Sargassum seaweed blob headed toward Florida, the Caribbean ...

Beachgoers in Florida and the Caribbean could be greeted by heavy blankets of smelly seaweed in the weeks ahead as a 5,000-mile swath of sargassum drifts westward and piles onto white sandy beaches.

Sargassum, a naturally occurring type of macroalgae, has grown at an alarming rate this winter. The belt stretches across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to Florida and the Yucatan Peninsula and is as much as 200 to 300 miles wide.

"This year could be the biggest year yet," even bigger than previous growths, said Brian Lapointe, an algae specialist and research professor at Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute.

The belt is already beginning to wash up in the Florida Keys and Barbados and elsewhere in the region, but researchers don't know where the bulk of it could wind up.

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The monstrous seaweed bloom is just one more example of a growing global invasion of macro and microscopic algal blooms thriving on an increasing supply of nutrients such as nitrogen in freshwater and marine ecosystems.

What is causing the algal blooms?

In addition to the unsightly piles of sargassum along the coast, some species produce toxins that affect the food chain or deplete the oxygen in the water when they start to decay, causing fish kills and the die-off of other marine species.

Here's what to know:

Cause: The algal blooms are linked to human activities, such as lawn fertilizers, wastewater and agricultural runoff, that increasingly send pollutants into rivers, lakes and oceans.

The algal blooms are linked to human activities, such as lawn fertilizers, wastewater and agricultural runoff, that increasingly send pollutants into rivers, lakes and oceans. Key quote: "These nutrients are the common thread that ties all the algal blooms together," whether it's sargassum, red tide, or blue green algae, Lapointe said. It's also linked to the "brown tide" bloom in Florida's Indian River Lagoon that has been blamed for killing thousands of acres of seagrass, leading to the starving deaths of hundreds of manatees.

"These nutrients are the common thread that ties all the algal blooms together," whether it's sargassum, red tide, or blue green algae, Lapointe said. It's also linked to the "brown tide" bloom in Florida's Indian River Lagoon that has been blamed for killing thousands of acres of seagrass, leading to the starving deaths of hundreds of manatees. Looking ahead: Such algal blooms are expected to occur more often and cover larger areas of the globe, potentially harming other aquatic ecosystems, fisheries and coastal resources, reported a group of international researchers in a coastal phytoplankton study published this month in the journal Nature.

Not all algal blooms are bad. Many can occur naturally and can have positive effects.

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Isn't sargassum naturally occurring?

Yes. Christopher Columbus wrote about floating mats of it in the Atlantic Ocean.

"It's not a bad thing to have the sargassum in the ocean," said Brian Barnes, an assistant research professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Sea turtle hatchlings swim from Florida beaches to the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic, where they spend their early lives floating and foraging in the grass.

"If it all stays offshore, we wouldn't really have a problem," Barnes said. But the macroalgae has mushroomed in size over the past 12 years or so, which makes it more likely to see large piles of seaweed that make it difficult to walk, sit or play on beaches.

The trend was first documented on satellite in 2011.

In some cases, there's so much seaweed that local governments must use heavy equipment and dump trucks to haul it away, LaPointe said.

He has linked the surge in sargassum to flow from the Mississippi River, extreme flooding in the Amazon basin, and the mouth of the Congo, where upwelling and vertical mixing of the ocean can bring up nutrients that feed the blooms. He said deforestation and burning also may contribute.

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Phytoplankton blooms increasing in size and frequency

Blooms of much smaller algae – a microscopic species known as phytoplankton – increased in size and frequency around the world from 2003 to 2020, the researchers concluded in the Nature study.

"We’ve seen something pretty similar in a lot of the things we study," Barnes said. "We’re seeing such massive blooms now."

The coastal phytoplankton study, by researchers at the Southern University of Science and Technology in China and elsewhere, used images from NASA’s Aqua satellite. They found:

Blooms affected more than 8% of the global ocean area in 2020, a 13.2% increase from 2003.

Bloom frequency increased globally at a rate of nearly 60%.

Europe and North America had the largest bloom areas.

Africa and South America saw the most frequent blooms, more than 6.3 a year.

Australia had the lowest frequency and smallest affected area.

Is climate change affecting algae blooms?

Blooms have been at least indirectly linked to climate change in several ways, but especially to the warming temperatures that bring more extreme rainfall that washes silt and pollutants into waterways.

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The authors of the coastal phytoplankton study, Lapointe and other researchers have found:

A correlation in some regions between changes in sea surface temperatures and ocean circulation.

Warmer temperatures coincided with blooms in high latitude regions such as Alaska and the Baltic Sea.

Climate change can affect ocean circulation and the movement of nutrients that feed phytoplankton blooms.

Global climate events, such as El Nino, also show connections to bloom frequency and movement.

Algal-bloom-favorable seasons in temperate seas have increased with warmer temperatures.

Where will the sargassum pile up this year?

"We can't really say which particular beach at which particular time," Barnes said. The university publishes a regular update on the status of the bloom.

"We can get an idea of when it will be fairly close," he said. "In general, everything flows west. It will come across the Central Atlantic and into the Caribbean, and into the Gulf of Mexico through the straits of Florida."

Winds, currents and even small storms can influence where the sargassum moves.

Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands could get hit hard, Barnes said. But the floating mats also wind up on beaches in Jamaica and all around the coast of Florida.

GONE

Jerry Mitchell

December 30, 2016

My office telephone rang, and a woman asked, “Would you be interested in writing about a serial killer living in Mississippi?”

“Yes, I would,” I replied.

The woman’s name was Mary Rose. She told me her missing daughter, Annette, had been married to a man named Felix Vail, and that Annette wasn’t the only one gone. She knew of two others.

A day after Mother’s Day, May 14, 2012, I met the 64-year-old, bright, short-haired woman and followed her to the property in Montpelier, Mississippi, where she planned to confront Vail.

She told me what she was going to say to him: “You may never go to jail, but I want you to know that I know and a lot of others know that you took the lives of these three women. You haven’t really gotten away with it.”

We parked and walked up to his gate, which was locked. She told me he lived down this path.

I followed her over the gate, and we walked down the path, the tall weeds blocking the light.

When we reached a clearing, we could see two trailers — a silver one gleaming in the sun and a second one 28 feet long and damaged.

I followed her to the silver trailer. She knocked. No one answered.

She checked the door. Locked.

Cupping her hands, she peeked inside and saw no one.

So where is this Felix Vail guy?

I turned around and noticed a patch of woods next to the trailers.

When I looked back, Rose was marching toward the damaged trailer. I hurried to catch up.

She checked the front door. Locked.

Circling the trailer, she noticed the back window was missing. She pulled the plastic off the window and slipped inside.

She opened the front door. Now I could see.

She rummaged through the trailer and began tossing things she found.

A machete clanked on the floor. Another machete clanked beside it. Then another. Then another.

Then a long sword clanked. Then another. Then another.

A chill ran up my spine, and I glanced back at the woods. Could he be watching us?

Felix Vail discovered he could disappear.

The blond boy stepped into the sandbox where he liked to play on the family’s dairy farm in the community of Montpelier a half-hour north of Starkville, Mississippi.

He figured out that, if he stood in the sandbox where a tree blocked his mother’s view, she couldn’t see him.

He would take one step back, then another, then another, slipping farther and farther away.

“She’d come and find me out there in the orchard 100 yards away,” he recalled in a series of recorded conversations he had with undercover private investigator Gina Frenzel. “I’d be fine or climbing one of the trees.”

He drifted off for hours at a time, and later, overnight.

He began testing other boundaries, tasting what he called the “nonsexual” parts of a girl in the neighborhood.

When his mother caught him and scolded him, he slid down the wall, crying. “I just crumbled,” he recalled. “I just wanted to die. It was the only time in my life.”

What upset him most was he couldn’t do it anymore. “It wasn’t a wrong thing until she was told it was wrong,” he said. “Damn ego, my mother. She totally polluted her son with ego and lies.”

At school, he excelled. In fifth grade, he made straight A’s, but five times the teacher noted he was “inclined to mischief.”

He also excelled on the farm. At age 16, he produced 130 bushels of corn in a 5-acre contest, topping every farmer in Clay County.

His father, Ray, gushed to the newspaper, “I thought my patch was good, but he beat me easily. His is the best I’ve ever seen.”

A year later, Vail volunteered for the military, hoping to be a pilot. When he took an aptitude exam, “I scored the highest score,” he recalled.

But the military found him unfit for military service. “They said I was not the kind of person who would follow orders,” he recalled, “and that I would be a disciplinary problem.”

Other signs of trouble arose. After his mother announced the family couldn’t keep their mother cat’s offspring, he scooped up the kittens and shot them, recalled his sister, Kaye Faulkner.

When a charismatic evangelist came to town, he became one of about a dozen teenage boys who responded to an “altar call” at the Montpelier Baptist Church.

He told his family he believed he had been called by God to preach.

On the day he delivered his 10th sermon, he said he felt an “infinitely greater” power, which he compared to sticking his finger in a light socket. “I started getting electrical rushes and thrills and tingles and ... sweat popping out.”

He later wrote that he saw a “being” that day, “shimmering like a moon-sized sun with infinite energy radiating out from it in all directions at once.”

Suddenly, he said he knew the deepest thoughts of parishioners. “I knew who was screwing who.”

He never preached again.

Fateful meeting

By the time Felix Vail received his diploma from Montpelier High School in 1957, he was already working an enviable job at one of several plants surrounding the Cities Service (later known as CITGO) refinery in Sulphur, Louisiana — thanks to his favorite uncle, a supervisor there.

“I’m making lots of money,” he recalled. “I have two cars, a motorcycle and a boat. I’m dating about 20 women.”

Slender and 6 feet tall, he drove his Karmann Ghia convertible to nearby Lake Charles, where he hung out at the country club and strolled across the McNeese State College campus, searching for the prettiest women he could find.

“He told me he was an ordained minister,” recalled Cynthia Miller, a student then. “I asked, ‘Where’s your Bible?’ He said, ‘I don’t have it with me.’ ”

She said he took her to a McNeese football game and afterward asked her for sex. She turned him down.

“Suppose the world ends tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll never know.”

“Well,” she replied, “then I’ll never know.”

Some, however, took him up on his offer. “The majority of women were available to me just for the asking,” he recalled.

Many noticed his light blond hair and piercing blue eyes. “He looked,” one sorority member recalled, “like he had been kissed by heaven.”

Mary Horton noticed him.

She had grown up in the Louisiana swamps, where Cajun food and music overflowed.

She became homecoming queen at Eunice High School, where she graduated and began attending McNeese State College. She was so popular all five sororities invited her to join.

She chose Chi Omega, and her friends marveled at how, no matter what, she seemed to find the good in people.

Her cute figure and perky personality captivated many men, and the football team nominated her for the homecoming court.

“All of us horny men were secretly in love with her,” recalled Vail’s friend, Bob Hodges. “She was a doll, very sweet. I would have lifted that girl up on high.”

By 1960, she began to date Vail, who took her to company shrimp boils, where they stuffed themselves and danced the night away.

“I am so deliciously happy!” she wrote in one of many letters to a childhood friend. “Felix and I have been doing some really unusual things this week and having fun.”

Driving around in his blue Lincoln with a white hardtop, the couple visited an African-American church, played 45s at his relatives, dined at A&W Root Beer and sipped from the same glass of lemonade.

But their relationship was not all bliss.

On June 20, 1960, Mary confided, “I really do love Felix, but I don’t think that I like him anymore. He really is sweet, but we don’t see eye to eye on things.”

She talked of being miserable with Vail and asked her friend to set her up on a date with someone else, hoping Vail would leave her.

“I never could break up with anyone,” she wrote. “I always keep hoping when there is no hope.”

In response to that date, Vail came to her, sharing that he was suffering from a disease.

“What disease?”

“Mary.”

She welcomed his words. “He did all the talking, and I just listened. I really had nothing to say — I mean, about us,” she wrote. “He said he’s changed. I have to.”

The couple dated again, and she continued to see others.

She joined classmate Kelley McFarland at a house party, and McFarland later heard Vail was so angry he wanted to kill him.

McFarland said he tracked down Vail at a bar on Cities Service Highway and approached Vail, who responded, “I’d rather not talk about it here.”

The two men met in the dark woods. Although McFarland sensed Vail’s anger, he and Vail exchanged no blows and went their separate ways.

After this, Mary described herself as “miserable,” writing that “Kelley and Felix (were) threatening to kill one another.”

Vail remained jealous, she wrote. “Felix says that he doesn’t even want me to walk around the block with another boy now, and I know just what kind of miserable feelings he’s going through. It’s just tearing me up, and I can’t do anything.”

She reiterated her love for Vail in letters. “He’s going to move to Lake Charles next week, so he’ll be closer now.

One night at a pool party, Vail “walked up to Mary and just slapped the heck out of her,” recalled her former boyfriend from high school, Leonard Matt.

He wanted to retaliate, but others held him back.

Before fall ended, Vail told Mary he wouldn’t give her a Christmas gift because he didn’t believe in giving at designated times.

She planned to buy him something anyway, “even if it’s a lollipop,” she wrote her friend. “This is one thing I love, and it won’t change for me.”

When her friends questioned his refusal to give, she defended him, calling him a “wonderful person.”

In an Oct. 12, 1960, letter, Mary confided, “I say things that I don’t mean when I’m angry — like at Mom and Felix, for example, and I usually say the ugliest things to the ones that I love most because they are capable of hurting me the most. You always hurt the ones you love, the ones you shouldn’t hurt at all.”

Sadness and fear

Felix Vail and Mary Horton married on a sunny day, July 1, 1961, in Eunice, Louisiana. When he slipped on her wedding ring, she nudged him, reminding him to say the marriage vow. As they headed for their honeymoon in Orange, Texas, rain pelted their gray convertible, drenching them before they could get the top back up.

That fall, she dyed her hair brown, back to her original color, and began her job as a second-grade teacher at Moss Bluff Elementary School.

Fellow teacher Myrtis Quinilty gave her a ride each day. She said they decided to join a local gym together because “Felix did not want her to lose her figure.”

When December came, Mary worried she might be pregnant, and Quinilty said Vail didn’t want a child.

A fellow teacher drove Mary to the doctor, where she learned the news. “We had been so careful and still I got pregnant,” Mary wrote.

For a week in February 1962, the couple celebrated a “real honeymoon” in Acapulco, Mexico, where they rode in a boat, soaked in the sun, ate lobster and listened as a band serenaded them.

Back home, Mary dyed her hair blond. Vail worked the late-night shift and often stayed gone. When he returned, he talked about playing golf and bowling in leagues.

Mary wrote in a May 3, 1962, letter, “Felix hasn’t been acting so sweet earlier, but I haven’t helped. I never stand up for him or say anything nice to him.”

Her sister-in-law, Sue Jordan, told her the only reason Vail believed Mary wanted to get married was to have a baby — not because of him.

After Mary heard this, she wrote her friend, “I can see, looking back, from many things I said how they could have been misunderstood.”

She insisted “we are very happy now,” but her sadness seeped through, writing how unattractive she felt being pregnant.

She switched her hair color to baby blonde. A month later, she tried silver blonde.

On the couple’s first anniversary, they greeted their baby, Bill, whom she adored and sang to.

Within a month, she suspected she might be pregnant again.

“My stomach has begun to get larger, and I don’t eat much,” she wrote. “It kind of excites me in a way.”

She talked of expanding her skirt. “Wonder if it’s not a tumor or something else. It hurts when you press my stomach on the right.”

Inside the Maree Apartments, where they lived in Lake Charles, strange things happened. One morning, the couple awoke to find their front door had been removed from its hinges.

Another time, they found the front door on their apartment wide open. Nothing was missing.

Mary began receiving threatening calls.

“She was afraid,” Quinilty recalled. “Mary told me, ‘Felix and I decided it must be somebody watching because he only calls when he’s not here.’ ”

Despite her fear of drowning and of anything that crawled, Vail took her by boat into a wildlife reserve, where she saw an alligator sunning itself before slithering into the water.

When they spotted snakes curled up on the muddy bank, Vail blasted them with his shotgun. Dirt rained down.

He gunned the 40-horsepower motor, taking her way out into the Gulf of Mexico “until we couldn’t see the camps anymore,” she wrote, “and the water was so rough that I was a little scared.”

She heard “a funny creaking noise, and I just knew that the boat had sprung a leak because we had hit the waves so hard like at Acapulco.”

Vail bailed water, and they made it home.

She confessed to several Chi Omega sisters that her husband had done “something awful” in Mississippi. She wouldn’t say what.

She spoke with her mother about divorcing him, recalled her brother, Will Horton. Their mother, Lillie Mae Horton, a devout Catholic, urged her daughter to stay and work things out.

Death and disappearance

Darkness had long enveloped Shell Beach on Oct. 28, 1962, when Vail drove up in his boat at 7:30 p.m., saying his wife, Mary, had accidentally fallen into the Calcasieu River while they were laying trotlines.

After two days of searching, authorities recovered her body near the spot where he had told authorities she disappeared.

Her funeral followed the next day, Halloween.

Her former roommate Cynthia Miller, attended with her husband, wearing a black maternity dress.

When she walked up to Vail to share her condolences, he replied, “I’m sorry y’all couldn’t come to our party.”

“What party?”

“We called y’all, but y’all weren’t home.”

The words stunned her because “I never got a call from him,” she recalled. “My husband didn’t like him at all.”

The more she pondered, the more puzzled she grew. “What is he talking about a party at a funeral? Mary is dead.”

Four days after the funeral, deputies arrested Vail at work, hauling him to jail and questioning him. He refused to take a lie detector test.

The coroner ruled the death an “accidental drowning,” and Vail walked free from jail days later.

Months later, he picked up his son, Bill, from the Louisiana home of his late wife’s aunt and headed for Mississippi.

Felix Vail traded the Mississippi hills for the San Diego cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean. His brother, Ronnie, was stationed there in the Navy, doing four tours in Vietnam, where he earned three bronze stars.

Vail left his son, Bill, behind with his mother and father, who continued to operate the family’s dairy farm in Montpelier.

In 1965, Mercy Hospital employed him as a technician, and he began working for Dr. Ivan Baronofsky, an open-heart surgery pioneer who had been chief of surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

Fellow surgeon Dr. Elliot Senderoff recalled Baronofsky’s experimentations, including a wild one that failed to curb angina with X-rays. “He was always having ideas about ways to do things.”

Vail oversaw a kennel of 40 dogs for the heart research and helped operate a heart-lung machine. At night, he took college courses in English and speed-reading, working toward a college degree.

“I have to go to bed,” he wrote his mother, Nell Rose, in a March 9, 1965, letter. “It is 10 p.m., and we have surgery tomorrow at 7:15 a.m. I will have help with the pump on this one, but after it, I’ll have to operate it alone. I hope the first patient doesn’t die. Quite a few people do in heart surgery, so it is possible.”

He urged her to lie about his whereabouts. “You can tell people about my job, but tell them I am in Alaska.”

Within a few months, he returned to Mississippi and took his son, Bill, back with him. From that point forward, Bill split time between California and Mississippi.

“I kept changing my accent so as not to attract attention,” Bill said in an interview he recorded months before his 2009 death from cancer.

When “love-ins” began at the park, Vail visited them, watching people listen to music, roll around in the grass and smoke marijuana.

After an affair with a married nurse, he traded his medical work for life as a hippie, hitchhiking, bicycling and exploring. For months, Bill lived on a farm run by a religious cult called the Holy Order of MANS.

He said his father made him try marijuana and LSD as a child. “He thought it would enlighten my mind. I didn’t like it.”

As for companions, “my father went through more girlfriends than I could count.”

One of them was Robin Sinclair. She met Felix Vail at a San Diego bus stop in 1967.

The 17-year-old slender brunette was spending the summer with her sister when he approached her.

“He was into the metaphysical, getting in touch with the subconscious,” she recalled. “He was a different person than I had ever met before.”

They began dating. When summer break ended, she returned to the San Francisco Bay area without him.

In October 1968, while listening to Iron Butterfly and other bands play at a concert, Vail appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. She saw it as a sign they belonged together.

“He was always on a very even keel, like he was a little detached and studying everybody,” she said. “He was the observer.”

Vail had his young son with him, and they bounced from place to place.

Bill “was neglected,” Robin recalled, “and Felix let him smoke pot. Bill would just run wild. He would make some friends with people at a hamburger stand, and they fed him.”

At the time, she said, “I was young and naive and concerned with my next joint. I didn’t worry about any of that.”

After being evicted for failing to pay rent, they watched another couple’s home over the Christmas holidays, she said.

Before the pair returned, she learned she was pregnant, sharing the news with Vail. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t think you’re emotionally stable enough to handle the pregnancy.’ ”

When morning came, Vail had vanished with his son, she recalled.

“A friend told me that he went back to Mississippi, that it was time for his son to go to school and that he didn’t want to be with me.”

Heartbroken, she moved back in with her parents. “There was no place to go, and I was sick, sick, sick.”

In August 1969, she gave birth to her daughter, Simone, and penned Vail an angry letter.

Two months later, he showed up, and she told him, “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you again.”

Vail and Sharon Hensley meet

Felix Vail spent time in a second-story apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco.

One night, a neighbor above him knocked on his door, saying they were filming upstairs and had run out of electrical plugs. Could they plug their extension cord into one of his outlets?

Vail agreed, and the neighbor invited him to watch them make their porn film. He stepped upstairs, glimpsing the writhing bodies.

One day while housesitting at a high-rise apartment, he stripped and stepped out onto the balcony, soaking up the sun. Some time later, he looked up to see a brunette joining him.

She was 20 with long, dark hair. Her name was Sharon Hensley, so attractive that she had modeled while growing up in North Dakota.

They became friends and then more than friends, despite him being a decade older.

Vail handed her a copy of “The Grape Cure,” the 1928 book in which author Johanna Brandt claimed a combination of fasting and eating grapes had cured her of stomach cancer.

Despite physicians condemning the diet as “quackery,” Vail and Hensley became believers, filling a bathtub with grapes they collected from vineyards.

They hitchhiked across California, living off the land. Vail’s 8-year-old son, Bill, accompanied them as they slept near vineyards and orchards.

He recalled his father sharing how his mother died. “(He said) he and my mother were out fishing …, that a boat had come by and caused a big wave and knocked my mother out of the boat and she didn’t know how to swim, had on no flotation and immediately sank and drowned. My father said he almost died trying to rescue her.”

Then one summer day, when his father thought he was outside playing, he overheard his father sobbing and speaking to Sharon.

“He told her that he had murdered my mother,” he recalled. “I heard the girlfriend saying, ‘Oh, I know you just must feel responsible for it.’ … He said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I really did kill her.’ ”

Emotions flooded Bill. He wanted to hit his father. Then run. Then cry.

“I was just so angry with my father,” he said. “He was actually a good father in many ways, but still how do I reconcile what I’ve just heard? I couldn’t.”

Shortly after that, the trio hiked to Mexico’s Baja Desert, where they camped and fasted, “which is miserable for an 8-year-old,” he recalled.

He decided to pray. “I really started talking to God, and just said, ‘God, get me home.’ ”

To him, home meant Mississippi, living with his grandparents.

After their desert trip, the trio trekked north until they reached a vineyard near Merced in in central California, where Bill met a 13-year-old migrant worker.

“He was very curious about me living with no shirt and no shoes,” he recalled. “We got to be friends.”

It was Aug. 21, 1970, when Bill began to share the story of his father with his new friend. “The more he heard of my story, he said, ‘Why don’t you just turn him in to the police?’ ”

When Bill heard those words, “It was like ‘ding.’ The light came on,” he recalled. “He told me there was a town about two miles away, and I started walking right then.”

In the town of Livingston, he found the police station, where he told officers he was hungry and tired of using the drugs his father gave him, that he wanted to go back to school and live like other kids, and that he had overheard his father admit to killing his mother.

“At first, they didn’t believe me, just kind of shooed me out, said, ‘Yeah, kid, go away,’ but I was committed,” he said. “I was not going to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

He camped out on the front steps until one detective listened.

At a beach along the Merced River, authorities found his 31-year-old father and 21-year-old Sharon Hensley, carrying a bag filled with LSD capsules.

Their only food? A bag of grapes.

Police charged the couple with LSD possession and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Newspapers across the U.S. printed stories about the arrests, and the National Enquirer published a photograph of the towheaded boy playing with a “lawn toy instead of drugs after being placed in a foster home.”

Vail received a six-month jail sentence, plus three years’ probation, after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of LSD possession.

California authorities shared their information with Louisiana authorities. Once again, the district attorney in Lake Charles passed on prosecuting Vail for murder.

Bill returned to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, who gained full custody.

On Jan. 23, 1971, he saw his father and Sharon Hensley in their driveway.

He stood frozen, wondering where he could run. “I really thought he was going to kill me,” he said. “My grandmother came back out and reassured me that he wasn’t going to hurt me.”

After a while, he and his father sat down and spoke, and his father said he did not blame him for time spent in prison, Bill recalled. “He actually blamed the girlfriend, which was strange ‘cause she had nothing to do with it.”

Vail’s family questioned how he and Sharon could legally be in Mississippi when they were supposed to be serving their time on probation in California. They soon realized they couldn’t.

A day later, the sheriff came. He told Vail’s family he had a cablegram from California, asking him to pick up the couple for questioning.

Vail’s mother told the sheriff she didn’t know where her son was.

Four days later, Vail and his girlfriend, Sharon, hid on a car’s floorboards as his family transported them out of town. At the bus station in Grenada, Mississippi, the family gave the couple enough money to return to the West Coast.

“Don’t know if (it) was the right thing to do,” Vail’s mother wrote the Hensley family. “We definitely feel that they both need psychiatric help. But there seems to be no way that can be arranged. So God help them, and us, is our prayer.”

‘She believed in love’

Sharon Hensley grew up in the state capital of Bismarck, North Dakota, where buffalo once roamed free on the hills. A post-World War II baby born five days before Christmas in 1948, she dated football players and belonged to the high school’s Demonettes, an award-winning dance team founded by a former Rockette.

One summer day, she and her best friend, Connie Woodworth, stepped into the Missouri River and nearly drowned. Another time, when they drove with their boyfriends on a gravel road, Sharon panicked rounding a curve, and the car rolled three times.

Thrown clear, she rushed to check on her friends. When she discovered they were OK, she wept, Woodworth recalled. “She was a person who cared deeply for her friends and family.”

The girls graduated in 1966, and Sharon attended Bismarck Junior College, where she took classes in dancing and acting, performing in a play with her older brother, Frank.

Younger brother Brian adored his sister. Although she was 11 years older than him, when the radio brimmed with Beatles songs in 1964, Sharon and her girlfriends played the records and had him dance with them.

When summer came, he tagged along with them as they sunbathed on the river’s sandbars. “It was heaven for a 6-year-old,” he said.

They picnicked, played volleyball, snapped Polaroids and tossed a new toy called the Frisbee, he recalled. “I just remember sunshine and happiness.”

In 1967, Sharon discovered she was pregnant. Wanting to escape her hometown, she followed her brother Frank and other classmates to San Francisco, where thousands of other young people were already gathering for the “summer of love.”

“She believed in love,” Brian recalled. “She believed in happiness. She believed in flowers and beads.”

After arriving in the Bay area, she stayed in a home for unwed mothers, where she gave birth to a girl she named “Cherry” after the popular Neil Diamond song. She told friends she wanted to keep the child, but was unable to.

Two years after leaving for California, Sharon was in jail and her mother, Peggy, headed there with a $5,000 cashier’s check to bail her out. “I’m going to get Sharon and bring her home,” she announced.

But when she returned, Sharon wasn’t with her.

“She said she had lost her daughter,” Brian recalled. “She cried almost every night.”

Depression overwhelmed his mother. “She was never the same after that.”

In the summer of 1972, Sharon appeared unannounced with Vail at her childhood home in Bismarck. They had been hitchhiking, eating macrobiotic foods, meditating and practicing yoga.

The more the family witnessed, the more horrified they became. Sharon wore a mini-skirt with no panties and had armpit hair and leg hair like a man, Brian recalled. “I thought she was freaking way out.”

She had been losing weight and with it some of the curves that made her a model. She was also losing clumps of hair.

She seemed brainwashed, Brian said. “You could just tell she was not the same person, that this guy was controlling what she was saying.”

If someone asked her a question, “either Felix would answer the question for her, or she would look at Felix while she was giving the answer.”

Brian went one day with Vail to the Elks Club, where his father was a member. “They had a workout room, and Felix gets totally naked.”

Vail tested out the exercise equipment then strolled into the steam room, where “these older gentlemen just freaked out on him because he was hippie looking and walking around naked.”

The men forced Vail to leave. When he objected, insisting he was a guest of Harry Hensley, one man shot back, “The hell you are. I know Harry Hensley better than that.”

Brian said he traveled with the couple to a small grocery store. While Vail distracted the clerk, Sharon stuffed jars of grape juice into a duffle bag. “I could even hear the bottles clanging.”

While the clerk questioned what was going on, Sharon dashed out with the bottles. When the clerk tried to pursue her, Vail stood in the way.

“We got away,” Brian recalled. “The cops didn’t come.”

The couple left North Dakota and traveled to Mississippi, where they stayed with Vail’s family. On the dairy farm, they helped paint the family home.

The couple also sunbathed in the nude, drawing more than a few glares from neighbors.

Peggy Hensley received a telephone call from Sharon, who said she and Vail were heading to New Orleans and then to Miami to make pornographic films.

“What daughter tells her mother she’s going to do a porno?” Brian asked. “I think it was a cry for help. That’s what my mom thought.”

He said his mother wanted to travel south in hopes of getting her daughter back, but his parents were unable to do that.

In early 1973, Sharon telephoned and talked of traveling to South America, where she and Vail would eat natural foods and write a book, Brian recalled.

It was the last conversation any family or friends had with his sister.

Sharon’s last letter contained a picture, which showed her holding a pen and sitting at a table at the home of Vail’s parents. She captioned the Polaroid: “Making travel notes.”

When Brian gazed at the photograph, all he could see was her sorrow, a shell of the sister he loved.

Sharon disappears

In New Orleans, Sharon Hensley worked as a table dancer at a strip club — something Vail said she had done before in San Bernardino, California, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“Guys would give her another $100 to dance on their table, rather than go to the next table,” Vail recalled. “She’d make a $1,000 a night sometimes.”

Vail left with Sharon for Miami, where they lived in a commune and worked at a health food store not far from the Voyager Inn, where the porn movie, “Deep Throat,” had been surreptitiously shot for $25,000. Now on its way to grossing $600 million, the film helped turn Miami into a mecca for porn flicks.

The couple managed to get a telephone number for Len Camp, who had worked on the iconic movie, and Vail recalled a man approaching them.

“He asked if we had ever been in movies and did we realize the camera might love us?” Vail recalled. “He didn’t say porn.”

The couple took him up on the offer, which paid them $500 a day, he said.

When they arrived, there was no script. Instead, they ad-libbed sex scenes, Vail recalled.

Rather than casting Vail in the part of a sexual stud, the director had Vail take on a different role. “You get on the bed, and you start masturbating,” he recalled. “They walk in and look, and you’re surprised.”

For him, it was hardly enjoyable. “So much of it was ridiculous.”

Months passed, and Sharon Hensley’s family never heard from her. Worried, her mother telephoned Vail’s mother.

In March 1974, Sharon’s mother received a letter from Vail, who wrote that he was in west Florida: “I share your concern about Sharon but then she is of age and she should have the right and freedom from you to decide for herself how she wants to live her time on earth.”

He wrote that he last saw Sharon about a year ago in Key West with an Australian couple traveling around the world. All he recalled was the first names of the couple, who were talking with Sharon about “island hopping around South America and the West Indies and they talked of stopping in Hawaii for a while, maybe a couple of years in the Philippines, then India, Egypt and the Mediterranean islands and coasts. I don’t know which of these (if any) they decided on or in what order.”

Brian remembered his mother throwing down the letter, not believing a word.

“Felix didn’t remember the boat’s name, the couple’s last name or much of anything else,” he said, “but, boy, he sure had down their travel itinerary.”

In fall 1975, Vail’s mother wrote the Hensley family about what her son had told her: “He was surprised that you had not heard from Sharon by this time.”

Vail told his mother the names of the couple that Sharon left with were Frank and Sally — different names than he gave a year earlier.

Vail explained that before Sharon left, she burned all of her identification cards, got new IDs and declared that she would become a completely different person.

His mother told her family, “My heart goes out to you. I know how hard (it) would be if Felix had gone like that.”

Vail’s son, Bill, recalled his father taking him aside and mentioning Sharon. “He said she would never bother anyone ever again.”

The words upset Bill, who believed his father had just confessed to another killing. “There was not a soul I could tell about it because I had had my experience in court when I was 8,” he wrote. “No one would believe me. It would be my word against his, and no one would believe a 13-year-old.”

While riding a bus back home to north Mississippi in 1975, Felix Vail spotted a 17-year-old girl seated behind the driver. He scooted beside Sharon Campbell, who was half his age. He told her how fit she looked, saying he needed someone like her to keep him fit.

In a 2014 sworn statement, she said she felt flattered and shared her telephone number. Not long after returning home, he showed up in a yellow Volkswagen bug.

During one conversation, he shared that his first wife had drowned while they were fishing. She felt sorry for him.

He talked of California, the mountains and other places he had visited. His words intrigued her, so different from her cloistered upbringing that she had begun to rebel against.

He wanted her to travel with him, and she told him the only way her parents would let her do that would be if they were married.

On July 24, 1975, they tied the knot and honeymooned in Gulf Shores, Alabama.

The couple never consummated the marriage because he was unable to “obtain an erection,” she told Louisiana prosecutor Hugo Holland.

After their honeymoon, the couple, along with her 1-year-old son, traveled to Clinton, Oklahoma, where Vail said he had a job.

During the day, he left, and she and her son hung out at the hotel, swimming in the pool.

Several weeks later, she went with Vail to visit his relatives in Louisiana. There, she said a niece told her, “You probably need to know that he killed his first wife.”

She said the niece continued, saying, “Yeah, they arrested him. … We all believed that he did it. … He drowned her out of a boat.”

The teenage bride discounted what she was hearing, thinking he would be in prison if he had killed someone.

But as months passed, she concluded he “had no value in the female gender,” she said. “He hated women.”

She later traveled with Vail to his parents’ home in Montpelier.

While there, he “was outdoors doing something around that yellow (Volkswagen) bug,” she said. “I walked out there. I don’t think he knew I was coming out there.”

He opened a compartment, and she said she saw “sinister, surgical looking saws of all shapes and sizes in a neat, neat formation. They were so clean … like you would see in a surgery clinic. I mean, they were that sterile.”

To her, the sight screamed evil. “It scared me. I said, ‘I’m not going anywhere with you.’ ”

She left, annulled the marriage and never looked back.

In 1977, Vail joined a crew for Western Geophysical, a seismograph company with an office in nearby West Point, Mississippi.

They traveled across the U.S., stomping geophones into the ground. The devices helped locate oil and natural gas pockets.

Most of the crew were in their 20s. Vail was the exception. Fit, thin and tan, he wore a pageboy haircut, but his craggy neck gave away that he was approaching 40.

Members of the crew said Vail regarded eating meat as unholy, but believed marijuana and LSD were “God’s creations,” giving insight into the divine.

When the crew discovered Vail missing one day, they retreated to find him hanging from a tree. He was meditating, arms crossing his chest.

Working with the crew that summer, Vail found himself in jail again.

On June 28, sheriff’s deputies arrested him near Bath, New York, less than an hour and a half south of Rochester, on a charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance.

Vail explores ‘enlightenment’

On a bus heading back to Mississippi, Vail ran into a woman named Ella from Holland. “She was rich,” he said. “She had made her money in Transactional Analysis.”

This new approach to psychoanalysis had become a national rage, fueling such bestsellers as “I’m OK, You’re OK” and “Games People Play.”

Ella planned to attend the International Transactional Analysis Association Conference in San Francisco, but in the meantime, “she was going to see America,” Vail recalled.

Heading for New Orleans, she exited the bus instead with Vail and went with him to his childhood home of Montpelier. From there, they rode together on his motorcycle across the country until they arrived at the symposium in August 1977.

“It was one of the most interesting weeks,” Vail recalled.

While there, he listened to speakers about Transactional Analysis, which describes parent, adult and child “ego states” when people interact with each other

Vail recalled a presentation from a group known as the “Frog Pond,” which believed that people could have their lives transformed, just as fairy tales described frogs being transformed into princes or princesses.

During that presentation, the Frog Pond people shared sexual research, Vail said. “Normally, orgasms are only a few seconds. They found a way to sneak into the orgasm and hold the orgasm … (for) several hours.”

After the conference, Vail headed south, reconnecting with an old friend, Brian Biedebach, and a San Diego native named Carolyn, whom he had dated in 1975 in Placerville, California. Their romance had flourished in that old Gold Rush boomtown, but when she returned from work one day, Vail had vanished like the prospectors.

Now reunited, the pair resumed their relationship. They married on Christmas Eve 1977 and rented a modest house in San Bernardino. “He decided he had allergies to everything,” she recalled. “We had to scrub the house from top to bottom and put plastic on things.”

While she worked at her job, he never found one, other than trying to grow marijuana once in the back yard.

She covered all the couple’s expenses, paid to get his teeth fixed and even bought him a Karmann Ghia. “I was paying for so many things, I was starting not to trust him.”

He signed a note to repay her for the car, but she said she “never saw a dime.”

She had long been frugal with her earnings as a teacher, saving $23,000 toward a future home.

When Vail learned of this, he became upset she wouldn’t give him some of it, telling others, “Carolyn doesn’t believe in community property.”

She did pay about $600 (the modern equivalent of nearly $2,400) for him to attend the Erhard Seminars Training (known as est), where trainers promised participants they could break free from their pasts.

When Vail returned home, he kept her up all night, saying he should be an est trainer “because he was so much more enlightened,” she recalled.

He insisted they drive two hours to San Diego to talk with her mother, trying “to alienate me from my mother by convincing me that she never loved me,” she said. “How stupid was that. How stupid was I.”

The marriage disintegrated soon after the couple went on a double date with Biedebach and Alexandra Christiansen. While they drove in a car together, Carolyn said Christiansen glared at Vail in the rearview mirror and asked, “So why did you get married?”

The next day, Vail left with Christiansen.

Carolyn said she soon found out he also had an affair with a neighbor. “I was so furious.”

She telephoned Vail’s mother and detailed what had happened. “Doesn’t this surprise you?” she asked.

“No,” his mother replied.

That response confirmed that he had “a history of behaving this way,” she recalled. “If your parents don’t defend you, there’s something wrong there.”

When he showed up later to collect a few things he left behind, she had friends serve him with divorce papers.

“He was not responsible. He was immoral. But, boy, he knew it all.”

After taking the divorce papers, Vail backed his car all the way across the property until he smashed into her MGB sports car.

About a month later, he telephoned and told her, “I love you.”

Utilizing a phrase popular in est circles, she replied, “I got it.”

She never looked back, moving more than 100 miles away. “He was so mentally deranged I couldn’t get far enough away.”

Annette

In summer 1981, Mary Rose and her teenage daughter, Annette Craver, greeted people at a friend’s yard sale in the Montrose neighborhood in Houston, Texas, not far from Rice University. They had contributed a few items before their move to San Antonio.

They had just returned from a vacation in Mexico, and Annette felt heartsick, still infatuated with a boy named Adolfo, who was unable to join her in America. Two years earlier, her father, a Vietnam veteran, had died in a car crash in Mexico.

While people poked through stacks of clothes and books, Vail pulled up on a motorcycle and spoke with Annette, a singer-songwriter who at 15 was so bright she was starting her senior year at a private school aimed at those entering the medical profession. He was 41 and had done some carpentry work in the area.

“When I saw her, I thought, ‘That’s going to be my new girlfriend,’ ” he recalled.

After moving with her daughter to San Antonio, Rose struggled to find work and relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Annette boarded with an art teacher near her high school and dreamed of becoming a midwife, assisting with three births. Vail began to visit her there.

In April 1982, Rose and her daughter invested in a Tulsa home that had a rental cottage behind it. Rose began renovating both of them.

After graduating from high school, Annette joined her mother in Tulsa. Vail appeared a few days later.

He convinced Annette to leave with him on his motorcycle. They lived off the $500-a-month Social Security check that she received from her father’s death, Rose recalled. “It was over one year before I saw her again.”

That fall, Annette became pregnant and underwent a painful abortion. “Ideally, we should have been ready to have it, go off into the woods and live happily ever after, but as it was neither of us was ready (me mainly),” she wrote. “That sure shot down my ‘I can’t wait to have a baby’ trip.”

The couple rode south of the border, stopping near Cancun at Isla Mujeres, where her old boyfriend lived, Annette wrote in a Dec. 4, 1982, letter to her mother. “The first couple of nights I looked everywhere for him.”

She confessed, “Felix has come close to leaving me a couple of times already because of my fantasy that Adolfo was better than anyone I could ever be with, including him.”

Seven months later, she saw her old flame. “He’s teaching children, doing artwork,” she wrote her mother in a postcard. “He asked about you.”

The couple trekked to Sausalito, California, to see friends.

Jerry Woodall recalled seeing the couple outside. “They were in a sleeping bag at 10 in the morning, about 20 feet away. Felix was on top of her and having sex. Annette was looking at me, grinning and waving.”

His then-wife, Meredith McMackin, recalled the scene as “just embarrassing. We were trying to ignore it.”

She recalled Vail as a “very handsome” and “spiritually enlightened” man who seemed to have it all together.

She noticed, too, “this coldness and controlling aspect to his personality. Annette was so open and alive, but I think he just totally dominated her. He would try to convey that he was this higher form of being. At first, I thought maybe he was evolved, but then I realized it was this arrogant act.”

Later that summer of 1983, police in California arrested Vail for violating probation a dozen years earlier.

Annette telephoned Woodall, who gave her $200.

After Vail walked free from prison, he and Annette decided to marry. Because she was only 17, she needed permission.

She told her mother that she loved Vail, that the couple was already “spiritually married” and that the couple would marry in Mexico if she refused.

Not wanting to lose her daughter completely, Rose said OK.

On Aug. 15, 1983, the couple married in Bakersfield, California.

Four months later, Annette turned 18, making it possible for her to collect more than $98,000 on life insurance policies taken out by her late father. Accompanied by Vail, she withdrew all the money in cash from a San Antonio bank. She bought a Fiat convertible that Vail liked and paid for his dental work.

In a letter to a friend, she described her husband as “a separate entity from his family. I’ve met them all, and we visit but infrequent. And Felix has established his own code of ethics which free him from any obligation.”

One day in April 1984, Rose returned home to find Annette waiting on her doorstep. She spoke of divorcing Vail and enrolling in college.

She talked, too, of Vail’s temper, Rose recalled. “She confessed to me that she had lied to me about Felix breaking his hand by dropping a pot on it. She said the truth was Felix took a swing at her face. She dodged the blow, and he hit the wall.”

A few weeks later, Vail showed up, Rose said. “They fought almost constantly. He left after a few days. He was insanely jealous of her, would go into a rage when she talked of her desire to go out with younger men.”

She and Annette worked on renovating the two homes, enjoying their time together, she recalled. “We started a garden.”

Annette received a letter from Vail, who vowed their time apart would fuel their love. “After we hung up,” he wrote, “I went out to a park and ran and hung and talked with god and smoked some and shot some pool and rode with the top down out through the marsh playing ‘Iron Butterfly’ [“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”] and bathing every inch of your body-spirit being with love.”

He referred to their being apart as “deprivation jail” — “only this time it’s your ego that is our (my) jailer.”

The idea of her cutting away ego’s “feeder roots and creating roots between your spirit and the cosmic ground of loving makes me hot for you,” he wrote her. “My mind is kissing you everywhere.”

Vail returned to her daughter’s life, Rose recalled. “Annette told me, ‘Felix is the wisest person in the world, and I can’t make decisions without him.’ ”

His influence on Annette grew stronger. She compared Vail to God, Rose said.

The reunited couple insisted Rose leave. “They became very angry and adamant about me getting out and deeding the place over to Annette.”

Rose said Annette fell under Vail’s control and became hostile, accusing her of being a thief.

She felt devastated. “I have never felt so low in my life.”

When thoughts of taking her own life swept over her in spring 1984, she said she realized she had to leave to survive, heading to California to stay with family and friends.

Before departing, she deeded the house to Annette for $7,000.

When Rose later spoke to Annette about the two cats she left behind, Yawni and Puff, Annette shared that Vail had killed them, calling them “a bother.”

In a July 24 letter, Rose encouraged her daughter to keep their communication open and continue her education. “I feel afraid that you are allowing all of Felix's attitudes to become yours and hope that you will be able to sort out what is true and what is manufactured through his fear.”

By the time that letter arrived, Annette had already added Vail to the deed. A month later, she deeded him both homes.

As fall neared, the couple told neighbors they were leaving on vacation. When Vail returned to Tulsa in October, he was driving the Fiat alone.

A neighbor, Wende Austin, asked where Annette was. Vail replied that Annette had a lot of money on her when they parted company and that she might see some people she knew in Denver.

Upon learning that Annette had failed to return, Rose telephoned Vail. “He told me that while they were camping, Annette had a sexual dream about being with other men in Mexico, and she wanted to go there,” she recalled. “He claimed that the dream made them both realize that she should have her freedom.”

The next day, she said Vail told her he had put Annette on a bus with $50,000, but gave no further details.

His explanation made no sense to Rose, who wondered how her daughter could have been carrying this much cash since the couple hadn’t planned in advance to split up.

On Oct. 22, 1984, Rose filed a missing person’s report. She told the Tulsa Police Department that each person who talks with Vail “gets a different story about the amount of money that Annette took with her and where she might be. We all believe that he knows where she is or has done something with her.”

Felix Vail answered the door, seeing Detective Dennis Davis and another officer from the Tulsa Police Department. It was Jan. 22, 1985, and Vail had been expecting them.

Weeks earlier, he had dropped off a photograph of Annette at Davis’ request. Two weeks before that, Vail had filed for divorce, citing an inability to find her after a “diligent search.”

He invited the officers in, and they chatted for more than two hours.

Davis said her mother, Mary Rose, mentioned her daughter had received more than $90,000 from her father’s estate.

Vail confirmed that was true, saying the couple had spent much of that money traveling in foreign countries. He said they kept their money in cash because they didn’t trust banks and that he had found about $10,000 in cash when he returned home.

The next day, Vail telephoned a lawyer, who promised to talk with the officers and tell them to “leave me alone,” he wrote in his journal.

By the time Davis returned five days later, Vail had a detailed alibi: The couple left Tulsa between noon and 3 p.m. Sept. 13, 1984, and stayed the night in a hotel in Claremont, Oklahoma. After two nights of camping on the river, Annette awoke and told Vail she had decided to leave him. He took her to the Trailways Bus Station in St. Louis and left before she bought the ticket.

He told the officers she told him she was headed for Denver, where she planned to get a fake ID card and leave for Mexico.

They asked Vail if he would take a lie detector test. He said no.

After the officers left, Vail wrote in his journals about Annette’s mother, Rose. She is “making Davis dance, and he’s trying to make me dance.”

Vail claimed Annette had bought a gun. “I regret some not letting Annette kill her [mother] when she wanted to & Annette is free of her (at least as long as she stays incommunicado).”

He wondered what to do about Rose. “Now how do I get free of her short of giving her the property?” he asks in his journal. “One way (that I don’t know how to do) is prove to Davis she is manipulative old whore who’s [sic] motivation is accusing me (of whatever) is mostly money and very little if any parental concern for Annette.”

He scribbled a letter to Rose. He blamed her for the “bad things” in Annette, saying she had “stymied the love between us to the point where we both decided that she could get more ... from miscellaneous emotionally and sexually hungry men than she was getting from me.”

He wrote that after the couple came back from Costa Rica, Annette “began seeing friends and relatives ... and doing what she called completing her relationships with them for the purpose of getting ready to drop everybody and start over.”

He wrote that she “disappeared herself from you because she realized that you probably would never voluntarily stop re-energizing in her and superimposing on her the same value system you live by that makes her see you and your mother (and herself partially) as zero self image whores for approval in the form of male attention as prerequisite to the periodic and temporary permission to feel good about yourselves.”

Vail explained the two left each other “with no plans to communicate in the future … I have not the slightest idea where she might have gotten to by now. I will tell you that I love the spirit part and very much respect her right to freedom and so I also assure you that even if I did know, I would not tell you.”

His response felt like a cold slap to Rose. She could feel police interest in her daughter’s disappearance growing cold, too. Perhaps they would be less skeptical if she talked to them in person.

She returned to Tulsa in April 1985, letting Vail know she would be in town.

“Dear Mary, I would like to see you to [sic],” he wrote her. “I think it could be more than lovely to be with you some. I look forward to it. Love, Felix.”

When she arrived, she was unable to reach him and grew worried about her daughter. She slipped inside the rental cottage where her daughter had lived. All of Annette’s clothes were gone, and so were nearly all her possessions, including the diary she kept.

Inside a Barbie suitcase, Rose found a photograph of her daughter and several of her identification cards. She also located things that Annette had written, including a Feb. 17, 1984, note that contradicted Vail’s claim that the couple had spent most of her inheritance on their travel to Mexico and Central American countries.

Instead, the note detailed how they used the money to buy the Fiat, pay off all of Vail’s loans, and deposit $36,000 into Louisiana Savings. “As of today, we have $41,600 in cash.”

Rose shared the information with police.

Detective Davis showed up again, “acting like Columbo with two more questions,” Vail wrote in his journal.

He had told Davis before that he and Annette kept their money in cash. Now he acknowledged the couple divided the money into smaller cashier’s checks.

After a while, Davis left. Vail hoped the answers satisfied the detective.

He dreamed about Annette in bed “with this great big ugly fat guy,” he wrote in his journal. “She was feeling dumb and ridiculous for having let him into her and being at the same time as high as she could be … (from) the energy of his desire and attention.”

Vail never heard again from the detective, who closed the missing person’s case.

Rose kept telephoning, hoping to talk with Vail. She tried him at home in Tulsa. She tried him at his parents’ home in Mississippi.

On Sept. 14, 1985, she finally reached him in Tulsa. When she asked about Annette’s missing clothes, he told her he had given all of them to charity.

When Rose asked about Annette’s whereabouts, he refused to say where she was.

She mentioned that she was talking to police. When she pressed for more details about what happened to all the money that Annette inherited, she said Vail shot back, “That’s all you really care about — her money.”

She hung up.

Each day in his journals, Vail wrote about his encounters with women. He hopped from bed to bed, sometimes in the same night.

When the sex was good, he described it as “electric” and “mutually orgasmic.” When he was unable to have sex with a woman, he blamed it on her “fat.”

When problems arose in the relationships, he blamed their egos, never his own.

December came, and temperatures dipped below freezing. Vail watched television, “vibrating on commercials.”

He thought about Annette. He had told Tulsa police she was schizophrenic and suicidal. Now he wrote that everyone he had met 3 or older was “schizo.”

Less than two weeks before Christmas, he stepped out into the snow at 1 a.m. After watching the movie, “The Hotel New Hampshire,” he returned to the icy white, this time in his bare feet. “It’s coming down in bigger flakes now & around 2 inches, it is magic to walk & frolic in it, falling & fallen, clothes on & clothes off.”

Burning bridges

Fed up with the lack of progress in her daughter’s disappearance, Rose returned in 1987 to Tulsa, where she began working at her old job as a manager for the Bakery on Cherry Street.

She spent thousands on private investigators. When they were unable to locate Vail, she decided to look herself.

Tipped off that he was staying at someone’s house, she went there with a friend and found him sitting outside.

“So where did Annette go?” she asked.

“Mexico.”

“Where in Mexico did she go?”

He told her that he and Annette had made a pact they would contact each other after five years.

He never looked up, never stood up and never looked her in the eye.

She walked away, shaking her head in disbelief. She didn’t believe a word.

Vail became fast friends with Tulsa native Scott Porter, an expert in martial arts who held more than one black belt.

Vail believed he was a martial arts expert, too, after practicing flying kicks into a mattress.

Each morning, he and Porter worked out, lifting weights together before hitting a Chinese buffet.

Over lunch, Vail shared that he had never felt bound by society’s rules, Porter recalled. “He dropped his silverware and began eating with his hands like a caveman.”

At nights, the pair played pool, drank beer and sometimes visited strip clubs in Tulsa, where Vail tucked dollar bills into the strippers’ panties. “Tulsa had more churches than gas stations,” Porter said, “but also more strip clubs than anywhere else I’ve lived.”

Back home, Vail listened to the songs of Porter, who still dreamed of a career in music.

The two men reminisced about the women missing from their lives. Vail, at 45, had been married to Annette, just 18, and Porter, at 28, had dated Rose, who was 36.

Porter had driven Rose to California before returning home alone. “My heart was absolutely broken,” he recalled. “She needed to move on, and I didn’t.”

Not long after Annette vanished, Rose telephoned Porter and shared her suspicions that Vail had something to do with her daughter’s disappearance.

Porter began examining each word his friend spoke.

While he discussed his hopes of reuniting with Rose, he noticed Vail never mentioned that possibility with Annette.

One night, Vail seemed more open. “He was crying like a baby,” Porter recalled, “angry it didn’t work out differently.”

Vail explained that Annette “wanted to ‘recreate’ herself and that she didn’t want any contact with any portion of her past life. She wanted to totally break with herself.”

While Vail talked of breaking with the past, Porter was busy searching for his.

He had been adopted and decided to move to Minnesota to reconnect with his birth parents. While there, he met his future wife, Jennie.

Returning to Tulsa with a small son and another on the way, he renewed his friendship with Vail, who was so kind he later watched the boys while the couple went out on dates.

Once, during a discussion of fidelity, Porter said Vail shared that he felt “nobody could ever be faithful to one person.”

Months later, Vail “starts hitting on my wife,” Porter said.

Upset about this, he took Vail on a walk and confronted him.

Vail denied it all, Porter recalled. “He said, ‘No, no, she was hitting on me.’ ”

As they crossed the Arkansas River Bridge, a fleeting thought ran through his head. “I was wanting to throw Felix off and wondering if I’d get away with it.”

Violence and jealousy

Vail began dating Beth Field. She was attracted to his intelligence, and the pair grew close.

Arguments followed, and he kept calling her a “whore.” During a December 1987 argument, he became so violent he ruptured her eardrum, according to court records.

She told Vail there was no justification for physical violence, and she said he replied, “If you quit behaving like a whore, I’ll quit hitting you.”

She recalled discussing the issue with a therapist. “I finally told this woman, ‘It’s all very nice, but one of us is going to be dead before this works.’ ”

Field took the advice of a close friend and attended an intensive 10-day meditation course in August 1988 on Colorado’s Western Slope. To her surprise, Vail came, too.

After the course, she received a telephone call from Rose, sharing details about the disappearance of her daughter, Annette.

From that point forward, Field said she began to examine Vail’s words more closely, realizing “the probability that he had taken Annette’s life.”

He told Field he and Annette had gone camping, that she decided she wanted to get away from her mother and that he had helped her set up an opportunity for her to change her name and move on.

Vail denied any involvement in Annette’s disappearance.

“Then one time,” Field recalled, “he said, ‘What if I said yes?’ ”

Four months after the meditation course, he entered her home unannounced. Already drunk, he accused her of “imagined promiscuity,” according to the court order.

He slapped her, struck her and threw her across the bedroom.

“Will I get out alive?” she asked.

“It depends on what you tell me,” Vail replied.

The judge gave her a protective order, requiring Vail to keep his distance. Two weeks later, the sheriff reported that Vail was nowhere to be found.

Field said she felt caught in a “sick, addictive relationship, and it took quite some time to fully unravel it.”

Over time, her attachment to him began to fade.

While Field was visiting a meditation center in Texas in 1990, Vail arrived and castigated her, and she felt the same anger and defensiveness rising up as before, she said.

She walked away to compose herself, and when she returned, she sat down next to him. “I told him, ‘There is a part of you that goes off, and it’s sick and it’s dangerous.’ ”

She said he looked at her and asked, “Really?”

“Yes, really.”

This time, the message seemed to soak in.

Vail left the next day, and with a single exception about five years later, she did not see him again.

Mary Rose moved to Ashland, Oregon, in 1989, working as an administrator for a private Waldorf School. She was hoping for a quieter life than the one she had in California.

More than a year later, she visited a psychic, asking if she could talk about her daughter Annette.

The psychic put her hands over her forehead and spoke. “Oh, my gosh, this is not something I usually talk about when I see images like this.”

She never shared what she saw, but Rose knew her daughter was dead and that she needed to get to the bottom of this.

In the summer of 1991, she removed the back seats from her Toyota van and put in a makeshift bed for sleeping. She made curtains to hang over the windows.

She had previously talked by telephone with Felix Vail’s sister, Sue Jordan, who now lived in Canyon Lake, Texas.

Now Rose decided to drive the more than 2,000 miles there, hoping she might find out more in person.

Jordan answered the door and invited her in. The two women sat in the living room, and Jordan recalled the last time she saw Annette. In October 1984, the family attended the Cam-Cal Fair in Sulphur, Louisiana, along with Vail and Annette.

“She told me Felix was giving Annette a hard time,” Rose recalled. “He criticized the way she was dressed.”

Days after the fair, the couple left together, and a few days after that, Vail returned alone, “extremely distressed, eating meat and drinking alcohol,” she said Jordan told her.

That struck Rose as strange because Vail was a longtime vegetarian.

Jordan shared that Vail told her that Annette wanted to leave, that he took her to a bus station and that she left with some Mexican men, heading for Mexico.

Jordan also mentioned that Vail’s first wife had drowned. That was news to Rose.

Before she left, she said Jordan remarked, “Oh, you know, there was another woman that disappeared. I remember her mother calling my mother for years, checking to see if they’d heard from her. I think her name was Sharon.”

After the conversation, Rose sat down at a typewriter, pecking out every word she could remember. She also telephoned the public library in Lake Charles.

The librarian remembered the 1962 drowning of Vail’s first wife, Mary. She recalled that he had taken out life insurance policies on his wife prior to her drowning. She also said the insurance companies were suspicious and didn’t pay the full value.

The librarian made copies of those newspaper articles and mailed them to her.

After reading them, Rose reached out to Mary’s family in Louisiana, speaking to Will Horton. He shared his suspicions about Vail and a copy of the 1971 National Enquirer article. When she read it, she learned that Sharon’s last name was Hensley.

That solved one problem, but created another. Where was Sharon Hensley from? She had no idea.

In 1994, she read in the newspaper about Dolores Strehlow’s disappearance from Medford, Oregon, seven years earlier. Police had just arrested her husband, thanks to the work of Detective Terry Newell.

She contacted Newell, who was able to help her find the family of Sharon Hensley.

When Rose dialed the Hensley family, Sharon’s mother, Peggy, answered.

“Do you happen to know who Felix Vail is?” Rose asked.

“You bet I do.”

“We need to talk.”

‘A fraud, bum and kind of a joke’

Now back in Mississippi, Vail lived with his mother and father in their home in Montpelier.

“Beginning lucid in the daily conscious waking dreaming and in the nightly sleep dreaming is the beginning purpose of this journal,” he wrote May 6, 1988. “A 24-hour-a-day lucid conscious spirit presence is my nature. … Starting tonight all the dreams go in this book.”

In one dream, he made his “fat” wife (whom he called “my cow wife”) disappear so he could be with a beautiful, black-haired woman.

During the day, he worked some on the family’s farm. He also tinkered with his Fiat and used his gravity boots to hang upside down in a barn.

One day, he “chased off a poor three-legged hound dog,” he wrote in his journals. The next, he “shot the 3-legged dog and cleaned up the garbage.”

He detailed winning pool games and bedding women, sometimes having sex in a grain bin, an old bus or their homes while their husbands are away. “We are amping each other’s electric in a way we both desperately need right now in our lives,” he wrote Feb. 28, 1992.

In 1992, Robin Sinclair telephoned a Mississippi newspaper, wanting to buy an advertisement to remind Vail that he had a daughter he had never met.

The newspaper put her in touch with Vail, and the two began to write letters and talk on the telephone.

In one note, Vail “stated he had never gotten over me,” she recalled.

She felt confused by his words, she said, because she was already living with a man who made her happy — and who would become her future husband.

When Vail arrived a few months later, she said the same magic she had felt more than two decades earlier had vanished. “I realized that he was a fraud, bum and kind of a joke.”

Pursuit for justice

Mary Rose contacted everyone she could think of, including the FBI.

The detective who had helped her before, Terry Newell, made contact with Jim Bell, a national expert in serial killings working for the FBI.

When Rose talked with Bell, she felt she had hit the jackpot.

He was interested in working on the Vail case if he could swing the time. He remained busy with active serial killer cases, helping train task forces across the U.S.

Vail’s son, Bill, told Rose that he was willing to testify, as long as authorities provided protection to his family.

Both the Tulsa police and the district attorney’s office in Lake Charles revived their investigations into Vail, now considered a suspected serial killer.

Bell suggested the victims’ families gather with authorities at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, to share information on Vail.

He was unable to work on the case and left the FBI in 1995. The meeting in Quantico never materialized, and the cases involving

Vail grew cold again.

Rose felt devastated. She had worked so hard to make something happened and nothing had. She knew the other families felt devastated, too.

She sought counseling to help her cope with the grief.

One night, she listened to a recording of Annette performing her songs, including “Sunset in Winter”: “I’m dying, leaving orange tears, blood upon your face … Throw me gilded kisses, silent sorrow, but do not stay up and wait for me, for I may not return.”

Tears streaked down her cheeks. She knew Annette would never return.

‘Not the man I know’

In the mid-1990s, Vail began dating a woman in Mississippi. At the time, he was 55, and she was 44.

“In 10 years, I never saw a temper,” the woman said.

She recalled Vail taking care of his parents before their deaths. “Felix was very attentive,” she said. “He was just a kind man.”

Although he never worked a job, she said he was the most frugal person she ever met. “He could probably live off $300 a month. He got rental money from the house in Tulsa.”

One day, she tried to step across the swollen creek in front of her house. Knocked off her feet, the current dragged her downstream.

“If I had died in the creek,” she said, “I would have been added to the list of people that Felix supposedly killed.”

She knew of the allegations that Vail had something to do with Annette Vail’s disappearance, but she was unaware of Sharon Hensley’s disappearance or suspicions surrounding Mary Horton Vail’s death.

“That man,” she insisted, “was not the man I know.”

Rose moved to western Massachusetts, hoping to heal.

In the fall of 1997, family members and friends held her hands during a memorial service for Annette, whose songs played.

At night, Rose sometimes stepped outside, gazing at the stars and pondering the past.

She fumed at herself for letting Annette marry Vail, for failing to stand up to him and for leaving Annette behind in Tulsa.

Her anger boiled toward Vail. Why, she wondered, was he not behind bars?

A dozen years later, she read about a local support group for parents whose children had died.

Would she fit in? She didn’t know, but decided to go anyway.

She shared stories about Annette, passing around her pictures and poetry.

Rose’s work with support groups and sessions with a local therapist helped her do something she had been unable to do for a quarter century — release the heavy burden she felt she had been carrying since her daughter’s disappearance.

After a therapy session in which she had sobbed at Annette’s loss, she returned home and listened to one of her daughter’s songs.

Annette strummed a guitar, and her voice rose. Her mother felt the joy of her daughter and her all-too-brief life, finally able to listen to the music without weeping.

Son’s mixed feelings

Vail’s son, Bill, became an Eagle Scout and graduated from Mississippi State University in the top 5 percent of his class.

He became a mechanical engineer, working for corporations such as Sinclair Oil, and remained active in church and Boy Scouts.

In 1984, Bill married his wife, Janet. Years later, he received a call from Rose and then from authorities.

“They asked, ‘Did I believe he may have murdered her (Annette)?’” Bill said. “And I said, ‘Yes, I believe based on past experiences, it was entirely possible.’ ”

He explained his complicated feelings to Rose.

“Felix is a mixture of opposite extremes — he is capable of incredibly unselfish love, and simultaneously he is capable of doing the incredibly selfish and black things he has done,” he wrote. “He values, even demands, honesty and integrity, yet he admittedly will lie whenever it is convenient.”

Vail held mixed feelings toward Bill.

In a letter to his son, he bragged about him holding “center stage with a whole room full of PhDs by simplifying logic sequence problems for them when you were 5.”

But in his journals, he criticized his son’s Christian faith as “herd animal mentality,” saying, “Ego finally took him over.”

In a letter, Vail told Bill that after death, he and his half-sister, Simone, should “split up whatever ‘stuff’ I will have accumulated … I love you both equally with all the heart I have.”

Bill replied in a letter: “I have always loved you. I can’t help but love you.”

But barricades remained to their relationship, the biggest of which was “the murder of my mother,” he wrote.

He mentioned the pain of learning about these two other missing women and recalled what his father had told him about Sharon Hensley.

“I was so angry that you told me because there was absolutely no one I could talk to about it,” he wrote. “I had to keep it to myself knowing that no one would believe you had killed her based on those words, at least not in court.”’

Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Bill heard from doctors that he didn’t have long to live. “Now,” he told his uncle, Will Horton, “I’ll get to be with my mom.”

Months before dying in 2009, Bill talked about his father in a recorded interview with his pastor at Grace Church in Overland Park, Kansas.

“Part of me loves him,” he said. “He was a good father. I know that’s hard to believe given what he’s done. ... I have to keep a distance because of what he’s able to do — for my family’s sake.”

On Jan. 3, 2009, Bill died, and Vail wrote in his journal, “I feel a large empty hole in my being where his life presence has been for 47 years.”

He then wrote about getting a good haircut.

Vail drove to Kansas, but skipped the funeral. If he had attended, he would have heard the recording, his son detailing how he overheard his father talk about killing his mother.

When Vail learned of the recording, he wrote Pastor Tim Howey, asking for a copy: “Bill never mentioned to me in his whole life any of the negative stuff about drugs and murder that had been put in his mind about me.”

Vail blamed his son’s statements on “false memories,” saying, “I have not known about it until now and am stunned.”

As for the accusations of murder, he wrote, “I have saved several people’s lives. I have never taken any.”

On May 14, 2012, I went with Mary Rose as she tried to confront Felix Vail about her missing daughter, Annette. He wasn’t there, but she found a stack of machetes and swords in one of his trailers.

“Could DNA tests be done to see if there is blood on these?” she asked.

I was wondering the same thing.

She handed me a spiritual tome by the Holy Order of MANS. When I opened it, I read the words, “Look not into the past, for it is no more.”

Before we left the area, Vail’s sister, Kaye Faulkner, stopped us. She wanted to talk.

Rose and I sat in her living room as she spoke about attending the 2009 funeral of Bill Vail. “Bill said he overheard Felix saying he killed his mother.”

She turned to me. “You should get a copy of that recording.”

She was convinced, she said, that Felix had killed all three women.

She was surprised he was still alive. Last year, a tornado smacked his trailer, and he had somehow survived, receiving only minor injuries.

I told her I was interested in talking to her brother. She gave me his cellphone number. She also shared the numbers for her other brother, Ronnie, and her sister, Beth.

When Felix Vail didn’t answer, I left him a message that I was interested in speaking with him about these women’s disappearances. Ronnie promised to speak to his brother on my behalf.

Over dinner, Rose opened two manila folders filled with hundreds of pages of documents she had collected on Vail.

There was the judge’s protective order for Beth Field after Vail had beaten her a second time and the National Enquirer article on the 1970 arrests of Felix Vail and Sharon Hensley.

Rose showed me similarities between the two letters Vail wrote — one to her after Annette disappeared and the other after Sharon disappeared.

In each letter, he insisted to the families that the women had gone away because they wanted to disappear, start over and leave their pasts behind.

Was he the one who really wanted to leave his past behind?

Rose shared the 1962 autopsy report on Vail’s wife, Mary, and a stack of newspaper clippings on her drowning in Lake Charles.

Vail told deputies that he and his wife had gone trotline fishing, that she was shining a flashlight and that when she warned him about a stump, he jerked the boat to avoid it, and she accidentally fell out. He told them he dove into the water, but was unable to save her.

Lake Charles

Arriving in Lake Charles, I stood along the Calcasieu River, examining the place where Vail told deputies his wife had drowned.

The dark, swift river, which bore the Atakapa word for “crying,” swept by as I stood on the dirt.

Reassembling this case was going to be even tougher than I thought. Whatever reports the sheriff’s office had made at the time had all been lost.

I stopped by the Southwestern Louisiana Genealogical and Historical Library, which shared copies from old city directories, and I began tracking down those who had lived in the Maree Apartments with Felix and Mary Vail.

One of them was Judson McCann II. When he finally answered the door, he invited me inside his apartment, filled with photographs of him deep-sea fishing.

He had been close with Vail, and Mary Vail’s death had always shocked him. He said he couldn’t believe she would be out on the river at night.

He also couldn’t believe Vail’s claim that he was laying trotlines. He and Vail golfed, but he never recalled Vail fishing. Instead, Vail used his boat to waterski.

McCann described Vail as a ladies’ man. “Many nights, his car wouldn’t be home, and Mary would be there with the lights on.

When Felix was gone, it wasn’t because he was trotline fishing.”

Another close friend, Bob Hodges, told me that when Mary drowned, “I’ll be truthful with you, that was the end of my friendship with Felix.”

He never knew Vail to fish and described Vail’s explanation about how his wife drowned as “horse manure. That’s what I think of that story.”

The odds of one man having one wife drown and two others disappear seemed beyond belief.

I decided to ask criminologist James Alan Fox of Northeastern University what the odds of such a scenario would be. “Smaller than the threshold of chance,” he said. “Either he tends to select partners that lead higher risk lives or something else is going on that’s more nefarious.”

The family of Vail’s wife, Mary, told me she had been a member of Chi Omega. I contacted a librarian from McNeese State University, who pulled out the old yearbooks and created a list of the members between 1957 and 1961. She shared the list, and I began contacting them.

They talked of how much she feared drowning. “Nobody believed it was an accident,” her college roommate, Sandra Sudduth Pratt, told me.

I shared the Oct. 30, 1962, autopsy report with renowned pathologist Dr. Michael Baden of New York City.

His conclusion? Foul play took place in her death.

The report showed large bruises with bleeding into tissues on the left side of the neck, which he said suggested she suffered forceful neck trauma before entering the water.

There were also hemorrhagic bruises to the right calf and left leg above the knee, which he said were consistent with a struggle before her submersion.

Most convincingly of all was the scarf authorities found around her neck that extended 4 inches into her mouth, which suggested traumatic asphyxia before entering the water, he said.

“Somebody had to push that scarf into her mouth. She had to have that scarf wedged in her mouth before she went in the water.”

Joining forces

A half-century after his sister, Mary, drowned, Will Horton went out onto the Calcasieu River and gazed at the place where she breathed her last.

He never knew she died in this section of the river that snakes north of downtown Lake Charles. He had always believed she had drowned much farther south.

He said he had looked up to his sister, seven years older than him. “It’s haunting. I keep wanting to talk with her.”

He told me Mary Rose had contacted him in the 1990s. “You could have knocked me over with a feather when I found out there were two other women.”

He and Rose bonded in their common cause for justice. She shared letters Vail had written and other documents she had been saving since 1984. Horton shared his sister’s autopsy report, death certificate and other documents his family had been saving since her death in 1962.

He said he told Rose, “No matter what happens, this is going to be for all three women.”

A cousin put him in touch with former detective “Rabbit” Manuel, who had headed up the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff Office’s investigation back in 1962.

Manuel had worked thousands of cases, but he had never forgotten Mary’s death, Horton said. “He said Felix’s story just didn’t add up. The fishing tackle was dry. The trotline was dry. The boat was dry. Even Felix’s cigarettes were dry, despite him telling the deputies he dove straight in the water to save Mary.”

He and Manuel met with “Lucky” DeLouche, who directed the Violent Crimes Task Force, an elite unit that investigated homicides.

Three young detectives took notes as they talked. Manuel shared details from the case, saying deputies wanted to prosecute, but the district attorney wouldn’t let them. Horton shared the autopsy report, Vail’s letters and his belief that Vail was a serial killer.

Horton said DeLouche replied, “This absolutely fits the profile of a serial killer.”

The other detectives agreed.

The task force discussed sending Vail’s son, Bill, in to secretly record a conversation with his father. Horton objected, saying that might put Bill in jeopardy.

DeLouche left the task force, and the case grew cold again.

Horton gazed out at the Calcasieu River as Calcasieu Parish Deputy Ron Johnson guided the boat. He had fished and dived in this river since the 1960s.

Johnson led us north of the old Halliburton docks, where newspaper articles said Mary’s body had been recovered.

Horton said his sister feared drowning and refused to swim where she couldn’t see the bottom. “Mary was scared of the dark water, so why was she out there? And why was she out there without wearing a life preserver?”

He wondered why Vail had failed to seek help closer, rather than boating back toward Shell Beach, more than 5 miles south, especially since he claimed to have trouble cranking his engine.

He questioned Vail’s story about running trotlines, saying he had waterskied in that high-powered boat many times, but “I never saw a fishing pole. I never saw a tackle box.”

He said ski boats aren’t designed for trotline fishing because they sit up too high on the water.

He said a ski boat sits up high on the water, but a boat that sits close to the water is needed to run trotlines. “Felix didn’t even have a trolling motor.”

He questioned Vail’s claim that Mary fell from the boat when he steered to avoid a stump.

Johnson said dredging during World War II enabled Navy ships, oil tankers and other vessels to use this waterway. He said a trotline can’t survive such traffic, and that’s why fishermen place their trotlines elsewhere.

Horton said Vail never explained to the family what happened that night.

“Our family had a lot of questions, but we never got any answers.”

Another disappearing act

Shortly after Rose rummaged through the old trailer, looking for clues, Vail disappeared again.

He returned on Labor Day weekend in 2012, only to sell his 17 acres and depart. He left his storm-damaged trailer behind, but the machetes and knives that had lined his floor were gone.

I telephoned his brother, Ronnie, who told me, “I don’t know where he went. He probably doesn’t want anyone to know where he is.”

Ronnie, who had worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for 22 years, told me when he heard allegations of the disappearances of these women, “We were all just shocked.”

“Did the FBI ever interview you?”

“No. I’m surprised they haven’t.”

After my story on Felix Vail, “Gone” appeared in The Clarion-Ledger on Nov. 11, 2012, I traveled to Montpelier to meet a man who had telephoned me.

Wesley Turnage grew up with Vail and recalled a conversation he had in the months following his 1963 graduation from Montpelier High School.

He said he had car trouble one day, and Vail gave him a ride to the Knickerbocker Manufacturing Co. in nearby West Point, where they both worked.

During that drive on Mississippi 46, he said Vail talked first of his son, Bill, and then of his deceased wife, Mary, calling her his “ex-wife” — a word that struck Turnage as strange since the two were not divorced at the time of her death.

He said the longer Vail spoke, the angrier the man got. “You could see a rage in his eyes.”

Vail referred to Mary as a “bitch,” saying she thought another child would help solve their marriage problems, Turnage recalled.

He quoted Vail as saying, “She wanted to have another kid. I didn’t want the one I got. I fixed that sorry bitch. She will never have another one.”

Time marched on, but he said he never forgot what Vail told him. “It’s like 9/11. Some things stick in your mind.”

I returned to Lake Charles, puzzled by how Vail dodged an indictment in the 1962 death of his first wife, Mary.

Her brother, Will Horton, joined me in the Calcasieu Parish clerk’s office as I pored through stacks of records, trying to find out more information about the grand jury that met on the case Jan. 7, 1963.

Flipping through the pages, I noticed a lot of criminal cases had been dismissed in 1962. When I added them up, I realized then-District Attorney Frank Salter Jr. had the judge dismiss 882 criminal cases — more than three cases for each working day.

Horton told me the original detectives in the case told him that Salter wouldn’t allow them to present the evidence they had collected against Vail.

That matched the stories I had heard from grand jurors’ families.

Horton left while I continued to dig. A half hour later, he called me to let me know he was talking with District Attorney John DeRosier.

“He’s from Eunice, just like me,” Horton said.

I walked over and met DeRosier, a Vietnam veteran who viewed himself as the guy wearing the white hat and battling the bad guys. He even kept a life-size cutout of John Wayne in his office.

He said he would be willing to reopen the case if there was enough evidence.

Afterward, I telephoned a retired lawyer who had known Salter.

The cheerful, white-haired man, who built boats and model airplanes, greeted Horton and me at the door, inviting us to join him at the kitchen table.

A talented attorney in both civil and criminal court, Russell Tritico Sr. had won a 1980 civil judgment, forcing chainsaw manufacturers to put chain brakes on their products.

The 84-year-old retired lawyer recalled the corruption of those days. He worked back then under his uncle, Joe, who represented then-Sheriff “Ham” Reid, accused of taking bribes but never convicted.

Tritico said the sheriff was so paranoid, he stayed in his patrol car, and he never answered the telephone at home unless he heard the right sequence of rings.

He described Salter as a longtime prosecutor whose “close friends were mostly what I called hoodlums.”

In the 1950s, Salter began his legal career as an assistant district attorney for then-District Attorney Ed Shaheen, but when the senior prosecutor sought re-election in 1960, Salter ran against him.

Tritico said the major issue Salter raised was Shaheen had dismissed too many cases. “Then Frank becomes DA and does the same thing.”

Dismissals became business as usual, and defense lawyers showered office secretaries with gifts, especially at Christmas, he recalled. “It was easy money. Of course, the victim might not be happy.”

He knew about the 1962 death of Mary Horton Vail.

When his uncle, Joe, ran against Salter in 1966, her death became a political issue. The candidate showed a photograph of her body after it was recovered from the river as proof of Salter’s political favors.

I asked Tritico about Cities Service, and he told me the company was like the General Motors of the Lake Charles area. I knew Vail’s uncle, Thomas Finnie, had worked there as a supervisor and had arranged for Vail’s job.

In searching for Salter’s obituary, I had run across the one for his father, who also worked at Cities Service. When I visited Finnie’s 94-year-old widow, Virginia, she confirmed the couple’s friendship with the district attorney.

I shared what Vail said about trotline fishing that night, and Tritico shook his head. The longtime fisherman questioned why Vail would have traveled so many miles up the Calcasieu River when he could have laid trotlines not far from where he kept his boat.

“You don’t run trotlines in deep water.”

Finding Felix

So where had Vail gone? Had he just disappeared like the women he professed to once love?

I telephoned more of his relatives and friends. They were just as clueless as me.

Weeks after “Gone” was published, I received a telephone call from a man who had read my nearly 9,000-word story online. We discussed Vail, the case against him and his disappearance before the man volunteered, “I know where he is.”

“You do?”

“Canyon Lake, Texas. Would you like his post office box?”

“You bet.”

Back in Jackson, I telephoned Enzo Yaksic of Boston, the founder of the Serial Homicide Expertise and Information Sharing Collaborative. No matter what questions I had about serial killers, Yaksic had the answers, thanks to a huge database he had amassed.

My search for answers in the Vail case led Yaksic to contact Armin Showalter, acting chief for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, which specialized in serial homicide investigations.

Yaksic shared a copy of “Gone” with Showalter, who in turn contacted Calcasieu Parish Deputy Randy Curtis, now taking on the Vail case.

Curtis telephoned me, explaining that he was a 20-year law enforcement veteran who had been transferred from the Violent Crimes Unit to the Forensic Cold Case Division. After reading “Gone,” he called back, wondering if I knew where Vail was these days.

“Canyon Lake, Texas,” I said.

Days later, the deputy telephoned with news that the FBI had discovered Vail purchased property at 737 Shadyview Drive in Canyon Lake.

On Jan. 18, 2013, Curtis decided to confront Vail. He found the suspected serial killer at that address, living in a storage shed so large it could be a home.

Curtis said he read Vail his rights before asking him about the death and disappearances of the women.

Vail refused to say anything, accusing families and The Clarion-Ledger of lying about him.

The whole time, Vail couldn’t stop smirking.

The sight of that smirk angered Curtis, who worked days, nights and weekends on the case.

One day, he called to tell me he had found something. Big.

Consensus: Vail killed Mary

Not long after this call, Will Horton shared the number of his cousin, who was in the same rosary group with a caretaker for 90-year-old Isaac “Sonny” Abshire Jr.

I drove to Lake Charles and sat down with the man, who was finishing his lunch in front of the television. He remembered Vail well. The pair had worked together at a chemical plant next to the Cities Service refinery in nearby Sulphur. They refrigerated the chemical butadiene, used to produce tires.

Abshire described Vail as “my helper” and “a good worker. I liked him.”

Vail was looking for a place closer to his girlfriend, Mary Horton, who was living in Lake Charles. Needing the cash, Abshire offered him a room for rent.

He accepted, and Mary became a frequent visitor. “I was kind of like a big brother to her. She was a sweet little girl.”

After the couple decided to get married, Vail moved out.

At work, his disposition soured. He talked about how ugly his wife was when she was pregnant and that he didn’t like his baby.

“Even a dog loves their children,” Abshire said he replied.

On the Friday before her drowning, the couple visited, bringing their infant son, Bill. Mary confided in Abshire, asking if he

thought Vail could take her baby away.

Two nights later, word came that Mary had drowned in the Calcasieu River.

Deputies contacted Abshire’s father for help in the search.

Abshire and two fellow workers went out the next day to drag the river. The next morning, Oct. 30, 1962, he returned with one of them, Jimmy May, to continue dragging.

While they were talking, “something popped up. A guy with binoculars asked, ‘Does she have blonde hair?’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s her.’ ”

They recovered the body, and Abshire could never forget what he saw. Her body was rigid, and a scarf was wrapped around her neck before going into her mouth. “It had a big ol’ knot in it.”

The deputies on the boat boiled in anger, all voicing the same opinion — that Vail had killed Mary. “They believed it was foul play.”

A deputy shared copies of photographs taken that day, and Abshire had held onto them ever since, placing them in a folder he marked “Keep.”

“You hung onto these photos for 50 years?” I asked.

“Yes.”

He told me he gave the photos to Deputy Curtis. He also handed over a copy of the 1962 sheriff’s report, which listed 15 points suggesting Vail’s guilt.

Despite being behind on major bills, Vail had managed to pay an entire year’s premiums in advance for a $50,000 life insurance policy on his wife. He had a second life insurance policy on her for $8,000, which promised to pay double if she died by accident.

Deputies reported that witnesses said Vail told them he didn’t love his wife, that she was stupid and that she looked vulgar.

Deputies also reported that Vail had “sexual relationships with other females and at least one male.”

Most witnesses they talked to felt he was capable of killing his wife.

Vail told deputies that his wife was wearing an off-white leather jacket when she went into the water. But she wasn’t wearing the jacket when her body was recovered.

Inside his boat, deputies found two life preservers. Mary had not been wearing one, despite her fear of drowning.

As for the trotline, deputies found it coiled inside Vail’s tackle box.

“That’s why,” Abshire told me, “they thought it was fishy.”

When he returned to work, he told his co-workers what he witnessed.

Word spread, and he said his boss hauled him in and told him to stop sharing what he saw.

Eventually, Abshire faced off with Vail. “He said he had lawyers that were ready to sue me for everything I had for all I was saying about him.”

“Get your lawyers ready,” he said he replied. “I want to get on the (witness) stand and tell everybody what happened.”

After some time passed, Abshire said Vail telephoned him, asking if he still wanted to tell everything to the lawyers.

“Get ‘em,” Abshire said he replied. “I’m still ready to talk. I want to get on the stand and tell ‘em what I know.”

Not long after, Vail left town.

I asked him if he believed Vail had killed his wife.

“Oh, my God, yes.”

Marriage made in hell

Over gumbo and crawfish étouffée, Steve Horton talked about his aunt Mary, whom his family adored so much that he and his wife had named their daughter after her. He showed me her 1962 death certificate, signed by the coroner, Dr. Harry Snatic. The certificate said she “fell from (the) boat while fishing and accidentally drowned.”

Horton detailed the many errors. Snatic had put down the wrong date of her birth. The wrong date of her death. The wrong occupation (“housewife” rather than “teacher”).

He pointed to the neat signature, “William Vail.” It looked nothing like the handwriting of William Felix Vail that I was familiar with.

He then directed me to the date of Vail’s signature, Oct. 31, 1962.

“That was the same day as the funeral, which was in Eunice,” he said. “How could he have signed this in Lake Charles?”

Horton shared other documents, which showed Vail had failed to pay any money toward the $1,014 bill for his wife’s funeral, her headstone or her burial plot.

“Dear Sir, I would have contacted you sooner if I had known anything definate (sic) about when I can pay you,” Vail wrote

Ardoin’s Funeral Home in 1963. “Thank you for your patience and I’ll be in your office the first part of April to settle the bill. Yours truly, Felix Vail.”

Vail never showed and never paid, despite receiving thousands on two life insurance policies he took out on his wife.

The funeral home won a $1,306 judgment in Mississippi against Vail. He still didn’t pay.

It was during a bridge game in 1969 that Mary’s mother learned Vail had never put a penny toward the funeral, Horton told me.

“She was so embarrassed, she went and paid.”

I spoke with funeral home operator Gene Ardoin. He remembered Mary as “a beautiful girl. They had a marriage not made in heaven, but made in hell.”

Trip to Canyon Lake

When I drove into the Canyon Lake neighborhood where Vail lived, I saw deer grazing on the lawns.

Paperwork I copied at the courthouse showed David Thomason had deeded his property to Vail after he paid the back taxes.

Digging into Thomason’s background, I discovered he and Vail shared something in common — each had a wife who died in an “accidental drowning.”

I decided to dig deeper.

Thomason’s estranged wife, Kathey, had drowned in Canyon Lake on July 3, 2005. Her family still had questions.

Her mother, Cathy Simon, still lived in Canyon Lake. She told me her daughter tried to get away from Thomason, who was charged twice with assault but was never prosecuted. “She was terrified of him.”

On the back lot of Vail’s property, I could see the boat Kathey supposedly fell from and drowned.

Friends told me Thomason was out of town at the time.

If he did take out a life insurance policy on her, I couldn’t find it, but I did find that insurance companies had shelled out more than a half million in proceeds to him, including $215,400 for a house fire that the fire marshal had ruled a suspicious arson.

Vail now lived on this property, and when I pulled up outside his home, I noticed there were no windows. The padlocked fence had barbed wire across the top.

I called out his name and told him I was interested in speaking to him about the missing women. There was no answer.

On March 10, 2013, I received an email from Gina Frenzel, a redheaded private investigator, whose colleagues nicknamed her “Batgirl.”

Obsessed with serial killers, she had read the e-book version of “Gone” before going online to discover Felix Vail was now living in Canyon Lake.

That was only an hour and a half away from her home in Kerrville, Texas, where her grandfather had been chief of police for 20 years.

“I’m a licensed private investigator,” she wrote me. “Let me know if you need any help.”

I promised I would. Later, I sent a second email, saying I would like to find out more about the suspicious burning of David Thomason’s house on the property where Vail now lived.

On April 3, she tried to talk to Thomason, and when she was unable to, she telephoned and said she was going to see Vail.

“He won’t talk to you,” I told her.

“Wanna bet?” she replied.

She called back later with the news that Vail had indeed talked. She told him she was an investigator looking into Thomason’s fire, and he had spoken almost nonstop to her.

She returned several more times, recording each of her conversations with Vail, who shared details about his life and lectured her about the dangers of ego, even as his own ego overwhelmed their conversations.

He claimed to have a genius-level IQ surpassing 140 and talked of memories from the womb, saying he could “feel the sunshine” on his mother’s belly.

I shared information from Frenzel’s visits with the expert, Yaksic. He provided many hours of advice and insights, saying Vail seemed “more in line with a cult leader” than a suspected serial killer.

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