Edward Harold Bell was serving a 70-year prison sentence for murdering a man when he sent a letter to Houston reporter Lise Olsen. He told her he’d also killed 11 girls in and around the Interstate-45 corridor between Houston and Galveston back in the 1970s. He named some of these victims and described others with initials, locations, and years. And he included a poem that he titled “The Eleven Who Went To Heaven.” Lise joined the efforts of Detective Fred Paige to investigate Bell’s links to the unresolved cases he alluded to… and together, they uncovered a long list of eerie coincidences and compelling circumstantial evidence. You can watch Lise and Fred’s investigation unfold in the docuseries The Eleven. And check out Lise’s nonfiction book, The Scientist and the Serial Killer, debuting in April 2025: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/720488/the-scientist-and-the-serial-killer-by-lise-olsen/ Keep up with us on Instagram @serialkillerspodcast! Have a story to share? Email us at [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What prompted Lise Olson to investigate Ed Bell?
This episode includes discussions of violence and murder. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. In 2011, investigative reporter Lisa Olson receives a handwritten letter in the mail. There, at the top of the page, is her name, scribbled out in mostly capital letters. But it's not from an old friend or a member of her family.
It's been sent to her by a convicted murderer named Edward Harold Bell. And in it, on lined notebook paper, he includes a poem he wrote.
And what of the innocent ones who fell by the way? Will the henchmen of Uncle Sam ever pay? All of those who fell were as brave as brave can be. The only coward who was there was me.
Chapter 2: What does Ed Bell's poem reveal about his victims?
When he sends this letter to Lisa, Bell is already in prison for murdering a man in broad daylight in front of the man's family. Now, he's claiming responsibility for more murders. The victims, all teenage girls who disappeared from in and around Houston and Galveston, Texas throughout the 70s. They later turned up dead, but their killer or killers were never caught.
Bell lists some of these girls in his letter. He names three of them. Others he only refers to by their initials or hair color. Sometimes he includes years or locations that are meaningful to their cases. He calls his poem about his alleged victims, The Eleven Who Went to Heaven. Welcome to Serial Killers, a Spotify podcast. I'm Janice Morgan.
You might recognize me as the voice behind the investigative docuseries Broken and the true crime podcast Fear Thy Neighbor. I'll be your host for the next few weeks, and I am thrilled to be here. We'd love to hear from you. Follow us on Instagram at Serial Killers Podcast and share your thoughts on this week's episode. Or if you're tuning in on the Spotify app, swipe up and leave a comment.
To help us tell today's story, we interviewed Lisa Olson, the investigative reporter and author whose work on this case is featured in the docuseries The Eleven. We're so grateful she could share her expertise. Stay with us.
True tales of horror, bizarre happenings, unexplainable events. On our podcast, Disturbed, terror takes center stage. Kidnappings, serial killers, hauntings, and the very essence of your worst nightmares coming to life on this weekly true horror show. Enter at your own risk.
So, Mickey, you're a producer here and you brought us this story because you have a connection to the case, right?
Yes. So I've been on this show for a while now, and it's been sort of a passion project to research the story, not just because it's one of the most unforgettable and bizarre true crime cases that I've read, but also because it all took place kind of close to my hometown. And where is that? I grew up in one of the communities between Houston and Galveston along Interstate 45 in Texas.
And so when I read this story, I know all the roads they talk about. I can picture all of the landmarks. I've even walked along one of the waterways where two of the victims were found. But I had never heard about these victims or these crimes when I was growing up.
I'd never heard of Ed Bell until a few years ago when I came across the work of a now-retired Galveston police detective named Fred Page and a Houston-area investigative reporter and author named Lisa Olson. The investigation they did is incredible. And for today's episode, I had the privilege of getting to talk to Lisa about her work on these cases.
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Chapter 3: Who were the teenage girls connected to Ed Bell?
I was working on a story for the Houston Chronicle about the unidentified dead, which is something that's kind of obsessed me for a long time.
That's Lisa talking about an unrelated or maybe not so unrelated article she was working on at the time.
I was interested in the case specifically of a torso of a teenager in a purple surf shirt. that was found floating in a bayou near Houston in the 70s. And I was looking for cases where there was enough identifying information linked to the body that I thought maybe I could write about it and help solve a case.
Her article quotes a forensic anthropologist who believes that, due to the age and the amount of remains recovered, it's not possible for investigators to identify the gender. After the article publishes, she gets a call from a man named Fred Page. He's a detective in Galveston, an island off the coast of Texas, about 50 miles from downtown Houston.
He's working to solve some cold cases from the 70s, and he thinks that several of the homicides could actually be connected to the same killer.
He said, you know, in fact, I think that is a teenage girl's body, and I think I know who killed her. And he was the first person who told me about Ed Bell.
Lisa won't receive that poem we mentioned earlier for a few more months. But Fred tells her it was actually two other letters that Bell sent from jail that originally piqued his interest in Bell as a potential suspect. Both were sent in 1998, one to the Galveston County DA, the other to the Harris County DA.
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Chapter 4: How did Fred Page become involved with Ed Bell's case?
In the letters, Bell confesses to having a hand in the deaths of seven girls across those counties, four fewer than the 11 he'll later claim. What really grabs Fred's attention is how Bell describes an unsolved double homicide from 1971. The victims were teenagers and best friends, Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson.
Bell even includes their names for the DAs, and then he goes on to list a lot of specific details about the murder, like how he bound their hands and feet, how he'd shot them from a bridge with a specific gun. He even includes the specific locations of their bullet wounds. As far as Fred could tell, it's pretty accurate.
And if you kind of think about this, you know, Texas prisons don't have a lot of Internet access. He had details in that letter that had a lot of information about a crime that had been committed in 1971, and he was writing it more than 20 years later.
To Fred, it seems like Bell might have actually been involved, because if he totally fabricated his story, it's a stunning coincidence that And if he read about those details long ago and is now lying and taking credit for a crime he didn't commit, he has an incredible memory.
By the time Detective Fred Page calls Lisa, the DA's office in Galveston had tried to talk to Bell about making an official on-the-record confession. But he refused to cooperate. And that kicked off a never-ending cycle of confessing and recanting over several years. Without more to work with, there's not much the DA's office can do. So they dropped their investigation.
But Lisa was just starting hers.
The first thing I asked Fred is, have you ever talked to Ed Bell? Ed Bell is in prison. I knew he was in prison from what Fred told me for another murder, an entirely unrelated murder of a young man. So he was available to talk. He had a long time in prison to kill time.
And Fred says, no, he hasn't spoken to Bell yet. It's not an easy ask coming from a homicide detective. It would be more straightforward for Lisa to request an interview as a reporter. So she does just that. Ahead of the interview, Lisa studies the case Fred has already put together. So far, Fred has focused on two double homicide cases in particular. We mentioned one already.
Debbie Ackerman and Maria Johnson. They were surfer girls. They were friends. Debbie Ackerman was a really good water skier. She had competed in water ski contests.
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Chapter 5: What evidence links Ed Bell to the murders?
So they met up with their friend Glenda along one of the city's hotspots, the seawall that runs along the beach. Now, Glenda had a convertible and a driver's license, so the friends spent the late morning cruising up and down the coast. Around lunchtime, Sharon and Renee realized they needed to get back home. They told Glenda they didn't need a ride, they would hitchhike. Then, they vanished.
Their remains weren't found until winter of 1972, about three months after Debbie and Maria's bodies were found. In January 1972, a couple of teenage boys thought they saw a volleyball in the water, but it turned out to be a skull. Officials later found a few other bones nearby, but not many. Dental records confirmed that the skull belonged to Renee Johnson.
Sharon's remains were found the following month, just a quarter of a mile away from her best friend. This time, the investigators recovered 29 bones, along with some black twine and a surfer's cross, a popular piece of jewelry in the 70s. An autopsy couldn't confirm Sharon's cause of death, but the medical examiner concluded she was killed.
The thing was that because Rhonda Renee Johnson and Sharon Shaw's bodies were dumped in a lake, Their remains were actually found after the two other girls, which is maybe a little bit why in 1971 there wasn't a panic right away, because those four cases, which obviously Fred found so similar later, weren't associated in time as closely at the moment that they happened.
A connection was eventually made, though. Local detectives wondered if an interest in surfing could be the common thread between the four victims. There were other commonalities too, both sets of best friends, both known to have been hitchhiking, both last seen alive in Galveston, and all found in remote waterways.
All these years later, Lisa Olson and Fred Page want to prove another connection, Ed Bell. In 1970, Bell met a man named Doug Prunes, a local Galveston legend. His surf shop was a popular teen hangout back then, and Bell, an avid diver, did business with him. Debbie and Maria were known regulars, and Bell spent a lot of time there too.
Maybe that's why Debbie and Maria seemed to know the person driving the white van that day. In 2011, Lisa gets the opportunity to interview Bell in person.
Media interviews in prison are limited to an hour. So I had an hour to try to talk to this guy and convince him to tell me whatever he would tell me about these murders.
Bell's now in his early 70s, with a white crew cut and hard of hearing. It makes their conversation difficult through protective glass. But there's another challenge, too.
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Chapter 6: What similarities exist between the victims?
Detective Fred Page had already linked Bell to the murders of Debbie Ackerman, Maria Johnson, Sharon Shaw, and Renee Johnson. But over the years, Bell had confessed to killing anywhere from 7 to 11 female victims. Soon, Fred and Lisa are basically partners in their investigation, and they want to find out exactly who Bell claims he killed.
We started with the ones that he most solidly identified, the ones where he gave names or where he gave the dates. He talked about Colette Anise Wilson. He used her middle name for some reason in Alvin in 1971, which actually that predated the other murders. So if that was true, That would have been his first murder.
In the summer of 1971, Colette Wilson was immersed in band camp. She played the clarinet. And every day after camp, her band director would drop Colette off in the same spot where her busy mom could easily swing by and get her. But when her mom arrived on June 17th as planned, Colette was nowhere to be seen. Her skeletal remains were found a few months later near a reservoir west of Houston.
Colette's father, a dentist, confirmed her identity using her teeth. Ed Bell used Colette's full name in his letter, and Lisa and Fred learned that the spot where Colette's mother was supposed to pick her up was right along Bell's commute to work. Belle didn't receive much attention at the time.
Her family and even police had developed another theory about a different killer. And there was a man prosecuted for Colette Wilson's murder. Now, did Ed really kill her? It could be.
Then there were the other victims Belle alluded to. One he identified only as Gigi in Houston. Fred and Lisa believed the initials could refer to Gloria Gonzalez, a bookkeeper who was last seen at her Houston apartment in October 1971, and whose death was already tied to Colette Wilson's.
We knew that at the same time Colette and Ace Wilson's body was found, that another girl named Gloria Gonzalez, who was kidnapped in Houston, her bones were found mixed with Colette Wilson's. So if he was telling the truth about Colette Wilson... he most likely killed Gloria Gonzalez, whose bones were found there.
Which makes sense. The remains of two murder victims were found mixed together in the same place, so they probably had the same killer. After Gloria and Colette were found in November 1971, investigators concluded the following. Gloria was most likely strangled with some kind of cord or rope, while Colette died from blunt force trauma.
The further Lisa and Fred went, the more legitimate the crumbs bell dropped in his letter seemed. He included the name Pitchford in one, along with a few other details, like that the girl was blonde and wearing a black coat. He also implied he found her near a mall in Houston called Gulfgate.
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Chapter 7: How did Lisa Olson conduct her investigation?
Chapter 8: What significant details did Bell provide in his letters?
What was the problem was to get him to talk about what I wanted him to talk about. And, um, Ed spent a lot of time talking about his life, about, you know, growing up. He was a proud Aggie. He had gone to Texas A&M, been in the marching band. He was all excited to talk about that.
Um, and then he would talk about how women wanted him, you know, sexually, um, which is kind of a weird thing for me as a woman interviewing him. But, um, You know, you just sort of listen. You try not to react. So eventually I get to his ears in Galveston. I ask him about running a dive shop in Galveston, which I knew he ran.
So that would have been a place where he really very likely would have met these girls.
Lisa gets Belle to admit that Maria and Debbie had been in that dive shop. But for all his talking, Belle doesn't give up much else. That is, until the interview is almost over.
I had about, say, five minutes left when he started to tell me that, yes, he had killed a bunch of girls in Galveston and that he thought there were 10 or 11 when he was living in Galveston and in the Dickinson area. But he said, I don't want to tell you in prison because they're always listening and watching me. I think I'll send you a letter with their names.
So in the prison interview, I said, well, do you know their names? And he said, yes, I know most of their names. And I said, well, you know, can you give me at least their initials? And so in the first interview, he gave me a couple of initials of girls, and he said 10 or 11. And then he said, I will write you with more details later. And I thought, well, he may or may not, right?
He does. In July 2011, Bell sends Lisa the first of two letters. Much of it is in the form of a list. For example, three Galveston, two fall 1971, one fall 1976, two Webster, 1971, July, one blonde, one brunette. The list goes on, with Bell reducing the bright lives of these young girls to bullet points.
But for Lisa, the good news is, aside from the fact that Renee and Sharon disappeared in August 1971, not July, Bell's list seems to support her and Fred's theory. Then Lisa gets another letter from Bell. It's the one with his Eleven Who Went to Heaven poem. And he seemed proud of it.
It was an accomplishment that he was excited to talk about. At that point, Ed Bell was not someone who had been interviewed. Ed Bell's murder of Larry Dickens had been an infamous murder at the time. But Ed Bell had, by the time I met him, he had been in prison for almost 20 years. He'd been in prison from the 90s to 2011, hadn't had too many people to talk to.
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