Technical Difficulties

Deliver Us: Three Decades of Murder and Redemption in the Infamous I-45/Texas Killing Fields by Kathryn Casey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about some of the cases in the three decades and counting worth of murders (some solved, some unsolved, and some stuck in the limbo of we know who it is but we can't prove it) along I-45 between Houston and Galveston. Overall, Casey is a competent writer, although she has a tendency to oversell things that need to be undersold, and she has doggedly interviewed everyone who would sit still long enough, including the families of the victims, the investigating officers, and the prime suspects.

The book is necessarily somewhat inconclusive, since so many of the cases are unsolved (two victims were identified in 2019, and one of the main we know who it is but we can't prove it suspects led the police to two of his victims' bodies IN 2015), but Casey has done her best to find a narrative of each case (one victim's father founded Texas EquuSearch; another victim's parents have also gotten involved in helping the search for missing persons; one case got solved because an evidence officer fourteen years later had the wit to resubmit samples for DNA testing)---which would be why her subtitle includes the word "redemption." She doesn't mean for the killers (her interviews with them make it clear that redemption for them is a long way off, if possible at all; a couple are clearly psychopaths, for whom the word "redemption" is meaningless). She means for the families who have brute-forced good out of evil and for the investigators who haven't given up.



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