Kimberly Norwood Part 1: In the Pines

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2024

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In early May 1989, sixteen-year-old Michelle Lee Richardson vanished from East Texas, the city of Palestine specifically. Just weeks later, on May 20th, another East Texas girl turned up missing under similar circumstances. Kimberly Norwood was a twelve-year-old who loved life and, believe it or not, school. She was experiencing the normal throes of being a preteen, but Kimberly was a good kid who never got in trouble and had certainly never tried to run away. But when she came up missing near her home in the Caney Creek Addition of Hallsville, Texas, the Harrison County Sheriff’s Office were working the case as if she had left on her own. Kimberly took no clothes, however, and left all her money behind. The harder the Norwood’s fought for Sheriff Bill Oldham to allow outside help to come in, the harder he fought against them. All they wanted was their little girl back, and the lawman, as the Marshall News Messenger put it, seemed unmoved by the family’s plight.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Kimberly Rachelle Norwood, please call the Harrison County Sheriff's Office at 903-935-4888.

If you have any information about the disappearance of Michelle Lee Richardson, please contact the Anderson County Sheriff's Department at 903-729-6068.

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The Marshall News Messenger and The Shreveport Times were used as sources for this episode.

#JusticeForKimberlyNorwood #WhereIsKimberlyNorwood #FindKimberly Norwood #HarrisonCountyTX #HallsvilleTX #MarshallTX #Texas #TX #TexasTrueCrime #TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast #Podcast #Unsolved #ColdCase #GoneCold #GoneColdPodcast #UnsolvedMysteries #TrueCrime #Disappeared #Vanished #MissingPerson #Missing

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The Gond Cole Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter.
0:05.0	Listener discretion is advised.
0:09.0	Like most small Texas towns, the Anderson County seat, Palestine, came into its own in the post-civil
0:16.7	war reconstruction period.
0:19.6	It was the prison built by convicts in nearby Rusk that truly opened up the area's economy.
0:26.3	Rusk penitentiary was among the first privately operated prisons in Texas and by leasing out inmates to construct the area railroads,
0:36.1	local taxpayers were spared much of the financial burdens that came with growth.
0:42.1	When railroad lines opened up through Palestine, the timber industry there boomed, and iron
0:48.3	ore was shipped into rusk penitentiary to be made into pig iron at the impressively large and efficient blast furnaces at the
0:56.9	prison, further supplementing the local economy.
1:01.0	Ultimately, however, the prison iron operations proved unprofitable, and for the short remainder of
1:08.2	Rusk Penitentiary's existence as a prison, it became a prisoner management facility, a role aimed at reform that might
1:16.9	have actually worked had it not been for the guards harsh mistreatment of inmates.
1:23.5	The building itself reopened as Rusk State Hospital for the mentally ill, a hellhole
1:29.4	in its own right for the first several decades of its existence.
1:35.0	Ten years after the prison's closure, and just in time, economically speaking, oil was struck
1:41.3	just east of town.
1:43.4	Dollar signs reflected off the pupils of Palestine's more enterprising folks, and before you could say
1:49.6	the words black gold, businesses that catered to the industry, oil well servicing and supplies businesses were up and running.
1:59.0	The modest city, in fact, became a center for oil production in the region, thanks in large part to the
2:05.9	advanced railway system that the area's prisoners helped build.
2:11.7	Like most towns that went on to serve as a reminder of a simpler, perhaps bygone age of the
	...

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