Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields (2022) s01e01 Episode Script

1
[insects chirping]
[eerie music]
[Tim] I became obsessed with this place.
[gunshot]
I remember one night, I came out here,
and I had my .357 Magnum.
[gunshot]
I shot that thing six times,
hoping the cops would come.
[gunshots]
Nobody came.
[gunshot]
I'm 75 years old. You think
I still wanna do this every day?
But I will.
[gunshot]
I'll fight till my dying breath,
trying to find out
who murdered 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 killing field.
Their bodies found
in the League City field.
[Skip] The Killing Fields.
It's an easy place to dump a body,
and you can get away with it.
[Kevin] This was brutal murder.
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 killed and dumped.
It was like, poof, vanished.
She was gone.
[Skip] There were over two dozen victims.
Was it one killer? Multiple killers?
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 killers to go free.
You gave him the green light
to continue killing 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 killers
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 Killing 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 Killing 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 killer 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 murdered 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 gun.
There was a bullet 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 murder 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 Killing Fields.
[announcer] The Killing Fields.
[Kathryn] And after the bodies started
showing up on Calder Road,
people started referring to it
more as the Texas Killing 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 killed 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 killer,
this is real, and it's in our community.
The fact that somebody's out there
killing 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 murdered
in the vicinity of Houston, Texas.
[Skip] The years begin to build up.
They were being viciously murdered.
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 murder,
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 Killing 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 Killing Fields.
League City and Dickinson
are not very far apart.
So when Clyde Hedrick
becomes the main suspect
in the murder of Ellen Beason,
he also becomes one of the main suspects
in the Texas Killing 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 killed 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 killer?
Was it multiple killers?
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 killing 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]