Jan Bynum has been waiting nearly 19 years to find out what happened to her daughter Kelli Cox, a 20-year-old University of North Texas honor student who went missing after a tour of the Denton jail with her criminology class. Now Bynum is hopeful that she may be closer to getting answers.

Texas Rangers dug in a Brazoria County pasture on Tuesday in search of human remains that may belong to Cox. Investigators said William Lewis Reece, a convicted rapist and kidnapper who's long been a person of interest in Cox's disappearance, is cooperating with them as they seek to solve the mysterious disappearance of multiple young women two decades ago.

The digging in Brazoria County follows the recent discovery of remains in a Harris County pasture that authorities believe may be those of Jessica Cain, a 17-year-old who vanished without a trace in Galveston County in 1997. Reece, now considered a potential serial killer, was observed helping direct searchers at the scene of that dig.

The searches have reopened old wounds for family members like Bynum, who is hoping for answers but doesn't expect closure.

"It may close one door, but then it opens another," Jan Bynum said, her voice cracking, by phone from the Dallas area Tuesday. "I just want to know if she's in God's arms. Not a day goes by that I still don't cry."

At the center of the revived investigations is Reece, 54, who has so far been convicted, charged or identified as a potential suspect in attacks on seven young women in Texas and Oklahoma.

The first two attacks occurred in Oklahoma in 1986; Reece was convicted of kidnapping and rape and spent the next decade in prison, until his release in October 1996.

Reece, a transient truck driver and heavy equipment operator, was convicted in 1998 of kidnapping 19-year-old Sandra Sapaugh of Galveston County, who escaped by leaping from his fast-moving truck onto Interstate 45 in 1997. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison.

DNA led to charges

Investigators are focusing on a number of attacks and disappearances involving young women that occurred in 1997, before Reece was put back behind bars.

Advances in DNA testing led to his being charged with the abduction, rape, and murder of 19-year-old Tiffany Johnson of Bethany, Okla., in September 1997.

Johnson vanished from a car wash, where her vehicle was found abandoned with her money, keys and jewelry inside. Her partially clothed body was later found in a patch of weeds in nearby Yukon, Okla. She had been strangled.

Since those charges, authorities say Reece has been "cooperating" with investigators, leading them to the pastures in Harris and Brazoria counties where they believe Cain and Cox may have been buried.

Authorities are waiting for the completion of DNA testing to identify the remains uncovered in March after two weeks of digging in the Harris County pasture, which is near Hobby Airport. Nothing has been unearthed in the pasture off a private road near Angleton in Brazoria County so far.

"We have two investigators at the dig site in Brazoria County, but no developments yet," said Denton police spokesman Shane Kizer. "We have talked informally to Reece twice, and he has been fully cooperating. We would like to get this case solved. How can a parent ever have peace not knowing where their daughter is?"

'I just want answers'

Both Cain and Cox vanished without a trace about a month apart in 1997. Only their abandoned cars, with their valuables locked inside, were ever found.

Cain, a Catholic preparatory school senior, had celebrated her performance in a high school musical with a cast party at a Clear Lake restaurant and was driving home on Aug. 17, 1997, when she disappeared.

Cox had finished a tour of the Denton jail with classmates on July 15, 1997, when she realized she'd locked her keys and purse in her car. She walked to a nearby gas station to telephone her boyfriend.

But when he arrived to help, she was nowhere to be found, her mother said.

She left behind a young daughter, Alexis, who is now a sophomore studying English and Spanish in college.

"I know my daughter would not have gotten in a car with somebody she did not know, not willingly," said her mother. "We were just a middle-class family. Don't assume something like this won't happen to you. You can never let your guard down."

Within the first months of Cox's disappearance, FBI investigators targeted Reece as a person of interest in her disappearance, the mother said.

"They could prove he had traveled from the Houston area and made a purchase at a gas station on I-45 in Denton on the same day she vanished near there," Bynum said. "They got copies of her fingerprints to check. Nothing panned out then. But now he's speaking up, wanting to make a deal to avoid the death penalty for the new charges in Oklahoma."

She doesn't object to his spending the rest of his life in prison, which she said might be harder than a quick death.

"I just want answers," she said.

Record of offenses

Jessica Cain's parents have declined comment, as family members say it's too painful to talk about until they know for certain if their daughter has been found.

Reece has also been listed as a person of interest in the 1997 slaying of 12-year-old Laura Smither, who vanished while jogging through her Friendswood neighborhood. The face of the aspiring ballerina was flashed over the nightly news for 17 days until her body, clad only in a pair of socks, was found in a Pasadena retention pond.

Her parents, Bob and Gay Smither, later won a $110 million wrongful death lawsuit against Reece, who chose not to participate.

Reece was also convicted of the 1986 kidnapping and rape of a University of Oklahoma freshman, who was bound with duct tape and zipped into a sleeping bag that he shoved inside the sleeper compartment of his truck. She escaped after pretending to befriend him when he allowed her to use the restroom.

He was also convicted of raping another woman whom he met at a bar while he was out on bond waiting to be tried for assaulting the Oklahoma college student.