Self-described serial-killer’s confessions leads to re-opened investigation

The killer, a 72-year-old prisoner named Edward Harold Bell, told the Houston Chronicle in interviews and letters this summer that he killed 11 girls here in the 1970s, naming four of them and describing the rest. Though Bell previously confessed to two of the same crimes in 1989 letters authorities kept secret, he’s never been prosecuted for any of a string of unsolved serial killings of adolescent girls in the Houston area in the 1970s. The Chronicle stories have resulted in old homicide cases being re-opened, new information being offered, old evidence being retested and – for some families – the first solid leads in years in murder cases that have remained unsolved for decades.