Since the 1990s, Robert Abel, a retired NASA engineer, has been suspected in the abduction and deaths of a number of young women in Texas.
The bones of four young women were discovered on the same plot of land close to Calder Road in League City between 1984 and 1991.
23-year-old Heidi Fye went missing in 1983; her remains were found in April 1984; and the body of 16-year-old Laura Miller was discovered nearby in 1986.
Another woman’s body was discovered while Miller was being sought after; sadly, she could not be positively recognised and was given the name Jane Doe. Audrey Lee Cook, a 30-year-old mechanic last seen alive in December 1985, was identified as the missing person in 2019.
A fourth woman was discovered in the same location in 1991, but she could not be identified. Until she could be identified as Donna Gonsoulin Prudhomme in 2019, she was known as Janet Doe, according to Oxygen. The land and property that Abel owned in League City are close to the oil field where the four women were discovered. For more than ten years, he had been renting the land, and in 1990, he had bought another 11 acres nearby to start Stardust Trailrides, a small horseback riding operation.
Abel was never put under custody for the killings because there was either insufficient or no evidence to do so.
According to a 1999 article in Texas Monthly, a police detective described Abel as a “serial sexual offender” who exhibits the
Abel had been accused of beating animals, being aggressive by a number of his ex-wives and partners, all of which he denied.
Officers used cadaver dogs to search his home in 1993 for bodies and other evidence for more than 12 hours in an effort to find evidence connecting him to the killings. Helicopters were used to search his property, and Abel was questioned by police in nearby towns, but nothing was discovered.
Tim Miller, the father of Laura Miller, a 16-year-old who was discovered in the Texas Killing Fields, once had no doubt that Abel was his daughter’s killer. After one night of heavy drinking, he claimed to have held a gun to Abel’s head in threatening messages placed on the man’s answering machine. Abel denied that they came into contact physically.
“There are many days when I think about driving over there, putting a gun to his head, and pulling the trigger,” Miller said in a 1999 interview with Texas Monthly.
“I feel like I’m in the presence of evil when I’m around him,” she said.