The Murder of Linda Jane Phillips
Gone Cold - Texas True Crime
Vincent Strange
4.6 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
The case shocked Kaufman County—a quiet, rural community east of booming Dallas—and became one of North Texas’s most haunting unsolved murders. Investigators found her car abandoned along Farm Road 1641, its window shattered, her clothing scattered along the roadside for nearly a mile. Despite hundreds of volunteers searching and an intensive investigation led by Sheriff Roy Brockway, no suspect was found.
Over the following decade, a wave of similarly brutal killings of women swept across North and East Texas. Lawmen speculated about a single “lust killer” operating around Dallas, connecting Linda’s death to others in Garland, Irving, Plano, and Grapevine. Yet no pattern held.
Then, in 1984, serial confessor Henry Lee Lucas—already infamous for hundreds of claimed murders—pleaded guilty to Linda’s killing. Kaufman County briefly marked the case “cleared.” But Lucas’s confession later fell apart. Records showed he was still in Michigan at the time of her death.
Fifty-five years later, Linda’s murder remains officially unsolved. What endures is the picture of a kind, capable young woman caught between the growing city and the fading quiet of small-town Texas—and a reminder of how easily a search for closure can bury the truth.
If you have information about the murder of Linda Jane Phillips, please contact the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office at (972) 932-4337.
Sources: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Tyler Morning Telegraph, The San Antonio Express-News, The Odessa American, The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, The Longview Daily News, The McKinney Courier-Gazette, The Austin American-Statesman, The Brownsville Herald, The Mesquite Daily News, and Henry Lee Lucas files
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Killers don't just take lives. |
| 0:06.0 | They reshape everything they left behind. |
| 0:09.7 | A quiet backroad, a busy stretch of highway, a house that once felt safe, now a shrine |
| 0:16.2 | to everything that went wrong. |
| 0:18.9 | Across Texas, deserts, fields, and bayous keep their secrets buried, |
| 0:23.6 | but not forever. From the creators of Gone Cold comes of Hell, Texas True Crime, a podcast |
| 0:31.5 | about the state's most depraved killers and the scars they left on every town, every family, every mile marker they touched. |
| 0:40.9 | Stories that ask one burning question, were there more victims? |
| 0:46.0 | Some folks aren't just from hell, they're of it. |
| 0:50.3 | Of Hell, Texas True Crime, coming soon. |
| 0:54.4 | Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. |
| 1:01.2 | Gone cold podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. |
| 1:05.1 | Listener discretion is advised. |
| 1:08.6 | Dallas and Kaufman counties exist shoulder to shoulder, but can feel like different areas stitched together by two lanes of asphalt, river bends, and stretches of dense woods. |
| 1:22.2 | In the summer of 1970, the city of Dallas was roaring forward, with oil and banking money pooling into mirrors of glass |
| 1:30.7 | downtown, the population just under a million at that time. Kaufman County, just east down highways |
| 1:39.2 | 80 or 175, moved at a steady, older rhythm. Farm-to-market roads cut between fields of wheat and cattle. |
| 1:49.3 | Courthouse squares set the tempo. Friday nights were for football, and most folks recognized the |
| 1:56.6 | sheriff on site. The population sat at around 30,000. Two different worlds side by side, |
| 2:05.5 | one chasing the future, the other anchored to the land itself. In August of that year, |
| 2:12.8 | those worlds met in the worst possible way. In 1970, Linda Jane Phillips was 26 years old, a teacher who'd earned her degree at North Texas University in Denton and put four years into the classroom. |
| 2:55.0 | Colleagues remembered her as steady, patient, and reliable, someone who stayed after school to help a child who needed one more explanation. |
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