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It's 8.54pm September 14th, 2018, a rainy Friday night in Laredo, Texas.

Francisco Hernandez, a state trooper for the Texas Department of Public Safety,

is refueling his patrol unit at a Valero gas station when a woman rushes up to him.

She's shirtless, wearing only a red bra and jeans, and in obvious distress.

She speaks in a torrent of English and Spanish, which is captured on Hernandez's bodycam.

The woman's name is Erica Pena. She explains that a man had just physically assaulted her

at gunpoint while they were parked in his truck nearby.

Somehow, she'd managed to rip her shirt off and leap out of the truck.

She's clearly in shock, but the trooper assures her she's safe and tries to calm her down.

Pena goes on to say that she and the man had been driving around earlier that evening

when she brought up the recent murders of two young women from Laredo.

At the mention of the murders, she says the man had become visibly uncomfortable.

At this point, trooper Hernandez calls the sheriff's office and relays Pena's story to investigators.

It was a call law enforcement had been waiting for for nearly two weeks.

The murders Pena mentioned had residents of Laredo in a panic.

The rumor was they were the work of a serial killer.

Detectives arrived on the scene minutes later, but the suspect was long gone.

By the end of the night, two more women would be dead.

This is Gone South, an Odyssey original documentary podcast series.

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