When I began writing about the Houston Mass Murders in 2010, I was an investigative reporter chasing cold cases from the early 1970s—young women murdered or vanished in the Houston area. I kept coming back to one name in particular: sixteen-year-old Kimberly Pitchford.
She vanished on January 3, 1973, within a five-mile radius of Dean Corll’s last known address in Pasadena. Two days later her partially nude body was found floating in a ditch fifteen miles away. She had been strangled with a thin strand of rope—Corll’s signature method.
Buried in her police file was a witness report: a green 1968 or 1969 Corvette seen near where she was last seen. Dean Corll drove a green 1969 Corvette.
That tenuous lead came with something priceless—a license plate number. But when I tried to trace it, the records had vanished. The plate had been recycled years earlier. Undeterred, I ordered Corll’s probate file. What I discovered only deepened the mystery: his Corvette had been completely stripped to a bare hull. No VIN. No license plate. No trace.
The more I dug, the more questions multiplied. Kimberly wasn’t the only one. Two other young women with ties to the Heights disappeared during the same narrow window.
The deeper I went, the clearer it became: this might not be only about the twenty-seven known male victims.
The stripped Corvette was just the beginning. To see the archival research, forensic breakdowns, and raw human stories behind these forgotten cold cases, join the hunt for answers.
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