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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Still, the damage had been done. Because the affidavit about Abel had been filed in open court, it was available for the public to peruse. Detectives from other agencies, frustrated with their own unsolved murders, began calling the police in League City to ask about Abel. After Tim Miller read the affidavit, he started parking outside Abel’s League City home at night. “I wanted him to know that I would never forget what he had done,” says Miller, who several times a week had been driving out to the site where Laura’s body had been found, standing before a wooden cross he had erected there in her memory. “Every day since 1986—every single day—I had been waking up thinking about the last moments of Laura’s life. I wondered if she was on her knees, begging for her life. I wondered if she had the time to call out for me or her mother.”
After Laura’s death, Miller began drinking heavily; six months later, he and Laura’s mother, Jan Miller, divorced. One afternoon in 1994, unable to contain his grief any longer, Miller called Abel and said that he planned to kidnap him, take him to Las Vegas, and bury him alive in a sand dune outside of the city. A few days later Miller claims he showed up at Abel’s house, dragged him out in the yard, and held a gun to his head. (Abel denies this ever happened.) “I was about to pull the trigger when I realized that it wouldn’t have mattered,” Miller told me. “There was nothing on his face—no fear, no emotion, nothing. He had no conscience.”
On the advice of another father whose daughter had been murdered in another town, Miller checked himself into the psychiatric unit of a hospital for ten days, promising when he left not to hurt Abel but vowing that he would keep pressuring him to confess. Abel, however, remained wary: He told me he still worried that Miller would drink too much one night and try to kill him. He was also worried about other private citizens who, he said, might be tempted to tell lies about him to get the reward money (now at $50,000) that the League City Police Department was offering for information leading to the arrest of the killer. One of Abel’s friends, a man who sang cowboy songs at Stardust Trailrides, was approached by a private detective who asked several questions about him and then said he was working for one of his ex-wives. “Why would she still be paying money to a private investigator unless she wanted the reward?” Abel asked.
Although he refused to take a police-administered polygraph test about the killing fields murders—he said he didn’t trust the League City Police Department as long as Bittner was on the payroll—he did take two lie detector tests conducted by private examiners, who say he passed. Still, perhaps because no other legitimate suspect ever emerged in the case, Abel never could erase the suspicions about him. Some law enforcement officials said the beta-blockers he took for his high blood pressure could have affected the results of those tests.
Bittner, meanwhile, insists that a pathological serial killer with no remorse could easily pass any lie detector test. He remains unapologetic about his investigation and the statements he made about Abel in the search warrant, despite his admission during a deposition that the bulk of his knowledge came “secondhand from [Abel’s] wives.” In 1994 Abel filed a lawsuit against him for slander, but it was quickly dismissed by a judge who said that he had only been identified as a suspect. “Look, there are still many questions that need to be asked,” Bittner told me. “But Mr. Abel doesn’t want to come down here any more to answer them. Just because no hard evidence was found during the search of his home doesn’t mean he’s exonerated.”
Not everyone working on the case is convinced that Abel is guilty. Willie Payne, a respected private investigator hired by some of the parents to help locate their missing daughters, says he can’t imagine that Abel “would have been dumb enough to leave three of the girls lying within yards of his property line.” But Bittner has an answer for that too. “Suppose you’re such a confident killer that you think you’re smarter than the police,” he says. “You wouldn’t be intimidated by leaving those bodies in your own back yard.”
Since Bittner’s promotion to assistant police chief in April 1997, the new League City detective on the case, Marty Grant, has raised the money to put up a billboard along I-45 asking for help solving the murders, and he has had a small retention pond on the old oil field drained because of a single comment Abel made last year when Grant paid him a courtesy call to tell him he was now running the investigation. Abel told Grant that if he had been in charge in 1991 when the fourth body was found, he would have searched a nearby pond because the killer might have thrown something in there. Grant sensed he was being given a hint and conducted a search. But nothing turned up, which Abel says should have been no surprise, “because what the hell did they think they were going to find after all those years? Besides, they didn’t even use a big enough backhoe, one that could get down to the bottom of the pond. So who knows what’s still down there?”
I had to wonder: Was Abel slyly providing another subtle suggestion about that pond? Or was he just trying to be helpful? Was I the one being paranoid? “Once you hear certain allegations about someone you’ve known for a long, long time, how do you get them out of your mind?” Gottlieb asks. “Even I’ve sat up at nights, wondering if he could have done it.”
UNTIL THIS YEAR, DESPITE HIS PARIAH status, Abel remained in League City. But earlier this spring, he closed Stardust Trailrides (“Nobody was coming out any more to ride because they were scared of me”), gave up his lease on the thousand acres, sold his cattle, and moved most of his horses back to the family ranch near Bellville, and started spending most of his time there. “It’s time to try to live out the rest of my life in peace,” he says. “As long as Pat Bittner and these other police departments have that FBI profile, they’re going to do anything they can to make me fit it.”
But there would be no peace. What Abel did not know was that a new investigation was about to begin at the killing fields—one conducted by Tim Miller. He had tracked down the owner of the 25-acre oil field and persuaded him to lease it for $10 a year. The cross he had put up for Laura had been knocked down, and he believed Abel had done it just to spite him. “If I have to, I’ll dig up every inch of this property to find some new evidence,” Miller told me.
Without informing the League City police department—“They think I’m a little crazy”—Miller borrowed a tractor and a backhoe and persuaded the Greater Houston Search Dogs team to join him in his first dig. As Miller drove his tractor past the cross that marked Laura’s body, the dogs began to fan out. Whenever any of them stopped in a certain place and “alerted” (that is, barked to signify that they smelled something), Miller would head over there and dig. The whole thing seemed fruitless but understandable—a way for a father to deal with his grief. I sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck with Miller’s construction buddies watching the late-afternoon sun turn red and then a sullen orange before it began to sink beneath the horizon. “I don’t think people here realize that ol’ Tim will want to keep digging all night,” one said with a grin as he popped open a beer.
A few minutes later two dogs began barking at the same spot by a tree. Then a beautiful black-and-white border collie named Jessi—the best dog of the bunch—rushed over and went into a kind of crazed conniption, whining and lying down.
Miller, his eyes wild with excitement, put the backhoe into gear and started scooping up earth over a ten-square-foot area. “Hold it!” one of the workers yelled, reaching down and pulling up the remnants of a purse. Then someone else saw a pair of women’s pants with a drawstring waist, which was discolored and nearly shredded from decomposition. Out came a discolored shirt and then some socks. “Why would a whole set of women’s clothes be buried way out here?” Miller said, turning off his machine.
For a moment, the only sound was the wind lightly rustling the trees and the low growl of diesel trucks changing gears out on I-45. For weeks I had felt almost as if I had been part of some parlor game. Was Abel innocent, or wasn’t he? But right then, as I stood over this remote patch of earth, I felt a chill. I suddenly understood why these coastal communities were linked by fear. I also understood why the parents of public school students in Friendswood had been given special kits to take their children’s fingerprints and keep locks of their hair in the horrifying event that their remains were one day found and needed to be identified.
And I understood why everyone was so desperate to hunt down the bogeyman: so they could tell themselves they were safe again.
A FEW DAYS LATER I RETURNED TO League City. Abel was at the now-padlocked Stardust Trailrides waiting for me. He had wanted to check on the horses he still kept there, all of which came up and nuzzled him. “Not exactly the response I’d get if I’d been beating them,” he said. I told him about the clothes that Miller had dug up and that after a subsequent search no evidence of a body had been found. “It’s doubtful the police can learn anything from the clothes,” I said. “As it turns out, Tim Miller might have found an old garbage dump.”
Abel shrugged, appearing neither anxious nor relieved. “Well, who knows what happened out here?” he said.
I added that Miller planned to keep digging with the assistance of the search dogs, which could easily smell decomposed bodies buried as far back as fifteen years ago. Again, Abel just shrugged. “Is that right?” he said.
We visited the exact locations where each body had been found. Perhaps we were following the very walking path that the killer had once used to inspect his trophies. For several seconds Abel was silent before each site, as if he were visiting a church graveyard. At that moment, with his back aching and his eyes squinting, he seemed like a kindly old man.
“I feel for these girls. I really do,” he told me. “I wish there was something I could do.”
He gave me another one of his long, lingering looks. Just before he shook my hand good-bye, he said, “Do I really look like a killer? Do I really look like someone who would want to kill pretty young girls?”
Then he turned, got into his pickup, and headed down the dirt road, away from the killing fields, disappearing behind the dust like a ghost.
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