(ominous music)
- I couldn't find Krystal
and I knew there was something wrong.
You don't expect your child to be murdered.
It was such a nightmare.
- She just disappeared.
Then her body was found under the Trinity River Bridge.
(dramatic music)
- I can still see her just like it was yesterday.
I still see it here.
(camera shutter clicking)
- We just kept having girls coming up missing
(ominous music)
and their bodies being dumped along the bayous, the swamps.
We've got a monster somewhere.
- It's disturbing that you've got somebody out there
that's hunting young girls.
- We're gonna go find the man that killed my daughter
and he's gonna have to pay for what he did.
(tense music)
(twangy suspenseful music)
(soft ominous music)
- Thank you.
That's genuine Chambers County alligator
that I actually shot myself.
I moved down here in 1976.
This is home now.
Down here you've got a lot of bayous.
You got a lot of marshland.
At Chambers County,
I think we actually have more water than we do land.
(soft ominous music)
- Being on the Texas Gulf Coast,
it's very green, it's very lush.
It's a lot of fishing, a lot of crabbing.
It's a big place for birders.
(birds squawking) (tense music)
- I see the beauty of the swamps,
but also I'm aware of the beast.
I see the other side of it as a dangerous place,
alive with death.
(tense music continues)
(insects chirping)
(twangy suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] The sun is starting to set
on the wetlands of Chambers County.
The sheriff's office receives a call
about a body found along the marshy banks
of the Trinity River.
- It was almost time to go home.
It was 4:30, 4:45.
(dispatcher chattering)
I left and went to the scene.
When I arrived, the victim is about 150 yards, at that time,
down to the bank of the river.
We had a young white female.
Her dress was pulled up, so I'm thinking sexual assault,
and I can clearly see it's a homicide.
She didn't have any kind of identifying information.
I could tell that she had been strangled with something
just because of the abrasions on the throat.
I can still see her just like she was laying,
just like it was yesterday.
I still see it here.
To be as young as she was and then dumped,
in my mind, there's no excuse for that.
(dramatic music)
- [Narrator] 40 miles across the bay
in the Gulf Coast town of Texas City,
the family of 13-year-old Krystal Jean Baker is on edge.
Earlier that day, Krystal left the house
while under her grandmother's care.
- She wanted to go be with her friends,
but her grandma said no,
and of course she got in an argument with her.
She walked down the street and she called me
and I was at work.
- [Narrator] Krystal tells her mother
that she's calling from the corner store.
- I was a little angry at Krystal when I talked to her
and I told her, I said, "Krystal," I said,
"You need to go back to your grandma's."
But about an hour later,
my mom calls me and tells me she didn't show up.
(dramatic music)
I was trying to get in touch with everybody,
and I kept calling up her friends.
There was no sign of Krystal
and I knew there was something wrong,
that she would be here right now if something wasn't wrong.
(crickets chirping)
- [Narrator] Krystal's mom, Jeanie,
contacts her local police department in Texas City.
- When we first got the call with Krystal Baker,
we assumed that she had run away.
Krystal was 13 years old.
She rebelled against her grandmother.
It seemed she had just gone somewhere and didn't call home.
And back then we didn't really address runaways
the way you would do today.
99.9% of the time the child returns home.
In the Texas City Police Department, they made a report.
They gave out a BOLO to the patrol officers
to be on the lookout for Krystal Baker.
- They just kept telling me, "Oh, well, she's a runaway."
And I kept telling 'em, "No, she's not."
- Historically along the Gulf Coast,
there had been a real problem with the police assuming
that someone who had gone missing had run away.
Working on this book about Krystal's case,
I spent a lotta time with Jeanie.
Jeanie knew that Krystal had not run away
and she was really scared.
- I really felt like something bad happened to her.
(soft ominous music)
I just had this feeling in my stomach and in my heart
'cause me and Krystal had such a good connection.
(ominous music)
(bright twangy music)
- [Narrator] Like many residents of the Texas bayou region,
Krystal and her mother have spent much of their time
enjoying the water.
- Texas City Dike is like a beach
and then there's a little bayou,
where you go fishing, and you go with your family,
and go out and have a good day.
We'd swim in the ocean and sometimes Krystal would go
a little farther than I wanted her to,
and I had to tell her, "Come on in," you know?
And I liked the spunk in her.
Good spirit. A beautiful smile.
She was just a natural beauty.
- [Narrator] The striking teen bears a resemblance
to an iconic star, who some believe is her great aunt.
- We found out through my husband's side
that Krystal was related to Marilyn Monroe.
I think she does look a little bit like Marilyn Monroe.
- The connection to Marilyn Monroe
is kind of a family legend.
Nobody knows if it's true or not,
but some of the pictures of Krystal,
she's this very vulnerable,
very beautiful young girl breaking out into the world
and it reminded me a little bit
of portraits of Marilyn at that age.
That's what stays with you about these cases.
When Krystal went missing, this was a young girl
just at the very beginning of her life.
- It's heartbreaking to not know where your kid's at.
You want your kid home.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Across the bay,
deputies are investigating
the murder of the Jane Doe
found in the boggy wetlands of Chambers County.
- It was basically my first big homicide.
To say I was overwhelmed would be an understatement.
There's no witnesses.
We're looking around for any kind of evidence.
We picked up a cigarette pack, cold drink bottle,
anything that was in probably about a 50-foot radius.
As I'm looking around the area,
I don't see signs of a scuffle in the dirt.
- I think it was pretty clear that she was killed
somewhere else and then dumped
because the crime scene was just her.
- I don't have anything that tells me who she is,
knowing that there's parents somewhere
wondering where she's at.
That's frustrating.
(tense music)
After we found the victim,
we tried to reach out to other agencies in the area
asking if anyone had any missing persons.
This was 1996.
We did not have the computer system
to network like we do now.
(birds chirping)
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Finally, two weeks after
the dead Jane Doe was found,
Investigator Moon gets a call
from the Texas City Police about a missing girl.
- They had the missing
person that was very similar
to what I had described.
Height, weight, and there was a birthmark.
(tense music continues)
So I left and went to Texas City.
I'm thinking in my mind,
we're gonna be able to make a positive identification.
(somber music)
- [Narrator] Investigator Moon and the Texas City Police
ask Krystal's mom to view some photos at the station.
- I thought I was gonna go down there
and look at pictures of Krystal, you know,
good pictures, you know,
to put in the newspaper or something.
And then they put down all these graphic pictures
of my daughter, how they found her,
what she looked like, for me to identify her.
(tense music)
And I seen the little freckles she had right here.
I knew it was my daughter.
(tense music continues)
I almost passed out
'cause she didn't even look like herself.
There was so many bruises on her body and even on her face.
It was like, who did this?
This is my baby that's lying in here dead.
(dramatic music)
(twangy music) (chirping bird)
- You know, it felt like I was just in a daydream,
in a nightmare.
I didn't know I was gonna look at pictures
of my daughter dead.
And murdered.
It was heartbreaking.
It was evil.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] With Krystal's death now confirmed,
detectives set out to find the killer
who disposed of her body in the thick marshlands
of Chambers County.
- The suspect had a two week headstart, and it's a swamp.
It's desolate.
We know it's rough terrain if there's a body
dumped out there for us to obtain any sort of evidence.
- In other words, if you wanna dispose of a body,
that's the perfect place to do it.
- We started taking statements and knocking on doors
to see if we could determine what happened to her.
(tense music)
Krystal Baker went to the corner store and used a payphone.
- At some point, she got off the phone and left.
It was right in the middle of the day,
busy street, busy convenience store.
(tense music)
- [Brian] And she just disappeared.
Then her body was found about ten after five
in the afternoon, 46 miles away
under the Trinity River Bridge.
- We needed to know how she got there,
how she met her demise, who it was that brought her there.
(tense music continues)
It was during that time that we spoke with Krystal's family
hoping they could point us to some potential suspects.
- [Narrator] The family shares that Krystal
had been spending time with a local boy
named Randall Robbins.
- She's 13.
And of course, Krystal being a little teenage girl,
it was more like puppy love.
- [Narrator] According to Krystal's mother,
Randall claimed to be 15 years old.
Yet, while digging into his background,
detectives discover that he's actually 19.
(dramatic music)
- That was a major turning point.
We're going, "Wow, we got a 19-year-old with a 13-year-old."
You know, this is unusual.
- [Narrator] Police then uncover
an even more unsettling find.
It turns out Randall has a wife.
- It's a very big red flag
when I find out he was married.
He may have been separated at the time,
but nonetheless, he was married,
and he was substantially older.
- After I found out how old he was,
his real age, I freaked out.
I thought he was a little boy.
He had a baby face.
I assumed that he was telling me the truth
when he even told me he was 15.
And Krystal, she didn't know that he was married.
She didn't know any of that stuff.
- The fact that he was married, it could have been
that the wife discovered his relationship with Krystal
and may have instigated what happened to Krystal.
- At this point, he was the primary suspect.
He was the number one person we were going to look at.
- [Narrator] When questioned,
Randall claims that he struck up a friendship with Krystal
while separated from his wife.
- He told us of his relationship with Krystal.
You know, this is unusual,
but the police didn't get a report of indecency
with a child or anything like that.
He had an alibi for the whole day.
There were documents that were provided
from the business that he was in.
He had dates and times.
Randall Robbins was an immature 19-year-old
having a relationship with a 13-year-old.
We did a solid investigation and cleared him.
(tense music)
(dramatic music)
(tense music)
- [Narrator] As police search for new clues,
the medical examiner releases his findings.
(tense music continues)
- It was ligature strangulation was the cause of death.
She was strangled with something other than the hands,
just because of the abrasions on the throat.
Because of the injuries that did look like
she'd been sexually assaulted,
but they didn't found any kind of traces,
any body fluid on her person.
(tense music continues)
Her dress was sent to the crime lab
as well as the fingernail scrapings and clippings.
The lab told us that there just wasn't enough there
for them to tell you what you needed to know.
- Back in the '90s,
it was a general rule for law enforcement
that you needed at least a dime-size bodily fluid
to get a DNA reading, and a dime-size is a lot,
and you gotta be able to see it.
Nowadays, you're swiping something
and you need to get DNA when you swab it with a Q-tip.
- The clothing and the fingernail scrapings
and clippings were all put into evidence
and secured at our facility.
I was hoping we may eventually have technology
that would help us find something useful
in the evidence that we had.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] Two weeks after her body is discovered,
Krystal's loved ones gather in Texas City to say goodbye.
- I had bought her a dress that covers up her neck,
covers up her hands.
I seen the bruises on her face
and I had to get into my purse, put some makeup,
a little bit of makeup where the bruises were at,
and put a little bitty eyeshadow,
little lipstick that's light.
I wasn't gonna let her go out there
lookin' like they had her.
And I knocked down a whole bunch of flowers
'cause I was so mad about everything.
I was mad, I was heartbroken, and I was devastated.
I kept telling her, "I'm so sorry, baby,
you went through this.
I'm so sorry, Krystal, you went through this.
I'm so sorry."
(somber music)
(tense music)
- [Narrator] As leads dry up, the investigation stalls.
Then the sheriff's office learns of a chilling development
further up the coast.
Another young girl has gone missing in the soggy marshlands
just 30 miles from where Krystal had disappeared.
- [Reporter] Laura Kate Smither told her parents
she was going out for a quick run.
The 12-year-old, who is homeschooled,
was last seen around nine in the morning.
(tense music)
- Laura Kate Smither, like Krystal,
she disappeared on the side of a road.
They were about the same age.
Laura was about six months younger.
- [Narrator] Three weeks after she vanished,
Laura's body is found in a nearby weedy pond.
Like Krystal, she too had been strangled.
(tense music)
- And then three months after Laura's body was found,
Jessica Cain's truck was found on I-45.
Just gone.
She had vanished.
Was a lot of speculation that perhaps the three killings,
Krystal's, Laura's, and Jessica's were all connected.
- It's disturbing that you've got somebody out there
that's hunting young girls.
It just seemed like every time you turned on the news,
some young girl was missing.
It was almost like we were living in the Twilight Zone.
It was just like every day we were thinking,
who's gonna go missing today?
(ominous music)
(somber music)
- We just kept having missing persons come up.
1996, we have Krystal Baker.
And then in 1997 we had Laura Smithers and Jessica Cain.
We've got a monster somewhere.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] With the disappearance of 3 young girls
in the Texas marshlands,
fear hangs heavy in the thick bayou air.
- I just remember everyone being in disbelief,
and in horror, actually,
thinking that it's outta control,
that there's some serial killer out there
who's obviously not gonna stop.
(tense music)
- With these murders happening as the way they did,
I did reach out to other agencies.
Maybe we can pool our information
and come up with a suspect.
- Also, we were in constant contact with the FBI,
and they were the profilers.
They were the persons
that could examine someone's characteristics.
- But after talking with the other agencies,
there's no leads that are developed at that time
to take us any further than what we already were.
- The police eventually concluded that Krystal's murder
was not connected to Jessica Cain's or to Laura Smithers'.
They had a DNA profile.
It was a man named William Lewis Reece,
who was ultimately charged with their murders.
- [Narrator] The investigation into Krystal's death
slows to a crawl like the sluggish waters of a bayou
and the case goes cold.
(ominous music)
(somber fiddle music)
- Everybody kept telling me it's a cold case
and there was no evidence.
(soft ominous music)
- [Narrator] Back in 1996, lab results failed to detect
any foreign DNA on Krystal's body,
but Jeanie holds out hope that one day there will be a clue.
- My child actually fought for her life
in every way with her legs, her arms, everything.
She had bruises all over her.
So I knew that there had to be some evidence on her.
I said, "I need to hire a private investigator."
So I call him, and they went to investigate.
- [Narrator] The PI digs deep into Krystal's file
at the Chambers County Sheriff's office.
He finds nothing.
- An evidence officer, she pulled the case
after the private investigator contacts her.
She pulled the case and she started reading through it,
got interested in it.
- She remembered Krystal being murdered.
She was a high school student.
It stuck with her.
- It was after this that we get what could be
a major break in the case.
(dramatic music)
- I became the sheriff after the sheriff's office
started this case back from what had relatively turned cold
and making that cold case hot again.
It was a major case.
Anytime you have a 13-year-old body that is disposed of
like it was, it's really never put away.
It's usually kind of waiting for that tip.
In 2009, our state police lab,
the Department of Public Safety Laboratory,
was making great strides
with some of the new technology from DNA.
In this particular case,
'cause it was a cold case for a long time,
they were able to get that evidence resubmitted
and reanalyzed, the dress and some fingernail scrapings.
(tense music)
- This time when the sample was tested, they got a profile.
(tense music continues)
And it was loaded into CODIS, the national database.
- In September of 2010, we got the call
we had been waiting for all those years.
(phone ringing)
- Brad is the one that called me and told me, you know,
"You're not gonna believe this."
(dramatic music)
We had a hit on Krystal's killer.
(dramatic music)
(tense music)
- When we got the CODIS hit, it was a huge moment.
Everybody was ecstatic that we now had a suspect
for Krystal Baker's murder.
So we finally get a name,
and then we start trying to track him down.
(tense music)
- The sheriff's office sent me a picture of him
and they said his name is Kevin Edison Smith.
In 2010, Kevin Smith got arrested in Louisiana.
- [Narrator] Smith was arrested on a drug charge
in Pointe Coupee Parish,
located in Louisiana's bayou country,
300 miles from Texas City.
- He subsequently had his DNA taken
and put in the CODIS database,
which subsequently wound up matching up
with our suspect information.
- In Texas, we were only taking DNA samples
from people who had been convicted
of certain sex offenses,
but in the state of Louisiana at that time,
they would take your DNA upon arrest even for misdemeanors.
The fact that we had his genetic profile
in the system, it's huge.
I mean, it's a big deal.
Once we got a hit on Kevin Smith,
they started doing some background on him.
Kevin Smith was under the radar.
No criminal record except for the drug charge.
(tense music)
- [Brad] I come to find out he's from the Texas City area.
He's worked all up and down the Interstate-10 corridor.
- In 1996, he was working as a contractor at the time
at one of the refineries
very close to where Krystal Baker's body was discovered.
- [Narrator] Detectives discover that Kevin Smith
is back in Texas and working in Port Arthur,
an industrial coastal town near the Louisiana state line.
(dramatic music)
- In September of 2010, we traveled to Port Arthur
and with the assistance of Port Arthur PD,
made contact with the suspect.
The day we arrested him,
I was actually able to put my handcuffs on him,
(dramatic music)
which is something I'd been waiting for all those years.
When our suspect was arrested, he maintained his innocence.
- Said he didn't know what we were talking about.
Very quiet, very unassuming.
And then they took his DNA.
- Myself and one of the rangers were in there with him.
We explained to him, you know, being nice.
You know, "We've got a court order
to get your buccal swabs."
- I pretty much held him down
while the ranger swabbed his cheeks.
(tense music)
- We got his DNA.
- [Investigator Moon] Let's go.
- [Narrator] Later that week,
lab results for the DNA sample come back.
- Sure enough, it's confirmed. He is our man.
(dramatic music)
(soft tense music)
Around the time we rode to Jeanie's house, Krystal's mom,
We were able to tell her that we'd found
the person responsible for her daughter's death.
It got very emotional for everybody.
- They showed me a picture of him.
I have already lived through 14, 15,
almost 15 years of not knowing who it was.
And then all of a sudden I have a face
to who murdered my daughter.
I've never seen him.
I don't understand why he did this to my daughter.
Thank God the detectives went and made sure
that the cold case got looked at.
It was a miracle that we caught this guy.
It was just remarkable.
- Kevin Smith was charged with capital murder
because he committed a murder during
or in the commission of an aggravated sexual assault.
It would be a death penalty case.
(cell door slams)
- [Narrator] As prosecutors prepare for trial,
they receive a surprising request.
- I was told, "Kevin Smith wants to talk to you
if you'll take the death penalty off the table."
And of course I think my first reaction was, "Oh (bleep)."
You know, I mean, this was a big deal.
We still don't know what really happened
on the day that Krystal was abducted.
Maybe I can get some answers.
I thought, hell yeah, I'll go talk to him.
I wanted the son of bitch to confess.
(dramatic music)
(twangy blues music)
- Kevin Smith wanted to confess
if I took the death penalty off the table.
I knew that a confession would help.
We would use it in trial, and I wanted to talk to him.
I wanted to hear what he had to say.
(soft tense music)
(ominous music)
- Kevin, myself, one of the rangers,
and prosecutor were all in the room,
and Cheryl did the majority of the talking.
She was asking the questions.
- Kevin said that he wanted to be very clear
that he was not the same man today that he was back in 1996,
that he was a Christian man, and that he was a good person.
If you get into their faces and you start berating them,
they're not gonna tell you anything.
So I sat there and listened to him and agreed with him,
trying to be his friend and being nice and sympathetic.
And then we talked about Krystal.
- Somehow he got her in his truck.
He said that she asked him for a ride.
Her family says there's no way in hell
she would have done that.
I guess at some point he wants to have sex.
- He says that he used his hands,
then that goes more in line to it being an accident.
You know, like, "Oh, I just, I freaked out
'cause she was freaking out,
so I just choked her and before I knew it, she was dead."
Which I knew all of that was (bleep)
because you don't accidentally
strangle somebody for four minutes.
- But it's so funny how he quickly remembered
when I told him that he did not strangle her with his hands.
Then all of a sudden he just starts telling it,
just like it was yesterday.
- When they get to the part where they're like,
"Oh, wait a minute, I'm supposed to be upset right now,"
then the tears will come.
(tense music)
- He knows what he's doing.
He knew what he was doing.
- When Kevin started crying, I didn't pity him.
I felt like he was crying
because he knew he had been caught
and his goose was cooked, so to speak.
- That man wasn't sorry for nothin'.
He went on about his life.
He had no concerns about what he did to Krystal.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] With the suspect's damning statements,
prosecutors are confident as they head to trial.
- We have the DNA, we had his confession,
which was everything.
But there's never a slam dunk.
I don't care what anybody says.
You don't know what he's gonna do with his defense,
and you never know what 12 people on a jury are gonna do.
You never know.
(dramatic music)
- I mean, if he was such a changed man,
why didn't he confess one year, two year,
three year, four year, ten years after he killed her?
(tense music) (insects chirping)
- [Narrator] With spectators packing the benches
of the small county courtroom,
Kevin Smith's recorded statements are presented
during his trial.
- He confessed that he had hurt Krystal.
He confessed that he strangled her.
To hear the details, it was such a nightmare.
It was devastating.
- A jury hearing a confession from a defendant
is very impactful because a lotta times
defendants don't testify.
Kevin Smith didn't testify.
He basically put on no defense.
(tense music)
- [Narrator] The jury reaches a verdict within 30 minutes.
- They find Kevin Smith guilty of capital murder,
which carries an automatic life sentence.
He won't ever get out.
I was just glad that it was over,
glad that we got the result that we wanted,
that Krystal deserved.
- It felt really good to hear Kevin convicted
of the murder of Krystal Baker.
It was long overdue.
- How could you do that to my baby?
How could you do that?
I can't understand that.
He's I think evil is too good of a word.
- He's a monster. We put a monster away.
- I probably have a little more peace
knowing that that man is never gonna get out.
Thank God his DNA ended up in the system.
- If Louisiana hadn't had a law mandating the testing
of DNA for all felons, Kevin Edison Smith
would never have been found.
- [Narrator] Following the trial,
Krystal's mother continues her fight for justice
by pushing for a similar DNA law in Texas.
- He took everything from me when he took my daughter.
And he took everything from her that day.
I don't want any other parent
to go through what I went through.
- The Krystal Baker Law in Texas passed in 2019.
We got 24 felonies that you could be tested for
once you get arrested.
Even in the short time that that has been the law in Texas,
we have solved over 250 cold cases.
- And now we just recently were able to pass
some additional legislation to now collect the DNA
off, off of all felony arrests.
- [Narrator] Krystal's mother is pushing
to expand the law to cover even misdemeanor arrests.
- Krystal Baker's Law has already helped a lot,
but this would even help more.
We need to get these criminals off the streets.
So if we could get their DNA like a fingerprints,
maybe they might think twice about what they do.
- Krystal is being remembered
and will forever be remembered
as changing the law in the State of Texas.
That's a big deal.
(dramatic music)
- [Jeanine] This is a bench that we dedicated to Krystal.
I come out here to bring my great-grandkids and my grandson,
bring the kids out here to play.
Coming out here, I really feel close to her.
I try my very best to think
about the good things of Krystal,
laughing and having fun and enjoying her life.
She was a joy to be around.
I have dreams of her still.
I dream mostly of her being a little girl
and I'd like to remember all the fun things we did together,
and remember all the love I had for her.
(tense guitar music)