Two HEADS Were Taken And Never Found – Houston’s Disturbing Unidentified Killer

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Not 1979 when police started actively searching for them, or in the decades of cold case work that have gone on since, and they were ripped away and taken like a trophy, only these aren't the normal things a killer might take for a keepsake, normally it's a piece of clothing or jewelry and these were literal heads. On top of that, these two weren't the only victims either, and there were three more, and in total, all five people were killed inside of a three month span, which begs the question, what kind of raging psychopath could do this, and an equally important question, where did this person go? Because after the fall of '79, the killing stopped on a dime, but the killer has never been brought to justice. Hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to every town where today we have a unique and disturbing one for you, a frenzied spree, the likes of which are rarely seen, so let's head on down to Texas now together, and this is Houston's most disturbing unsolved case, the Orchard Apartment murders. In the summer of 1979, the city of Houston, Texas, was on a hot street, both literally and figuratively. The oil boom had turned the city into a magnet, and so tens of thousands of people poured in from all over the country, and they were young, hungry, and chasing jobs and a fresh start in a place that felt like it had no limits to what you could accomplish. And Houston was the fourth largest city in America, and it was growing so fast you could almost watch it happen in real time. New apartment complexes were going up everywhere. New Orchard Apartment, on Glenmont Drive in the gulfed in area of southwest Houston was exactly that kind of place, packed wall to wall with young, single working professionals. And you might wave at a neighbor in the hallway there, or hear their music through the walls at night, but you didn't necessarily know anyone all that well. I mean, everyone was busy trying to get a piece of the action. Which man, if someone you'd seen around for a few months, suddenly stopped showing up, you wouldn't exactly notice right away. And it was right here in this world, young people, new city, nobody knowing their neighbors all that well, that something started happening and it happened fast. Between July and October of that year, five people were murdered in and around southwest Houston. A three of them were decapitated or nearly so, and two of those murders happened inside the same building, just two floors apart and two weeks apart. And those other three were all within a few miles one another. By October 1, Houston had already recorded 500 murders for the year, matching all of 1978 with three months still to go. The deadliest year in the city's history, and somewhere right in the middle of all that, the orchard apartments. Elise Rankin, July 27, 1979, she was the first. Elise was a 33-year-old single mother who had worked at an engineering firm right there in Houston as a secretary. She had her life organized, was practical, and on top of things, and that week her car was in the shop, so she had already arranged a ride to work with a colleague named Bob Smith. And when Bob showed up to the orchard apartments that morning, Elise's door was already open. It wasn't wide open, just a jar, enough to notice. I mean, most front doors you never think about because they're always shut, so when Bob's side sitting open like that, he stopped for a second. Called out her name, but there was no answer. He put the car in park, walked up to the door, pushed it open, then he walked in. The apartment was still, he called out again, there was nothing, he made his way toward the bedroom, and that's when he found her. Elise was in her bed, nude with her feet bound together. A pillow had been placed over her upper body, laid there deliberately, covering her from the chest up. When Bob lifted the pillow, and she had been decapitated, and her head was totally gone. Not left nearby, or on the floor, it was missing. Once investigators got in there, they pieced together what had happened, and she had been assayed and stabbed multiple times. And then whoever did this would take in their head with them when they left. Carried it right on out of that bedroom, down the hallway, out of the building, and across that parking lot. Police found a blood trail that followed that exact path, and ended at a single empty parking space. And to this day, Elise Rankin's head has never been found. The next victim was Mary Calcutta, I was August 10th, 1979. Mary was a 27 year old Pittsburgh girl, and she had moved to Houston, chasing the same thing everyone else was chasing in '79. A fresh start, her own life, she had a clerk job, and her own apartment, right there in the orchard complex. And when Elise was murdered, two floors below her, Mary was scared, and not unsettled, I mean genuinely frightened. And she picked up the phone and called her best friend, Beth McKinstree back in Pittsburgh, and Beth remembers wondering why she was calling her on a weeknight. Mary told her what had happened in the building, and from there, they went through everything to help calm her down and keep her safe. Don't open the door for anyone you don't know, and walk the halls with your head up, look over your shoulder, and just be aware of your surroundings. A two weeks later, a friend came by Mary's apartment and knocked, but didn't get an answer. They knocked again, still nothing. And that was weird, because Mary's car, it was right there. They then got someone to open the door, and inside the apartment was far too quiet. They moved through it cautiously, calling her name, and then they got to the bathroom. Mary was on the tiled floor, fully clothed, which investigators noted, because Elise had not been. And she had been stabbed so many times, and with such force, the knife played a bent under the pressure, and the killer just kept stabbing. A her throat had been cut so deeply she was nearly decapitated, and she too had been assayed. Now, Mary knew someone had been killed right there in her building. She'd been scared enough to call her best friend, and she was being careful. And still, at some point that night, it was a knock at the door, and she opened it. Whoever was on the other side of that door was someone who didn't set off enough alarm bells and a woman who was already on high alert. Someone who knew exactly how to get through a door, but a frightened young woman had every reason to keep shot. Our thread-gill was next, and that was also on August 10th. Now, here's where this whole thing gets even more disturbing, because this is the exact same day Mary was killed, and if ever there was a sign of a true psycho killer, it's that they aren't satisfied with one in a day, now they needed more. and Doris was 26 years old. She lived in a townhouse in northwest Houston, nine miles away from the orchard complex and Doris was actually killed first about seven hours earlier. As she had been stabbed several times in her neck, it had been slashed very deeply. Same type of wound that had been inflicted on the women at the orchard apartment, so on the surface, it looked like the same hand. When investigators got inside Doris' townhouse, there was something that was different. At first off, there was no sign of a struggle anywhere, on an overturned chair or a broken lamp, on a single thing out of place, and no evidence of essay taking place, which had been present in both of the orchard murders. The place looked almost normal, except for what had been done to her. HPD Detective Richard Rodriguez, who would later work the cold cases, said, "Either she made herself a very easy target, or she knew the killer." And so was the person who walked into Doris' home that day, the same person who had been moving through the orchard apartment, or was this someone else entirely? And if it was the same person from the orchard complex, do this tell you that perhaps they lived right there in one of the apartments? The first kill was on his home turf. The next was Doris at the townhouse. Perhaps he tried to say her and got interrupted. And so when he returned home unsatisfied, did he perhaps go knocking on Mary's door? The reality is nobody knows, but on August 10th, two young women had their throats cut in the same city seven hours apart, and 47 years later, where both cases are still open. Joan Huffman was 16 years old, and Bobby Spagenberger was 18, and they had been together less than a year. Late on the night of October 3rd, residents around the Freed Park area started hearing things. A Freed Park is about nine miles away from the orchard apartment, and residents heard a woman screaming, and then it sounded like gunshots. A neighbor looked out their window, and saw a young woman being dragged by her hair across a front porch by a man wearing a cap. She was fighting, screaming stuff like, "Help, and don't do this to me." When someone then called the park police, and when officers showed up, they looked around and told anxious residents to just go back inside their homes. But there was no blood on the porch, and they had probably mistaken firecrackers for gunshots. The next morning, though, used in police, well, they found blood on that porch, and then they found Joanne. Her body was in with Tonga Park nearly four miles away, and she had been shot to death. That same morning, I'd used Carlot nearby, a sales manager showed up for work and noticed a white dodge sitting there. It wasn't there the day before, and it was smeared with blood. He called it in, and when investigators opened the trunk, well, they found the headless body of Bobby Spangerberger. His head has also never been found. So that brings the total of five people, dead between July and October of '79, in and around the same stretchy Houston. Two missing heads, and two of them killed the same day, and two of them killed the same night. But one of these cases has ever been solved. Houston PD back then was working these cases the best way they could, but this was a time when things moved a little slower than they do today. They worked with the physical evidence, witness interviews, and with paper records. The automated fingerprint identification system, that could eventually store hundreds of thousands of prints, was just being introduced. DNA profiling didn't exist. The concept of a national database connecting crimes across jurors' dictions wasn't even on the horizon. Investigators conducted more than 260 interviews across several years and followed every tip they got, but they still came up empty. Mainly, that's because no usable fingerprints from any of the crime scenes were ever found. And there was no witness who could put a specific person in the right place at the right time. And that blood trail, from the least Rankin's apartment that led to a parking space, well, nowadays you can look at the CCTV footage from that lot and watch the killer get in his car, drive away, and have the license plate. But back then, well, they didn't have that. And of course, the real question is whether all five of these murders came from the same pair of hands. And the similarities are hard to look past. The extreme throat and neck wounds, the geographic concentration of crimes within a short window of time, on the surface it looks like a pattern, but also there are discrepancies. Some victims, I say it, others not, many stab, but one was shot, some missing heads, some still there. Detective Rod Rieghez, who worked the case for several years, felt the same way when he said, "I think it's highly irregular that you have multiple suspects all in the same area decapitating people at the same time, but I'm not ready to say it's the same individual." And so, you either have a bloodthirsty person who moved with speed to kill these victims and then they just vanished, or you have multiple killers, with overlapping methods in the same city, same few months, all of them still out there. And either answers, it's easy, which is why both are still on the table. To me, it definitely feels like one killer. At the very least, one person responsible for several of the murders. It's not like there was a different killer per victim, and that would be insane given the specificity of the crimes. And so, if this was one killer, what do we actually know about them based on their brutal behavior? In terms of the victims, you had four women and one man. And that one man, Bobby Spangerberger, was a boyfriend. He was there with Joanne, the witness heard a woman screaming and saw a woman being dragged by her hair. Joanne was clearly the one being targeted, and Bobby was almost certainly killed because he was there and just couldn't be left alive. He was a loose end in other words, and not the prime target. So, strip Bobby out of it, and what you have is four young women. All of them in their 20s are younger, all of them living alone or invulnerable situations. This is a victim type, the young lady was defenseless against a grown man. That means that the killer wanted control, and that the act of the killing and assay combined with the power, that's the motivation. The method of killing wasn't consistent, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the same killer, not by a long shot. Circumstances may have warranted a different method. Their curiosity and experimentation could warrant a different method, or even doing different things to the victims to deliberately throw police off the trail, that would warrant a different method. And, if that was the intention, well then they succeeded. At least was bound, assayed, stabbed and decapitated. Mary was stabbed repeatedly with enough force to bend the blade. Doris had her throat slashed but showed no signs of the struggle and no assay, and Joanne was shot, the fastest and most efficient of all the kills. Four women, four variations, but one thread running through all them, extreme violence directed at the throat and neck, and almost obsessive focus on that specific part of the body. Behavioral analysis, look at that kind of consistency and call it a signature. Not the method, the signature. The method is practical and it can change, but the signature, that's psychological. It's the thing the killer needs to do regardless of how everything else unfolds. In this case, the signature appears to be the throat, a control over breath, over voice, over the ability to scream, and then of course, there are those heads, and this is the part that no amount of clinical language fully explains, but it's been seen before, and taking a trophy as a document of behavior in certain types of killers, jewelry, underwear, photographs. All things that let you relive the experience, at least in part, in private, so a head is not that kind of trophy, it's flesh and bone that needs to be cut through, it rots. A head requires a plan because you'll need to keep it somewhere safe and cold, and it also requires a level of detachment from what you are doing that most people cannot even fathom. Killers who take significant body parts, not small souvenirs, but actually parts of someone are driven by a need for possession that extends beyond death. See, the victim isn't fully theirs until they take something permanent, something that can never be given back. Jeffrey Dahmer kept skulls, Ed Geen took it further. The psychology, though, is the same across all of them, an obsessive need to dominate and to hold on to something after they are gone. The killer has become the owner of the victim by taking their life and then taking a piece of them with them. Neither Bobby or Ali's heads have ever been found, nor ever took them likely kept them somewhere that has just never been discovered. Then the other strange angle on this case was the instant silence. Now after October of '79 the murders just stopped, or at least the ones that fit this pattern stopped appearing in Houston, and did the killer move, did they die, did they get arrested for something else, or did they simply get better at not being found? Because here's the truth about organized killers and everything about this case points to someone organized. Now they don't stop because they want to, and they stop because something external forces them to. A change in circumstance, a close call perhaps, or a move to another city. Without a suspect, though, we have no way of knowing what the answer is. Since '79 forensic science has changed in major ways no one could have seen coming back then, in tiny vacuums that can find DNA where conventional swabbing never could, the next generation sequencing can build a profile from degraded samples that older methods simply couldn't. Authorum labs, which was founded in 2018 and specializes in forensic genetic genealogy and advanced DNA sequencing, specifically for cold cases, is based just outside of Houston, and when everything was tested recently, well this is what they found, nothing. Because even with everything science has to offer in 2026, it's just not enough in this case. The DNA is either degraded beyond recovery in the decades it sat in their boxes, or was never left behind in a way that was enough to pull from. Either way, the lab came up empty. That doesn't mean this case is finished. In 2025, ABC13 Houston got exclusive access to the evidence room and walked through what had been collected and what had been preserved and what hadn't been tested yet with the most current methods available. So the evidence is still there, and the technology keeps advancing, so hopefully one day it'll get a hit. The Houston itself kept growing after 1979. The oil boom eventually busted out, but the city certainly didn't. It sprawled outward and upward and the gulfed in neighborhood changed and the orchard apartments changed with it. And the young people who had poured in chasing opportunity grew older and moved on. And the person or person who moved through that world in those three months either did the same or didn't make it out in 1979 themselves, nobody knows. This killer didn't rely on luck, and they had a certain amount of intelligence and a thirst for extreme violence, and that will never change no matter how much the landscape does. So, trust your gut out there, and remember that if something feels wrong, even when everything looks fine, pay attention to that feeling and don't ever ignore it. So, that's going to do it for today's episode of Every Town. Hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, well, we have all the true crime you could ever need. So, have a look around at our collection of macabre cases, and remember to come back next week for another scary, strange, and mysterious story, because you never know, maybe your town will be next.