News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

It has been described as “as good a place as they come” - for serial killers with a body to dump.

Around Texas’ Interstate 45 south of Houston, a desolate, marshy stretch of wasteland, close to abandoned oil fields.

And for decades murderers have done just that.

Since the 1970s nearly 40 young women and girls have been found murdered, or mysteriously vanished, along this 25-acre patch of land known as the Texas Killing Fields.

Their dismembered or mutilated bodies were dumped in fields, lakes and canals.

And while police believe some are linked, they accept that most have no connection with the others.

The cases of missing or murdered females linked to the site mostly remain unsolved.

The victims were aged between 12 and 34 and have been found in a period spanning four decades, from 1971 to 2002.

This has lead the 68-mile stretch of highway next to the Killing Fields being dubbed the bloodiest road in America.

Last month, however, police finally identified two of the women from the Killing Fields, using new DNA and genetic genealogy techniques.

For years known only as Jane Doe and Janet Doe, officers were able to identify them as 31-year-old Audrey Cook, of Memphis, and 34-year-old Donna Prudhomme, of Port Arthur.

They were among four women found in the same abandoned oil field, known as Calder 3000, during a six-year period between 1984 and 1991.

The FBI suspects that a single serial killer murdered all four women.

Audrey’s body was found in 1986 by police who were investigating the murder of another girl, 16-year-old runaway Laura Miller, 16, whose body was found by two children riding bikes.

Their remains were found next to each other.

Donna’s body was found in September 1991 by horseback riders, three months after she was last found alive.

Laura, who was last seen at a gas station in nearby League City after calling her boyfriend in September 1984, had been shot in the back of the head by a small caliber weapon.

Police have not revealed how the other women died.

Another young woman, cocktail waitress Heide Villarreal-Fye, disappeared at the same gas station as Laura, a year earlier in October 1983.

The 23-year-old had left her parents’ home in League City to hitch a ride to see her boyfriend.

Six months later, a family living near the Calder 3000 field had a grisly surprise when their dog wandered home carrying Heide’s head.

Police later found her dumped body.

In 1993 Sgt Pat Bittne, investigating the case, said: “We have girls with similar appearances and similar hair colour.

"The area where the bodies are being left [is similar]. The girls are all left nude.”

Police hope that having identified the other two women they might now gather more information to help finally solve these, and other cold cases from the Killing Fields, going back decades.

Despite a number of suspects being named over the years, no-one has ever been charged over those four murders, or indeed most of the others.

After visiting the sites of recovered bodies, Ami Canaan Mann, director of the film Texas Killing Fields, described the area as “a perfect place for killing somebody and getting away with it.”

He said: “You could actually see the refineries that are in the south end of League City. You could see the I-45.

"But if you yelled, no one would necessarily hear you. And if you ran, there wouldn't necessarily be anywhere to go.”

And the frightening frequency with which bodies have been found in the wastelands along the Interstate 45 has led many to believe that the murders have been the work of not one, but a succession of serial killers down the years.

The gruesome murders began in the early seventies.

Five teenagers were found dead there in 1971, and six more between 1974 and 1977. Of those, six were murdered in pairs.

The first bodies were those of 13-year-old Colette Wilson and Gloria Gonzales, 19, who were dumped 35 metres from each other.

Colette had been dropped off at a bus stop after summer school. Her body was found 40 miles away from where she was last seen, naked with a single gunshot wound to the head - just like Laura Miller, who died in the same spot 12 years later.

In August 1971, two 14-year-old girls, Rhonda Johnson and Sharon Shaw, disappeared after a day at a nearby beach.

Six months later, two boys fishing saw a skull floating in Clear Lake, nine miles north of the Calder 3000 field, and both girls’ skeletal remains were recovered.

Again, both girls, were shot in the back of the head.

A local gas station attendant and sex offender, Michael Self, was convicted of Sharon’s murder but it was later found he had been coerced into a false confession and was acquitted.

Then, on November 9, 1971, three young girls vanished from Houston and Galveston.

Allison Craven, 12, disappeared from her mother’s apartment near the Interstate 45.

Her dismembered body was found four months later, buried in two places 12 miles from her home.

Six days after Allison disappeared, best friends Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson, both 15, were last seen accepting a ride from a man in a white van at an ice cream shop.

Their bodies were found in a canal near the highway, between Galveston and League City.

They had been bound and stripped from the waist down.

Police discovered that the girls were both friends of Sharon Shaw and Rhonda Johnson, who they knew from a water ski school, but still police were nowhere nearer to finding their killer.

The catalogue of harrowing disappearances and grisly discoveries carried on year after year.

The victims were always girls or young women and they were often killed in the same way, shot in the head after being stripped.

They included 16-year-old Kimberly Pitchford in 1973, 12-year-old Suzanne Bowers in 1977, and best friends Brooks Bracewell and Georgia Geer, aged 12 and 14, in 1974, whose remains were not found until 1981, just 12 miles from where they were last seen.

The killings continued in the eighties, when 19-year-old waitress Shelley Sikes, and Suzanne Richerson, 22, vanished from their jobs and were never seen again.

Shelley’s car was later found abandoned on the side of the Interstate 45, bogged in mud, splattered with blood and the windscreen smashed.

Her body has never been found but Gerald Zwarst, 63, was later convicted of her aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to life.

And there was no let up in the nineties either.

In February 1996, friends Lynette Bibbs and Tamara Fisher, aged 14 and 15, were dropped off at a motel near Houston city centre.

Days later their bodies were found dumped by a rural road in Cleveland, 50 miles north.

The following month 13-year-old Krystal Jean Baker - who great aunt was Norma Jean Baker, or Marilyn Monroe, was found murdered under a bridge in Texas city, hours after leaving her grandmother’s home.

She had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled to death with a ligature.

Itinerant refinery welder, Kevin Edison Smith, was convicted 16 years later of her murder, after her dress was resubmitted for DNA analysis and yielded a semen stain.

In 1997, two murders convinced police they were committed by the same person.

The bodies of aspiring ballerina Laura Smither, 12, and nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, were found 300 miles apart, Laura in a pond near the Interstate 45 and Amber in Arlington, Texas.

Both had been stripped of all their clothes, except for a single sock.

Several months later, another teenager, 17-year-old Jessica Cain, went missing after dining at a restaurant with friends.

Her father’s truck, which she had been driving, was found abandoned on the Interstate 45, with witnesses saying she had walked towards a red Isuzu Amigo which was stopped behind her vehicle.

Nineteen years later, in 2016, her remains were found in a horse paddock in south Houston - and police charged convicted kidnapper William Reece, who had been in prison since 1998, with her murder.

Reece is also to stand trail for the murder of Laura Smither and Amber Hagerman, as well as 19-year-old newlywed Tiffany Johnson, who was stranger to death at an Oklahoma carwash, and Kelli Ann Cox, a 20-year-old student who vanished in 1997 from Denton, in the state’s north.

But while police were sure they’d captured one of the Interstate 45’s serial killers, even after he was locked up bodies continued to turn up in the Texas Killing Fields.

In 2002, a fisherman found the decomposed body of Sarah Trusty, who had vanished 14 days earlier while riding her bike in Galveston County.

And in November 2006 two female bodies were found within a week.

Terra Vanegas, 16, who had disappeared after a Halloween party, was found at the edge of a field, raped, strangled and cut with a knife.

Then seven days later a passer-by found the naked body of Amanda Kellum, 27, at the edge of a bay near the Interstate 24. She had been beaten and stabbed to death.

Police now hope last month’s DNA breakthrough may finally solve so many mysteries and snare whoever committed the murders that had haunted the area for decades.