Portrait of a serial killer He went undiscovered for 19 years —— then led authorities to the bodies. Now, one big question remains: Why?













: William Lewis Reece has been connected to attacks on at least seven women between 1986 and 1997 up and down the I-35 corridor in Texas and Oklahoma and along I-45 in the Houston area. The victims were young and brunette, ages 12 to 20. Click their pictures above to learn more. Status: View map of Reece’s crimes The prisoner paced the pasture, unsettling the earth with each shackled step. In a thicket of tall, yellow grass, he examined the ground and his memory. So much had changed since he’d last been here. His auburn beard had faded to white. The everyday clothing he wore — jeans, a sweat shirt and a camouflage hat — had become a luxury. He was flanked by the authorities he had once avoided. Breaking nearly two decades of silence, William Lewis Reece had just claimed responsibility for young women missing since 1997. Earlier this year, he agreed to lead authorities to their bodies, buried in fields outside Houston. For years, families in Texas and Oklahoma had wondered what happened to their daughters, conscientious girls from attentive homes who disappeared under what seemed to be ordinary circumstances. On a morning run. At the car wash. Driving home from a theater cast party. Kelli Cox, shown with her 1-year-old daughter, Alexis, in 1996, vanished a year later. (Courtesy Bynum family) For years, the families had no answers. Then, the man behind their anguish — a 56-year-old Texas inmate with convictions for rape and kidnapping, but never murder — suddenly began talking. Authorities have tied Reece to attacks on at least seven women, including four who ended up dead. Together, the cases reveal a serial killer who targeted women of a specific type — young, brunette, alone — and lured them into his grasp, often by posing as a good Samaritan. “He’s just a monster,” said Sue Dietrich, a Harris County private investigator and former police officer who has studied Reece for years. “He’s a predator. He got away with it. I hate to say it, but he was good at it.” Reece’s unexpected confession helped solve the mystery of what happened to Kelli Cox, a University of North Texas student who 19 years ago used a pay phone at a Denton gas station, then vanished. Her family finally knows who took her — but the biggest, most baffling question remains. Why? Nyles and Jan Bynum, at their home in Farmers Branch, have been tortured for years wondering what happened to their daughter, Kelli Cox. They have raised Cox's daughter as their own. The girl is now a 20-year-old student at the University of North Texas, just like her mother was when she disappeared. (G.J. McCarthy/Staff Photographer) At age 19, Reece stood before a Southern Baptist minister and vowed to spend his life with a quiet girl named Judy Fleming whom he met in Anadarko, Okla., a town of 6,500 about an hour outside Oklahoma City. “He said if I didn’t go out with him, he was going to shoot himself,” Fleming said. His proposition seemed good-natured, but she soon realized her new husband could turn violent. Reece had been raised on a farm not far away, in Yukon, Okla., with 12 brothers and sisters. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade to shoe horses, he told the Houston Chronicle in 1997. Despite bouncing around in foster care as a child, Reece had an especially close relationship with his mother, according to those familiar with his background. “She would do anything for him,” Fleming told The Dallas Morning News. It was 1979 when she and Reece wed as teenagers. They had a difficult marriage. She left him within a year because, she said, he was cheating on her. But the pair reconciled. They had two children together, a boy and a girl. Then, in 1982, Fleming filed for divorce — again. This time, she said, Reece became abusive. “He broke into my house and beat me up. Put a knife to my throat. Threw me down and put a shotgun to my head,” Fleming said. Reece eventually moved on. Court records show he remarried and got divorced a second time. But Fleming said the new woman called her on more than one occasion, asking her to take Reece back. Fleming, remembering how he once pummeled her so hard that half her face turned black, declined.


On a stormy spring day in 1986, the daughter of a deputy sheriff had just finished classes at the University of Oklahoma and was driving to her job as an aerobics instructor when her Mustang stalled on Interstate 35. The 19-year-old panicked. Rain pounded the highway. A tall fence separated her from a mall and a hotel, where she could call for help. Just as she considered climbing the fence, she would later tell a jury, a semi pulled up next to her. At the wheel was a young Reece, offering to help. Relieved, she got into his truck. Instead of taking her to a phone, however, Reece parked outside an Albertsons, grabbed the 115-pound college freshman and pinned her onto a mattress in the truck’s sleeper cab. In 1997, William Lewis Reece was a few months removed from prison — and young women started disappearing. (Courtesy Kathryn Casey) “Why are you doing this to me?” she screamed. He replied, simply, that he was “crazy.” Reece duct-taped her arms behind her back. He shoved her into an orange sleeping bag. He drove off. The next time he parked, he forced her to give him oral sex. Afterward, she testified, “he pulled his pants up, told me how much he loved me again, how he started being lonely and we were going to live forever in Houston.” The woman – The News does not typically identify victims of sexual assault – said she played along to gain Reece’s trust. She ultimately escaped by persuading him to let her use the bathroom. With witnesses around, she asked to use a pay phone to call her family. Reece, she said, gave her a quarter to make the call — then asked for a kiss goodbye. In his first known attack, Reece, 26, had revealed what would become the hallmarks of his crimes: a young woman, car trouble, proximity to a highway and an abduction that ends in sexual assault, death or both. He didn’t wait long to strike again. The next month, while awaiting trial for kidnapping and oral sodomy in the first case, he raped a woman he followed home from a bar. He was convicted in both attacks and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He would only serve 10. In October 1996, after an appeals court reduced his sentence because of improper comments by a prosecutor, Reece went free. He showed up at his mother’s house in Anadarko, where many locals knew little about his past. He seemed “very polite,” said Kathy Dobry, a family friend who said she took Reece into the city to get a new driver’s license, as a favor to his mother. “And dummy me,” she said, “I didn’t think to ask what he’d been in jail for because it didn’t concern me and my family.” Until that summer, when her teenage daughter disappeared.


The spring of 1997 was brisk, making way for a smoldering summer. The FBI had not yet created its national DNA database. Most people did not own cellphones. Reece, by then nearing 40, with reddish-brown hair and bags under his hazel eyes, had recently moved to Houston. He found work in construction and his old trade, shoeing horses. One ranch owner recalled sensing something was off about the new farrier. Butch Bloodworth said he once saw Reece hit a horse with a two-by-four because it wouldn’t stand still. Another time, he said, a teenage girl came to him crying because Reece had complimented her “sweet britches.” He suspected Reece of trying to sell him a stolen bulldozer. But no one yet knew that Reece, as Bloodworth put it, went around “looking for horses to shoe, things to steal and girls to kill.” They only knew that young women had started vanishing. On April 3, 1997 — just months after Reece’s early prison release and exactly 11 years after his first known attack — aspiring ballerina Laura Smither did not return home for breakfast after a run in her Houston suburb. The 12-year-old’s body was later found in a retention pond — nude and with signs of strangulation. The next month, Sandra Sapaugh discovered her tire had been slashed outside a Houston-area gas station off Interstate 45. A man offered to help — then kidnapped her at knifepoint and ordered her to undress. Sapaugh, pregnant with her third child, escaped by throwing herself out of his moving truck as it sped down the highway. William Reece (right), conferring with attorney Anthony Osso in a 1998 court hearing, has volunteered information to authorities in recent days that paints a picture of a serial killer who targeted women of a specific type and lured them into his grasp, often by posing as a good Samaritan. (Carlos Antonio Rios/Houston Chronicle) By July, another young mother, Kelli Cox, had disappeared a few miles off I-35 in Denton. She, too, had car trouble. Cox had hidden a spare key under her car because she had a class field trip to the city jail that day and could not bring personal items inside. When she returned, the key didn’t work, even though she’d tested it earlier. She walked less than two minutes to a gas station to call her boyfriend from a pay phone. That was her last known communication with anyone. “This is such a nightmare,” her aunt said after she disappeared. “Three weeks ago, I cried for a little girl who was missing in the Houston area. I never thought we’d be in the same situation.” Days later, Kathy Dobry’s daughter, Tiffany Johnston, was snatched from a car wash in Oklahoma. She had planned to celebrate three months of marriage that night. Authorities found her Dodge Neon at the car wash, the mats still hanging from clothespins. The girl, meanwhile, had been strangled, stripped of everything except a bathing suit top and dumped in weeds off a highway. The medical examiner found semen on her body. In August, a Galveston-area teenager, Jessica Cain, vanished off I-45 while driving home from a theater cast party. Her car had also been abandoned, with her wallet still inside. Hundreds of volunteers searched for her, including the father of the missing 12-year-old. Dietrich, the private investigator, theorizes that Cain might have seen amber lights flashing on Reece’s truck and believed a cop was pulling her over. This kidnapping spree — five women in five months — gnawed at authorities and fueled public intrigue about the “Texas Killing Fields,” an area off I-45 in Houston that’s known for dead bodies. Reece denied any involvement, even as he was named the prime suspect in the 12-year-old’s slaying. Even as the woman who jumped out of his truck underwent forensic hypnosis and identified him as her abductor. That fall, Reece sat in jail, stiff in a new gray suit, starched dress shirt and tie. He called the allegations against him a “crock,” telling the Houston Chronicle that he was “not the kind of person to kill.” He couldn’t wait to be exonerated, he said, so he could move to the mountains, far away from the people ruining his life. “I’m not a rapist,” he said. “I’m just an old country boy.” Reece aided investigators in the search for human remains in a field near Houston. (KTRK-TV) Kathy Dobry, the family friend who once took Reece to get his driver’s license, moved in a daze as she planned her daughter’s funeral. She picked out a rosary and a stuffed dog named Tippy to keep her baby company in the coffin. She also asked Reece’s mother, who did the family’s ironing, to press the burial outfit: an A-line skirt and a high-collared blouse that would hide the strangulation marks. For years after that, Dobry said, she found anonymously placed flowers and trinkets on her daughter’s grave. The gifts stopped after Reece’s mother died in 2005. “I really think that down deep she knew that Billy did it,” Dobry said. But even Dobry didn’t believe that until last year, when new DNA analysis linked Reece to the semen found on Johnston’s body. If not for that break, no one would know William Reece is a serial killer. After he was charged with Johnston’s murder, the Texas Rangers, hoping to close other cold cases, visited Reece in prison in Huntsville, according to his attorney, Anthony Osso. Reece, serving 60 years for kidnapping Sapaugh, has a life-threatening heart condition. He cooperated to avoid the death penalty in Johnston’s murder, Osso said, and to bring closure to the victims’ families. Of the four unsolved murders from 1997, Reece has implicated himself in two. He has been charged in another – Tiffany Johnston’s – and does not plan to fight the accusation, provided he can escape execution. Only one remains publicly in question: that of Laura Smither, the 12-year-old who disappeared while on a run. Osso would not say whether Reece had confessed to killing the girl, but did not deny his client’s involvement. “He feels like he got a lot off his chest,” Osso said. But serial killer expert Jack Levin doesn’t buy such a pure motive. “Getting it off his chest because he’s proud of it — not because he feels he is guilty of anything,” said Levin, a professor emeritus at Northeastern University in Boston. Most serial killers, he said, are sexual sadists who consider their crimes their “greatest achievement in life.” They’re master manipulators who use rape as a form of torture, often graduating to murder only “as a footnote” to avoid leaving witnesses. Kathryn Casey, a crime writer who interviewed Reece for her book Deliver Us, also doubted that Reece would help unless it served his own needs. “The Bill Reece I met in prison would not be doing this out of the goodness of his heart,” she said. Searchers in fields near Houston dug for the remains of Jessica Cain, which they would end up recovering – 19 years after she disappeared. (Jon Shapley/Houston Chronicle) As authorities dug deep into fields near Houston, Kelli Cox’s mother sat at home in Farmers Branch, waiting for answers. Surrounded by photos of her daughter, Jan Bynum agonized over where Cox might be. “I don’t want them to find remains,” she said. “I want her to come home.” On the other hand, Bynum said, “if she is gone, then I want to know.” Weeks went by. Authorities found one body, then another. Last month, they identified the remains as those of Cox and the missing Galveston girl, Jessica Cain. After 19 years, Bynum knew the truth — but she found that only led to more unrest. Why Kelli? How did her smart, ambitious girl get caught in this man’s trap? What unthinkable horrors did Kelli suffer on her way to Houston? She’ll never know. The earth and her life had been overturned, in search of answers that died with her daughter. Follow Sarah Mervosh and Claire Ballor on Twitter at @smervosh and @claireballor.