GUILTY TX - William Lewis Reece, Serial Killer - Laura Smither, 12, Kelli Cox, 20, and Jessica Cain, 17

nutkin said:

One of the stories says they will begin digging at another site where they believe he buried another body next week. But, who could that be? I am assuming they are meaning in the Houston area, so likely isn't Kelli Cox.

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According to law enforcement sources, police will begin digging at another site in the Houston area next week. Investigators think another victim of Reece could be buried there.

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In October 1996, after an appeals court reduced his sentence because of improper comments by a prosecutor, Reece went free.

He showed up at his mother’s house in Anadarko, where many locals knew little about his past. He seemed “very polite,” said Kathy Dobry, a family friend who said she took Reece into the city to get a new driver’s license, as a favor to his mother.

“And dummy me,” she said, “I didn’t think to ask what he’d been in jail for because it didn’t concern me and my family.”

Until that summer, when her teenage daughter disappeared.

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A contingent of prosecutors and investigators from Texas traveled to Oklahoma Monday as part of continuing legal negotiations regarding a man suspected of murdering several women and young girls in the late 1990s...

Osso said Reece is "willing to accept responsibility" for the deaths... Osso said he is trying to negotiate a deal that will resolve all of the Texas cases quickly before Reece is sent to Oklahoma to answer for Johnston's murder.

"That will require that everybody agree to take the death penalty off the table," Osso said.

Osso said Texas officials have agreed to this, while Oklahoma officials have not.

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The process to resolve several-decades-old murder cases hit a standstill over whether prosecutors in another state will seek the death penalty against the prime suspect. William Lewis Reece is suspected of killing several young girls and women in Texas and Oklahoma in the late 1990s.

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Gay Smither acknowledges that "forgiveness is a journey," but she said that one day she'd like to sit down and look into the eyes of William Reece, the admitted serial killer linked to the death of her 12-year-old daughter Laura.

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Smither made her comments after Reece, a convicted kidnapper and rapist, agreed during a court hearing Wednesday to be returned to Oklahoma to be tried for capital murder in the 1997 death of another young woman.

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A convicted kidnapper who recently led authorities to the remains in Texas of two women who vanished in 1997 has been moved to Oklahoma to face murder and kidnapping charges.

KHOU-TV reports that William Reece was moved to Oklahoma Monday. He is charged with the 1997 death of 19-year-old Tiffany Johnston.

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The mother of a woman slain in 1997 had waited for years to see someone in court charged in the death.

So Kathy Dobry was at first lost for words when that moment came Thursday morning as Oklahoma County sheriff deputies escorted murder defendant William Lewis Reece into court.

Dobry's daughter, Tiffany Johnston, was abducted July 26, 1997, from a Bethany car wash, according to police.

Johnston, 19 at the time, was found the following day in Yukon. She had been strangled to death, authorities said.

Now, nearly two decades later, Dobry said she is ready for justice after such "a long road."

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Interstate-45 from Houston to Galveston, Texas is the bloodiest stretch of highway in America.

Just 80 km long, over the past 45 years nearly 40 women and young girls have been murdered or vanished along this stretch of road.

Their bodies have been dumped in fields, parks and the bayou.

But now, scientific advances may have finally ended the macabre dance of death. The question now is: was there more than one maniac on the loose?

He first struck June 17, 1971.

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“Many of these girls had the same look, the same hairstyle, were close to the same age, were on foot and their bodies found near water,’ says Galveston Police Det. Att Wingo.

But detectives finally got a break this year when a 58-year-old jailbird named William Lewis Reece told them he was responsible for a number of the murders. He led them to the bodies of Cox and Cain and confessed to Smither’s murder.

He was serving time in a Texas prison for raping and kidnapping a teenage girl. But now, Oklahoma cops have linked him to the 1997 sex slaying of Tiffany Johnston, 19.

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