Edward Harold Bell Admits Eleven Murders

on September 27, 2011 in Serial Killers by Brian Combs

Edward Harold Bell was convicted of one murder. In letters obtained by the Houston Chronicle, he confessed to eleven others.

In 1978, Larry Dickens, a US Marine, confronted Bell when he saw Bell get out of his pickup truck sans pants, and begin masturbating in front of a group of girls in Pasadena, Texas (between Houston and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico). According to witnesses, Bell shot Larry four times with a pistol, then retrieved a rifle from his truck to finish Larry off.

Bell was convicted of the murder, and sentenced to 70 years in prison.

It has now been revealed that in a series of letters sent to Harris and Galveston county prosecutors in 1998, Bell first confessed to killing seven girls, and later confessed to killing eleven.

Investigators say that they long suspected that Bell had committed other murders, but that their investigations had stalled. And Galveston prosecutors refused to present Bell’s written confession to a grand jury.

The letters were later lost.

Said Galveston DA Kurt Sistrunk:

I didn’t believe we had sufficient evidence that we could proceed to grand jury with, and without getting into specifics, that’s the decision that had to be made, no matter the temptations to proceed otherwise … It wasn’t for a lack of effort.

Bell claims he killed five girls in 1971, and six more between 1974 and 1977. He named three of his alleged victims from 1971: Debbie Ackerman, Maria Johnson, and Colette Anise Wilson.

All three cases remain officially unsolved.