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.
ON A STIFLINGLY HOT AFTERNOON in late August, at an abandoned oil field twenty miles south of Houston, more than a dozen people hunted for the bodies of dead women.
“Right here,” shouted Tim Miller, a grim, wiry building contractor who was at the controls of a large backhoe. “Let’s start here.” Nearby were a dozen search dogs, including four trained to detect the scent of decomposing human flesh. A few construction workers, employees of Miller’s, were on hand to help, as were friends and even Miller’s ex-wife. One man brought his thirteen-year-old son. “You see those high weeds?” Miller said. “That’s where we need to dig.”
It is known as the “killing fields,” and it is a lonely, spooky patch of land: In the stillness of the day you can hear the yips of small wild animals and the distant rumble of traffic along Interstate 45 about a mile away. Many people who live in the surrounding towns and bedroom communities won’t come near the place. Since 1984, the remains of four young women have been found here—each one nude, on her back, under a tree, with her arms folded. Because they were placed within a thousand feet of each other, a private investigator who has studied the scene many times thinks the killer created a “walking path” for himself to “visually inspect his trophies one by one.” Indeed, many police detectives and FBI agents are convinced that this is the personal graveyard of a vicious serial killer.
And they think they know his identity: Robert Abel. In the sixties Abel was one of NASA’s great young engineers, part of the team that was instrumental in designing the rocket that would put the Apollo astronauts into Earth’s orbit. “If we had any hope of getting man to the moon, we had to get the maximum Saturn payload into orbit,” says Robert Gottlieb, a veteran aerospace engineer who now works at Boeing. “And Robert Abel was part of the little band of very bright men who figured out how do it.” Today, however, a police detective suggests in a sworn affidavit that Abel is a “serial sexual offender” who displays the kind of rage and violent behavior that’s often seen in serial killers. He is the prime suspect in the murders of the four women found in the oil field, which is next to property he owns, and his name quickly surfaces whenever a teenager or a young woman disappears or is found dead in the area.
In League City, where Abel has lived for sixteen years, officers have searched his home and questioned his friends and family. He has been interviewed by detectives from neighboring towns. Investigators have flown over his land in helicopters and brought in cadaver dogs to look for bodies. Mark Young, a highly respected FBI criminal profiler from the agency’s Houston office, has talked with Abel, and a profiler from the behavioral sciences unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, has analyzed his relationships with women.
A slightly built sixty-year-old with thinning brown hair and a mustache, Abel walks stiffly because of a bad back, wears reading glasses, and takes pills for his high blood pressure. He seems almost shy—he tends to put his hands in his front pockets when he speaks—and has the soft Texas drawl of a small-town high school civics teacher. Yet he haunts people. In League City some mothers backpedal when they see him in the grocery store. Others push their daughters out of sight so that he can’t get a look at them. One day a group of teenage boys, hoping to prove their courage when they spotted him cruising through town in his pickup, rolled down their car windows and shouted, “Hey, Killer!” Over the years, he has become such a focus of fear and hostility that in 1997, nearly two hundred people fanned out over his land without his permission, looking for the body of a pretty college student who had disappeared from a Bennigan’s restaurant not far from League City and who to this day has never been found. Tim Miller, whose sixteen-year-old daughter, Laura, was found dead in the killing fields, is so convinced of Abel’s guilt that he has left threatening messages on his answering machine, demanding that he confess. “There are many days when I think about driving over there, putting a gun to his head, and pulling the trigger,” Miller says. “When I’m near him, I feel like I’m in the presence of evil.”
Yet there are problems with the allegations against Abel: Not a shred of physical evidence has ever been found linking him to the four women found dumped in the oil field, no evidence has been uncovered by any police department that can connect him to the murders they have been investigating, and no witness can place him with any of the teenagers or women before they were found dead. What’s more, he has never been arrested for any crime, nor is there any known record of a criminal complaint filed against him. “My life has been destroyed, my reputation ruined,” Abel told me when I first met him earlier this year. “I didn’t kill any of those girls. I wouldn’t know how to kill.”
Is it possible that Robert Abel is a cold, calculating murderer, one who is consumed by a twisted need to prey on young women but also patient enough to wait years between attacks—and smart enough to leave almost no clues behind? Or is he a victim of overzealous police work and outright hysteria? For several weeks I tried to learn the truth about a brilliant but sometimes baffling man who, as one FBI agent told me, “is not your average social encounter.” During that time, I headed down to the killing fields to see if Tim Miller—who had become so frustrated with the police’s inaction that he had launched his own investigation—was going to find more bodies, as he had predicted, or whether he was merely chasing ghosts.
As it turned out, this was indeed a ghost story, but not the kind that I or anyone else really expected—for just as the sun was setting that August afternoon, a few of the dogs went into a frenzy, barking and pawing anxiously at one particular clump of dirt. “Something’s down there,” Miller shouted as people came running with their flashlights. “Something’s down there!”
YOU CAN SPEND A WEEK driving through the towns south of Houston, visiting the parents of murdered daughters. They greet you at the door, lead you inside, and pull out scrapbooks filled with photos: their girl posing in a soccer uniform, pushing dolls in a stroller, laughing at Showbiz Pizza. They often take you into their daughter’s bedroom, many of which still look exactly as they did when the girls were alive.
“Just 20 days to my birthday,” reads the note written by Laura Smither, an aspiring ballerina from the quiet town of Friendswood. Laura was only twelve years old when she jotted those words on a message board on the morning of April 3, 1997, a couple of hours before she went jogging through her neighborhood and disappeared. Seventeen days later her nude body was found at the edge of a retention pond in Pasadena. “Mom, I love you,” reads a note on the nightstand in Krystal Jean Baker’s bedroom in Texas City. Her body was found under a bridge by the Trinity River near the Louisiana border. Some young women have never been found: More than ten years after René Richerson, an achingly pretty college student, vanished from a condominium complex in Galveston, her parents are still paying a private detective to search for her. “All we know is that there was a terrible scream the night she disappeared,” says her mother, Kathy Richerson. “The police tell us that she is probably dead, murdered like the others. But that doesn’t mean we will stop looking for her. We just want the chance to tell our daughter good-bye.”
It is impossible for an outsider to understand the shattered psyches of parents whose daughters will never grow older. “Sometimes, at night, the wind would begin to blow, and the house would start to shift, and the bed in Laura’s room would start to squeak,” says Laura Smither’s mother, Gaye, a gentle woman who sometimes swallows when she talks, trying to keep her voice in control. “Even after all that time, I’d find myself running in there, calling her name, believing that she was back home with us.”
The number of mothers and fathers left to grieve is staggering. Depending on who’s counting, at least fifteen and perhaps as many as thirty young females—all of whom resided in the fifty-mile stretch of coastal plain between Houston and Galveston—have vanished or been brutally murdered since the early seventies. “There’s no place in the country that has had to deal with something this heinous,” says Don Clark, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Houston office. “All of the victims were young, all of them were attractive, and we think all of them were sexually assaulted before they died.”
Law enforcement officials insist that many of the killings—sometimes referred to as the “I-45 killings” because most of them have taken place within a few miles of Interstate 45—could have been committed by any number of men, from transients to sex offenders paroled from one of the area’s prisons. In 1997 one police department ran a computer search of registered sex offenders living between Houston and Galveston, and more than 2,100 names popped up. Yet despite a variety of sometimes desperate measures—one department followed leads provided by psychics, and another had police officers hide in trees at a cemetery to see if a suspect might visit the freshly dug grave of a murdered teenager—no arrests have been made. With the passing of the years, it’s harder to deny the probability that a serial killer has been at work since as far back as 1971, when seven young women were murdered over a four-county region in twelve months’ time.
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