The Four Most Famous Texas Serial Killers
Long before I started penning my Nick Noelle series, a number of serial killers made headlines in Texas. My home state has a dark history that provides more than enough material for a thriller writer. Killers have made their marks on history through heinous murders, including right in the Under a Cloud of Rain Texas scene of my debut mystery novel.
Let’s take a look at some of the most famous serial killers who have operated in and around the Bayou City in Texas in recent decades.
1. Out of Sight, Out of Mind
With an MO of shooting female prostitutes and cutting out their eyes, Charles Frederick Albright earned the murderous moniker: the Eyeball Killer. Albright goes down in history for his murdering spree in the early 1990s. He killed three women—all prostitutes—in the Dallas area, and the kicker? He surgically removed each victim’s eyeballs. Murderpedia.org credits the Eyeball Killer with an “abnormal obsession with eyes, going so far as to remove the eyes from dolls and photographs.” Albright is currently serving life in a psychiatric correctional facility.
2. Lady in Waiting
Genene Anne Jones is on a very short list, given the mere fact that female serial killers are exceedingly rare (estimates have them at fifteen percent of all those convicted). Jones worked as a pediatric nurse in Kerrville and San Antonio in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Under her care, it’s estimated that she killed upwards of forty-five infants. However, she was only tried and convicted of killing one, fifteen-month-old Chelsea McClellan. No chopped up body parts here, though. Jones’s MO was much subtler—poisoning. She alleged that she only intended to only temporarily harm the infants, and then bring them back to life to receive praise and attention for saving them.
Jones was sentenced to ninety-nine years, but an outmoded Texas law enacted to prevent prison overcrowding means she’s scheduled to be released in 2018 before serving her full sentence.
3. Season of the Witch
Kenneth McDuff, nicknamed the Broomstick Murderer for strangling his final victim with a broom handle, killed three teenagers in Everman, Texas, in 1966. It wasn’t his serial killings that earned McDuff a spot in the history books, however, but rather his serial death sentences. McDuff received the death penalty for the three murders, but it was later reduced to life. After spending two decades in prison, he was granted parole in 1989. Yes, set free. Investigators allege he murdered as many as nineteen more women after his release. He was arrested again, convicted of murder of a twenty-two-year-old convenience store worker, and received the death penalty—again. McDuff was executed by lethal injection in 1998. He’s still believed to be the only person in the United States who walked away from death row only to return for round two.
4. The Sweetest Feeling
Dubbed the Candy Man from his work at his mother’s candy factory when he was young, Dean Corll killed around thirty boys in and around Houston between 1970 and 1973. But unlike the others in this list of famous Texas serial killers, he didn’t act alone. And unfortunately for him, his accomplices were his demise. Both accomplices received life sentences, but Corll wasn’t so lucky—his coconspirator Elmer Wayne Henley Jr. shot and killed the Candy Man during one of their attempted murders in 1973. Interestingly, the term serial killer hadn’t been coined yet, but reports of the gruesome murders had reporters flocking to Houston from all over the world. The infamous Truman Capote even showed up to get some fodder for another best-seller.
McDuff, Corll, Albright, and Jones have either died or been caught, killed, or prosecuted, but according to the FBI, a startling twenty-six percent of murders go unsolved in Texas today. Sounds like Texas could use a real-life Nick Noelle!
