A Serial Killer on the Waterfront
Police work is often boring and thankless. But in 2005, one cop did something most in his profession never do. He found a serial killer.
From Crimes In Progress editorial: True crime as a genre probably wouldn’t exist without serial killers. The media depiction of the clever killer is intriguing but ultimately hollow for lack of real world analogs. Still, every so often a serial killer eludes capture, leaving imagination to conjure more grisly details than realistically possible. One such killer stalked the Texas Gulf Coast in the late 1970s. In some ways, he’s still terrifying victims with unanswered questions.
Galveston detective Alfred “Fred” Paige heard about the murders long before investigating them himself.
The brutal killing of teenage girls was hard news to miss growing up in Texas in the 1970s. Paige didn’t know any of the missing personally. They faded into the background of his mind as he moved through life, eventually becoming a police officer then a homicide detective.
At some point in 2005, he learned something stunning. Prosecutors had ignored a huge piece of evidence and, in his frustration, Paige got to work.
Missing teenagers were depressingly common in the seventies. Exact numbers are difficult to find because, “Until the early 80s, investigating cases of missing children was left entirely up to local officials, who didn’t have an alert system in place or a central database to keep records,” according to Slate’s Explainer.
A part of those missing statistics were two girls, Rhonda Renee Johnson and Sharon Shaw. Nearly 35 years later, Paige would come to believe their deaths were the work of a serial killer. Proving his theory would be incredibly difficult. Especially since someone else had already been convicted.
Rhonda and Sharon were last seen walking along Seawall Boulevard in Galveston on August 4th, 1971. Their bodies were found together a month later in Turner’s Bayou. The girls were friends, often hanging out at a water ski school or Doug’s Surf Shop.
In June 1972, police made an arrest and got a confession. The exact interrogation methods used against Michael Lloyd Self, a mechanic described as “brain damaged”, are very much in question.
The officers that arrested Self were later convicted of robbing banks and using Russian roulette to extract one of his confession’s. Despite these infractions, it wasn’t enough to release Self or get him a new trial.
Paige didn’t believe the mechanic killed Rhonda and Sharon. His reasoning was simple. In addition to the questionable reputation of the arresting officers, Self’s description of the crime failed to match forensic evidence. The most damning evidence against Self’s conviction arrived in 1998 but remained hidden for years. A convicted murderer confessed to killing at least seven girls, including Shaw and Johnson, in detailed letters to Harris County prosecutors.
“It defies reason to confess to something you did not do, especially murder, but some ambitions override reason: notoriety, for example, gamesmanship, and even self-aggrandizing,” wrote Dr. Katherine Ramsland in a 2014 Psychology Today article about serial killer claims. She concluded the article by writing, “The bottom line is this: Even skilled investigators may not spot a clever liar with a selfish agenda. Sorting out truth takes time, patience, sleuthing, and the corroboration of facts. Above all, it requires the ability to avoid a rush to judgment that might trigger mistakes.”
The confession letters of Edward Harold Bell are strange and fascinating. Sent to authorities while in jail, the letters offered the names of some victims and descriptions of others. In total, Bell claimed to have killed seven women in the 1970s. (He later updated that number to eleven and starting referring to his victims as “the eleven that went to heaven”.) Though Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson were unnamed, Bell described killing two girls with similar appearances and dumping them in Turner’s Bayou.
Bell claimed to have been brainwashed into committing the crimes, according to excerpts of the letters obtained by the Houston Chronicle, referring to his crimes as “the program killings”. In a later exclusive interview with the paper, Bell said he would divulge all details about his crimes in exchange for immunity.
The letters were kept from public knowledge until 2011. By then, the originals had gone missing. Probably out of professional propriety, Paige himself kept the confession quiet while reaching out to the community. A 2006 letter to the editor published in the Chronicle fails to mention Bell’s confession while explicitly asking for information about him and the murders.
By the time the letters were made public, Paige had built a compelling case against Bell but there wasn’t enough to prosecute. It was also too late to release Self, who died in prison in 2000.
Through exhaustive interviews with family members and friends, Paige pieced together the final hours of Renee and Sharon’s life. Their deaths were not pleasant or quick.
Two other unsolved murders helped strengthen the case against Bell. Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson disappeared about a month after Shaw and Johnson (the Johnsons are unrelated). The girls were last seen accepting a ride from a white van, similar to one owned by Bell and possibly linked to the Shaw and Johnson murders.
All four also frequented the same areas, including the ski school and Doug’s Surf Shop. Bell was a partner in the shop and lived a couple of blocks away from the ski school.
Bell admitted to killing Ackerman and Johnson by name in his letters. Despite popular misconceptions, confessions alone aren’t enough to convict someone. In the case of nearly 30 year old murders, finding corroborating evidence would be nearly impossible. It’s probably for this reason that prosecutors made the decision to largely ignore the Bell confession letters. (The ethics or morality of that decision is up for debate but I personally see it as a reasonable if distasteful.)
Some follow-up was performed but stalled until Paige started working the case in 2005. For the next five years, he interviewed remaining family members and witnesses, piecing together a strong circumstantial case that would probably be enough for a grand jury indictment. If only the letters still existed. They went missing from Harris County evidence and have only resurfaced in excerpts. Bell has refused to confirm or deny his confession without an offer of immunity, a request unlikely to be granted.
The Houston law enforcement community now largely agrees with Paige’s findings. Many seem to accept that a serial killer will go unpunished for his heinous crimes but he’ll die in jail. When dealing with ultimate human darkness, maybe that’s victory enough despite all the anguish left in its wake.
Andrew Egan is writer and editor of Crimes In Progress. His work has appeared in Forbes Magazine, ABC News, Atlas Obscura, Tedium, and more. You can read his article, “Any Which Way but Down or A Fair Amount of Male Nudity in the American West” in the December 2016 issue of Blue Skies Magazine. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. His novel, Nothing Too Original, is available now for Kindle and paperback.
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