Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston’s Lost Boys (Random House, April 2025) by Texas Observer Investigations Editor Lise Olsen. The book traces a forensic anthropologist’s decades-long attempt to restore the identities of the victims of one of Texas’ most prolific serial killers—and explores the shocking reasons why so many boys who were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by a murderer trolling Houston neighborhoods in the early 1970s remained anonymous for so long.
