For Texan drivers, the main road that winds through the sprawling metropolis of Houston and ends at the shores of the Gulf of Mexico is called Interstate 45.
But to the police, this region is known as the Texas Killing Fields.
Since the 1970s, the bodies of about 30 murder victims, mostly young women and girls, have been found along this 80-kilometer stretch of coastal plain.
The region, with its wild wetlands, vast beaches and abandoned oil fields, became a crime scene.
And for many other families, their loved ones simply disappeared without a trace from the Texas Gulf Coast.
Warning: This article contains details that readers may find distressing.
For too long, the police insisted that the missing women and girls were simply runaways and refused to investigate.
But locals knew the freeway was allowing something sinister to creep into their coastal community.
And just as easily as Interstate 45 brought predators, the nine-lane highway provided a quick, anonymous exit.
Interstate 45 connects downtown Houston to the Texas Gulf Coast. (Wikimedia Commons: David B King via Creative Commons 2.0)
It wasn’t until the 1990s that the authorities recognized that the region had become a hunting ground for killers.
“Three decades of loss and redemption along a busy highway, between us, where more than 100,000 commuters drive each weekday,” investigative reporter Kathryn Casey wrote in her book Deliver Us.
Dozens of murders and disappearances from the 1970s and 1980s remain unsolved.
But for a handful of families in the area, they finally have answers.
William Reece, a serial killer in the neighboring state of Oklahoma, confessed to three murders near Houston in the summer of 1997.
But Reece wasn’t looking for redemption.
The information he provided was simply a bargaining chip in an attempt to save his own life.
The girls start disappearing in the 1970s
Beginning in the 1970s, each decade seemed to bring new horrors to coastal cities south of Houston.
In the summer of 1971, teenage girls disappeared at an alarming rate.
Colette Wilson (left), Rhonda Johnson (center) and Sharon Shaw were among the 11 girls who were kidnapped and murdered in Texas in the 1970s. (Wikimedia Commons)
The first to disappear was Colette Wilson, a 13-year-old girl who was waiting to be picked up by her mother after band practice.
His mother arrived at the street corner where they had arranged just six minutes late.
But Colette had already left.
Police told Colette’s family she must have run away from home and refused to investigate.
“The police weren’t worried,” Colette’s mother, Claire, would later tell Kathryn Casey.
“They said she was probably on drugs or something, that she had slipped away. We knew Colette. We knew it wasn’t true. But they wouldn’t listen to us.”
Without the support of the police, the parents of the missing often hired private detectives.
Those who could not afford the expense would gather friends and neighbors to look for clues in the area.
But Colette’s body was found by chance.
Five months after her disappearance, a hiker found the skeleton of a girl near a reservoir in South Texas.
Colette’s father, who was also her dentist, was forced to identify his son’s remains.
As she held her daughter’s jaw, she said she recognized her own handiwork.
In total, 11 girls were taken off the streets and brutally murdered in the area during the 1970s.
Some investigators believe the murders were the work of Edward Harold Bell, a serial flasher and rapist.
He fled the state in 1978 after killing a young man who tried to intervene when he saw Bell harassing a group of girls.
The killings stopped abruptly when Bell left Texas.
He was later found and convicted of the man’s murder, and from his cell vindicated the girls’ deaths, calling them “the 11 who went to heaven.”
He died in prison as the prime suspect in the murders, but was never charged.
The lonely camp with a scary reputation
The coastal residents of the state were not left alone for long.
In 1983, girls and women began disappearing again, and this time their bodies were dumped on the same desolate strip of land.
Just off Interstate 45, heading south toward the coast, was a dirt road.
At the end, far from houses, factories and refineries, there was an abandoned and overgrown oil field.
In the 1980s, four murder victims were found in an abandoned oil field in League City, Texas. (NASA: Tim Kopra)
In just seven years, four bodies were found on this land, each woman naked, under a tree, with her arms crossed over her chest.
“It’s a desolate space, dotted with little more than oil rigs and dirt roads,” the US Federal Bureau of Investigation said of the field.
“If they’re asking for help, it’s unlikely anyone will hear it.”
While Laura Miller and Heidi Fye were identified soon after they were found, the other two women would be known as Jane Doe and Janet Doe for 33 years.
In 2019, advances in DNA technology meant they could finally be named: they were Audrey Cook and Donna Prudhomme.
All four murders remain unsolved.
Richard Rennison, an FBI agent in Houston, has long suspected that the murders were the work of someone who lived in the area.
“The fact that the offender chose this area gives us a couple of little details,” he said.
“It’s such a remote rural area. Someone had to know about that place.”
Heidi Fye, 23 (far left), Laura Miller, 17, Audrey Cook, 30, and Donna Prudhomme, 34 (far right) were killed in South Texas in the 1980s. (Provided: League City Police)
As cities began to develop and more houses went up in the area, the countryside was not so isolated.
The killings of the 1980s soon stopped.
The dirt road is now paved and surrounded by houses and a church.
The only witness to the macabre history of the camp is a small memorial with four crosses erected in honor of the women whose lives ended there.
At the dawn of a new decade, locals hoped that the 90s would finally end their terror.
But they were wrong.
A convicted rapist named William Lewis Reece had just been released from prison in Oklahoma.
And he was ready to start a new life in South Texas.
A summer of terror
One night in May 1997, Sandra Sapaugh discovered that her car’s tire had mysteriously been slashed while she was inside a gas station.
A man approached the 19-year-old, offering her help, then forced her into his own truck at knifepoint.
Pregnant with her third child and terrified, Sandra knew she had a chance to escape. As she sped down Interstate 45, she opened the door and stepped out onto the road.
The busy highway that allowed so much horror in Sandra’s community was also her salvation.
A woman in the car behind them stopped, picked Sandra up and took her straight to the hospital.
While Sandra told the police everything she knew, her memories of the night were hazy.
After several months, the authorities tried hypnosis and Sandra had a breakthrough: deep in her subconscious was Reece’s license plate number.
He was charged with kidnapping and sentenced to 60 years in prison, though he insisted to a Houston Chronicle reporter that it was all a misunderstanding.
“I’m not a rapist,” he said.
“I’m just an old country man.”
With a string of unsolved murders in the area that summer, authorities were left wondering what Reece had been up to before he was caught.
Tiffany Johnston was just 19 years old when she was murdered. (Provided: Bethany Police Department)
It would take 18 years to reveal the full extent of his crimes.
In 2015, his DNA was linked to the murder of Tiffany Johnston.
The 19-year-old, who was the daughter of Reece’s friends, had been found dead in Oklahoma in late 1997.
Extradited to his home state from Texas, Reece was found guilty and sentenced to be executed.
Now on death row, Reece knew there was a way to try and save himself from the lethal injection.
A serial killer reveals himself
When a Texas ranger visited Reece in his Oklahoma cell in 2016, he asked if he had a dark side.
“Well, yes, I have no doubt about it,” he told her
“I won’t lie to you.”
William Reece admitted to killing Laura Smither, Kelli Ann Cox and Jessica Cain 19 years after their crimes. (Provided: Houston Police Department)
Reece revealed that for five months in 1997, he had haunted the Texas Killing Fields.
He killed 12-year-old Laura Smither after running her off the street during her morning run.
A few months later, he murdered Kelli Ann Cox, a 20-year-old psychology student, and Jessica Cain, 17.
The brutal murder of Tiffany Johnston happened shortly before Sandra was put under hypnosis and gave the police the information they needed to stop Reece’s rampage.
Reece provided precise locations for Kelli Ann and Jessica’s burial sites: two horse pastures outside of Houston.
The information allowed their families to finally fire them, but few believed that Reece was trying to atone for the past.
“The Bill Reece I met in prison wouldn’t do it out of the goodness of his heart,” writer Kathryn Casey told the Dallas Morning News.
In fact, he tried to negotiate with the authorities to drop his death sentence in exchange for information about his crimes.
But they refused.
Reece was extradited to Texas and last month was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Laura, Kelli Ann and Jessica.
Kelli Ann’s daughter Alexis, who was just 19 months old when her mother was killed, watched Reece in court.
She also grew up near Interstate 45.
Like many other women in South Texas, she was raised to fear what monsters the road might bring to her town.
“Seeing him, for me, reminds me, I pretended I was something I wasn’t,” he told local media.
“Don’t get me wrong, he was a bad man, but he’s only a man.”
William Reece is now in the custody of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which has yet to decide his fate.
He can stay in Texas or he can be sent back to…