In February 2016 Texas Ranger James Holland sat down with a prisoner serving 60 years for a 1997 kidnapping. William Lewis Reece had just been charged in Oklahoma with the 1997 murder of a 19-year-old woman, and prosecutors there could seek his execution. Holland brought documents from two Texas district attorneys promising not to seek death in Texas. Within the month Reece had led Holland and a Friendswood police detective to the place where Kelli Cox was buried, confessed to four murders, and told them where to find Jessica Cain. Families who had waited nearly 19 years got answers, and the promises Holland made became the center of Reece's appeals.
Reece grew up near Yukon, Oklahoma, and spent part of his youth in foster care. His lawyers later said he had scored just above the threshold for intellectual disability; the appeals court record puts his IQ at 75 at age 12 and 78 before his trial. As an adult he worked in construction, drove trucks and shod horses as a farrier. He married twice, divorced three times and had two children.
In 1986, in Norman, Oklahoma, a 19-year-old woman whose car had broken down accepted his offer of help. He lured her into the sleeper of his semi-truck, drove to the loading dock of an air conditioner plant and sexually assaulted her. When she asked why, he said, "because I'm crazy." She escaped after persuading him to let her use a restroom and finding help on the dock. Two months later in Anadarko he broke into the home of a 20-year-old woman, who woke to find him in her room. He choked and raped her; she got away and later identified him. He was convicted and sent to prison, served about 10 years and was released in October 1996.
He stayed briefly with his mother in Anadarko. The family knew Kathy Dobry, a local woman whose laundry his mother, Patsy Miely, had once done; Dobry later recalled giving Reece a ride to Oklahoma City to renew his expired driver's license. Then he moved to the Houston area, where a sister lived, worked construction and shod horses at a ranch near Friendswood, and traveled often between Texas and Oklahoma in a white Ford dually pickup. "He was out of prison for one year, from October 1996 to October 1997," said the author Kathryn Casey, who interviewed him in prison.
Laura Smither was 12 and lived with her parents, Bob and Gay Smither, in Friendswood, south of Houston. She loved ballet. She danced in the living room, played board games at the kitchen table and staged productions for the other children in the neighborhood. "She was always orchestrating little performances," her mother said. That spring she read that running would build the stamina to hold her arabesque higher, and asked to go jogging. "It really took me by surprise," Gay Smither said.
On the morning of April 3, 1997, Laura went for a run and vanished less than a quarter mile from home. Police, friends, neighbors, strangers and U.S. Marines searched for her. "We would not have made it through April of '97 without the community behind us the way they were," Bob Smither said. Seventeen days later, on April 20, her body was found in a retention pond in Pasadena, about 12 miles away. Reece, who was working a bulldozer clearing land for a subdivision nearby, became a suspect. Police searched his truck, but they did not have enough to arrest him, and the case stayed open for 19 years. During the search someone painted a sign that read, "To the killer of Laura. We will get you! From: A local police officer." The family never learned who made it.
In 2016 Reece gave his own version: that he had hit something with his vehicle, found the girl in a ditch, and killed her to stop her screaming. That account is his alone.
On May 16, 1997, Sandra Sapaugh, 19, noticed a man staring at her as she used a payphone at a convenience store in Webster, a neighbor of Friendswood. When she drove away she found a flat tire and pulled into a Waffle House parking lot. A man in a white dually pickup pulled in behind her and offered to help. He asked her to fetch something from his truck, then put a knife to her throat and forced her inside. He drove off, said he was taking her to Dallas and assaulted her. On the highway she inched toward the passenger door, opened it, fought off his grip on her shirt and jumped from the truck at highway speed. She survived with serious injuries.
On July 3, 1997, two girls, 16 and 17, accepted a ride home from a cafe in Pearland, where they knew Reece as a regular customer. He took them to his apartment instead and raped them both. When one asked why, he again said it was because he was crazy. They begged him to take them home and promised to say nothing, and he did; he told one of them he wanted to come back for her and take her to Oklahoma. Ashamed and frightened, the girls made a pact to tell no one. They kept it until October, when they saw his face on the news.
Kelli Ann Cox was 20, a senior studying psychology at the University of North Texas in Denton, and hoped to become a juvenile counselor. She had a 19-month-old daughter, Alexis, who was, as one account put it, her whole world. On the morning of July 15, 1997, she left her parents' home, dropped Alexis with a babysitter and joined her criminal justice class for a tour of the Denton city jail. She left the group around noon to take a test, but her key would not open her car and she had locked herself out. She walked across the street to a convenience store and called her boyfriend from the payphone. When he arrived about 45 minutes later, her car was still there and she was gone. She did not pick Alexis up from day care. The last thing her mother, Jan Bynum, remembered her saying was "I love you." For years Alexis called out "Mommy" whenever she saw a car like her mother's.
The case went cold with no body and no strong leads. Reece's 2016 version was that he met her at the convenience store, that she spilled a drink on him and insulted him, and that he attacked her there; he said he buried her in a Brazoria County rice field using a bulldozer he kept in the area. Investigators had no independent account of the encounter.
Tiffany Johnston grew up in Anadarko, Oklahoma, and was 19 and newly married, living in Bethany, outside Oklahoma City. Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond later called her "a young bride with her whole life ahead of her." Her mother was Kathy Dobry, the same Anadarko woman who had given Reece a ride the year before.
On July 26, 1997, Tiffany was washing her car at the Sunshine Car Wash in Bethany and had hung her floor mats on the wall of the bay. Reece pulled in with his truck and a horse trailer. He abducted her there, sexually assaulted her in the trailer and strangled her. That evening Bethany officers found her car at the wash with the keys and her money inside and the mats still on the wall; her mother had already been searching the streets nearby. The next day searchers found her body in tall grass beside Gregory Road, south of Interstate 40 and west of Yukon in Canadian County, about 15 miles away. A rape kit was collected, but the technology of the time could not produce a usable profile.
In his later confession Reece claimed that he had sprayed her with the hose, that she had become angry and that she had struck him with a horseshoe. A prepaid calling card showed that on the drive west he stopped in Yukon and made a call from a payphone. The car wash owner, who had seen Reece there eight to ten times that summer, recognized him on a Houston newscast that winter and called the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. After the murder Reece phoned Kathy Dobry to offer his condolences. She said he sounded sincere, and when investigators asked about him in 1997, she could not believe he was involved.
Jessica Cain was 17, a student from La Marque whose family lived on Tiki Island, across the causeway from Galveston. Her clothes were already packed for college. On the night of August 17, 1997, she celebrated with fellow drama students at a cast party, and friends saw her leave a Bennigan's restaurant in Clear Lake. She missed her curfew. Her father, C.H. Cain, went looking and found her 1992 Ford pickup abandoned and in working order on the southbound shoulder of Interstate 45 near home, with her wallet and keys inside. Pam Mitchell, a La Marque police detective, was named lead investigator the next day. The search went on for nearly two decades. Gay and Bob Smither, still grieving Laura, joined it.
Reece later said that he and Jessica had argued after one of them dinged the other's car door, that she followed him, and that he killed her on the roadside. He buried her near a gas line on a property in southeast Houston.
Sandra Sapaugh learned that the truck in her attack matched the one police had searched in the Smither case. On October 16, 1997, she picked Reece out of a lineup, and he was arrested for her kidnapping. His trial began on April 29, 1998; the jury deliberated less than three hours, convicted him of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced him to 60 years. Many people in the Houston area came to believe he had been convicted of Laura's murder. He had not, and in four cases the families were left waiting.
In 2012 a retired police chief, Lynn Williams, joined the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and was assigned Tiffany Johnston's case. Her mother had called investigators year after year to ask about it. Reece had been a suspect in several killings and in 2013 agreed to give a DNA sample. In December 2013 a cheek swab was sent to the OSBI, where criminologist Wendy Duke compared it with the sample from Johnston's body, which had been tested twice before without result. Reece could not be excluded as the source of a partial male profile; the chance of an unrelated person matching was at least 1 in 11,200, and Y-chromosome testing also pointed to him. On September 22, 2015, Oklahoma issued a warrant charging him with Tiffany's kidnapping and murder, and Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater pursued the case.
Holland's interviews began on February 9, 2016. According to the appeals court record, he urged Reece to help find the bodies of Kelli Cox and Jessica Cain so he could control his own destiny, said he believed Oklahoma would agree not to seek death if Reece cooperated, and said repeatedly that he was not the district attorney, the judge or the governor and could promise nothing. Transcripts cited by the defense show him telling Reece he would be treated like a "rockstar" and "like a king," offering a helicopter ride to McDonald's and boasting, "I'm the best at this ever." At the end of that session Reece laid out photographs of four victims he was willing to discuss.
On February 15 he came back with a list of demands. Holland told him that Denton and Galveston counties had agreed not to seek death under certain conditions, and that Harris County and Oklahoma had made no such promise. Reece said he could not be executed because he had been a special education student. That day he agreed to lead the way to one of the bodies, and on the drive he admitted killing Kelli Cox. On February 16, with Friendswood detective Doug Bacon recording, they went to the site in Brazoria County. On February 18 he described the Cox and Cain killings to Holland and Denton detective Eric Beckwith, insisting that Kelli be found first. "If they don't want to deal," he said, "let them give me the needle." On February 26, at his own request, Bacon read him his Miranda rights for the first time, and he gave formal statements about Laura Smither, Jessica Cain and Kelli Cox. On February 27 Bacon asked him about Tiffany Johnston, and he told the story. On March 1 he said he was talking to clear his conscience and to help the families.
Galveston County brought him back on a bench warrant, and the Texas Rangers, the FBI and the La Marque and Friendswood police, with Texas EquuSearch volunteers, dug at a four-acre tract in the 6100 block of East Orem Drive near Hobby Airport. On March 18, after 25 days of digging, they found Jessica Cain's remains. Galveston County District Attorney Jack Roady said the discovery brought "confirmation" and "new sorrow." On April 1 searchers found Kelli Cox's remains along Highway 288 about 25 miles south of Houston, with her bracelet; the University of North Texas confirmed her identity through dental records. "There's almost a comfort knowing," Jan Bynum said. "I'm now certain she hasn't been hurting all these years." She later had the bracelet made into a locket.
On June 21, 2016, Reece asked to see Holland again. Against the advice of his lawyer, Anthony Osso, he talked about Laura Smither, saying he was speaking of his own free will. Days later Holland, Osso and others asked the Oklahoma County District Attorney not to seek death. The district attorney did not answer, and soon afterward Reece learned that Oklahoma would seek it. A Brazoria County grand jury indicted him for capital murder in Kelli Cox's death in December 2017; Denton police, who had found her last known location, left the prosecution to Brazoria County, where her remains were found.
Before trial, the Oklahoma County trial court held a hearing on the confessions. The judge found that Holland had promised only that he would try to get everyone on board, and that Reece knew the final word belonged to the district attorneys. The recordings came in. Jury selection began in Oklahoma City on May 10, 2021. Reece pleaded not guilty and did not testify. His lawyer, Jacob Benedict, did not dispute that Reece had killed Tiffany; he argued that the confession came only after a Texas Ranger made a promise about the death penalty he could not keep.
Jurors heard the confessions, the DNA evidence, the car wash owner, and the women Reece had attacked in 1986, who testified about what he had done to them. Evidence of the Texas killings and of the Pearland and Webster attacks was admitted as well. Tiffany's husband read a letter about the children, the old age and the long life the two of them would never have. After a 17-day trial Reece was convicted of first-degree murder, and on June 2, 2021, the jury recommended death, finding four aggravating circumstances: a prior violent felony, a murder the statute describes as especially atrocious or cruel, a murder committed to avoid arrest, and a continuing threat to society.
"This was for Tiff," Kathy Dobry said. "After 24 years, and 10 months, this is Tiffany's time." C.H. Cain said he was glad Reece "can never harm another innocent young woman," and that final judgment belonged to God. Gay Smither felt "a tremendous amount of relief."
On August 19, 2021, Judge Stallings formally sentenced him to death. Reece stayed silent and declined to address the court or apologize. "He's not sorry," Dobry said. "He don't have a conscience." Tiffany's sister, Vickie Standing, said that after hearing all the women he had hurt, he deserved worse. Alexis Bynum said she felt evil come into the room with him and leave when he did. Gay Smither called him "incredibly prolific" and said more missing girls were still waiting to be found. Then she spoke to her daughter: "Keep dancing, baby."
Reece was returned to Texas on March 8, 2022, and held in the Friendswood jail. On June 29, 2022, aged 62 and using a walker, he pleaded guilty in a Galveston County courtroom to murdering Laura Smither and Jessica Cain and received two life sentences. That afternoon, in Angleton, he pleaded guilty to murdering Kelli Cox and received a third, about 25 years after the killings. "It certainly isn't going to bring these girls back," Roady said, "but it will make sure William Reece dies in prison." The pleas left him no appeal in Texas.
Gay Smither thanked him for leading police to the remains, saying he "did the right thing," because "those girls could still be missing." She explained her forgiveness: "I chose forgiveness because I didn't want to live in the prison of anger anymore." Jan Bynum told him to look at her and said the crimes were his alone: "this all falls on your shoulders." Alexis Bynum, who had been 19 months old when her mother vanished, said seeing him in person showed her she had built him up to be more than he was: "he was a bad man, but he is just a man." Reece avoided their eyes.
The Smithers turned their search into a lifelong cause. The volunteers who looked for Laura in 1997 had nicknamed their makeshift command post after her, and that became the name of the Laura Recovery Center, which helps families and police in missing-child cases. By 2017 it had worked on more than 1,700 cases and taken part in more than 100 searches. The Smithers wrote up what they had learned about organizing volunteers into a manual offered free online. "We just knew that God had given us a job to do, that we had to pay forward what had been given to us," Gay Smither said. She travels to police academies to train officers on missing-person cases, with the goal of "getting them in touch with their own humanity," and shows them a photograph of the 1997 sign promising Laura's killer would be caught. The Smithers never moved from the Friendswood house.
Kathy Dobry pushed the Oklahoma case for nearly two decades and credited new leadership at the OSBI for finally reviving it. Jan Bynum searched for Kelli and raised Alexis, who came with her to court. The Cain family waited 19 years to bring Jessica home.
On direct appeal Reece raised more than a dozen claims. The first was that Holland's promises and displays of power, combined with his low intelligence, improperly induced his confessions. Others challenged the testimony about his earlier rapes and the seating of jurors who had expressed views on the death penalty. On July 16, 2025, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals unanimously affirmed the death sentence in a precedential opinion by Judge David Lewis. The court found the trial judge's ruling on the confessions reasonable, noting in particular that on February 15 Reece knew there was no deal with Oklahoma and confessed anyway. It held that evidence of sexual propensity can be admitted in a murder case with a sexual motive. Lewis wrote that Reece killed Johnston as he had killed others: "It is simply his nature." Vice Chief Judge William Musseman concurred but called that remark unnecessary. Judge Scott Rowland, a former Oklahoma County prosecutor, stepped aside. Rehearing was denied on September 3, 2025.
Texas returned Reece to Oklahoma custody on December 29, 2025, and he is held at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. His petition to the U.S. Supreme Court argued that the state court should have reviewed the confession question independently and tested any error for harmlessness; the Attorney General's office answered that the court had found no error to test. On April 20, 2026, the Supreme Court denied review. The Attorney General's office has said it will ask for an execution date once his appeals are exhausted. As of October 2026 no date had been reported.
Every account of how the four victims died beyond the physical evidence comes from Reece, and he told those stories to men who were deciding whether to seek his death. In each version the victim provoked him: a girl struck by his car, a spilled drink, a sprayed hose, a dinged door. The courts did not have to accept them, and the families never did.
Some reports describe him as linked to at least nine rapes or killings in Oklahoma and Texas between 1986 and 1997. That figure counts the two 1986 rapes, the Webster kidnapping, the two Pearland teenagers and the four murders; he has not been tied by any court to other cases. Gay Smither has said she believes there are more missing girls. That belief has not been proven.
Kathy Dobry has said that for years small plastic trinkets and flowers appeared on Tiffany's grave around her birthday and the anniversary of her death, beginning about a year after the murder and stopping in 2005, the year Patsy Miely died. Dobry suspects Reece's mother left them because she knew what her son had done. Miely may simply have been mourning a neighbor's daughter. Nothing has settled the question.
Holland's methods remain disputed. Reece's lawyers called them coercion of a man of limited intelligence; the trial judge and the appeals court found that Holland kept repeating that he could promise nothing and that Reece chose to talk. The two Texas counties kept their word, and Oklahoma never gave its own.
1986: Reece rapes a 19-year-old in Norman and a 20-year-old in Anadarko, Oklahoma; convicted and imprisoned.
October 1996: Released from prison in Oklahoma; moves to the Houston area.
April 3, 1997: Laura Smither, 12, disappears on a jog in Friendswood; her body is found April 20 in Pasadena.
May 16, 1997: Sandra Sapaugh is abducted in Webster and escapes by jumping from his truck.
July 3, 1997: Two Pearland teenagers are taken to his apartment and raped.
July 15, 1997: Kelli Cox, 20, disappears in Denton.
July 26, 1997: Tiffany Johnston, 19, is abducted from a Bethany car wash; her body is found the next day west of Yukon.
August 17, 1997: Jessica Cain, 17, disappears after a cast party; her truck is found on I-45.
October 16, 1997: Sapaugh identifies Reece in a lineup; he is arrested.
1998: Convicted of aggravated kidnapping (trial began April 29) and sentenced to 60 years.
2012: OSBI agent Lynn Williams takes over the Johnston case.
December 2013: Reece's DNA is sent to the OSBI and cannot be excluded.
September 22, 2015: Oklahoma charges him with Johnston's murder.
February 9-27, 2016: Interviews with Ranger James Holland; confessions to four murders.
March 18, 2016: Jessica Cain's remains are found in southeast Houston.
April 1, 2016: Kelli Cox's remains are found in Brazoria County.
December 2017: Brazoria County indicts him for capital murder in Cox's death.
June 2, 2021: An Oklahoma County jury convicts him and recommends death.
August 19, 2021: Formally sentenced to death.
June 29, 2022: Pleads guilty to the Smither, Cain and Cox murders; three life sentences.
July 16, 2025: The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the death sentence.
December 29, 2025: Returned to Oklahoma's death row at McAlester.
April 20, 2026: The U.S. Supreme Court denies review.