The I-45 corridor runs roughly 50 miles from Houston's southern sprawl through League City, Texas City, and Dickinson to the island city of Galveston. Flanking the highway are miles of marshland, retention ponds, drainage ditches, and overgrown fields -- terrain that is flat, wet, lightly populated, and difficult to search. One investigator described it as 'a perfect place for killing somebody and getting away with it.' The specific patch of land that gave the Killing Fields its name sits along Calder Road in League City, where four women were found between 1983 and 1991. But the broader pattern stretches across the entire corridor and spans from 1971 to at least 2006. Most victims were girls or young women between the ages of 12 and 25. Some vanished from bus stops, convenience stores, or their own neighborhoods. Others were last seen leaving work late at night. Their bodies turned up in fields, ditches, reservoirs, and marshes -- often months or years after they disappeared.

Colette Wilson was 13 when she disappeared from an Alvin bus stop in June 1971. Her body was found five months later near the Addicks Reservoir. Kimberly Pitchford, 16, vanished from a Houston high school after a driving test in January 1973 and was found two days later in a ditch in Angleton. Laura Miller, a 16-year-old sophomore who had just moved to League City and loved singing in choir, was last seen using a payphone at a convenience store in September 1984 -- the same store where cocktail waitress Heidi Villarreal-Fye had vanished a year earlier. Miller's remains were found 17 months later, just 60 feet from where Villarreal-Fye had been discovered. Laura Smither, 12, told her mother she was going for a 20-minute jog in Friendswood in April 1997. Her body was found 17 days later in a retention pond in Pasadena. Her parents founded the Laura Recovery Center, a nonprofit that aids the search for kidnapping victims. Krystal Jean Baker, 13, left her grandmother's house in Texas City in 1996 to use a phone at a convenience store. Two hours later, her body was found. In 2019, Governor Greg Abbott signed the Krystal Jean Baker Act, permitting DNA collection from individuals arrested for certain felonies.

The investigations have been haunted by false leads, coerced confessions, and the passage of time. In 1974, gas station operator Michael Lloyd Self was convicted of killing Sharon Shaw after confessing under interrogation. He later recanted, alleging torture -- suffocation with a plastic bag, cigarette burns, and beatings by the police chief. Three years later, that same police chief, Don Morris, and his deputy were convicted of torture and misconduct against detainees. Morris received 55 years, his deputy 30. Self died in custody in 2000. Only afterward did police officials publicly state their belief that he had been wrongly convicted. Edward Harold Bell, a known exhibitionist arrested at least 12 times for exposing himself to children, confessed in prison letters in 1998 to killing 11 girls in the 1970s. He named specific victims, including Colette Wilson and Kimberly Pitchford. Yet no physical evidence tied him to the murders, and he was never charged. He died in 2019. Meanwhile, convicted kidnapper Mark Stallings confessed in 2013 to killing Donna Prudhomme in 1991 with details that investigators found consistent with the evidence -- but he, too, was never charged.

Some cases have been resolved through advances in forensic science. DNA testing linked Kevin Edison Smith to the 1996 murder of Krystal Jean Baker; he was convicted of capital murder in 2012 after a jury deliberated for roughly 30 minutes. William Lewis Reece, arrested in 1997 for the kidnapping of Sandra Sapaugh from Webster, eventually confessed to killing Laura Smither, Jessica Lee Cain, and Kelli Ann Cox after his DNA was matched to a 1997 murder in Oklahoma. He was convicted of all four killings between 2021 and 2022. Genetic genealogy through Family Tree DNA identified two previously unidentified victims -- Audrey Lee Cook and Donna Prudhomme -- in April 2019. In one of the most remarkable outcomes, forensic genealogists identified the murdered couple Harold Dean and Tina Clouse in 2021, and in 2022, their daughter Holly Marie -- taken as a baby when her parents were killed in 1981 -- was found alive in Oklahoma, more than 40 years later. A task force called Operation HALT (Homicide/Abduction Liaison Team), composed of local law enforcement and FBI agents, continues to investigate the remaining unsolved cases.

The Texas Killing Fields have entered national consciousness through media -- a 2011 film starring Sam Worthington and a 2022 Netflix documentary series, Crime Scene: The Texas Killing Fields, which became the platform's top-rated docuseries with nearly 24 million hours viewed. Tim Miller, whose daughter Laura was found in those fields, founded Texas EquuSearch, a volunteer search-and-recovery organization that has assisted in thousands of missing-persons cases nationwide. In 2022, he won a $24 million wrongful-death judgment against Clyde Hedrick, his former neighbor who was found civilly liable for Laura's death but never criminally charged. The flat, unremarkable landscape along I-45 holds no monuments. There are no plaques at the convenience stores where girls were last seen, no markers in the fields where they were found. The weight of what happened here lives in court records, DNA databases, and the families who never stopped searching.