Infamous America - TEXAS KILLING FIELDS Ep. 2 | “1980s: Calder Road”
Episode Date: February 25, 2026After a pause, the disappearances begin again in 1983 when Heide Fye vanishes after using a payphone in League City, Texas. A year later, Laura Miller vanishes after using the same payphone. They are ...two of four female victims whose remains are found in a field along Calder Road in League City between 1984 and 1991. While the police try to identity the other two victims, they hone in on two potential suspects. Go to Incogni.com/infamous or use code INFAMOUS at checkout to get 60% off an annual plan with Incogni! Thanks to our sponsor, Quince! Use this link for Free Shipping and 365-day returns: Quince.com/infamousamerica Thanks to our sponsor, Rocket Money! Use this link to start saving today: RocketMoney.com/InfamousA Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes, bingeable seasons and bonus episodes. Click the Black Barrel+ banner on Apple to get started with a 3-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: hit “Join” on the Legends YouTube homepage. For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com or @blackbarrelmedia on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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At 1 o'clock in the afternoon, American journalist Sidney Schaumburg thought he was going to be executed.
Seanberg, plus an American freelance photographer, a British journalist, their driver,
and a local journalist who also acted as Seanberg's translator,
had just walked out of a group of operating rooms in a hospital
when they were surrounded by soldiers who started screaming at them.
The soldiers were from the totalitarian regime known as the Khmer Rouge.
It was May of 1975.
the Khmer Rouge was beginning its takeover of Cambodia,
and few people in the Western world were paying attention.
The final dramatic evacuation of Americans from Saigon
had happened just two weeks earlier,
and by that time, the spring of 1975,
the world had been saturated by 10 years of non-stop stories
about the American war in Vietnam.
In the U.S., there was plenty of turmoil to dominate the headlines
without reading more about Southeast Asia.
So, few people tuned in as the Khmer Rouge, led by a vicious dictator named Pol Pot,
took over Cambodia, and began systematically killing people.
Over the course of four years, starting in the spring of 1975,
the Khmer Rouge killed between 1 million and 3 million people.
On that afternoon in May, Sydney Schaumburg of the New York Times thought he would be one of them.
But the local translator, Dith Prawn, saved Schaumburg's life and the lives of the others.
Prawn convinced the soldiers to release the journalists before Prahn himself was taken to a labor camp.
Five months later, Pran escaped the camp and made his way to Thailand,
where he continued to raise awareness of the horrors happening in Cambodia.
Some of those horrors were the desolate areas in the countryside
where soldiers shot and killed thousands of people and dumped them in mass graves.
Cambodian journalist Dith Prawn is credited with calling those remote gravesites the killing field.
A year later in 1976, Sidney Schaumburg won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting
for his stories about the Khmer Rouge and his experiences with his friend, Dith Prawn.
In 1984, their story became a movie.
The powerful and impactful film, titled Simply The Killing Fields, starred Sam Waterston
as Sidney Schaumburg and Hang No as Dith Prawn.
It debuted in theaters in the UK in November 1984 and in American theaters on February.
1st, 1985. One year later, on February 2nd, 1986, the remains of two young women were found
in a desolate, overgrown field in League City, Texas. They were the second and third murder victims
who were found in that field. The skeletal remains of the first victim had been found a few yards
away from the newest discoveries. All three victims had been placed at the bases of trees,
and it seemed pretty clear that a killer was using the field as an open-air graves' graves'est.
site. No one knew how many more victims might be found in the field, and so it didn't take long
for people to adapt the title of a recent movie to fit the tragic and frightening events in League
City. Dith Prawn had called the desolate gravesites in Cambodia the killing fields. Ten years later,
a field on Calder Road in League City, Texas became known as the killing field. Over the course of
three decades, more than 20 murders along Interstate 45 between Houston and Galveston would
take on the name, Texas Killing Fields.
From Black Barrel Media, this is infamous America.
I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and in this mini-series,
we're telling the stories of the unsolved cases of young girls and women
who went missing or were found murdered outside Houston, Texas,
from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Their stories are collectively known as the Texas Killingfields.
This is episode two, 1980s, Calder Road.
In October of 1983, 25-year-old,
Heidi Fai and her five-year-old daughter were living with Heidi's parents in League City, Texas.
Heidi was saving money so she and her boyfriend could buy a place of their own, and they were
going to start with a trailer home they found up in Houston. For the moment, Heidi, who was called
Heady by her family, worked as a waitress at the Texas Moon Bar. On October 7th, Heidi's boyfriend
was at the trailer home while Heidi helped her father with yard work at the house in League City. That afternoon,
Heidi told her father Joe that she was going to catch a ride up to Houston to spend the night at the new place with her boyfriend, and she would come back to League City the next day.
Heidi left her family's house and went to a convenience store about a half a mile away on the corner of West Main Street and Hobbs Road.
She used a pay phone outside the front of the business, presumably to call friends to try to find a ride to Houston.
The clerk who worked at the store saw her and recognized her.
Heidi was a local and she'd been in there many times.
The phone call was the last verified sighting of Heidi Fy.
That evening, when she didn't show up at the new house in Houston,
her boyfriend and her family became worried.
As her family searched the area around their home in League City,
they learned that she'd been at the convenience store less than a mile from their house.
But that was where the trail went cold.
Sometime after using the payphone, she disappeared.
Naturally, Heidi's family went to the police.
Her family received a response that was becoming standard.
Heidi was an adult, and she left on her own.
She'll come back if she wants to.
The police advised the family to, quote,
give it a few days, and don't put up flyers or go to the media.
Heidi's family, led by her 60-year-old father, Joe,
started a diligent search.
Despite having had a stroke, walking with a cane,
and worrying about his memory,
Joe trudged through the surrounding fields searching for his daughter.
He made calls, tracked down leads, and conducted interviews all over town.
He visited the Texas moon and other bars late at night and in the early morning hours.
When he returned home, he dictated his thoughts and findings into a tape recorder
Heidi had given him for Christmas.
He presented the police with lists of people to interview, but the leads went nowhere.
Heartbreak and frustration mounted for Joe and his family.
They couldn't convince anyone in authority that there was no chance Heidi would abandon her daughter, her family, her job, and her boyfriend who was fixing up a new house that they had been saving money to buy.
Six months passed with no news.
And then on April 4, 1984, a boy was out playing with his dog a few miles from the home of Heidi's family.
The boy's family lived in a house that backed up to a field which was overgrown with waist-high grass and brush and skisks.
shattered with trees. The dog darted into the field and returned moments later carrying a human
skull in its teeth. The family notified the police. Search parties combed the field and found the
skeletal remains of a female who was lying on her back under a tree. Dental records confirmed the
remains belonged to 25-year-old Heidi Fy, who had lived just two miles from the field. Advanced
decomposition limited the evidence, but the medical examiner ruled the cause of
death as, quote, trauma. Numerous cracked ribs revealed that she had been severely beaten,
and the initial police assumption that Heidi had left voluntarily was now painfully wrong.
Homicide detectives began working the case, but there was little they could do.
Heidi Fye had simply vanished after using a payphone at a convenience store a half a mile
from her family's house. And then it happened again. Another female from the same neighborhood
used the same payphone at the same convenience store and disappeared without a trace,
until she was found in the same field.
Today, pay phones are novelty items to be used as decorations or museum exhibits about the old days.
They live on in junk shops or galleries or faded film memories.
But in the 1980s, they were lifelines and they were everywhere.
The telephone industry deregulated in the early 80s,
and America's payphone count doubled from the previous day.
decade. Payphones were at every rest stop, gas station, convenience store, hotel, motel, and
roadside diner. There were banks of them at airports, train stations, subway stations, and bus
stations. There were pay phones standing on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere for
emergencies. And so, what were the odds that two people who lived in the same neighborhood
would disappear after using the same payphone at the same convenience store, and those two disappearances
were not connected.
One year after 25-year-old Heidi Fy
disappeared after using the payphone
at the shop on the corner of West Main Street
and Hobbs Road in League City,
16-year-old Laura Miller
stepped up to the same payphone.
Laura's family had just moved
one community north along Interstate 45
from Dickinson to League City,
and their home phone was not yet connected.
Even though the move wasn't very far,
it meant Laura would go to a new school.
Laura's parents, Tim and Jan Miller, hoped for a fresh start for their daughter.
Laura was a bright student who loved music and excelled in academics and athletics
while maintaining a wide circle of friends.
But she was also more vulnerable to sickness than other kids.
At six months old, Laura contracted a serious illness.
Her temperature spiked so high that she slipped into a coma for two days.
Her parents watched their infant daughter hover between life and death.
until the fever eventually subsided.
Laura appeared to make a complete recovery,
but the high temperature had scarred some brain tissue,
which set the stage for seizures that would emerge years later.
For several years, the seizures remained under control,
which allowed Laura to live like a normal teenager.
She starred in choir, competed in sports, and enjoyed socializing with friends.
But then she caught the flu.
The fever returned, and with it came the seizures.
Laura's lifestyle changed. She stopped choir and sports and began skipping classes.
She was scared of the embarrassment she would feel if she had an episode at school, and she became depressed.
Daily medication eventually restored some stability to Laura's life, but her parents recognized she needed a new beginning.
They didn't want to move her away from her friends, they just wanted a new school district.
So the Miller family moved four miles up Interstate 45 from Dickinson to League City,
and they settled into a house that was only four blocks from the home of Heidi Fies family.
On the morning of September 10, 1984, Laura asked her father if her boyfriend Vernon could visit that afternoon and hang out for the evening.
Tim Miller agreed and said they would barbecue while unpacking boxes.
Since their landline telephone had not been connected,
Jan Miller volunteered to drive Laura to the payphone at the convenience store
less than a half a mile from their new house.
Jan was on her way to work anyway, so the quick stop would be fine.
At the convenience store, Jan waited in the car while Laura used the pay phone to talk to Vernon.
But as teenagers have done since the invention of the device, Laura and Vernon kept talking.
Jan Miller waited as long as possible before telling Laura to wrap up the conversation.
Jan needed to get to work.
Laura asked for a few more minutes, and she said she could walk home.
Jan wasn't concerned.
Their house was a straight shot down the road and an easy walk.
It wasn't in the middle of the night or bad weather, so she agreed.
That afternoon, Tim and Jan arrived home from work to an empty house.
They assumed Laura must be out walking with Vernon, as the kids had done all the time at their old house in Dickinson.
But then the doorbell rang.
Vernon stood on their doorstep.
He was equally confused about Laura's whereabouts.
They had talked on the phone and made plans for that afternoon,
but since the phone call, he hadn't seen or heard from Laura.
The three immediately searched the neighborhood and checked nearby hospitals.
The most likely explanation was that Laura had suffered a seizure while walking home,
and someone had taken her to the emergency room.
But they found nothing.
The next morning, the Millers filed a missing person,
report with the League City Police. They explained that Laura was last seen at the local
convenience store payphone the previous morning. And since Heidi's family had followed the
instructions of the police and they had not publicized their daughter's disappearance,
the Millers didn't know that Heidi had vanished after using that same payphone almost exactly
11 months earlier. The League City Police had found Heidi's remains in a field along Calder Road
five months before Laura went missing,
but they dismissed Laura as a runaway like Heidi.
Heidi had a loving family, a daughter, a boyfriend,
a steady job, and a new house to renovate.
Laura had a loving family, a boyfriend,
and a medical condition which required medication twice a day.
If it was absurd to think Heidi would abandon everything to run away,
then it was potentially life-threatening to think Laura would run away without her medication.
And then a few days after Laura disappeared, her father, Tim, learned about Heidi Fye.
Heidi's family lived just four blocks away.
Tim implored the League City Police to search the Calder Road field for Laura, but they refused.
When he asked for the location of the field so he could search himself, they said it was
private property and a waste of time.
Laura was a missing person.
Heidi had been murdered.
The police said there was no link between the cases.
But then Tim learned of the case of Ellen Beeson, and he quickly had a suspect.
Ellen Beeson had vanished from League City three months earlier,
between the discovery of Heidi Fy's remains and the disappearance of Laura Miller.
Ellen was 29 years old, and she lived in the small city of Friendswood next to League City.
On the night of July 29, 1984, Ellen went to the Texas Moon nightclub in League City
with her friend Candy Gifford and Candy's husband.
In what would become another similarity between cases, Heidi Fye had been a waitress at the Texas moon until she had been killed 10 months earlier.
On that night at the end of July, problems started when Clyde Hedrick walked into the Texas moon.
In his signature black cowboy hat and black boots, Clyde had a swagger and a presence, and Candy Gifford was having an affair with him.
Before long, Candy and her husband were in a fight, and they both left early.
But Ellen Beeson stayed at the bar, and she quickly connected with Clyde.
Later that night, they left the bar and drove to a sand pit down in Dickinson, where Clyde lived.
The sand pit was full of water, and according to Clyde, Ellen went skinny dipping while Clyde sat in his truck drinking beer.
Sometime later, they returned to the bar where Clyde said Ellen climbed into a truck with people Clyde didn't recognize and drove away.
That version of events, Clyde's first story, surfaced a couple days later when people close to Ellen realized she was missing.
The Galveston County Sheriff's Department, which took the lead on Ellen's case,
believed Clyde Hedrick's account of the evening that ended with Ellen leaving in a truck with strangers.
But fortunately, Ellen's friend Candy Gifford did not believe it.
For months, Candy pressured Clyde for more information about that night until he finally snapped
and screamed at her, you want to know where your friend is, get in the car.
Clyde drove Candy to the Galveston Causeway, which doubled as a dumping ground for unwanted
appliances and car parts and all kinds of junk. He pulled back a car bench seat, and Candy
stared at the remains of her friend. Ellen had vanished in July. It was now November.
Six months of exposure to the elements and animals had reduced Ellen's remains to bones
lying among trash in the causeway.
Candy recognized Ellen only by the necklace
Ellen had worn the night they went to the Texas moon.
Clyde threatened Candy and her family into silence,
and his intimidation worked for another six months.
But after an explosive fight with Clyde the following July,
exactly one year after Ellen's disappearance,
Candy finally went to the police.
She led investigators to Ellen's remains.
The decomposition appeared to eliminate any of the,
clear evidence and cause of death. But now, Clyde could no longer deny knowing Ellen was dead,
and his story shifted when police questioned him. This time, he claimed she drowned while swimming.
He said that as he sat in his truck drinking beer, he didn't hear any more noises coming from the
sandpit. He found Ellen floating on the water, and he panicked. He briefly considered taking her
to a hospital, but they'd both been drinking, and he believed he would be blamed for her death.
So he drove her to the causeway and dumped her body with the trash.
The medical examiner ruled the cause of death unknown,
a ruling which would cause problems in the future.
But for now, the ruling and the lack of physical evidence
meant prosecutors couldn't charge Clyde Hedric with homicide.
They had to settle for a charge called abuse of corpse
for the reckless manner in which Hedrick disposed of Ellen's body.
He was convicted, received one year in county jail,
and paid a $2,000 fine.
And as Tim Miller learned all of those details about Clyde Hedric,
Tim also learned a startling new fact.
Clyde Hedric had lived just two houses away from the Miller family
before the Millers moved.
Clyde Hedric knew Laura Miller.
Tim Miller investigated Clyde Hedric
and discovered Hedrick had lived only two doors down from the millers in Dickinson
before the family moved to League City.
Laura's friends confirmed that they all knew who Clyde
was, and Laura avoided him as much as possible.
Heidi Fy's father, Joe, also named Clyde Hedrick as a suspect.
Clyde was a well-known regular at the Texas moon where Heidi worked.
Heidi's niece, Nina, remembered Clyde visiting their house, and Nina felt uncomfortable
around him.
Heidi and Laura disappeared after using the same payphone less than a mile from their
homes, and in between their disappearances, Clyde picked up Ellen Beeson at the Texas moon
and she died in his presence later that night.
The problem was there was no evidence to link Clyde to Heidi's disappearance and murder
or Laura's disappearance.
When Ellen Beeson's remains were found and Clyde Hedrick was arrested,
Laura Miller had been missing for 10 months.
The helplessness drove Tim Miller to drink heavily to numb the pain.
And then seven more months passed with no news.
The relationship between Tim and Jan was crumbling.
On February 1st, 1986, anxiety and alcohol sent Tim Miller to the hospital.
The next day, an article in the local newspaper delivered the news no one wanted.
Two more female skeletons had been found in the Calder Road field.
Two kids riding dirt bikes had followed a foul smell to a pile of human bones.
When the police arrived and searched the area,
the same area Tim Miller had begged them to search a year and a half earlier,
they found another set of remains a few yards away from the first.
Jan Miller raced to the League City Police Station,
demanding to know if one of the bodies was her daughter.
After comparing dental x-rays,
the police confirmed the second set of remains was Laura Miller.
For 17 months, Laura lay in a field just two miles from her family's home,
and because of the decomposition, her cause of death was recorded as unknown.
The remains found near Laura were not as decomposed, indicating they hadn't been there as long.
The medical examiner recorded the cause of death for that female as a gunshot.
A 22-caliber bullet was lodged in her spine.
She had a distinct feature, a large gap between her two front teeth, and she was estimated to be around 30 years old.
With those facts, authorities hoped for an easy identification and that the family might provide information to assist all three investigations.
But no missing person reports in the area matched the description, and her remains were labeled Jane Doe.
Jane Doe's remains had been in the field for about two months, yet they provided no more clues about the killer than Laura's remains.
At that point, all hope rested on an article of clothing. A heavily stained, blue men's western-style button-down shirt was found near Laura's body.
But there was little evidence that could be gathered from it at the time.
In 1984, forensic DNA technology was in its infancy.
It wouldn't become a common and reliable asset for at least another 15 years.
So the shirt could be a valuable clue which could break the case wide open,
or it could be nothing.
Like the Galveston Causeway, where Ellen Beeson's remains were found,
the Calder Road field was a dumping ground for anything people wanted to throw away.
The shirt could have been discarded by someone who had no connection to the crimes,
and it was purely a coincidence that it ended up near Laura Miller's body.
Tim Miller's fury made him obsessed.
His marriage fell apart.
He lost his job.
He relentlessly searched the field for Laura's clothes,
for more clues and for more bodies.
At night, he went to the field and fired a handgun in the air to try to bait the killer
or to see if the police would show up.
No one ever did.
For a field so close to civilization,
it might as well have been in the middle of nowhere.
As Amy Canaan, director of the movie The Texas Killing Fields, put it in an interview at the Tribeca Film Festival.
I understand why, if you were a killer, you would take people there.
It's right along the interstate, but if you were to scream, no one would hear you.
If you were to run, there's no place to go.
You're out in the open, but hidden at the same time.
In the case of each victim at the Calder Road field, the body had been placed at the base of a tree.
The ritualistic nature of the scenes sparked terror throughout League City and the surrounding communities.
The term serial killer was now familiar to many people, and it had been applied retroactively
to infamous killers from the 1970s, like Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, and John Wayne Gacy, all of whom
returned to specific places to dispose of at least some of their victims.
In League City, by 1986, it looked like an unidentified killer was doing the same thing.
Initially, for many people like Tim Miller, the identity of the killer was Clyde Hedrick,
even though it couldn't be proved.
But five years passed, with no significant progress on the cases of the Calder Road victims.
And then on September 8, 1991, a couple who were on a horseback ride
discovered the body of a fourth female victim in the Calder Road field.
Her body was discovered more quickly than the others, and it clearly revealed her cause of
death as strangulation. But other than that fact, police faced the same problems they'd had
with Jane Doe. The newest victim had no identification, and there was no missing person report
based on her physical description. There were no witnesses to a crime and no clues that pointed
toward a killer. The police were forced to call her Janet Doe until they could solve the mystery
of her identity. At that point, the FBI stepped in to try to shine more light on the identity of the
killer. The FBI's criminal profilers listed likely characteristics, proximity to the Calder Road
field, highly intelligent, anger issues, cruelty toward animals, troubled relationships with women,
and sexual violence tendencies. Clyde Hedrick had all of those traits except one, high intelligence.
But as it happened, a man named Robert Abel lived right next to the Calder Road field, and he had all of the
traits. Robert Abel was a former NASA engineer, so he obviously had the highly intelligent
characteristic covered. He moved to League City in 1983, just as the murders began. He leased land
close to the Calder Road field during the first three killings, and then in 1990, one year
before the discovery of the final body, he purchased 11 acres right next to the field. They were for
his business, Stardust Trail Rides, in which he guided customers on horseback through the woods.
Robert Abel had proximity and high intelligence. He had three ex-wives and a history of dominant
behavior. That checked three more boxes. He was known to beat horses. When they died, he left their bodies
to rot in the field. He met all the criteria of the FBI profile, and he also inserted himself
into the investigation, a behavior typical of guilty parties. He offered excessive help when authorities
searched his land. A search of his house revealed newspaper clippings about the Calder Road killings,
and a 22-caliber pistol, the same type used to kill Jane Doe. Investigators found what appeared
to be a trophy, a tooth, that could have been from one of the victims. All the signs pointed to
Able, and those signs satisfied the League City Police. Before thoroughly investigating the supposed
evidence, and certainly before arresting or charging Able, the League City Police released a public
affidavit that stated, NASA scientist Robert Able could be the sexual serial killer who
murdered four young women. The statement was carefully worded with the qualifying description,
could be. But it had the predictable effect of convincing most people that Robert Abel was the killer.
It definitely convinced Tim Miller. Tim was the most vocal advocate for the victims, and now he
switched his focus from Clyde Hedric to Robert Abel. Tim found a target for his pent-up rage,
and he began tormenting Robert Abel. For years, Tim Miller stalked Robert Abel around town,
left threatening voicemails, led an excavation on Robert's property to search for evidence,
and one time pressed a gun to Robert's head and demanded a confession.
Robert refused to confess.
Tim spared Robert for one reason.
Tim admitted that he said,
Robert, I don't want you dead, because if you're dead, we're never going to know who these other girls are.
I'll remind you every day for the rest of your life what you did.
Having survived the incident, Robert Abel filed an order of protection against Tim Miller,
and slowly but surely the case against Robert Abel fizzled out.
Or maybe it's more accurate to say that it never materialized in the first place.
Suspicion ran high, but evidence remained non-existent.
Items found during the search of Robert's property revealed no links to the murders.
Robert's 22-caliber gun was common among gun owners,
and it could not be checked for a ballistics match to the bullet that killed Jane Doe
because the medical examiner had accidentally boiled the bullet while processing Jane Doe's bones.
Forensic evidence on the bullet was destroyed.
The tooth in Robert Abel's house, the one the police thought could be a trophy from a victim,
belonged to Robert himself.
And when everything else fell away, the newspaper clippings about the killings
and an eagerness to help the investigation didn't seem so sinister.
After years of suspicion and countless police and media interviews, authorities never arrested Robert Abel or charged him with a crime.
In August of 2000, after nine years of harassment, Tim Miller recognized he had gone too far.
Tim accepted that Robert likely was not the killer, and he backed off.
Tim channeled his anger into positive action and founded Equus Search, a Houston-based nonprofit that helps search for missing persons.
Over the years, it expanded substantially.
Today, it uses horses, boats, drones, ATVs, radar, ground crews, and divers to assist with searches.
The company has worked on 2,700 cases in 48 states and 11 countries, and it's found 444 people alive.
In 2001, Robert Abel came close to full public exoneration.
Abel's former ranch hand, Mark Stallings, who was incarcerated for other crimes, confessed to
killing the fourth victim, Janet Doe, in 1991 and dumping her near Abel's property.
He claimed he wanted to frame Abel for the Calder Road murders in retaliation for Abel firing him.
Authorities thought Stalling's story was, quote, very possible, but ultimately they deemed his confession
not trustworthy. In early 2005, Tim Miller formally apologized to Robert Abel. The two men
hugged and cried, but the damage was irreversible. Abel repeatedly said that the accusations
by police destroyed his life. Abel shut down his trail ride business, relocated to a different
part of Texas, and filed a slander lawsuit against League City Police in 1994. But he could
never escape the stigma of being named in a public statement.
In an interview with Texas Monthly Magazine, he said,
My life has been destroyed. My reputation ruined. I didn't kill those girls. I wouldn't know how to kill.
In July of 2005, Tim Miller and Equalsearch traveled to Aruba to participate in another high-profile
missing person case, the search for Natalie Holloway. While Tim was there, he learned that Robert Abel had driven his
golf cart onto railroad tracks in Belleville, Texas. Robert had been struck by a train and killed.
Robert Abel was 65 years old when he died. Officials recorded his death as an accident, but Tim Miller
and many others believed it was intentional and the result of nearly 15 years of being branded a possible
killer. If Robert Abel told the truth, the killing fields had claimed one more innocent life. But that was in
2005. Back in the 1990s, when Tim Miller was fixated on Robert Abel and the police were trying
to build a case against Abel, the disappearances started back up. Janet Doe's body was found in the
Calder Road field in 1991, and there was a lull in the story of the Texas killing fields for six years.
But in 1997, it roared back to life with more murders along Interstate 45, new revelations,
a new suspect and the return of an old suspect.
Next time on Infamous America,
the police learned the identities of Jane Doe and Janet Doe,
but they also have to investigate three more murders.
A daring escape leads to a new suspect for multiple homicides.
New evidence in Ellen Beeson's case revives the hope that the full truth will come out,
and that places Clyde Hedrick back in the spotlight.
In the final episode of the miniseries about the Texas killing fields,
next week on Infamous America.
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This episode was researched and written by Mandy Wimmer.
Additional research and writing by me, Chris Wimmer.
Original music by Rob Valier.
Thanks for listening.
