The Torso Murders Part 3: Fort Bend County & Room 636

Gone Cold - Texas True Crime

Vincent Strange

True Crime, Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In June 1964, a Fort Bend County farmer discovered a headless, handless torso in a roadside ditch — a killing so cleanly done that investigators said only someone trained in anatomy could have done it. Sheriff “Tiny” Gaston and the Texas Rangers searched for weeks, but the victim was never identified. Then, just months later, another scene shocked Texas — Room 636 of San Antonio’s Sheraton Gunter Hotel, where blood coated the walls and floor but no body was found. The man who’d checked in under a false name vanished, only to turn up two days later dead by suicide in another downtown hotel. His name was Walter Audley Emerick — a drifter, forger, and former airman who may have been responsible for far more than the crime in that room.

From the rice fields of Fort Bend County to the marble halls of the Gunter, this episode follows the grim trail of the 1960s Texas torso murders and asks whether the mystery that began in the Rio Grande ended that night with a .22 in Room 536 — or if the real killer was still out there.

If you have any information about the Fort Bend Torso Case of 1964, please contact the Sheriff’s Office there at (281) 341-4665.

If you have any information about Walter Audley Emerick or his victim, please contact the San Antonio Police at (210) 207-7635.

Sources: The Houston Post, The Houston Chronicle, The San Antonio Express-News, thegunterhotel.com, historichotels.org

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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.
0:08.5	By the mid-1960s, the Texas torso murders were already a story that had spread across the state,
0:15.9	and even the nation. They'd begun on the far western edge, El Paso County in 1959, where the Rio Grande snaked through sand and salt brush.
0:26.6	There, a suitcase bobbed against the reeds, and what was inside changed the county forever.
0:32.6	The headless remains of a man, the work of a hand that understood anatomy and butchery.
0:40.4	Less than three years later, 300 miles east in San Jacinto County, near Cleveland, another torso
0:47.6	surfaced not far from the Trinity River.
0:50.9	It was a woman this time, carved apart with much less precision, crude and irregular,
0:57.3	as one pathologist put it, perhaps the work of someone in a great hurry. No one ever proved
1:04.3	the cases were connected, but anyone who had ever stood over one of those torsos felt it in
1:09.9	their gut. They had to be.
1:13.0	By 1964, the killings seemed to have stopped.
1:17.2	The files gathered dust, and even Sheriff Bob Bailey out in El Paso had announced retirement,
1:23.9	though the cases still sat on his conscience.
1:27.1	The lawman used to tell reporters that a man like
1:30.0	that doesn't just quit. If the murders were connected, he was right. 1964 brought yet another case.
1:39.8	But even with the addition of this torso, the following year would bring about a mystery just as perplexing
1:46.2	and horrific, one that would leave many speculating a connection to the Texas torso murders,
1:52.9	even though this one left behind nobody at all.
1:56.7	Music I'm In Fort Bend County, daylight came slow over the Brazos River Bottom on June 11, 1964.
2:30.1	Rice fields glimmered with shallow water, the soil red and heavy from weeks of rain.
2:37.2	Along Farm Road 359, 64-year-old farmer George Rhodes started his tractor before sunrise.
	...

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