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He taught me how to-- if I ever had to stab somebody, it's like, Hollywood is so stupid. They always show people with these big knives. He's like, you use a short blade knife. You can make several small cuts really fast. And then you twist the knife when you stab them. You twist it to open up the wound. And if you can, try to break the blade off into that person. Lessons.
It's the third day of my trip and I'm back at the Texas EquiSearch office, the rundown-looking headquarters of a world-class search and rescue organization, one that's tucked between a dive bar and a Dollar General. The sun's just set, there's catered brisket and sweet tea on someone's desk, and I'm surrounded by a group of people who have never met each other before. The vibe's a little awkward. People are pushing their food around their plastic plates and making stilted small talk. But the air feels heavy.
These are the family members of the Killing Fields victims, and some of them are reluctant to be there. Others, like me, are a little scared. Everyone is right to be nervous. Tim's a great detective in the sense that he has a photographic memory and an almost Rain Man-like capacity for recalling names and dates. But his bedside manner is a little lacking. He sometimes doesn't know when to pump the brakes. You know how they found Donna. One of the guys that works for Abel found a skull.
I don't know. Okay, one of the guys that worked for Abel filed this call. For people who are new to his world, which is to say, normal people who don't talk about serial killers all day every day, the firehose of information and misery can be a little punishing. Almost four decades after Tim's daughter went missing, he's still singularly, obsessively focused on figuring out who killed her. He also doesn't trust the cops to help in this quest.
According to Tim, the local police have repeatedly made crucial errors in handling the crime scene. They've also lost key pieces of evidence and have generally failed to look into leads that he's generated through his armchair detective work. It's not the idea that Clyde's the smartest guy in the world. He's the dumbest son of a bitch in the world. But we dealt with the dumbest goddamn police department medical examiner that ever walked the face of the earth. The cops have repeatedly told Tim not to bother the other victims' families, to let them sit with their grief.
But Tim, a true vigilante, is never one to listen. He decides to gather them all together, all at once, and talk over the case. He spent decades trying to figure out the identity of a local serial killer. And this is the next step in that mission. He's hoping to make some connections the police have missed. Remember, Clyde's just been released from prison after serving a little more than seven years for killing Ellen Beeson.
If Tim doesn't solve the case, like, maybe even tonight, Clyde might theoretically pick back up where he started. Before the meeting starts, everyone stands outside the EquiSearch office smoking cigarettes and making small talk. Is this the first time you guys have all been together in person, right? Just then I realize the front of the building is adorned with a broken wagon wheel that's very similar to the one that Tim keeps at home. The one he told me was a metaphor for his broken life.
But I'm starting to think the wheel also stands for all the ways in which Tim never seems to learn his lesson. I had just learned the day before that Tim had once accused a different guy, Robert Abel, of being the killer. Many people believed him, and then Robert Abel died, seemingly by suicide. Maybe Tim is just stuck on an endless, repetitive loop.
Staring at that wheel and preparing to hear Tim give a bunch of bereaved families a rousing speech, galvanizing them against a single man, it's hard not to wonder, is there a good reason that the cops don't want Tim talking to these family members? It is possible that Tim might really be about to crack a decades-old case, or it could just be history repeating itself. I'm Allie Conte, and from Cast Media, this is Vigilante, Episode 3, Lessons.
If you're enjoying the show so far, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. That way, you'll be notified when new episodes drop, new people can discover the show, and we'll just feel super good. Thanks for listening, and now back to the episode. Now, who is your family? I was Laura's boyfriend. You were who? Laura's boyfriend. Oh, you were. And he kept me on the right track, even though I was messing up. I think you were...
I immediately recognized Laura's old boyfriend Vernon from my first afternoon in Texas when he was washing Tim's truck. Destiny's also here helping to make everyone feel at home.
Tim never knows what to call her, but usually goes with the term "part-time girlfriend." But some people I have to introduce myself to. There's Ross, who's Ellen Beeson's brother. What's up, Ross? My man? Okay, I'm just standing here trying to figure out what the hell's going on. I think I've seen a picture of you that went on the news robbing a convenience store. Who? Looked like you. Robbing in who? A convenience store.
I also haven't met Diane, a very petite and very proudly Cajun woman in her 50s. Cajun people, we like, we die for our kids. You know, we Cajun, we dance hard, we play hard, we love hard, we work hard, and we party hard.
you know, till we can't anymore. But I recognize her from some relatively recent news stories. About three years ago, the League City Police Department submitted the DNA of Jane and Janet Doe, the two unidentified women found in the killing fields, to a genealogy database. They were able to match Janet Doe, whose real name was Donna Prodome, to an uncle. This opened up a whole new realm of inquiry for Tim. He already knew that Clyde was his old neighbor,
which meant he'd crossed paths with his daughter Laura. He also knew that Clyde knew Heidi Fye from the Texas Moon Bar. Now he wants to prove that he knew Donna as well. Ross lives about 12 miles from Texas EquiSearch, so it was easy for Tim to convince him to show up. The free food was a good enough incentive. Diane lives a few hours away, so Tim had to offer to put her up in a motel for a couple of nights, turn it into a mini vacation where she could visit her niece.
I heard them talk it through over the phone a couple of days prior. What do you want? I need to touch base with you. You know, I just came back from home. I've only told a couple of people about this, and they're all saying, you don't do anything else and all that stuff, and I don't want to hear people's shit. I'm going to do what I know I need to do. Hey, just send me your information, and I'll go ahead and book your motel today. It's probably going to be...
We're all sitting around a circular table in Tim's office and picking at our barbecue as Diane unspools her life story. It's immediately clear that she's endured tragedy after tragedy. Her other sister was also murdered, and she's the only surviving sibling out of six.
Diane once hired a private investigator who told her that she was probably never going to find out what happened to her sister Donna. But then one day in 2019, Diane got a call from the League City Police Department. So it was a shock when I got the call. The detectives were there the next day. They gave me and my son their word that nothing would be released without us knowing. They told me not to talk to Tim Miller.
That night I got home and my best friend who knew Donna Babyset, we were, you know, friends since we were fourth grade or whatever. And she said, Diane, you have to call this man. I said, what man? She said, Tim Miller. He's been looking for you for 30 years. I said, oh, I can't talk to him. Diane listened to her friend, not the police. She got in touch with Tim. And of course, his first question for her was...
Have you ever met a guy named Clyde Hedrick? She looked at a picture online, but nothing jogged her memory. But that night, Tim had some other pictures he wanted her to look at. Tim's been dangling in front of me the possibility of going through boxes of evidence he pulled out of Clyde's old house. I've only recently learned how this evidence was obtained. Tim pretended to befriend Clyde's wife in order to find out who owned her house. Then Tim called that person up and convinced him to evict his tenants.
Destiny, the so-called part-time girlfriend, helped Tim clean the whole thing out, which meant going through old photos, address books, and what they suspected might be trophies from his victims.
Tim pulls out his phone and shows Diane the photo of the necklace. I got a bunch of jewelry right here. We got all Clyde's house. What necklace? Hold on, hold on. The one with the D on it. Oh. Which we thought could be Donna's. See, I didn't know it had the D on it. Yeah, it was a D. It was the initial D. It was little rhinestones. I have a picture of it.
No daughters know anything with initial D. And I thought, I wonder if this is Donna's. No cousins, no granddaughters. I mean, that looks like us. We always have a pearl. We always do pearls with stuff. And there's a little pearl on there. And that's something that Nanny did. It has the rhinestones, but see, it has the little pearls. That's like our signature. We always did pearls. Whether Nanny gave it to her.
And it's clear right away that the necklace means something to her. She struggles to hold back tears. To be clear, a necklace with a D on it is not exactly a smoking gun. The fact that Donna liked pearls could obviously be a coincidence. But still, Tim showing Diane the picture feels significant in the moment. I beg them motherfuckers to do DNA. I just know that it's very personal to our family. Well, I'm going to give you a picture. I'll send that picture to you.
- Over there too. - But we got all kinds of jewelry out of that goddamn house. - Yeah, I went through it. - Got knives out of the house and he was great with knives. He always raped them at fucking knife point. - Bloody knives, you know how much shit I pulled out of there and did exactly the way that Allison County told me to do it. Put it in the fucking bags. Bloody knives.
And they met. It's unbelievable. And they didn't? They met me. They met me. And took it? Mm-hmm. They did. They really did. They sure did. Thank God a good friend of mine was with me that day. For a witness? Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. They don't have it now. It never got processed. I already know that Tim is a masterful storyteller, someone who is capable of manipulating people's views and perspectives.
After all, he helped to whip up the town of League City into thinking Robert Abel was a serial killer when he was really just an offbeat guy. But seeing him put the skill to use in person is a whole different story. It's like watching the reveal of a perfectly practiced magic trick, where listening to a really talented trial attorney deliver a closing statement. And watching Destiny participate in the meeting, that's interesting.
She's in her 50s, so a little younger than Tim, and very well put together, with long black hair and perfectly manicured eyebrows. And she's very good at making people feel at ease. For what's basically a giant group therapy session, she's an incredible asset. But like Tim, she's also a very good storyteller. And she's apparently a decent actor, too. For about three months, she'd been going to visit Clyde in prison and flirting with him, all while dating Tim.
Her alibi was a little confusing. She pretended to be cleaning out his old house and needed to know what to do with his stuff. But what's relevant here is that she and Tim were hoping to trick Clyde into confessing. "Oh, she's seen all these letters with his breasts on them. She said, 'How about if I write him and tell him that I've got all his stuff and I'm gonna go ahead and put it in storage and I don't know why you're in there but
According to the letters I'm written, it doesn't look like we've done anything too bad, blah, blah, blah. So she wrote to him, and then, of course, he wrote back. And she wrote back, and he wrote back. And then I gave her $100, put in his commissary, $100, put on his phone. Then they started talking back and forth and everything. Then he put her on his visitor's list, and she was going to visit him twice every weekend, not knowing that he was talking to my girlfriend. The plan was perfect, until it wasn't.
Tim and Destiny never expected for Clyde to get out of prison on a loophole or for him to find out that he'd been tricked. Stupid-ass Tisdale detective goes in there and tells Clyde that I was the suspect and that girl is coming in to talk to him as my girlfriend. So all Tisdale did is put her life in a lot of damn danger because Clyde knows exactly where she lives, exactly what her phone number is, every damn thing. So a detective supposed to be helping us is...
I've never been able to quite figure out Tim and Destiny's relationship. But the fact that she was able to do this gives me a few clues as to what Tim likes about her. For one, Destiny has a bit of a vigilante streak herself. She was totally game to go talk to a convicted killer in prison. And because she's a woman, she's able to do things that Tim simply can't.
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So Destiny may have pretended to be a house cleaner to get information out applied, but she really did clean out his house. And what she found was terrifying. Here she is telling us about it while we sit in Tim's office. So some of the, I found, did you tell anybody about the fireplace stuff I found? So get this, I was inside that house. You're going to get pictures of this, the whole thing.
So the guys were downstairs and there was like a waterbed frame thing upstairs in Gladys' and dumbass Clyde's bedroom. So when the bed got moved, I realized that that headboard was a fake headboard. It was actually a fireplace and they had pushed the bed up there.
So I got to poking around there and I could hear sounds coming. So I went into the kitchen and I started playing around on this pantry and the pantry opened. This is no joke. I'm getting chills. Like, this is no joke. Behind that pantry was a room. There was, and so then there was a ladder that went into the attic. So I went and got Polly and I got Tim and I said, you're not going to believe this. I need to get up there. We need to look at this, but I'm not going to go by myself.
So we got the flashlight, the video camera, went up there. There was some stuff up there, but nothing significant. I really thought we were going to find something. So, yeah. If you didn't catch that, Diane said, some bodies. And at this point, everyone is on the edge of their seats. And I'm just thinking to myself, some bodies? I assume Destiny had maybe gone through some photo albums or cleaned out some drawers or
I already knew Tim sent his employees on stakeouts and his best friend to an alleged serial killer's front door, but I didn't realize he had his girlfriend climbing into hidden chambers. Yeah, or we were really looking for like a trophy chest where he had saved jewelry from the girls or some kind of memento. We were told about a wooden box that would have stuff in it, so I thought, this is it. It's up there. Well, it wasn't up there.
So then they go back downstairs. I go poke around. I'm still trying to figure out where the noises come from. So I look at this fireplace and there's a stone missing. I figure out this thing is loose. So I pull it up and holy shit. So I start screaming for Tim. It's not the box. It's...
clothes and stuff from like, no, but they were old tights, the pantyhose from like the 70s or 80s. You could tell these were not, these were old school vintage pink tights. When was that? September 17, 18?
Oh, just in the last few years. Yeah. Yeah. In Clyde's old house, because he's in prison. And Tim got the house, so we went over there and got to go through everything. So inside of there were a pair of old school... Did you buy the house? I didn't buy it, but they gave it to me. Gladys lost it because she wasn't paying for it. Oh, oh, oh. So we got to take it over for a while. I tricked Gladys bad, bad. That's a whole other story.
So inside of there were bloody tights, clearly from the 70s, possibly the 80s. They were pantyhose, like old school pink. Okay. And some old other vintage clothes. And so we bagged all of that, videotaped it just the way they told me because I called him and he said, get it on video. I'd rather not give the name of the person you told me, but they said, get it on video. This is incredible. I can't believe it.
So then I start poking around inside the fireplace. Inside the chimney, I find children's little girls' clothes that I could tell someone had tried to burn, but they did not burn. We got to looking at it, inspecting it, and trust me, it was not a good thing. So we did that. We bagged all of that shit.
They never took that stuff, did they, Tim? They never came and got it. What the fuck is going on here? There were bloodstains on the pantyhose inside the fireplace. Why would you put clothes on? I can't help agreeing with Diane. Just moments ago, I was skeptical of Tim's big reveal. I thought the police didn't want people like Diane to talk to Tim because maybe they thought he was a suspect, or that based on his past treatment of Robert Abel, they didn't want him to whip people up into a frenzy ever again. Those could both be true.
But it's undeniable something crazy is also going on. It seems like a serial killer really is hiding in plain sight, and that the police are either unable or unwilling to do anything about it. And apparently that's where I was supposed to come in. I've got a question. This whole thing that we're doing now is about trying to get Clyde indicted on some stuff, right? I don't know that we've ever got together in a...
and really talked about it the way we're talking about it now of course to try to fill in any little pieces and stuff that could be possibly valuable that we connect all the stuff we know it's him they know it's him okay like you said to get more information but then also I think
Okay, so I'd just gotten on board with the fact that it really did seem like a serial killer was hiding in plain sight.
But this is the first moment I feel the weight of what that means for me. If what Tim's saying is true, I have a ton of responsibility on my shoulders. Not only is this story complicated and growing more so by the day, it's obvious that Tim and the rest of the people here actually expect me to help solve the Killingfield murders. And no one is making me feel the weight of that responsibility more than Clyde's stepdaughter, Marla.
When she was a teenager, Clyde drilled a peephole into her bedroom to watch her change. Her mother, a woman named Deborah Darling, did nothing to help. And when Marla went to the police, she said, no one was willing to do anything about it. They told her they wanted to get Clyde put away on something much bigger. She hopes that talking to me might help that finally happen. I guess I would have been about 11, 12 years old. It was 1988 when we met him.
He came over to the house. Mother wanted us to meet this new guy she was dating. And so he came over to meet me and my brother. We watched a lot of movies, you know. So there would be scenes in the movie where someone was being choked. And he would kind of laugh. He's like, "People are so stupid. They always go for people's-- for the hands of the person who's choking them. They're so stupid."
Your hands are free, your legs are free, your feet are free. You could do so much more. Why do you go for the hands? Why does everyone always go for the hands that are around your throat? You could gouge their eyes out when they're choking you. You could punch them. You could kick them. You can do all of these things. These were lessons. He taught me how to, if I ever had to stab somebody.
It's like Hollywood is so stupid. They always show people with these big knives. It's like you use a short blade knife. You can make several small cuts really fast. And then you twist the knife when you stab them. You twist it to open up the wound. And if you can, try to break the blade off into that person. Lessons. We know we did a lot of stuff with knives.
Marla was quiet during the group portion of the evening because she wanted to chat separately. She's an elementary school teacher here in Dickinson, Texas, with the handwriting to prove it. The stack of papers she's brought with her are filled with dates and ages, penned in big, bubbly letters. We go into Tim's office and shut the door, hoping it'll be quiet there. I was made to feel like I was crazy or something, like it wasn't really happening. It was so downplayed and...
not even cared about. The other guests are still a little loud. Laughing, eating, lingering in the lobby. It's annoying to me, trying to record, but it's also making Marla really upset. This isn't a free meal or a mini vacation to her. She sees it as a chance to course-correct her life. I have to go outside and ask everyone to be quiet, and when I return, Marla takes a deep breath.
She's still nervous to speak and does so haltingly. It's no wonder because Marla's life with Clyde was a nightmare. Over the course of three hours, she describes how Clyde once doused her mom in gasoline and flicked matches at her. How one time her mother helped Clyde dye his hair a different color because he had quote-unquote "done it again."
Howie would sometimes come home with a bloody knife or shirt. He was physically violent and sexually abusive. She moved out as soon as she could. After a little while, everyone finally leaves, and we go back to the main part of Tim's office. We sit at the circular table where he often holds court, with me next to Marla and Destiny sitting across from her. This is intentional. Tim told me that Marla doesn't really trust men, and that she's not a good person.
So the idea is that we're positioned in a way to make her feel the most safe. Marla's looking through her stack of papers. She's buried a lot of memories when it comes to Clyde, but an important one recently popped into her head out of nowhere. Clyde took her to the killing fields once, and something very strange happened while she was there. Something that Tim didn't even know about, but that could blow the case wide open. We're in Tim's office, talking to Clyde's stepdaughter.
Marla is cross-referencing an enormous sheet that tells us how old she would have been in certain grades and in certain years. She's trying to figure out how old she was when she first went to the killing fields. And it's, you know, just like driving, so we weren't old enough to drive yet. Oh my God, we weren't old enough to drive yet. We weren't old enough to drive yet. So if it was such a big deal to drive a riding lawnmower...
then I was, it had to be anywhere from, anywhere from '89 to either '91 or '92. I can almost see the wheels turning in Marla's head at this point. She's talking very slowly, but she's about to have an important revelation. So, going out to Mo. All right. Him, my mother, my brother, and myself go out to Mo. So there was a metal building, and there was all this property
And behind, if you go through the metal building, it's like a shop. On the backside of it had small trees. And at some point, me and my brother were exploring the grounds. And he was off over here in the trees doing something to the ground here. And then we were told to go into the building with my mother. And we couldn't go outside for a little while.
Wait a second, why is the figuring out the age significant? Does that tell us something? What am I missing? I'll tell you what it's told me right now, and then it's just going to go down. I'll explain that going into there and then that iron deal in there, that was that old...
oil pump deal that they used to service once or twice a month. Is that what that is? Yeah, then when you went... Remember the metal thing and jumping on it and jumping off of it and playing with it as a kid, you know? When you're a kid, you explore... You jump on and off stuff. But then when you just said how you went around the left and stuff a little bit and then there was that little body of water? Yeah. Well, that was that pond...
Right there is where Donna Padone's body was found in '91. Everyone starts to realize the implications of this. Clyde took his family to visit the killing fields. And the timeline was such that one of the victims' remains may still have been out there. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Shit! What are you thinking?
I don't know. I wonder if that's when your mother told you to come back to that metal building or something, and then you-- when Clyde was out there doing something. He was doing something. We just don't-- I don't know what-- I mean, we were just told we had to come in-- come into the-- the shet-- the shop, the-- A good while, she was total skeletal remains.
So, and the word was that Clyde would go back out and visit the bodies and relive his sexual fantasy and everything. Donna could have been out there for six months before she was found. I don't know what he was... He had to do something. We had to stay inside with her because he was doing something. I don't... She never said. It was just like...
Okay, don't, you know, in just a little bit you can go back out and play. So you're speculating that he was visiting the body because the timeline matches that? Timeline to the outfits, and that's the first time we've heard that. And then how she explained that thing that he played in, that iron thing, and then went around the left in that body of water. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Recovering this memory is extremely difficult on Marla.
During our conversation, she keeps having to stop or gets this faraway look in her eyes. But she goes through with it at Tim's behest. It's that important to her to put Clyde away for good. Part of it is that she wants justice for all the awful things she witnessed and suffered through herself growing up. But there's also more to it. Marla actually testified at the Ellen Beeson murder trial and was a big part of the reason why Clyde was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Now that Clyde's out, Marla is terrified that he might seek revenge. And she has no doubt that he will be coming. Did it surprise you when they was arrested for murder? Did it surprise me? Shit, no. My thought was, shit, great. He's going to get out. This man doesn't forget anything. He's very calculated, always has been. He's several steps ahead.
He plans for everything. And he sits and he waits. So right now, he's biding his time. He's minding his P's and Q's because he knows exactly what to do. He just needs enough freedom to do what he wants. And just given just a little bit, just a little window, and that's it. When I learned about what happened with Robert Abel, I started to doubt him a little bit.
But now after hearing from all these people, it's finally starting to sink in. I may just be shadowing Tim, but by merely being here, I'm fully implicated in a mission with life and death stakes. Destiny believes she's in Clyde's crosshairs. Marla thinks he's going to seek revenge against her too. And if all this is true, what would stop him from going after me next?
Next time on Vigilante. So he's not in there? Well, that's what he said, but that doesn't make any sense. Oh, I need to know if he's out because I'm going to tell you something. He is going to go after destiny. And two guys that was in prison with him all said that. Vigilante is written by me, Allie Conte. It's produced by Colin Thompson, Trey Schultz, and me.
Editing by Trey Schiltz. Music editing and supervision by Colin Thompson. Mixing and mastering by Matt Sewell. Voice over and narration was recorded in Cast Studios in Los Angeles in the Relic Room in New York. And it was engineered by Trey Schiltz, Sam Baer, and Josh Hahn. Cover art by Leah Kantrowitz. Our end credit song is called To Walk Alone and it's by Rebecca Rose Harris and Franklin Mockett. Fact checking provided by Lauren Vespoli.
Very special thanks to Hannah Smith and Drew Schwartz. This is part three of our five-part series on Tim Miller. ♪
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