WHEN 12-year-old Laura Smither didn’t return home after a morning jog, more than 6,000 volunteers set out to find her, with devastating results.
Laura Smither’s murder and the decades-long cold case against her killer, are the subject of an ABC 20/20 true crime event, Highway Hunter, airing on Friday, March 15, 2024, and streaming exclusively on Hulu the next day.
Who was Laura Smither?
Laura Smither was born on April 23, 1984.
Laura lived and grew up in Friendswood, Texas.
According to her parents, Bob and Gay Smither, Laura was “a gifted and talented student, scuba diver…and a Girl Scout,” as reported by ABC 13 News.
She was also an aspiring professional ballerina.
“Everybody loved Laura,” Gay Smither, Laura’s mother, told John Quiñones during a 20/20 interview, as reported by ABC News.
“She was just one of those people. I always say she was touched by light.”
On April 3, 1997, the Smithers recalled making pancakes for breakfast.
When Laura asked her mother if she could go for a morning jog around the neighborhood before eating, Gay agreed.
It would be the last time she ever saw her daughter alive.
When Laura failed to return from her jog, the Smithers called the police.
By nightfall, the police– along with hundreds of volunteers – had mobilized to find the missing child.
Search parties handed out fliers and combed through nearby fields.
Helicopters circled the sky, and patrols from local prisons searched the neighborhood and rural areas around Laura’s home.
Thousands of volunteers joined the search over the next few weeks, which even involved the U.S. Marines.
Laura had seemingly vanished without a trace.
What happened to her?
On April 20, 1997, 17 days after she disappeared, Laura Smither was found.
A father and son were walking their dogs 12 miles from Laura’s home in Pasadena, Texas, when they discovered her decomposed body in a retention pond.
Her body had seemingly spent weeks in the water, and her cause and time of death were not immediately clear.
Despite her horrific condition, family and friends were quick to identify her, thanks in part to her clothing and accessories.
“She had a ring that she would wear, [that] had her initials,” recalls Laura’s friend, Erika Jensen.
Authorities were able to zero in on a suspect: William Lewis Reece, a construction worker who worked at a site just down the street from the Smither family home.
The police questioned Reece, and even searched his truck, but didn’t have enough evidence to make an arrest.
Unfortunately, Laura’s disappearance, and murder, weren’t the only crime to rock the otherwise quiet Texas suburbs that summer.
Between May and August 1997, four other young women disappeared, too.
On May 16, 1997, a man offered to help 19-year-old Sandra Sapaugh change a newly-discovered flat tire.
Sapaugh recognized the man as the same one that had been staring at her earlier, in a convenience store parking lot, and again inside a local Waffle House.
Before she could react, the man had forced her into his white pickup truck and sped away, assaulting her.
Sandra jumped from the moving truck onto the highway and though badly injured, she survived the fall.
Months later, Kelli Cox, a 20-year-old student at the University of North Texas and a new mother to a baby girl, Alexis, went missing in Denton, Texas.
She was last seen at a gas station on July 15, 1997.
Just a few days after Cox disappeared, newly married 19-year-old Tiffany Johnston seemingly vanished in broad daylight at a car wash in Bethany, Oklahoma.
Her body was discovered the following day, July 27, 1997, on an unpaved rural road near the interstate.
Less than a month later, 17-year-old Jessica Cain left a restaurant in Clear Lake, Texas, but failed to show up before curfew.
Her father, C.H. Cain, found her truck abandoned on the shoulder of I-45 the same night of her disappearance, on August 17, 1997.
It was Sapaugh’s escape, description of the killer, and an unconventional questioning method that ultimately allowed police to pin the crimes on Reece.
Where is William Reece now?
Sapaugh had previously described her abductor as a white male in his 30s, with blonde hair and a beard.
Webster Police Department Detective Sue Dietrich-Nance was able to use forensic hypnosis to help Sapaugh, among other victims, “recall details of traumatic experiences their conscious minds may have forgotten,” as reported by ABC News.
Dietrich-Nance realized that the details Sapaugh gave her matched the description of Reece and his truck.
He was brought in for a lineup, identified by Sapaugh, and immediately arrested on aggravated kidnapping charges.
Reece, a divorced truck driver and construction worker, had been previously sentenced to prison in the 1980s for two rapes and a kidnapping.
His new case went to trial in May 1998, where he was found guilty and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
After his conviction for Sapaugh’s kidnapping, the other four murder cases went cold, including Laura Smither’s.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation eventually reopened one of the women’s cases in 2012, and they were able to piece together that Reece had been involved in more than just one kidnapping.
“They were able to find gas receipts, calling cards that put him nearby these locations where the women went missing,” Kaitlin McCulley, a former Houston-based reporter at ABC station KTRK-TV, told 20/20.
Investigators were also able to piece together witness testimony and DNA at the crime scenes to connect Reece to the four cold cases.
Reece eventually confessed to the killings and even helped investigators locate the bodies of Kelli Cox and Jessica Cain, which had never been found.
Reece also admitted that Laura Smither was his first victim and that he had accidentally hit her with his truck while she was out jogging.
He confessed that he took Laura in his car, strangled her to death, and hid her body in a nearby lake.
In July 2016, Reece was extradited from Texas to Oklahoma to stand trial for the murder of Tiffany Johnston.
On August 19, 2021, he was officially sentenced to death by the Oklahoma County District Court.
After his conviction, he was extradited to Texas in March 2022, where he pleaded guilty to the murders of Laura Smithers, Kelli Cox, and Jessica Cain.
He was sentenced to life in prison for each of the three murders in June 2022.
Reece is currently on death row in the Allan B. Polunsky Unit in West Livingston, Texas.