Cold Cases · Spotify Studios

The Texas Killing Fields

·46 min·3 clips

Tim Miller points a gun at Robert Abel and nearly pulls the trigger before walking away.

1. Cold Cases follows the Texas Killing Fields case in League City, Texas, where bodies were found off Calder Road. 2. Carter Roy hosts the episode, and his show uses weekly cold-case storytelling to track unsolved murders and later breakthroughs. 3. The episode asks why a patch of land between Houston and Galveston became linked to multiple disappearances and killings. 4. Laura Miller vanished on September 10, 1984, after her mother dropped her at a payphone near a convenience store so she could call Vernon. 5. Tim and Jan Miller reported Laura missing, but police first treated her as a runaway and noted that her seizure medication was still at home. 6. Tim then learned that a human skull had been found in April 1984 in a small oil field off Calder Road. 7. That April 1984 discovery identified Heedy Fye, a 25-year-old cocktail waitress whose bones were found a few hundred yards from where Laura would later be found. 8. Tim pushed League City police to search the field, but officers said it was fenced private property and would not let him in. 9. Laura’s body was eventually identified by dental records after two boys found a partially decomposed woman and a second body in February 1986. 10. The medical examiner said Laura’s remains were too degraded to determine a cause of death, but the death was still ruled a homicide. 11. The partially decomposed woman found in 1986 had a bullet lodged in her spine, but police could not identify her and labeled her Jane Doe. 12. The clustering of three women in the same field within a few years made investigators believe they were dealing with a serial killer. 13. Tim later focused on Clyde Hedrick, a former Dickinson resident who worked for a roofing contractor and had been linked to Ellen Rae Beeson. 14. Ellen Beeson had last been seen with Clyde at the Texas Moon Club in July 1984, and her body was later found near a Galveston causeway. 15. Police also considered Robert Abel, a retired NASA engineer, after the FBI described the killer as a methodical organized sexual serial killer who was probably local. 16. A search of Robert Abel’s home produced guns, a gold tooth, and newspaper clippings about the killings, but no proof tied him to the deaths. 17. Tim Miller later admitted he became unhinged, including the moment when he nearly shot Robert Abel during a confrontation outside Abel’s house. 18. In 2019, genetic genealogy identified Jane Doe as Audrey Lee Cook, and it later identified Janet Doe as Donna Prudhomme from Port Arthur, Texas. 19. The episode’s tone is somber and investigative, with Carter Roy using a detailed, chronological narration style and archival-style suspense beats. 20. People interested in Texas true crime, missing-person identifications, and long-running cold cases will get the most from this story.

As heard by us

A bleak, methodical cold case where grief and investigation stay tightly bound.

Cold Cases treats the Texas Killing Fields as a place marked by violent crime. It opens with a father standing where his daughter was found, then settles into the history of how the field off Calder Road came to be linked with repeated disappearances and deaths in League City,…

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Press play for a cold case in League City, Texas, where a father returns to the spot where his daughter's skeleton was found.

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