The Gond Cole Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter.

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John Godwin wrote the 1978 book, Murder USA, The Ways We Kill Each Other, he said, to get the weight of what he'd seen

as a journalist off his chest.

The crime reporter had traveled the country, investigating everything from the Manson murders to a little known and long forgotten case out of Fort Worth, Texas.

The result of which ultimately led to Murder USA, the book Godwin described as a quote

gloomy and bloody picture of how little value is placed on human life in America.

The United States was facing a murder epidemic.

It was, quote, the age of mass murder, Godwin said, and he was right.

In an FBI report released in September of 1978, Fort Worth was shown to have failed in keeping

up with the rest of the nation's efforts to reduce

the crime rate in the first quarter of that year.

Fort Worth's violent crime rate had decreased by 10% in the first three months of 1978 though and the rate of homicides

had gone down 29%, a huge number by any city's standards. This report, however, was a smoke screen. Violent crime and

murder were in fact up when the year 1978 ended, and for the most part these numbers would steadily rise through

the end of the decade, the entirety of the 1980s and into the first half of the 90s. Cities in Texas were high on the list, in fact, of the most violent ones in the nation.

By the end of 1978, another report released by the FBI indicated that the violent crime rate

in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, along with Houston, jumped higher than the other cities in the United States 25 most populated metropolitan areas.

Among the many homicides in Fort Worth that year was one of the most horribly brutal and undoubtedly

senseless the city had seen a crime that remains unsolved to this day, the January 1978 slang of 17-year-old

Leisha McGee. Oh, On October 15th, 1960, Leca Ann McGee was born to parents Helen Ruth and Cecil

Carl McGee.

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