To Texan drivers, the major highway that winds through Houston's sprawling metropolis and ends at the shores of the Gulf of Mexico is called Interstate 45.
But to police, this region is known as the Texas Killing Fields.
Since the 1970s, the bodies of about 30 murder victims — mostly young women and girls — have been found along this 80-kilometre stretch of coastal plain.
The region, with its wild marshes, vast beaches and abandoned oil fields, became a crime scene.
And for many other families, their loved ones simply vanished without a trace from Texas's Gulf Coast.
Warning: This article contains details readers might find distressing.
For too long, police insisted the missing women and girls were simply runaways and refused to investigate.
But locals knew the highway allowed something sinister to slip into their coastal community.
And just as easily as Interstate 45 brought predators in, the nine-lane highway provided a swift and anonymous exit.
It wasn't until the 1990s that authorities acknowledged the region had become a hunting ground for killers.
"Three decades of loss and redemption along a busy highway, in our midst, where more than 100,000 commuters drive each workday," investigative journalist Kathryn Casey wrote in her book Deliver Us.
Dozens of murders and disappearances from the 1970s and 80s remain unsolved.
But for a handful of families in the area, they finally have answers.
William Reece, a serial killer in the neighbouring state of Oklahoma, confessed to three murders near Houston in the summer of 1997.
But Reece was not looking for redemption.
The information he provided was simply a bargaining chip to try to save his own life.
Girls begin to vanish in the 1970s
From the 70s, each decade seemed to bring new horrors to the coastal towns south of Houston.
In the summer of 1971, teenage girls were going missing at an alarming rate.
The first to vanish was Colette Wilson, a 13-year-old girl waiting to be picked up by her mother after band practice.
Her mother arrived at the street corner where they had arranged to meet just six minutes late.
But Colette was already gone.
Police told Colette's family she must have run away from home and declined to investigate.
"The police weren't worried," Colette's mother Claire would later tell Kathryn Casey.
With no support from police, the parents of the missing would often hire private detectives.
Those who couldn't afford the expense would marshal friends and neighbours to search the area for clues.
But Colette's body was found by chance.
Five months after she vanished, a hiker stumbled across a girl's skeleton near a reservoir in southern Texas.
Colette's father, who also happened to be her dentist, was forced to identify his child's remains.
As he held his daughter's jaw, he said he recognised his own handiwork.
In all, 11 girls were snatched off the streets and brutally murdered in the area through the 1970s.
Some investigators believe the killings were the work of Edward Harold Bell, a serial flasher and rapist.
He fled the state in 1978 after killing a young man who tried to intervene when he saw Bell harassing a group of girls.
The killings abruptly stopped when Bell left Texas.
He was later found and convicted of the man's murder, and from his prison cell claimed responsibility for the deaths of the girls, calling them "the 11 who went to heaven".
He died in prison a prime suspect in the murders, but he was never charged.
The lonely field with a gruesome reputation
The state's coastal residents were not left in peace for long.
In 1983, girls and women started vanishing again, and this time their bodies were all dumped in the same desolate strip of land.
Just off Interstate 45, heading south towards the coast, was a dirt road.
At the end — far from homes, factories and refineries — was an overgrown and abandoned oil field.
In just seven years, four bodies were found on this plot of land, each woman naked, under a tree, with her arms folded over her chest.
"It's a desolate space, dotted by little more than oil rigs and dirt roads," the US Federal Bureau of Investigation said of the field.
"If they cried for help, it's unlikely anyone heard."
While Laura Miller and Heidi Fye were identified soon after they were found, the other two women would be known as Jane Doe and Janet Doe for 33 years
In 2019, advancements in DNA technology meant they could finally be named: They were Audrey Cook and Donna Prudhomme.
All four murders remain unsolved.
Richard Rennison, an FBI agent in Houston, has long suspected the killings were the work of one person who lived in the area.
"The fact that the offender chose this area gives us a couple little tidbits of insight," he said.
"It's such a remote, rural area. Somebody had to know about that place."
As towns started developing and more houses went up in the area, the field was not quite so isolated.
The murders of the 1980s soon stopped.
The dirt road is now paved and lined with houses and a church.
The only evidence of the field's macabre history is a small memorial with four crosses erected in honour of the women whose lives ended there.
At the dawn of a new decade, locals hoped the 90s would finally bring an end to their terror.
But they were wrong.
A convicted rapist named William Lewis Reece had just been released from prison in Oklahoma.
And he was ready to start a new life in southern Texas.
A summer of terror
One night in May of 1997, Sandra Sapaugh discovered the tire on her car had been mysteriously slashed while she was inside a petrol station.
A man approached the 19-year-old, offering to help — then forced her into his own truck at knifepoint.
Pregnant with her third child and terrified, Sandra knew she had one chance to escape. As he sped down Interstate 45, she flung open the door and tumbled out onto the road.
The busy highway that allowed so much horror into Sandra's community was also her salvation.
A woman in the car behind them screeched to a stop, grabbed Sandra, and took her straight to hospital.
While Sandra told police everything she knew, her memories of the night were hazy.
After several months, authorities tried hypnosis and Sandra had a breakthrough: Deep in her subconscious was Reece's licence plate number.
He was charged with kidnapping and sentenced to 60 years in prison — though he insisted to a Houston Chronicle reporter that it was all a misunderstanding.
"I'm not a rapist," he said.
With a string of unsolved murders in the area that summer, authorities were left wondering what Reece had been up to before they caught him.
It would take 18 years for the full extent of his crimes to be revealed.
In 2015, his DNA was matched to the murder of Tiffany Johnston.
The 19-year-old newlywed, who was the daughter of Reece's friends, had been found dead in Oklahoma in late 1997.
Extradited to his home state from Texas, Reece was found guilty and sentenced to be executed.
Now on death row, Reece knew there was one way he could try to save himself from lethal injection.
A serial killer reveals himself
When a Texas ranger visited Reece in his Oklahoma jail cell in 2016, he asked him if he had a dark side.
"Well, yeah, ain't no doubt about it," he told him
"I ain't going to lie to you."
Reece revealed that over the span of five months in 1997, he had stalked the Texas Killing Fields.
He killed 12-year-old Laura Smither after snatching her off the street during her morning jog.
A few months later, he murdered 20-year-old psychology student Kelli Ann Cox and 17-year-old Jessica Cain.
The brutal slaying of Tiffany Johnston occurred shortly before Sandra underwent hypnosis and gave police the information they needed to stop Reece's rampage.
Reece provided precise locations for the burial sites of Kelli Ann and Jessica: Two horse pastures outside Houston.
The information allowed their families to finally lay them to rest, but few believed Reece was trying to atone for the past.
"The Bill Reece I met in prison would not be doing this out of the goodness of his heart," crime writer Kathryn Casey told the Dallas Morning News.
In fact, he tried to bargain with authorities to drop his death sentence in exchange for information about his crimes.
But they refused.
Reece was extradited to Texas, and last month he was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Laura, Kelli Ann and Jessica.
Kelli Ann's daughter, Alexis, who was just 19 months old when her mother was killed, stared down Reece in court.
She too grew up near Interstate 45.
Like many other women in south Texas, she was raised to fear what monsters the highway may have brought to her town.
"Seeing him, for me reminds me, I made him out to be something he wasn't," she told local media.
William Reece is now in the hands of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which is yet to decide his fate.
He may stay in Texas or he may be sent back to Oklahoma where he would likely be executed.
"It certainly isn't going to bring these girls back," said Galveston County District Attorney Jack Roady.
"But it will make sure William Reece dies in prison."
