Every Town - Two HEADS Were Taken And Never Found – Houston’s Disturbing Unidentified Killer

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

Today we have a frenzied spree the likes of which are rarely seen. So let’s head on down to Texas now, this is Houston’s most Disturbing Unsolved Case - The Orchard Apartment Murders 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/ds9rng59Gbw 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Every town has a dark side. The two heads from two human beings have never been found.

Not in 1979 when police started actively searching for them or in the decades of cold case work that have gone on since. They were ripped away and taken like a trophy, only these aren't the normal things a killer might take for a keepsake. Normally it's a piece of clothing or jewelry. and these were literal heads. And on top of that, these two weren't the only victims either. And there were three more, and in total, all five people were killed inside of a three-month span,

which begs the question, what kind of raging psychopath could do this? And an equally important question, where did this person go? Because after the fall of 79, the killing stopped on a dime, but the killer has never been brought to justice. Hey, guys, it's Andrew, and thank you. Thanks for tuning in to every town where today. We have a unique and disturbing one for you. A frenzied spree, the likes of which are rarely seen.

So let's head on down to Texas now together. This is Houston's most disturbing unsolved case. The Orchard Department murders. In the summer of 1979, the city of Houston, Texas, was on a hot streak, both literally and figuratively. The oil boom had turned the city into a magnet, and so tens of thousands of people poured in from all over the country. They were young, hungry, and chasing jobs and a fresh start

in a place that felt like it had no limits to what you could accomplish. Houston was the fourth largest city in America. It was growing so fast you could almost watch it happen in real time. New apartment complexes were going up everywhere. The orchard apartments, on Glenmont Drive

in the Gulfton area of southwest Houston, was exactly that kind of place. Backed wall to wall with young single working professionals. You might wave at a neighbor in the hallway there or hear their music through the walls at night, but you didn't necessarily know anyone all that well. I mean, everyone was busy trying to get a piece of the action.

Which meant if someone you'd seen around for a few months suddenly stopped showing up, you wouldn't exactly notice right away. And it was right here in this world. Young people, new city, nobody knowing their neighbors all that well, that something started happening, and it happened fast. Between July and October that year, five people were murdered in and around southwest Houston. Now, three of them were decapitated, or nearly so,

and two of those murders happened inside the same building, just two floors apart and two weeks apart. And those other three were all within a few miles of one another. By October 1st, Houston had already recorded 500 murders for the year, matching all of 1978 with three months still to go. The deadliest year in the city's history, and somewhere right in the middle of all that, the orchard apartments.

Elise Rankin, July 27, 1979. She was the first. Elise was a 33-year-old single mother who had worked at an engineering firm right there in Houston as a secretary. She had her life organized, was practical and on top of things, and that week her car was in the shop. so she had already arranged a ride to work with a colleague named Bob Smith.

And when Bob showed up to the Orchard Apartments that morning, Lisa's door was already open. It wasn't wide open, just a jar, enough to notice. I mean, most front doors you never think about because they're always shut, so when Bob saw it sitting open like that, he stopped for a second. Called out her name, but there was no answer. He put the car in park, walked up to the door, pushed to the door, pushed to the car. it open, and then he walked in. The apartment was still. He called out again. There was nothing.

He made his way toward the bedroom, and that's when he found her. Lees was in her bed, nude with her feet bound together. A pillow had been placed over her upper body, laid there deliberately, covering her from the chest up. And Bob lifted the pillow, and she had been decapitated, and her head, it was totally gone. Not left nearby or on the floor, it was missing. Once investigators got in there, they pieced together what had happened. She had been essayed and stabbed multiple times. And then whoever did this had taken their head with them when they left. Carried it right on out of that bedroom, down the hallway, out of the building, and across that parking lot.

Police found a blood trail that followed that exact path and ended at a single empty parking space. and to this day, Elise Rankin's head has never been found. The next victim was Mary Calcutta. It was August 10, 1979. Mary was a 27-year-old Pittsburgh girl, and she had moved to Houston chasing the same thing everyone else was chasing in 79. A fresh start, her own life, she had a clerk job in her own apartment right there in the orchard complex.

And when Elise was murdered two floors below her, Mary was scared, and not unsettled, I mean genuinely frightened. She picked up the phone and called her best friend, Beth McKinstree, back in Pittsburgh. Beth remembers wondering why she was calling her on a weeknight. And Mary told her what had happened in the building, and from there, they went through everything to help calm her down and keep her safe. Don't open the door for anyone you don't know. And walk the halls with your head up, look over your shoulder, and just be aware of your surroundings. Two weeks later, a friend came by Mary's apartment and knocked but didn't get an answer.

They knocked again, still nothing. And that was weird because, well, Mary's car, it was right there. They then got someone to open the door, and inside the apartment was far too quiet. They moved through it cautiously, calling her name, and then they got to the bathroom. Mary was on the tiled floor, fully clothed, which investigators noted, because the lease had not been, As she had been stabbed so many times and with such force, that the knife blade had bent under the pressure, and the killer just kept stabbing.

Her throat had been cut so deeply she was nearly decapitated, and she too had been assayed. Now Mary knew someone had been killed right there in her building. She'd been scared enough to call her best friend, and she was being careful, and still, at some point that night, it was a knock at the door and she opened it. Whoever was on the other side of that door was someone who didn't set off enough alarm bells and a woman who was already on high alert.

Someone who knew exactly how to get through a door that a frightened young woman had every reason to keep shut. Doris Threadgill was next, and that was also on August 10th. Now here's where this whole thing gets even more disturbing because this is the exact same day Mary was killed. And if ever there was a sign of a true psycho killer, it's that that's that the whole thing. they aren't satisfied with one in a day, now they needed more. And Doris was 26 years old, and she lived in a townhouse in northwest Houston, nine miles away from the orchard complex, and Doris was actually killed first, about seven hours earlier. As she had been stabbed several times, and her neck, it had been slashed very deeply. Same type of wound that had been inflicted on the

women at the orchard apartment, so on the surface it looked like the same hand. But when When investigators got inside Doris's townhouse, there was something that was different. First off, there was no sign of a struggle anywhere. Not an overturned chair or a broken lamp, not a single thing out of place. And no evidence of SA taking place, which had been present in both of the Orchard murders. And a place looked almost normal, except for what had been done to her. H.P.D. Detective Richard Rodriguez, who would later work the cold cases, said, either she made herself a very easy target or she knew the killer.

And so was the person who walked into Doris's home that day the same person who had been moving through the orchard apartments, or was this someone else entirely? And if it was the same person from the orchard complex, did this tell you that perhaps they lived right there in one of the apartments? The first kill was on his home turf. The next was Doris at the townhouse. Perhaps he tried to essay her and got interrupted. And so when he returned home unsatisfied, did he perhaps go knocking on Mary's door?

Well, the reality is nobody knows. But on August 10th, two young women had their throats cut in the same city seven hours apart. And 47 years later, both cases are still open. Joan Huffman was 16 years old, and Bobby Spagenberger was 18, and they had been together less than a year. Late on the night of October 3rd, residents around the Freed Park area started hearing things. A Freed Park is about nine miles away from the Orchard apartment. The residents heard a woman screaming, and then what sounded like gunshots. A neighbor looked out their window and saw a young woman being dragged by her hair across a front porch by a man wearing a cap.

She was fighting, screaming stuff like, help, and don't do this to me. Someone then called the Park Police, and when officers showed up, they looked around and told anxious residents to just go back inside their homes. But there was no blood on the porch and that they had probably mistaken firecrackers for gunshots. The next morning, though, Houston Police, well, they found blood on that porch. And then they found Joanne. Her body was in with Tonga Park nearly four miles away, and she had been shot to death. That same morning, had a used car lot nearby, a sales manager showed up for work and noticed a white Dodge sitting there. It wasn't there the day before, and it was smeared with blood.

He called it in, and when investigators opened the trunk, well, they found the headless body of Bobby Spangerberger. His head has also never been found. So that brings the total to five people, dead between July and October of 79, in and around the same stretch of Houston. Two missing heads, and two of them killed the same day and two of them killed the same night. Not one of these cases has ever been solved. Houston PD back then was working these cases the best way they could, but this was a time when things moved a little slower than they do today. And they worked with the physical evidence, witness interviews, and with paper records.

The automated fingerprint identification system that could eventually store hundreds of thousands of prints was just being introduced. DNA profiling didn't exist. The concept of a national database connecting crimes across jurisdictions wasn't even on the horizon. Investigators conducted more than 260 interviews across several years

and followed every tip they got, but they still came up empty. Mainly, that's because no usable fingerprints from any of the crime scenes were ever found, and there was no witness who could put a specific person in the right place at the right time. And that blood trail from Elise Rankin's apartment

that led to a parking space, well, nowadays, you could look at the CCTV footage from that lot and watch the killer get in his car, drive away, and have the license plate. But back then, well, they didn't have that. And of course, the real question is whether all five of these murders came from the same pair of hands.

Now, the similarities are hard to look past, the extreme throat and neck wounds, the geographic concentration of crimes within a short window of time. On the surface, it looks like a pattern, but also there are discrepancies. Some victims essayed, others not. Many stab, but one was shot. Some missing heads. Some still there.

Detective Rodriguez, who worked the case for several years, felt the same way when he said, I think it's highly irregular that you have multiple suspects all in the same area decapitating people at the same time. But I'm not ready to say it's the same individual. And so, you either have a bloodthirsty person who move with speed to kill these victims and then they just vanished, or you have multiple killers with overlapping methods in the same city, same few months, all of them still out there. And neither answer sits easy, which is why both are still on the table. To me, it definitely feels like one killer.

At the very least, one person responsible for several of the members. murders. It's not like there was a different killer per victim, and that would be insane given the specificity of the crimes. And so, if this was one killer, what do we actually know about them based on their brutal behavior? In terms of the victims, you had four women and one man, and that one man, Bobby Spangerberger, was a boyfriend. Now, he was there with Joanne. The witness heard a woman screaming and saw a woman being dragged by her hair. Joanne was clearly the one being targeted, and Bobby was almost certainly killed because he was there and just couldn't be left alive. He was a loose end, in other words, and not the prime target.

So strip Bobby out of it, and what you have is four young women. All of them in their 20s are younger, all of them living alone or in vulnerable situations. And this is a victim type. The young lady was defenseless against a grown man. That means that the killer wanted control, and that the act of the killing and S.A. combined with the power, that's the motivation. The method of killing wasn't consistent, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the same killer, not by a long shot. Circumstances may have warranted a different method.

Pure curiosity and experimentation could warrant a different method. Or even doing different things to the victims to deliberately throw police off the trail, that would warn a different method. And if that was the intention, well, then they succeeded. Elise was bound, essayed, stabbed, and decapitated. Mary was stabbed repeatedly with enough force to bend the blade. Doris had her throat slashed but showed no signs of the struggle and no essay. And Joanne was shot, the fastest and most efficient of all the kills.

Four women, four variations, but one thread running through all them. extreme violence directed at the throat and neck, an almost obsessive focus on that specific part of the body. Behavioral analysis, look at that kind of consistency and called a signature. Not the method, the signature. The method is practical, and it can change, but the signature, that's psychological. It's the thing the killer needs to do regardless of how everything else unfolds.

In this case, the signature appears to be the throat. a control over breath, over voice, over the ability to scream. And then, of course, there are those heads. And this is the part that no amount of clinical language fully explains, but it's been seen before. And taking a trophy is a documented behavior in certain types of killers. Jewelry, underwear, photographs, small things that let you relive the experience, at least in part, in private.

So a head is not that kind of trophy. It's flesh and bone that needs to be cut through. It rots. A head requires a plan because you'll need to keep it somewhere safe and cold. It also requires a level of detachment from what you are doing that most people cannot even fathom. A killers who take significant body parts, not small souvenirs but actual parts of someone

are driven by a need for possession that extends beyond death. See, the victim isn't fully theirs until they take something. something permanent, something that can never be given back. Jeffrey Dahmer kept skulls. Ed Gein took it further. The psychology, though, is the same across all of them, an obsessive need to dominate and to hold on to something after they are gone. The killer has become the owner of the victim by taking their life and then taking a piece of them with them. Neither Bobby or Ali's heads have ever been found,

and whoever took them, likely kept them somewhere that has just never been discovered. And the other strange angle on this case was the instant silence. How after October of 79, the murders just stopped. Or at least the ones that fit this pattern stopped appearing in Houston. Did the killer move? Did they die? Did they get arrested for something else? Or did they simply get better at not being found? because here's the truth about organized killers

and everything about this case points to someone organized. They don't stop because they want to, and they stop because something external forces them to, a change in circumstance, a close call perhaps, or a move to another city. Without a suspect, though, we have no way of knowing what the answer is. Since 79, forensic science has changed in major ways no one could have seen coming back then, and tiny vacuums that can find DNA where conventional

swabbing never could. The next generation sequencing can build a profile from degraded samples that older methods simply couldn't. Arthurum Labs, which was founded in 2018 and specializes in forensic genetic genealogy and advanced DNA sequencing, specifically for cold cases, is based just outside of Houston. And when everything was tested recently, well, this is what they found. Nothing. Because even with everything science has to offer in 2026, it's just not enough in this case.

The DNA is either degraded beyond recovery in the decades that sat in their boxes or was never left behind in a way that was enough to pull from. Either way, the lab came up empty. But that doesn't mean this case is finished. In 2025, ABC 13, Houston got exclusive access to the evidence room. They walked through what had been collected and would have been preserved and what hadn't been tested yet with the most current methods available. So the evidence is still there, and the technology keeps advancing,

so hopefully one day it'll get a hit. Houston itself kept growing after 1979. The oil boom eventually busted out, but the city certainly didn't. It sprawled outward and upward, the Gulfton neighborhood changed, and the orchard apartments changed with it. The young people who had poured in chasing opportunity grew older and moved on, and the person, or persons, who moved through that world in those three months, either did the same or didn't make it out in 1979 themselves.

Nobody knows. This killer didn't rely on luck. They had a certain amount of intelligence and a thirst for extreme violence, and that will never changed no matter how much the landscape does. So, trust your gut out there. Remember that if something feels wrong, even when everything looks fine. Pay attention to that feeling, and don't ever ignore it. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Everytown. Hope you enjoyed it. And if you did, well, we have all the true crime you could ever need. So have a look around at our collection of macabre cases. And remember to come back next week for another scary, strange and mistake.

mysterious story because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.