Infamous America - TEXAS KILLING FIELDS Ep. 3 | “1990s: Primary Suspects”

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

As a police task force revisits evidence from one of the murders in the 1980s, the next series of crimes begins in the same area of Texas that has been haunted for twenty years. In 1997, a young mother stages a daring escape from a kidnapper. Her case leads police to a killer who targets young women. After the passage of time and the advancement of technology, the police learn the identities of the final two victims in the Calder Road field. They refocus on an early suspect, but the old frustrations continue. Go to Surfshark.com/infamousdeal or use code INFAMOUSDEAL at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! 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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From 1971 to 1977, 11 girls and young women were murdered in communities between Houston and Galveston. The similarities in victims and crimes made them seem like they were the work of a single killer who traveled Interstate 45 between the two cities. For a while, people believed the killer was a young man named Michael Self. He was prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for one of the murders, and he maintained his innocence throughout more than 25 years behind bars. While Self was in prison, a far more likely suspect emerged.

He was Edward Bell, and if the big three of criminal investigations are motive, means, and opportunity, then Edward Bell had at least two of the three when it came to the murders known as the Galveston 11. Unlike Michael Self, who had no history of violence and only a minor record for a couple petty offenses, Edward Bell had actually committed murder. He shot a man multiple times in broad daylight and then fled the country and went on the run for 12 years. When Michael Self went to prison, the murders along Interstate 45 did not stop. When Edward Bell went on the run, the murders stopped. Maybe it was a coincidence, maybe not.

And the murders didn't necessarily stop in 1978 when Edward Bell fled to Central America. They just paused. Between 1983 and 1991, three women and a teenage girl were killed, and their bodies were placed in an overgrown field along Calder Road in League City, Texas. Two suspects emerged, Clyde Hedric and Robert Abel, though neither could be conclusively tied to the crimes. But during that same stretch of time, a fifth woman, Ellen Beeson died. She died while she was with Clyde Hedrick. He claimed she drowned during a nighttime

skinny-dipping jaunt at a swimming hole. Clyde said he panicked and dumped her body in a remote area rather than tell the police. By the time her mostly skeletal remains were found, there was no evidence to indicate that a crime had been committed, or so everyone thought in 1987. The League City Police charged Clyde Hedrick with abuse of corpse and sent him to county jail for a year. There were plenty of people who never believed Clyde's story that Ellen drowned, but there was no proof to say otherwise until 1993. A law enforcement task force in League City had hit dead ends with the unsolved murders of the four victims who were found in the Calder Road field, which became known as the killing field. Two victims were unidentified.

They were known only as Jane Doe and Janet Doe. But Clyde Hedrick had loose connections to the other two victims, 25-year-old Heidi Fy and 16-year-old Laura Miller. He used to live two houses away from Laura Miller until her family moved up the road to League City. Andy was a regular at the Texas Moon nightclub where Heidi Fy worked. On the night Ellen Beeson died, Clyde met Ellen at the Texas Moon.

So that made three dead women with at least some connection to Clyde Hedrick. With no good leads in the Heidi Fye and Laura Miller cases, the League City Task Force went back to Ellen Beeson's case. Ellen's remains had been buried for six years, but the family agreed to an exhumation. The medical examiner who performed the original autopsy had ruled the cause of death unknown,

a finding that shielded Clyde Hedrick from a murder charge. In 1993, League City sent Ellen's remains to Dr. Harold Gill King at the University of North Texas. Dr. Gil King was shocked. To tone down the gory details, the doctor discovered that Ellen's skull had not been properly cleaned and examined.

When Dr. Gil King cleaned the skull, he found a large fracture. He stated the injury could only have been caused by immense force, either hitting something hard or being hit by a heavy object with great force. The shorthand jargon is blunt force trauma.

According to Dr. Gil King, Ellen Beeson did not drown, as Clyde Hedric claimed. Another doctor agreed with Dr. Gil King's findings, but the doctor who performed the original autopsy stood by his report. So two doctors said Ellen Beeson died from blunt force trauma, which could have made her death a homicide, but one doctor said her cause of death was unknown. The conflict resulted in a stalemate, and yet again, the hope of progress faded away. Four long years passed before there was any real movement, and then it was only because of a harrowing escape of a kidnapped victim.

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 Killing Fields. This is episode three. 1990s, primary suspects.

On April 3rd, 1997, 12-year-old Laura Smither laced up her running shoes in Friendswood, Texas, one of the communities along Interstate 45 that made up the heart of the killing field story. It was a quiet, sunny Sunday morning. Laura's stepmom stood at the stove making pancakes as Laura left the house to go for a jog. Laura should have been back in 20 minutes, but 30 minutes passed, and then 40. five minutes and then an hour with no sign of Laura. Laura's father and stepmother knew the 12-year-old couldn't run for an hour straight, so they frantically scoured the neighborhood and then went to the police.

For two weeks, police officers, military personnel, and volunteers combed the area for Laura. Rain or shine, her family stood along roadways holding signs which featured Laura's picture. 17 days after Laura disappeared, two people walking near a retention pond made a grim discovery. Laura's badly decomposed body was found 14 miles away in Pasadena, the community on the eastern edge of Houston, where one of the Galveston 11, Kimberly Pitchford, had been murdered in the 1970s. Due to decomposition, the cause of death was inconclusive. It had been four years since a League City Task Force had tried to update the cause of death in Ellen Beeson's case.

Ellen Beeson was also from Friendswood. The Calder Road field was just five miles from Friendswood, and Laura Smither was the 16th victim since 1971. There was no way to know for sure how many killers were responsible, but one thing remained

constant. The police were never able to get ahead of the crimes. One month after the discovery of Laura Smither's body, the police thought they caught their break. On the evening of May 17th, 1997 in Webster, Texas, 19-year-old Sandra Seypaw pulled her red minivan into a stop-and-go convenience store to make a phone call. Webster, along with League City and Friendswood,

make up the heart of the killing field story. That night, Sandra was on NASA Parkway, next to a motel 6 and across from a Waffle House. She had dropped her two young daughters at her parents' house and planned to meet a friend at the Waffle House for a late dinner. Like Heidi Fai in 1983 and Laura Miller in 1984, Sandra used the pay phone outside of the convenience store to call her friend. While they discussed the details, Sandra noticed a man sitting in a white pickup truck staring at her from the parking lot. An uneasy feeling crept over her, and she mentioned it to her friend.

They quickly finished their plan to meet at the Waffle House, and Sandra hurried back to her van. She drove across the street, and as she pulled into her friend, of the Waffle House parking lot, she felt something was wrong with her van. But before she could investigate, the man from the convenience store parking lot appeared at her driver's side window. He smiled and pointed at her flat tire. He offered to help, and despite her suspicion, she couldn't change a tire, so she accepted his offer. As the stranger gathered tools from his pickup truck, he instructed Sandra to grab a rag from the driver's side of his pickup. She leaned in,

and felt a knife at her throat. He ordered her to stay quiet and get in the truck. She slid into the passenger seat, he hurried into the truck, and they sped onto Interstate 45. A million thoughts raced through Sandra's mind as civilization blurred past her window, and then she saw her attacker's mistake. He left the passenger door unlocked. She weighed her options in a split second.

They were driving up the interstate. If she stayed in the truck, she was dead. If she jumped out, she was probably dead. Even if she didn't survive, it was better than suffering through whatever he had planned for her. She grabbed the door handle and shoved the door open against the rushing wind. She started to throw herself out. The man lunged and grabbed the back of her shirt, but she wrestled free. She tumbled out of the truck, moving at a high rate of speed, and crashed onto the motorway.

She rolled as cars sped by. She was cut and bruised and bleeding, and she watched the white person. pickup truck swerve onto the shoulder up ahead. He was coming back for her, and she could barely move. But then another car pulled over, and it was much closer to her than the pickup. A woman hustled out of the car and ran over to Sandra. They watched the pickup truck speed away as the woman told Sandra they needed to go to the hospital. Sandra refused. She insisted the woman drive her back to the Waffle House where her friend waited. The woman reluctantly agreed, and they drove back to the Waffle House. The restaurant staff called 911, and the responding officers took Sandra's description of the man and his truck before transporting her to the hospital.

It was a small miracle that she didn't suffer severe injuries, and she was released a few days later. The police generated a sketch of her attacker, but their frustration continued when it did not produce any results. Exactly three months after Sandra Seypaw's terrifying encounter, 17-year-old Jessica Kane disappeared, on Interstate 45. Jessica lived on Teke Island, a tiny, mostly man-made island right at the base of the bridge of Interstate 45 that crosses from mainland Texas to Galveston Island. On August 17, 1997, Jessica had been in Clear Lake, a small community right next to Webster, where Sandra Seypaw had been abducted.

When Jessica hadn't returned home by 2.30 in the morning, her parents were in a panic and couldn't wait any longer. Jessica's father started driving up Interstate 45 toward Clear Lake, and he found Jessica's car abandoned on the shoulder of the highway. There were no signs of a struggle and no clues to her whereabouts. A massive search began almost immediately, but it found no sign of Jessica. She was just gone. Three months passed with no movement on any of the cases until an investigator made a connection between Laura Smither's murder and Sandra Seypaw's kidnapping. A man whom police had interviewed early in the Laura Smither case looked remarkably similar to the sketch of the man who had kidnapped Sandra Seypaugh. In October 1997, police brought the man in for a lineup.

He stood in position number four, and Sandra identified him immediately as her kidnapper. Number four was William Reese, an ex-convict from Oakland. who'd served time for rape and kidnapping. Authorities in Oklahoma released him from prison five months before Laura Smither went missing. He'd traveled to Houston and landed a construction job in Friendswood where Laura lived. Reese's sexual offender criminal background and proximity to Laura made him an immediate suspect for her disappearance in April. But at the time, there was no hard evidence to link him to her murder, so he was never arrested. Sandra Seypaw was abducted one month later.

William Rees drove a white pickup truck. That, combined with Sandra's identification of him, made him the prime suspect in her crime. And in between Sandra's abduction and the lineup, Jessica Kane vanished. Witnesses claimed to see a white pickup truck near Jessica's abandoned vehicle on Interstate 45. They didn't know its significance at the time, but there were now tenuous links between Reese and all three recent victims. Jessica was still missing, so that was a major problem. But the pieces of the puzzle started to fit together

when William Reese was convicted of Sandra Seppos kidnapping in 1998. After the lineup, he was arrested, charged, tried, and convicted. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison, and while he sat behind bars, the Friendswood police kept working on the open cases of Jessica Kane and Laura Smither. They soon learned of a disappearance four hours from Houston in Denton, Texas, north of Dallas. On July 15, 1997, a 20-year-old student at the University of North Texas in Denton named Kelly Ann Cox disappeared after her criminal justice class toured the city jail.

After the tour, she tried to get into her car to drive home, but her key wouldn't work in the lock. She walked to a nearby gas station and used a pay phone to call her boyfriend. She explained she was locked out of her car and she needed help. When the boyfriend arrived, she wasn't there, and she was never seen again. Like Jessica Kane, she was presumed dead, but the authorities still hadn't found her body. If William Reese was responsible, he had been on a monthly crime spree. He killed Laura Smither in April. He kidnapped Sandra Saypaw in May.

He killed Kelly Ann Cox in July, and he killed Jessica Kane in August. He was already connected to the three cases around Houston, Laura, Sandra, and Jessica, and then gas station receipts and calling cards for phone calls placed him in the area of Denton for Kelly's case. And as the police kept digging, they learned of one more crime that might be the work of William Reese. It took a long time, but that one finally unlocked all the others. At the end of July, 1997, 11 days after Jessica Kane went missing,

The police in Bethany, Oklahoma, discovered an abandoned car at a car wash. Bethany is straight north of Denton and right outside Oklahoma City. The owner of the car, 19-year-old Tiffany Johnston, was nowhere to be found. But her body was discovered the next day. She had been raped and strangled three months after her wedding night. William Reese was an immediate suspect, but at the time, the police could do nothing with the extremely limited physical evidence at the crime scene. Like the four murders in Texas, Tiffany's case went cold for 15 years. In 2012, DNA technology

had advanced to the point where technicians could re-examine the one piece of evidence in Tiffany's case which might still contain DNA. The DNA sample matched William Reese, who was still in prison in Texas for kidnapping Sandra Seppaw. The authorities in Texas and Oklahoma finally had leverage against William Reese. Investigators in Texas started meeting with Reese in prison. They told him Oklahoma had ironclad evidence against him for the murder of Tiffany Johnston. He would be prosecuted and convicted, and it was virtually certain he would receive the death penalty. If he didn't want to be executed, he needed to help with the three cases in Texas. Eventually, Reese agreed to lead Texas investigators to the bodies of Jessica Kane and Kelly Ann Cox,

if they agreed not to pursue the death penalty against him. The Kane and Cox families agreed to the deal, and Reese led investigators to the locations. Tim Miller, from League City, who was still desperate for closure in his daughter's case, helped with the excavations. Both were successful. With the remains of Jessica and Kelly recovered, prosecutors in Texas and Oklahoma moved forward with the agreement. In August of 2021,

William Rees was tried and convicted for the murder of Tiffany Johnston in Oklahoma. He received the death penalty, as expected. One year later, he confessed to the murders of Laura Smither, Jessica Kane, and Kelly Ann Cox in Texas. He received a life sentence for each crime, and he is in prison at this time. And with the obvious similarities between William Rees' victims and the Calder Road victims, Tim Miller and others wanted to know if Reese had committed the string of murders in the 1980s, as well as the ones in 1997. Possibly the only thing that could be proved quickly and conclusively in any of the cases

was that William Rees did not commit the Calder Road murders. Reese was a frequent offender, and he had been in prison in Oklahoma during much of the time when the Calder Road killings happened. But as the brief possibility that William Rees might be the Calder Road killer faded, the original suspect, Clyde Hedrick, reappeared. In 2011, after 18 years of no leads in the Ellen Beeson case or the Calder Road killings, FBI agent Richard Renison reopened Ellen Beeson's case. She had died in 1984, and at the time, the medical examiner listed her cause of death as unknown.

In 1993, the police received permission from Ellen's family to exhume her remains and perform another autopsy. Two medical examiners declared that she had suffered a severe head wound. which caused her death. It was blunt-forced trauma, which by extension meant she had not died by drowning, as Clyde Hedrick claimed. Ellen had been with Clyde Hedric when she died, and he had discarded her body along a roadway. He served a year in jail for the charge of abuse of corpse, but most people were sure he had killed her. In 2011, at the request of Agent Rennyson, Ellen's family approved another exhumation. This time, the cause of death was was conclusive, blunt forced trauma to the head, not drowning. Two years later, in 2013,

the Galveston County District Attorney prosecuted Clyde Hedrick for the murder of Ellen Beeson. The DA had a compelling case, but there was no way to know if it was solid until it was all over. FBI agent Richard Rennyson dismantled Clyde Hedrick's story that Ellen Beeson had drowned. Hedrick claimed he had been sitting in his truck drinking beer while Ellen swam in a pond that had formed in a sandpit. At one point, Clyde looked over and saw Ellen floating on the water. He pulled her out and realized she was dead. He panicked and dumped her body in a trash-laden area. He thought the authorities would blame him for her death, so he hid the body and made up a story.

He told the League City Police that he drove Ellen back to the Texas Moon bar where they had met and he watched her get into a truck with a bunch of strangers. Agent Renison demolished the narrative. First, drowning victims don't float immediately. Their water-filled lungs dragged them down in the beginning. Bodies only surfaced later after decomposition releases gases that create buoyancy. Second, the water in the sandpit was so shallow that it was easy to stand up. Drowning was nearly impossible.

Next, Clyde's ex-wife and her daughter testified against him. Clyde had been married and divorced back in the 80s, and his ex-wife painted a picture of a man who could be violent and scary. Her daughter gave painful testimony about sexual abuse. Taken together, the testimonies were a damning portrait of a man who preyed on women. With the new evidence of blunt force trauma, the case seemed to be heading toward a slam-dunk conviction. But there was a problem. It seemed like a small thing, a technicality, but it was important.

The prosecutor had photos of Ellen Beeson's skull from the 1993 and 2011 autopsies, but he needed an important point of comparison. He needed to be able to show the jury photos of the skull from the original autopsy in 1984, and he couldn't. Somehow, the original medical examiner had lost the photos of the skull. All the other photos from the first autopsy were there, Only the now controversial photos of the skull were missing. The missing photos didn't destroy the prosecution,

but they did limit the impact of a key piece of evidence. The prosecutor also had a statement from an inmate who had been in jail with Clyde Hedrick, while Hedrick was serving his one-year sentence for abuse of corpse. The inmate said Clyde confessed to killing Ellen Beeson, and the inmate told a story which seemed to support both basic ideas of how the crime happened. The story began identically to Clyde's version.

Ellen went swimming while Clyde watched from his truck. After he spotted her floating, he loaded her into his truck and drove around aimlessly, not knowing what to do. But when he pulled Ellen from the truck to dump her into the causeway, she moved. She wasn't dead, and her movement shocked Clyde. He grabbed a discarded table leg from a nearby pile of trash and struck Ellen over the head with savage force. The blow killed her.

and he left her body there in the causeway. It was an interesting story, but the prosecutors had no way to verify it. Ultimately, they didn't use it in court. So, the case came down to the FBI testimony, the ex-wife and stepdaughter testimony, and the good but not perfect autopsy evidence. And without a murder weapon or any eyewitnesses,

it was only enough for half of a victory. In 2014, the jury delivered a verdict. of guilty for manslaughter, not murder. Prosecutors could not prove conclusively that Clyde Hedric had planned to kill Ellen Bison, which would have been murder, or exactly how he had done it. The judge sentenced Hedrick to 20 years in prison, the maximum allowable sentence. Clyde Hedrick was 59 years old. If he served most or all of the sentence, he would be nearly 80 when he was released, if he lived that long. It wasn't perfect, but it would have to be good enough. And as always, investigators would continue to work on the cases of the four Calder Road victims,

all of which were still open and unsolved. When Clyde Hedrick went to prison in 2014, it had been 30 years since the discoveries of the remains of unidentified victims, Jane Doe, and Janet Doe, in the Calder Road field. No friends or family members had come forward to discuss either woman. Both were believed to be in their 30s when they were discovered, but there were virtually no clues to their identities. Eventually, as happened with lots of cold cases, the evolution of forensic science came to the rescue.

In 2019, the FBI convinced the League City Police to try a new technique, genetic genealogy using DNA preserved from the bones. Within one hour of uploading the DNA samples to databases, both Jane Doe and Janet Doe had names. After 30 years, their families received long-awaited answers about their loved ones. Jane Doe, the victim who was discovered near Laura Miller in 1986, was Aubrey Lee Cook. She was 30 years old and from Tennessee. She was close with her family, but a free spirit at heart.

Aubrey had moved to Houston in the early 1980s with a friend. She lived a transient lifestyle, and communication with her friends grew sporadic, but she sent regular letters to her family. Though when she stopped checking in about her brother, who was seriously ill, and when she didn't send a letter at Christmas in 1985 or her mother's birthday in January 1986, the family became worried.

Aubrey's mother sent a certified letter to the return address from Aubrey's last correspondence, but the Postal Service returned it with the stamp, undeliverable. Family members traveled to Houston to search, but different police jurisdictions and limited communication in the 1980s meant no one connected her disappearance to the League City Jane Doe. To the Cook family, Aubrey had simply disappeared.

Janet Doe was Donna Prudham, a 34-year-old mother of two boys, Chad and Brad. Donna was born in Texas, but lived most of her life in Louisiana. She was divorced and rebuilding her life after escaping an abusive relationship. She struggled financially and occasionally with drugs. Eventually, she decided to leave her boys with her parents in Louisiana, returned to Texas to establish stability, and then come back for her sons. It was a slow process, and she went back and forth between Texas and Louisiana multiple times. In July of 1991, she contacted her sister Diane to receive a copy of her birth certificate so she could travel.

That was the last time anyone in her first time anyone in her family. her family heard from Donna. Around the time of her disappearance, Donna's son Chad suffered a car accident that left him with a traumatic brain injury and paralysis. He required round-the-clock care, and his Aunt Diane, Donna's sister, became his legal caregiver. Every time Diane's first question was, Aunt Diane, have you found my mom? died in early 2019, two months before authorities identified his mother and solved part of the mystery for her family. In 2019, when authorities identified Donna, Clyde Hedrick was five years into his

20-year manslaughter sentence and remained a suspect in the Calder Road killings. When Diane Prudham learned the details of the investigation in League City, authorities showed her a photo of Clyde Hedric. She showed the photo to Donna's remaining son, Brad. He said he recognized Hedrick. Brad strongly believed Clyde Hedrick was the man his mother brought with her from Texas the last time she visited her kids in Louisiana, a few months before she banished. It was another piece of circumstantial evidence against Hedrick. Sometimes circumstantial evidence is strong enough to move a case to trial.

Sometimes it's not. In Clyde Hedric's case, it wasn't. There were loose connections to three of the Calder Road victims, Heidi Fye, Laura Miller, and Donna Prudham. There was testimony to show that Hedrick was a bad guy, to put it simply, who was capable of violence. But there was no evidence of murder, or at least not enough to warrant a prosecution. In July of 2022, Tim Miller, Laura Miller's father, won a wrongful death lawsuit against Hedrick. In the civil case, a jury was willing to believe that Clyde Hedrick was liable

for Laura's death, even though he had never been charged with a crime related to Laura's murder. Clyde failed to show up in court, and the jury awarded Tim Miller nearly $24 million in damages. Not that it mattered. Clyde Hedrick didn't have anywhere near $24 million. Tim Miller has claimed that much of the evidence they had accumulated over the years and revealed in court during the civil case remains undisclosed to the public due to the ongoing investigation. But whatever the total amount of evidence is, it clearly isn't enough, not yet. Today, Clyde Hedrick is still free. Due to a legal technicality, Hedrick served only eight years of his 20-year sentence for manslaughter in the Ellen Beeson case.

He continues to deny involvement in the murders of Heidi Fye, Laura Miller, Aubrey Lee Cook, and Donna Prudham. And the cases at the heart of the story known as the Texas killing fields remain. unsolved. Thanks for listening to the story of the Texas killing fields here on Infamous America. For those who are listening in real time, I've mentioned previously that we've made some changes to the release schedule for 2026. We'll be back in the first week of April with our next story, which is a good request from a listener. It's the story of one of the godfathers of Harlem crime, Frank Lucas, who was played by Denzel Washington in the film about his life, American Gangster. That's next time on

infamous America. To binge all the episodes of a new season and to listen to every episode of the podcast with no commercials, subscribe in Apple Podcasts or sign up through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. 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.