Debra Sue Moore (Jack of Clubs, Texas)
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Our card this week is Deborah Sue Moore, the Jack of Clubs from Texas. When a young mother was stabbed to death outside an apartment complex in Odessa, Texas in the spring of 1986, police initially suspected her estranged husband could be behind the crime. But when three other women were attacked in the same area that same week, investigators were forced to reconsider their theory and grapple with a bigger question. Did they have a serial predator on their hands? And that's a question that they are still asking to this very day. But perhaps with your help, they'll finally get an answer. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. Just before 3 a.m. on May 17th, 1986, a woman's scream rang out in the Viva apartment complex in Odessa, Texas. Alarmed by the piercing sound of distress, a man named Dale ran out of his second floor unit and down a set of stairs into the open-air courtyard of the two-story building. And he noticed a trail of blood along the sidewalk leading to the door of apartment 51.
And as he knocked on the door, he heard a man cry out, "'Oh, my God!' When the door opened, Dale saw a woman soaked in blood lying motionless on the floor. The man who opened the door had already called police, and as he ran to the parking lot to flag down first responders, Dale started CPR on the unresponsive woman. When police and paramedics arrived and began assessing the woman, the man who'd flagged them down told them that she was 25-year-old Deborah Sue Moore. They saw that Deborah had been stabbed at least once, and they weren't going to be able to care for her there, so they loaded her into an ambulance and rushed her to the local hospital. But it wasn't long before official word came back that Deborah hadn't made it. By the time they got that news, detectives at the Viva Apartments were already kicked into high gear speaking with witnesses. First up, the occupant of apartment 51 and the man who'd called 911. And that's 23-year-old Charles Ezell.
In interviews that morning and a few days later, he told them Debra had come over to his apartment at around 8.15 p.m. on the 16th. They'd met up with another couple, and the four of them went on a double date to a bar called The Brewery. And Charles estimated that they'd all left the bar sometime between 12.30 and 1.30 in the morning. Charles said that he and Debra had gone alone to eat at a Denny's before going back to his place at around 1.45 p.m. Here's Odessa Police Department's lead cold case detective, Lauren Gonzalez, who now is overseeing the case.
They had sex. Debra fell asleep, but woke up and told Charles she'd had a nightmare about the time her grandmother died in her arms. Sometime afterward, she put on his robe and walked out into the living room. And he said he figured she was maybe going to go use the bathroom, but he fell asleep. And he woke up because he heard her screaming his name, Charles. So he went into the living room and opened the door, the front door, and she was there in the doorway bleeding. And she fell to the floor. She'd still had the overnight bag strapped onto her shoulder. And he realized later she must have gone outside to get her bag out of the car because they kind of briefly talked about this. And he's like, oh, no, we can just get it in the morning, something like that. So he knew the bag was in the car. So it's not like she was leaving the apartment with the bag. She had gone to the car to get the bag and bring it back into the apartment because the intention was to spend the night there.
Charles's statement ends with the upstairs neighbor, Dale, knocking on the door and Charles running out to the parking lot to flag down the ambulance. It didn't seem that Charles had seen or heard anyone else, but also he probably didn't do much looking around. Like he had jumped right into action, pulling Debra inside the apartment for safety and calling police. The story seemed almost unbelievable, but a quick canvas of the complex actually proved that it was possible. See, the design of the apartment complex meant that lots of people could have heard or seen something that night. And they did. Each of the buildings in the apartment complex was two stories with units opening up onto this courtyard.
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