Member-only story
Murder on Ice
Volunteers and Public Tips Thaw a Cold Case in Texas
If, as lawyers claim, “hard cases make bad law,” sometimes hard cases improve police practices. The combination of law enforcement officers knowing more and technology making more possible can sometimes heat up the coldest of cold cases, and we’ve got one thawing here in Central Texas. Williamson County, to be more exact.
I had heard of this case way back when I was a criminal magistrate for the People’s Republic of Austin, which was in Travis County but for a sliver of the northern edge that extended over the line to Williamson County, where I’ve retired after a second career in academia.
The body of a young woman was found in a ditch near Interstate 35. She was never identified, but she acquired the moniker “Orange Socks,” because those were all the clothing found on her body. The gruesome discovery happened on Halloween in 1979. The cause of death was strangulation, but homicide investigators were stymied by inability to identify the victim and lack of forensic clues that might point to the perpetrator.
After hitting the walls erected by limitations in available facts, the Orange Socks Murder languished until 1982, when a confessed serial killer named Henry Lee Lucas added Orange Socks to his roster of victims, claiming he had picked her up in Oklahoma and dumped her body along the…
