The Calder 3000 has yielded the bodies of murdered women between the 1970s and the 1990s. Image / Supplied
The Calder 3000 has yielded the bodies of murdered women between the 1970s and the 1990s. Image / Supplied
Warning: Disturbing content
On a marshy stretch of land bordering the old oilfield on Calder Drive in the Texan overflow town of League City lies an eerie tract of land that is a human dumping ground.
Between scattered houses, strip malls and a trailer park, the ten hectares overgrown with weeds is crisscrossed with dirt roads no-one ever bothered to name.
Located off Interstate Highway I-45 in Galveston County on the southern fringes of the metropolis of Houston, it is known as the Texas Killing Fields.
Locals also call it the Calder 3000 block, for its position below 3000 Calder Road.
They've been pulling out the bones and body parts of women and girls for decades from this patch which is linked with the disappearances and murders of almost 30 females.
Corner of Calder 3000 field where the bodies of murdered women between Houson and the Galveston coast have been dumped. Image / Google Maps
Adjacent to the old Stardust Trail Rides, where horses were hired out for recreational evenings, the land is now the site of the Magnolia Creek Baptist Church.
In the church grounds are crosses, one erected for 16-year-old Laura Miller, last seen alive at a gas station in League City after calling her boyfriend on a spring day in September, 1984.
She vanished from the same spot where Heide Villarreal-Fye, a cocktail waitress, disappeared from a year earlier.
The 23-year-old had left her parents' house in League City in October, 1983, to hitch a ride to Houston to see her boyfriend.
Six months later, her corpse was found in the Calder 3000 after a family dog wandered home on Calder Road carrying Ms Fye's head.
Cocktail waitress Heidi Fye went missing and her body was found on the eerie block six months later when a dog was found carrying her skull. Photo / Supplied
The cases of the missing or murdered women which are linked to the site mostly remain unsolved.
The I-45 from Houston to Galveston, just 110km long, has ben described as the bloodiest stretch of highway in America because of its own links to nearly 40 women and young girls murdered or vanished along this stretch of road.
Their bodies have been dumped in fields, lakes, parks and the bayou.
The victims were aged between 12 years old and 34, in cases spanning four decades, from 1971 to 2002.
This week, League City police scored a breakthrough with the positive identification through DNA testing called "phenotyping" of Jane Doe and Janet Doe.
This predicts physical appearance to produce a physical profile and was used to track down California's Golden State Killer who has been charged with multiple rapes and murders dating back to 1974.
Jane Doe was identified as Audrey Lee Cook, 30, who vanished in December 1985 and whose remains were found on Calder 3000 in February 1986.
The mother of two sons had worked as a mechanic for six years before moving on to dealing cocaine before her death. Her remains were found next to Laura Miller's.
Janet Doe was Donna Prudhomme, 34, who vanished in July 1991 and whose remains were found three months later by horseback riders on Calder Road.
The bodies of these two women, found on the Calder 3000, were known only as Janet Doe and Jane Doe until DNA 'phenotyping' revealed their identities this week. Photo / Supplied
Neither Ms Cook nor Ms Prudhomme was reported missing by family.
Despite suspects being named over the years, police have charged no-one in relation to those four murders.
Theories about one or more serial killers operating in this small part of southern coastal Texas have arisen from the linked cases of females who vanished from streets.
Five teenagers were murdered in 1971 and six more between 1974 and 1977; six teens were murdered in pairs
Back in 1971, a girl and a young woman, 13-year-old Colette Wilson, and Gloria Gonzales, 19, disappeared and their bodies were found dumped 35m from each other.
Colette, who was from Alvin, 17km south west of Calder 3000, was dropped off on a road in June 1971 and her body was found in late November at Addicks Reservoir in northwest Houston.
Ms Gonzales vanished from near her Houston apartment and her dismembered body was found at Addicks Reservoir, three days before Colette Wilson was found there.
Audrey Lee Cook, left, and Donna Prudhomme were identified as the two remaining victims in one part of the "Killing Fields". Photo / League City Police Department
In June, 1971, Colette Anise Wilson, 13, was dropped off from after summer school band camp at a bus stop.
Five months later her naked body was discovered 64km away with a single gunshot wound to the head.
In August of the same year two 14-year-old girls, Rhonda Johnson and Sharon Shaw, disappeared after a day at the beach in Galveston.
Six months later, two boys fishing saw a skull floating in Clear Lake, 15km north of the Calder 3000 and both girls' skeletal remains were recovered.
Krystal Jean Baker, 13, whose great aunt was Marilyn Monroe, was abducted from near the I-45, raped and strangled. Photo / Supplied
They had been bound at the feet and hands and shot in the back of the head.
Although a man, gas station attendant and sex offender Michael Self was convicted of Ms Shaw's murder, it was later found he was coerced into a false confession by corrupt officers.
Two other men confessed to the murders, including serial killer Edward Harold Bell, however he was never charged.
In November 1971, three young girls vanished from Houston and Galveston.
Allison Craven, 12, disappeared from her mother's apartment near the I-45 on November 9.
Four months later, pieces of her dismembered body were found buried in two places in a field 20km away.
Best friends Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson, both aged 15, were last seen accepting a ride from a man in a white van at an ice cream shop on November 15, 1971.
The girls were bound, stripped from the waist down and their bodies were found in Turner's Bayou, in Texas City between Galveston and League City.
The girls were friends of Sharon Shaw and Rhonda Johnson, who they knew from a water ski school at Offats Bayou on Galveston Island.
In January 1973, 16-year-old Kimberly Rae Pitchford vanished after taking a driving class at Dobie High School, just off the I-45.
Audrey Lee Cook, left in 1973 and, right, in the mid 1980s when the cocaine dealer was abducted and murdered and dumped in the 'killing fields'. Photo / Supplied
She was meant to call her parents to pick her up, but never made the call
On September 6, 1974, best friends Brooks Bracewell, 12, and Georgia Geer, 14, went to the UtoteM convenience store store on the I-45 in Texas City.
Best friends Georgia Geer, 14, and Brooks Bracewell, 12, were abducted from the street and their remains not fund until seven years later in a ditch 20km away. Photo / Supplied
It was a short bus trip from their homes on Dickinson Bayou, Galveston County, where they lived a short trail through pine trees apart.
The two pretty young girls wore the latest in 1970s fashion, bell bottoms and crop tops.
They frequented UtoteM for soft drinks and bags of chips.
Galveston County Police initially believed they were runaways and didn't look into their disappearance for months.
It was not investigated as a homicide until April 1981, when their remains were found in a culvert near Alvin, 20km from where they were last seen.
In October 1983, just after waitress Heidi Fye vanished and her remains were dumped on the Calder 3000 block, a 14-year-old girl vanished from home in Santa Fe, just 10km south.
The house from where Sondra Kay Ramber disappeared was left with the front door open, food in the oven, and her purse and coat inside.
When her father reported her missing, police told him she was a runaway and said she had gone to start up a new life.
No trace of Sondra Ramber has ever been found.
When the other missing female whose remains ended up on the Calder 3000 block vanished, her father did not take it lightly from police.
After Tim Miller's daughter Laura was abducted from League City, murdered, dumped and her body found in February 1986, he sprang into action.
When Robert Abel, a NASA engineer who ran the Stardust horseback rides on Calder Road came under suspicion, Tim Miller confronted him with a revolver and accused him of being a serial killer.
Abel was never charged and Mr Miller went on to found EquuSearch, a search and recovery organisation for the hundreds of missing cases in Texas.
It has recovered 238 bodies and he and his team have searched bays, bayous, canals, rivers and lakes for the missing.
The notorious stretch between Houston and Galveston continued to provide cases to be investigated.
Suzanne Richardson was studying marine administration and working nights when she was kidnapped. Photo / Supplied
In May 1986, 19-year-old Shelley Sikes left her waitressing job at Gaidos Seafood Restaurant on Seawall Boulevard in Galveston.
The next day her car was found abandoned on the side of the I-45, bogged in mud, spattered with blood and the windscreen smashed.
Gerald Zwarst, 63, was later convicted of her aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to life, but Sikes' remains were never found.
In October 1988, Suzanne Rene Richerson, 22, also vanished from her job and was never seen again.
Richerson appears to have been kidnapped around 6am from the Casa Del Mar condominiums where the maritime administration student worked as a night desk clerk.
Witnesses heard a woman's screams and a lone shoe was found in the parking lot.
Her parents and fellow students plastered the Houston Galveston streets with posters of the missing woman.
Suspects included a drug addict who later died of an overdose and two men, cousins, none of whom were ever charged.
On February 1, 1996, Lynette Bibbs, 14, and Tamara Fisher, 15 visited a Houston club for teenagers.
A 22-year-old male later claimed to have dropped the friends off at a motel near the city centre.
The bodies of the two girls were found dumped by a rural road two days later in Cleveland, 80km north.
The following month Krystal Jean Baker, 13, was last seen near the I-45 in Texas city leaving her grandmother's home for a convenience store to use the phone.
The young girl, whose great aunt was Norma Jean Baker — better known as Marilyn Monroe — was found hours later under a bridge in nearby Chamber County.
She had been beaten, sexually assaulted and strangled to death with a ligature.
Itinerant refinery welder, Kevin Edison Smith, was convicted 16 years later of her murder, after her dress was resubmitted for DNA analysis and yielded a semen stain
In April 1997, aspiring ballerina Laura Kate Smither, 12, was jogging near the I-45 in Friendswood.
She never returned home.
Her decapitated body was found 17 days later by a retention pond near the I-45 in Pasadena, naked except for a sock.
Aspiring ballerina, Laura Smither, 12, vanished while jogging and her decapitated body was found in a retention pond. Photo / Supplied
Police drew comparisons with Smither's murder and that of nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, three months earlier and 500km away in Arlington.
But several months later, in August 1997, the murder of Jessica Lee Cain, 17, was to make police link her and Smither to one of several suspects, William Lewis Reece.
The teenager had been dining at a restaurant in Clear Lake with friends and then driving her father's truck, which was found abandoned on the I-45, but operational, with no signs of a struggle and her wallet on the front seat.
Witnesses saw her leave the truck and walk towards a red Isuzu Amigo which was stopped behind her vehicle.
Nineteen years later, in 2016, human remains were found in a horse paddock near Hobby airport in southern Houston.
They belonged to Jessica Cain and within days police recovered Laura Smither's remains in Pasadena.
They charged William Reece, a convicted kidnapper who had been in prison since 1998 when a woman escaped him and alerted police.
At the time Reece was suspected of murdering Smither and Cain, he had been out of jail for a year after serving ten years for kidnapping and raping two women in Oklahoma.
The suspected serial killer was due to be tried in Oklahoma for strangling to death a 19-year-old newlywed, Tiffany Johnson at a car wash in Oklahoma.
After the trial, he will be transferred back to Texas to stand trial for the murders of Cain, Smither and Kelli Ann Cox, a 20-year-old student who vanished in 1997 from Denton, in the state's north.
In July 2002, Sarah Trusty was riding her bike near the Algoa Baptist Church in Galveston County around 11pm.
The next day, her bike was inside the church but no other trace of her was found until 14 days later fisherman saw her decomposed body on the Texas City dike.
In November 2006, within a single week, the bodies of two missing females were found in neighbouring counties on the Galveston coast.
