But between July 1990 and April 1992, those names became important to the Killeen Police Department when they were added to a growing list of cold case killings.
“Those are the cases where we have exhausted all of our leads,” said Capt. Jackie Dunn, who heads up Killeen Police criminal investigative division. “That’s the reason they are still on there.”
That ominous list of names was created as part of the department’s Web site in 2003 by Scott Dickson, a former Killeen police investigator who now manages the intelligence section.
“It was kind of a personal quest, more or less, to try and go back and come up with a complete list of cases,” Dickson said. “I took this on because I didn’t want any of these people to be forgotten.”
On the Web site are their stories.
There are 28 names on the cold case list. Dickson said there are still more on the department’s books that remain unsolved and for which the leads are growing stale.
The first case on the list occurred on Sept. 5, 1973 - the slaying of Spc. Thomas Roland Wright, who was stationed at Fort Hood.
According to that report, officers were called to the 2800 block of Terrace by Wright’s wife, who’d returned from a shopping trip in town and found her husband bleeding on the couple’s bedroom floor from multiple gunshot wounds.
Wright was transported to Darnall Army Medical Center where he was pronounced dead upon arrival.
Down the list is the case of 17-year-old Paula Diana Warren, whose partially nude body was discovered July 6, 1985, in a field in the 1000 block of East Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard.
Miss Warren’s family told investigators the victim traveled often and was known to hitchhike.
Her family last heard from her the day before her body was discovered when she’d called family members to tell them she was coming to Killeen from California.
Witnesses reported seeing a shiny black newer model truck tractor with a sleeper pulling a white box-type trailer parked near the area where her body was found.
One of the cold cases was personal for Dickson.
In April 1997, then-detective Dickson was assigned the Danydia Thompson case, which originated as a child abduction and ended up as a murder investigation.
On the morning of April 30, 1997, 7-year-old Danydia Thompson was kidnapped and killed while she walked to the Marlboro Heights Elementary School in Killeen. Witnesses reported she walked away from near the school with an adult black male. She was last seen riding “piggy back” on her abductor near the intersection of Veteran’s Memorial Boulevard and Jefferies Avenue. Her body was found several days later on Highway 195 south of Killeen.
“I don’t want any of these people to be forgotten,” Dickson said. “Each one of them was a mother or a father . . . a somebody and they are all important.”
Anyone with any information about these cases is urged to contact the Killeen Police Department at 254-501-8800 or Crime Stoppers at 254-526-TIPS. Crime Stoppers callers may remain anonymous.
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