder. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. But the hard times for the Sanders family were not over. In the anguish-filled days after her daughter's murder, Vicki Sanders was hospitalized with cancer. The day Blakeney was sentenced, Joe Sanders rushed to his wife's bedside to announce, "You don't have to worry about Jason any more. Thank God, you don't have to worry." Vicki Sanders died hours later. Miller attended both funerals. Visit Texas EquuSearch on the Web at www.texasequusearch.org

10:06 PM 9/19/1997

Murders unsolved



The searches for Laura Smither and Jessica Cain serve as a reminder that numerous cases of missing or murdered young women and girls have yet to be solved

By CINDY HORSWELL

Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle



SINCE THE MID 1980s, a scrubby pasture crisscrossed with horse trails in Galveston County has been called the "killing fields".

Four bodies were found there from 1984 to 1991. Today, the person using the "killing fields" as his personal graveyard remains unidentified.

In the 1970s, a $10,000 reward was offered for the killer of a 13-year-old girl in Brazoria County. Today, unclaimed, it is being used to fund scholarships in her name. Meanwhile, her murder is listed among at least eight unsolved cases believed to be linked.

More recently, in Harris County, an anonymous man telephoned a TV tip line in 1995 to report a "serial killer on the loose." Implying he was that killer, he gave directions to the body of a 16-year-old girl who had been strangled. He never called again. He is considered a suspect not only in her death but also in several others.

Memories of these and similar cases -- all involving young women and girls and all unsolved, some for decades -- resurfaced recently as news stories focused on massive searches for two girls who disappeared in Galveston County. Various authorities have indicated at least three serial killers are responsible for some of the deaths.

The cases of Laura Smither, a 12-year-old who was snatched in April from a jogging trail in Friendswood, and Jessica Cain, a 17-year-old Tiki Island girl who disappeared from her pickup in La Marque last month, have been added to a long list of unsolved crimes.

The exact count is unknown. While the Texas Department of Public Safety tallies the number of murders that occur each year and figures a clearance rate, it does not keep a running list of unsolved cases.

Also making an accurate count difficult is the fact that some corpses are so decomposed that identities and causes of death cannot be determined.

The Harris County morgue has recorded 75 unidentified female bodies since 1962, and the cause of death is listed as "unknown" for a majority of them. Only 28 have been ruled as definite homicides.

The count grows more difficult when considering the many young girls and women who are officially listed as missing but believed to be victims of foul play.

ENE RICHERSON is one of those. Clyde and Kathy Richerson of Corpus Christi have never given up the search for their daughter, who vanished from a beachfront condominium-hotel in Galveston on Oct. 7, 1988.

The Texas A&M-Galveston student, then 22, was working there as a night clerk to put herself through school.

She left behind her purse, school books, car -- but not a clue to her whereabouts.

Willie Payne of La Porte, a private investigator hired by the family, has been working the case for nearly nine years. He is planning another search of a remote portion of Brazoria County, hoping to find the spot where she might be buried.

Past searches of that area -- pinpointed by an anonymous tipster -- have been fruitless, but Payne thinks he knows where to look this time. But he wouldn't elaborate.

The tipster said he had driven the car used by two companions to abduct, rape and murder the college student.

Similarly, no sign has been found of Sandra Ramber, whose disappearance from her Santa Fe home in 1983 is considered foul play.

Sandra, 14, left behind not only her purse, but also a new coat that her father bought her.

Her father, Alton Ramber, 56, who now lives in Hitchcock, said not having even a body to mourn has made the loss especially hard.

A disabled carpenter, he describes her as a "daddy's girl" with striking good looks. She had just completed modeling school and dreamed of one day becoming a model.

"I last saw her before I went to work. I remember teasing her for picking at some food on my plate at breakfast. She was happy," he said. "But when I got home, the door was open, biscuits were cooking and she was gone. It's only now that I can even talk about it. I've had to try to put it behind me or else I would have gone crazy."

Empathy for such parents drove hundreds of volunteers who recently gave their hearts and time to search for Laura Smither and Jessica Cain.

Laura, an aspiring dancer, was abducted April 3 while jogging in her quiet Friendswood neighborhood. Her body, nude except for a pair of socks, was discovered more than two weeks later in a retention pond in Pasadena.

Then on Aug. 18, some of the same people who had helped look for Laura began another prayerful vigil and search for Jessica, a recent graduate of Galveston's O'Connell High School. She disappeared on her way home from a cast party after performing in a musical.

Her parents, who had attended the production, grew worried when she hadn't arrived by 2 a.m. Her father went to look for her and found the family's 1992 pickup abandoned on the Interstate 45 shoulder. Her wallet was inside, but the keys were gone.

Laura's father, Bob Smither, joined in the search for Jessica, as did Tim Miller -- whose 16-year-old daughter, also named Laura, was found dead in the "killing fields" in League City on Feb. 3, 1986.

"The main thing we have to do is make people aware of the danger," said Bob Smither, an electrical engineering consultant. "It's a hell of a note that we should have to bring kids up to be almost paranoid, but I don't know any other alternative."

No concrete evidence has been found so far to link the Jessica Cain case to that of either Laura Smither or Laura Miller.

"But I do know that these girls weren't stupid," said Bob Smither. "Not just any stranger could beckon them into a car."

HE GRIEVING families come from different backgrounds, but they share their loss. Miller, 50, a construction contractor from Houston, said, "What we do have in common is losing our daughters. Nobody else can relate to it.

"I used to go out to that field at 3 a.m. where my baby's body was found and scream at the top of my lungs, `You chicken (expletive), I'm out here ... come and get me.' That first Christmas I put a cross on the property and planted a fir tree to decorate. You just can't forget something like that."

He became so distraught after the discovery of the body of Laura Smither that he had his daughter's body exhumed in June in hopes a new autopsy, still pending, might shed light on the case. He also thinks some of her remains were misplaced and mishandled by authorities.

"She deserved better than that," he said.

His daughter had already been robbed of some of the joy of childhood before she vanished, he added. She had begun suffering seizures at age 12, believed to have been triggered by a high fever and measles when she was a baby.

Depressed after seizures forced her into special education classes, he said, she attempted suicide several times.

"She had gone from being a straight `A' student, who loved music and had lots of friends, to thinking that she was retarded and losing all her friends," her father recalled.

The family had hoped to make a fresh start when they moved to League City in September 1984.

Instead, just after moving into their new home, Laura Miller disappeared from a neighborhood convenience store. She had gone there with her mother to use the telephone because theirs was not connected yet.

Laura Miller, a Clear Creek High School sophomore, had insisted that she was old enough to walk home alone when she was done, her father said, but she never arrived.

Her skeletal remains were not discovered in the "killing fields" on Calder Road until two years later. The cause of her death could not be determined, but she and the three other victims found there were all nude, leading investigators to suspect sexual assaults.

DOG DISCOVERED the first victim, Heidi Villareal Fye, 23, a cocktail waitress, carrying her skull to a nearby house April 4, 1984. She had vanished six months earlier after walking from her parents' home to use the telephone at the same convenience store where Laura Miller was last seen.

The medical examiner noted she had broken ribs and might have been beaten to death.

Two years later, on Feb. 3, 1986, children riding dirt bikes in the vicinity of the field smelled an odor and located the body of an unidentified female, who was given the name Jane Doe. She had been shot in the back. Laura Miller's nearby body was found the same day.

On Sept. 8, 1991, the latest skeletal remains were retrieved from the field. Robert Abel, a retired aerospace engineer who had been leasing the property and eventually bought a portion for a horse stable, said his stepdaughter stumbled upon the corpse while riding.

The still-unidentified female victim is called Janet Doe. She appeared to have been beaten and possibly strangled.

"I'm a father. So I identify with those losing a child," Abel said. "I'd like to see these cases solved not just to clear my own name, but so the families can have some closure."

He said investigators have wrongly targeted him as a suspect because of his connection to the property: "But who would be dumb enough to put a body on their own land?"

He tried to sue police, alleging harassment, but the case was rejected because the court said a city has immunity to conduct investigations.

Although a search of Abel's property turned up no evidence, League City Assistant Police Chief Pat Bittner said the engineer remains among a small group of suspects.

In the search warrant, Bittner noted Abel's home lies within three miles of where the victims were found and that he later built his Star Dust Trail Rides on that property.

Abel, the search warrant said, continued to inject himself into the investigation, action which an FBI profile said could be expected from the killer. The search warrant also included statements from two ex-wives accusing Abel of viciously beating horses into submission and refusing to bury dead animals.

Abel called the allegations preposterous and said investigators even went so far as to conduct a fruitless search of his family's large ranch in Austin County.

"There was a body found somewhere around there, too. But I think that's been cleared," he added.

The body actually was found a few miles away in Waller County. Sheriff Randy Smith confirmed that an unidentified female, in her 20s or early 30s, was found on March 10 of this year.

Wrapped in a mattress cover and estimated to have been dumped there two or three years ago, it was discovered by a property owner clearing some brush. Smith said he has no leads in the case, however, and it remains open.

N THE EARLY 1970s, a rash of unsolved murders of young females plagued area law enforcement officers.

Alice Wilson Killough, 33, an airline reservationist from Alvin, remembers that she was in the second grade on June 17, 1971, when she accompanied her mother, Claire Wilson, to a bus stop to pick up her oldest sister, Colette.

One of 10 children of an Alvin dentist, Colette, 13, had attended a band practice and had been dropped there by the band director.

"We thought maybe she had gotten a ride with someone else. So we called all her friends that lived nearby," recalled Killough.

Unable to find any sign of Colette, the family knew something must be terribly wrong. Still, authorities initially labeled her a runaway.

That didn't stop the Wilson family from taking an Alvin map and organizing volunteers who searched the area for the next three weeks.

Killough remembers the agony. "The best thing we did was kneel around Colette's bed and pray every day. It held us together during the five long months before we knew what happened," she said.

Colette Wilson's nude body with a gunshot wound to the skull eventually was found near the Addicks Reservoir in west Houston.

The body was only 35 yards from where a man looking for buried treasure a few days earlier had stumbled upon the body of 19-year-old Gloria Ann Gonzales, a bookkeeper who lived on Jacquelyn Street in Houston.

Last seen alive near her home, she had been reported missing on Oct. 28, 1971, about three weeks before her body was found. Her death was caused by a blow to her head.

Investigators had returned to the scene to search further because a human molar found there did not belong to the bookkeeper's skeleton.

It turned out to be Colette's tooth. Her father, Thomas Wilson, was able to identify it along with others from a jawbone found there because he had performed her dental work himself.

"I sometimes wonder what would it be like if Colette had not died. She'd have her own children now," said Killough. "What are we missing out on? Our lives would be very different."

Her mother, Claire Wilson, 65, continues to reside in the area. But Colette's father, Thomas, lived only four years after her death.

Killough said he had become obsessed with solving the case. He died of a heart attack at age 42.

"We always said it was because of a broken heart," Killough said.

ATT WINGO, now an investigator with the Brazoria County District Attorney's Office, helped look into the possible links between Colette Wilson's death and more than a dozen others after the skeletal remains of two Dickinson girls were recovered from a remote swampland near Alvin on April 3, 1981.

The two, Brooks Bracewell, 12, and Georgia Geer, 14, had last been seen alive at a convenience store in Dickinson after having skipped school. That was Sept. 6, 1974.

"They all looked somewhat alike with the same hairstyle, were close to the same age, were mobile on foot and their bodies were found near water. A lot of them were shot with a .22," recalled Wingo.

"Most who worked on those cases are now dead. There was a lot of ideas in a lot of officers' minds that they thought they knew who did it, but could never prove it."

Brazoria County Sheriff Joe King has not given up hope.

"Many hours have been spent investigating these cases by many agencies, but nothing has ever been developed that gave us anybody that we could charge. I still believe there was a link," he said.

Cases thought to be possibly connected to each other include:

Maria Johnson and Debbie Ackerman, both 15-year-old Galveston residents, disappeared from a shopping mall Nov. 15, 1971, and were found two days later floating in Turner's Bayou in Texas City. Both were partially clad and had been bound hand and foot and shot in the head.

Kimberly Ray Pitchford, 16, who lived on Wynlea Street near Hobby Airport, was abducted after attending a driver's education class at Pasadena's Dobie High School on Jan. 3, 1973. Her father, E.L. Pitchford, a longshoreman, said she was supposed to call home when she finished the class. Instead, she vanished. Two days later, her body was found in a ditch near Angleton. She had been strangled. An uncle, Ray Pitchford, a Huffman lawyer, said recent information about a possible serial killer known to have attended the school about the same time is causing the family to seek further information.

Brenda Jones, 14, of Galveston was reported missing July 1, 1971, after she left home to walk to a hospital to visit an aunt. Her body was found the next day floating in Galveston Bay near Pelican Island with a slip stuffed in her mouth. She died of a wound to the head.

Alison Craven, 12, who vanished from her apartment in the Almeda Mall area of Harris County on Nov. 9, 1971. Her mother told authorities that she had left her daughter alone while she ran errands. Returning about an hour later, she found the girl had put up groceries and done her homework.

Other youngsters said she had been seen near the pool but said she was returning to her home because she was cold. Instead, she vanished. Three months later a field nearby yielded bones from an arm and two hands, along with some teeth. Then, on Feb. 25, 1972, her skeleton, missing the same bones, was found in a Pearland field.

ORE RECENTLY, law enforcement officers have been investigating whether a serial killer might be taking victims in north Houston.

On July 14, 1995, a man, who made no attempt to disguise his voice, telephoned KPRC television's tip line and talked about a "serial killer being on the loose." The anonymous caller implied that he was the killer and said the body of a girl could be found in a remote field near Interstate 45 and Richey. He said the victim's name was Ruby and gave her birthdate as May 11.

When investigators followed his clue that evening, they found the nude body of a 16-year-old girl who had died of ligature, or tourniquet-style, strangulation. The caller had provided the victim's correct birthday, but had given the name of her best friend.

Police identified the victim as Dana Sanchez, who had vanished eight days earlier after calling her boyfriend from a pay telephone in the 600 block of Cavalcade and telling him she was going to hitchhike to his house on Greenyard.

Investigators checking for similarities in cases targeted at least two others that might be linked to Dana's homicide:

Diana Rebollar, 9, who was abducted about 11:30 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1994, on her way home after running an errand for her mother to a convenience store at 6600 N. Main. Her nude body was found that afternoon behind a vacant office building on the North Loop. Sexually assaulted, she died by ligature strangulation.

Maria del Carmen Estrada, 21, abducted while walking from her apartment at 7200 Shadyvilla on the morning of April 16, 1992, to catch a bus to her janitorial job. Her body was found a few hours later about one block north of her apartment in a Dairy Queen drive-through area on Westview. She was partially clad and also died of ligature strangulation.

Harris County sheriff's Detective Bert Diaz noted these three victims were young Hispanics who had small statures and were missing clothing. Also, each had been abducted on the county's north side on a public street in broad daylight and died of ligature strangulation.

"Whoever could do something like this is like a junkie who wants dope. They get started and can't stop," he said. "They like killing girls. These girls are victims of opportunity, who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Another 14-year-old Hispanic girl was discovered strangled on June 7 of this year -- but on the southwest side of the county. The slightly built girl was identified as Erica Ann Garcia, who lived in the 7300 block of Bissonnet. Erica had been at a teen nightclub on Beechnut.

Her partially clad body was found by a security guard on the floor of the vacant Alief General Hospital behind the club.

Investigators declined to say if her strangulation was done tourniquet-style like the others.

"We're following up numerous leads," said Houston police Lt. Greg Neely. "There's nothing to prove it was definitely linked to the other cases, but we're not ruling it out."

Police said another strangulation of a teen in Houston is not believed to be connected to the others because the victim was black rather than Hispanic and was strangled manually rather than with a cord.

Trellis Sykes, 16, a straight "A" student athlete, was killed after apparently taking a shortcut across a field off Redbud in southeast Houston to catch a bus to school on May 13, 1994.

"We also have a suspect in this case -- but not enough evidence to charge him -- who has already been arrested in connection with kidnapping another young female who was sexually assaulted," said Neely.

The victim lived on Elberta with her grandmother, Mae Sykes, and aunt, Pamela Sykes, who began searching for Trellis immediately when she was late coming home after school that day. Her body was found that evening in the field which she had been cutting across.

"She is very sweet, quiet and to herself -- a churchgoing girl who sang in the choir," said her aunt. "My question is: What did she ever do to someone to make him take her innocent life?

"We have continued to put up posters. Until justice is done, we will never have any peace."

In the last few years, the murders of several other young teens in the Houston area have left law enforcement officers stumped. They include:

Hillory Farias, 17, of La Porte, who was ruled as possibly the first in the nation to die from an overdose of a "date-rape drug." Gamma y-hydroxybutyrate or "GHB," apparently was slipped into her soft drink at a local nightclub on Aug. 4, 1996. She went to bed with a severe headache that night and never regained consciousness.

Lynette Bibbs, 14, and Tamara Fisher, 15, both of La Porte, were found shot to death on Feb. 3, 1996, near Cleveland in Liberty County. The two best friends had left two days earlier for a night on the town. They went to a Houston nightclub and then a motel.

Their bodies were found off a dirt road. Bibbs was partially clad and shot twice in the head and once in the thigh, while Fisher, fully clothed, was shot once in the back of the head.

Krystal Jean Baker, 13, disappeared March 5, 1996. Last seen alive using a telephone at a Texas City convenience store, she was reportedly walking to a friend's home in Bayou Vista but stopped at the store in hopes of finding a ride. Two fishermen found her body, which had been strangled, beaten and sexually assaulted, a few hours later under the Interstate 10 bridge over the Trinity River in Chambers County. Her purse and identification were missing. She was not identified for almost two weeks until authorities connected her to a missing-person report.

As days, weeks and even years pass without arrests in such cases, victims' families remain haunted with unanswered questions.

"Someone is doing this when we least expect it and enjoying getting away with it right under our noses," said Krystal Baker's mother, Monetta, 37, a Texas City hairdresser.

Her last contact with her daughter was a message left on her answering machine that Krystal made from a pay telephone at a Texas City convenience store. She was looking for a ride to go to her friend's house.

"This could happen to anybody's child. I keep seeing kids use that same pay phone with no parents around. I want to scream that there's a crazy man out there and he has no heart and doesn't care," the mother said.

She describes her daughter as a loving child who liked to swim and talk on the phone. Krystal, she said, resembled a young Marilyn Monroe -- who happened to be her great-aunt.

"I can't understand why anyone would deliberately hurt my baby," the mother said.

Investigators don't understand either, and relentlessly work to find the killers.

Modern technology is helping solve some cases more quickly. For example, Montgomery County authorities hope DNA testing will soon lead to charges against suspects in the June 8 deaths of two young north Harris County women, whose charred bodies were found in a burned car north of Conroe. Unlike the other cases, deputies have named suspects in the slayings of the two -- Sarah Cleary, 17, and Misty Morgan, 19.

Friendswood Police Chief Jared Stout, who had spent hundreds of hours on the Smither case in Friendswood, compared the murder investigation to "solving a 3,000-piece jigsaw which is 3-D with ill-defined boundaries and all shades of color but no shapes."

For instance, he is still sifting through a list of 2,120 sex offenders registered in portions of Brazoria, Harris and Galveston counties near where the crime occurred. Each one is a potential suspect, he said, but there seems to be an endless number of other possibilities.

Yet he, like most investigators in unsolved cases, remains optimistic that a killer will eventually be caught.

Investigators say they periodically take out the files of cases that are decades old, flip through them and hope to stumble upon a new lead. None admits to burying these cases, closing the books or giving up.

"The world isn't big enough for us not to find such a killer," said Stout. "But at the same time," he said, in reference to the popular Star Trek television and movie series, "it sometimes seems as if Scotty found that crystal and whoever did it was beamed up to the Enterprise."




www.chron.com/content/chronicle/aol-metropolitan/97/09/20/old.2-0.html

Do police have new lead in 'killing field' murders?




Investigators checked evidence in a field where a woman's remains were found to see if there was a link to accused killer Anthony Allen Shore.


ABC13 Eyewitness News



(10/30/03 - LEAGUE CITY) Harris County prosecutors will reportedly decide within a month whether to seek the death penalty against Anthony Allen Shore, who is suspected of killing at least four women.

Shore made his first court appearance Wednesday on capital murder charges. Police say he confessed to killing four young women between 1986 and 1995 after he was confronted with DNA evidence. Shore is set to go on trial next September.

Homicide investigators across the Houston area are checking to see if they can close cases by tying Shore to the crimes. In League City, detectives interviewed him about four missing women. They all disappeared between 1984 and 1991, and all the bodies were found on the same acre of land, now known as the "killing field".

Investigators say they hope to use DNA evidence from fingernail scrapings found on one of the victims in order to see if Shore is responsible for the murders. That DNA evidence could be sent to a private Dallas lab within the week.

Harris County investigators are also looking at Shore as a possible suspect in the death of a woman whose long-buried bones were found in east Harris County last week. The remains were found in a vacant lot on Freeport near Texarkana. A gardener made the discovery. On Thursday, detectives sifted soil for more bits of bones. Already, what could be a ligature was near the remains. Shore is said to have used ligatures in his alleged killing spree. Harris County is now reviewing all its homicide cases where victims were bound.

La Marque police also plan to investigate whether Shore could be behind the unsolved disappearance of a Galveston County woman. Jessica Cain disappeared in 1997. She lived in Tiki Island near Galveston. Her abandoned truck was later found in La Marque. An eyewitness said he saw flashing lights behind Cain's truck on the night of her disappearance. Shore drove a wrecker that had emergency lights. La Marque detectives will talk to Houston investigators to see if there's a link to Shore. Already League City is investigating whether Shore could be behind the unsolved murders of four women there.



(Copyright 2003, KTRK-TV)




abclocal.go.com/ktrk/news/103003_local_killingfield.html



Copyright 2004 ABC Inc., KTRK-TV Inc.

Authorities Get Break In I-45 Killing Spree

Victims' Families Wait For Word

POSTED: 6:22 a.m. CST November 2, 2001
UPDATED: 12:04 p.m. CST November 2, 2001


HOUSTON -- Authorities on Friday questioned a suspect who they said is a strong suspect for some of the 27 killings along Interstate 45.

Video

Watch More On Break In Case





News2Houston learned earlier this week that investigators may have cracked at least two cases in the so called "Killing Field Murders" which span 20 years and stretch along a section of I-45 in Galveston and Harris counties.

Authorities said that after interviewing Mark Stallings, 34, they consider him a strong suspect in multiple homicides near the Calder Road area in League City, Texas, in Galveston County.

Stallings is currently serving 489 years in the Texas Department of Corrections for aggravated assault and an escape attempt.

Stallings was a former employee of Robert Abel, who leased property on Calder Road.

His confession of multiple homicides has not been corroborated, authorities said. DNA was obtained from Stallings and is being analyzed.

Investigators added that efforts are under way to identify at least one of the unidentified females that were located on Calder Road

An inside prison tip led to the suspect, investigators said.

The 27 victims, mostly women, either disappeared or were killed along I-45, leaving many local, state, and federal authorities puzzled.

"Primarily, if not all, white females of a generally speaking age range in there," former Houston FBI director Don Clark said. "And if you look at the photographs, many of them are very similar looking."

Clark, who now serves as an exclusive crime expert for News2Houston, had formed a special task force to track down the unsolved murders along I-45.

He said that there could be more than one serial killer committing these deadly crimes.

"When you look at that span of time, it would certainly appear that it could very well have been more than one person," Clark said.

Tim Miller's daughter, Laura, was one victim whose body was found along the freeway.

He said that whoever took his daughter's life may still be around.

"What do we do? What's happening to our society?" Miller asked. "What is happening here?"

Miller said that for now, he, like many other families, is waiting to hear what the suspect has to say about whom he may have killed.



www.click2houston.com/news/1038946/detail.html


Copyright 2003 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved.

ABC 20/20 (10:00 pm ET)

JANUARY 30, 1998

THE SUSPECT

TEXAS MAN LIVES NIGHTMARE AS MURDER SUSPECT


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


HUGH DOWNS: The man you're about to meet is a living a nightmare. His face and his name have been splashed across newspapers and televisions in Texas for years, linking him to the most chilling of crimes. Police have branded him a suspected serial killer, even though to this day they've found no hard evidence against him -- not one shred.

How could this happen in America? Is he a murderer too smart to get caught? Or is he a victim? ABC's chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross has a mystery with a surprising outcome.

BRIAN ROSS, ABC News: (voice-over) For at least 15 years now, in the small towns and suburbs along this interstate south of Houston, a serial killer has been on the loose.

DON CLARKE (ph), FBI Special Agent: There's somebody that's out there. These little girls are not missing on their own.

SUZY CAIN, Jessica's Mother: There are going to be other abductions, and we have to be ready.

PAT BITTNER, League City Assistant Police Chief: The killers are mobile. And victims along that -- up and down that freeway are accessible.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Several serial killers may be involved. But for a lot of people in the area, there's little doubt about who at least one of them is -- this man, Robert Abel, a retired NASA engineer.

TIM MILLER, Laura's Father: I think that Robert Abel needs to be feared.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) In fact, police have taken the unusual step of publicly identifying Abel as a suspect based almost entirely on an FBI serial killer profile.

PAT BITTNER: He's a suspect. He may not be responsible for killing these women, and he may be responsible for killing these women.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) It's quite a crime to be connected with -- one of the worst series of unsolved murders in the country, at least 42 teenage girls and young women.

DON CLARKE: Law enforcement is not going to sit here and see our young kids being drug away from their families in the middle of the day, night or whatever.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Don Clarke is the special agent in charge of the FBI in Houston.

DON CLARKE: We've got to do something to try and see to it that this doesn't happen again.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) The victims have all come from the quiet, mostly middle-class towns and suburbs that border the interstate between Houston and Galveston. Sixteen-year-old Kimberly Pitchford (ph) was last seen leaving a high school driver's education class. Thirteen-year-old Krystal Baker (ph) disappeared from a local convenience store. Each and every case, a heartbreaking story that has shocked a community and devastated a family.

(Clip from home video)

CAIN FAMILY: Jessica!

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) The latest, that of a 17-year-old Jessica Cain.

SUZY CAIN: If there was anything that Jessica did wrong, it was her friendly disposition. She was friends with everyone.

(Clip from home video)

JESSICA CAIN: (singing) My boyfriend's back, and you're going to be in trouble.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Jessica was performing with a local theater group one night last August when she disappeared, last seen driving home alone on Interstate 45 in her pickup truck.

C.H. CAIN, Jessica Father: I found the truck on the side of the road. And when I looked in, I expected to see her there, and when I didn't, it was the most horrible feeling you could imagine.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Once again, suspicion fell on Robert Abel almost immediately. Abel first became a suspect years ago when four of the murdered girls were found near his horseback riding business. And in the Jessica Cain case, police, accompanied by Jessica's parents, searched Abel's property for two days but turned up no body and no evidence on Abel.

PAT BITTNER: All you can say to the families is that we're doing the best we can. Please be patient.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Pat Bittner is the assistant police chief in the town of League City, where Abel's property is located. Armed with the FBI serial killer profile, Bittner has been on Robert Abel's case since 1993.

PAT BITTNER: Profiling is very important. It provides an investigative aid for us that will give us an idea of the type of person we're looking for. Abel exhibited some of the traits that are consistent with being a serial sexual killer.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) The FBI's ability to profile and track down serial killers has gained wide acclaim, depicted in books and movies like this one, "Silence of the Lambs," a relatively new technique based on a psychological analysis of the unique traits of known serial killers.

(Clip from "Silence of the Lambs")

JODIE FOSTER, Actress: He's in his 30s or 40s. He's got real physical strength, combined with an older man's self- control. He's cautious, precise, and he's never impulsive. He'll never stop.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Hannibal Lector (ph) and what makes a good movie is one thing. But as we learned in a 20/20 investigation, Robert Abel quite another. Yet Abel has become a hated man, based almost entirely on an FBI profile provided to police four years ago. Since then, police have been unable to back up their suspicions with a single shred of evidence.

PAT BITTNER: After searching his home, we were unsuccessful in finding any forensic evidence or direct evidence to connect him with the killings. But at the same time, we aren't able to eliminate him. So at this time, he is still a suspect.

BRIAN ROSS: (on camera) And that's based almost entirely on the profile?

PAT BITTNER: Yes.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) It's a profile done in what police admit was only one two-hour session with the FBI -- laid out in this affidavit Bittner used to get the search warrant for Abel's home.

Virtually everything about Abel seems to somehow connect him to the traits of a serial killer -- his intelligence, his proximity to the crime, his troubles with two ex-wives who alleged he had a bad temper and sometimes beat his horses. It all led to the conclusion in stark, no uncertain terms that Robert William Abel was a serial sexual offender and killer.

ROBERT ABEL: I didn't do it. I had nothing to do with it. Never in my lifetime did I see any one of those four girls or any of the other 40 girls that they are talking about missing. I have never killed anyone.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) But Abel, a 58-year-old father of three, says no one will believe him, and he has lived a life of hell for the last four years being known in his community as a suspected serial killer.

ROBERT ABEL: Oh, man, you have to live through something like this to appreciate it, you know?

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Abel has no known criminal record and has volunteered to take a lie detector test, but he says all the police seem to care about is that he somehow fits the FBI profile.

ROBERT ABEL: You take a profile that you could fit to just about anybody. And you place it on someone, and no -- basically no more than that profile is what would got me named as that suspect.

LOCAL TV ANCHOR: Many people in League City call it the killing field.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) It's been a big story all over Houston, which Abel says has nearly wrecked his business, scared away friends and led to numerous death threats.

(From tape of phone call)

TIM MILLER: And I've got friends right now that would kill you.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Abel recorded this chilling telephone call from the father of one of the dead girls.

(From tape of phone call)

TIM MILLER: I had a person that was going to come out there and take you out of the stables, and take you to Las Vegas and put you in a sand dune and beat your ass all the way up there, and then just put you in a sand dune.

I wanted to kill him.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) This is the man who made the calls, Tim Miller, whose daughter Laura is one of the girls Abel is suspected of killing. Based largely on what the police are saying about the profile, Miller freely admits he's been trying to make Abel's life miserable.

TIM MILLER: I went out there with a gun.

BRIAN ROSS: (on camera) What did you say to him?

TIM MILLER: That I'm going to remind him every day of what he's done.

BRIAN ROSS: Do you think he would kill you?

ROBERT ABEL: Yes. Yes, I do. I think -- I think there is a really substantial risk. And that's one of the most aggravating things -- the police department alleges that I am a continuing suspect, causing people like him to believe that if they kill me, they are going to be killing a serial killer.

BRIAN ROSS: You've seen the search warrant, affidavit?

ROBERT ABEL: Uh-huh.

BRIAN ROSS: Let's go through it because this is your chance here.

ROBERT ABEL: All right.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Perhaps the most significant point in the FBI profile, that four of the bodies were found near Abel's property -- what the police and the FBI call a serial killer's comfort zone.

PAT BITTNER: This comfort zone is an area where the killer feels at home, where he can go back and probably relive the crimes.

BRIAN ROSS: (on camera) They call this, as they look at you, your comfort zone.

ROBERT ABEL: It's not at all a comfort zone. I certainly wouldn't put a body out right next to a trail where I was planning on holding a trail ride. I mean, this just doesn't make any sense.

BRIAN ROSS: If you're a smart killer, would you really want to leave the bodies on your own land that would point at you?

PAT BITTNER: Well, suppose you're such a smart, confident killer that you think you're smarter than the police. Then you wouldn't be intimidated by leaving those bodies in your own backyard.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Even Abel's cooperation with the police has counted against him.

PAT BITTNER: His cooperation was welcomed by us at the time. It is still welcome now. But it just so happens that that kind of behavior is consistent with a killer, a serial killer.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Much of the background information police gathered to profile Abel came from an ex-wife at a time they were going through their divorce, who Abel says falsely told police he beat his horses. And more to the point, that he kept photographs of nude white females.

ROBERT ABEL: That is true. That is true. And I want you to know, out of 6,000 photographs, they found two nudie pictures, which you could show in any Sunday school class, I mean.

BRIAN ROSS: (on camera) So you didn't have 6,000 photographs of various naked women?

ROBERT ABEL: Absolutely not. I had 6,000 photographs of travel to Europe, family pictures and etc., and I'll put every one of them on display to this day.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) These are some of them. Photos which might also suggest a man with normal, healthy relationships, but they didn't change the thinking of police.

PAT BITTNER: Unfortunately, the results of the search warrant were inconclusive.

BRIAN ROSS: (on camera) Unfortunately? Doesn't that clear him if you don't find what you're looking for?

PAT BITTNER: Well, you're fencing with me. It doesn't clear him, and it didn't eliminate him. So he's still in the pool. He's swimming in the pool of suspects.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) Abel says he has suffered the same fate as the security guard wrongly accused in the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics -- Richard Jewell -- against whom there was no physical evidence, but whose personality and eagerness to cooperate with authorities also fit an FBI profile.

BILL TEIGEN (ph), Polygraph Expert: These will record respiration.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) It was a polygraph test that helped clear Richard Jewell. And Robert Abel volunteered to take one, too, for us, conducted by polygraph expert and former FBI agent Bill Teigen, who was paid by 20/20 and who conducted two different tests in a one-week period.

BILL TEIGEN: This test is about to begin. Is your full name Robert William Abel?

ROBERT ABEL: Yes.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) The results of such tests are not generally admissible in court as evidence, but they are widely used by police and the FBI as an investigative tool.

BILL TEIGEN: Did you cause the death of any one of those four females whose bodies were found on the Mako Stewart (ph) property we've discussed?

ROBERT ABEL: No.

BILL TEIGEN: Is there anything about the death of any one of those four females we've discussed that you're deliberately keeping from me today?

ROBERT ABEL: No.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) The results were dramatic. It seemed at first that Robert Abel had just convicted himself. The examiner found deception in the first test, based, oddly enough, on Abel's apparent hesitation to reveal a rumor he had heard that one of the dead girls was involved with drugs.

ROBERT ABEL: I didn't want to -- with what I consider hearsay kind of stuff. I didn't want to bring it out.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) That showed up on the machine as deception, although the examiner said it also showed Abel had a conscience and couldn't beat the machine.

BILL TEIGEN: If you will sit back in the chair now and lower your arms...

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) One week later, Abel was tested again by Bill Teigen -- this time with the disparaging rumors about one of the victims fully disclosed in advance.

BILL TEIGEN: What's your attitude about whether or not you passed this polygraph test or not?

ROBERT ABEL: I think I passed it.

BILL TEIGEN: You think you did?

ROBERT ABEL: Yeah.

BILL TEIGEN: My analysis agrees with you, and so does the computer's.

ROBERT ABEL: Oh, OK. I am very pleased to hear that.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) The results of the 20/20 lie detector test were considered extremely significant at the FBI office in Houston, where agents working the case told us they considered the four-year-old profile on Abel to be of poor quality anyway and that they have now ruled out Abel as a suspect.

DON CLARKE: The profilers will tell you themselves, the experts will tell you that many people can fit the same profile. But the evidence should only lead to the one person that's actually guilty.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) But the results didn't mean a thing to League City assistant police chief Pat Bittner, who says Abel may be innocent, but he's still a suspect.

PAT BITTNER: We still consider -- I still consider Robert Abel an innocent man.

BRIAN ROSS: (on camera) But a suspect?

PAT BITTNER: But a suspect.

BRIAN ROSS: Do you know the power of those words to call somebody a suspect in a serial killing?

PAT BITTNER: I can imagine, yes.

BRIAN ROSS: So you don't think he's owed an apology?

PAT BITTNER: No, not from me.

BRIAN ROSS: (voice-over) As for the father who was close to killing Robert Abel, Tim Miller, he says he now feels differently about the man.

TIM MILLER: I mean, he's went through hell. Let's face it, he has. And -- and if there is no connection, my God, he's a stronger man than me, you know, to put up with this over all these years.

ROBERT ABEL: It's something that you're -- you check in, and you can't check out. You're -- you had nothing to do with it. It's unjustified that it was brought on you in the first place. But they won't leave you alone, and they should.

HUGH DOWNS: This is horrible. He's still a suspect. And do the police have other suspects, Brian?

BRIAN ROSS: Well, they say there are other suspects, but they have lost a lot of ground in the last four years by focusing so much on Robert Abel.

HUGH DOWNS: Yeah, doesn't he have a lawyer or some means of suing?

BRIAN ROSS: Well, he's tried to sue, Hugh, but the courts have not allowed it. They've said that the police are in their rights to call him a suspect. So he's in kind of a legal Never-Neverland and can't really clear his name.

HUGH DOWNS: No other way to salvage something of his life until something is done one way or the another.

BRIAN ROSS: Until tonight in our report, really.

HUGH DOWNS: Yeah. Well, fascinating story. Thank you, Brian.



www.law-forensic.com/cfr_abel_2.htm

05/01/97 11:28 PM


Girls' killings similar, but police unable to link them or find suspect



FRIENDSWOOD (AP) - Police have found similarities in the murders of 12-year-old Laura Kate Smither and a 9-year-old Arlington girl, but they have not been able to determine whether the same person is responsible.

Laura was last seen the morning of April 3 when she went for a jog near her rural Friendswood home. Her body was discovered April 20 in a Pasadena retention pond.

Nine-year-old Amber Hagerman was grabbed from her bicycle Jan. 13, 1996. Her body was found four days later in a rain-swollen creek about three miles from her Arlington home. Her throat had been slashed.

Both girls were white and their bodies - found in waterways - were nude except for socks.

A witness in the Arlington case told police that a white or Hispanic man in a dark-colored pickup truck had taken Amber. Friendswood police are seeking a possible witness - driving a dark blue pickup - who was described as a white man in his 30s with a dark complexion.

A $50,000 reward remains for information leading to an arrest and conviction in Laura Smither's case.

Anyone with information is asked to the call the Friendswood police hot line at (281) 482-8061.




www.lubbockonline.com/news/050297/girls.htm


Copyright Lubbock Avalanche-Journal 1997