01x01 - Nobody Sees Anything

[bunniefuu]

[insects chirping]

[eerie music]

[Tim] I became obsessed with this place.

[g*nsh*t]

I remember one night, I came out here,

and I had my .357 Magnum.

[g*nsh*t]

I shot that thing six times,

hoping the cops would come.

[g*nshots]

Nobody came.

[g*nsh*t]

I'm 75 years old. You think

I still wanna do this every day?

But I will.

[g*nsh*t]

I'll fight till my dying breath,

trying to find out

who m*rder*d my daughter.

[Lise] The Calder fields

are just an enigma.

[woman] It's a place

where bad things happen.

[reporter] Police are baffled

over the latest discovery

at what some are calling a k*lling field.

Their bodies found

in the League City field.

[Skip] The k*lling Fields.

It's an easy place to dump a body,

and you can get away with it.

[Kevin] This was brutal m*rder.

And it's here in our backyard.

[reporter 1] Since 1983, Galveston County

has an unusually large number

of mysterious disappearances.

[reporter 2]

Just yards off this busy highway,

abducted girls and women

had been k*lled and dumped.

It was like, poof, vanished.

She was gone.

[Skip] There were over two dozen victims.

Was it one k*ller? Multiple K*llers?

Well, you know what?

If you wanna commit a crime,

do it here,

because they sure can't solve it.

[Lise] It's a scary story.

We have been allowing

serial K*llers to go free.

You gave him the green light

to continue k*lling our girls.

[Kathryn] These are just notorious cases.

The world might have forgotten about it,

but those families didn't.

Whoever did this, I want them punished.

The families deserve answers.

Our loved ones deserve justice.

[Tim] Put a mark

right at the fence line right there.

All this new information

could be the key to the entire case.

[woman] After the things

that I've seen and heard,

I want to put a spotlight

on the situation.

I want to bring it out of the dark.

[dramatic music]

[dark opening theme music]

[Skip] If you drive down I-45 today

you'll see two worlds there,

the suburban world

that's reaching its tendrils south

[woman] Whoo!

and there's still the last vestiges

of the old world of South Coast

that people don't remember anymore.

[car horn honking]

[Lise] As you drive south

out of Houston on I-45,

there are a lot of small towns

on either side of it.

There's a lot of just empty fields,

bayous, retention ponds,

and the petrochemical plants

all hug the coastline.

There are a lot of

old oil fields and marshes

between Houston and Galveston.

A lot of those places

are still very remote.

It was a place where K*llers

could hide bodies pretty easily.

[Skip] In certain areas,

the body disappears,

and then you shut the door,

and you drive on, and you're home clear.

[Richard] This is what's known

as the k*lling Fields.

The Calder Road fields were owned

by a petrochemical company.

A large amount of acres with nothing on it

other than a horse trail ride business.

It was a dirt road with a dead end.

Not much around it at all.

My name is Richard Rennison,

and I'm a supervisory special agent

for the FBI in Texas City.

I started my law enforcement career

at the League City Police Department.

And that was when I was first introduced

to the k*lling Fields.

It was a very big case for the department.

The department was small.

It was always on the back of my mind.

This is something I'd like to work on

when I get the experience.

Once I transferred back with the FBI,

then I was able to work on it.

Through the tree line

on the other side of the road,

there's some houses and trailers

over there.

That's three, four hundred yards.

That's a good ways, so

There was a couple

that had a house on Calder Road.

And their kid was outside

playing in the yard,

and their dog ran off into the woods.

And a little while later, it came back,

and it had something round in its mouth,

and they thought it had found

a ball out there.

So they went out to investigate.

In the dog's mouth was a human skull.

They also found a skeleton.

[Skip] Two years later

some boys were riding

their bicycles by that same area.

They found the skeleton

of another young woman.

And while the police were looking

around the area for any evidence

that might help them find

the identity of the second girl

they come across a third skeleton

25 yards away

from where the second girl was found.

[Richard] This was so, so different.

It was so thick,

just minus your little trails.

You couldn't walk around like this at all.

But this is the spot where

where they were found.

Three of the victims were found

just yards away from each other.

Uh, really close.

And the person kept coming back

to the same location, uh

Wow.

[Kathryn] The Calder Road killings

have haunted this part of Texas

for a really long time.

And at a certain point,

they just kind of haunted me.

My husband and I would drive

from Houston down to Galveston

for a nice weekend or to go to the beach,

and there'd be a billboard

with one of the girls' faces.

You're on your way

to have a great seafood dinner,

and what's on your mind is,

"I wonder why so many women

are dying around here."

And I kept kind of collecting

the articles as they evolved.

So that's when I started the book.

These cases are old, you know.

Nothing going on with them

when I started the book.

But the families

just kept these cases alive.

And Tim Miller's one of the first people

I kind of reached out to.

[Tim] When we get called on a case,

I'm one of the guys that can go

to the family and say,

"Listen, I know

what you're going through."

"I know."

You're starting to shed, buddy.

The very, very first body

I ever found was on that horse.

That's why we called it EquuSearch.

You know, we've been in 42 states

in 11 different countries.

Never charged a family ten cents.

[Kathryn] Tim Miller's kind of

a well-known figure here

on the Gulf Coast.

The idea that someplace,

there's somebody who's turned up missing

and nobody is looking for them

is just too much for him to carry.

So he goes out, and he does it.

But

sometimes when I talk to him,

I wonder if he's still looking for Laura.

I think I'm gonna take a break.

I'll never forget the day

that my daughter disappeared.

It's like it was yesterday.

I was walkin' outdoor

about quarter to seven,

and Laura said, "Dad, can I talk to you?"

And I said,

"Sure, sis, what's on your mind?"

And she says, "Is it okay

if Vernon comes over tonight?"

Vernon was her boyfriend.

And I said,

"Yes, I think that'd be a good idea."

"Mom's gonna be putting stuff away,

and I'll actually barbecue outside."

"When Mom comes home for lunch,

have her take you down to the pay phone."

We just moved into this house,

and back then, they didn't have your phone

hooked up the day you moved in.

So, Laura's mom came home,

took her to the pay phone.

Laura's talking on the phone.

Her mom says, "Laura, hurry up.

I'm gonna be late for work."

And Laura says, "I just want to talk

to Vernon a bit longer. I can walk home."

Less than a half-mile away

from the pay phone.

Later, I got home,

and Laura's mother got home.

And we got a knock on the door.

It was Vernon.

I said, "Vernon, where's Laura?"

He says, "I don't know."

And Laura didn't make it home.

We panicked.

She was 16. She had a seizure problem.

Laura had to be

on her Dilantin twice a day,

or she was gonna be in trouble.

We said, "Oh my God.

Laura was walking home from the store."

"She had a seizure."

"Now she's in one of the hospitals

as little Jane Doe, so"

We went to two hospitals in the area,

and there was no little Jane Doe.

There was no Laura there.

We went to the police,

reported her missing,

and police said she was a runaway.

They said, "Go home. Wait by your phone."

"Laura's gonna be calling."

[Kathryn] The Millers,

they were given the answer

that so many parents were given.

That, "Oh, she just ran away."

"Oh, she's just with friends.

Just be patient. She'll show up."

[Tim] Laura loved music.

Linda Ronstadt. Fleetwood Mac.

She had a lot of friends.

[Kathryn] She was running with maybe

a little bit of a rough crowd.

Some of the kids were smoking pot

and getting into a few things.

Everybody wants

to be accepted by somebody.

[Kathryn] The Millers had been living

in Dickinson, Texas,

and they moved not too far away

to League City, Texas,

in order to get Laura

into a different school system.

To give her a fresh start.

[Tim] I said to the police,

"Listen, Laura is in trouble.

She has to have her medication."

And I will never, ever forget

that detective telling me,

"Laura is very streetwise,

and she can get her medication anywhere."

[Kathryn] I don't think the police took

Laura's disappearance

anywhere near as seriously

as they should have.

But unbeknownst to Tim,

she wasn't the first young woman

to disappear in the area.

There was a girl named Heide Fye.

[ominous music]

[Joe Villareal] This recording

that's coming up next

was taken some years back.

The voices are of Heide,

and Mom and myself.

One day right around Christmas,

Heide had bought me a tape recorder.

Say something to see

if you can make the needle move.

[Heide] Needle, move!

[Heide laughs]

[Nina] Heide was born in 1958

to Joe and Janie Villareal,

my grandparents.

The world knows her as Heide Fye.

But our family

affectionately calls her Heide.

My aunt was really the light in the room

that really went out

when she went missing.

[Joe] October 7, 1983.

My daughter Heide

was on her way to Houston

to the small trailer house that, uh,

her boyfriend was

supposed to be fixing up.

[Nina] The plan was to move their trailer

into my mother's backyard.

They were gonna stay there,

save up some money.

[Joe] She got all ready to go.

Poked her head into the den there.

And she said,

"Daddy, I'll see you tomorrow."

[Nina] She was gonna walk to the store.

She was probably at that pay phone,

calling her friends,

see if she could catch a ride.

But

she never showed up in Houston.

[ominous music]

[audio jittering]

The clerk at the convenience store said

she watched her make a phone call

from that telephone booth.

[Joe] It's real lonely out there

from where she was calling.

No lights on the street at all.

We decided, "Okay, we've got

to go talk to the police."

[Richard] I don't know

the exact circumstances

of when she went missing,

because nobody knows for sure.

But she was an average 25-year-old girl

working in a bar called the Texas Moon.

Then she disappeared.

[Nina] The League City police

basically felt like it was just

her trying to get away

and not to worry about it.

Give it a few more days. She'll come back.

No need to go to the media.

Don't put posters out.

Let's just give it some time.

My grandfather, he wasn't going

to just sit on his hands.

He wasn't built that way.

[Joe] She's too close to me,

she's too close to the baby

to pull a stunt like this.

I've got to find her.

[Nina] My grandfather went out

and searched every single day for her.

My grandfather would interview

people in nightclubs,

and he would drive across town

without telling us.

[Joe] I would have to jot down

what they would tell me,

and then I'd come back

and put it on this tape.

[Nina] Two or three times a day,

sometimes, he would get on the recorder

and he would describe

the people that he talked to.

He would write down names, phone numbers.

[Joe] I know damn well

these people know something.

They know.

Her remains weren't found

until April of 1984.

It was six months.

And the discovery of her remains

out in the Calder field

was pretty horrific.

Through the tree line on the other side,

one of those houses is where

the dog brought back the remains.

It had found a human skull.

It was Heide's skull.

Police responded, and they came out

and started searching the field.

And they found Heide's body

laid underneath a tree.

Sorry.

[ominous music]

[Richard] She was, uh,

advanced state of decomposition.

A lot of the bones were spread by animals,

so it was hard to see

if there was any signature

or anything that the k*ller may have done.

So, it didn't really glean

a lot of information from that.

The suspected cause of death was trauma.

Severe broken ribs.

It wasn't until

the discovery of her remains

that it got some real attention

from the police.

Like, okay, well, maybe

we should have listened to her family.

[Joe] It's now 1:45.

I'm going back to the Texas Moon.

[Richard] From the Texas Moon

where Heide worked,

Calder Road is probably

about four or five miles away.

[Joe] I have given these names

to the police to check out.

And there'll be some more

because I'm gonna keep on looking.

[Nina] There were

several people of interest

that were close enough to Heide

that he really felt like

needed to be questioned,

but he didn't feel like he was getting

the response from them

that he was hoping for.

[Richard] There was

multiple different suspects,

but none of them panned out to where they

had enough evidence to charge anybody.

[Nina] More times than not,

when you read his journals

or you listen to his tapes,

it's just disappointment in his voice.

[Joe] Something's got to be done.

My little girl can't just die like this.

[Tim] Heide's body was found

in April of 1984.

And then Laura disappeared in September.

There was a pay phone right here

in this corner.

The pay phone that Laura was last seen at,

this is where Heide also was last seen at.

I don't think we had to do a lot

to connect the dots.

Possibly these are connected.

We went back

to the police department and said,

"We know about this girl

that was found named Heide Fye."

"They live close to here."

That detective stopped me

in my tracks and said,

"Number one, I told you before

that's an isolated incident."

"Heide worked in a bar.

Someone took her out after it closed."

"And, uh, they m*rder*d her

and threw her out."

They said, "Don't go talking

to Heide's family."

"They're trying to get over Heide's loss."

[Kathryn] Heide's parents

didn't really know Tim.

And, like the Millers,

they'd been told not to communicate.

[Joe] We've been just not saying nothing,

as they have told us,

not to discuss this with anyone else

other than ourselves here.

[sighs]

And the families felt all alone.

They really felt as if they'd been

abandoned in this process.

Because there was so little going on

with the investigations,

the parents were forced to do their own.

[Tim] I said, "Would you please search

that property Heide's body was found?"

I physically asked the police,

"Please tell me where this is at."

"We want to know

so we could go out there."

They told me,

"Well, that's private property."

"It's all fenced in.

Nobody can get there."

I begged and pleaded.

"This has just happened.

You think there could be a similarity?"

They did their best to convince me

I'd lost my damn mind.

[scoffs]

[ominous music]

There was a path that came through here,

and it was so full of trash

and old refrigerators

and different things people had dumped.

And some kids

were actually riding dirt bikes,

and they got a foul odor

just right over there.

And they went up to it, and, uh

and it was a a girl.

[Richard] When the detectives

and crime scene personnel

showed up to work the scene,

they didn't know who she was,

but the medical examiner's office

provided us with some information.

An age range, 20 to 30, roughly.

She had a gap in her teeth.

Didn't know who she was,

so she was named Jane Doe.

As the detectives and crime scene

personnel were out there,

they expanded their search

looking for other evidence.

And then they found

the body of another female.

[detective] We discovered

an unidentified body

in the field about approximately 100 yards

from the location of the first.

[Tim] I knew that morning

when it came out in the paper.

Remains of two females found. So

Yeah, I remember that day.

The bodies were both laid under trees.

They were fairly close together.

And they were on their backs.

And it was almost as if they'd just been

laid there and positioned.

Jane Doe had been shot

with a .22 caliber g*n.

There was a b*llet lodged in her spine.

And at that point, they started

to look into the other body.

They used dental records.

And it turned out

that it was Laura's remains.

[somber music]

[sniffles]

[Kathryn] There was

a blue plaid Western shirt

that was found near Laura's body.

The shirt had some stains on it,

and back in the 1980s,

we didn't have DNA yet.

But the police tagged the case number

from Laura's m*rder on the shirt.

[Richard] Two bodies on the same day.

That day in February of '86,

it's when things really broke bad.

[Kathryn] In 1984, there was a movie out

about the Khmer Rouge

called The k*lling Fields.

[announcer] The k*lling Fields.

[Kathryn] And after the bodies started

showing up on Calder Road,

people started referring to it

more as the Texas k*lling Field.

At that point, it started

to get a lot more attention.

[Skip] One after another after another,

these ritualistic killings of young women,

all set up in an array

like some kind of work of art.

And no one could sort of figure out

all the pieces of the puzzle.

[Tim] Laura had been there

the entire 17 months.

Almost exactly where I asked them to look.

What if they would've done

what I asked them to do?

They would've found Laura.

She would've been dead, but

there probably

would've been some evidence.

They probably would've been able

to determine a cause of death.

There's a lot of pain.

I'm the one that should have

followed through

and maybe talked to Heide's parents.

And I didn't do it.

I know what it's like to be paralyzed

and not knowing what to do,

because I know what I did not do

for my own daughter.

If Heide's dad and me

could have got together early on,

we wouldn't be here again

this many years later.

And you know what?

This right here is what k*lled Heide's dad

way before his time.

Poor man died of a broken heart.

[somber music playing]

[Richard] I can't imagine

losing a daughter.

I cannot imagine.

If you're looking at a small town

that doesn't have a lot of violent crime,

then suddenly, within a two-year period,

you have abductions

and kidnappings and murders,

this is very unusual.

That was the point where

people realize this is a serial k*ller,

this is real, and it's in our community.

The fact that somebody's out there

k*lling people and not being held

responsible for it bothers me.

You know, what was happening here?

These killings of young women

had been going on as far back as 1971.

[Lise] In the '70s, Houston was a city

of a million people.

You had the NASA Space Center.

There was an oil boom going on.

Exxon was starting to build

what would become some

of the biggest refineries in the world.

It was a boomtown.

[crowds cheering]

We wanted to try a larger city

and see what it was like,

and it's just been fabulous.

This is the hub of the petroleum industry

here in Houston.

I'm a geologist,

so I thought I'd give it a try.

You can see it's a lot of fun out here.

[Lise] Because of what was happening

all around Houston, there was work.

You had a lot of people moving in.

You had a lot of people moving around.

And there were also sort of

smaller railroad towns along I-45

that began to grow,

began to become sort of suburbs.

[Skip] Malls, neighborhoods,

and bedroom communities.

All that was growing.

And at the same time, there were drifters.

Men with criminal pasts.

[Richard] Having the beaches,

it's very transient.

People here for the weekend,

then they're gone.

And so those two cultures

eventually collided.

[tires squeal]

[Lise] This is Maria Johnson.

And this is her best friend,

Debbie Ackerman.

They were 15 when they disappeared

in November of 1971.

Debbie Ackerman

was a champion water-skier.

Fifteen years old.

They were best friends.

Young active surfer girls

having a good time in the '70s.

[ominous music]

And then they disappeared.

Their bodies were found fairly quickly.

[reporter] On November 17th,

the body of 15-year-old Maria Johnson

was found in a pool of water

fifty miles west of Houston.

The next day, the body

of 15-year-old Debbie Ackerman

was found in that same pond.

My estimation, the body has been

in the water approximately 48 to 60 hours.

[Lise] By the time they disappeared,

there'd already been

other mysterious disappearances.

[reporter] November 26th,

the partial skeleton

of 13-year-old Colette Wilson

was found at Addicks Reservoir,

ten miles west of Houston.

[Lise] They were all teenagers along I-45

who mysteriously disappeared suddenly,

either alone or in pairs.

In the past six months,

seven teenage girls

and young women aged 13 to 21

have been found m*rder*d

in the vicinity of Houston, Texas.

[Skip] The years begin to build up.

They were being viciously m*rder*d.

And there was no answer

as to who was doing it.

[reporter 2]

Lawmen search hopefully for clues

but are fearful

of finding additional bodies.

[Lise] From 1971 to 1977.

Eleven girls.

No answers.

You have to remember this was an era

when there were no surveillance cameras

in parking lots.

No license plate readers

on the side of highways.

There were 11 different jurisdictions.

That was a problem

because the police

didn't share information.

[Lise] I think it shows how,

along the I-45 corridor,

if somebody's allowed

to get away with one m*rder,

they might be able to get away

with another or another or another.

What we see again in the '80s

is a new group of murders

that start to occur at a different stretch

of I-45 up in League City.

The Texas k*lling Fields.

[woman] We traveled that stretch

of highway going to and from Galveston.

Did that my whole life.

And being a female,

you know, your parents

talk to you about safety,

being careful.

My mom and dad were divorced

before I was in kindergarten.

Things changed

when I was in the fifth grade.

That's when

my mother met someone new.

She brought him home,

um, to meet me and my brother.

To me, it was just another boyfriend,

you know, not sure how long

he was going to be around.

She liked him.

His name was Clyde Hedrick.

So, this is where

the dance club used to be,

that he "happened" to run into my mother.

[director] Why do you say it like that?

Because that was his plan.

[Lise] Clyde Hedrick, he was

a good-looking man back in the day.

He liked to wear a black cowboy hat.

He liked to go to bars, dancing contests.

And he'd often win those contests.

He considered himself a ladies' man.

I would say a little bit

like a Casanova conman.

[woman] He found out just enough

that he knew

where she went.

And they met at the bar.

And she took him home

because

he could dance.

[Lise] Clyde Hedrick was attracted

to Houston in the '70s and '80s

by the construction boom.

He moved here from Florida,

and got work as a roofer.

It's pretty easy for somebody

to get a job in construction

without a background check.

We had no idea who he was

at the time, but we started

to find out more

because my dad actually checked him out.

He had a printout of his criminal history.

[director] What was Clyde

in prison for at the time?

I think he was in prison for, um,

abuse of a corpse.

It turned out that Hedrick

had been involved in a mysterious death,

a woman named Ellen Beason.

[insects chirping]

[Kevin] Ellen Beason was a young woman

that lived with her parents

and brother in Friendswood, Texas.

She was in her twenties.

She had a good job.

She enjoyed dancing.

All of that changed

the evening she met Clyde Hedrick.

In July of '84, her friend

Candy Gifford took Ellen Beason

to a local bar called the Texas Moon

and introduced Ellen to Clyde Hedrick.

They hit it off to some degree.

[insects chirping]

[Kathryn] When Ellen Beason

didn't show up at work the next day,

when her friends couldn't find her,

her family couldn't find her,

they started asking Clyde.

"Where is she? What happened?"

[Kevin] Clyde Hedrick said

he saw Ellen Beason leave in a truck,

that she just left with some friends.

[car alarm beeps]

As the weeks passed,

she really began to get concerned.

Candy, she would often bring up

the subject of Ellen to Clyde.

And he grew more

and more impatient with that.

One day, Clyde had just had enough.

And in an argument, he said,

"Well, then I'll show you where she is."

Clyde drove Candy Gifford to a location

just before the bridge

from the mainland to Galveston Island.

This was sort of a dirt road,

a rough road.

It was a small building

near the railroad tracks.

There was some tires on an old sofa

that had been discarded

by the side of the road.

He removed those.

And that's where she saw

the remains of Ellen Beason.

[disturbing music playing]

It had been six months

after Ellen went missing.

Why it took Candy another six,

seven months to go to the police

[spluttering] it's hard for me to say.

But I think she was scared of Clyde.

Because that night,

he told her that, "If you tell anyone,

this can happen to you too."

[insects chirping]

We know that the Texas Moon

was obviously in that direction,

and not just shortly,

but, you know, at least 20 to 25 miles

in that direction.

Because of the lack of traffic,

y-you can see the weeds are high enough.

You got the sense

that this was something hidden.

This was something

that he was basically disposing of her,

just like you dispose

of a couch or a mattress

or any other number of things

that were thrown out here.

[Kathryn] The police found her

in a bad state of decomp.

She was still wearing the necklace

she'd worn that night to the Texas Moon.

Clyde said that he and Ellen

had gone out to a swimming hole,

and she had wanted to go skinny-dipping.

He said he looked out,

and she was floating on top of the water.

She had drowned.

[Kevin] To hear Clyde tell the story

of Ellen Beason drowning that night,

he panicked,

put her in the back of the truck,

and then on the way

to the hospital, as he describes it,

he decided to ditch the body for fear

that he would be suspected of foul play.

And that's when he put her

under the couch and under the tires.

When you see someone who, um,

dumps a body in a place

where there's just so much trash,

he didn't see her as a person.

He didn't see her as a human.

He saw her as some trash

that he needed to hide away

from the police and authorities.

And I think that says a lot

about a person.

[birds squawking]

Ellen Beason's remains were taken

to the Galveston County medical examiner.

She was still very much exposed

to the elements out there.

It is a wet area.

The skin had long since

deteriorated in the elements.

It was just bones.

The medical examiner indicated

that both the cause and the manner

of the death of Ellen Beason

could not be determined.

The only charge

that the DA's office could bring was

the tampering with evidence,

basically dumping Ellen Beason's body.

The charge at the time

was called abuse of corpse.

[Kathryn] He was convicted.

He was fined $2,000

and one year in prison.

[Kevin] After the abuse of corpse case

and a year in county jail,

Clyde Hedrick was a free man.

He had been tried. He had been convicted.

There wasn't much else

for us to do at that point.

When you don't have scientific evidence,

then there are a lot of challenges.

This part of Houston,

we have pretty severe weather.

[reporter] The storm

battered the Gulf Coast

with torrential rains and flooding.

[Kathryn] It's on a coastal plain.

We have hurricanes.

And it floods.

[reporter 2] Flash flood watches are out

on all of South Texas.

[Kathryn] When the hurricanes come in,

they're pretty brutal.

[reporter 3] Hurricane Gilbert has been

blamed for at least 66 deaths

and billions of dollars worth of damage.

[Kathryn] People understand

that water is very hard on evidence,

that it destroys DNA.

It destroys a lot

of what the police look for

when they try to piece a crime together.

Water speeds up decomposition,

but the heat down here does too, you know?

We have this incredible heat.

So, a lot of times with the girls' bodies,

all that was found were skeletal remains.

[Richard] The Calder Road cases,

they were somewhat intertwined,

mostly by the time frame

with Ellen Beason.

If there was similarities between the two,

it could be the same perpetrator.

Since Ellen went missing in 1984,

which was the year

after Heide Fye first went missing,

we absolutely had to consider

that it could be related.

The story Clyde told about Ellen Beason

never made any sense.

And her death occurred

during the same period

when the other three women

were found in the Texas k*lling Fields.

League City and Dickinson

are not very far apart.

So when Clyde Hedrick

becomes the main suspect

in the m*rder of Ellen Beason,

he also becomes one of the main suspects

in the Texas k*lling Fields.

But at the time,

because they were unsolved cases,

I had a hard time with the police

just like you're having

a hard time with the police.

[ominous music]

The first time

I reached out to Tim Miller,

he spent the whole day with me,

talking about Laura

and how he was still fighting

to try to find the person

who k*lled his daughter.

And one of the first things Tim said was,

"Well, what you really ought to look at

is the Ellen Beason case

and Clyde Hedrick."

[Tim] He was on my radar

the minute I learned about Ellen Beason.

And then I do what any parent's gonna do,

is start asking questions,

find out more about this cat.

This is my house here in Dickinson.

Two houses in between

my house and Clyde's house.

This is where Clyde lived.

I never knew him.

I think maybe I'd seen him one time

when the guy had a flat tire,

and I gave him a tire.

I went in my shop right there.

There was a tire and a rim.

And I brought it out to him, and I said,

"Here, man, I got one that's gonna fit."

He said, "What do I owe you?"

I said, "Man, nothing." I said,

"You look like a hard-working guy."

And I think it was Clyde.

There's one of Laura's little friends

that still contacts me that

her and Laura would go walking,

and they would walk way around

because Laura was afraid of Clyde Hedrick.

[ominous music]

I don't know how

it all happened that morning.

I can only speculate.

[insects chirping]

[Kevin] Whether it's an accident,

or it's something that happened naturally,

why would you dump a body

like he did, just like trash

by the side of the road,

if there wasn't something else going on?

[woman] Ellen Beason.

My mother, she would ask Clyde

about it, and

whatever answer he gave her

was good enough for her,

because she didn't She didn't leave him.

She kept him around.

And so, they

They got married.

[Skip] The thing about these kind

of killings is the police weren't cynical.

They weren't skeptical.

They just didn't know what to do.

Well, you know what?

If you wanna commit a crime,

do it here,

because they sure can't solve it.

[Skip] In the '70s, they had a dozen

murders in this one area of the state.

And then in 1986,

three bodies were found

within a period of two years,

all within 50 yards of each other.

Was it one k*ller?

Was it multiple K*llers?

What was going on?

There was no answer.

[Kathryn] And then it happened again.

[reporter] Police are baffled

over latest discovery

at what some are now calling

a k*lling field.

The body of a fourth victim, a woman,

was found just two weeks ago.

[Lise] Another body is found

on the same piece of land.

[reporter 2] A fourth body

found in the same location.

Here we go again.

[somber ending theme]