The Eleven Who Went to Heaven: The Case Against Ed Bell Pt. 1

This episode includes discussions of violence and murder.

Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen.

In 2011, investigative reporter Lisa Olson receives a handwritten letter in the mail.

There, at the top of the page, is her name, scribbled out in mostly capital letters.

But it's not from an old friend or a member of her family.

It's been sent to her by a convicted murderer named Edward Harold Bell.

And in it, on lined notebook paper, he includes a poem he wrote.

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.

When he sends this letter to Lisa, Bell is already in prison for murdering a man in broad daylight, in front of the man's family.

Now, he's claiming responsibility for more murders.

The victims, all teenage girls who disappeared from in and around Houston and Galveston, Texas throughout the 70s.

They later turned up dead, but their killer or killers were never caught.

Bell lists some of these girls in his letter.

He names three of them.

Others, he only refers to by their initials or hair color.

Sometimes he includes years or locations that are meaningful to their cases.

He calls his poem about his alleged victims, the 11 who went to heaven.

Welcome to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

I'm Janice Morgan.

You might recognize me as the voice behind the investigative docuseries Broken and the true crime podcast, Fear Thy Neighbor.

I'll be your host for the next few weeks, and I am thrilled to be here.

We'd love to hear from you.

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To help us tell today's story, we interviewed Lisa Olson, the investigative reporter and author whose work on this case is featured in the docuseries The Eleven.

We're so grateful she could share her expertise.

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So, Mickey, you're a producer here, and you brought us this story because you have a connection to the case, right?

Yes.

So I've been on this show for a while now and it's been sort of a passion project to research this story, not just because it's one of the most unforgettable and bizarre true crime cases that I've read, but also because it all took place kind of close to my hometown.

And where is that?

I grew up in one of the communities between Houston and Galveston along Interstate 45 in Texas.

And so when I read this story, I know all the roads they talk about.

I can picture all of the landmarks.

I've even walked along one of the waterways where two of the victims were found.

But I had never heard about these victims or these crimes when I was growing up.

I'd never heard of Ed Bell until a few years ago when I came across the work of a now retired Galveston police detective named Fred Page and a Houston area investigative reporter and author named Lisa Olson.

The investigation they did is incredible.

And for today's episode, I had the privilege of getting to talk to Lisa about her work on these cases.

It was 2011 when Lisa Olson first became aware of a suspected serial killer named Ed Bell.

I was working on a story for the Houston Chronicle about the unidentified bed, which is something that's kind of obsessed me for a long time.

That's Lisa talking about an unrelated or maybe not so unrelated article she was working on at the 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.

Her article quotes a forensic anthropologist who believes that due to the age and the amount of remains recovered, it's not possible for investigators to identify identify the gender.

After the article publishes, she gets a call from a man named Fred Page.

He's a detective in Galveston, an island off the coast of Texas about 50 miles from downtown Houston.

He's working to solve some cold cases from the 70s, and he thinks that several of the homicides could actually be connected to the same killer.

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.

Lisa won't receive that poem we mentioned earlier for a few more months, but Fred tells her it was actually two other letters that Bell sent from jail that originally piqued his interest in Belle as a potential suspect.

Both were sent in 1998, one to the Galveston County DA, the other to the Harris County DA.

In the letters, Bell confesses to having a hand in the deaths of seven girls across those counties,

four fewer than the 11 he'll later claim.

What really grabs Fred's attention is how Bell describes an unsolved double homicide from 1971.

The victims were teenagers and best friends, Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson.

Bell even includes their names for the DAs, and then he goes on to list a lot of specific details about the murder.

Like how he bound their hands and feet, how he'd shot them from a bridge with a specific gun.

He even includes the specific locations of their bullet wounds.

As far as Fred could tell, it's pretty accurate.

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.

To Fred, it seems like Bell might have actually been involved.

Because if he totally fabricated his story, it's a stunning coincidence.

And if he read about those details long ago and is now lying and taking credit for a crime he didn't commit, he has an incredible memory.

By the time Detective Fred Page calls Lisa, the DA's office in Galveston had tried to talk to Bell about making an official on-the-record confession.

But he refused to cooperate.

And that kicked off a never-ending cycle of confessing and recanting over several years.

Without more to work with, there's not much the DA's office can do.

So they dropped their investigation.

But Lisa was just starting hers.

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, entirely unrelated murder.

of a young man.

So he was available to talk.

He had a long time in prison to kill time.

And Fred says, no, he hasn't spoken to Belle yet.

It's not an easy ask coming from a homicide detective.

It would be more straightforward for Lisa to request an interview as a reporter.

So she does just that.

Ahead of the interview, Lisa studies the case Fred has already put together.

So far, Fred has focused on two double homicide cases in particular.

We mentioned one already.

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.

Debbie and Maria were murdered in November 1971.

That month, the 15th, Monday, was a school holiday, an extra day of freedom, so Debbie and Maria planned to make the most of it.

A few students were hanging out at an ice cream shop that morning and saw the girls outside.

According to one friend, Debbie and Maria said they planned to hitchhike into Houston, which isn't all that unusual for the time.

Catching rides from strangers if you can't drive yourself is just something that happened back then.

Debbie and Maria waited outside the ice cream shop for someone to pick them up.

A driver in a white van finally stopped and talked to them.

By the way they interacted, one witness assumed it was somebody they knew.

The girls climbed in and the van took off.

Two days later, Maria's body was found in the murky waters of Turner Bayou, in the middle of nowhere, over 20 miles from Galveston.

Maria's hands and feet were bound and she was partially unclothed.

She'd been shot and left near a wooden bridge.

Investigators determined she was probably killed late on Monday night because that's when a local heard gunshots ring out across the field.

Debbie was found soon after Maria, not far away.

She too had been bound, undressed, shot, and left in the water.

According to the medical examiner, her wounds suggested she had tried to save her best friend by placing her body in front of Maria's.

The case did get media attention, but it took a while for people to connect this double homicide to a second similar crime.

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

Another pair of best friends disappeared from Galveston about three months earlier.

They too were killed and their bodies left in water.

They just hadn't been found yet.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia made to travel.

On August 4th, Sharon Shaw woke up at the home of her best friend, Rhonda Renee Johnson, who typically went by Renee.

Confident Sharon was athletically gifted, especially at water skiing, and Renee loved to have fun.

And with freshman year of high school looming over them, the inseparable best friends were living for that summer of 1971.

That day, they decided to go from Webster, their hometown, to Galveston, about 30 miles away.

Their first stop was Wicks Ski School, but the water was rough and choppy.

not great conditions for going out on the bayou.

So they met up with their friend Glenda along one of the city's hotspots, the seawall that runs along the beach.

Now, Glenda had a convertible and a driver's license, so the friends spent the late morning cruising up and down the coast.

Around lunchtime, Sharon and Renee realized they needed to get back home.

They told Glenda they didn't need a ride, they would hitchhike.

Then,

they vanished.

Their remains weren't found until winter of 1972, about three months after Debbie and Maria's bodies were found.

In January 1972, a couple of teenage boys thought they saw a volleyball in the water, but it turned out to be a skull.

Officials later found a few other bones nearby, but not many.

Dental records confirmed that the skull belonged to Renee Johnson.

Sharon's remains were found the following month, just a quarter of a mile away from her best friend.

This time, the the investigators recovered 29 bones, along with some black twine and a surfer's cross, a popular piece of jewelry in the 70s.

An autopsy couldn't confirm Sharon's cause of death, but the medical examiner concluded she was killed.

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.

A connection was eventually made, though.

Local detectives wondered if an interest in surfing could be the common thread between the four victims.

There were other commonalities, too.

both sets of best friends, both known to have been hitchhiking, both last seen alive in Galveston, and all found in remote waterways.

All these years later, Lisa Olson and Fred Page want to prove another connection, Ed Bell.

In 1970, Bell met a man named Doug Prunes, a local Galveston legend.

His surf shop was a popular teen hangout back then, and Bell, an avid diver, did business with him.

Debbie and Maria were known regulars, and Bell spent a lot of time there too.

Maybe that's why Debbie and Maria seemed to know the person driving the white van that day.

In 2011, Lisa gets the opportunity to interview Bell in person.

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.

Bell's now in his early 70s.

with a white crew cut and hard of hearing.

It makes their conversation difficult through protective glass.

But there's another challenge, too.

What was the problem was to get him to talk about what I wanted him to talk about.

And 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 AM, been in the marching band.

He was all excited to talk about that.

And then he would talk about how women wanted him, you know, sexually,

which is kind of a weird thing for me as a woman interviewing him.

But,

you know, you just sort of listen, you try not to really 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.

Lisa gets Belle to admit that Maria and Debbie had been in that dive shop.

But for all his talking, Belle doesn't give up much else.

That is, until the interview is almost over.

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?

He does.

In July 2011, Bell sends Lisa the first of two letters.

Much of it is in the form of a list.

For example, 3 Galveston, 2 Fall 1971, 1 Fall 1976.

2 Webster, 1971, July, 1 Blonde, 1 Brunette.

The list goes on, with Belle reducing the bright lives of these young girls to bullet points.

But for Lisa, the good news is, aside from the fact that Renee and Sharon disappeared in August 1971, not July, Bell's list seems to support her and Fred's theory.

Then Lisa gets another letter from Bell.

It's the one with his 11 Who Went to Heaven poem.

And he seemed proud of it.

Like, you know, it was an accomplishment that he was excited to talk about.

At that point, you know, 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.

So he was at that point excited about someone visiting him.

And so that's, I think, why he ended up writing me and, in fact, sending me down what was then a multi-year effort to try to figure out if Bell really was a serial killer, as he said he was, or if he was just a big liar.

Detective Fred Page had already linked Bell to the murders of Debbie Ackerman, Maria Johnson, Sharon Shaw, and Renee Johnson.

But over the years, Bell had confessed to killing anywhere from seven to 11 female victims.

Soon, Fred and Lisa are basically partners in their investigation.

and they want to find out exactly who Bell claims he killed.

We started with the ones that he most solidly identified, the ones where he gave names or where he gave the dates.

He talked about Colette Anise Wilson.

He used her middle name for some reason in Alvin in 1971, which actually that predated the other murders.

So if that was true, that would have been his first murder.

In the summer of 1971, Colette Wilson was immersed in band camp.

She played the clarinet, and every day after camp, her band director would drop Colette off in the same spot where her busy mom could easily swing by and get her.

But when her mom arrived on June 17th, as planned, Colette was nowhere to be seen.

Her skeletal remains were found a few months later near a reservoir west of Houston.

Colette's father, a dentist, confirmed her identity using her teeth.

Ed Bell used Colette's full name in his letter, and Lisa and Fred learned that the spot where Colette's mother was supposed to pick her up was right along Belle's commute to work.

Belle didn't receive much attention at the time.

Her family and even police had developed another theory about a different killer.

And there was a man prosecuted for Colette Wilson's murder.

Now, did Ed really kill her?

It could be.

Then there were the other victims Belle alluded to, one he identified only as Gigi in Houston.

Fred and Lisa believe the initials could refer to Gloria Gonzalez, a bookkeeper who was last seen at her Houston apartment in October 1971, and whose death was already tied to Colette Wilson's.

We knew that at the same time Colette Anise Wilson's body was found, that another girl named Gloria Gonzalez, who was kidnapped in Houston, Her bones were found mixed with Colette Wilson.

So if he was telling the truth about Colette Wilson, he most likely killed Gloria Gonzalez, whose bones were found there.

Which makes sense.

The remains of two murder victims were found mixed together in the same place, so they probably had the same killer.

After Gloria and Colette were found in November 1971, investigators concluded the following.

Gloria was most likely strangled with some kind of cord or rope, while Colette died from blunt force trauma.

The further Lisa and Fred went, the more legitimate the Crumbs Bell dropped in his letter seemed.

He included the name Pitchford in one, along with a few other details like that the girl was blonde and wearing a black coat.

He also implied he found her near a mall in Houston called Gulfgate.

As it turned out, A girl named Kimberly Pitchford had disappeared one evening in January 1973 after Driver's Ed class.

She was wearing a black coat she'd just gotten for Christmas.

Her body was found two days later near a drainage ditch with a bridge nearby, not far from I-45.

It was also close to Highway 6, which led straight to Belle's home at the time.

It's the same highway Colette Wilson disappeared on.

There's not much evidence in that case, except for the chilling story that I've since heard from many people who have reached out to me, that they were followed by a man that looked like Ed Bell on I-45 or on the service roads when they were kids because people during that era in the 70s were walking along I-45 because it wasn't as big of a busy road.

They were going to the mall.

And one of the people who says she was followed along that road and at the entrance of her neighborhood was one of Kim Pitchford's best friends.

Another name that appears in Lisa and Fred's investigation is Brenda Jones.

In July 1971, she vanished on her way home from visiting her aunt at the hospital.

She was also found in the water under a bridge, but actually in Galveston proper.

Like some of the other possible victims, her wrists and ankles were bound and she was in a state of undress.

Bell knew the hospital Brenda visited too.

He'd once been admitted there for psychiatric treatment.

He was released the year before Brenda's murder, but we know he returned to that hospital at least once when he tried to abduct a patient there.

We know he was lurking outside that place both during and after he was in treatment.

He had ability to go and come from there.

He had access to a vehicle, and that he took her in a vehicle to a remote area, and that she believed she was able to survive just because she kept him talking about himself and told him she would never tell anyone.

And she was brought back to the hospital.

When the woman initially reported what happened, she wasn't taken seriously, but her story never changed.

If you're keeping track, Brenda Jones would make eight possible victims Lisa and Fred have identified.

They believe she's one of the, quote, five girls in Galveston Belle mentioned.

Not everyone is convinced, though, mostly because Brenda was black and most of Belle's other alleged victims were white.

But Lisa and Fred believe the connections are just too hard to ignore.

Then there's the unsolved murder of Susie Bowers in 1977.

She disappeared while walking in her Galveston neighborhood, just a few blocks from where Sharon Shaw and Renee Johnson were last seen.

Bell has made statements that could tie him to Susie.

He told Lisa that he killed a girl in Galveston a year or two before Larry Dickens, the murder that ultimately landed him in prison.

Susie's case is the only unsolved murder that seems to check all the boxes.

And then, there's this coincidence.

At the time, Ed was running a series of crew boats out of Galveston that were being used to send supplies to offshore rigs.

He still ran his dive business, but he had these crew boats.

But anyway, at the time, his main crewman for those boats, who he was giving rides to and from the pier, lived within a block of Susie Bauer's grandparents, and he was there all the time.

Not to mention, two years later, Susie's remains are also found in a remote field next to a canal out in Alta Loma.

Lisa and Fred know Bell used to live nearby, so they track down an old neighbor of his who confirms where Bell parked his trailer back in the mid-70s.

The spot is roughly 20 miles from where Susie went missing and just 2.3 miles from where she was found.

If Belle really killed 11 girls, that leaves two more.

And Lisa and Fred Fred have identified who they think those two could be.

It's another best friend double homicide case that matches part of Belle's list.

Two in Dickinson, one blonde, one brunette.

Their names are Brooks Bracewell and Georgia Gere.

The striking thing about these two girls was not necessarily what Eddet said about them, but the fact that first their abduction site was near where he was known to go.

He had,

according to police records, tried to abduct two other girls who lived very close to these two girls that same year.

In September 1974, Brooks and Georgia decided to cut class.

That afternoon, they ended up at the El Rancho Motel in a public area with games like pool and pinball.

Other kids from school, even Brooks' older sister, were there too.

When it was time to go, some of the kids caught a ride with a friend, but there was no room in the car for Brooks or Georgia.

It wasn't a big deal, though.

They weren't far from home and could walk.

But as the car pulled away, one boy looked back at the girls.

It looked like they were trying to hitchhike.

When the girls didn't come home that night, their parents involved the police, but they assumed the girls had run away.

It took years to finally track them down, out in a drainage ditch in an oil field.

By then, there were few remains left and even less forensic evidence.

The murders went unsolved.

With so many connections between Bell and these unsolved murders, it might seem a little baffling that the DA's office ended their investigation so quickly until you learn about one of Bell's other claims.

It turns out, in addition to these murder confessions, He's been trying to tell another story for years.

One that he says explains all of his predatory behavior and involves a vast brainwashing conspiracy he believes is run by the government.

He calls it the program, and it's kind of like a nightmarish version of the Truman show.

He even referenced it in the poem he sent to Lisa.

And what of the innocent ones who fell, by the way?

Will the henchmen of Uncle Sam ever pay?

Maybe the DA's office found it hard to take his confession seriously in the midst of ranting about a conspiracy.

But what if

he wasn't making it all up?

Thanks for tuning in to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast.

I'll be back next Monday with part two of this story.

We'll dig deeper into Ed Bell's claims about the program and reveal the most compelling evidence that Lisa and Fred found during their investigation.

A big, big thank you to Lisa Olson for her time and expertise.

If you haven't already, check out the docuseries The Eleven and look for her book, The Scientist and the Serial Killer, coming out in April 2025.

Along with The Eleven, we also found Catherine Casey's book, Deliver Us, Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45 Texas Killing Fields, extremely helpful to our research.

Stay safe out there.

This episode was written and produced by Mickey Taylor, edited by Connor Sampson and TTU, fact-checked by Lori Siegel, and sound designed by Spencer Howard.

I'm your host, Janice Morgan.

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