An unidentified man raped and killed more than five women in the South Side of St Louis during late 1999. It is not clear whether he is the same man who went on to terrorize East St Louis on the other side of the Mississippi.
Things came to a head in October 2001 when two women were found dead in East St Louis within a day, bringing the number of women slain in the same general area in the previous two years to eight.
The first victim was 41-year-old Lolina Collins, a mother of three who had worked at a state hospital and was planning to become an elementary school teacher. Clad only in a bra, she was found with trash bags over her arms and legs. She had been strangled.
The next day motorist found the naked body of 33-year-old Brenda Beasley lying on the sidewalk beside a fire hydrant. A mother of four, she worked full-time at a fast food restaurant. Her ankles and wrists were bound with duct tape and she had died from a blow to the head.
Police denied that these two killings were related to the earlier murders, most of whom were found in neighbourhoods frequented by drug users and prostitutes. However, police officials in East St Louis had repeatedly turned down the offer of help from the FBI’s serial killer unit. They explained that they were under-staffed, lacked the resources, and that the murders did not seem to fit the pattern of a serial killing.
Journalist Earl Ofari Hutchinson maintained that the real reason was that the women were black, poor, and some had histories of prostitution and drug use.
“These are not the type of women that reflexively ignite police and public outrage,” he said.
However, in November 2001, the East St. Louis police finally agreed to let the FBI join the hunt.
Texas’ “Highway to Hell”
A series of serial killers seem to have been at work on the Gulf Coastal Plain since 1970. Over the three decades up to the year 2000, the FBI has filed the cases of at least 32 murdered women along the 50-mile stretch of Interstate 45 between Houston and Galveston in Texas known as “America’s Highway to Hell”. The
Although the murders seem to have been going on since 1971, the situation was confused because 11 police forces have jurisdiction in the area and it was only with two well-publicized crimes in 1997 that anyone spotted a pattern. On 3 April 1997 12-year-old Laura Kate Smither disappeared while jogging near her home in Friendswood, Texas, five miles west of the I–45. Over 6,000 people took part in a massive search that covered over 800 square miles. Her headless corpse was found on 20 April dumped in a pond ten miles away in Pasadena. She was naked except for one sock and a ring. A dark coloured pick-up was observed in the same area as where she was last seen and a composite sketch was issued of the person in the truck.
“We thought we lived in a really safe town,” her mother said. “And that at nine o’clock in the morning, to go for a run on a little private road, that she would be fine.”
Investigators noted some obvious similarities between Laura Smither’s murder and the abduction of nine- year-old Amber Hagerman in Arlington, Texas, three months before. She had been riding her bike with her brother Ricky near her grandmother’s home in Arlington on 13 January 1993 when a neighbour heard a scream. In broad daylight, the neighbour saw a man pull Amber off her bike, throw her into the front seat of his black pick-up truck and drive away at high speed. She was found four miles away at the bottom of a creek bed at the Forest Hollow apartment complex on Green Oaks Boulevard a short distance west of Highway 360 in north Arlington. Her throat had been gashed numerous times and she had been sexually assaulted. Both girls’ bodies were dumped in waterways, naked except for their socks. It could not be conclusively determined if the two cases are related or not. Amber’s abduction lead to the Amber Plan, where local radio stations—initially in the Dallas area, then further afield—repeat news bulletins concerning missing children. In April 2003, President George W. Bush signed legislation making the Amber Alert system mandatory across the country. In 2006, a movie called
On 17 August 1997, 17-year-old Jessica Lee Cain disappeared. She was last seen at Bennigan’s, a nightspot, in Clear Lake, Texas. She left the restaurant at approximately 1.30 a.m. to return to her home in Tiki Island, Texas. Her empty pick-up truck was found abandoned on the side of the I–45 between Exits Seven and Eight in La Marque near Highland Bayou Park. Several witnesses reported seeing a red Isuzu Amigo tow truck parked behind it. Her wallet was found on the seat of her truck, but her keys were missing. Jessica Cain has not been seen since.
“Before Laura Smither and Jessica Cain, each one of us was in his own little world, investigating our own individual cases,” said Lieutenant Tommy Hansen of the Galveston County Sheriff’s Department. “We would have no way of knowing that some fellow we wanted to question in one murder, and had been a top suspect, had already been questioned in a very similar murder just a few miles down the highway.”
Sex offender William Lewis Reece was suspected of involvement in the murders of Laura Smither and Jessica Cain. Convicted of rape in Oklahoma some years before, Reece worked at a construction site near the Smither home and left his work as a bulldozer operator because it was raining and too wet to work, around the same time Laura Smither disappeared. Later he was arrested for the abduction of Sandra Sapaugh.
On 16 May 1997, the 19-year-old Sapaugh was fixing a flat tyre on NASA Road 1 in Webster, across the I–45 from Friendswood, when Reece stopped. But instead of helping her he pulled a knife on her and forced her into his truck. As he drove at 70 miles an hour down I–45, he ordered her to undress. Instead she opened the passenger door and jumped out of the fast moving truck. She was rescued by another driver. Pregnant at the time, she sustained serious injuries but both she and the baby survived. Five months later she picked Reece out of a police line-up. She believed that he was responsible for her flat tyre in the first place.
Reece was convicted of aggravated assault and sentenced to 60 years imprisonment. He appealed on the grounds that there was a conspiracy to arrest him for the abduction of Sandra Sapaugh because there was no probable cause to arrest him in the Laura Smither case. But on 20 July 2000, his appeal was rejected and the conviction and sentence upheld.
Reece admitted he drove down the street where Smither was jogging but returned to the job site and his boss saw that he was alone in his truck. According to Reece, he then went home and did laundry. After a search of his home and truck turned up nothing, a lie detector test proved inconclusive. Reece’s pick-up truck was examined for possible fibres, blood or other clues. But problems with the post mortem also surfaced. The medical examiner’s report indicated that African-American hairs found on the girl’s body were contaminants and that they did not come from the crime scene. The police even went as far as to dig up a pile of horse manure at the Diamond B Ranch. Reece was boarding a palomino at the stables there and occasionally shoed horses for other owners there.
Jessica Cain’s disappearance was quickly related to that of Sondra Kay Ramber, who disappeared from her home five miles away in Santa Fe, Texas, on 26 October 1983. The door to her home was left open and and biscuits were baking in the oven. It was first thought that she had gone to the store, but she had left her purse and coat in the house. It was only when she had not returned the following morning that her father filed a missing person report. The authorities initially classified her as a runaway. She had just completed modelling school and wanted to becoming a model.
There was another suspect in the Jessica Cain case—Jonathan David Drew. On 29 November 1998, Drew attended a birthday party at a bar in Seabrook, Texas. He was introduced to 23-year-old blonde waitress Tina Flood at the party. He bought her drinks, and they were seen kissing. When the bar closed and the party ended at 2 a.m., several people went to a Holiday Inn hotel. Because Tina was too drunk to drive to the hotel, she and her friend Justin Chapman rode there with other people. Her car was left in a parking lot next to the bar. When they attempted to check into their room, Chapman, who was a Holiday Inn employee, realized he had left his employee discount card in Tina’s car and they decided to go back and get it. Outside they saw Drew sitting in his pick-up truck in the hotel parking lot and accepted his offer to take them back to the bar. Tina sat in the middle next to Drew, who was driving, while Chapman sat in the passenger’s side of the front seat. When they arrived at the parking lot next to the bar, Chapman got out of the truck and held Tina’s purse while she got out as well. But as Tina attempted to scoot across the front seat to the passenger door, Drew grabbed hold of her and drove away.
