The Torso Murders Part 1: El Paso County

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In June of 1959, a fisherman on the Rio Grande west of El Paso pulled a black suitcase from the slow, muddy current near Montoya, Texas. Inside was a headless, handless torso — mutilated, skinned, and wrapped in the previous day’s newspaper. Within hours, El Paso County Sheriff Bob Bailey was standing over what he’d later call “the most brutal murder in El Paso history.” What followed was a multi-state investigation that spanned Texas, New Mexico, and beyond — an effort to name the victim and find the sadist who cut him apart.

Over the next weeks, more body parts surfaced downstream and across the desert near Tularosa. Each discovery added a new layer of horror — feet in a sandwich box, organs in a cereal carton, and hands packed in plastic and left in the sand. Every clue pointed to someone who knew anatomy and took their time.

Despite help from the FBI, countless missing-person matches, and even a copycat case a year later in New Mexico, the Rio Grande torso murder remained one of the Southwest’s most chilling mysteries. The body was never identified, the killer never found.

This is Part One of Three of The Torso Murders — a case that haunted El Paso lawmen for years and stretched from the cottonwoods of the Rio Grande to the deserts beneath the Sacramento Mountains.

If you have any information about the 1959 Torso Case, please contact the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office at (915) 538-2292.

Sources: The El Paso Times, The El Paso Herald-Post, The Carlsbad Current-Argus, The Albuquerque Journal

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Gone Cold Podcasts may contain violent or graphic subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.
0:09.3	Saturday, June 20, 1959, Montoya, Texas. The brown water of the Rio Grande River moves slow through the upper valley outside of El Paso, almost silent.
0:23.3	In the summer of 1959, the river ran high. Cottonwoods lined the banks near the small
0:30.2	farming settlement, 10 miles west of the city. By mid-morning, heat shimmered above the water like
0:37.4	smoke.
0:39.1	At 9.30 a.m., an El Paso couple sat on the bank with a fishing rod and a thermos,
0:44.7	watching debris roll by in the current.
0:47.7	First came a cardboard box, drifting lazily but steady downstream.
0:53.6	They paid it no mind. Then 20 minutes later,
0:57.7	something larger caught the sunlight. A black suitcase, expensive looking, half submerged and
1:04.9	bumping against reeds. The man, William Taylor, fished it in with a stick.
1:12.3	Then the odor hit him.
1:17.4	He flagged down the first passing car and asked them to phone authorities.
1:24.4	El Paso County Sheriff Bob Bailey had been in law enforcement almost 30 years,
1:26.9	long enough to think he'd seen everything. When he and his deputies arrived at the
1:29.9	scene and pried open that suitcase, he learned otherwise. Inside lay the naked torso of a man,
1:38.3	head cleanly severed at the neck. Both hands were gone. One cut at the wrist, the other at the elbow. The body had been
1:47.6	skinned like a calf, deputies said. Flesh from the back and the crotch was missing. The sexual
1:54.8	organs mutilated. Wrapped around the upper torso was the El Paso Herald Post Home Edition from June 19th,
2:04.0	a paper that had rolled off the press the previous afternoon at 2.30 p.m.
2:10.0	Sheriff Bailey called it one of the weirdest cases we've ever seen.
2:14.6	He mobilized every man he had, deputies, ten county jail trustees, and a boat crew
	...

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