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The Texas Co-Ed Murders · DEADBUG SAYS

• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The following part, gas, visit that bug, park, gas, then is not suitable for children, and contains language that may offend.
• 0:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you're ready to proceed, won't you sit back?
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shut that pleasure given mouth of yours, smoke him if he got him, and hit play.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Austin, Texas, summer 1965.
• 0:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: They, in Texas that year, had a personality of its own.
• 0:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not the kind of heat mind you, the tourists talk about now, with the postcards and rooftop margaritas.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: women with their, they stook shores, right in high, with men's tongues sweltering up, wanted to get to that sweet nectar, inside, you know, the score, where there's live music spilling out into the streets, there's yelling and yelping from the hillbilly cowboys gone rogue out in the streets.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, this wasn't that kind of taxes.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a heavier taxes.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: A taxes slower than a down syndrome kid, though, a mathematics.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: A taxes where the air itself felt stained, yellow, bicycle, red, smoke.
• 1:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Body Oda, gasoline tubes, at night asked an humd, neon signs buzzed over motorcarts, ice machines rattled behind roadside motels, pickup trucks, rolled down dark farm roads, a country music blasted out through crapped windows.
• 1:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trans was just the word to describe the transcontinental highway.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that was still real, man.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The track was key.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: beneath low-moving ceiling fans, while women in press cotton dresses tried not to sweat through their makeup and still lookin' presentable.
• 2:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: An hanging overall of it was that strange, mid-1960s American feeling that it was a country cop between innocence and wrought.
• 2:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The war Vietnam was growing dark up by the month, young men with disappearing overseas.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them to never come back.
• 2:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: A new television series called The Adam's Family had everyone laughing, sitting around the TV set.
• 2:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's when they could get away from the news, cover on the civil rights protests, it seemed to be interrupted in things every hour upon the hour.
• 2:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Dodgers won the World Series, Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and the Chevrolet Impala was America's top-selling car.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: But most importantly, at all of this was that families still sat together for dinner.
• 3:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know, bizarre as that concept may seem, pretending everything was normal.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: While something underneath, had already begun to crack.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And an Austin, Thuxes, that were two young women who vanished into that crack by the name of Susan Riggs-Beam, and Shirley Stock, pretty.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Intelligent, educated, the kind of girls people describe those good girls, the kind of girls the parents trusted, church going, so we're already girls, future teachers, mothers, lives, and by the end of July 1965, both of them
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their bodies would be found discarded in an empty field under the brutal Texas sun.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, followed was one of the most unsettling murder cases in Texas history, because the killer was not some drifter, her ex-gate convict lurking in the shadows.
• 4:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The killer sat beside them, talked with them, smiled at them, and accorded the
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He can fast.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: But even that case later, the case still leaves behind a strange taste, because nothing about it feels clean, nothing about it feels finished.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the story of the 1965 Texas Co-Ed murders.
• 4:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now, before I give it all away, like some half-assed storyteller out of a crack at Jack Box, let's go back in time to Austin.
• 5:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back before the city began polished in modern.
• 5:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back when the only roads cut through open fields in the night felt endless.
• 5:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Back to the summer, where two girls disappeared, an evil lurk, a broad daylight,
• 5:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Susan Riggs Bay and Shirley Stark were both 21 years old, both from Texas, both students connected to the University of Texas.
• 5:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And both had the kind of future that looked already mapped out for him, teaching degrees, marriage maybe, children, small suburban homes with tidy lawns and station wagons parked
• 5:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American Dream, as it was sold back in 1965, you know the score?
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Susan was a pretty, leaky young thing.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alligant, thoughtful, the type of girl who'd make your ice cream melt.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Franz described her as warm, an intelligent, I'll show him.
• 6:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was ambitious, pretty, and well liked.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two young women will close friends and sorority sisters at Chai Omega.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They'd come to Austin in July of 1965 for entirely ordinary reasons.
• 6:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's always the terrifying part of stories like this.
• 6:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The no one ever realizes, journeys, mundane moments, that their death clocks were now ticking.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: On July 18th, they drove from Dallas to Austin and Shirley's yellow co-vare Montza.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now pitch at that for a moment.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A bright Texas afternoon, long highway stretch and south.
• 7:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Radio playing softly.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: When coming through the windows, the college girls laughin' about boys and classes and apartments and some uplands.
• 7:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some uplands that will never happen.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The world still felt safe to them.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Austin in 1965 was far smaller than it is now.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The skyline belly existed.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beyond the university in downtown, much of the city opened in the rough fields and undeveloped land.
• 7:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was stretches where you could drive at night and see almost nothing beyond the telephone balls passing in the darkness.
• 7:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Susan planned the move into an apartment for summer classes.
• 7:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shirley was visiting friends and handling university business before returning home.
• 8:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simple plans.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Simple girls.
• 8:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing dramatic.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: When they arrived in Austin, there was a delay getting access to the apartment.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they stopped for lunch at a holiday house restaurant.
• 8:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where they unexpectedly met Susan's friend Martha
• 8:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a nice surprise.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was one of those ordinary accidental meetings people remember forever afterwards because it becomes the final memory before paying, before darkness, before catastrophe.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The girls all laughed, they lunch, and talked casually.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody noticed danger.
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: After lunch, Susan and Shirley said they planned to visit a friend.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: A university attacks a student named James Cross.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is where the story begins turning dark.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: James Crosse Jr. was 23 years old by every outward appearance he did not look like a killer.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He came from a respectable fall or family.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was handsome, educated, intelligent.
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The son of a department store executive, he came from money.
• 9:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were the haves, and there were the haves nots in America at the time, and I guess still now.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he was definitely one of the haves.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He looked clean-cut, polished, well-manored.
• 9:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of young man parents would happily invite inside for dinner, which, if we're being honest, is often exactly what makes people truly dangerous.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The girl's left lunch, in the yellow core of her.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friends saw them wave as they sped away, weaving through the arced and traffic.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The superian, like spiders, washed down the kitchen sick.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that was the last confirmed sighten, a Susan Rakesby, and Shirley Stark.
• 10:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, nothing, the girls vanished, and days passed, then more days.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the keys to the no-bombon were failed to be picked up, now, family members became worried.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friends became worried, the police became involved.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But remember, this was 1965, and Festication's moved differently then.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when those cell phones, no surveillance cameras, no digital trail, no GPS tracking, if somebody disappeared, well, they could vanish almost completely.
• 11:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The person could disappear and the open land that not be found for days, sometimes long ago.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: As police searched, rumor spread through the university community, at the girls' runaway, met two strangers, the kind of look like Elvis, and headed south to Mexico.
• 11:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it happened in the Bihaz, with others.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why not them?
• 11:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they've been adopted, attacked by strangers.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city grew uneasy.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Parents whispered warnings to daughters.
• 11:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is why we give you curfews, young women.
• 11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stop walking alone at night.
• 12:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And no one will share for us true, but the skirts at the time they seem to get a little bit longer again.
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Referred back the 1950s.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And somewhere in Austin, the truth sat hidden beneath the July sun.
• 12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was 12 days after the girls had vanished.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: That survey is working near North Lamar Boulevard and Rundberg Lane.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Discovered something horrifying in an overgrown field.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two young female bodies, a meal to the maggots, almost stripped of all their flesh.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the taxes hidden itself had done terrible damage.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The skin that was left looked almost like bacon overcoat.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the girls were partially encoded.
• 13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their bodies discarded carelessly among the weeds and the sunflowers, but both of their legs spread wide.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as their final moments,
• 13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: a photograph of souls, of what their final moments must have looked like.
• 13:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their bodies discarded amongst the weeds in the wild, some flowers.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And suddenly I was then realized something terrifying.
• 13:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: This wasn't a disappearance.
• 13:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a murder.
• 13:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scene itself sounded almost cinematic in the worst possible way.
• 13:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Blazing sunlight overhead, dry grass, bending in the hot wind, like a blow dryer.
• 13:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: In sex buzzing, and do beautiful young women abandoned, like trash in an empty field at the edge of the city.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: One cop described the crime scene as horrific As the bodies had almost been burnt charcoal black from exposure to the summer Texas Both girls were shown the forehead so they definitely saw it coming as they begged for their lives Both had been raped Violated and every home God had given them It's unclear why one of them didn't run
• 14:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: while he was raping the other, possibly loyalty, fair.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who could say?
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Except for one of the girls, and the hands gawking.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The taxes piggys believed that the girls could have been murdered somewhere else and then dumped there in the field.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Transported from where?
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who could say?
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The contrast to the murders, the stub, the Texas Town Folk Deepling, because Susan and Shirley represented safety, respectability, middle-class, American innocence, and now they had become symbols of something much darker, something changing in America.
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Police immediately launched a massive investigation.
• 15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as four months ago, they had been brutally raped, until I was in unbeaten.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: My guess is much as you could tell when the bodies were burnt, like bacon.
• 15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The brutality of the crime shocked even the most seasoned of investigators.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Austin, Newspapers, exploded with coverage.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city became consumed by fear.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And almost immediately, suspicion turned towards 23-year-old James Cross.
• 15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the blunt family had mentioned the two girls said they were meeting up with them.
• 16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And besides the blunt family, he was the last known person connected to the victims.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: One police questioned them at first cross denied any involvement, but investigators noted in consistencies,
• 16:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: My once, not twice, but it seemed constantly.
• 16:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: His behavior became erratic.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, according to police reports, Graskin Fest.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The confessions stunned the Texas, clean cut, middle-class kid.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Miss family had money.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It didn't save me a typical murder.
• 16:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was safe to say that he wouldn't need to be ripping panties off girls, and they'd be usually dropping them for him.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: So why was this one different?
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cross said he was friendly with the girls, and they met up with them for coffee.
• 17:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Investigator has believed that Susan Rick's being and Shelley Stark went willingly to James Cross's apartment because they knew him socially through the University world.
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is important, there was no forced abduction at the beginning, no mass stranger.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: That makes what happened afterwards, feel even more bizarre.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosse said once he'd got the two pretty girls back to his apartment, his bachelor pad, something snapped, and in his own words, he just went mental.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And those exact words were, I became mentally detached from reality.
• 17:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: But prosecutors believed the crime showed planning in awareness afterwards.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, some of the details make him sound cold as ice.
• 17:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The confession reportedly describes Susan being attacked while Shirley was in the bathroom showering.
• 18:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about that psychologically for a second.
• 18:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: A hot blonde who's in your bathroom showering.
• 18:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He must have been harder than a cat's scratching post.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: That mental image is surely in the shower.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The water running down, or a long, taint legs, and Susan and a mini-scar, only sitting inches away.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He must have imagined putting that tip in until he could imagine the more.
• 18:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Annie revered to what all of us hide and subsided deep down.
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fucking animal, surely in the shower, singing her latest top ten favorite.
• 18:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: While a friend is being violated in every home, let God give her, and a few, she didn't even know she had.
• 18:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then surely walks out.
• 18:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: towel wrapped around her.
• 18:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And according to the prosecution narrative, cross attacks are too.
• 18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I was eight, 12, we into the abyss.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here's where it becomes even more sinister.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: If this tale could become more sinister, some reports imply the murders may not have been instantaneous.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are suggestions that prolong the salt and panic inside the apartment before the killings were completed.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The state believed sexual violence was the central to the mode of lust, the basis coin there is, and then comes the detail that absolutely destroys the temporary madness image.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the killing, he allegedly hid the bodies in a closet overnight, not immediately dumped, not panicked,
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: hidden inside his apartment, or he then went and slept like a baby, a double-rapping, murdering, and killing baby.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a detail that horrified people during the trial, because prosecutors used it to argue this wasn't blind in sanity.
• 20:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, somehow, they get worse.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the trial, a teenager comes forward and said that she'd met up with cross, socially that evening.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she said that he seemed in good spirits, even though he just killed two young women and raped them.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And she admitted embarrassingly that he even think of fucked up in the bag of his car.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, as she went down on him, undoubtedly tasting the two girls he just murdered, the sort of image and thing that a jury member will remember, forever.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because it's a just compartmentalization so severe, it feels almost inhuman.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let's talk about his actual demeanor.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: and his defense to these heinous crimes.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Crosse is a turning pushed hard for insanity.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not sadness, not remorse.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the kid ran that job.
• 21:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Insanity, the number one defense of killers even to this day.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The courtroom battle became, was James Crosse evil, or mentally broken beyond control.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Psychiatrist has defied, the fence witness described him as emotionally unstable, deeply disturbed, the touch from reality, some reports from the era describe him as vacant, and disconnected during the proceedings, and yet Cross was still able to get too young, pretty co-eds to come back to his place and shower.
• 22:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: does money, greed, complacency.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's odd to imagine what these two girls were thinking.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they just, young wild and free, that they trust them, was there a sexual attraction.
• 22:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But pros, Acute is Hammett once specific point.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: If Cros was so insane and he didn't understand his actions, why do you hide the bodies?
• 22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why dump them miles away?
• 22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: why attempt to avoid discovery.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That contradiction sat at the center of the trial.
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And remember, 1965 juries were very suspicious of insanity, please, especially in Texas.
• 22:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if you go to Texas and you commit a murder, wow, you guaranteed to go to the chair.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the defense had the pain him almost psychologically shattered beyond ordinary comprehension.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another fascinating detail, he was reportedly obsessed with religion and morality in strange ways after the murders.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some accounts suggest he drifted into bizarre guilt and emotional collapse afterwards, leading to his swift confession.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the confession itself is bizarre.
• 23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He didn't get cornered dramatically by the tactics, according to reports.
• 23:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: telephone the police a couple of days later saying he wanted the confess.
• 23:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That changes the energy of the entire story.
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean just picture it.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Austin police have this major story about two girls, missing and then murdered, and then suddenly the killer calls him.
• 23:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's a shit movie's a made out of.
• 23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's psychologically loaded.
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Why can't fast?
• 23:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Guilt, fear, mental collapse, desire for attention or religious torment?
• 24:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: When cross pleaded insanity, the trial, the Ghana, a completely different tone because psychiatrists became involved and the public became divided.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was he generally insane, or simply manipulative?
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was the confession real, or co-host?
• 24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: While accounts, the core room atmosphere reportedly became tense and theatrical.
• 24:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers described cross appearing calm one moment and emotionally detached the next.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And remember the cultural backdrop here, this is the mid-1960s.
• 24:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: America had become fascinated by psychology and disturb minds.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The public was beginning the year in New Language, around mental illness, criminal pathology and violent impulses.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: People wanted monsters to look monstrous, but James Crossey didn't.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a good looking kid.
• 25:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that unnerved everyone.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He looked ordinary.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the detail the lingers in cases like this, not the sexual violence, the normality, the fact that evil can wear a breast shirt, drive a sports car, and smile politely,
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: During trial proceedings, horrific details emerged about the murders themselves.
• 25:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The prosecution painted Crosse as a sexually violent and deeply disturbed young man, the defense insisted he was mentally broken, beyond comprehension.
• 25:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ultimately, Crosse was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for many God-fearing folk in Texas, that verdict felt unjust and unbearable.
• 26:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The families of Susan and Shirley had lost everything.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two girls with futures erased in a patch of Texas weeds.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And although the death penalty had been halted in taxes that year because of growing concerns and just won't write, and if you believe in God, well it seemed now that Cross would be avoidin traditional prison all together.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can get a bed in a nice, comfy, state mental institution.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the story still didn't end there.
• 26:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Years past, America changed.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 1960s became the 1970s and Vietnam War ended, and then the 1980s.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Austin transformed, high-rise disappeared, the music culture exploded.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sleepy Texas city evolved into something modern and crowded.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the murders, well, they never fully disappeared.
• 27:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because every so often James Cross resurfaced in the headlines again.
• 27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Questions arose about his mental condition, but possible release, but whether he still posed the danger, the society, and pretty young girls, and every time his name appeared, it reopened, those old wounds, imagine being a parent of one of those girls and seeing the killer's
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Imagine the heartbreak, the fury, the helplessness, the exhaustion of grief that never fully leaves a parent of a mother child.
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the late 1980s reports emerged that Crosse had been released on bail during legal proceedings, connected to his confinement.
• 28:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just quietly walked away, meant of the sunset.
• 28:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: That news outraged many Texans, because in the minds of the public, Susan and Shirley never got to leave.
• 28:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: They never got another summer, never got older, never got to become teachers.
• 28:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Time stopped for them forever, on our July day, in 1965.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe that's part of the reason that this case still feels haunting to this very day.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not because it was the bloodiest crime in Texas history, not because it remains unsolved,
• 28:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The illusion that good families, educated girls, bright futures, and respectable surroundings could somehow protect people from the evil that lurks in the shadows.
• 29:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 1960s destroyed that illusion of no malady for one of a better word.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, and again,
• 29:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Texas co-admothers, as it became known as, were part of that larger unraveling.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before Ted Bundy, before the zodiac killer, before America became fully aware of how charming predators could be.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: This case arrived at the edge of a cultural shift, and, as then itself, almost feels like a character in the story.
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: People today imagine bustling tech campuses and crowded nightlife and music festivals.
• 29:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in 1965, darkness still dominated huge sections of the city, with open land, lonely roads, fields, stretching beneath giant texas skies.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: With the heat in the sun blazing down.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's something especially terrifying but crimes committed in wide open places with the walls, no alleyways, no witnesses, just emptiness.
• 30:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: As though that landed self, swallows the screams, and even now, if you drive certain roads outside Austin later night, you can still feel echoes of that old detexus,
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: the neon signs, maybe no one.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The highways wider, but once you leave the city glow behind, darkness returns quickly.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I swallows the flood, mark, and contrasting.
• 31:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Telephone polls disappear in it in the way.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I've become lazy to imagine a bright yellow
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as I'm on July, I'm at the 65th, but they'll pretty girls inside.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Short skirts.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Believe at least they'll head down whole lives ahead of them.
• 31:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, wrong, they were, in cases like this they leave scars, not because of the violence alone.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, sure, they were plenty of the hunt.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But because of the interruption, the sudden tearing away of ordinary life, Susan and Shirley should have become old women, they should have enjoyed their life, they should have complained
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: They should have forgotten the details of college summers because they were too busy, that gates beyond them, and something maybe they would share at a reunion now and then.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, they remain permanently 21, forever frozen in those paper photographs.
• 32:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's what makes all the motor cases so unsettling.
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: victims never age.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the world around them, while it keeps moving, and eventually memory itself becomes fragile.
• 32:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: People forget names, forget details.
• 32:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city's build over old fields, and restaurants close, witness his time.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The landscape changes until it almost feels like the crime never happened at all.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and somewhere in Austin tonight, people are driving roads connected to this story without even knowing it.
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's a strange thing about true crime.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The world seems to keep building over horror.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Coffee shops appear where terror once lived.
• 33:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: A barman complex is rise over old emptiness.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Life moves on with a man who is emotionally ready or not.
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: But every so often a story claws its way back up through history.
• 33:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the 1965 Texas Coab murders remains one of those stories, not simply, because of all the brutality.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: but because the atmosphere surrounding it, the feeling of innocence collapsing, the feeling of America changing shape in real time, the feeling that something dark had entered the modern age wearing a friendly face.
• 33:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And maybe that's why the case still lingers in the imagination, that case later, because deep down, it taps into one of society's darkest fears.
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But monsters sit in beside us in the daylight, talk and softly, smile and politely, waiting.
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Susan Rexby and Shirley Stark came to Austin expecting an ordinary summer week.
• 34:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead, they became part of Texas history.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the imberable heat of that July 1965, Boston lost something to her.
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not just too young women,
• 34:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: with another piece of innocence, and maybe just maybe once in a sense the disappears and never really comes back.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: James Claude Crosst Jr died in 2001 at the age of 58 years old.
• 35:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no public record of his closet death.
• 35:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I guess the
• 35:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this has been the facts, or at least how they are known.
• 35:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reaccount it by deadbuck your consias to the abyss.
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to close this one out with a song dedication for all of you who have lost someone and dream of them coming back.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I have the future in summer, Friday night.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know then ever come and back.
• 36:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Going in the sink, the side of your keys Cold little shine under the leeks You left your scarf on my chair back Red thread hanging like a thin crack
• 36:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: my thumb keeps moving and it stops same old corner, same old stop and I keep the door crept like maybe you come back one more time one more time
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Come back, take this sake Come back, come back before I break, broken, broken
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And be sure in yourself Rain on the still mud on my shoes Every small thing still points to you The kettle clicks and those still I poured too much out of habit And the whole room feels your name Like a note
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Take this steak Come back, come back before
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: If your halfway down the block, if you stuck at the corner, stop if you miss me Just a little turn around, make it some more Come back, come back, take this lake Come back, come back before
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm crying in the sink beside your keys Call that'll shine under the wings