Lisa Olson
speaker
50 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Lisa Olson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
She took the police report home. She read it late at night, and she noticed names of kids who had been forgotten, like Randy Harvey is one of the names. His sister had called multiple times saying, my brother would never leave and not tell my mom and I where he went. So she's trying to find the family's To link them to the bodies.
And the first one she does find is Randy Harvey, who had been riding his bike to work on the day he disappeared. And he had gone off with his bell-bottom pants, with his shirt with the peace sign on it. So she describes Lenore Harvey, Randy's little sister, as being sort of almost giddy seeing his clothing change. Because she could never resolve in her heart for sure that he had died.
And so when she gets the proof and she realizes that she's been right all along, she has a huge sense of relief. She's able to have a memorial service for her brother.
It was originally thought to be 27, and it's definitely 30. It could be as many as 40. And she goes on to be able to provide those answers to family after family.
And what of the innocent ones who fell by the way? Will the henchmen of Uncle Sam ever pay? All of those who fell were as brave as brave can be. The only coward who was there was me.
I was working on a story for the Houston Chronicle about the unidentified dead, which is something that's kind of obsessed me for a long time.
I was interested in the case specifically of a torso of a teenager in a purple surf shirt. that was found floating in a bayou near Houston in the 70s. And I was looking for cases where there was enough identifying information linked to the body that I thought maybe I could write about it and help solve a case.
He said, you know, in fact, I think that is a teenage girl's body, and I think I know who killed her. And he was the first person who told me about Ed Bell.
And if you kind of think about this, you know, Texas prisons don't have a lot of Internet access. He had details in that letter that had a lot of information about a crime that had been committed in 1971, and he was writing it more than 20 years later.
The first thing I asked Fred is, have you ever talked to Ed Bell? Ed Bell is in prison. I knew he was in prison from what Fred told me for another murder, an entirely unrelated murder of a young man. So he was available to talk. He had a long time in prison to kill time.
Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson. They were surfer girls. They were friends. Debbie Ackerman was a really good water skier. She had competed in water ski contests.
The general public didn't realize that, in fact, four girls were likely abducted and then killed from Galveston Island from points that were very close to each other.
The thing was that because Rhonda Renee Johnson and Sharon Shaw's bodies were dumped in a lake, Their remains were actually found after the two other girls, which is maybe a little bit why in 1971 there wasn't a panic right away, because those four cases, which obviously Fred found so similar later, weren't associated in time as closely at the moment that they happened.
Media interviews in prison are limited to an hour. So I had an hour to try to talk to this guy and convince him to tell me whatever he would tell me about these murders.
What was the problem was to get him to talk about what I wanted him to talk about. And, um, Ed spent a lot of time talking about his life, about, you know, growing up. He was a proud Aggie. He had gone to Texas A&M, been in the marching band. He was all excited to talk about that.
Um, and then he would talk about how women wanted him, you know, sexually, um, which is kind of a weird thing for me as a woman interviewing him. But, um, You know, you just sort of listen. You try not to react. So eventually I get to his ears in Galveston. I ask him about running a dive shop in Galveston, which I knew he ran.
So that would have been a place where he really very likely would have met these girls.
I had about, say, five minutes left when he started to tell me that, yes, he had killed a bunch of girls in Galveston and that he thought there were 10 or 11 when he was living in Galveston and in the Dickinson area. But he said, I don't want to tell you in prison because they're always listening and watching me. I think I'll send you a letter with their names.
So in the prison interview, I said, well, do you know their names? And he said, yes, I know most of their names. And I said, well, you know, can you give me at least their initials? And so in the first interview, he gave me a couple of initials of girls, and he said 10 or 11. And then he said, I will write you with more details later. And I thought, well, he may or may not, right?
It was an accomplishment that he was excited to talk about. At that point, Ed Bell was not someone who had been interviewed. Ed Bell's murder of Larry Dickens had been an infamous murder at the time. But Ed Bell had, by the time I met him, he had been in prison for almost 20 years. He'd been in prison from the 90s to 2011, hadn't had too many people to talk to.
Showing 21–40 of 50 · page 2 of 3
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