William Reece is sitting in the courtroom of the 405th District Court of Jared Robinson in Galveston, Texas, on Wednesday, June 29, 2022, after pleading guilty to two counts of felony murder for the deaths of Laura Kate Smither and Jessica Cain in 1997. Photo by Jennifer The Daily News of Galveston County via AP
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GALVESTON, Texas – A man already sentenced to death for cold-blooded murder in Oklahoma has pleaded guilty Wednesday to killing three girls whose disappearances in Texas also remained unsolved for decades.
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William Rees, 62, pleaded guilty in a Galveston court to the murders of 12-year-old Laura Smither of Friendswood and 17-year-old Jessica Kane of Tiki Island in 1997. He later pleaded guilty in nearby Angleton to murder in the disappearance and death of 20-year-old Kelli Cox from Denton. In any case he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Rees was serving a 60-year prison sentence for abduction in Texas in 1998 in 2016, when he began working with investigations into other cases.
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Smither failed to return from a morning jog in Friendswood in April 1997. Her remains were found more than two weeks later, about 50 miles[50 km]in a retention pond near Pasadena, a suburb of Houston. Cain had been missing since August 1997, when her abandoned car was found on Interstate 45 near Tiki Island, a community off Galveston Island. In April 2016, Rees led researchers to Cain’s remains in a pasture on the southern outskirts of Houston. William Reece pleaded guilty in Brazoria County to the murder of Kelli Ann Cox in 1997. She was abducted from the Denton gas station, murdered and buried in Brazoria County. Reece eventually led police to her body in 2016. Cox’s now adult daughter said she spent 20 years searching for her mom pic.twitter.com/dCpgJEpPI0 – Robert Arnold (@ KPRC2Robert) June 29, 2022
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The remains of Cox, a North Texas University student who was last seen in Denton in 1997, have been buried. He was sentenced to death last year for the 1997 murder of 19-year-old Tiffany Johnson from Oklahoma City.
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