Latest / Gone Cold - Texas True Crime / The Murder of Linda Jane Phillips

Transcript

The Murder of Linda Jane Phillips · Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

0:04
Speaker 1: Killers don't just take lives, They reshape everything they left behind.
0:09
Speaker 1: A quiet back road, a busy stretch of highway, a
0:13
Speaker 1: house that once felt safe now a shrine to everything
0:17
Speaker 1: that went wrong. Across Texas, deserts, fields and bayous keep
0:22
Speaker 1: their secrets buried, but not forever. From the creators of
0:26
Speaker 1: Gone Cold. Comes of Hell Texas True Crime, a podcast
0:31
Speaker 1: about the state's most depraved killers and the scars they
0:35
Speaker 1: left on every town, every family, every mile marker they touched.
0:41
Speaker 1: Stories that ask one burning question, were there more victims?
0:46
Speaker 1: Some folks aren't just from Hell, they'reo it. Of Hell
0:51
Speaker 1: Texas True Crime coming soon. Subscribe wherever you listen to
0:56
Speaker 1: podcasts Gone Cold. Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter.
1:05
Speaker 1: Listener discretion is advised. Dallas and Kaufman Counties exist shoulder
1:11
Speaker 1: to shoulder, but can feel like different areas, stitched together
1:16
Speaker 1: by two lanes of asphalt, river bends, and stretches of
1:20
Speaker 1: dense woods. In the summer of nineteen seventy, the city
1:24
Speaker 1: of Dallas was roaring forward, with oil and banking money
1:28
Speaker 1: pooling into mirrors of glass downtown. The population just under
1:33
Speaker 1: a million at that time. Kaufman County, just east down
1:38
Speaker 1: Highways eighty or one seventy five, moved at a steady,
1:43
Speaker 1: older rhythm. Farm to market roads cut between fields of
1:47
Speaker 1: wheat and cattle. Courthouse squares set the tempo. Friday nights
1:53
Speaker 1: were for football, and most folks recognized the sheriff on site.
1:58
Speaker 1: The population sat at around thirty thousand, two different worlds
2:04
Speaker 1: side by side, one chasing the future, the other anchored
2:08
Speaker 1: to the land itself. In August of that year, those
2:13
Speaker 1: worlds met in the worst possible way. In nineteen seventy,
2:43
Speaker 1: Linda Jane Phillips was twenty six years old, a teacher
2:47
Speaker 1: who'd earned her degree at North Texas University in Denton
2:51
Speaker 1: and put four years into the classroom. Colleagues remembered her
2:56
Speaker 1: as steady, patient and reliable, someone who stayed after school
3:01
Speaker 1: to help a child who needed one more explanation. She
3:05
Speaker 1: had taught at Forest Ridge in Richardson during the previous
3:09
Speaker 1: few school years, and over that summer she had given
3:13
Speaker 1: up her apartment in Dallas to spend time back home
3:16
Speaker 1: in Kaufman with her parents. Her father, Jimmy Phillips, was
3:21
Speaker 1: the superintendent of Kaufman Schools, meaning the family name carried
3:25
Speaker 1: some civic weight across the county. Linda had grown into
3:30
Speaker 1: an adult life of service that made sense to her
3:33
Speaker 1: and the people around her. On the evening of Saturday,
3:39
Speaker 1: August eighth, nineteen seventy, Linda was attending a wedding party
3:43
Speaker 1: in North Dallas, near Cedar Springs Road. It was the
3:47
Speaker 1: kind of summer gathering that stretched late into the warm night,
3:51
Speaker 1: a swirl of friends and small talk and the chatter
3:54
Speaker 1: of what the next school year might hold. Linda had
3:59
Speaker 1: told her parents she'd stay nearby in Dallas with friends
4:02
Speaker 1: of her brother's fiance, something relatively normal for her. She
4:08
Speaker 1: discussed the same thing with friends at the party. Sometime
4:12
Speaker 1: after two thirty am, now Sunday the ninth, Linda changed
4:16
Speaker 1: her mind. She said her goodbyes and walked out to
4:19
Speaker 1: her car to head southeast toward home. The route from
4:24
Speaker 1: north central Dallas out to Kaufman was familiar, east on
4:28
Speaker 1: Highway eighty, skirting Mesquite and Forny, then cutting down on
4:33
Speaker 1: Farm Road sixteen forty one toward Tlty, the east fork
4:37
Speaker 1: of the Trinity River on your left. As the road
4:39
Speaker 1: bent through low country. It was a nocturnal drive that
4:44
Speaker 1: a careful person might make in forty five minutes if
4:47
Speaker 1: you caught all the green lights and kept a steady speed.
4:51
Speaker 1: But Linda never arrived. By daylight, someone spotted a car
4:57
Speaker 1: pulled off along FM sixteen forty one one between the
5:01
Speaker 1: small towns of Tlty and Forny. The driver's window was smashed,
5:06
Speaker 1: The glass inside the vehicle and scattered along the gravel.
5:10
Speaker 1: Shimmered in the morning sun. Near the shoulder lay women's clothing.
5:16
Speaker 1: The vehicle was soon identified as belonging to Linda Phillips.
5:21
Speaker 1: Kaufman County Sheriff Roy Brockway and his deputies took one
5:25
Speaker 1: look and opened a search that would swell into the hundreds.
5:30
Speaker 1: Searchers quickly found more clothing, a shoe, pantyhose, slacks, and
5:36
Speaker 1: half of a brazier. Some of the items were stained
5:39
Speaker 1: with blood. The situation was urgent. After an initial search
5:45
Speaker 1: of the immediate area, Linda was nowhere to be found.
5:49
Speaker 1: At the scene of the car, there were no skid marks,
5:53
Speaker 1: no gouges in the dirt to suggest a crash, and
5:56
Speaker 1: nothing inside the vehicle to mark a struggle. Looked like
6:00
Speaker 1: a stop, not a collision. That day, folks in Kaufman County,
6:05
Speaker 1: Texas mobilized about three hundred people, law officers, citizens, ranchers
6:12
Speaker 1: on horseback, DPS troopers, and eventually Texas Rangers fanned out
6:18
Speaker 1: along creeks and hedgerows. They walked fence lines and ravines
6:23
Speaker 1: and low spots along the bottoms. Between Forney and Kaufman.
6:28
Speaker 1: The air was thick August heat lay on the land.
6:32
Speaker 1: By four pm, the temperature had reached one hundred and
6:35
Speaker 1: two degrees. Volunteers pushed through Johnson grass and holly, the
6:40
Speaker 1: places where a thing can lay hidden in broad daylight,
6:45
Speaker 1: through the afternoon and into the dark. There was no
6:48
Speaker 1: sign of Linda. The next dawn. They went back out.
6:54
Speaker 1: Late Monday morning, August tenth, a construction worker from Terrell,
6:59
Speaker 1: Alfonso te Arena, was driving a gravel road near the
7:03
Speaker 1: tiny community of Post Oak, just a few miles north
7:06
Speaker 1: of Kaufman. He saw something light colored in a hedgerow
7:11
Speaker 1: bordering a field, something obviously out of place. Alfonso stopped
7:16
Speaker 1: his truck and walked closer. Shocked by what he'd found,
7:21
Speaker 1: the body of a woman, he headed straight to the
7:24
Speaker 1: Sheriff's office alongside deputies. Justice of the Piece Joe W.
7:30
Speaker 1: Fowler came to the scene. He later estimated that Linda
7:34
Speaker 1: had been dead about twenty hours, likely killed just before
7:38
Speaker 1: dawn on Sunday. The death was a homicide. That much
7:43
Speaker 1: was immediately certain. It was difficult for officers at the
7:47
Speaker 1: scene to know the precise nature of Linda's wounds. She
7:51
Speaker 1: had been stripped and mutilated and left along that green
7:55
Speaker 1: narrow hedgerow, a place Sheriff Brockway ascertained, you'd only know
8:00
Speaker 1: to use if you understood the back roads and knew
8:03
Speaker 1: that the nearest farmhouse had just recently been vacated. Brockway
8:09
Speaker 1: believed he was dealing with a killer who knew Kaufman County.
8:14
Speaker 1: The autopsy at Parkland Hospital would eventually determine that Linda
8:18
Speaker 1: died as the result of twenty six stab wounds, primarily
8:23
Speaker 1: to the chest, throat, and abdomen. Pathologists confirmed sexual assault.
8:30
Speaker 1: Whether certain acts were pre or post mortem would require
8:34
Speaker 1: additional testing, the kind of lab work that in nineteen
8:38
Speaker 1: seventy could take time and wouldn't always deliver clean answers.
8:43
Speaker 1: The pattern of the wounds and the condition of the
8:45
Speaker 1: body told lawman what the location already had. This was
8:49
Speaker 1: a killing committed by someone who had time and the
8:53
Speaker 1: privacy to do their worst. Back at the car on
8:57
Speaker 1: FM sixteen forty one invests, instigators had already started to
9:01
Speaker 1: form a narrow path of theory. The glass inside suggested
9:06
Speaker 1: the window had been struck from the outside. On the road,
9:10
Speaker 1: there were no tire marks, no sign of a forced runoff.
9:15
Speaker 1: Sheriff Brockway believed Linda had pulled over for someone, maybe
9:19
Speaker 1: someone she recognized, or someone who flagged her down convincingly.
9:25
Speaker 1: What he didn't believe was that she'd have stopped for
9:28
Speaker 1: a stranger on a lonely farm road in the middle
9:31
Speaker 1: of the night. The idea shaped the first days of interviews.
9:36
Speaker 1: Officers first stuck to the Dallas wedding party, list ringing
9:40
Speaker 1: telephones and taking statements, building a grid of movement through
9:45
Speaker 1: the early hours of Sunday morning. Nothing tracked to a suspect.
9:51
Speaker 1: Some details had a peculiar gravity. Among Linda's clothing, one
9:57
Speaker 1: item never turned up, a wig she war to the party.
10:02
Speaker 1: Every other piece thrown along the road, as though pitched
10:05
Speaker 1: one at a time from a moving vehicle, was eventually recovered.
10:10
Speaker 1: The wig was not that missing article was the kind
10:14
Speaker 1: of fact that anchor's theories for years, a trophy taken,
10:18
Speaker 1: perhaps a piece the killer kept. The Dallas newspapers noted it.
10:24
Speaker 1: Lawman did not dismiss it. The sheriff's office put out
10:28
Speaker 1: what it had. Two days after the discovery, the press
10:32
Speaker 1: asked straightforward questions. Was there anything to go on? Sheriff
10:38
Speaker 1: Brockway's public answer was blunt, not a thing. He said
10:43
Speaker 1: he and his deputies were working every thread. A Dallas
10:47
Speaker 1: man reported that he and a friend had seen a
10:50
Speaker 1: woman who fit Linda's description walking toward Kaufman along Highway
10:54
Speaker 1: one seventy five in the Kleeberg area. He claimed his
10:58
Speaker 1: friend gave her a ride to a truck stop and
11:01
Speaker 1: that she mentioned a Dallas party, then left there with
11:05
Speaker 1: three people, one a woman. It was examined and set aside.
11:11
Speaker 1: It didn't hold. Nothing seemed to. On August fourteenth, nineteen seventy,
11:28
Speaker 1: the case of the murder of school teacher Linda Jane
11:31
Speaker 1: Phillips lurched forward when a forty six year old man
11:34
Speaker 1: walked into the Little Rock, Arkansas Police Department and said
11:38
Speaker 1: he feared he might have had something to do with
11:41
Speaker 1: the killing. He told authorities that he'd been drinking heavily
11:45
Speaker 1: that weekend and didn't trust his own memory. That led
11:49
Speaker 1: Dallas County deputies to this man's companion, a thirty year
11:53
Speaker 1: old man working at a drive in, who was hauled
11:56
Speaker 1: to Kaufman and questioned. Both men were eventually released. The
12:02
Speaker 1: motel room of the younger man contained pornographic materials, which
12:07
Speaker 1: was what it was, but it didn't connect him to Linda,
12:10
Speaker 1: to Kaufman County, or to any crime, even considering the
12:15
Speaker 1: obscenity laws at the time. The brief flurry of hope
12:19
Speaker 1: around and arrest evaporated. The Richardson Independent School District, where
12:26
Speaker 1: Linda had taught, put up a five thousand dollars reward
12:29
Speaker 1: to try and shake something loose. The account was opened
12:32
Speaker 1: at First Bank and Trust in Richardson, and the reward
12:36
Speaker 1: would go to anyone with information leading to an arrest
12:39
Speaker 1: and conviction. It produced tips and talk, but no forward movement.
12:46
Speaker 1: Officers spent entire weeks walking down the path of public
12:50
Speaker 1: rumor and speculation, but it led nowhere. Reporters in the
12:55
Speaker 1: Metroplex began to ask a different question. Was Linda's murder
13:00
Speaker 1: connected to other unsolved killings behind closed doors? Area law
13:05
Speaker 1: enforcement was way ahead of them. There were recent cases
13:10
Speaker 1: with similar wounds and similar staging. Missus Earl Crossland in
13:14
Speaker 1: Garland and Patricia An Mahaney in Oak Cliff, both stabbed
13:19
Speaker 1: and slashed repeatedly among them. Sheriff Brockway's line, when asked,
13:26
Speaker 1: was steady. Whoever did this was someone who knew Kaufman County.
13:31
Speaker 1: The Crossland and Mahoney murders were city crimes. He discounted
13:36
Speaker 1: a Dallas nexus in public, even as Dallas County investigators
13:41
Speaker 1: compared notes, something that pointed to Brockway keeping an open
13:45
Speaker 1: mind in the case. Both the Crossland and Mahoney killings
13:49
Speaker 1: were ultimately proven unconnected. Beyond Kaufman, a pattern grew harder
13:57
Speaker 1: to ignore. In nineteen seventy, about four hundred and thirty
14:02
Speaker 1: miles to the west in Kermit, a husband arrived home
14:06
Speaker 1: to find his wife, Nancy Mitchell gone. Her clothing slashed
14:11
Speaker 1: and discarded, was found along the Kermit Odessa Highway. Texas
14:17
Speaker 1: Ranger Captain Jim Riddles said aloud what others were thinking.
14:22
Speaker 1: It looked a lot like what happened in Kaufman. Her
14:25
Speaker 1: clothing was ripped and scattered like Linda's, and it was
14:28
Speaker 1: an apparent abduction, but in Nancy's case, there was an
14:32
Speaker 1: open question of whether she was alive or dead. The
14:36
Speaker 1: next several months brought more bodies, those closer to home.
14:41
Speaker 1: Linda's case was buried in the madness of it all.
14:45
Speaker 1: In January nineteen seventy one, a nineteen year old from
14:49
Speaker 1: Plano turned up in Ralet Creek after an anonymous call.
14:54
Speaker 1: The autopsy wasn't shared immediately with the press, but investigators
14:59
Speaker 1: said there oh bullet holes and no obvious strangulation marks.
15:04
Speaker 1: Weeks later, in February, a young hospital worker from Irving
15:09
Speaker 1: was abducted near a small grocery store on her way home.
15:13
Speaker 1: Her body was discovered near Grapevine Lake, strangled, beaten, and stabbed. Suddenly,
15:20
Speaker 1: Terrant County Sheriff Lawn Evans was saying the quiet part aloud,
15:25
Speaker 1: Yes there might be a connection to Linda's case, and yes,
15:29
Speaker 1: they were looking at women being followed in their cars
15:32
Speaker 1: and attacked on the edges of towns. By March nineteen
15:36
Speaker 1: seventy one, Dallas Assistant Police Chief Paul mccafferin told the
15:41
Speaker 1: Austin American Statesman that at least four of the unsolved
15:45
Speaker 1: slangs of Dallas area women had likely been committed by
15:48
Speaker 1: the same man. Psychiatrists brought in by the department sketched
15:53
Speaker 1: a profile of a young man early to mid twenties,
15:58
Speaker 1: small to medium build, recently wounded by a failed relationship,
16:02
Speaker 1: perhaps haunted and compelled to kill. He was someone who
16:07
Speaker 1: performed a violent ritual and removed a personal item from
16:11
Speaker 1: each victim. The missing wig and Linda's case fit cleanly
16:16
Speaker 1: into that profile, but none of that produced what the
16:20
Speaker 1: cops really needed a name. For a moment, there was
16:26
Speaker 1: a suspect with a history that made detectives notice. In
16:30
Speaker 1: March nineteen seventy one, as Cisco police moved in to
16:34
Speaker 1: question a twenty five year old man named Nathan Curry
16:37
Speaker 1: about an attempted robbery, Curry shot himself. Dallas detectives admitted
16:43
Speaker 1: they'd hoped to question him in at least six unsolved murders,
16:48
Speaker 1: including Linda's. Curry carried a past full of violence and
16:53
Speaker 1: alleged nineteen sixty one church secretary stabbing murder. He had
16:58
Speaker 1: beaten in court and Amarillo charges from nineteen sixty nine
17:02
Speaker 1: for rape and robbery in coin operated laundries. The fact
17:07
Speaker 1: that he'd been eyed. In the nineteen sixty eight Odessa
17:10
Speaker 1: murder of Linda Cooget made the parallels darker. She was
17:14
Speaker 1: taken from a laundrymat, but Curry's suicide left nothing but
17:19
Speaker 1: questions behind. The Fall of nineteen seventy two brought a
17:25
Speaker 1: different kind of echo. Along Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County,
17:30
Speaker 1: just to Kaufman County's southeast, Geneva Brunner Midget, forty nine
17:36
Speaker 1: years old of Scurry, turned up partially clothed and dead
17:40
Speaker 1: near a public boat ramp off FM eighty five. Her
17:44
Speaker 1: throat had been cut and there were slashes to her body.
17:48
Speaker 1: Word of a brag in Kemp made its way to
17:51
Speaker 1: law enforcement, and a construction worker named Edward Lee Staggs
17:56
Speaker 1: was questioned and ultimately arrested. Officers recovered a switchblade and
18:02
Speaker 1: took a statement, and then Kaufman County took a hard
18:05
Speaker 1: look at him. For Linda Jane Phillips's murder. Staggs was polygraphed.
18:11
Speaker 1: The results didn't satisfy Sheriff Brockway or Chief Deputy Carl Hall,
18:16
Speaker 1: so they ran him again. Midget's case came first. Staggs
18:21
Speaker 1: confessed to that killing, but denied knowing anything about Linda Phillips.
18:28
Speaker 1: By late January nineteen seventy three, Brockway told the press
18:32
Speaker 1: that a light detector indicated Staggs was not implicated in
18:36
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventy Kaufman County murder. Staggs later pleaded guilty
18:41
Speaker 1: in the Midget case and received a forty five year sentence.
18:45
Speaker 1: Linda's file remained open. The early and mid nineteen seventies
18:52
Speaker 1: in Texas collected unsolved murders of young women relentlessly and
18:57
Speaker 1: seemingly without caution. In Collin County, Sheriff Jerry Burton had
19:03
Speaker 1: four bodies of young women in nineteen seventy five, with
19:06
Speaker 1: ages ranging from fourteen to twenty. Dallas County cases stacked
19:12
Speaker 1: beside them. Patterns were plotted, age, hair, color, bodied dump
19:18
Speaker 1: sites within a few miles of each other, and still
19:21
Speaker 1: there was no unifying thread that could be tied to
19:24
Speaker 1: a name, at least not at first. Linda Phillips case
19:29
Speaker 1: and Kaufman County often sat on those comparative lists. The
19:34
Speaker 1: statistics threatened to become the highest numbers the counties had
19:38
Speaker 1: ever seen. For almost a decade and a half, suspects
19:42
Speaker 1: in Linda's case came and went, but they seemed to
19:46
Speaker 1: only materialize when apprehended and charged for other homicides. Then,
19:52
Speaker 1: in June nineteen eighty three, a drifter named Henry Lee
19:56
Speaker 1: Lucas was arrested in Montegue County as a fellow in
20:00
Speaker 1: possession of a firearm. Not yet at the height of
20:04
Speaker 1: his infemy, Lucas had already served a decade for the
20:08
Speaker 1: murder of his mother. At the time of his arrest,
20:11
Speaker 1: he was suspected in the disappearance of his elderly landlord,
20:16
Speaker 1: Kate Rich. Once Lucas started talking, he did not stop,
20:21
Speaker 1: especially if there was a soul in the room that
20:24
Speaker 1: would hang on to his words. By January of nineteen
20:27
Speaker 1: eighty four, Lucas had confessed to the murders of as
20:31
Speaker 1: many as one hundred and fifty women across seventeen states,
20:35
Speaker 1: including Linda Jane Phillips in Kaufman County. Shortly after Henry
20:52
Speaker 1: Lee Lucas started confessing to multiple slangs, the Texas Department
20:57
Speaker 1: of Public Safety convened multi state media a task force
21:02
Speaker 1: was formed. Flowcharts bloomed across police station walls, his supposed routes,
21:09
Speaker 1: interstate twenty, US seventy nine, sixty nine, and two seventy one,
21:14
Speaker 1: stitched like a net over East Texas. Prosecutors and rangers
21:20
Speaker 1: began securing cases, charging or clearing them with Lucas's help.
21:26
Speaker 1: The number climbed until it swallowed belief. In the early stage,
21:32
Speaker 1: some investigators were cautious, but many were not. Lucas was
21:37
Speaker 1: a people pleaser, a chameleon who seemed to say what
21:40
Speaker 1: anyone needed to hear. When lawman treated him well, he
21:45
Speaker 1: rewarded them with details. When they brought him dummy cases,
21:50
Speaker 1: he sometimes bought the premise and confessed to those. Most
21:54
Speaker 1: famously in Dallas, Rangers and local officers moved him around
21:59
Speaker 1: the state to walk scenes and to reenact crimes. Media
22:04
Speaker 1: attention created a feedback loop. In that storm of confessions,
22:10
Speaker 1: the murder of Linda Jane Phillips finally found a man
22:13
Speaker 1: willing to say I did it. Lucas's narrative for Linda's
22:19
Speaker 1: murder was simple and chilling. He said he'd been traveling
22:23
Speaker 1: east on I twenty the night of August eighth, nineteen seventy.
22:28
Speaker 1: There he spotted a lone woman in her car, followed
22:32
Speaker 1: her off at a Kaufman turn, forced her off the
22:35
Speaker 1: road at gunpoint, made her disrobe, and stabbed her repeatedly
22:40
Speaker 1: before dumping her body outside town. Lucas said he'd been
22:44
Speaker 1: driving a dark blue vehicle, which sounded tidy when matched
22:49
Speaker 1: against a paint transfer found on Linda's car, a detail
22:53
Speaker 1: hidden from the public until Lucas's confession. In May nineteen
22:58
Speaker 1: eighty four, Kaufman came District Attorney Bill Conrad flew Lucas
23:03
Speaker 1: in by helicopter from his cell in Georgetown before District
23:08
Speaker 1: Judge Glenn Ashworth. The so called drifter pled guilty to
23:12
Speaker 1: Linda's murder and received a life sentence. Conrad told reporters
23:18
Speaker 1: Lucas new details. Only the killer would know the location
23:22
Speaker 1: of the car when it was found, the wounds on
23:25
Speaker 1: Linda's body, the paint scrapings. For families, a plea is
23:32
Speaker 1: not the same as truth, but it can feel like
23:35
Speaker 1: the closest thing the system offers. In nineteen eighty four,
23:39
Speaker 1: some people in Kaufman County believed Linda's killer had finally
23:43
Speaker 1: been named. The case appeared, in official terms cleared, and
23:49
Speaker 1: yet even on the surface, cracks were showing. Even before
23:54
Speaker 1: the plea deal Lucas had been paroled from Michigan in
23:58
Speaker 1: June nineteen seventy. The prosecution leaned on that to fit
24:02
Speaker 1: him into the Texas summer, but documentation later showed Lucas
24:07
Speaker 1: probably didn't leave the rust Belt until January nineteen seventy one.
24:13
Speaker 1: That winter, he shows up in Maryland applying for state assistance.
24:19
Speaker 1: It's also unclear whether authorities ever stepped back to consider
24:23
Speaker 1: the validity of the claim that Lucas first saw Linda
24:26
Speaker 1: on Interstate twenty. Likely Linda never took this route. Lucas
24:32
Speaker 1: eventually recanted most of his confessions in the years that followed,
24:37
Speaker 1: keeping only three his mother, Kate Rich and fifteen year
24:41
Speaker 1: old Becky Powell. The rest of the admissions, including Linda's,
24:47
Speaker 1: generally collapse under scrutiny. The Lucas aftermath, the years in
24:52
Speaker 1: which counties around Texas reopened files they'd solved on his
24:57
Speaker 1: word landed differently in different plays. For some departments, it
25:03
Speaker 1: was a public reckoning, for others, a quiet correction. In
25:08
Speaker 1: Kaufman County, the official ledger had a plea and a sentence.
25:14
Speaker 1: On paper, you could say the case of Linda's murder
25:17
Speaker 1: was closed. In the hearts of investigators who had walked
25:20
Speaker 1: hedgerows in August nineteen seventy and sat with the Phillips family.
25:26
Speaker 1: The truth remained. The person who stopped Linda's car on
25:30
Speaker 1: FM sixteen forty one before dawn, who scattered her clothing
25:34
Speaker 1: along the road, who left her in hedges near Post Oak,
25:39
Speaker 1: had never been proven by evidence you could carry into
25:42
Speaker 1: a hard cross examination. The Lucas confession era had painted
25:48
Speaker 1: over a mystery with a thin coat that could be
25:51
Speaker 1: easily peeled. There are pieces from the original investigation that
25:58
Speaker 1: keep human shape even after half a century. The farmer
26:02
Speaker 1: who noticed the helicopters flying low that Sunday. The neighbors
26:06
Speaker 1: who drove slowly past the crime scene and looked away
26:10
Speaker 1: when they realized what they were seeing. The deputies who
26:14
Speaker 1: spent days walking creek beds and then went home, trying
26:18
Speaker 1: hard not to bring the details through the front door.
26:22
Speaker 1: For the original investigators, the case likely reduces to a
26:26
Speaker 1: handful of rural miles and a few hours in the dark.
26:31
Speaker 1: Someone followed Linda out of Dallas, or intercepted her car
26:35
Speaker 1: closer to home. Someone persuaded her to stop, or made
26:39
Speaker 1: her stop in a way that left no rubber on
26:42
Speaker 1: the road. Someone did their worst and then silenced her.
26:47
Speaker 1: Someone took her clothes and flung them into the night,
26:51
Speaker 1: one piece at a time, keeping only one item a trophy.
26:56
Speaker 1: Perhaps the brief season when psychiatrists in Dallas stood at
27:02
Speaker 1: podiums and described a lust killer also tells you something
27:06
Speaker 1: about where investigations sat in nineteen seventy one. Early behavioral profiles,
27:13
Speaker 1: comparative casework across counties, emphasis on wounds and ritual, and
27:19
Speaker 1: the search for a single figure who tied it all together.
27:23
Speaker 1: Sometimes that framework helps, Sometimes it encourages a kind of
27:28
Speaker 1: storytelling that feels right but proves wrong. The last reliable
27:34
Speaker 1: sighting of Linda Alive is at the Dallas wedding party
27:37
Speaker 1: near Cedar Springs Road just after two thirty a m
27:42
Speaker 1: early Sunday, August ninth, nineteen seventy Her car, with a
27:47
Speaker 1: smashed driver's window is found on FM sixteen forty one
27:51
Speaker 1: between Tlty and forty. Her body is found the next
27:56
Speaker 1: day near Post Oak, north of Kaufman, in a spot
28:00
Speaker 1: chosen with an understanding that the nearest farmhouse had recently
28:04
Speaker 1: been vacated. The autopsy counts twenty six stab wounds. Pathologists
28:10
Speaker 1: confirm sexual assault. Sheriff Brockway says publicly he believes Linda
28:16
Speaker 1: would not have stopped for a stranger and tells reporters
28:20
Speaker 1: that whoever did this knows Kaufman County's roads. Every theory
28:24
Speaker 1: has to fit those facts. Fifty five years is a
28:29
Speaker 1: long time for a small county to carry a question.
28:33
Speaker 1: Some cases break when a family member or someone else
28:36
Speaker 1: close to the victim speaks after a life lived half honestly.
28:41
Speaker 1: Some break when advances in technology let a lab find
28:45
Speaker 1: a thing the nineteen seventy forensics team couldn't. Some never break.
28:52
Speaker 1: What is certain here is that Linda Jane Phillips lived
28:55
Speaker 1: a careful, normal life and died in a way that
28:59
Speaker 1: doesn't makes sense. She isn't the beginning of a pattern
29:03
Speaker 1: or proof of a theory, or a bullet point on
29:07
Speaker 1: a map. She is a daughter and a teacher whose
29:10
Speaker 1: last drive took her from a Dallas apartment where people
29:14
Speaker 1: were enjoying her company to a farm road that led
29:17
Speaker 1: to a field where someone mad had left her. Everything
29:22
Speaker 1: that matters in the file and everything that matters outside
29:25
Speaker 1: it can fit inside that sentence. If you have any
29:32
Speaker 1: information about the murder, of Linda Jane Phillips. Please contact
29:36
Speaker 1: the Kaufman County Sheriff's Office at nine seven two nine
29:41
Speaker 1: three two four three three seven if you'd like to
29:46
Speaker 1: join Con Cold's mission to shine a light on unsolved
29:50
Speaker 1: homicides and missing persons cases. Get the show at free
29:54
Speaker 1: and have access to bonus content. You can at patreon
29:57
Speaker 1: dot com slash Gone Cold pot. You can also support
30:02
Speaker 1: the show by leaving a five star rating and written
30:05
Speaker 1: review on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you listen. However
30:10
Speaker 1: you choose to support Gone Cold, we appreciate you. Thanks
30:14
Speaker 1: for listening, y'all,