July 26, 1987
Unsolved murders not rare for Houston area
Author: BOB TUTT; Staff
BY ALL ACCOUNTS, success, prosperity and happiness filled the lives of Eddie Bruce McMillan and his wife Jo Ann.
McMillan, 49, a Conoco executive, and his wife, 51, a Realtor, were respected, well-liked church-goers who had reared two children to adulthood. They lived in a fine home situated on a lake in an upscale Kingwood neighborhood.
But after they had retired on the evening of July 13, an assailant or assailants broke into their home and bludgeoned them to death in their bed.
Their bodies were so badly battered officers believed at first the attackers had blasted them with a shotgun.
The intruder or intruders ransacked the house but apparently took nothing of significant value. That adds to the mystery of why they were slain. HarrisCounty sheriff's investigators have found no motives for the killings and have no good leads.
Officers say they have little to go on except for tape recordings of two telephone calls an unidentified man placed after the killings to summon authorities to the McMillan home. One of the calls came from the residence itself.
Authorities released the tapes to the news media last week and appealed to the public to help solve the case. They hoped someone might help them identify the caller.
A grim possibility looms that the McMillan murders could become another case that will remain unsolved. Sometimes, despite all their diligence and best efforts, investigators never succeed in cracking a case. That happens in an estimated 20 percent of murder cases.
Some startling murders, like those of the McMillans, committed in this metropolitan area have gone unsolved. One of the most notable involves the slayings of two wives of Houston entertainer Dean Goss.
On March 16, 1982, Goss found his wife, Elaine, 43, shot to death in the bedroom of their Meyerland home. She had been shot once in the head at close range. Police could not establish a motive for her murder or find evidence that would solve the case.
Goss remarried, but on July 31, 1985, his second wife, Paula, 42, also was slain in the same Meyerland home. Her assailant attacked her as she entered the house at night, acting in what police said appeared to be a state of rage. He viciously beat her, stabbed her repeatedly and shot her in the head at close range.
At the time of her murder, Goss was in a hospital for minor surgery, and Assistant District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal later stated publicly he was not a suspect. However, Rosenthal said investigators felt sure the killer was a man close to the family and there was a theory the same person had slain both wives.
Police expressed hope that with time the case would be broken, but so far that break has not occurred.
Another set of mystifying murders occurred when realtor Elizabeth Shumate, 54, and two of her employees, JoAnn Brown, 46, and Fran Ivey, 60, were slain Aug. 19, 1983.
Witnesses saw a man, believed by police to be the killer, enter the office of the Shumate Realty Co. at 16007 Memorial about closing time.
At the time, Shumate was talking on the telephone, and the caller told police she heard a man's voice and could tell something was wrong.
Police said Brown and Ivey seemed to have feared they were going to be robbed and apparently had time to slip off some jewelry. A diamond ring belonging to Ivey was found under the cushion of a couch.
According to the police theory, the killer appeared to be tying Shumate's legs with cord from a venetian blind when she began to struggle. Then he shot her and the other two women. All three were shot in the head.
From descriptions provided by witnesses who saw the man enter, the police obtained a composite drawing of the suspected killer, but they never got a firm lead.
Another still-unsolved triple murder occurred at League City in GalvestonCounty on the evening of Nov. 2, 1983. One or more persons entered the Corvette Concepts shop and killed the shop's co-owner, Beth Wilburn, 25; her friend, Thomas McGraw Jr., 28, an oil field worker; and James Oates, 22, an electrician who happened to be working at the shop.
According to a medical examiner's report, Wilburn suffered 129 stabs wounds in addition to being shot, and McGraw was shot and stabbed 15 times. A sharpened screwdriver remained embedded in McGraw's spine. Oates was shot several times.
Police said it appeared to be a crime of passion, but they never uncovered a motive. Even the assistance of a psychic produced no results.
Lt. Jim Gibson, who spent more than a year on the case, said it is still under investigation but no good leads have turned up. He said it ranks as the most brutal crime ever committed in that bedroom community.
One of Houston's most infamous unsolved murder cases is that of Fred C. Rogers, 81, and his wife, Edwina Harmon Rogers, 79.
On June 23, 1965, two Houston police officers went to the Rogers' Montrose area home after one of their relatives reported the elderly couple had not been answering their telephone. Finding the house locked, the officers forced their way in.
Inside they saw nothing unusual. Noting food left out on a kitchen table, one of the officers on impulse decided to open the refrigerator door. He received the shock of a lifetime because inside he found the dismembered remains of the couple.
That officer was C.M. Bullock, now a captain.
"It just looked like a bunch of meat. I didn't immediately know what it was. Just as I was closing the door, I saw the heads through the clear glass of the vegetable bin."
Autopsies showed FredRogers had been beaten to death, apparently with a blood-stained hammer found in the house, and EdwinaRogers had died from a bullet wound to the head.
Their intestines, vital organs and sex organs were missing, but some of these remains were discovered in a sewer line near their home.
Evidence indicated the bodies probably were dismembered in a downstairs bathroom. Traces of blood appeared on the bathroom and kitchen floors and on the steps leading up to the bedroom of their son, Charles Frederick Rogers, then 43.
The son, a Navy veteran and one-time seismologist, was so reclusive he left home each day before dawn and returned late at night. Neighbors said they hadn't even known he lived in the home.
Among items found in his room was a keyhole saw bearing traces of blood and flesh.
No trace of the son was found after the murders. For years police sought him as a material witness. In 1975, a judge declared him legally dead.
Sometimes authorities get a break that enables them to crack previously unsolved murder cases.
That was true in the killings of Houston attorney James Campbell and his wife, Virginia, who were shot to death at their home in 1982.
Investigators saw Cynthia Campbell Ray, a daughter of the Campbells, and her one-time boy friend, David West, as prime suspects but almost three years passed before they secured solid evidence against the pair.
The break in the case came after Kim Paris, a private investigator, worked her way into West's affections and then secretly recorded a confession she induced him to make. Later, after entering a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence, West appeared as the state's star witness against Ray.
He said he agreed to act as the triggerman after Ray convinced him her parents had abused her. Prosecutors contended Ray's true motive was not vengeance but obtaining a share of her parents' estate. Earlier this year a jury convicted Ray and gave her a life term.
Another celebrated case that defied solution for several years was the 1979 murders of Houston socialite Diana Duff-Smith Wanstrath, her husband, John Wanstrath, and their 14-month-old son Kevin.
The county medical examiner first ruled Diana Wanstrath had shot her husband and son to death and then committed suicide, but persistent probing by homicide detective Johnny Bonds uncovered that Wanstrath's adopted brother, Markham Duff-Smith, had plotted the murders so he could collect the family's $1 million estate.
The investigation also determined Duff-Smith had arranged to have his adoptive mother, Gertrude Duff-Smith Zabolio, murdered in her River Oaks home in 1975. Her death also had been incorrectly ruled a suicide.
Duff-Smith and Allen Janecka, the hired killer who acted for him in both cases, were convicted. They are on Death Row awaiting the outcome of appeals. Several others also involved in Duff-Smith's plots drew long prison terms.
A more recent case that remained unsolved for more than a year involved 19-year-old Shelley Sikes, a Texas City waitress who was abducted May 25, 1986 as she was driving home. Although the indications were she probably had been killed, her family held out hope she might still be alive.
Those hopes recently were dashed when apparent guilt feelings impelled John Robert King, 29, an unemployed Bayview laborer, to confess he and Gerald Peter Zwarst, 32, of El Lago, had forced Sikes' car off the road and abducted her. He said they were high on narcotics.
King stopped short of admitting they had killed Sikes but said they had buried her body. The search for her remains continues. Meanwhile, authorities are holding the two men on kidnapping charges.
Most law enforcement officers learn to accept that all murder cases won't be solved, said Sgt. M.E. Doyle, a Houston homicide detective.
"It may be the crook was clever enough to get away with it," he said, "but it just may be there is a lack of witnesses or evidence. You may have the best suspect in the world in jail, but you have to let him go because of a lack of evidence, and you can't do anything about it.
"After you've been in police work a while, you learn there are a lot of frustrations about it, but you just have to go on."
Harris County Sheriff's Lt. Drew Warren, who is heading the investigation of the McMillan murders, said he is confident that case will be solved.
"It does offer a puzzle or two," he said, "but I feel with a little bit of time and good police work there is a high percentage of clearance."
Copyright 1987 Houston Chronicle