Jerry McFadden: Murders, Escape, Execution, and Cold Case

Jerry McFadden was a Texas serial rapist and killer, nicknamed “The Animal,” who abducted and murdered three young people near Lake Hawkins in 1986 while on parole for aggravated sexual assault. He was executed by lethal injection on October 14, 1999, at age 51. Twenty years later, genetic genealogy tied him to a 1979 murder in Portland, Oregon.

A Record of Violence Before 1986

By the time of the Lake Hawkins killings, McFadden already had convictions for burglary, destruction of private property, two counts of rape, and aggravated sexual abuse. In Shackelford County he had kidnapped and battered a 21-year-old co-worker and forced her to perform a sexual act. He had been held there in maximum security since December 29, 1980. Local officers warned state prison officials that he was a “dangerous, aggressive type individual” who was “not to be trusted at any time” and told them security around him should be “doubled and tripled.”¹

He was paroled in 1985 after serving less than five years of a 15-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault. The release came under a Texas mandate meant to relieve prison overcrowding, which let inmates shorten sentences through good-behavior and time-served credits. A pre-release assessment indicated he would “probably offend again,” but the overcrowding directive took precedence.¹ McFadden was assigned to a parole office in Tyler that was underfunded, short-staffed, and had no specialized training for supervising sex offenders. He was required to attend sexual and mental health counseling as a condition of release but frequently missed sessions.

The Lake Hawkins Murders

On May 4, 1986, three friends from Hawkins, Texas drove to an outing at Lake Hawkins and vanished: 18-year-old Suzanne Denise Harrison, 20-year-old Gena Turner, and 19-year-old Bryan Boone.² Earlier that evening McFadden had committed an armed robbery at the lake, approaching a couple at gunpoint and demanding money, then accepting beer when they said they had no cash.³ Those victims, Clifton and Denise Phillips, later gave police a description of his blue-and-white truck and a partial plate number.

McFadden abducted all three. He raped and sodomized Harrison, strangled her with her own underwear, and left her body in a state park about 25 miles north of the lake. He then drove roughly 15 miles northeast of the park and shot Turner once and Boone twice with a .38-caliber pistol, leaving them in a roadside ditch.²

Boone’s pickup was found at Lake Hawkins at 1:20 a.m. on May 5, Harrison’s and Turner’s purses still inside. A park cleanup crew found Harrison’s body later that day at Barnwell Mountain near Gilmer. Boone and Turner were not found until May 10, in a ditch along Farm Road 1649 near Ore City.⁴

The forensic case against McFadden was strong. His hair matched evidence collected from Harrison, fiber samples matched her sweater, and firearms examiners matched bullets recovered from Boone’s body to a .38-caliber revolver kept by McFadden’s romantic partner, Debbie West. Witnesses placed McFadden near the lake with Boone in his truck around 7:20 and 8:00 p.m. on May 4, and neighbors near Ore City reported hearing three gunshots around 3:00 a.m. on May 5.²

Jail Escape and Manhunt

On July 9, 1986, while being held at the Upshur County Jail in Gilmer awaiting trial for Harrison’s murder, McFadden escaped. He beat a male jailer, stole his pistol, and took 24-year-old dispatcher-jailer Rosalie Williams hostage, forcing her to help him flee.⁵⁶

Williams was held for 16 hours in a sweltering boxcar in Big Sandy, Texas, and became severely dehydrated. She later said she believed McFadden “might kill me at any time.” Her chance came around 10:30 p.m. Thursday, when McFadden left the boxcar to look for water. She waited 10 to 15 minutes, slipped out, saw him about 500 feet away fighting off a dog with a stick, and crawled through the grass to a nearby house to get help.⁵ She was briefly hospitalized and released with scratches and skin irritation.⁷

The escape triggered what was described as one of the largest manhunts in Texas history, with an estimated 1,210 officers from more than 50 agencies searching over two days.⁸ McFadden was found hiding in a vacant house around 11:00 p.m. on Friday, July 11, 1986, roughly 52 hours after his escape and not far from where Williams had gotten free. He offered no resistance.⁹ For the escape and hostage-taking, he was convicted of armed robbery in August 1986 and sentenced to life in prison.²

Trial, Death Sentence, and Execution

McFadden’s capital murder trial was moved on a change of venue from Upshur County to Belton, in Bell County. On July 14, 1987, a jury convicted him of the capital murder of Suzanne Harrison in the course of an aggravated sexual assault.¹⁰ The verdict came at 1:45 p.m., and the same jury returned a death sentence that evening.³ Prosecutors played Rosalie Williams’s recorded account of the hostage ordeal, which included McFadden telling her, “I didn’t even know those kids.”

McFadden was never separately tried for the murders of Gena Turner and Bryan Boone, though the evidence tying him to all three deaths was laid out at Harrison’s trial.⁴

His appeals ran for more than a decade without success. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction and sentence on May 26, 1993, and denied rehearing on November 3, 1993. His first state habeas application was denied on January 22, 1997; a second filed a week later was dismissed for “abuse of the writ.” A federal habeas petition filed on April 11, 1997, was denied by the district court, and on January 29, 1999, the Fifth Circuit affirmed.¹¹ He was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit on October 14, 1999.²

The 1979 Portland Cold Case

Twenty years after his execution, investigators tied McFadden to a murder in Portland, Oregon. On July 24, 1979, 20-year-old Anna Marie Hlavka was found dead in her apartment by her sister. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled with the cord of her electric clock radio.¹² The case went cold.

Analysts recovered an unknown male DNA profile from crime scene evidence in 2011. Eight comparisons against potential suspects between 2012 and 2016 came back negative. Because McFadden had been executed in 1999, his DNA was never entered into the FBI’s CODIS database, so a routine database search could not have found him.¹³

The break came through genetic genealogy. Portland police worked with Parabon NanoLabs and its chief genetic genealogist, CeCe Moore, who uploaded the crime scene DNA to GEDmatch, a database where consumers share results from services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA. Using reverse genealogy, the team built family trees from shared matches. By October 2018 they had mapped three of the killer’s four familial lines and zeroed in on McFadden. Detectives traveled to Texas, interviewed his relatives, and obtained familial samples that the Oregon State Police Crime Lab used to confirm the match.¹⁴ Traditional investigation also established that McFadden had traveled to Portland in 1979 with a woman who dropped him off in the city, a trip that coincided with Hlavka’s murder.¹² The Portland Police Bureau announced the identification on February 1, 2019.¹⁵

Aftermath in Texas

The Lake Hawkins killings pushed Texas to rethink its parole policy. Residents of the Hawkins area formed a group called “We the People” to protest mandatory release procedures and press for tighter controls on paroling violent offenders. Wood County Justice of the Peace Jerry Parker said, “The people of Texas let the legislature know, we don’t want these people on the streets.”¹ The state later pulled back from its aggressive early-release procedures, making it harder for violent inmates to earn parole.

The case still provokes strong feelings locally. In 2024, a proposal to preserve McFadden’s fifth-floor jail cell in the Upshur County Courthouse as a historical artifact during a renovation drew sharp opposition from victims’ families. Dan Spence, husband of one of Suzanne Harrison’s cousins, said the plan “sensationalizes and glamorizes that jail’s most infamous prisoner, done under the guise of honoring the murder victims.” Calvin Turner, Gena’s father, asked, “How would you feel if that was your daughter?” On March 15, 2024, the Upshur County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to demolish the cell.¹⁶

1
Tyler Morning Telegraph. A Town in Terror Part IV
2
txexecutions.org. Jerry McFadden Execution Report
3
UPI. McFadden Given Death Penalty for Murdering Cheerleader
4
Tyler Morning Telegraph. A Town in Terror Part II
5
UPI. Rosalie Williams, the Woman Taken Hostage by Suspected Murderer
6
Texas Standard. Upshur County Courthouse Gilmer TX Jerry McFadden Jail Cell
7
Los Angeles Times. Texas Murder Suspect Captured After Two-Day Search
8
Tyler Morning Telegraph. A Town in Terror Part III
9
New York Times. Texas Murder Suspect Recaptured After 2 Days
10
Justia. McFadden v. Johnson, 166 F.3d 757
11
U.S. Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit. McFadden v. Johnson, No. 98-50485
12
ABC News. Murderer Executed in 1999 Identified by DNA as Man Who Allegedly Killed Woman
13
Good Morning America. Murderer Executed in 1999 Identified by DNA
14
Texas Public Radio. A Genetic Witness Links an Oregon Cold Case to a Texas Killer
15
OPB. Anna Marie Hlavka DNA Match Portland
16
KLTV. Upshur County Commissioners Agree to Demolish Serial Killer Jail Cell