Who Killed These Girls?

December 6, 1991

When the call came in, Austin Police Department s Sgt. John Winston Jones was the only homicide cop on the street. That s how small and safe a city Austin was back then. Close to midnight on a Friday night and Jones was it. When his mobile rang the first time, he was on the other side of town, at Airport and Martin Luther King boulevards, following up an earlier call, a guy who d barricaded himself inside a building and was threatening to kill himself.

Jones punched in.

Two fatalities, the dispatcher told him, suspected arson, suspected homicide, looks like gunshot wounds. And he gave him the address: I Can t Believe It s Yogurt!, 2949 West Anderson Lane. Everything about that night was unusual, including the fact that two people had ridden out with Jones, a reporter and photographer from KTBC-­TV, a local CBS affiliate doing a series on homicides in Texas. So far, except for a couple of weenie calls, the ride had been a bust. Nothing happens in Austin, the reporter complained. But never mind. They were heading to Houston the next day, where they d surely score.

Abandoning the would-­be suicide, Jones cranked his unmarked sedan, switched on his lights and siren and, once his riders were settled in the backseat, hit the ramp leading to the interstate. If working in law enforcement had taught him anything, it was that there was no such thing as a routine call, but this one sounded ominous. Crime in northwest Austin was rare, murders all but nonexistent ­and in a frozen-­yogurt shop?

In no time the next call came in. They d found another body.

From the backseat, the cameraman videotaped John ­dressed in dark pants, a black windbreaker and a long-­sleeved white dress shirt with pale green stripes ­as he blazed north on I-35. After tonight, he will hang the shirt on a wall at APD headquarters, a symbol of Homicide s determination to find the killers. When you see me wearing this shirt, he d told the victims families, you ll know the

BEVERLY LOWRY is the author of six novels and three previous works of nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Mississippi Review, Granta, and many other publications. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. She lives in Austin, Texas.

"Gripping, moving, and as good as any depiction of a murder case since In Cold Blood. . . . This transcends the genre. Brilliant." Ann Patchett

A true-crime page-turner. . . . Lowry exhausts every possible scenario behind the shocking, unsolved quadruple murder . . . and offers a theory on what really happened. New York Post

Deeply compassionate . . . An agonizing portrait. . . . We re fortunate to have [Lowry] as our investigator, our cultural historian, our mourner. Austin Chronicle

Heartfelt. . . . Chillingly concise. . . . Lowry works the case from a human rather than a forensic angle. The New York Times Book Review

A page turner. . . . A very real reminder that horror isn t just a fictional genre. . . . Lowry lets no detail escape her literary light. . . .These murders shook a city and are sure to haunt you long after you set the book aside. Bust

A story of pain and loss, and how one heinous act that takes four lives destroys so many others. . . . In its swift pacing, intimate peeks into the characters lives, and deep research and reportage, Who Killed These Girls? features everything we wish for in a book about an event we wish had never happened. Los Angeles Review of Books
 
Gripping . . . well-researched and thought provoking. . . . A terror-filled thrill ride which is captivating from start to finish. New York Journal of Books

Beverly Lowry is rapidly becoming the Zola of Central Texas. Her character studies only get better. Larry McMurtry