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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In fact, Bittner is a bright young man who grew up in Ohio, received a degree in criminal justice from Michigan State University, and moved to Texas to be a police officer—hardly the stereotype of the tobacco-chewing small-town lawman. He has received specialized training in homicide investigations and is familiar with the research conducted by the FBI’s behavioral sciences unit in Quantico, which has been attempting to compile an accurate composite profile of the type of man who turns out to be a serial killer of women. By conducting lengthy interviews with many such killers already behind bars, the agents have come up with a list of common denominators seen in the killers’ childhood, in their behavior as adults, and in the way they carry out their crimes. The League City killings appear to be the work of what the FBI literature calls an “organized” killer, someone who carefully plans his brutal acts. According to one FBI report, an organized killer is in the “bright-superior intelligence range and, therefore, potentially a skilled imposter”—in other words, he’s able to fit into everyday society without drawing any suspicion. Moreover, an organized killer prefers working in what the FBI calls a “comfort zone,” an area very familiar to him where he receives little or no interference from outsiders.
Based on that information, Abel fit the bill, though nonspecific FBI profiling was all Bittner had to go on. Then, in the summer of 1993, he got a break: He received a phone call from Abel’s wife, Paula, who told him they had separated the previous year. And she was ready to talk.
When they met, Paula told Bittner she was afraid of what she described as her husband’s “fits of rage.” Sometimes, she said, he would get so angry during their arguments that he’d leave the house and not return for as long as a week. Although he never hit her, she said she had watched him beat horses with pipes and chains until they submitted to his commands. Whenever livestock died on his pastureland, she added, he left them out in the open so their rotting corpses could be ravaged by coyotes and other scavengers. Paula also said that she had seen several photos of nude women in his desk drawer at the house, and that Abel not only owned handguns but also carried one with him during the later months of 1991. Before leaving, Paula told Bittner he needed to talk to Cindy Jacobs, the woman Abel had been married to for 41 days in 1989.
In her interview with Bittner, Cindy said that she decided to leave Abel during their honeymoon in Germany after they had a fight over sex. According to Cindy, Abel said to her, “If you ever deny me sex again, I’ll kill you.” Cindy also confirmed Paula’s stories about a stash of nude photos and Abel’s anger with horses. She said that before their marriage, when he had gotten angry with her, he went out and beat a horse named Lancelot.
Subsequently, Bittner contacted the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in Quantico and provided details of the League City killings to David Gomez, an agent who specializes in serial sexual homicides. Gomez told Bittner that the murderer probably lived close to the comfort zone and could very well have insinuated himself into the investigation, either to establish an alibi or to provide false leads. Gomez added that the murderer was in all likelihood preoccupied with the media accounts of the crimes and perhaps had kept newspaper articles about them; he also could possess jewelry or clothing from the dead women to serve as his “trophies.” Gomez gave Bittner a list of other characteristics about the killer, including “superior attitude,” “multiple sex partners,” “a history of cruelty to animals,” “usually described as a troublemaker,” and “will act out his anger.” Bittner was intrigued: Gomez could have been describing Abel.
Earlier Bittner had learned at a homicide seminar that a police department could get a court-ordered search warrant based solely on the FBI’s psychological profile of the potential killer. If a local law enforcement agency could identify a suspect that fit the parameters of that profile, a judge could rule that there was sufficient reason to search for more evidence. So in November, Bittner presented an affidavit before a state district court judge outlining Gomez’s profile and reporting the statements made by two of Abel’s ex-wives. He suggested that Abel left the women’s bodies on the pastureland because he knew they’d be ravaged by animals. Although he had no actual evidence, Bittner suggested that Abel was a “serial sexual offender.” “We spent three weeks polishing that affidavit,” Bittner told me. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a masterpiece.”
ON NOVEMBER 12, 1993, WITH A search warrant in hand, Bittner and five other League City police officers showed up unannounced at Abel’s home and conducted a twelve-hour search. They vacuumed the carpet, looking for hairs of the victims; confiscated three .22-caliber weapons to see if any of them matched the bullet found next to one of the bodies; hauled away more than 6,200 slides and photographs; took a gold tooth found on a dresser to see if it came from the mouth of one of the women; and clipped a cord off a curtain to see if it matched a strangulation mark.
Bittner and his team came up with nothing. There was no hair evidence. None of the dead women’s clothing or jewelry was found. The gold tooth turned out to be from Abel’s own mouth. Because of too much deterioration in the bullet the guns could not be matched—in fact, no gun could. And although two photos were of a semi-nude woman, she later told the police that she had willingly posed for Abel when they were dating. (The rest of the photos were of family, friends, and various people he’d shot as an amateur photographer.)
The only thing that Bittner found justifying the search warrant was a collection of newspaper articles found about the investigation into the League City murders and one long Houston Chronicle story detailing the life of a serial killer. Abel told the police he had started keeping those articles because he was interested in their investigation. “Why wouldn’t I be?” he asked me. “These were bodies found on land next to mine.” As for the Chronicle story, he said, “I didn’t know anything about serial killers. I wondered if the police knew about this person I had read about, and I was going to send the article to them.”
Such comments might have sounded incredible to Bittner and his fellow officers. I know I had my doubts. During one of our meetings, Abel loaned me a box of legal documents about the case and about himself. At the bottom of the box I saw a small photo album with the words “Robert Abel” printed on the cover. Inside were a series of photos of the places where each body had been found. My throat suddenly went dry: Was I looking at a serial killer’s scrapbook? And there were other occasions when I felt as if Abel talked a little too much about the allegations against him. One afternoon on the phone, he said to me, “I don’t know if you know this, but I had torn rotator cuffs at the time some of those girls turned up dead. I couldn’t have picked a girl up. I couldn’t have overpowered her and gotten her into my car. And if I did kill her, I couldn’t have carried her out of my house.” It was as if he was giving me a scenario of how one of the murders had happened.
Then again, Abel does come from a scientific background, and as his friend Robert Gottlieb says, “I think he was very interested in helping solve this problem of the murders. That’s what he’s good at—solving problems. And remember, he had a new trail-rides business going. Of course he’d want the murders solved.” When I later asked Abel directly about the photo album, he acted surprised that I was suspicious. He said the photographs had been taken by a private investigator hired by his attorney. “In case charges were ever brought against me, I wanted to know exactly what I was being accused of,” he said.
But what of the accusations by his ex-wives? It’s hard to gauge who’s telling the truth. In our conversations Abel always denied every allegation they had made against him. (Paula and Cindy would not be interviewed, but they have not retracted the sworn statements they gave Bittner.) He told me he never mistreated animals—“It’s ridiculous to think that you can run a horseback-riding business with horses that are scared of human beings”—and that he didn’t carry a gun. It was Paula, he said, who had the fits of rage—“I was scared to death of her at one point, to be honest with you, and I told the police that”—and he said Cindy Jacobs was angry with him after the honeymoon only because he wouldn’t put her name on his checking account and didn’t let her see his will. And, indeed, one former girlfriend did tell me that Paula had contacted her, asking that she, too, go to the police and talk about Abel’s behavior when she had dated him. “I’m not saying Robert was the perfect man,” the woman said. “We had our rounds, our arguments and fights. But not once did I ever think there was anything to fear about him.” When I asked her if he abused horses, she replied that she saw him hit one once, when the horse was raring and had her young daughter cornered—“but he didn’t beat the horse.”
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