Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

In November 1986, 24-year-old June Carpenter Gilkerson left her Midland home to meet a probationer she supervised at the Midland County Restitution Center. She never returned.

Her blue Honda Civic was found abandoned at a Best Western near Interstate 20, purse and belongings still inside. Evidence quickly pointed to probationer David Russell Alderink and Midland library custodian Kenneth Wayne Parker, who had discussed abducting women for profit.

Alderink later admitted helping set up June’s abduction, claiming Parker carried out the attack. Investigators uncovered physical evidence, contradictory alibis, and recorded conversations between the men. Though June’s body was...

In February 1999, fifteen-year-old Sonya Christene Wallace left her mother’s home in Rockdale, Texas to walk four blocks to the post office. She left around 5:30 p.m.

She never came back.

Initially labeled a runaway by local authorities, Sonya’s disappearance received little urgency. Her family insisted that something was wrong. Weeks passed without answers.

On March 14, 1999, a rancher discovered the body of a teenage girl beneath a bridge in southeastern Williamson County, close to the Lee County line. The remains were badly decomposed. DNA testing later confirmed it was Sonya Wallace.

Her...

On the night of January 28, 2006, 28-year-old Amber Lyn Smith was last seen at her home in the 1300 block of Aldama Street in Seguin, Texas. She was gone, but her purse, identification, and vehicle were still there. Her two young sons, just four years old and one month old, were asleep inside.

Amber’s disappearance launched one of the largest searches in Guadalupe County history. Local police, Texas Rangers, DPS Crime Lab personnel, K-9 units, volunteers, and later Texas EquuSearch combed fields and vacant properties in and around Seguin. Helicopters, drones, mounted teams, and sonar-equipped boats were used. No si...

On Christmas Eve 2015, 71-year-old Schertz businessman Henry Manuel Gutierrez, Jr. was found shot multiple times inside his home along FM 3009, near the yard of his company, Bexar Waste. His son discovered him seated in a recliner, partially covered by a blanket, in what investigators described as an execution-style killing.

Henry was in the midst of negotiating the multimillion-dollar sale of Bexar Waste to Republic Services at the time of his death. His estate was valued at approximately $14.6 million. An active civil lawsuit alleging a handshake agreement over future sale proceeds added financial tension to an already complex landscape.<...

On a narrow stretch of School Road in Austin County, Texas, a small turquoise-and-white trailer sat in the middle of the Raccoon Bend oil field, just miles from the Brazos River. It belonged to 86-year-old Will Stetenpohl — a quiet widower known to everyone simply as “Mr. Will.” He lived simply, kept cash in his pockets instead of banks, left his doors unlocked, and trusted the people around him.

Almost every day, Mr. Will’s daughter Bernice Schiller and her husband Aldon brought him lunch, washed his dishes, and made sure he ate something better than the canned food he prefe...

In August 2004, 21-year-old Katara Deboise Johnson finished her shift as an assistant manager at Taco Bell in Taylor, Texas, and drove home to her mobile home on North Dolan Street. By the following evening, her grandmother would discover her shot to death inside her bedroom.

Her car was missing. Her cell phone was gone. Hours after her death, someone answered her phone and claimed to be Katara before laughter echoed in the background and the call disconnected.

Her maroon Mitsubishi Lancer was later found abandoned at the Thorndale Community Pool in neighboring Milam County, miles from...

In the final installment of the Amber Hagerman series: the Amber Hagerman Taskforce disbands. Detective Jim Ford and Sgt. Mark Simpson follow leads out of state, one that has a connection to Berlin, Germany. Amber’s mother Donna Whitson, Brother Ricky. And Father Richard Hagerman struggle to come to terms with the 9-year-old’s senseless and violent death. The legacy left after the tragic death of another little girl, 7-year-old Athen Strand, adds strength to the Amber Alert system in Texas. 

If you have any information about the abduction and murder of Amber Rene Hagerman, please call the Arlington Police...

In 1999, another abduction rocked North Texas when 6-year-old Opal Jo Jennings was snatched in broad daylight as she played with other children in a field next to her house. The similarities were striking, and police in Arlington thought they had their man. In 2007, in Tacoma Washington, a twisted child rapist was exposed when he murdered one of his victims, and his ties to Fort Worth, Texas put him on the persons of interest list in the Amber Hagerman case. The following year, police in Dickinson, Texas renew an investigation from 1990 in which the victim, left for dead, survived. In 2009, her would-be...

The Amber Hagerman Taskforce searched far and wide for suspects. Whether a perpetrator was known, like a Fort Lauderdale, Florida child rapist and killer, or was yet to be apprehended, such as the monster responsible for raping and killing a 12-year-old girl in a Houston suburb, there was certainly no shortage of suspects to scrutinize. Even an obsessive tipster came on the Taskforce’s radar. But police investigating the January 13th abduction and subsequent murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman couldn’t catch a break that led to an arrest, or enough proof that actually made them believe they’d identified their...

As the Amber Hagerman Taskforce investigated, they were attempting to leave no stone unturned. Privy to resources not usually readily available to local police jurisdictions, Detectives were utilizing science, mathematics, and old-fashioned police work in order to cover every base. It was, perhaps, the toughest investigation many of the very experienced policemen had ever worked. And it was personal. Nothing, however, seemed to pan out. Even with the identification of countless suspects, finding the evidence that nailed one of them was proving frustrating. What were they missing?
  
If you have any information about the abduction and murder of Amber Hagerman, please...

On the evening of Wednesday, January 17th, 1996, a cold front in North Texas brought in a major thunderstorm system. Arlington, Texas got drenched. At about 11:30 PM, when the rain stopped, a Forest Ridge Apartments resident took his small terrier out for a walk. When the dog became agitated at the creek near the complex, the man walked down to check it out. To his horror, a small, female body was in the water facedown. He knew who it was. The next couple days, the Arlington Police and the Amber Hagerman Taskforce scrambled to find out how the body got there and who might be...

At about 3:18 PM on January 13th, 1996, in east Arlington, Texas, 78-year-old retired machinist and WW2 Veteran Jimmie Kevil dialed 911. He’d just witnessed a man in a pickup truck kidnap a little girl, he told the operator. The girl was 9-year-old Amber Hagerman. Police responded and a search began. Folks in the neighborhood, too, came out to look for her and the black truck her abductor drove. But there was a problem: this was Texas and black pickups were everywhere. Everyone in Arlington was hanging on to the hope that Amber would be returned unharmed, unlike the victim in the last kidnapping case i...

When Amber Hagerman was born, her parents’ relationship was still relatively new. In spite of the many challenges her mom Donna faced, particularly after becoming a single mother, Amber and her brother Ricky were happy with strong emotional stability and love in their lives. By the time Donna was ready to give the kids’ father a chance to continue to be in their lives, she’d agreed to take part in a local television news docuseries about the struggles of being a single mom. After filming wrapped, and 100s of hours of footage had been shot, it was nearly 1996 and Amber was 9 years old...

Within a year of the abduction and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman, several vastly differing factors came together to create the Amber Plan, known today as the Amber Alert. From the idea of a concerned parent who mourned for Amber’s relatives to Amber’s family, and then from an association of radio managers to state and local authorities, the little girl’s long-lasting legacy came to fruition and subsequently saved many lives. Though the Amber Plan went off without a hitch in many regards, it got off to a rocky start in others. This is the story of the Amber Plan, the Amber A...

In July 1970, the body of 26-year-old Eula Mae “Kay” Miller was discovered inside her apartment at the Hilltop Apartments in Odessa, Texas. What initially appeared quiet and undisturbed soon revealed a brutal killing, one that had gone unnoticed for days in the sweltering West Texas heat. As investigators worked backward through a shrinking window of time, they were confronted with a case already eroded by delay, decomposition, and the transient nature of a booming oilfield city.

Kay Miller was known publicly as a friendly, outgoing go-go dancer at a local club, but behind that image was a woman carr...

After the discovery of the burnt car that belonged to millionaire Houston oilman Ed Baker, speculation was abound. Though the medical examiner finally ruled that the body found inside was indeed Edward Gerald Baker’s, some folks didn’t buy the ruling. They insisted the oilman had faked his own death and skipped country to avoid the lawsuits against his company or worse – jail time. Harris County Sheriff’s Investigators, however, didn’t really buy that. Though they seemed to believe that Ed’s death was the result of an elaborately planned suicide, they couldn’t prove it and still had to leave their minds op...

Below the Surface is a true crime podcast covering a variety of strange and bizarre cases with one common theme; a water connection.
 
The show features both solved and unsolved cases, some of which are well known, while others have received little attention.


In this special preview of episode 1, we explore the puzzling case of journalist Kim Wall who was Best known for her articles in the Guardian, New York Times, and Vice. She disappeared in a submarine beneath the Oresund Strait after interviewing inventor, Peter Madsen, on August 10, 2017. We can only speculate what exactly h...

In November of 1985, rice farmers harvesting crops just north of the Texas small town of Katy found the smoldering remains of a car in one of the fields. Inside the vehicle, Harris County Sheriff’s Deputies found a badly charred and disfigured body. Later that day, it was discovered that the burnt car belonged to millionaire Houston oilman Ed Baker. As the investigation progressed, the murky waters only muddied further. To this day, precisely what happened to Ed Baker remains a mystery.

Part 1 of 2. 

If you have any information about Edward Gerald Baker’s case, please contact Crime S...

In January of 1985, siblings Michael and Pamela Mayfield were last seen getting into a vehicle willfully on their way home from school. The six-year-old and five-year-old, respectively, were never seen again. Efforts to locate the two children were relatively extensive. The Missing Children Milk Carton Program was new and gaining momentum fast, and the Mayfield Children were featured there, on nationwide news, and at the end of the third broadcast of the Adam Walsh television movie. No trace, however, of what happened to the two vibrant children was ever found.  

If you have any information on the disappearances of Pamel...

On January 24th, 1969, one of Gregg County, Texas’s most cold-blooded and savage murders occurred: that of 17-year-old Longview High School senior Leslye Dian Koon. The slaying prompted one of the city’s most extensive and intensive investigations in its history. What you might call a taskforce was created that included the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office, the District Attorney’s Office, and Longview Police Detectives, who were on loan out of their jurisdiction. Upon the discovery of a life insurance policy in Leslye’s name, the District Attorney identified three suspects who were charged, indicted, and tried for the murder. Bu...

In April 1974, 16-year-old Danita Ann Cash drove to the abandoned Trinity River Bridge, better known in local lore as “Screaming Bridge,” to pick up her brother from target practice. But instead of finding the boys, she encountered a stranger with a shotgun who forced his way into her car. What began as a routine favor turned into a harrowing abduction attempt that Danita survived only through courage, calm decisions, and faith. Her escape would set off a police investigation that quickly zeroed in on a young carpet layer with a dark trail behind him, a man investigators believed might be resp...

On Halloween morning in 1984, a masked gunman lay in wait inside a garage in the tiny Stephens County community of Caddo, Texas. When oilman and civic leader Sammy Martin Rogers went to investigate a report of a prowler, he was confronted at gunpoint and fatally shot in front of his family.

Rogers was widely known and deeply respected, a self-made oilman, school board trustee, hospital board member, and lifelong resident of Caddo. His killing stunned a quiet rural community and launched a massive manhunt involving local law enforcement, Texas Rangers, roadblocks, and aerial searches. Despite the scale of...

In July 2010, twenty-nine-year-old Heather Leann Pope left her mother’s home in Royse City, Texas, telling her she was going to visit a friend. She never returned. Days passed without a call or message, something that immediately alarmed her family, who knew Heather always checked in.

Nearly two weeks later, while searching the Quinlan area of southern Hunt County, Heather’s father and a family friend made a devastating discovery behind a convenience store off Cedar Hill Road near Lake Tawakoni. Heather’s body had been left under a tarp beside a vacant house. The extreme summer heat had ta...

In April 1988, the quiet lakeside community of Lakeway, Texas was shaken when 45-year-old Betty Ann Thomas vanished from her home on Cold Water Lane. A violent scene inside the residence suggested a targeted attack, and two days later, Betty was found in the trunk of her Jaguar outside an Austin hotel, bound, gagged, and executed. Her murder became the first, and still the only, homicide in Lakeway’s history.

As detectives uncovered Betty’s life story and examined her home for clues, an eerie parallel emerged: her father-in-law had been murdered in a similarly cold-blooded fashion eight years earl...

This is a preview of Of Hell: Texas True Crime, a narrative investigation into the darkest crimes committed on Texas soil.

From the creators of Gone Cold, each episode dives deep into cases where violence leaves a permanent scar on the land and the people who call it home.

This clip features the haunting case of Nancy, a beloved mother taken from her home and brutally tortured and murdered.

What begins as a tragic disappearance in a quiet Texas neighborhood unravels into a story of fear, grief, and a killer who believed he could...

On the morning of November 13, 1992, Suzanne Marie Hummel, a 39-year-old mother of two, parked in the busy lot of Rice Epicurean Market at Kirby and West Alabama in Houston, a familiar spot she used to wait before work. While eating breakfast in her car, she was approached by a woman demanding her purse. Within seconds, a .22-caliber shot tore through Suzanne’s arm and chest, and the assailant fled, vanishing into morning traffic and leaving her fighting for her life.

Suzanne managed to drive forward and crash into a nearby bus shelter, drawing the attention of witnesses. Before lo...

On August 28, 1989, 24-year-old Jana Carol Simpson walked into her portable classroom at Glen Park Elementary School in southeast Fort Worth for her very first day of teaching in the district. Not long after, she was found dying on the steps of that classroom, stabbed seventeen times in broad daylight.

Her purse and jewelry were untouched. There was no sign of sexual assault. And yet the young teacher, remembered for her warmth, hugs, and devotion to her students, had been brutally murdered on what should have been among the happiest days of her career.

This episode retraces...

In February of 1983 23-year-old Austin mother Cindy Davis Rendon vanished from her parents’ home in Northeast Austin. It was a normal Tuesday morning — Cindy fed her baby daughter, spoke briefly with her parents before they left for work, and planned to head to her shift at the Internal Revenue Service later that afternoon. But when her estranged husband arrived to pick up the baby, he found the front door wide open, breakfast spilled on the floor, and Cindy gone without a trace.

Days passed. Then an anonymous envelope arrived in the mail containing some of Cindy’s personal belong...

In May of 1992, 42-year-old Christine “Starrine” Byrd vanished from her home in west Tyler, Texas. What began as a missing-person case soon turned into something far darker – and more disturbing – than anyone could have imagined.

Starrine was a beloved mother of four, a woman of faith whose home was always filled with music. She disappeared without a trace; the front door left open, food still cooking on the stove, pets unfed. The scene looked frozen in time, as if she had been interrupted mid-afternoon. Investigators suspected foul play almost immediately.

Then came a phone call. An anonymou...

On the night of March 28, 1980, twenty-one-year-old Kathryn Ann “Kathy” Stembridge was attacked while closing up the C&M Laundromat on Paluxy Road in Granbury, Texas. Stabbed repeatedly in the chest and abdomen, she managed to crawl more than 170 feet across a vacant lot to the porch of her neighbors, Bill and Mary Lou Carney, where she collapsed after telling them, “I’ve been stabbed.” Despite an immediate response and appeals to anyone who might have been driving by that night, no weapon was ever recovered, and no eyewitnesses came forward to name a suspect.

The case soon focused on Robert...

In August 1970, 26-year-old schoolteacher Linda Jane Phillips, daughter of Kaufman County School Superintendent Jimmy Phillips, vanished while driving home from a Dallas wedding party. Two days later, her mutilated body was discovered in a hedgerow near Post Oak, Texas.

The case shocked Kaufman County—a quiet, rural community east of booming Dallas—and became one of North Texas’s most haunting unsolved murders. Investigators found her car abandoned along Farm Road 1641, its window shattered, her clothing scattered along the roadside for nearly a mile. Despite hundreds of volunteers searching and an intensive investigation led by Sheriff Roy Brockway, no sus...

In the early hours of June 23, 1985, fourteen-year-old Jennifer Leigh Day opened Preston Road Donuts in North Dallas for her usual Sunday shift. She brewed the coffee, stocked the shelves, and rang up her last customer at 6:20 a.m. Fifteen minutes later, the shop was silent. Jennifer’s purse and jewelry sat untouched on the counter, her apron on the floor, and the cash drawer still full.

Three days later, construction workers discovered her body in a field off Preston Road and State Highway 121 in Plano—eleven miles north. Jennifer had been bludgeoned and stabbed through the throat.

In June 1964, a Fort Bend County farmer discovered a headless, handless torso in a roadside ditch — a killing so cleanly done that investigators said only someone trained in anatomy could have done it. Sheriff “Tiny” Gaston and the Texas Rangers searched for weeks, but the victim was never identified. Then, just months later, another scene shocked Texas — Room 636 of San Antonio’s Sheraton Gunter Hotel, where blood coated the walls and floor but no body was found. The man who’d checked in under a false name vanished, only to turn up two days later dead by suicide in another downtown hot...

Three years after a suitcase containing a man’s torso surfaced in the Rio Grande near El Paso, another horror emerged—this time in the pine woods of East Texas. On February 3, 1962, two brothers seining minnows in a roadside ditch off U.S. Highway 59 north of Cleveland discovered two cardboard boxes wired together and packed with cement. Inside was the severed torso of a woman. Her head, arms, and legs were missing.

San Jacinto County Sheriff Lewis Woodruff and Constable Collis Everitt called in the Texas Rangers and Houston pathologist Dr. Joseph Jachimczyk. The autopsy revealed crude dismemberment, a mi...

In June of 1959, a fisherman on the Rio Grande west of El Paso pulled a black suitcase from the slow, muddy current near Montoya, Texas. Inside was a headless, handless torso — mutilated, skinned, and wrapped in the previous day’s newspaper. Within hours, El Paso County Sheriff Bob Bailey was standing over what he’d later call “the most brutal murder in El Paso history.” What followed was a multi-state investigation that spanned Texas, New Mexico, and beyond — an effort to name the victim and find the sadist who cut him apart.

Over the next weeks, more body parts surfac...

On April 5, 1985, 29-year-old Kathleen “Kathy” Ranft finished her shift at Lippe Tire Center in Seguin, Texas, and headed into the weekend. She was in the middle of a separation, moving into a new apartment, and trying to build a fresh start for herself and her three sons. That night, Kathy was supposed to meet friends at the Country Cabaret, a small nightclub off FM 467. She never made it.

The next morning, her 1980 Chevy Citation was found in the club’s parking lot. Inside were two cigarette butts and a child’s wristwatch. Back at her apartment, her purse and make...

In October 1996, a rancher in rural Wise County, Texas, stumbled on a body hidden in a brush pile. For over two years she was known only as “Brush Girl,” a Jane Doe with no name, no identity, and no justice. Eventually, persistence and forensic artistry revealed her true identity: 14-year-old April Dawn Lacy from Oklahoma City.

April’s story is one of poverty, addiction, instability, and systemic failure — a child caught between parents lost to alcohol and drugs, shuffled between motels and friends’ homes, desperate for stability. Five days after storming out of a seedy motel room following a fight wi...

In October 1987, a visiting nurse walked into a Tyler, Texas duplex and discovered a scene of unimaginable violence. Fifty-seven-year-old Mary Hooper, confined to a wheelchair after a long battle with illness, had been bludgeoned to death. Just steps away, her longtime partner, sixty-two-year-old Emmett Lynch, was found beaten in the bathroom. Nothing in the home appeared disturbed. Valuables remained untouched. The only thing missing was Emmett’s car—a gray 1977 Ford LTD he cherished and would never have willingly sold.

When the car turned up more than 1,000 miles away in Prescott, Arizona, so did two suspects: Terry and Kath...

Most disappearances leave echoes—missing persons flyers, TV reports, police pleas for tips. But when James Robert “Jimmy” Farenthold vanished in the spring of 1989, there was only silence. No bulletin. No headlines. No public outcry. Just absence.

Jimmy wasn’t just anyone. He was the youngest son of one of Texas’s most prominent dynasties, a family bound by oil, politics, and power. But behind the legacy was a private story of grief and dysfunction. Jimmy had been born a twin—and when his brother Vincent died suddenly, Jimmy became the “one who lived,” carrying scars that shaped the rest of his...

On June 6, 1972, the Gulf of Mexico gave back one of its secrets. The body of Randolph “Randy” Farenthold, 32 years old, oil money in his veins, and gambling smoke in his lungs, washed ashore on Mustang Island. His hands were bound, his body chained, his skull fractured. The brutal murder of the South Texas “sportsman” triggered one of the most intensive investigations in Nueces County history, pulling in local lawmen, Texas Rangers, and even the FBI.

But this was no simple killing. Randy had been scheduled to testify in a federal fraud case against men tied to shady financial schemes...