Is Robert Abel Getting Away With Murder?
Lawmen think the retired NASA engineer could be responsible for the deaths or disappearances of several young women who lived in the coastal plain between Houston and Galveston. There’s only one problem: They don’t have enough evidence to arrest him. In fact, they don’t have any.
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According to the detective’s affidavit, which was filed in a state district court, there is little doubt that a single person was responsible for the four bodies found in the old oil field located just off a rut-filled dirt road on the outskirts of League City. The first was discovered in April 1984, after a dog owned by a couple living several hundred yards away carried home a human skull and dropped it at the feet of their three-year-old daughter. After a long search, police officers discovered the rest of the body and identified the remains as those of Heide Villareal Fye, a 23-year-old cocktail waitress who had been reported missing six months earlier. At the time of her disappearance—she had last been seen walking from her parents’ home to use the telephone at a convenience store—the League City police had conducted a cursory investigation, and they came across no clues as to where she might have gone or who might have wanted to abduct her. Heide’s father, who had worked as an automobile tire salesman, hunted for her himself, walking the fields around League City almost every day. He grieved until the day he succumbed to cancer. “Even when he was on his deathbed,” says Heide’s sister, Josie Poarch, “he brought the family together and made us promise that we would never give up the search for her killer.”
Nearly two years later, in February 1986, four boys riding their dirt bikes past the oil field smelled a putrid odor and came across another decomposed body about fifty yards from the spot where Heide Fye was found. The victim was never identified and became known as Jane Doe. The medical examiner said she was between 22 and 30 years old and perhaps had been shot to death by a .22-caliber weapon. (Part of a bullet turned up with her remains at the medical examiner’s office.) As the police looked around the field for more clues, they came across the skeleton of Laura Miller—Tim Miller’s daughter—a mere twenty yards away. Laura had been a straight-A student in elementary school in League City, but after she began to have seizures at age twelve, she grew depressed, made a couple of halfhearted suicide attempts, and started hanging out with a crowd of teenagers who used drugs. When she went missing, the police suggested to her father that she had run away from home. At the time, no one made the connection that she was last seen alive at the same convenience store where Heide Fye had last been seen.
“We had to search for suspects,” says Pat Bittner, the League City detective who, at the tender age of 30, was put in charge of the murder investigation. Every day Bittner would sit behind his battleship-gray desk, flip through his case files, repeat to himself all the relevant details, and then stare at the autopsy photos, hoping that the dead women could tell tales. He went so far as to consider the possibility that the killer was Henry Lee Lucas, who was said to have wandered through this part of Texas.
Bittner came up with nothing, however, and he wouldn’t for nearly five years, until a new set of decomposing remains were found in the field about one hundred yards from where the other bodies had been discovered. Like Jane Doe, this woman was never identified. The medical examiner thought she had been beaten to death with a club. Once again, without eyewitnesses and only scant physical evidence, the police were stuck.
But at least there was someone new for them to question—a retired NASA engineer who had been leasing land on one side of the 25-acre oil field for nearly a decade and who, in 1990, had bought eleven acres adjacent to the field to open Stardust Trailrides, a small horseback-riding business. His name was Robert Abel, and he was so eager to assist the police the day the fourth body was found that he helped them clear brush in the area and let them use fourteen of his horses and his backhoe free of charge. “He was on me like a duck on a June bug,” said an FBI agent who was there. “He even made suggestions about what we should be doing in our investigation.”
I TRIED TO HELP THE POLICE SOLVE A terrible crime, and now they think I was too helpful?” Abel asked me, seemingly bewildered.
“You might have been trying to deceive them, to provide false leads,” I said.
“They think I wanted to mislead them?”
“A couple of detectives think you’re talking to me because you want to draw attention to yourself,” I told him. “It’s your way of thumbing your nose at the police, telling them that they won’t ever catch you.”
Sitting across the table from me at a coffee shop, Abel bowed his head. “All I want to do is prove my innocence,” he said. “That’s all I want to do.”
Abel is aware that the police and the FBI have studied every inch of his life. Descended from a family that came to Texas seventeen years before the Civil War, Abel was raised on a ranch in Bellville, a tiny town between Houston and Austin. After graduating from Bellville High in 1957, he married his sweetheart, Jane Ross—they later had a daughter and a son—and headed off to the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a degree in aerospace engineering. In February 1962 he took a job at NASA, and in the evenings he attended graduate school—first at the University of Houston, then at UT-Austin, where he wrote papers with titles like “Analytic Solutions to Interplanetary Transfers.”
NASA put Abel to work sizing the Saturn rocket: He determined how much weight should be in each of its three stages and then performed a trajectory analysis to determine the most efficient way to get the third stage and the payload into orbit. He also worked on lunar visibility studies (for which he received top-secret clearance) and regularly flew to Cape Canaveral to brief Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, and other Apollo astronauts on lunar landing and visibility. “When you met him, he came across as this country boy, a rancher’s son with a thick accent,” says Boeing’s Robert Gottlieb. “But the fact was that he was one of the brightest people down there.”
In 1978, after 21 years of marriage, the Abels divorced. (Jane told me that the split was amicable, “really just caused by us growing in different directions over the years.”) Abel started spending his evenings meeting women at the little bars and restaurants around the Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake; sometimes he’d stop by Elan, Houston’s hottest nightclub. Although he bought a Mercedes 380 SL convertible to go along with his pickup, he was hardly the portrait of the suave Houston bachelor: His front teeth were chipped, his sideburns were too long, and—despite his vast intelligence—he sometimes came across as more hayseed than scientist. Yet according to Gottlieb, Abel was successful with women. “In his own way he was very charismatic,” says an ex-girlfriend. “He was romantic. At Christmas we’d go back to his old family ranch outside of Bellville, and he’d put together a scene from a Hallmark card—we’d go out and cut down a Christmas tree.”
In June 1983 Abel moved from Houston into a pleasant middle-class neighborhood in League City. (Heide Fye and Laura Miller lived less than half a mile away, but Abel told me he never knew them.) What drew him there, he explains, was Galveston County’s lower tax rate, but he also appreciated the availability of nearby pastureland: He leased about a thousand acres at the edge of town roughly three miles from his house. “Coming here was my chance to keep working at NASA and be able to work some cattle on the weekends,” he says.
Neighbors liked Abel, though they were aware that he did not have much luck with relationships. In June 1989 he married Cindy Jacobs, a secretary for an accounting firm whom he had met earlier that year at the Hilton hotel bar. But she left him 41 days into the marriage—Abel never told anyone why—and the two quickly divorced. In 1990 he retired from NASA and married Paula Kay Myers, a pretty NASA secretary whom he had first met and dated three years earlier. Soon after, he purchased the eleven-acre property for sale next to the oil field and made preparations to open Stardust Trailrides. “I wanted kids and families to have the chance to be around horses like I did when I was a kid,” he says. He offered discount trail rides to youth groups and charities, provided catered barbecue dinners, hired country music singers to perform cowboy songs, and often threw in free hayrides for toddlers.
By all accounts, Stardust Trailrides was an immediate success, drawing people from all over the Houston area, including a few couples who came to have their wedding conducted on horseback. Abel led many of the trail rides himself over the property and through his leased land. Sales hit $250,000 in 1991, he says. “And there’s no doubt they would have kept going up”—he pauses, shaking his head like a man under siege—“if it wasn’t for that so-called detective.”
THAT SO-CALLED DETECTIVE WAS BITTNER, who soon after the discovery of the fourth body asked Abel to come to the League City police station for a routine interview. Among the questions he posed was whether any bodies had turned up near the six-hundred-acre Abel family ranch near Bellville the way they had near his land in League City. They hadn’t. “I had no reason to ask except out of curiosity,” Bittner says. “But Abel became furious and very defensive. He wouldn’t answer any more questions, left the building, and later went to the mayor and complained about me. I began to think, ‘Why would he get upset over such a standard question?’”
“He was cocky, and I was offended by his tone,” Abel told me, revealing for the first time a flash of what I had been told by some officers was a hostile temper. “Have you met this man? He seems like someone who should be washing windows instead of being a police detective.”
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