We are going to be talking about the case of Felix Vale and his many many many many many wives and girlfriends who mysteriously disappeared or mysteriously died while they were with him.
Particularly, we’re going to be talking about Mary Horton, Sharon Hensley, and Annette Craraver. This case took a really long time to solve.
This case took over 53 years for them to solve it. And what you’ll realize as we get into the story is that that is insane.
So, William Felix Vale, he went by just Felix Vale.
He was born on the 19th of August in 1939 to parents Nell Rose and Ray Vale.
He was raised on a dairy farm in Montiplier, Mississippi. And he had four siblings.
So he had three sisters named Sue, Beth K, and a brother named Ronnie. He went to high school at Montiplier High School and he graduated from there in 1957.
In spring of that same year, he moved to Sula, Louisiana, and he started working at a chemical plant there.
And things were really going well for him. He was earning good money and he was okay looking.
I guess that’s how people described him. He had no trouble with the ladies. He actually later recalled this time in his life and said, “I’m making lots of money.
I have two cars, a motorcycle, and a boat. I’m dating about 20 women.” So, he was a bit of a ladies man to say the least.
He was 6′ tall. He had these blue eyes that everyone loved. He had this great head of blonde hair.
He drove a convertible. One woman that knew him during the time that they were in college said or described him saying that he looked like he had been kissed by heaven.
And that is a direct quote. So from the surface it seems like he’s this successful, handsome guy when really that was all an act.
This guy had something seriously seriously wrong with him. And unfortunately for many of the women that he did meet, their lives would never be the same.
One of these women was Mary Horton. She was born on the 16th of February in 1940 to Floyd and Lily Horton.
She grew up in Louisiana and attended Ununice High School. She was this beautiful, intelligent girl.
She wrote for the school newspaper. She was popular and she even went on to become the homecoming queen.
After graduating from high school, she went on to attend MCN State University where she was offered a spot at all five of the sororities there.
She joined theQi Omega sorority. And as she started her college journey, everything there was just going so well for her.
In 1960, she started dating Felix. She met him at the university, but he didn’t actually attend the university.
He would just kind of go to the university to meet people and hang out with people.
He spent a lot of time at the university just kind of like socializing, especially with the women.
Mary had a lot of guys chasing her. But out of all of these guys that, you know, wanted to go on a date with her, she chose Felix.
And when they started dating, things started moving very quickly. Things were going very well at the start of their relationship.
But as time went on, things started to go downhill. In June of 1960, Mary told one of her friends in confidence, “I really do love Felix, but I don’t think that I like him anymore.
He really is sweet, but we don’t see eye to eye on things.” She also requested that her friends set her up on a date with another man because she thought if she went on a date with another man, then it would kind of prompt Felix to leave her.
But then when Felix found out about this, he was not happy, to say the least.
He confronts Mary about it and instead of coming in super aggressive, he decided to tell Mary that he had a disease.
Mary is super confused and she asks him what the disease is and he tells her that the disease is Mary.
It was honestly a really hard situation for Mary at this time because she was struggling to find a way to leave him and she just she didn’t want to be with him but she just couldn’t find or bring herself to break up with him.
So, they stayed together despite their relationship troubles, and things only continued to get worse.
Mary started seeing other guys on the side, which, as I’m sure you can imagine, made Felix very jealous.
But despite demanding monogamy from Mary, he didn’t those rules didn’t apply to himself. And it seems to me like Mary was kind of going and seeing these other guys and and wanted to start seeing these other guys because the relationship was so bad.
And you know, he must have manipulated her to a point that she really didn’t see another way out of the relationship.
And she thought, if I date these other guys, maybe I can get him to leave me.
She was feeling trapped in the relationship. They would have these huge arguments. And Felix did get physical on at least one occasion.
And you’d think that being in such a bad relationship and things being so rocky, they would eventually separate.
But instead, they actually got married. They got married in Ununice, Louisiana on the 1st of July 1961 and went and honeymooned in Texas.
Then after their honeymoon, they returned back to Louisiana and they moved into an apartment there in Lake Charles.
Later that year, Mary started working as a second grade teacher. And it wasn’t long after she started work that she found out that she was pregnant.
And one of Mary’s colleagues said that Felix did not want this child. He didn’t want a child.
They were on completely different pages about parenthood because Mary was excited. She was excited about the prospect of having a child.
She was excited to be a devoted mother. At the same time, her and Felix really weren’t seeing a lot of each other.
He was working at this chemical plant still and he was working nights. Mary was working as a teacher during the day, so their schedules didn’t really line up.
And then in his spare time when he did have time off work, he would go out.
He would go play golf. He would go bowling. He would work on cars and motorbikes and just they really were not spending a lot of time together.
So Mary knew that once she did give birth, then pretty much all of the parental responsibilities would fall to her.
Still, they were trying to make things work. And it wasn’t all bad. You know, he did kind of help her come out of her comfort zone a little bit.
She, for instance, really didn’t like going out on a boat, and he would always try and convince her to come out on the boat with him.
They even went on a second honeymoon to try and rekindle things and get a bit of their spark back.
And then when they got back from the second honeymoon is when Mary gave birth to their son who they named William Felix Vale Jr.
But they just called him Bill. Within a month of giving birth to Bill, Mary believed that she may have been pregnant again.
And it was around this time that strange things started to happen to the couple.
One morning they woke up to find the hinges of their front door or their front door just completely taken off the hinges.
There was another time when they woke up and their front door was just wide open.
Nothing had been taken from the house but still waking up your front door is completely open.
It was very very strange. And then on top of all of these things, Mary started receiving threatening phone calls.
They came to the conclusion that whoever was making these phone calls was obviously stalking Mary or watching them because the phone calls only came when Felix wasn’t home.
So, whoever it was, they must have been waiting for Felix to leave before they would make these phone calls.
While all of this is going on, Mary also, you know, the relationship is still not going well.
Things are not improving and Mary goes and talks to her mother about the fact that she actually wants to divorce Felix.
Mary’s mother though is a very devout Catholic. So she completely did not agree with this.
She said, “No, you should really try and make the marriage work.” And so that’s what Mary did.
She decided to push through and hope that they could salvage their marriage. But it wasn’t long before tragedy struck.
On the 18th of October 1962, Mary and Felix decided to take the boat out.
They drove to Shell Beach at around 7:30 p.m. And not long before they got out on the water, Mary fell overboard.
Felix told authorities that she had fallen off in the Kauashu River while they were out together running trot lines.
He told them that while they were traveling up the river, Mary had spotted a stump in the river.
He swerved to avoid this stump and that is what caused her to fall in.
He also alleged that he jumped in immediately to try and save her, but he couldn’t find her.
Authorities immediately started searching the river for Mary. After 2 days of searching on the 30th of October, they found the lifeless body of 22-year-old Mary Horton.
She was found floating close to where Felix had said that she had fallen in.
A funeral was held for her the following day on the 31st of October, which friends and family who attended remembered her as the sweetest, kindest woman you could imagine.
Felix was arrested days later on the 4th of November. He was brought in for questioning where he refused to take a lie detector test.
Outside of this, he did seem to be quite cooperative with police, but there was just a few parts of his story that weren’t adding up.
First of all, he told police that when Mary fell overboard, she was wearing a white leather jacket, but when her body was found, she hadn’t been wearing a white leather jacket.
The coroner officially ruled her death as an accidental drowning, which was really strange to be honest that this even happened because even the police that found her body completely disagreed with this ruling.
To be honest, I feel like the ruling completely went against the findings from the autopsy as well.
So, the autopsy report showed that she had large bruises on her head and her neck.
She also had bruising on both of her legs. And most alarmingly, she had a scarf which had been wrapped around her neck and stuffed into her mouth.
How that makes this considered an accidental drowning, I have no idea. I don’t know that it was ever officially confirmed that she was pregnant either, but like I said before her death, Mary, it’s rumored that Mary believed that she was pregnant with a second child and her family said that she believed that she was pregnant at the time of her death.
Despite the obviously suspicious nature of Mary’s death, Felix was released just days later and the Kushu DA declined to prosecute him.
So, while all of this is going on, Mary’s aunt is looking after Mary and Felix’s son, Bill.
And thank God for her, too, because she looked after him at a time when no one else could or would.
If you couldn’t have guessed, Felix was kind of useless as a father. But months after Mary’s death, he shows up at Mary’s aunt’s place out of the blue takes Bill and says that he’s taking him to Mississippi.
He gets to Mississippi, really doesn’t stay long. I don’t think it lived up to his expectations.
He was a bit of a nomad. He liked to kind of just hop around.
So, he decides to leave Mississippi shortly after getting there and move to San Diego.
His brother was stationed there while he was in the army. So, I guess he thought that it would make for a good start.
But, he didn’t bring Bill with him. He left Bill in Mississippi with his parents.
In 1965, he finds a job at Mercy Hospital in San Diego as a technician.
And then at nighttime, he was taking classes or courses for English and speed reading.
He sends his mom a letter on the 9th of March, which reads, “It’s 10 p.m.
And we have surgery tomorrow at 7:15 a.m. I will have help with the pump on this one, but after it, I’ll have to operate alone.
I hope the first patient doesn’t die. Quite a few people do in heart surgery, so it is a possibility.”
He also said, “You can tell people about my job, but tell them that I am in Alaska.”
I’m not sure exactly what he was trying to hide from, why he wanted his mom to lie about his location, but it almost seemed like he was running from something.
Maybe he was running from the fact that he murdered Mary and he didn’t want to get caught for that.
I don’t know. Months go by and eventually he heads back to Mississippi. He picks Bill up and he takes him back to San Diego with him.
While he’s there in 1967, he starts dating a woman named Robin Sinclair. She was a 17-year-old girl at the time that they started dating.
And Felix, by this point, was 28 years old. When they first met, it was kind of more of a summer fling.
They broke up. Robin moved to San Francisco. They ended up reconnecting in 1968, and this time it was a little bit more serious.
They started traveling around with Felix’s son, Bill, and Robin spoke about how she noticed that Felix was a very neglectful father.
He was also on drugs at the time. And she even recalled that when Bill was 6 years old, Felix gave him drugs.
And when Bill was older, he confirmed that his father had in fact given him LSD.
Eventually, Robin falls pregnant and Felix is once again not happy about the pregnancy. He said that he thought that she wasn’t stable enough for a child.
And then he literally just vanished and ghosted his pregnant girlfriend. Robin wakes up one morning and he is just gone.
And she starts asking around, asking all of their friends, everyone that knows them, if they knew where he had gone.
And that’s when she learns that he had gone back to Mississippi because he didn’t want to be with her, which is crazy and also really sad because she was really in love with him.
And now she has been left alone while she’s pregnant. She’s in a really vulnerable place.
She had to go and move back in with her parents, which is where she gave birth to their daughter, and her name was Simone.
After the birth of her daughter, she writes Felix a strongly worded letter. Not sure what it said, but 2 months later, Felix just shows up at her place out of the blue.
Thankfully, she wanted nothing to do with him, and she turned him right back around and sent him packing.
And that was the end of that. And she described him as a fraud, bum, and kind of a joke.
So over the next few years, Felix spent some time in Mississippi and California, and he was living in San Francisco for a while, which is where he met another woman named Sharon Hensley.
Sharon was born on the 20th of December to parents Peggy and Harry Hensley, and she had a great childhood growing up alongside the Missouri River in Bismar, North Dakota.
She attended Bismar High School, and she was a part of the school’s competitive dance team, the Demonets.
She loved dancing and when she graduated in 1966, she went on to take classes in dancing and acting at Bismar Junior College.
When she was 19, her life took a little bit of an unexpected turn when she found out that she was pregnant.
She didn’t let this stop her from pursuing her dreams and she had always dreamed about getting out of Bismar.
I don’t think necessarily because she didn’t like Bismar, but it was just kind of a small town and I feel like a lot of kids that grow up in small towns have dreams of getting out of that small town.
So, when the opportunity came for her to get out of Bismar and moved to San Francisco, that’s exactly what she did.
She moved there with a couple of her classmates and then also her brother Frank.
When she first got there, she stayed at a home for single mothers, which is where she gave birth to her daughter, Cherry.
And she knew that she wasn’t going to be able to give Cherry the life that she deserved.
And so, she decided to give her up for adoption. It was really for the best because she didn’t feel like she could even support herself, let alone a child.
And then 2 years after giving birth to Cherry, she ended up in jail as well.
I’m not exactly sure what she ended up in jail for, but her mother, Peggy, came to San Francisco and she bailed her out.
Her bail was set at $5,000. After Peggy got her daughter out of jail. She ends up going back to North Dakota and Sharon stays behind in San Francisco.
And the whole situation was actually really traumatic for Peggy because first of all, her daughter leaves at quite a young age and then she’s pregnant at quite a young age.
Then she hears after moving away, she’s so young, she’s getting in this trouble, she’s going to jail, and Peggy was really feeling like she had lost her daughter.
Then when Sharon was 20 years old, she meets Felix Vale, who at the time is now 30 years old.
These kind of age gaps as well, you’ll see as we go further in the video, but they’re kind of a common theme.
The older Felix get, the younger he likes his women. So, he and Sharon start out as friends and then eventually, of course, they start dating.
Felix is still living his nomadic lifestyle at this point. So, he’s still moving around, hopping around, he’s housesitting.
He’s never really in one place for too long. And when him and Sharon start dating, she joins him.
They start hitchhiking around California together. And they’re doing this with Felix’s now 8-year-old son, Bill, which in and of itself is crazy to be hitchhiking and doing all of this with such a young child who should really be in school.
But what’s really crazy about this is that while they’re doing this, Felix allegedly tells Sharon that he killed his first wife, Mary.
Bill actually overheard this and understandably he was extremely upset by this information. He was only eight years old.
He had no idea how to process this information or what to do with this information.
So he told his friend, his friend told him that he should probably go to the police.
And that’s what he did. 8-year-old Bill went to the police. I mean, I cannot even imagine having to do this at such a young age.
At any age, but at such a young age. He told them everything. He told them that his dad was giving him drugs, that he was essentially preventing him from being able to go to school, and of course, he told them that he overheard his dad say that he had killed his mom.
The police were a little skeptical of him at first, but eventually one of the detectives did listen to him.
They went and tracked Felix down. They found him and Sharon at a beach along the Merced River, which is just outside of San Francisco.
And when they found him, he was in possession of LSD capsules. So they were subsequently arrested and charged with possession and also contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Sharon was let off. Felix plead guilty to the possession charge, but he denied having any involvement in anything to do with Mary.
For the possession charge, he received a six-month jail sentence and 3 years probation. California police did pass on the new information they had received about Mary.
What Bill had told them about Felix saying that he killed Mary. They passed this information on to Louisiana in the hopes that it might shine some light on Mary’s death, but the DA there really wasn’t interested at all.
The police who investigated Mary’s death believed that Felix was involved in some way, but there really just wasn’t any evidence against him.
So, while Felix was in jail for this possession charge, Bill went back to Mississippi to live with Felix’s parents.
They were given full custody and it seemed like finally Bill might be able to have a normal life.
Months went by and things were pretty normal. And then in January of 1971, Felix and Sharon showed up at the house out of the blue.
They weren’t even allowed to be in Mississippi. It was part of Felix’s probation. So, not only was it unexpected, but it was also very confronting for Bill because he was kind of the reason that his dad had gone to jail.
So, he was kind of scared that his dad would blame him. He honestly thought that his dad had shown up there to kill him.
I’m not sure why Felix’s parents didn’t call the police on him or have him removed.
I I guess maybe it’s hard to do that to your family, but they didn’t even send him away.
They let him stay there for a few days. And during this time, obviously, Bill is there.
So, Felix convinces Bill to sit down with him and talk it out. Allegedly, during this conversation, Felix tells Bill that he didn’t blame him for anything.
In fact, he blamed Sharon for everything for whatever reason. Then while they’re staying there, I guess Felix had missed a couple of parole meetings.
So authorities back in California where he had the drug charge and where he was on probation knew that he wasn’t there and they knew somehow that he had gone to Mississippi.
So the sheriff goes over to his parents’ house and they say, “Can we speak to Felix and Sharon?
The Californian authorities want us to bring them in for questioning.” Felix’s parents cover for him.
They say, “We don’t know where he is.” And then they smuggle him out of the state.
So he and Sharon hide in the floor of a car and they drive him to a bus stop so that he and Sharon can leave.
Once they get out of Mississippi, they continue to travel around and in the summer of the next year, so we’re now in 1972, he Felix and Sharon just show up at Sharon’s parents house in Bismar.
Sharon’s parents were so shocked because not only had they not had any contact for quite a while, but Sharon also looked completely different now.
She wore a minikrt with no panties. She had lost a bunch of weight and she was losing all of these clumps of hair.
And it was a really stark contrast to the girl that they knew. Her younger brother, Brian, said later that it was like she had been brainwashed because when she was asked a question, either Felix would answer it for her or she would look at Felix the whole time that she was answering a question.
Eventually, Felix and Sharon leave and they go back to Mississippi, back to Felix’s parents’ house, and he gets in trouble this time for violating his probation.
So, they don’t stay there. They continue traveling around and eventually Sharon calls her mom, Peggy, and she tells her that they are going to New Orleans and they’re going to Miami so that they can start making pornographic films.
And Sharon’s mom thought that the call was kind of strange and potentially a call for help because who just calls up their mom and says, “I’m going to go make pornos when they’re not even in contact.”
She contacts her family again in 1973 and this time she tells them that her and Felix have plans to go and travel South America.
This phone call is the last time any of Sharon’s friends or family would ever hear her voice.
She did also write them a letter after this phone call which had a photo of her in it.
And as far as we know, this is the last photo that was ever taken of Sharon Hensley.
By this point, she and Felix had moved to New Orleans where she was working at a strip club.
Eventually, they decided to leave and go to Miami to make their porn debut, and they did make a couple of spicy films, but it never really took off like they had hoped it would.
So, then in March of 1974, Peggy, Sharon’s mother, receives a letter from Felix. This letter says that he’s in West Florida.
He said that he had last seen Sharon a year earlier in Key West, which is also in Florida, and that he believed that she was now traveling around the world with an Australian couple.
Really didn’t have any information about this Australian couple except for the fact that their names were John and Vanessa and that they planned on going on this round the world trip and they were going to take Sharon with them.
He had no idea where Sharon was. He could only say that he had heard the couple discussing and Sharon discussing that they were going to go to the West Indies, to the Philippines, to India, to South America, to Hawaii, to the Mediterranean.
So really, they they could have been anywhere. Peggy really felt like there was something strange about this story.
Something was off about the story. And they never hear from Sharon again. So over the next year, they’re reaching out to her friends.
They’re trying to find out what’s going on, where Sharon is. Then they randomly get this letter from Felix’s mom of all people.
And she says that Felix, I don’t know why Felix isn’t sending this letter, but Felix was surprised to hear that they hadn’t heard from Sharon in all of this time that he and Sharon hadn’t been together.
This letter also said that the names of the Australian couple were Frank and Sally.
So, completely different to the names that Felix had given to Peggy. It also said that Sharon had burnt all of her identification cards so that she could go and get new IDs and essentially become a new person.
In an interview that happened after all of this, Bill said that Felix had told him at the time that she would never bother anyone again.
Bill was 13 years old at this time. And so when he when his dad told him this, he was upset all over again because he felt like it was his dad confessing to another murder.
But unfortunately, because nothing came of the first time Bill went and reported a murder, he didn’t feel like anything would come of it if he went to the police again.
So this time he decided not to. So then in 1975, Felix meets a girl named Sharon Campbell.
She’s 17 years old. He is 35 or 36 years old at this point, mind you.
He met her when he was he came and sat next to her on a bus.
He was heading to North Mississippi. Sat next to her, began chatting to her, flirting with her, telling her she was hot.
One thing led to another and they exchanged numbers or she gave him her number and they start getting to know each other.
It really didn’t take long for him to suggest that she come and start traveling with him.
And this time he told her that the only way her parents would allow it, considering she’s 17 years old, is if they got married.
I mean, he must have been really charming to be able to convince all of these women to basically just run away with him.
I don’t know if he was super charming or he was just really good at picking young, vulnerable, impressionable women and promising them the world.
I mean, he and Sharon had barely even met by this point and she was so excited already to run away with him and essentially leave her entire life behind.
They did get married. They got married in July of 1975 and they went and honeymooned in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
Several weeks later, they go to Louisiana to meet all of Felix’s family. And when they get there, Felix’s niece tells her, “You probably need to know that he killed his first wife.
They arrested him. We all believe he did it. He drowned her out of a boat.”
At first, Sharon didn’t really believe it, but as time went on, she started to realize that he was a massive sleas bag.
And she said he had no value in the female gender and that he hated women.
The real nail in the coffin for her was when he was working on his car.
She went over, took a peek over his shoulder, and she saw in the car he had all of these sinister surgical looking sores of all shapes and sizes in neat formation.
After seeing that, along with the information that his niece had given to her, she realized that he was a freak and she got the marriage enulled and she left him.
But Felix moved was quick. He was already married again by 1977, this time to a woman named Carolyn.
This marriage did not last long because Carolyn left him after she found him cheating.
And this was now his third failed marriage. And this is just marriages, right? There are so many more relationships that he went through that didn’t work out that probably also these women have insane stories about what a horrible person he is, too.
But after Caroline found him cheating, he drove into her car. Then a month later, he calls her and he’s like, “I still love you.”
Thankfully, Caroline’s response was along the lines of, “What the is wrong with you?” And the relationship was left there.
But Felix had already moved on anyway. He moved on with the woman that he cheated with.
Her name was Alexandra. And they got married. So this is now wife number four.
Shortly after they get married, she finds him, surprise, surprise, cheating. She confronts him about it.
And he does not take well to being confronted. And he told her, “You know, my first wife died.
I could have saved her, but I chose not to. It was for sure a threat.”
So she tells him to leave. She goes and has a shower, I guess, while he packs his stuff and gets out.
But instead of leaving, he goes into the shower and he attacks her. He wraps his hands around her neck.
She starts screaming and thankfully her younger brother is there. So her younger brother runs into the shower and grabs Felix off her.
He forces Felix to the ground and he probably saved his sister’s life. After that incident, Felix laid low for a little while until 1981, which is when he found his next target.
Anette Craraver was born on the 7th of December in 1965. She was a singer songwriter and she was an intelligent and creative young woman.
She was just 15 years old when she met Felix and she had dreams of becoming a midwife, but unfortunately that would never happen because instead she crossed paths with Felix Vale.
In the summer of 1981, Annette had a broken heart after a summer fling ended and she went to a yard sale with her mom.
While she’s at this yard sale, 41year-old at this point, Felix Vale, shows up on his motorcycle and he’s immediately interested in 15year-old Annette, I’ll remind you, and starts chatting her up.
And this is in Houston, Texas, by the way. Felix said himself later on, “When I saw her, I thought that’s going to be my new girlfriend, 15 years old.”
I will remind you again. Anyway, so in April of that year, Annette’s mom, Mary Rose, bought a house or brought a property in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The property had a rental cottage on it that was separate from the main house, and it needed a little bit of work done to it, but it was a good investment.
So, when Annette finished high school, she started helping her mom with the renovations. Shortly after moving to Tulsa, 41-year-old Felix Vale shows up again on his motorcycle, and he convinces Annette to run away with him somehow.
It all happened really quickly, too. One minute she’s at home with her mom helping her with these renovations, and the next she’s run off with some random dude in his 40s.
She was also supporting them. So, she got $500 a month in social security payments from her dad’s death.
And she was using that to fund her and Felix, which is typical Felix because all of these years he’s moving around.
He’s jumping from place to place, from girl to girl. He never holds down a stable job.
Yet somehow, he’s always able to survive. One of his signature moves was financial exploitation.
Just a few months after they ran away together in fall of 1981, Annette found out that she was pregnant and she was 15 at this time, just about to turn 16.
It’s beyond disgusting. It’s statutory rape. And Felix then forced her to have an abortion, which was really painful for her.
And it’s something that he didn’t force any of his other wives or girlfriends to do.
So, it’s clear that he was trying to cover it up because statutory rape. Later that same year, he was arrested for violating his probation again.
And him and Annette stayed together while he was I guess he went did a prison stint for this and they stayed together, continued to see each other.
When he was released, Annette was 17. They decided they wanted to get married. So they went back to Tulsa to visit Annette’s mother, Mary Rose, because they needed to get permission for Annette to get married because of her age.
They told Mary Rose that they were already spiritually married and that they were in love.
Now, Mary Rose reluctantly agreed to let them get married. But keep in mind, her daughter had just run away with this guy.
So, she was scared that she was going to lose her again. Felix and Annette got married in August of 1983 in Bakersfield, California.
And if you’re counting, then yes, this is his fifth marriage. Conveniently for Felix, Annette turned 18 4 months after their wedding.
And she got paid $100,000 in insurance money from her late father’s death, and she used this money to buy a Fiat convertible, pay for Felix to get some dental work done, and then paid off Felix’s debts.
I feel like based on Felix’s track record, you can probably tell where this is going.
And I wish that I could tell you a different story, but unfortunately, Annette and Felix had a lot of issues.
In April of 1984, Annette showed up at her mother’s house and she told her that she wanted to divorce Felix and enroll in college.
She also told her mom that he had a really bad temper and one time he had actually broken his hand when he tried to punch her, but he missed and had hit a wall and broken his hand.
Annette ended up staying with her mother for a few weeks at this time. And Felix just shows up to the house as he always does.
I’m not sure why Mary Rose allowed him to stay. Maybe she was scared of him.
I don’t know. But she ended up allowing Felix to stay. And the whole time he and Annette just fought constantly.
It seemed like by this point Annette had kind of grown to resent him and she wanted to date younger guys.
She expressed the fact that she wanted to date younger guys and this caused a lot of arguments and Felix was very jealous and very angry.
Eventually, he leaves and things go back to normal for a little while until he starts sending letters.
These letters were super weird, too. I’ll read you one of them. So, one of the letters she received wrote, “I went out to a park and ran and hung and talked with God and smoked some and shot some pool and rode with the top down out through the marsh playing I am butterfly in brackets in a ga dvida and bathing every inch of your body spirit being with love.”
Unfortunately, these weird letters work on Annette and they end up getting back together. Mary Rose said, “Anette told me Felix is the wisest person in the world and I can’t make decisions without him.”
She also said that Annette compared Felix to God. I mean, he had been manipulating this girl since she was 15 years old and she was still so young, right?
And I feel like you can really see that manipulation coming through in the way that and her age as well at the time of being manipulated coming through in the way that she speaks about him.
So when Felix and Annette get back together, they end up insisting that Annette’s mother, Mary Rose, move out of her house and sign the deed over to Annette.
I’m not sure what they did or how they did it to make her do something like this.
And it’s just another example of Felix’s controlling behavior. And it all took such a toll on Mary Rose as well that she started experiencing suicidal thoughts.
It was so bad that she decided to actually leave Oklahoma and move to California.
But before she left, she signed over the deed of the house to Annette for $7,000.
Sure enough, Annette added Felix’s name to the deed and eventually Felix removed Annette from that deed and it was fully in his name, which he did just a month later.
So, a month after all of this happened, the whole house was in his name.
A couple of weeks after this, Felix and Annette tell their neighbors they’re going on vacation.
But in October, Felix is the only one to return from this vacation. One of the neighbors did ask him where Annette was, and he said that she was likely in Denver.
And not to worry, there’s nothing to worry about cuz she had a lot of money with her.
When Annette’s mother, Mary Rose, found out about this, she immediately calls Felix and she’s like, “What is going on?
Where’s Annette?” He tells her that while they were camping, Annette had a dream about going and sleeping with some men in Mexico.
So, she decided she wanted to go there and do that. He claimed that the dream made them both realize she deserved her freedom.
So, he went and put her on a bus with $50,000. So, in October of 1984, Mary Rose reported her daughter missing and she told the police that Felix was giving multiple different stories about the situation.
She was basically telling them that she thought that Felix was hiding something and that he knew where her daughter was.
Felix wasn’t questioned in this case until January of the following year. So, great police work as always in these cases.
By this point, Felix had already filed for divorce on the grounds of being unable to find Annette.
Detective Dennis Davis from the Tulsa Police Department was the one who went and spoke with Felix.
He asked him about the life insurance money that Annette had received. And Felix said that they had spent most of this money traveling.
He said they kept it all in cash because they didn’t trust banks. And when he returned home, he found that they still had about $10,000 left.
All in all, he was questioned for about 2 hours before he was free to go.
And nothing really came of this interview, but it did prompt Felix the next day to hire a lawyer.
5 days later, Detective Dennis returned to question Felix again about Annette’s disappearance. Felix’s story is that on the 13th of September, 1984, he and Annette went and stayed at a hotel in Claremont, Oklahoma overnight.
And then the next day, they went camping for two nights. When Annette woke up, he said that she told him that she had decided she didn’t want to be with him anymore.
And he was like, “Okay, sure.” Which I’m sure as you can tell from the rest of this video is behavior very unlike Felix.
But he claims he accepted it and he went and dropped her off at a Trailways bus station in St.
Louis. Now the police didn’t recognize this immediately, but there is no Trailways bus stop in St.
Louis and there never has been. Felix then goes on to tell the officers that Annette planned to go to Denver.
She was going to get a fake ID there so that she could then go to Mexico.
They asked him to sit a lie detector test, which of course Felix declined. And with no actual evidence, that was it.
They had to let him go. After he gets released, he then goes and writes a letter to Mary Rose, basically blaming her for Annette’s disappearance.
And he also told her that Annette viewed her and her grandmother as zero self-image horse.
And to top it all off, he said that he and Annette had no plans to communicate.
He didn’t know where she was, and that if he did, he wouldn’t tell her.
Eventually, Mary Rose goes back to Tulsa in April of 1985. She goes to the house that she had had to hand over the deed to Annette from, and when she goes into the house, she finds that pretty much all of Annette’s stuff is gone.
Felix still owned the house, but I don’t think he lived there anymore at the time.
The only trace of Annette in this house was a suitcase, which had some photos of Annette inside.
It had some identification cards, and it also had some notes that Annette had written.
One of the notes detailed the fact that she had used most of the life insurance money to pay off Felix’s debts to buy the convertible.
And then she said that they put $26,000 in a bank account. And at the time of writing, it also said that they had $41,600 in cash.
Obviously, this note contradicted Felix’s previous statement that they didn’t put any money into bank accounts because they were he they were scared of banks or they didn’t trust banks.
So Mary Rose passes this note on to the police and it prompts Detective Davis to then go again and question Felix about the disappearance.
When he spoke to Felix, Felix’s story changed again. This time he was saying they actually divided their money up and they put it into smaller cashier checks, which also still contradicts the letter that says they have all this money in cash and they have all this money in bank accounts.
And despite Felix’s conflicting stories and the fact that none of it adds up, it was satisfying to Detective Davis and Felix was once again free to go.
And the investigation into Annette’s disappearance was closed. So this was now the third suspicious incident that Felix had been involved in, seemingly gotten away with.
And of course, it didn’t end there. All of these incidents also did happen in different jurisdictions.
So there wasn’t a lot of communication between these different jurisdictions at the time. They probably didn’t know about all of these separate incidents.
So, it was harder for them to look at the broader picture. Maybe if Detective Davis had known about Mary Horton and Sharon Hensley, then he would have looked into things and and thought that they were a little bit more suspicious.
Personally, I think it’s way too sketchy, even as a standalone incident, to just ignore all of the inconsistencies and close the case.
Anyway, like his story about Annette’s disappearance is so unbelievable. Are we really meant to buy the fact that this 15-year-old girl transfers over the deed of the house to this guy?
And then one day she just wakes up and she’s like, “You know what? I don’t want to be with you.
I want to go and be with men in Mexico.” So he says, “No worries.”
And he goes and drops her off at a non-existent bus stop so that she can go and be with other men.
Unlike the police, Mary Rose did not give up on her daughter’s disappearance and trying to find her daughter.
And she continued trying to contact Felix all throughout 1985. She finally gets in contact with him in September.
And she just asked him point blank what he did to her daughter and where her daughter was.
And of course, Felix refused to answer. She asked where all of her daughter’s clothes were because the house had been emptied out and he said that he had donated them to charity.
Then when she asked him about the missing insurance money, he said that’s all she really cared about and then he hung up on her.
2 years later, Mary goes back to Tulsa, and this time she spends thousands of dollars on a private investigator trying to locate Felix, but unfortunately, nothing came of it.
She still couldn’t find him. She continued to look for him herself. And eventually, she actually does find him.
She gets an address and she goes to confront him in person again. He just tells Mary Rose that Annette is in Mexico.
And this time, she’s like, “No, you have to give me more details.” But he couldn’t give her any specifics.
He couldn’t give her any more information than she’s gone to Mexico. And he also told her that he and Annette made this pact to contact each other every 5 years.
Of course, Mary Rose didn’t believe any of this. But it was really frustrating because there was nothing she could do.
Nobody would listen to her. She was certain that Felix was involved in her daughter’s disappearance, but nobody else seemed to care but her.
No matter what she did, she was always met with resistance. So, in the aftermath of Annette’s disappearance, Felix started seeing another woman.
Of course, he started seeing a woman named Beth Field, and this relationship went pretty much the same of all of all of his other relationships, which is to say it didn’t go well.
Reports online suggested that they frequently argued and that he was both verbally and physically abusive.
It’s actually alleged that Felix once hit Beth so hard that it ruptured her eardrum.
In August of 1988, Mary Rose, Annette’s mom, found out about Beth. And she actually got in contact with her to tell her about Annette’s disappearance and the fact that she believed that Felix was involved.
And Beth believed her immediately. She even confronted Felix about it. She asked him point blank if he had anything to do with the disappearance.
And allegedly, he responded saying, “What if I said yes?” They ended up staying together for another four months until one day Felix shows up inside of Beth’s house unannounced and he starts accusing her of imagined promiscuity, whatever that means.
I think maybe it means that she was imagining cheating on him. She was imagining sleeping with other guys because that also seems to be a very common theme with Felix and something that he commonly said that his girlfriends and his wives were doing.
When he got in and he accused her of this, there was a big altercation.
He allegedly hit her and threw her across the room and she was scared for her life.
She asked if he was going to kill her and he responded and said, “It depends on what you tell me.”
Thankfully, after this, Beth did leave him and she got a protection order against him.
They didn’t see each other again for 2 years until 1990 when Beth was at a clinic in in Texas and none other than Felix walks in.
She told him that he was sick and that he was dangerous. And I don’t think anything really came of this, but I do wonder if this, you know, it seems like a mighty big coincidence.
I wonder if he was stalking her and kind of planned this interaction, hoping for a different outcome.
Now, while [clears throat] Felix was roaming around, ruining more people’s lives, Mary Rose was still trying to find justice for her daughter, and she was still trying to find out what happened to her daughter.
So, in 1991, she drives to Canyon Lake in Texas to speak with Felix’s sister, Sue.
Sue tells her that Felix had told her that Annette wanted to leave him, so he drove her to a bus stop and she left with some men from Mexico to go to Mexico.
Now, she also told Mary Rose that Felix’s first wife had drowned. Up until this point, Mary Rose had no idea that Felix had a background of girlfriends and wives going missing and dying.
So, this really validated her suspicions that he had something to do with the disappearance.
Then, right before she goes to leave, Sue adds in and she says, “You know, there was another woman that went missing.
Her mom called my mom for years and years trying to see if we’d heard from her.
Her name was Sharon, I think.” So, now Mary Rose knows that her daughter is missing.
One of his previous wife is missing, and another one of his previous wives is dead.
Mary Rose starts collecting information on all of these women. She starts collecting as much information as she can about her own daughter’s disappearance, about Mary and about Sharon.
And she even goes to the local library to get as much information as she can.
She reaches out to Mary’s family and she gets in contact with Mary’s brother, Will.
It seemed like he and everybody else that knew Mary believed that Felix had killed her.
And he told Mary Rose about this. And he also told Mary Rose about Felix’s son, Bill, and how he had gone to the police saying that his dad had admitted to killing his mom, to killing Mary.
Will also gave her a news article from 1971, which had Sharon’s last name in it, which is Hensley.
And so, it seemed like every single person Mary Rose spoke to, she got a little bit more information, and things were kind of starting to come together.
In 1994, she reaches out to a private detective that she had read about in the newspaper, and his name was Terry Newell.
Terry was really impressed with all of the information Mary Rose had gathered so far, and so he agreed to help her locate Sharon Hensley’s family.
He was also contacting other colleagues that he knew, some who even worked for the FBI.
The Tulsa police and the Calcuchu DA both reopened their investigations into Felix, who was now a suspected serial killer.
And the case really started to get a lot of momentum. It was back in the spotlight.
Even Felix’s son, Bill, agreed to testify against him as long as he got some sort of protection for his family.
But for one reason or another, the case just fell to the wayside once again, which was heartbreaking for Mary because she had been looking into this for so many years.
And it finally felt like she was getting somewhere and things were finally starting to happen and maybe she was going to see some justice for her daughter.
And then the rug was just pulled out from underneath her feet once again. Years went by.
Felix was now approaching his late 50s and still dating woman after woman. Mary Rose moved to Western Massachusetts to try and get a fresh start.
And although she had lost a lot of momentum, getting justice for Annette was always at the forefront of her mind.
In the fall of 1997, a memorial was held for Annette where family and friends gathered to listen to recordings of songs that she had written and sung.
Felix’s son, Bill, went on to become an Eagle Scout, and he also graduated in the top 5% of his class at Mississippi State University.
He went on to become a mechanical engineer. And he married a woman named Janette in 1984.
And thank God, he was able to have this success and have this life despite his dad being generally the worst ever, feeding him drugs at like 6 years old, killing his mom.
He obviously had a very complex and confusing relationship with his dad. When he was asked by both Mary Rose and by the police if he believed that his dad had killed Annette, he said based on past experiences, I believe it’s entirely possible.
But then he also told his dad that he loves him and that he can’t help but love him.
And like I said, it’s obviously an incredibly complex relationship that I don’t think you can really understand until you’re in that sort of situation.
Unfortunately, Bill was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and he died in 2009. At his funeral, he had a tape played that he had recorded.
And this tape was him detailing how his dad had admitted to killing his mother, Mary.
Felix didn’t know about the tape at the time because he actually didn’t even attend his own son’s funeral.
But when he found out about the tape, he contacted the pastor and demanded that he hand over the tape.
Soon enough, a reporter named Jerry Mitchell also heard about this tape, and he was going to do everything that he could to get his hands on a copy as well.
Jerry had already been investigating Felix. He had already spoken to Mary Rose, and he had also already spoken to Felix’s sister.
During his investigation, he had found out that most of the police records about Felix’s lovers had actually disappeared, which might explain why the police were reluctant to actually look into this case and investigate this case because they had royally cooked it.
Jerry kept digging anyway. He was working with Annette’s mother, Mary Rose. And in 2012, the two of them went to visit the trailer that Felix was living in at the time.
So, this trailer was located in Mississippi. Felix wasn’t there at the time, but they, I guess, went in anyway, or they looked in the window.
I’m not sure, but they found inside a whole bunch of machetes and swords. Jerry also went and spoke to Felix’s other sister, Kay, and she said that she believed that Felix had murdered Mary, Annette, and Sharon.
She gave him Felix’s phone number. She also put him in contact with some of Felix’s other siblings.
Another person that Jerry spoke to was one of Felix’s close friends named Judson McCann and he said that Felix was a ladies man and he described Mary and Felix’s relationship saying many nights his car wouldn’t be home and Mary would be there with the lights on when Felix was gone.
It wasn’t because he was trot line fishing and he was obviously insinuating that Felix was cheating on Mary.
Judson also said that he didn’t buy the story of Mary drowning. That it made no sense for Mary to have been out on the river that night because Felix never spoke about fishing.
He only ever spoke about in Judson’s experience only ever talked about his boat for the purpose of going water skiing.
His boat also wasn’t made for trot line fishing, which is what he claims that he was doing when Mary fell overboard because his boat sat too high on the water for trot line fishing.
Felix didn’t even have a trolling motor on his boat, which is kind of essential for doing what he claimed that he was doing that night.
And then also the area that he claimed that he was laying trot lines in made no sense for him to be doing that because it was very high traffic.
There was the water was way too deep and it’s just not an area that anyone would ever lay trot lines.
Now, these weren’t the only people that thought that Felix had murdered Mary. I think pretty much every single person that knew either of them thought that Felix had murdered Mary.
Another one of Felix’s friends named Bob Hodges said, quote, “Nobody believed that it was an accident.”
The more people that Jerry spoke to, the more convinced he became that Felix was involved in her drowning and that he had actually killed her.
And so, he decided to share Mary’s autopsy report with a doctor in New York City.
And this doctor concluded that this was not an accidental drowning, that foul play was involved in her death.
After he analyzed the autopsy report, he concluded that she likely suffered from traumatic asphixia before she even entered the water.
And he also concluded that the scarf that was wrapped around her neck and stuffed into her mouth was likely stuffed into her mouth by somebody else.
So once again, the case is getting all of this momentum. Will Horton, Mary Rose, and Jerry are all on the case.
They bring in a former detective, Manuel, and he had been fixated on this case for years by this point.
He said, quote, “Felix’s story just didn’t add up. The fishing tackle was dry, the trot line was dry, the boat was dry, even Felix’s cigarettes were dry, despite him telling the deputies, he dove straight in the water to save Mary.”
So, they were all trying to convince anyone that they could to look into this case.
And they were almost successful when they had a meeting with a detective delouch. At the time he ran a task force that was dedicated to investigating homicides and when he took a look into the case he said that Felix Vale definitely fit the profile of a serial killer.
He and his team were interested in taking the case on but before they could before any progress was made Delouch left the task force and the case was once again left to go cold.
Thankfully, Jerry Mitchell did not give up and he went on to publish an article about the case.
And this article actually got quite a bit of traction. Like, I think a lot of people saw it.
It went nationwide. People saw it all over the country. The article detailed Felix’s life and the deaths and disappearances of his many lovers.
It also revealed the fact that Felix was a pedophile and he had a photo of a young naked child and detailed that the best sex of his life was with a child.
After this article was published, it really put this case into the spotlight once again.
It had a lot of people talking, a lot of people coming forward with stories about Felix Vale.
One guy that Jerry spoke to as a result of this article being published was a guy named Wesley Turnage and he had worked with Felix and he said that he recalled Felix speaking horribly about Mary.
He claimed that Felix said she wanted to have another kid. I didn’t want the one I got.
I fixed that. Sorry, She will never have another one. Also, according to one of Mary’s relatives named Steve Horton, he said that a bunch of the information on Mary’s death certificate was wrong as well.
So, they got the date of her birth wrong, the date of her death wrong, and they also got her occupation wrong.
So, they listed her as a housewife when she was actually a teacher. On top of this, the death certificate was allegedly signed by Felix Vale, but records show he wasn’t even in the state or in the area where the death certificate was signed at the time that it was signed.
The handwriting also looked nothing like Felix’s. So, it seems like the death certificate was fraudulently completed and filled out.
Also, Felix took out life insurance policies on Mary before her death. Won a year before her death.
So, he paid for this a whole year before she died. And then he also took out a second life insurance policy on her shortly before her death.
And despite receiving all of this insurance money, he didn’t pay a scent towards her funeral.
The funeral home had to take action against him, legal action against him. And even when they won, Felix still didn’t pay a scent.
Mary’s family ended up having to step up and pay that money. Jerry also spoke to another one of Felix’s co-workers named Isaac Abshshire Jr.
And he said that Felix would always talk about how ugly Mary was while she was pregnant and how he didn’t want the baby.
He also alleged that 2 days before Mary died, Mary and Felix came to visit him at his house.
While they were there, Mary took him aside privately and asked him if he would take the baby.
All these years later, when he was asked if he believed that Felix did kill Mary, he replied and said, “Oh my god, yes.”
On top of all of this, Jerry also went through the court filings for 1962, which is the year that Mary died.
What he found was that the same judge who had dismissed Felix’s case, also dismissed 882 other criminal cases that same year.
In the article that he had written about Felix, Jerry said that in at that time there was a lot of corruption.
And he insinuated that there might have been some pressure from the DA at the time.
His name was Frank Salter Jr. To dismiss a certain number of cases that year.
So, could it have been that Felix’s case just slipped through the cracks? Or perhaps there was something more at play?
Will Horton actually claimed that the the original detectives on Mary’s case said that Salter, the DA at the time, wouldn’t even let them present evidence that they had collected against Felix.
So, it definitely seemed like there was something fishy going on there. And also, can I say how crazy it is that Jerry, who is like an investigative journalist, has found out all of this information and released all of this information in his article.
Meanwhile, what what have the police been doing? I mean, if they had all of this information and their police, their detectives, they should have been able to get all of this information back when Mary died.
This case could have been solved a lot sooner. And if the case was solved a lot sooner, it also could have saved a lot more women.
It could have saved Annette. It could have saved Sharon. It could have saved so many other women that dated Felix who suffered abuse at his hands.
And sorry, not just women, but children, too. So, after the release of Jerry’s article, the Kushu DA agreed to finally reopen the case against Felix.
But by this point, Felix was nowhere to be found. He was now a wanted man.
And it seemed now with the help of law enforcement that if they actually did find him, he would finally be put on trial.
It was actually somebody that had seen Jerry’s article that called up to say they had seen Felix in Canyon Lake, which is in Texas.
When law enforcement go out to the property to find Felix, they do find him living in a storage shed on the property.
When they bring him in, they ask him about all of these disappearances and deaths.
And surprising to no one, Felix denied any involvement in any of it. He actually blames the families of the victims and the media for lying about him.
And the whole time he’s saying this as well, he’s got this stupid smirk on his face.
At this point, they didn’t actually have any evidence on him still. So, the point of them doing this was kind of to get his story, to see how he reacted under pressure, to see if he might willingly agree to some tests that might help them get some information or help get some evidence against him.
So, at the end of this questioning, he was free to go once again. This time, it wasn’t over there.
They didn’t just drop the case. This time, they were actually building a case against him.
They just weren’t able to actually arrest him right then and there. Despite not being able to arrest him, they had a whole mountain of circumstantial evidence that a whole bunch of people had come together to collect over the years.
One particular piece of information or evidence that was really important in this case was his journals.
He loved to journal. And although the journals aren’t actually available to the public, there have been some things that have been reported that were inside them.
Unfortunately, there were large gaps in the journals. So, it was clear that Felix had removed a bunch of pages from the journals, likely the worst parts.
But the one thing that stood out from his journals was his philosophy on life.
So, I’ll read that to you. It was kill and eat, restrain, redirect, release, burn, plow, nature and explore, be sexual, be gentle, be forceful, inquire and instruct, and do it all with love and joy.
And this was really weird because he’s not a known hunter. He’s not a known fisher.
So, what what did the kill and eat mean? He also wrote in 2005, “I was in bed with a woman and I was looking at an incredible assortment of knives and wondering if the knives were for cutting up large animals or even humans.”
The main topic of the journals though was sex and he went into great detail about his various different relationships with different women.
In 1986, he also wrote about being interested in children. He wrote, “The little girls were delicious.
We massaged some, hugged some, kissed some, and it was 12 and time for them to go.
Obviously, there was a lot of stuff in this journal, so I’m not going to go through all of it, but this was probably some of the most incriminating evidence and probably the closest that you will ever get to an admission from Felix.
Eventually, Felix went on to or he was trying to sell the Tulsa property that Annette had handed over to him.
And when Mary Rose heard about this, she became really worried that he was trying to go on the run.
And it looked like she was right as well because they found out that he had left Texas and he was pulled over in Mississippi.
True Felix fashion. He was moving all over the place. But this time, police didn’t want to let him get away.
Finally, after all these years, police decided that they shouldn’t let him get away. When they were finally satisfied with the evidence they had collected against him, they arrested him in Canyon Lake on the 17th of May in 2013.
And he was being charged with the murder of his first wife, Mary Horton. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough evidence for him to be charged with anything related to Annette or Sharon’s disappearances, but at least it was something.
After his arrest, police recovered a bag from the attic of the home that he had just sold in Tulsa.
In the bag were clothes and a prescription to a birth control pill that belonged to Annette.
And while this wasn’t evidence, it did seem kind of suspicious that he had held on to this bag for so long, it kind of seemed like he was holding on to it as a trophy or something.
I think what’s really crazy about this case, too, is it seems like every single person that knew Felix believed that at the very least he was guilty of Mary’s murder.
Even in the initial police report on Mary’s case, there were 15 different points that suggested his guilt.
So these different points included things that I spoke about earlier like the area that he claimed he was laying trot lines when Mary went overboard is not the kind of place or not the area that anyone would ever go and lay trot lines.
The troll line that he did have was not only dry but it was still in his tackle box.
So he hadn’t even taken it out and hadn’t even pretended to use it. There’s also the matter of the life insurance policies that he took out against Mary.
He had all these other bills, right, for this whole year that he was paying for Mary’s life insurance.
He had all these other bills and instead of paying them, he just let them pile up and he continued to pay Mary’s life insurance policy and then took out a second life insurance policy on her just before she died.
On top of this, there were countless people that said that he constantly said all of these horrible things about Mary and just had this general hatred towards her.
And not to mention over the years he practically admitted to it. He admitted it to his son Bill who came forward and told the police that he admitted to killing his wife.
And then he admitted it or at least partly admitted it to a whole bunch of other people as well.
His trial for the murder of Mary Horton began on the 8th of August in 2016 in Lake Charles.
The 76-year-old was finally being held accountable for what he had done more than 50 years ago.
District Attorney John D. Rosier laid out all of the evidence and spoke to the jury.
He told them, quote, “William Felix Vale quietly slipped the lifeless body of Mary Horton Vale into the Caucasu River.
The blow to her head and the scarf shoved in her throat along with the other unknown trauma would assure that she never breathe again.
Mary Horton [clears throat] is gone. Sharon Hensley is gone. And Annette Craver Veil is gone.
You are going to write that last chapter and it’s simply going to read and justice was finally done.
William Felix Vale guilty as charged. While he was only facing charges for Mary’s murder, the prosecution painted a picture of a man whose wives and girlfriends kept disappearing and dying.
They presented [clears throat] pretty much all of the evidence that we’ve already spoken, the letters that he wrote to Sharon and Annette’s mothers.
They had three separate men who got up and testified under oath that Felix had admitted to them that he had killed Mary.
They spoke of what a generally terrible person he was and how everyone in his life that met him thought he was a generally terrible person.
They also brought a coroner to the sand, Dr. Terry Walke, and he testified that generally when a person drowns, there is a thing called a dead person’s float.
And that is where a person who has died basically floats to the surface. The back of their head is what hits the surface of the water and then all of their limbs float down into the water beneath them.
He noted that Mary was her body was stiff and her hands were crossed over her chest kind of like she was in a coffin.
This would mean that she was already dead before she was placed in the water because rigger mortise had already set in.
Probably the most damning piece of evidence was the 4in hematoma on the back of her head.
She had all of these other injuries. She had all these bruises all over her legs, all over her body, and especially the 4in one on the back of her head.
It couldn’t be explained. And there’s no way that she got all of these injuries from falling off a boat.
Not to mention, they all appeared to be blunt force injuries. The scarf was also brought up, the one that was around her neck and in her mouth.
And this was brought up as what could have been used to esphyxiate her. A forensic psychologist said, “A scarf doesn’t go into the mouth by itself.”
My opinion is that Mary Vale died of traumatic affixia because she couldn’t breathe. One person that actually had a significant impact on this case is a woman named Gina Frenzil.
So, she was a private investigator who had been in contact with Jerry Mitchell, the journalist, and she had taken it upon herself to mislead Felix into thinking that she was romantically interested in him.
She used her relationship with him to record conversations with him, and she also managed to gather 2,400 photos of his journal entries, among other things.
She was incredibly important to this case, because without a lot of the evidence that she gathered, then the case probably wouldn’t have been as strong.
And Felix may have even been able to get away and flee the country. She handed over all of her information to authorities.
She also testified at Felix’s trial and she claimed that he expressed knowledge of killing people and that he also became visibly angry when she mentioned Annette.
Felix’s defense tried to claim Mary’s death was a freak accident. She fell overboard and Felix tried to jump in and save her, but he couldn’t.
They tried to question the reliability of the three witnesses who came forward saying that Felix had admitted to them that he had killed Mary.
They also claimed that it should have gone to trial back in 1962 when the original detectives on the case could have testified.
Worst of all though, they tried to claim that Annette and Shara might still be out there somewhere.
I think this part of the prosecution’s closing statement sums the case up pretty well.
They said, “How unlucky is this guy? His first wife dies. His second wife, girlfriend, disappears off the face of the planet.
His third wife disappears from the planet. He’s either the most unlucky person born on the planet since job or it is what it looks like, a killer who learned from his mistakes.
The jury only deliberated for 33 minutes before finding Felix Vale guilty of the murder of Mary Horton.
He was 76 years old at the time of this verdict. And it was nearly 54 years since Mary’s death.
So after almost 54 years, her family finally got justice. And it was also a win for Annette and Sharon’s families who have been waiting 32 and 42 years respectively.
I do find it unfortunate that he just got to live his life for 54 years.
You know, he had no consequences for all that time. The police really bungled it when Mary was first murdered by him.
He’s 76 years old. He he’s practically getting no consequences for his actions. And because the original police did such a bad job, he got to go on to murder at least two other women.
Who knows what else he did. He at least terrorized a bunch of other women.
Also, after the verdict was read, the prosecutor revealed or suggested that there could be other victims and also revealed that the FBI had found and discovered that he had molested a child 30 years earlier and he was unable to be put on trial for this due to the statute of limitations.
Felix was held in the Kushu Parish Correctional Facility while he awaited sentencing. When his sentencing did come along, Mary’s brother Will had the chance to speak to Felix.
And he said, “There is no decency in you, so I don’t expect you to ever reveal the truth about Sharon and Annette.
You’re not man enough to do that. You are a killer, and you are headed to the place where killers deserve to go, and God will direct you after that.”
Felix once again pleaded with the judge, with the sentencing judge for leniency, saying once again that Mary’s death was a freak accident, but ultimately he was sentenced to life in prison.
He did try to appeal the conviction claiming that the testimonies about Annette and Sharon shouldn’t have been allowed, but thankfully the appeal was rejected and he remains incarcerated.
He’s actually since done interviews from prison and to this day he still says that Sharon and Annette are both alive, but he won’t say where they are because they’re part of the Felix Veil Witness Protection Program.
It’s honestly crazy that it took so long for him to be held accountable for his actions and so much so that a lot of members of the families of the victims weren’t even alive to see justice served.
Obviously, after a sentencing, the question also became, “Were there other victims?” It’s impossible to say for certain, but his son, Bill, actually came out at one point and said that he recalled Felix talking about how he had been attacked by a bunch of Mexican men.
And he fought back, killed one of them, and chopped his body into pieces. He also claimed that he found a photo of a naked woman who was face down, and he couldn’t tell if she was alive or not.
Allegedly, Mary had also told members of her sorority that Felix had done something terrible in Mississippi.
And in hindsight, it seems like maybe she could have been alluding to a murder.
She also apparently told one person from her sorority as well that Felix had ran somebody over and killed them.
These could be the same incident potentially, but it’s impossible to know. And honestly, there could be a hundred more different incidents that he was involved in, and we’ll probably never know.
Personally, I’m inclined to believe that we’ve only scratched the surface of Felix’s crimes. It seems like I mean, this is a man that he’s capable of a lot.
He is a seriously deranged dude, and he got away with it for so long, too, that surely he had built up some confidence to commit more crimes and more murders.
But that’s everything for this case today. What do you guys think? What do you think?
Do you think he’s I mean, surely I feel like every single one of you will be thinking he committed other crimes because there’s no way.
There’s no way he didn’t, right? But this case really infuriated me because it just made me so angry.
The way the police acted in Mary’s death, I really feel like it could have been solved so much sooner and that could have prevented 54 years of crimes that he committed and could have saved so many other women and so many other children.
I mean, it’s really such a heartbreaking case and it’s such a frustrating case. It’s so frustrating when things are so obvious and they take so long to be solved like this.
But what do you guys think? Let me know your thoughts. That’s everything for this case today.
It’s all from me. I hope you guys enjoy the rest of your day and hopefully I will see you in my next video.
Bye guys.
