He calls his victims the "Eleven that went to Heaven." Edward Harold Bell, admitted sex offender, convicted murderer and self-described serial killer, has given multiple chilling confessions from his locked prison cell of abducting and slaying teenage and adolescent girls in the 1970s, describing crimes even now unsolved. In disturbing letters sent to Harris and Galveston county prosecutors in 1998 - but kept secret for 13 years - Bell claimed to have killed seven girls, including two Galveston 15-year-olds shot as they stood tied up and half naked in the chilly waters of Turner Bayou, according to excerpts and descriptions of Bell's letters. Bell claims a brainwashing "program" forced him to "be a flasher," to "rape girls" and ultimately to kill. The victims were young girls from Houston, Galveston, Webster and Dickinson. The murders came in waves: five in 1971 and six more from about 1974 to 1977. Six teens, he adds, were murdered in pairs. Bell named three victims from 1971: Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson, 15-year-old Galveston surfer girls and experienced water skiers who disappeared after hitchhiking, and Colette Anise Wilson, 13, who never arrived home near Alvin after attending a summer band camp. All three cases remain unsolved, though Brazoria County Sheriff's officials long theorized Wilson and another girl were murdered by a convict killed in a 1972 jail escape. Wilson's bones were found in a reservoir mingled with those of a missing Houston girl, Gloria Ann Gonzales, 19. In 1998, Bell described murdering Ackerman and Johnson in letters written from a maximum security cell in Huntsville 17 years after the crime: "I was 'Brainwashed' into killing Deby (sic) Ackerman and Maria Johnson in November 1971," Bell wrote. He detailed how he shot them and described the remote bridge where the bodies were recovered. Ackerman and Johnson were last seen accepting a ride near an island ice cream shop from a man driving a white van. Their abductor tied them up, stripped them from the waist down and left their bodies in the bayou, records show. Bell owned a white 1971 Ford Van, lived in an apartment in a sprawling beach house along Offatts Bayou, and had invested in a surf shop that both girls visited before their deaths, according to documents and interviews. In fact, Bell was arrested in the van in February 1972, after flashing a 15-year-old on a sales trip to Greta, La. Bell repainted the van and it later burned, Bell and others said. Bell identified another of his victims as a reddish-blond Houston teen named "Pitchford," kidnapped near Gulfgate Mall. Harris County medical examiner's records and newspaper archives show Kimberly Rae Pitchford, a 16-year-old who lived near Hobby airport, never returned home after taking a driver's education class at Frank Dobie High School in Houston. Her body was found in a thicket in Brazoria County in January 1973. Bell claims not to know the names of other girls. In some cases he remembers the color of their hair. The 1971 murders included Ackerman, Johnson, Wilson and two Webster girls Bell does not name. Just three months before Ackerman and Johnson disappeared from Galveston Island, so did two Webster 14-year-olds named Sharon Shaw and Rhonda Renee Johnson. All four girls hung out at a popular water ski school on Offatts Bayou near Bell's apartment. The Texas Killing Fields is an area bordering the Calder Oil Field, which is a 25-acre patch of land situated a mile from Interstate Highway 45. Since the early 1970s, some 30 bodies of murder victims have been found within the Killing Fields area. These were mainly the bodies of girls or young women. Furthermore, many young girls have disappeared from this area. Their bodies, if they are deceased, are still missing. It is believed that many of the murders were the work of serial killers. Many of the victims were aged 10–25 years, and many shared similar physical features. A few of them had similar hairstyles. Despite exhaustive efforts by the Texas City police, along with the assistance of the FBI, very few of these murders have been solved. The Film reels reside at The Houston Metropolitan Research Center. KHOU-TV retains the copyright to the material.

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