Have you heard about Charles Cox, or the 1960s Texas Torso Murders? Not many people know about these heinous unsolved crimes from 1959-1964. Their sheer awfulness definitely warrants more attention.
I only just recently discovered these murders and now I’m obsessed. I really want these horrible murders to be solved. Several of the victims have never been identified, but with modern-day advancements in forensic genealogy and DNA extraction from severely degraded old tissue, they could finally be identified. That would bring law enforcement at least one step closer to solving their awful deaths.
It is not known if the murders are connected, but the strikingly similar manners of death and dismemberment of these men suggest that one individual may have been responsible.
Charles Cox
Charles Cox was a well-known schoolteacher and choirmaster in Artesia. He was president of the Kiwanis Club and played the organ for the church. The newspaper often praised him throughout the 1950s for his work as a singer and piano teacher. People remember him as a big man, who never used his stature in an intimidating way. They remember him being outgoing and friendly and trustworthy. Certainly no one expected him to die the way he did.
Charles Cox was last seen at the Nixon Hotel in Roswell. That’s also where his car was found after he was discovered dead. He was last seen alive around 10 pm on Saturday December 3, 1960, when he cashed a $5 check at the hotel and then had a hamburger and coffee in the hotel restaurant. Then he moved to the bar and enjoyed two beers. While he sat at the bar, another young man joined him. The two appeared to be deep in conversation for a while. No one knows who this young man was. It’s also not known if Cox knew him from before or if he was just a friendly stranger at the bar. Cox left the bar alone, according to two witness accounts.
Cox wasn’t seen or heard from again after he left the bar. His mother reported him missing. He was missing for three days while his loved ones frantically searched for him. The fact his car was still at the hotel made foul play appear likely.
Then, a corn farmer near Dexter, NM, noticed that something was blocking the drainage in one of his irrigation ditches on December 6, 1960. That’s when he found the decomposing nude body of the teacher. Cox’s head had been bashed in. His legs had been cut off at the knees and were nowhere to be found. And he had been sexually mutilated and possibly raped. It is believed that he had been alive when his legs were amputated, though he had quite possibly been unconscious due to the blunt force trauma to his head. He had apparently been dead since Saturday night, when he was last seen.
It was a well-known secret that Cox was gay. He was unmarried and he spent a lot of time at a well-known gay bar in Roswell. He also possibly had some sort of romantic liaison with a couple in Roswell, though that is unconfirmed. No one knows what he was doing at the Nixon Hotel in Roswell that night, but his activities in Roswell often centered around the gay bar there.
Some think that he had been killed by the couple he was involved with, who were living in Roswell at the time. His students heard the story that he had been visiting this couple in their home and they shot him and dismembered his body to make it decompose more easily. However, there is no evidence he had been shot. Others think his murder was related to the similar dismemberment murders committed across several states in the 1950s and 1960s.
1959 The El Paso Torso Murder
A fisherman in the Rio Grande was horrified when he found an expensive black suitcase cotaining a torso, floating in the river on June 30, 1959. (Some accounts say the suitcase was actually green). He also witnessed a large cardboard box drift by on the river and he suspected it contained more body parts.
He promptly called police, who soon found a smaller cardboard box inscribed with “Larry’s Sandwiches, Culver City, CA, 12-2 Sandwiches JUMBO COMBO” in the water near the suitcase. This box was wedged in the bank near the Country Club bridge and it contained feet and legs severed cleanly below the knees.
Just fifty feet away from there, they found the lower torso and upper legs of a man, leaning against a tree. The penis had been cut off and the scrotum had been neatly skinned. There was no sign of the hands or head and a lot of skin had been removed from the body, primarily in the genital area but also on the back and pelvis. The larger box that the fisherman saw floating by may have contained the head.
On July 12, 1959, a family was enjoying a picnic near Round Mountain in Bent, NM. Round Mountain is located between Alamogordo and Mescalero and it looms over Tularosa Creek. The family stumbled upon a reeking cardboard box in the creek. When they opened it, they were horrified to discover hands and intestines, wrapped in women’s plastic shoe bags and newspaper. A “pile of skin and flesh” was also found dumped in this area a day later, though it’s not clear who found it. Partial prints were obtained from the decomposed hands and that eliminated several missing persons from the time frame as the victim.
It is thought that the body parts from the Tularosa Creek and the Rio Grande belonged to the same victim because they both were wrapped in El Paso Herald-Post papers, dated June 19 for the torso and June 17 for the hands, as well as plastic shoe bags for women’s shoes. The body parts also appeared to match the same description of a white male, aged 19-25, who didn’t have callouses on his feet or hands from manual labor. His muscular build suggested that he may have been an athlete or dancer.
The body parts had all been stored in a freezer for some time, and had been expertly carved and separated at the joints with a sharp instrument, possibly a butcher knife. The killer obviously possessed some anatomical knowledge. The cardboard boxes all came from “Larry’s Sandwiches,” a California-based lunch distribution company that sold sandwiches to stores all over the States. The El Paso distributor for the company was located on North Mesa Street in El Paso. This distributor was questioned and evidently cleared.
State police and lead investigator, Dan Sosa, searched the area around Bent and found some good-condition home items in the mud near the location of the hands. Law enforcement thought these items had been dumped in another place and had been washed into the mud by the creek water. Due to the presence of a few bloodstained pages from the El Paso Herald-Post dated June 16 among the items, they believed they may have belonged to the victim. These items were an expensive Mexican serape, an oil cloth, a pink and white bedspread, an empty plastic bag, a curtain from a window, and the newspaper.
Then, in 1961, a Tulie Creek fisherman then found a skull lodged in the sill, which had been subjected to some type of violence, possibly blunt force trauma by a meat cleaver or ax. Since the skull of the dismembered body had never been found, people thought it could also belong to the same victim. As far as I could determine, this has never been confirmed.
People thought the victim might be a man named John Bradley who had vanished from Las Cruces. Bradley’s employer’s car was found abandoned in El Paso. Bradley’s attorney assured investigators that Bradley was alive and well and they dropped the lead. I think this is ridiculous and they should have confirmed the attorney’s statements. What if the attorney had killed Bradley and lied?
The torso murder was also briefly linked to a man missing from Denver, but the height was off and the fingerprints did not appear to match the partial prints from the hand in Tularosa Creek. Police did not entertain suggestions that the body could have belonged to W.D. Patterson, a man who had been missing from El Paso since March 6, 1957. I’m not sure why they ruled this out so completely and I wonder if more investigation should have been done into that lead.
When Cox was raped, killed, and dismembered in 1960, police immediately thought it might be connected to the 1959 dismemberment case. Both crimes involved the dismemberment and sexually sadistic mutilation of a white male victim. However, Cox still had his head, while the head of the El Paso Torso Murder victim has not been recovered.
Some police thought this killer may have committed the 1961 Matty and Patty murders, too. While the El Paso Torso Murder and Charles Cox certainly could be related, I’m not sure how they would relate to the Mattie and Patty killings. The method is totally different. A person who enjoys dismembering people probably wouldn’t change that in the case of the two girls. Plus the dismembering killer seemed to prefer men.
I can see why this lead was abandoned. But now I want to see these two dismemberment cold cases solved! I never heard about them before, as horrible and gruesome as they are. Dismemberment killings are rare, constituting under 2% of murders. Thus, it is a little far-fetched that there were two separate sexually sadistic killers on the loose in the New Mexico/El Paso area in the same time frame. Possible, but far-fetched.
Other Dismembered Bodies of the 1960s
The El Paso Torso Murder and Charles Cox’s murders are thought to be committed by the same killer. But a few other dismemberment murders in Texas, Florida, and Georgia made police begin to suspect a psychopathic sadist was at large.
1962 John C. Jackson
On January 30, 1962, the arms, legs, feet, and “other parts” of John C. Jackson were located in a palmetto grove near the Highlands community in Clay County, Florida. A day later, his torso was found near Sylvester, GA, about 30 feet from Hwy 82, over 200 miles away from Clay County. The fingers were clipped off at the joints, the skin of the palm had been peeled cleanly off, and the head was missing, which made this John Doe impossible to identify at the time. Law enforcement noted that the body parts had been “expertly” separated at the joints with no jagged edges in the skin, indicating the killer had known what he was doing and had used a very sharp instrument to make the cuts. Law enforcement found that the body parts matched, and appeared to belong to a white male between 20 and 40, with a stocky build and black hair and size 7 shoes.
On February 15th, 1962, the Worth County Advantage in Georgia reported that police had found an expensive suitcase of clothes about 50 yards from where the torso had been found. The suitcase had apparently been there for some time, since the clothes were mildewed from recent rains. The suitcase contained pencils, a toothbrush, five pants, five shirts, moccasin-style shoes men’s size 7, men’s underwear, and a letter. That letter led police to Ellijay, GA, where they located the owner of the suitcase, very much alive. The owner said that he had gone to Sylvester for work and had not found anything. He was hitchhiking home and propped the suitcase against a tree because it was “burdensome.”
Sometime between January and March 1962, John C. Jackson’s mother returned home in Cincinnati from a lengthy hospital stay and noticed her son was missing and there was blood on the carpet. Her husband, Joseph Arnold Cooper, wouldn’t tell her where Jackson was. Cooper had also been fired from the energy plant where he worked for a lengthy unexplained absence in January. Cops in Ohio questioned Cooper, and he was extremely evasive about John Jackson. He was arrested and that’s when he confessed that he had killed his stepson. He thoroughly narrated where he had scattered the body parts over Ohio, Florida, and Georgia. In addition, he revealed where he had stashed the fingers and head, which were still missing.
Ohio investigators came to Florida and viewed the dismembered body parts at the University of Florida, finding that they were similar to John Jackson’s description. They began a search for the head and fingers based on Cooper’s account. The Worth County Advantage reported that on April 18th, 1962, the young man’s head was found in Florida and dental records confirmed he was John Jackson. Another paper in Cincinnati, however, claims the head has never been found. The only way Jackson was positively identified was through his mother, who told the cops about certain identifying marks on her son’s body that corresponded with the torso and limbs.
Nevertheless, Cooper’s story was confirmed. Cooper had beaten Jackson to death on January 21 with a ball-peen hammer, after Jackson tried to strike him during an argument about his upcoming vacation. He then hid the body in his basement and later under Jackson’s own bed before loading it into his car and scattering the skin, fingers, limbs, head, and torso in different places across Ohio, Georgia, and Florida. A jury found him guilty of first-degree manslaughter and he was convicted on October 4, 1964. Cooper was apparently a college-educated file clerk at an industrial energy plant and was in his 40s when he was convicted of his stepson’s death. He certainly did not seem like someone who would do something so heinous.
Joseph Cooper’s method of killing John C. Jackson is so eerily similar to the other cases that I really wonder if he may have done this before. He sure knew how to butcher a body and hide identification of the remains. His undoing was his confession. In the case of the skull found in Tularosa Creek in 1961 and the death of Charles Cox, both victims had been beaten in the head as well.
1962 San Jacinto County Jane Doe
On February 3, 1962, two cement-filled Borden Dairy boxes were found in San Jacinto County, Texas, in a culvert off of US-59. The cement encased two halves of a woman’s torso, which had been sawed in half with a hatchet or a dull pocket knife type blade. The head, arms, and legs have never been located. A burlap sack near the body contained her intestines and a baby bib, a bra, and a handkerchief. A green waitress-uniform-style dress with the label ripped off and a beige wool coat with the laundry mark “SS 66 GJ” were encased in the cement with the torso.
The woman had consumed about eight beers prior to being murdered. She had been dead for about five to eight days. The pathologist who did her autopsy estimated that she was about 40-45 years old, 180-200 pounds, 5’8”-5’10”, and had an appendectomy scar. She had had one or two children in her lifetime. Reddish-brown hairs were found on the green dress and are believed to indicate her hair color.
The victim is now buried in Cold Spring, TX, in an unmarked grave near the grave of the sheriff who investigated her case. This grave now can’t be found, as there are many unmarked graves in that particular cemetery. Details on her case are scant. A Reddit websleuth found some crumbs of information about her and a death certificate, but no active investigation or even a NamUs profile. This woman has practically been forgotten. She may have children out there who want to know what happened to their mother. However, the baby’s bib in the burlap sack is creepy to say the least. I worry about the fate of that baby.
There was one suspect – a “bushy-haired man” who had worked at a Borden Dairy plant in Houston. The man had been arrested previously for strangling a waitress. His story was that the waitress had strangled herself while drunk. Excuse me, what? People don’t strangle themselves. They may asphyxiate themselves or hang themselves, but they don’t strangle themselves. This man was cleared in the Jane Doe case via polygraphs, which are notoriously unreliable.
This suspect does seem suspicious. Plus the details of this case aren’t quite like the others, making me think that they were committed by a different person. First, the victim was female, while the other victims were male. The woman had been hacked at with a dull blade, while the other dismemberment murders were performed very cleanly with a sharp blade, by someone who knew what he was doing. The dairy boxes stood out to me, though, because they sound like the Larry’s Sandwiches boxes in the El Paso Torso Murder case. This could point to a truck driver who delivered food throughout Texas and New Mexico. But it is also possible that these boxes were just conveniently nearby as the killer was dismembering the victim.
1964 Fort Bend County John Doe, aka “Stubby”
In Fort Bend County, Texas, a farmer found a torso in his field on June 11, 1964. The head and hands were missing and the legs had been severed at the knees. The victim had been a man with olive-toned skin and black body hair. He was estimated to be middle-aged or elderly. He had been deceased for about a day and his cause of death is undetermined but his manner of death was ruled homicide. Nicknamed Stubby, there is not much info available about him.
Like the others, Stubby has never been identified. His torso was embalmed and stored at a local morgue in hopes someone would identify him. Many people viewed his torso and only one person thought she might know him. However, she later said she was sure he wasn’t who she had thought he was. He was finally buried in 1984. His other body parts have still never been found.
Police thought the Fort Bend man might have been the husband of a dismembered woman found in Ohio. But that proved to be false with time. The Ohio dismemberment victim was later identified as Daisy Shelton. Shelton was found in Troy, OH, around the same time as the Fort Bend man. Her arms had been found in a pool at the bottom of a gravel pit in Troy. Later, her head and torso were fished out of the Erie Canal. She had struggled with alcohol, had recently split from her alcoholic husband, and had been laid off from Delco shortly before her disappearance. She disappeared in September of 1963, leaving behind a young son. The investigation into Shelton’s death revealed that she frequented a teenage hot spot and lured teenage girls away with cookies, only to make them have sex with men for money. Her death is believed to be related to the human trafficking and not a serial killer.
The Fort Bend County John Doe has never been identified. I’m not sure how police formulated the theory that the Troy woman and the Fort Bend man had been married. Now we know that the cases are unrelated.
The Connection between the Murders
In 1962, twenty-one law enforcement officers from Georgia, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas convened in Austin to compare notes on the El Paso Torso Murder, Charles Cox, the San Jacinto Torso Murder, and John C. Jackson (who had not yet been identified). The result was that they unanimously agreed the murders had been committed by the same individual. Law enforcement began looking for a deranged serial killer across state lines.
It is now clear that at least a few of these deaths are not related to the others. Daisy Shelton’s dismemberment and John C. Jackson’s dismemberment were both unrelated (though I do wonder if Joseph Cooper had done this type of thing before). The San Jacinto Jane Doe seems different from the other cases, too.
However, there remain some striking similarities between the Fort Bend County John Doe, the El Paso Torso Murder, and Charles Cox. The most interesting similarity is how a lot of the body parts have never been found. The distance between body parts is also interesting, suggesting a killer who traveled a lot. The use of grocery boxes in two of the murders further paints a picture of a person who possibly traveled delivering food and disposed of the body parts along his route.
In 1964, the killings seemed to abruptly stop. Since killers like this rarely stop of their own accord, it seems most likely that the killer died, moved out of the country, or became incarcerated for a different crime. He may also have been drafted to Vietnam.
The Prime Suspect: Walter A. Emerick
The killings stopped in 1964, right before Walter A. Emerick’s suicide. Emerick had been staying in the Sheraton Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, TX, with a young woman. He had checked in on February 2, 1965, signing the registration slip “Douglas Ashley.”
On February 3, a maid opened the door of Room 636 and saw the room was absolutely washed in blood. Emerick was standing over the bed, wrapping up something in a box – something she thought might be the torso of his female companion. Emerick made a shushing motion to the maid.
The horrified maid ran to the registration desk to get the police called. By the time police barged into the room, though, Emerick was gone. It is believed he fled down the fire escape with the torso of his victim in the box. He may have flushed additional body parts down the toilet.
The room was an absolute murderous mess. Police found empty wine bottles, remnants of a charcuterie tray, women’s underwear, blonde hair, and nylons. There were several bloody footprints, thought to be too small for Emerick. There was a .22 shell and a slug in the wall over a bloodsoaked chair. Trails of blood led into the bathroom, to the toilet. Police were confident that a woman had been staying in the room and also that someone had been murdered there.
Emerick’s unidentified female companion is the presumed victim, but the tiny footprints make me wonder if she had been an accomplice instead. Not many people start quietly walking around in their own blood after being shot. Since neighbors didn’t hear any screams, it seems possible that there was another person in that room, willingly helping Emerick.
A few days later, police tracked Emerick to the St. Anthony Hotel in San Antonio, where he had checked in under “Albert Cox.” As they knocked on the door to talk to him about whatever had transpired at the Gunter Hotel, Emerick shot himself. He thus took his secrets to the grave. He was only 38 and survived by a mother, brother, niece, and nephew. His family had a funeral for him at the Post Chapel in Fort Sam Houston and I wonder what they must have thought about him and his bizarre escapade at the Sheraton Gunter Hotel.
The victim’s body parts have never been found and the woman with Emerick has never been identified. But hotel staff at the Sheraton Gunter say that the woman’s ghost still haunts the room to this day and the hotel has even had nightmare conventions on their sixth floor around Halloween. Meanwhile, at the St. Anthony Hotel, you can get a cocktail called “The Emerick” at the bar. This seems like a rather shitty way to commemorate a horrible tragedy but I guess if you’re into that kind of thing.
Emerick does seem like a possible suspect. He was in Texas in 1965 and three dismembered bodies had been found in Texas between 1959 and 1964. He was staying in hotels – and Charles Cox had disappeared from a hotel in Roswell. He also seemed to be transient, traveling a lot, and the murders had spanned across two states. Finally, he seemed to have been caught in the act of dismembering someone, but the evidence seems shaky on that. It has never been confirmed he had actually murdered his female companion or dismembered her. Something bad undoubtedly happened in Room 636, though – something that Emerick took with him to the grave.
Another Suspect: Darlington W. Shaw
In May 1961, Darlington W. Shaw was arrested for murdering his wife, Hildreth Shaw, and scattering her body parts across three counties in California. The similar nature of his crime linked him to the El Paso Torso Murder and Charles Cox. Interestingly, both Cox and the El Paso Torso Murder had occurred relatively close to Las Cruces, where Shaw said he had last seen his wife.
Hildreth Shaw’s head was found wrapped in plastic and dumped in a thermos jug box in Garden Grove. One of her legs was found in the Angeles National Forest. The torso was found last in Box Canyon, in Ventura County. Her daughter, Joan Mullin, identified her head based on police sketches and other family members confirmed the identification. I can’t imagine how horrible it must have been for the family to look at those sketches and to find out what had happened to their beloved Hildreth.
Darlington Shaw claimed that he and his wife had been driving toward San Antonio for their son George’s funeral. George had been 17 when he was killed in a car accident in San Antonio. The couple had a fight near Las Cruces, and Hildreth got out of the car. Shaw claimed that he never saw her again. But police felt that this was not a believable story.
Shaw was 52 at the time and was employed as a woodworker. He had previously served time for stealing a car and driving it across state lines. Shaw had discarded some of his wife’s body parts in a box in which a thermos jug had been sold. This thermos jug purchase was tracked back to Shaw, leading to his arrest.
After being interrogated all night, Shaw finally confessed. Police also questioned him in regards to the murders of Charles Cox and the El Paso Torso Murder. But they were unable to get him to confess to those murders.
Police in San Antonio confirmed that Shaw had been to his son’s funeral. Whether or not his wife had been with him was not confirmed. Thus, it seems that Shaw had been driving around with his wife’s body before returning to California and disposing of it. This jibes with the other two killings, where the victims had been murdered in one location and then their body parts had been strewn about in other locations.
However, even if Shaw was the killer of Charles Cox and the El Paso Torso Murder victim, he obviously wasn’t the killer of the people in Fort Bend County and San Jacinto County, TX. Those murders occurred after Shaw was already put away. It’s perfectly possible that each of these torso murders had been committed by a different person, but the same killer seems possible too.
Forensic Profile
Without a solid suspect, it is hard to even begin to think about who committed these ghastly dismemberment murders. A forensic profile would be helpful in identifying possible suspects. I came up with the following profile based on similar solved cases and some Finnish research that has been conducted into corpse dismemberment (linked below). I am in no way a professional profiler and this is just conjecture, built entirely on the unproved assumption that Stubby, the El Paso Torso Murder Victim, the San Jacinto Jane Doe, and Charles Cox had all been killed by the same individual.
It seems that this person was probably homosexual, hence why he enjoyed killing and sexually mutilating men. Necro-sadistic lust may have been the entire point of the murders for him. He enjoyed torturing his victims and sexually mutilating them. He may have also had a sick sense that the victims deserved this because they were gay (though we don’t actually know any of the victims were gay besides Charles Cox). This may have been at sharp odds with his own homosexuality – sort of like the Green River Killer, who killed prostitutes because he believed they were sinners, even though he used those prostitutes for sexual services himself. The two unidentified male victims may have been gay and thus targeted by this killer; alternatively, this killer may have simply picked the most vulnerable male victims he could find, regardless of their sexuality. Why he picked a female victim in 1962 is unclear and it’s plausible that her murder may have been committed by a separate individual.
This killer likely traveled a lot all over the Southern US, hence the wide geographic distances between the body parts. Thus, he was either transient in a vehicle or he had a job that entailed traveling. He had to have had a vehicle that he could transport the body parts in. He may have driven a truck, possibly delivering food, which gave him access to the Larry’s Sandwiches boxes and the Borden Dairy boxes. The truck may have been refrigerated, which is how he stored the El Paso Torso Murder victim’s body parts that had been previously frozen.
The El Paso Torso Murder victim may have been killed in his home due to the home goods dumped near Bent. His murder seems to center around El Paso based on the newspaper clippings and the location of his legs and torso; I think he was probably killed or at least abducted in El Paso. It is not clear where Charles Cox was killed but it is thought to be in Roswell because that’s where he was last seen alive. The whereabouts of the other victims before they died is completely unknown. If they are ever identified, then we might be able to find out the places where they were last seen alive. But just from the scant evidence available on these victims, it seems that this killer focused his killings along truck routes. El Paso is a major distribution center for all kinds of industries and Tularosa Creek can easily be accessed from El Paso via I-10 and then US 70. Roswell is a fairly big town and it connects to Dexter via US-285. US-59 where San Jacinto Jane Doe was found is also a common truck route. Fort Bend County is in the Houston metropolitan area which is rife with truck traffic. So the dump sites for all of these body parts were not too far out of the way for a trucker to conveniently go while en route to his ultimate destination.
His anatomical knowledge and precision with a knife do not necessarily mean he worked in a trade involving butchering, according to a Finnish study on killers who dismember bodies. After all, we saw that John Cooper dismembered his stepson expertly and he was a filing clerk at an atomic energy company! But it is possible that this killer had prior experience with knives. After all, he had to have learned how to carve up bodies so well from somewhere. He may have worked at a grocery store, possibly the meat counter, or he had his own butcher shop or meat packing business. He may have also been a hunter. He undoubtedly wasn’t squeamish around blood.
These crimes were organized because they were planned carefully, they occurred in two or three locations, and they featured dedicated efforts to disguise the victims’ identities. This suggests that the killer was smart. He had some forensic knowledge, which is how he knew to remove identifying information, such as heads and fingers. He also dumped their bodies in remote areas where he wouldn’t be caught in the act, suggesting he may have picked out these places beforehand.
Most serial killers are blue-collar workers, suggesting this killer was working class. Following the profile of most organized serial killers, he was likely employed and good at creating an image of being stable. He may have even been married.
He was also probably manipulative and charming. This charm would have also worked in luring his victims to places where he could easily kill them without being detected. He knew how to exploit his victims’ personal desires to get them alone with him, and he knew how to find victims who had been drinking and were vulnerable – Cox and San Jacinto Jane Doe being examples. Since homosexuality was very forbidden and socially unacceptable in the 50s and 60s, the killer may have taken advantage of that fact to entice some of his male victims to very private locations (though, again, we don’t know that any of the victims were gay beyond Charles Cox).
The killer didn’t make a huge effort to hide the body parts. Had he not wanted the body parts to be found, he could have hidden them or buried them in one of countless desolate areas in the vastness of New Mexico and Texas. But he didn’t do that. He even displayed the sexually mutilated lower torso and upper legs of the El Paso Torso Murder victim. This suggests he didn’t care if the body parts were found and he was actually proud of his gruesome work. He felt no shame whatsoever. He intended for the sexual mutilation of the El Paso Torso Murder victim to be the focal point of the murder; hence, sexual sadism was probably his motive.
The killer likely had been sexually molested as a child, since most people who dismember corpses have had a history of childhood sexual abuse. He also likely had diagnosed or suspected mental health issues and a prior violent history. He may have been to a mental hospital or jail before, possibly for non-homicidal crimes like auto theft, shoplifting, or armed robbery. A lot of serial killers start small and escalate with their crimes over time.
Most of these types of killers tend to be psychopaths who have trouble feeling. The killer did not feel horror or guilt as he dismembered the bodies; he simply felt a morbid drive to destroy the victims and he also possibly felt sexual arousal. Since serial killers often kill people close to them, he may have killed a family member or friend in the past without being caught.
If the murders are indeed linked, then this killer may have started with Charles Cox. This is why he dismembered that body but left the head on. When he saw in the news how easily Cox was identified, he adjusted his MO to include head removal. That’s why the other bodies have never been identified. You can see the dismemberment became more thorough with time and practice.
The murders stopped in 1964. Killers like this don’t usually just stop of their own accord. Hence, it would make sense to look for someone who died in 1964, 1965, or 1966, or who went to prison or a mental institution during that time frame, or who was deployed to Vietnam after 1964. I say through 1966 because there was a two-year lull in dismemberment killings between 1962 and 1964, so it could be that this killer took a cooling-off period of a couple years before he experienced the compulsion to kill again. But something may have happened to stop him from killing after 1964, in the middle of his cooling-off period. It would also be interesting to see if dismemberment killings picked up after 1964 in a different area of the US or even in a different country. They may have even picked up many years or decades after 1964 if the killer served a lengthy incarceration, institution, or deployment.
Then again, these killings may not even be related at all. In that case, we had several really creepy people running around, who have never received punishment for their crimes. At least they are probably dead or elderly now, and thus unable to claim more victims.
There is just a huge vacuum surrounding these cases that leave a lot more questions than answers. For instance, was Charles Cox the victim of a hate crime or a jealous lover? What about that Roswell couple he was rumored to have been killed by? Who was the El Paso Torso Murder victim? Who was Stubby? Who was the San Jacinto Jane Doe, and what happened to the baby whose bib was found with her intestines? Where are Jane Doe’s children and have they ever wondered what happened to their mother? Had she abandoned them and so they never looked for her? Did any of these unidentified people have someone looking for them, perhaps in a completely different place than Texas? I hope one day these questions can be answered. Identifying these unnamed decedents may be a way to reconstruct their last moments and find their killer or killers, too.
Conclusion
Charles Cox was a kind man with a love for music who didn’t deserve to die the way he did. I don’t know who the other torso murder victims were, but I know they were once laughing, cooing babies. They once had dreams and aspirations and favorite foods. They probably still have family members who wonder about where they went. None of them deserved to die the way they did or to have their bodies mutilated in the fashion that they were. The fact that their names were robbed from them as well as their lives is a true tragedy.
The murders appeared to have stopped in 1964 (that we know of). Now the killer (or killers) is probably dead. But at least knowing his identity, and the identities of the people he murdered, would offer some closure to many loved ones left behind by these awful murders. I hope that one day these cases are solved. Until then, awareness and advocacy are all we can do for Charles Cox and the 1960s Texas torso murder victims.
Sources
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1373191856069044
https://unidentified-awareness.fandom.com/wiki/Stubby
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/78963774/john-c-jackson
The Worth County Advantage. January 30-October 22, 1962. http://worthcounty.advantage-preservation.com/search?k=torso&st=1792&co=1772&i=f&d=01/01/1962-12/31/1962&bcn=1&m=between&ord=k1