The Gone Cold Podcast may contain violent or graphic subject matter.

Listener discretion is advised.

At a little after 9 a.m. on Friday, November 8, 1985, in West Harris County, just two miles north of small town, Katie, Texas,

a couple rice farmers on their way to harvest the day's crops noticed black smoke

billowing high into the air. In their vehicle, they followed the smoke to its source and discovered

a car smoldering from what had obviously been a terrible fire not long before. The men sped away to call police.

Authorities and firefighters arrived quickly, but weren't prepared for what they found.

Inside the smoldering vehicle in the front passenger's seat was a body.

The body, of course, was charred. It was so charred, in fact, so

disfigured from the blaze that Harris County Sheriff's deputies couldn't tell if the body was

male or female. Identifying these remains wasn't going to be an easy task, but at least they could identify who the car belonged to.

Later that afternoon, Sheriff's investigators did just that, and the vehicle, a 1984 jaguar, was registered to a familiar name,

52-year-old millionaire oilman, Edward Gerald Baker, known to most as simply Ed.

The Houston Police and the Harris County Sheriff's Department, in fact, had been on the lookout

for this very car since the day before, Thursday, November 7, 1985.

At 915 that morning, Ed and his wife Sandy Baker's Gardner saw that a window

of their northwest Houston home was broken, and inside were signs of what looked like a burglary

at first sight. In Ed and Sandy's bedroom on the floor was an overturned ashtray and a telephone, which had been knocked

off a bedside table. Upon inspection of the rest of the home, however, a burglary or robbery began to

appear far less likely. Nothing else was in disarray, let alone ransacked in any way. Ed Baker's

jacket laid across a chair in the living room and in it, credit cards, and $900 cash. The only

things that seemed to be missing was a shotgun, Ed's 1984 Jaguar, and Ed himself. His wife Sandy

...