TEXAS OBLIVION

A true-crime collection recounts some of Texas’ most intriguing disappearances.

Virtually everyone has heard of the Bermuda Triangle, but how many readers know that Texas has its own lengthy history of unexplained vanishings, from sailors and farmers to outlaws and teens? “I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination,” wrote author Ambrose Bierce before famously disappearing over the Mexican border. “His fate is a question mark,” writes Bills of Bierce. “We’re left with only rumor and speculation. But Bierce was not the first or the last person to go missing in Texas—his date with oblivion just generated the most interest and fanfare.” With this book, Bills delves into 20 other cases that generated far less fanfare. The oil tanker SS Marine Sulphur Queen, which sailed out of Beaumont with 39 men, never made it to its destination. The pilot of a small chartered flight was never located even though the plane was found at a remote airport with blood in the cabin and a bullet hole in the roof. At the height of the Depression, two duck hunters snuck over the border of the King Ranch—a “Walled Kingdom” with a million acres and its own extralegal justice—never to be seen again. Not all of the cases are recent history. Texas has been swallowing people up since at least the 19th century, like Jesse Evans, Billy the Kid’s lesser-known partner in crime, who disappeared the day he was released from the famous Huntsville Penitentiary. Two priests associated with the cathedral in Brownsville also vanished—one in a storm in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the back of his horse while visiting the outlying ranches of his parish. There are more traditional true-crime abductions as well, including the cases of the four young women who went missing in Galveston over the course of the 1980s. Some were murdered; some merely disappeared; but none of their remains have ever been found.

Bills’ volume harkens back to an earlier, pulpier era of paperback true crime. His prose style is lean and matter-of-fact, though he knows how to give each narrative a satisfying shape—no easy feat when the mysteries are never solved: “After the M/V Southern Cities’ next-to-last Gulf of Mexico crossing in 1966,” begins one story about a missing tugboat, “its chief engineer, Frank McCarney, quit his post in Port Isabel, Texas….He would later tell a Coast Guard fact-finding panel that even though the tugboat had been in ‘first class condition,’ he was ‘scared’ of the vessel. That fear probably saved McCarney’s life.” The author finds captivating angles even in otherwise run-of-the-mill cases, like “Without a Trace,” in which an adult learns that he had an older half brother who vanished forever when the man was a baby. Authoritative and well-researched, the stories are enthralling not only for their enigmatic natures, but also for the colorful picture they paint of Texas: its history, its culture, and the ways its crimes get investigated (or not). The book is the perfect read for a plane ride or beach day—preferably one in the Lone Star State.

A varied and well-crafted assemblage of missing person accounts.