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Remains Believed to Be Kelli Cox Found at Texas Site Shown by William Reece

Missing from Denton since 1997, the college student was found in a Brazoria County field a month after a dig in Houston turned up remains believed to be Jessica Cain.

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A line of searchers in light jackets walking away through knee-high prairie grass and wildflowers under an overcast sky, a ribbon on a stake in the foreground. Not the actual site.

For several days investigators had been digging through a long stretch of ground near Highway 288 in Brazoria County, just south of Houston. On Tuesday, April 5, 2016, they found human remains. Denton police confirmed the find that evening and said the remains were believed to be those of Kelli Cox, a University of North Texas student who had been missing for nearly nineteen years.

The man who had shown them where to dig was William Reece, 56, already serving a 60-year Texas sentence for aggravated kidnapping. He had been seen at the site, and at a second one. A month earlier, at a dig in southeast Houston, investigators had found remains believed to be those of Jessica Cain, 17, who disappeared the same year. Those had not yet been positively identified. "Investigators have been working with William Reece," Denton police said, and he "directed investigators to the crime scene."

Kelli Cox was 20 in July 1997, a couple of years into a psychology degree, hoping to work as a juvenile counselor. On the day she vanished she went with her criminal justice class to tour the Denton city jail. The last words her mother, Jan Bynum, heard from her were "I love you." Afterward Cox called her boyfriend from a payphone at a nearby gas station because her spare key would not open her car. When he arrived about 45 minutes later the car was still in the lot and she was gone. Jessica Cain had vanished in August after a theater cast party.

Reece had been out of prison barely a year that summer, released in 1996 after serving ten years of a 25-year sentence for kidnapping and sexual assault. In 1998 he went back, convicted of abducting Sandra Sapaugh in Harris County two months before Cox disappeared. Sapaugh escaped and testified against him. Then, in 2015, DNA tied him to the 1997 rape and murder of Tiffany Johnston, 19, taken from a car wash in Bethany, Oklahoma, and found in a field. He was charged with her murder, and soon afterward he began leading Texas investigators to graves.

On the day of the Brazoria find, Johnston's mother, Kathy Dobry, thought of the families in Texas now living through what she had lived through. "They won't have complete closure but at least they have something," she said. April 6 would have been Tiffany's 38th birthday. The true crime author Kathryn Casey, who had interviewed Reece in prison and said he denied being a serial killer, suggested the prospect of a death sentence in the Oklahoma case might be why he was now helping police.

Investigators later identified Cox's remains through her dental records, and in December 2017 a Brazoria County grand jury indicted Reece for capital murder in her death. In June 2021 an Oklahoma jury convicted him of murdering Tiffany Johnston and he was sentenced to death. A year later he pleaded guilty in Texas to the murders of Kelli Cox, Jessica Cain and 12-year-old Laura Smither and received three life sentences. Oklahoma's Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the death sentence in July 2025.

What this story covers. The search near Highway 288, the find on April 5, 2016, the Denton police statement, the earlier Houston find believed to be Jessica Cain, Reece's age and sentence, and the words of Kathy Dobry and Kathryn Casey come from News 9 Oklahoma City's report that evening. At the time Reece was charged only in the Oklahoma case and convicted of no murder; he is called a suspect accordingly. Kelli Cox's last day, Reece's earlier sentences, Sandra Sapaugh's escape, the dental identification and the 2017 indictment come from the Dallas Observer of December 15, 2017. The Oklahoma conviction and death sentence, the Texas guilty pleas and life sentences, and the 2025 appeal ruling come from NonDoc's report of July 10, 2025. According to NonDoc, a Texas Ranger began interviewing Reece about Cox and Cain in February 2016 after promises that two Texas counties would not seek death; his lawyers later argued those promises improperly induced his confessions, and the appeals court rejected that claim. Accounts of how Cox met her killer differ, and this story does not choose between them.

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