"20/20" explores the multi-decade investigation of William Lewis Reece.The attacks of Laura Smither, Sandra Sapaugh, Kelli Cox, Tiffany Johnston and Jessica Cain in 1997 haunted their Texas and Oklahoma communities until the person responsible was finally brought to justice.When four young women disappeared in 1997, fear ravaged their tight-knit Texas and Oklahoma communities along the corridor of Interstate 45.
The attacks of Laura Smither, Sandra Sapaugh, Kelli Cox, Tiffany Johnston and Jessica Cain in 1997 haunted their Texas and Oklahoma communities until the person responsible was finally brought to justice.On April 3, 1997, 12-year-old Laura Smither, an aspiring professional ballerina, vanished after going for a morning jog in her quiet Friendswood, Texas, neighborhood.
On April 3, 1997, 12-year-old Laura Smither, an aspiring professional ballerina, vanished after going for a morning job in her Friendswood, Texas, neighborhood.Three hundred miles north, another young woman would soon suffer a similar fate. On the evening of July 26, 1997, an officer spotted an abandoned white Dodge Neon sedan at the Sunshine Car Wash.
On the evening of July 26, 1997, Tiffany Johnston went missing, failing to meet her husband to celebrate their three-month wedding anniversary.Her partially clothed body was discovered the next day along the interstate. She had been raped and strangled. DNA swabs collected by the medical examiner were inconclusive. Johnston's case also grew cold.A month later in South Texas, another young woman's disappearance would shatter the lives of Suzy and C.H. Cain.
Friendswood Police Department Chief Josh Rogers and Detective Doug Bacon discuss what they learned from William Lewis Reece.On May 17, 1997, 19-year-old Sandra Sapaugh called a friend from a convenience store pay phone in Webster, Texas, asking them to meet at Waffle House. Sandra would later say she noticed a man staring at her in the parking lot. As she drove her car across the street to the restaurant, she realized her car tire was flat.
Meanwhile, detectives at nearby Friendswood Police Department were zeroing in on a suspect in Laura Smither's murder.Reece was a divorced truck driver and construction worker who was convicted and sentenced to prison in the 1980s for two rapes and a kidnapping, according to court documents. While OSBI's review turned up nothing new, there was one piece of evidence remaining from Johnston's body that could be tested for DNA using current technologies. A partial DNA profile resulted, and when investigators tested this against Reece, it was consistent with him and no one else, linking him to the crime.
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