HOUSTON, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- A 72-year-old convicted murderer and admitted sex offender told a Houston Chronicle reporter he killed 11 adolescent girls in Texas in the 1970s.
The newspaper said Edward Harold Bell, in exclusive interviews in July and September, said he had killed the girls in the 1970s, calling them "11 that went to heaven."
The newspaper also reported it had obtained excerpts and descriptions of letters Bell had sent to Harris and Galveston county prosecutors in 1998 -- but kept secret for 13 years -- in which he claimed to have killed seven girls. The victims included two Galveston 15-year-olds shot as they stood tied up and partially nude in Turner Bayou, the newspaper said.
The Chronicle said Galveston prosecutors refused to present Bell's written confessions to a grand jury and Harris County prosecutors never investigated his claims and later lost the letters. Bell, the newspaper said, did not cooperate with police, and several investigators said there had not been enough effort in 1998 to re-investigate the cases.
"I didn't believe we had sufficient evidence that we could proceed to grand jury with, and without getting into specifics, that's the decision that had to be made, no matter the temptations to proceed otherwise ...,' Kurt Sistrunk, a former Galveston district attorney, told the Chronicle. "It wasn't for a lack of effort."
Bell said a "program" brainwashed him into become a "flasher" who raped and killed girls.
Bell is serving a 70-year sentence for the 1978 murder of Larry Dickens, a Marine who had confronted him after he got out his pickup naked from the waist down and masturbated in front of a group of girls in Pasadena, Texas.
The Chronicle said several investigators familiar with Bell's written confessions told the newspaper they believed he had committed multiple murders and had found evidence to corroborate his claims.
