S2E6: The Disappearance of Bill Roland

00:00:01
Speaker 1: In the summer of nineteen ninety seven, Bill Rowland went to his lake house for a quiet day of fishing and never came home. But the trail he left behind, burned, scattered, and deliberately hidden, left just enough evidence to suggest a crime, but not enough to explain it. That’s next on Blood Trails. East Texas is a place where heritage runs.

00:00:32
Speaker 2: As deep as the tap root of a lob lolly pine. Family is everything.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: Traditions are sacred, and the yearly cycles of deer hunting and bass fishing make up the fabric of daily life.

00:00:44
Speaker 3: We love Eas Texas, we love going to the lake. It’s like my family is always done.

00:00:48
Speaker 1: That’s Jenna Sprinkle. She was born in Lufkin, a small town in Angelina County, and her family has been there for as long as she can remember. Jenna reached out to me a few months ago because she heard I was asking questions about another East Texas resident named Bill Roland.

00:01:04
Speaker 3: Bill is my grandfather. That would be my dad’s dad. My dad is rusty, and so that was Bill’s oldest son.

00:01:12
Speaker 1: Like his granddaughter, Bill Roland was steeped in East Texas culture, and that included a lot of hunting and fishing.

00:01:18
Speaker 3: I’ve always heard that he was one of the best of the best fishermen. If you want to catch the fishy, better go with Bill. He also loved to hunt. His two sons, Tobe and Rusty, they were big fishermen as well, and they loved to go with him. Yeah, that was one of their favorite things to do with their dad. He was a family man. He loved his family things like that, but when it was time to go fishing, he would go and fishing.

00:01:38
Speaker 1: And yeah, Bill was a member of a bass fishing club and he even fished competitively. But on Monday, July twenty first, nineteen ninety seven, he was hoping to go out by himself and catch some groceries crappy that is well.

00:01:52
Speaker 4: The family had been after sunby before and they generally put the boat up in a boat house, but they left it out on the pull up on the bank or Bill gonna come back and I’m wanting to do a little fishing, So that’s why he was out there.

00:02:07
Speaker 1: Don Morris was a Texas ranger and in nineteen ninety seven he’d been with the Law Enforcement Agency sixteen years. He told me that Bill owned a small lakehouse on Lake Sam Rayburn and the Angler had planned to go back out that day on his pontoon boat, but as far as anyone knows, Bill didn’t do any fishing that day. No one had heard from Bill by ten o’clock that evening, so Bill’s wife, Lynette called to see when her husband would be coming home.

00:02:33
Speaker 4: She called a lake out which had a phone over there, and it could didn’t get any answer, no answer to whatever.

00:02:39
Speaker 1: Lynette called a neighbor woman and asked her to walk over and see whether Bill was still at the house.

00:02:44
Speaker 4: She went over her and check, and all the last were out there. No pickup, no boat, no trailer. It was just like nobody’s there. You know.

00:02:54
Speaker 1: It wasn’t like Bill to disappear without telling anyone. As Jenna said, he was a family man. He wouldn’t wanted to worry his wife. But it looked for all the world like he’d hauled his boat out of the water and left. I’m sure officials assumed at first that he’d turn up before too long. He was known to throw a party now and again, and maybe he’d dragged himself back home the next morning after a night on the town.

00:03:18
Speaker 2: But that didn’t happen.

00:03:19
Speaker 3: I’m just always Aready went fishing and it never came back.

00:03:22
Speaker 1: As hours turned into days and days into weeks, it became evident that either Bill had run away for good or something much worse had taken place. That second possibility started to look like the tragic reality when two weeks later they found Bill’s truck parked on a deer lease thirty five miles from the lake house.

00:03:44
Speaker 4: It had been abandoned, the front end had been burnt, and the last of place was going and the keys were going.

00:03:52
Speaker 1: The trailer was discovered about a month later in a national forest twenty miles from the house. The location of the boat remained a mystery until that October, when a duck hunter found it tied off on a small cove on the lake.

00:04:06
Speaker 4: After we pulled it, that was able to determine that the floaters and moniting floaters had been shot two thousand east side, and it was at an angle to where somebody was owned a boat hm it shot down into it.

00:04:25
Speaker 1: The burn truck, the abandoned trailer, and the shot up boat strongly suggested that wherever Bill was, he wasn’t in great shape.

00:04:33
Speaker 2: But beyond these troubling signs.

00:04:35
Speaker 1: Investigators weren’t able to piece together what happened to the husband, father, and avid.

00:04:40
Speaker 3: Outdoorsman, and they kind of did the best they could do in that time. There were so many missing things that no that made sense, so still doesn’t.

00:04:48
Speaker 1: It will soon be thirty years since anyone has seen Bill Roland alive.

00:04:53
Speaker 2: What happened that hot.

00:04:53
Speaker 1: Summer day in nineteen ninety seven remains a mystery, one that the Pine Curtain of East Texas has yet to re.

00:05:01
Speaker 2: These forests offer solitude for those.

00:05:03
Speaker 1: Seeking a reprieve from the rat race of modern life, but the dense woods and deep lakes can also hide secrets. In this case, those secrets have spawned rumors of infidelity, drugs, poaching, neighborhood conflicts, and a man who everyone seemed to know, but these days no one wants to talk about. I’m Jordan Sillers and this is Blood Trails the Disappearance of Bill Roland, Part one, the Fisherman. Whenever someone goes missing under suspicious circumstances, investigators spend a huge amount of time digging into the life of the missing person. In Bill’s case, that wasn’t difficult.

00:05:47
Speaker 4: He is well known in Lufgen. Everybody in Lufkin knew him and doubt of him.

00:05:52
Speaker 1: Bill worked alongside his wife at a construction company owned by Lynette’s family. He was well respected as someone who knew his trade, and he’d become a fixture in the Lufkin area.

00:06:02
Speaker 3: He was a big man who never met a stranger. Everybody around here knew him.

00:06:07
Speaker 1: He was known not only as someone who could build you a sturdy metal building, but also as someone who could catch a fish and shoot a deer.

00:06:14
Speaker 4: He was a big fishman, big outdoorsman. He loved a card, he loved the fish, he loved you know, anything outdoor like he did. He did that all the time.

00:06:23
Speaker 1: I live in East Texas, and when we drove down to speak to Jenna, we also got a chance to meet Bailey, one of Bill’s other grandchildren. Bailey brought photos of his grandpa and virtually all of them involved the field and the water. That’s Bill, yes, sir, right, do you know who that is?

00:06:39
Speaker 5: Too? To Henry?

00:06:40
Speaker 2: Okay, who’s that one of his friends?

00:06:43
Speaker 4: Okay, fishing buddies.

00:06:45
Speaker 1: Yeah gotcha, Yeah, there was some big catfish man.

00:06:49
Speaker 5: But yeah, in fact they’re Rice boat Rice good number on the side.

00:06:55
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, gotcha.

00:06:57
Speaker 1: So they did like boat races too, nice.

00:07:00
Speaker 2: So just like a lot of stuff on the water.

00:07:02
Speaker 5: Yeah.

00:07:04
Speaker 3: On the woods.

00:07:05
Speaker 1: Bailey runs a tree service, but he told me that, like his grandfather, he spends most of his free time hunting and fishing.

00:07:12
Speaker 2: Like Jenna, Bailey is too young.

00:07:14
Speaker 1: To have personal memories of Bill, but he still hears stories from people around town.

00:07:19
Speaker 5: A lot of people, you know, just tell me they know they used to know Bill and stuff right right anywhere from you know, I go a bit of job or working somewhere, I’ll be on like just anything, you know.

00:07:33
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:07:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, So people still remember him and they know that grandson.

00:07:37
Speaker 4: Yeah, they bring it up. Yeah.

00:07:40
Speaker 5: I can’t get on their laces because of it.

00:07:42
Speaker 1: But oh you can’t. Yeah, oh really, yes, sir oh man, why is.

00:07:46
Speaker 5: That pretty good outlaw? You know he liked to kill stuff Bill David.

00:07:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, got chack.

00:07:52
Speaker 5: He didn’t really give a crat. What you know is what I’ve heard, you know, right right. I don’t know if that’s true. What was what I heard?

00:08:01
Speaker 2: A pretty good outlaw?

00:08:02
Speaker 1: In East Texas and in much of the South, this term isn’t used to describe a bandana wearing stagecoach robber on a most Wanted poster. It’s used to describe people who don’t care much for wildlife laws and, like Bailey says, prefer to do things their own way. Bailey wasn’t the only person I spoke to who mentioned Bill’s outlying ways, but we’ll get to that later in the episode. This also wasn’t the only interesting thing Bailey told me about his grandpa.

00:08:28
Speaker 5: Her was pretty good. Lighty’s Mandy, Oh really, yeah, how did you hear that? Old Lighties? Oh yeah, yeah. I got a call like two days ago and she wanted to tell me a start word.

00:08:44
Speaker 1: Bailey didn’t elaborate, and I unfortunately wasn’t able to track down this woman. It sounds like she had a story to tell, but I bet she wasn’t the only one. Bill was one of those guys who was larger than life. He was literally a big man, Don said, close to three hundred pounds. But he was also garious, friendly, and he liked to have a good time. He made an impression, and even to this day, strangers will approach Jenna and bring him up.

00:09:08
Speaker 3: I mean they yeah, they asked, They ask us about it, some like oh, that’s your grandpa, right, and we’re like, yeah, that is. People like to almost make jokes in a way like they’ve seen him in Vegas before and stuff, and I’m like, that’s not you don’t really say that stuff.

00:09:22
Speaker 1: You know. These kinds of comments put Jenna and Bailey in an awkward position. There Bill’s only living descendants, but since they never knew him, they can’t do much to satisfy the curiosity of strangers. It also wasn’t a topic of much discussion in their households. Jenna’s grandmother, the woman to whom Bill was married before Lynette, is still alive, but she declined to be interviewed for this episode. Bailey was close to his father, but he said he almost never talked about Bill.

00:09:51
Speaker 5: I mean nobody really talked about it much.

00:09:53
Speaker 6: You know.

00:09:53
Speaker 5: It wasn’t something you talked about, yeah, you know, whenever. It just was a sore subject. And right, nobody really talked about it.

00:10:03
Speaker 1: Jenna may not have known her grandfather, but his death still had a devastating impact on her childhood. Bill had two sons with Jenna’s grandmother, Jenna’s father Rusty, and Bailey’s father Toby. Bailey’s photos illustrate how close Toby and Rusty were to Bill, and I was told his passing hit them hard, even if they didn’t.

00:10:22
Speaker 2: Always express it.

00:10:24
Speaker 1: Bill Roland was many things to many people, a fisherman, a hunter, a husband and father. But for all Bill was in life, what defines him now is the mystery of his death. The man who loved the lake, who knew every corner and channel on sam Rayburn, disappeared into it, and the people he left behind have spent decades trying to understand.

00:10:46
Speaker 2: How and why.

00:10:48
Speaker 1: Finding those answers would mean tracing the last hours of his life, where he went, who he talked to, and what or who he may have encountered that morning at the lake House, Part two the search. As we learned in the Bob Smith case from earlier this season, a disappearance is often one of the most difficult criminal cases to investigate. Unless there are obvious signs of foul play, law enforcement sometimes doesn’t do what they normally would to interview suspects and collect evidence. This case is still open, so we don’t know everything investigators did and didn’t do in the days after Bill disappeared, but Ranger Morris tells me that there wasn’t anything in or around Bill’s lake house to suggest that Bill had been the victim of a crime.

00:11:38
Speaker 4: Nothing in the house, it gave any in any case, I wish wherever there was a half eaten sandwich in the refrigerator and some dog food on the table, and you’ll play there. And his wife, Lynette said that wasn’t there Sunday when they were there, so it had to happen sometimes we after Bill got there.

00:11:56
Speaker 1: And then there was she said, dog food there. But there was any sign of a struggle, no like blood anywhere.

00:12:04
Speaker 4: It was just no struggle inside or outside either.

00:12:08
Speaker 1: One Lynette’s daughter told a local paper that Bill had been going to the lake house to fish, but also to feed a stray dog that had wandered onto the property. This explains the dog food, but that and the half eaten sandwich told investigators that Bill made it to the lake house safely. The dog food also suggested that Bill had been somehow interrupted, As Lynete’s daughter pointed out to reporters, he wouldn’t have prepared the dog food and then just left it on the table. Despite this evidence, sheriff’s deputies told local media that they didn’t suspect foul play. Bill’s relatives questioned this determination, but at that point, about a week after anyone had seen the fishermen, it was still plausible that Bill had had some kind of boating accident or had just run away. His actions that morning didn’t indicate he was in trouble or afraid for his life. Investigators determined that Bill had stopped at a vet clinic, purchased fleet and tick medication, and then he purchased ice at a small grocery store about two miles from the lake house. The problem was the San Augustine County Sheriff’s Office was at the time ill equipped to deal with the murder investigation.

00:13:14
Speaker 4: They’re a small organizational where they don’t have a criminal investigator.

00:13:18
Speaker 1: By the time Don was called in to help, deputies had already been walking all around Bill’s property.

00:13:24
Speaker 4: You got to move now. When I got there, the search team had done been there. They’d been looking and walked around. They were and they hadn’t been in the house that much because it wasn’t obvious nobody in the house, but they’d been all walking around everywhere outside. If something happened outside, it could be condaminated.

00:13:39
Speaker 1: Law enforcement didn’t initially believe Bill had been murdered, but that doesn’t mean they treated his disappearance casually. Within twenty four hours of Bill being reported missing, friends, family, and local law enforcement launched what local media described as a massive search effort.

00:13:54
Speaker 4: We did a numerous searches on the lake by aircraft. The DPS flew of the helicopter sheval time looking for the boat, you know, on the lake or pick up what if we could find. And then they had numerous land search over there and they searched, you know, around where the boat was would have been lost, search around the house. Everything had horses. They were riding through the brush and looking at everything, and nothing ever showed up.

00:14:21
Speaker 1: The search drew officials from multiple agencies, including the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the San Augustine and Angelina County Sheriff’s offices, and the Texas Rangers. Searchers used heat sensing devices to peer through the thick brush around the house, and they sent divers into the cove. Since Bill’s truck and trailer were both missing, searchers wondered if he’d driven over to a local boat ramp to pull his boat out of the water, but all local ramps were searched, and no one could find any sign of the missing angler. Tips came in claiming to have seen Bill or his truck around Lufkin, as well as farther east into Louisiana. Investigators followed up on these tips and looked in locations Bill was known to free, but all.

00:15:01
Speaker 2: Their efforts came up empty.

00:15:04
Speaker 1: I don’t know exactly when investigators started to suspect foul play, but the first time those words are mentioned in media reports is August fifth, just over two weeks after anyone saw Bill alive. That’s when two teenagers riding four wheelers stumbled upon a silver Chevy Z seventy one pickup parked in the middle of the woods. It was over thirty miles from Bill’s lake house, but there was no mistaking it. It was Bill’s truck, and it became the first real indication that this case was so much more than a simple disappearance.

00:15:36
Speaker 2: That’s next after.

00:15:37
Speaker 4: The break.

00:15:45
Speaker 1: Part three, the truck, trailer, and boat. There were several reasons finding the truck sparked serious concern about Bill’s well being. The first, as you already heard, was that the truck had been burned from the seats through the engine.

00:16:01
Speaker 4: Bay, somebody’s stuffs and lambs in there, and maybe gas lane and what it was sitting for because there was a cloth down at a gas tank.

00:16:10
Speaker 1: The other reason investigators were concerned is because before torching it, someone had stolen most of the things Bill kept in the back seat.

00:16:18
Speaker 4: He had a lot of stuff in it. He had tools, he had good I mean, he had a lot of stuff in there, and it was pretty well not empty, but it was. It was pretty real clear, you know.

00:16:28
Speaker 1: The truck had been burned and ransacked about a mile and a half off of Neil Road in a heavily wooded area. Ranger Morris described the location as a deer lease, though he didn’t mention whether that lease had any connection to Bill. If you look at this location on on X, which you can do by going to the Meat eater dot com slash blood Trails, you’ll see that it isn’t really on the way to anything.

00:16:49
Speaker 2: It’s not like the truck was dumped off a highway.

00:16:51
Speaker 1: As the perpetrator fled the area, the vehicle was deliberately hidden, and investigators hoped they’d find a clue in or around the chef.

00:17:01
Speaker 4: They did a search team out there. They got a horse team search Renner and they didn’t find nothing.

00:17:06
Speaker 1: The Tyler Morning Telegraph reported that officials also flew a helicopter over the area, but to no avail. However, they did find something strange a few days later.

00:17:16
Speaker 4: They were going to come back at Saturday, which they did after this we found is And as they were coming in they started search nowhere and they found a whole kind of tools along the face over there.

00:17:28
Speaker 1: Huh, how did they get there?

00:17:30
Speaker 2: What do you think happened?

00:17:30
Speaker 7: I think who said the vehicle on force? They found out we got a bid man tools? Right, we don’t want to take these? Yeah, if you didn’t quite catch it.

00:17:42
Speaker 1: Ranger Morris says he believes that the people who set the vehicle on fire were also the ones who took the tools, but he thinks they didn’t know whose tools they had taken until the paper started reporting that Bill’s truck had been found. Once that happened, they realized it would look bad for them to be caught with all of Bill’s stuff, and so they went back and dumped it. Do you think the same person who was responsible for Bill’s disappearance burned the truck or could have been a different.

00:18:10
Speaker 4: Person, a different person.

00:18:12
Speaker 1: Oh so you think it was some kind of thief found the truck? Well, June was oh, okay, okay, So some kids found the truck. They said, let’s take this stuff that’s in it and burn it. And then they realized, oh, oh, like this could be this guy’s truck that disappeared.

00:18:34
Speaker 4: We don’t want these things.

00:18:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, remember how I mentioned that the truck had been found by a couple of kids on ATV’s Ranger Morris believes it was those kids that burned the truck and took Bill’s stuff, not because they were responsible for his disappearance, but just because they were a couple of hooligans. Ranger Morris didn’t explain exactly why he believes that, which isn’t really surprising given the open status of the investigations. Possible those kids confessed to their crimes. That’s the case. The burned out truck is far less suspicious than it first appears. But if they didn’t confess, if their responsibility is more of a theory than a known fact, I can’t help but wonder why would those kids burn the truck and not try to drive it or at least strip it and sell it for parts. They might not have wanted to take that risk if they knew it was the truck that belonged to the missing man. But if that’s true, why didn’t they report it as soon as.

00:19:28
Speaker 2: They found it.

00:19:29
Speaker 1: It’s also worth pointing out that Bill had tools and guns in that truck or Andrew Morris didn’t mention any guns being returned in the days after the truck was found, So did the teen steal those as well, or were they taken by someone else. Whatever actually happened, whether the truck was burned by the perpetrator trying to hide his crime or by a pair of board teenagers, that Chevy didn’t provide the answers investigators were looking for. Angelina County Chief Deputy Jim Casper told the media that they were quote basically back where we started. Even after they found the truck. They weren’t able to find any clues as to Bill’s whereabouts, and they weren’t even willing to speculate. Casper said that while they were considering foul play, they also thought it was possible Bill had just left. So then the other piece is the trailer, right, because the trailer wasn’t with the truck, even though it had been with the truck. According to the family, when Bill was there, it was no.

00:20:26
Speaker 4: Longer with the truck. The truck the trailer was at the lake out Oh Okay. What I’m saying is it was someone had take hit the same time he took to picka and got rid of the trailer in the National Forest and Broadest, Texas, which is on the way to where the hunt least was the pickover found.

00:20:43
Speaker 1: Okay, So they have the truck and trailer, and they dumped the trailer one place, the truck another place. The trailer hadn’t been burned or damaged, at least as far as I know, but it was clear that, like the truck, someone had tried to hide it. What struck investigators as especially odd was that Bill’s pontoon boat wasn’t on the trailer. Bill had parked that boat on the bank of the lake outside his house, but it wasn’t there by the time the search began. The location of that vessel remained the biggest mystery of the case until October of nineteen ninety seven, about three months after Bill’s disappearance.

00:21:18
Speaker 4: Ken Hints to the sheriff Angelina County called me one night about ten o’clock said, I think I found Bill roll a boat, and what happened was a duck clunter found a boat.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: The boat had clearly been there a while. It was tied off under a willow tree, and detectives found sap on the deck that had dripped down over the preceding months. It was also clear that someone had driven it into the cove intentionally. It hadn’t just drifted there from somewhere else. It had been tied to the tree, and the boat’s top had been taken off and thrown into the water, likely so it could be driven deeper into the brush.

00:21:52
Speaker 2: Like the truck and the trailer.

00:21:53
Speaker 1: The boat had been hidden in an apparent attempt to delay the investigation. Did you find anything on the boat or about the boat that indicated anything about what happened to Bill?

00:22:04
Speaker 4: Well, there was some stuff about the boat that wouldn’t like it was when they left it Sunday, Like them past seats on the back back there where you see it and cast off like that. Well, they had been moved. They had been moved over to a coner over there, and right there at the edge there’s a little strip of that carpe had been tore out for some reason.

00:22:26
Speaker 1: Rayner Morris said the carpet had likely been torn out to hide something such as a bloodstain or some other evidence. The seat was one of those raised removable models that make it easier to fish. Bill’s family said he wouldn’t have removed the seat himself, though It’s tough to be certain, but what investigators knew without question is that someone had tried to sink that boat.

00:22:47
Speaker 4: Af we pulled it. That was able to determine that the floaters and mounting floaters had been shot two times on each side, and it was at an angle to where somebody was owned a boat. It shot down into it.

00:23:06
Speaker 2: Was it a rifle?

00:23:08
Speaker 4: It appeared to be a twelve gaye shotgun.

00:23:10
Speaker 1: Okay, so someone was standing in the boat with a shotgun shooting down at those pontoons. Do you think to try to sink it?

00:23:18
Speaker 4: I assume so. I think that’s what that moative was. Yes, yeah, I didn’t think he won’t sink. All they do is gather more water.

00:23:25
Speaker 1: The boat being more seaworthy than the perpetrator had hoped, he opted for plan B and drove the vessel to the back of a cove and tied it off. Whether he planned to come back later and sink it, we’ll never know, But as it turned out, that wouldn’t have been necessary.

00:23:39
Speaker 4: I think the investigation was slow gold if it was hard to find the stuff because the boat had no kind of blood anything like that, or it was anything was sycamore tree or will it tree rather? And I we had all kinds of samp on it. We took several sample nothing come out of it.

00:24:00
Speaker 1: Bill’s nineteen ninety four low pontoon boat didn’t lead investigators to a suspect, but it was nonetheless suggestive. Obviously something that farious had happened related to that boat, Otherwise why would anyone try to sink it? Before the boat was found, detectives had to wonder whether Bill was kidnapped and then taken somewhere else. Now they had evidence suggesting that Lake sam Rayburn should be.

00:24:22
Speaker 2: The focus of their search.

00:24:24
Speaker 1: That assumption was bolstered by the absence of two items that should have been found but never were.

00:24:31
Speaker 4: You forgot to ask about a ladder.

00:24:35
Speaker 1: Yes, tell me about the ladder, because Bill, Because that is one thing that the news reports say from the time is that when they’re still looking for the truck. We’re looking for a truck and it usually has this ladder in it.

00:24:47
Speaker 4: So particular, he had this sixteen foot five of class letder right right, So he has the ladder in the back of his pickup.

00:24:54
Speaker 2: But that’s gone.

00:24:56
Speaker 4: Is that right? What do you think I have not been found? Okay, of course, I’m telling you just a theory. I don’t know what it was mastered anything. Was he truthful or not? I have no way to prove it. But you know, Bill weigh three hundred pounds and when you put that pontoon boat up on that, the banker the fourth part up or gets high. Well you ever trying to lift the three hundred pound me? You know I can’t. But if he got a ladder, he’s trapped to the ladder. He figured out one end for the fire picked the other than enough for the fire m You got to move the seats out of the way. And then there’s some concrete five gallon buckets that are missing.

00:25:37
Speaker 1: Really he used that for anchors, So picks him up into the boat, uses the concrete buckets to sink. Bill’s family said he had an orange ladder in the back of his pickup, but it wasn’t there when his.

00:25:51
Speaker 2: Truck was discovered.

00:25:52
Speaker 1: Ranger Morris’s theory is that the perpetrator incapacitated Bill at the lake house, strapped him to the ladder, and used it as leverage to get him into the pontoon boat. He had to move the seat to get the ladder in the front of the boat, and he used Bill’s concrete anchors to sink the man and the ladder in the lake. He tied off the boat close enough to walk back to the house, where he stole the truck and trailer and dumped them at different locations to impede the investigation.

00:26:18
Speaker 4: I assume they wanted to make sure that make you seem like Bill wasn’t there. I don’t know, you know that makes sense.

00:26:25
Speaker 1: So if they take the trailer and there’s no boat, then we assume Bill maybe took the boat out himself.

00:26:32
Speaker 4: No pivot, right right.

00:26:35
Speaker 1: This theory explains the how, it accounts for the evidence we have, and proposes a plausible sequence of events for Bill’s disappearance, but it doesn’t address the who or the why. We still have no idea who would have wanted Bill dead or whether more than one person was involved. We don’t know if this was an argument gone wrong, a premeditated murder, or an attempt to cover up some kind of accident. For all the questions the truck, trailer and boat helped answer, they raised three times as many. For Jennet and Bailey. Those questions have never been abstract. Bill’s disappearance cast a shadow over everyone who loved him, including the sons who spent years searching for answers they never found.

00:27:17
Speaker 3: When I was eight years old, my dad took his life. And I feel as though, in the stories that I’ve heard, like he just wanted his dad, He wanted to know what his dad and it was just eating at him, like he couldn’t take it no longer.

00:27:29
Speaker 4: Like he wanted to know what happened to his dad.

00:27:31
Speaker 3: He was thirty one and when it had happened, So there were lots of memories, Like he was old enough to understand what has happened.

00:27:37
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:27:38
Speaker 3: So I feel as though like he would still be here today.

00:27:40
Speaker 4: If that didn’t happen.

00:27:42
Speaker 3: Yeah, because I’m sure himself searched forever over there right where is hey?

00:27:47
Speaker 4: What has happened?

00:27:48
Speaker 1: Rusty wasn’t the only one searching for his father. I was told that Lynette spent tens of thousands of dollars hiring private investigators, but she couldn’t find her husband, and the small town attention and speculation turned her into a recluse. She passed away in February of twenty twenty one, and Toby followed her in December of that year. I’m sure investigators know or think they know, the answers to some of the questions that haunted Rusty, Toby, and now their kids, but as with most cold cases, those detectives are hesitant to release too many details, and they’re not the only ones. It was incredibly difficult to find people who knew Bill and were willing.

00:28:28
Speaker 2: To talk to us on the record.

00:28:29
Speaker 1: Even those who did told us point blank that they knew more than they were willing to share. In one instance, someone seemed willing to talk to us but was shut down by another person who said Bill’s death wasn’t a topic we should be discussing. That’s next after the break, Part four, Catfish Junction. Part of the reason I wanted to cover Bill’s case is because it happened in my backyard. Luffkin is only about two hours from where I live in East Texas, and I was excited to drive down to the area and do interviews in person. If you check out the video version of this podcast on YouTube, you can see those interviews, along with some amazing footage of Lake sam Rayburn, Bill’s old house, and the Angelina National Forest. I drove down with my buddy and videographer David McDaniels, who you might know from his articles in Bear Hunting Magazine or his video work for Brent Reeves podcast This Country Life. I tell you this because not only did David operate the camera for this episode, he also did some pretty great on the ground reporting.

00:29:42
Speaker 6: And met a guy today named Delwyn at Catfish Junction restaurant.

00:29:48
Speaker 1: David called me during a trip back down to Luffkin a few weeks after we spoke to Ranger Morris, Jenna and Bailey. He was shooting more footage of the area and he pulled over at a restaurant called Catfish Junction. He asked an employee there, a guy named Delwin, if he could record video of the outside of the restaurant.

00:30:06
Speaker 6: Delwan ended up sharing a lot of really interesting details with me. He knew Bill personally knew a lot about him that he shared and just wanted to tell.

00:30:16
Speaker 1: Delwan explained that he and Bill had fished together on a few occasions, and Bill was a frequent patron at the restaurant. But David noticed that the catfish merchant chose his words carefully.

00:30:27
Speaker 6: Then he made some He also made some kind of vague references. He was really kind of broken in some of his communication around. It, almost like he was trying to sort through what details to share in which ones he did not.

00:30:40
Speaker 1: The details he did share were interesting, to say the least.

00:30:44
Speaker 6: He also mentioned that somebody did not say who told him that Bill was wrapped in some kind of fish net and dropped in the lake. Someone else said he said that he made it sound like another person said that Bill was stuffed in an oil barrel and buried underneath something. I couldn’t tell if he was saying it was underneath the structure or something, but he basically referenced that he was buried out near where his pontoon bow was found shot up. At the different point of conversation, he also referenced that there was speculation around that Bill’s wife may have been involved. That I guess Bill had a one million dollar life insurance policy.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: These are the kinds of rumors that always circulate after a disappearance, and trust me when I say there are more where these came from. For example, one of Bill’s associates told me that she believes Bill got on the wrong side of the area’s drug dealers. She thinks he saw something he wasn’t supposed to, the drug dealers killed him, and law enforcement looked the other way. This associate declined to be interviewed for this podcast, and Ranger Morris told me he never found any connection between Bill and the drug trade. Another particularly juicy rumor was that a guy named Heath was having an affair with Bill’s wife. I saw this theory on an Internet forum, which normally I wouldn’t take too seriously, but when I looked into it, the details checked out. This person said that Heath and Bill were both working on building a bus stop for a high school, and the theory is that Bill was buried underneath that concrete. I asked Jenna about this, and she knows the bus stop in question and remembers law enforcement searching underneath. They didn’t find anything, but the fact that they looked lends at least some credence to the rumor. This anonymous Internet poster also mentioned that Heath was a Freemason and so looking into Bill’s death, they claimed would be dangerous.

00:32:45
Speaker 2: The Masons are.

00:32:46
Speaker 1: A secret of society that some view as dangerous. I don’t know about what the internet poster said, but Jenna did confirm that the Masons performed a ceremony at Heath’s funeral. It’s also worth noting that Heath was good friends with Bailey’s dad, Toby, and like Jenna’s dad, Heath died by suicide. I reached out to Heath’s friends and associates, but did not hear back by the time of this recording. All these rumors are second or third hand, but Delwyn did mention one thing he could speak to personally.

00:33:16
Speaker 6: He shared that it was pretty well known that Bill was messing around with one of the waitresses that worked at the restaurant at the Catfish Junction, which he said that his words were Bill light here every weekend. If I understood him correctly, he literally made it sound like that waitress like when they found out that Bill was missing that a that he saw her like basically weeping, and it sounded like she actually quit her job there at the restaurant after that happened. It seemed like he was insinuating that those things were actually related in some way.

00:33:57
Speaker 1: Remember how Bailey mentioned that Bill was a bit of a lady. Delwin insinuated the same thing, and it’s hard not to wonder if one of those alleged relationships may have led to Bill’s disappearance. Apparently law enforcement was thinking the same thing. I called up San Augustine County Sheriff Robert Cartwright, whose father was the sheriff when Bill went missing. He wasn’t involved in the investigation, but he told me his father and Ranger Morris interviewed several people in connection to the case. Two of them were a husband and wife who lived in the county. The wife was a nurse, and Sheriff Cartwright recalled that they thought she might have been quote slipping around. The implication was that she and Bill had some kind of relationship, and maybe the husband was involved in Bill’s disappearance. It’s just speculation. But when three unrelated people, one of whom is a county sheriff, mentioned the same thing, you have to take it seriously. But here’s where things get a little weird. If they aren’t already weird enough. David left Catfish Junction, called to tell me what he’d heard, and then went back to the restaurant to see if Delwyn.

00:35:00
Speaker 2: Would agree to a recorded interview.

00:35:02
Speaker 6: When I came back to the restaurant to try to talk with Delwyn Moore, the owner of the restaurant, was there a guy named Danny. Really nice guy, but seemed really interested in just dampening the conversation. Delwyn and I were starting to engage in some more conversation and Danny jumped in a couple different times and said basically, yeah, man, just really not good to speculate, really not wise to gossip.

00:35:30
Speaker 1: David said he had a good conversation with Danny about other topics and he wasn’t unkind or aggressive.

00:35:37
Speaker 6: But definitely seemed like he was not interested in me talking with him, or really with Delwin anymore about the situation with Bill. I wasn’t sure if there was almost like an underlying if there was a fear there or something associated with just not wanting to bring it up. But it’s interesting to say the least.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: Stirring the pot in a small town has its downside. So if that’s actually the reason for Danny’s hesitation, I get it. Jenna told us that while she has her own theories about what happened to her grandfather, she decided not to express them publicly. It’s awkward to accuse someone of murder if you might see them in line at the grocery store. Still, it seemed like Delwin had things to say, and I wasn’t about to give up. So about a week later I called Catfish Junction to give it another shot. Catfish Junction, Delwin was there and he agreed to be interviewed. He told me that yes, Bill ate at Catfish Junction all the time, and Delwin and his brother were part of the same bass fishing club.

00:36:39
Speaker 8: The day went missing, my little brother has sham on the Cooma seven oh five. A little store there. My little brother stopped in to get a beer, and the Bill within there by an aisle, said he was getting ready out on lake coffee fishing.

00:36:53
Speaker 1: This trip to by Ice was, as I mentioned earlier, the last time Bill was ever seen in public.

00:36:59
Speaker 2: Was he acting strain usually at all or did he seem normal?

00:37:01
Speaker 1: No?

00:37:03
Speaker 8: Adam said, he just talking, said he was in there all getting nice. He’s getting ready to go on with light go fishing.

00:37:09
Speaker 1: I asked Delwin if he could tell me anything else about the diehard angler. The first thing he mentioned was that waitress.

00:37:16
Speaker 8: He shit out and eat with her all the time when he come in. It was sort of a lady’s man away.

00:37:22
Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:37:23
Speaker 8: Yeah, he’s a big old guy and worked hard, made good money, and he come in, eat and always leave girl fifteen twenty dollars till you know mm hmm, yeah, she was waitress.

00:37:34
Speaker 1: Whether things went any farther than a generous tip and a few jokes, Delwin couldn’t.

00:37:38
Speaker 8: Say no, all just as he’s always sitting down talking to him and all that kind of stuff. I never seen him go out when a woman or anything like that. He was a married man, but they just enjoyed talking to him.

00:37:51
Speaker 1: You know. That context is helpful, though it does still align with Bill’s reputation as a ladies man. I also wanted to ask Dewan about the other thing Bailey told us about his grandfather. One thing his grandson mentioned is that he was a bit of an outlaw when it came to hunting. Did you ever hear anything about that?

00:38:11
Speaker 8: Oh, yep, he didn’t. He didn’t follow.

00:38:18
Speaker 2: Just like hunting maybe on like private private land stuff like that.

00:38:23
Speaker 4: Just shooting off the road.

00:38:24
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, gotcha, gotcha.

00:38:28
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, he was good sports.

00:38:30
Speaker 8: But he’s shooting while he’s driving.

00:38:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, it’s the opportunities there, right, I were back in the day.

00:38:39
Speaker 8: On outlaw or big time.

00:38:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, I’ll do it now day.

00:38:44
Speaker 8: They got it for colle too much.

00:38:46
Speaker 1: I’ve never heard anything to indicate that Bill’s disappearance is related to his outlawing, but it nonetheless speaks to the man’s tendency to do his own thing, to have his own way, and that aspect of his personality does factor into the only law enforcement backed theory about who might have killed Bill.

00:39:04
Speaker 4: There was a neighbor in the coaches that Bill lived in a culture sack. That and just this his outen. The neighbor’s house here, Bill’s house here, than another one right apart, And there was a culture sack. And this neighbor lived darned he was there all day long. He’s been interviewed a couple three times and he said he’d never seen Bill. Don’t know what happened to him, you know, like.

00:39:26
Speaker 2: That, m do Can you tell me anything about what the conflict was there?

00:39:33
Speaker 4: I don’t know of any conflict. Okay, I don’t know if any Bill, it’s never mentioned you think Lynette by any kind of conflict anything like it. I’m sure they’ve seen or talk to him. Know it’s time they spend the time on the lake or right, But I don’t know if any conflict in Lynette. Like I said, didn’t know of any conflict.

00:39:49
Speaker 1: We don’t know this neighbor’s name or whether he’s still alive. But Delwyn also mentioned this person and after a little pressing, he was more forthcoming about what was going on in that secluded past of lake front property.

00:40:01
Speaker 8: Him is next door neighbor down there on the lake, was always getting into it at the house in the late then he got into it two or three times. Oh yeah, pretty good audument.

00:40:12
Speaker 2: Yeah what do you know what they were fighting about?

00:40:16
Speaker 8: No, not in not in particular, I don’t. I do you know him and Bill didn’t get along real good, That’s all I know.

00:40:24
Speaker 1: Yeah, so Bill, Bill told you he just kind of tried to keep to himself and not and not bother.

00:40:29
Speaker 8: This guy Bill was a drinker who drank his beer and stuff, and he he throw parties dinner at the lake house. You know, and this man didn’t like the party, didn’t drinking going on next door, I guess. And he said every time he could get a party together, that man had come on and tell him they need to leave. He didn’t like all that party and drink and loud music, and Bill told him what to get all that a couple of times.

00:40:55
Speaker 9: I think.

00:40:56
Speaker 1: So a conflict over a house party might seem like a weak motivation for murder, but as we saw in the Mike Krit’s case, where a hunter was murdered after getting into a neighborhood conflict, even a seemingly minor argument can spiral into violence. It’s also worth pointing out that the people who live in a neighborhood like this do so for the peace and quiet. There are more homes now than there were in nineteen ninety seven, but when we visited earlier this year, it was dead silent. No one came out to talk to us or answered when we knocked. It was honestly a little creepy, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it, But a big party would have felt very out of place. So even though it’s still a weak excuse for homicide, I can see why Bill’s neighbor might have been upset. What’s more, Delwin isn’t the only person to acknowledge that Bill was having an ongoing conflict with his lake house neighbor. In two thousand and five, Ranger Morris sat down with another Texas Ranger to be interviewed for a book series published by the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame. Ranger Morris was asked about Bill Roland’s case, which was one of the few he didn’t solve.

00:42:01
Speaker 2: And here’s what he said.

00:42:03
Speaker 1: Quote, there was another old boy in that same cul de sac he lived in. That’s a strange duck, and him and Bill had so many problems over the last year or so. And I feel certain that he killed Bill and dumped him in that lake. As you heard just a few minutes ago. Ranger Morris told me that he didn’t know of any conflict with that neighbor. The ranger hasn’t seen the case file since he retired in two thousand and two, so you could chalk it up to a faulty memory. I don’t know how else to interpret it. Since Ranger Morris was more than happy to talk to me, it would be a weird move to agree to an interview with a journalist to try to lie about a past statement that anyone with an Internet connection can read. Whatever the reason, he said something else that suggests if there was a conflict, Bill Roland wasn’t about to back down.

00:42:51
Speaker 4: And Bill is one of them guys too, for whatever beout be if somebody confronts him, he ain’t backing down. You know you’re going to stand his ground. I’ve heard. I know one is that they told me it brought it somewhere way back to Nobred down with a knife toward it. So really so, I mean he’s he’s that type of individual.

00:43:11
Speaker 1: Someone came at Bill with a knife, but Bill stood his ground. That situation ended without anyone getting killed. But you can imagine how a scenario like that goes very badly, very quickly. If Bill’s neighbor decided to confront him on that Monday afternoon, who knows what could have happened.

00:43:30
Speaker 4: If it had something happened, it had to happen at the house. I don’t know what happened or what happened to Bill there, if something had to happen.

00:43:41
Speaker 1: Part five Finding Bill. Investigators never found Bill’s body, which means there are still plenty of people in the Lufkin area who think the East Texas man took off and made a new life somewhere else.

00:43:55
Speaker 8: I heard it somebody had used his credit card a day after when missed and on the other side of the look and know where to fellow sect. And they had a pictures of him, but never show or Spade. But they said from looking behind it big guy like he was, So I thought it was him, but they don’t have no picture of him.

00:44:15
Speaker 4: We’ve had people say, well, I see Bill over the casino and Louisiana. You know, he tell me about a month later, you know, right, And so I said, why do you go up personally hi to him? He ain’t wanted for nothing, just cool hog. His next Bill, will you be it?

00:44:30
Speaker 1: The problem is none of these sightings led investigators to the missing man. Rainger Morris doesn’t think Bill ran away, and the reason speaks to the hunter’s love of the outdoors.

00:44:39
Speaker 4: And reading us say that is coach Bill. He got an old rifle gave down to by his grandfather, and he’s he’s married to Lynette, and he’s been married to another one before and he brought that rifle from there. So he’s he’s not going to run off. We’ll leave that rifle. You know, if he had plans to leave, he would it out of the house something. And there’s nothing in the bank accounts to indicate any kind of off we drawing money out or stuff like that. Nothing, you know, right, So yeah, to me, I think he’s he’s he’s see somewhere.

00:45:16
Speaker 1: The question is, where as the years stretch on, the odds of finding Bill and bringing his killer to justice grow ever smaller. If Ranger Morris’s theory is correct, Bill’s remains are still at the bottom of Lake sam Rayburn, finding them will be a challenge, maybe a bigger challenge than anyone is willing to undertake.

00:45:36
Speaker 4: Well, let me tell you what, Sam Rayburn out there is a force underneath that water. You can’t there’s got they got cuts in there. But most time it’s a force underneath that water. You go ten foot down, it’s just trees there were you know. That makes it hard, makes it difficult to try to find any anything out there when you look at when divers are looking. We had several dive teams looking, and you know they can’t just do their normal search like they do from a points you know, like that. We had to carry them out into a boat and they had to come back over the trees. I mean, it’s terrible. Yeah, we’ve done several dives searches and hadn’t found anything.

00:46:17
Speaker 1: The Texas Rangers are a state level agency, so Ranger Morris had the latest technology at his disposal in nineteen ninety seven. Along with the dive teams, they used sonar to scan the bottom of the lake for any sign of human remains the ladder or the concrete buckets. They couldn’t search the entire lake, but they thought they had a lead on where to start looking.

00:46:37
Speaker 4: The lady that they called to come over with her to check the seath billers there that she heard a pond toombo go out and stop in the area after she passed her points. She don’t know, she didn’t see it. She don’t know what, but then felt she heard of splash. Well, well that’s true or not, I don’t know, but that’s the best we had goul.

00:47:02
Speaker 1: That location didn’t reveal what they were hoping to find, But technology has come a long way since nineteen ninety seven.

00:47:08
Speaker 9: Be better they run it nowadays. They could still if he’s still down there, they could probably find. There’s a lot of ways we could find it now that we wouldn’t have, you know, using resonance frequencies and using other things.

00:47:17
Speaker 1: That’s Michael Hadsel. Michael operates a Florida nonprofit called Peace River Search and Rescue. He’s an experienced search and rescue diver, canine handler, and expert on all things water recovery. I asked him what searchers today could expect to find and what techniques they could employ.

00:47:34
Speaker 9: Yeah, at this point, it’s just bones. What we would hope for is to be able to find like the mandible or some teeth along with some bone, and then we can get DNA off of that. Hopefully if they wrapped them and they wrapped them in a tarp and they chained them and they anchored him down, there’s a lot that we can find if we can find that.

00:47:51
Speaker 1: The bones that are left have likely sunk into the muck at the bottom of the lake. But believe it or not, a dog’s nose is strong enough to sense that odor, even for the deck of a boat. Once a dog hits on a particular location, it’s up to the divers to swim to the bottom and start sifting through the mud. The trees make that project more difficult, but still not impossible. Searchers might also find some of the other items that were possibly sunk with Bill, such as that orange fiberglass ladder.

00:48:20
Speaker 9: It does have a sonar picture. I mean, you can see it if it’s in an area where you can see it. Of course, we’ve got a lot of vegetation down there that’s going to mask a lot of things. But if it’s in a place that it’s open, yeah we can. We’ll see that from the high desk sonar.

00:48:36
Speaker 1: Those buckets would also appear on sonar, and Michael says nylon rope could still be intact even all these years later. Of course, whether any of those items are found depends in large part on whether anyone is looking. Anglers on Lake Sam Rayburn might find something by accident, and they wouldn’t be the first to discover a missing person using modern fish finders. Texas ranger Chris Perkins also told me that if they learn new information searching the lake is still in the cards, it.

00:49:05
Speaker 10: Very well could be. Certainly wouldn’t rule it out. If it came up as something that we needed to do, then certainly we would do it.

00:49:12
Speaker 1: Ranger Perkins is the investigator currently in charge of Bill’s case. He works for the agency’s Cold Case Division, and.

00:49:18
Speaker 2: He knows his stuff.

00:49:20
Speaker 1: We actually had to reschedule our first interview because he had to attend a press conference announcing a breakthrough in a nineteen eighty six murder investigation. He told me the same resources that were used to crack that case can also be deployed to solve bills.

00:49:35
Speaker 10: It is active, and this is one of the cases that we still get tips on our website on a pretty frequent basis. They are all actively looked into and pursued as best we can. Sometimes the details may not be enough to get us where we need to be, but sometimes they are, and that’s the whole purpose of the website is to be able to finally get that one break that just blows the case open.

00:50:02
Speaker 1: I mentioned earlier that the number of years since Bill disappeared makes his case more difficult to solve, but Ranger Perkins pointed out that time can be a double edged sword.

00:50:12
Speaker 10: People’s relationships change, so we can go back and reinterview people who may have had a close relationship with whoever was involved early on, and then maybe not so much now, so the longer a case goes on, it can be challenging, but it can also be a benefit to investigators because there may be a level of complacency on the part of vose involved where they’re just not They get comfortable and they go back to life and they think nobody’s ever going to find them, and that’s usually when we can make up that ground and identify somebody and bring charges.

00:50:45
Speaker 1: You can read between those lines for yourself, but it sounds to me like the rangers can guess who might be involved, or at least who might know something, so they’re biding their time, waiting for those people to slip up, have a change of heart, or tell the person what happened to Bill, Because somewhere beneath the surface of Lake sam Rayburn, past the down timber and the silt and the dark water, Bill Roland may still be out there. East Texas has a way of keeping its secrets. The pines grow thick, the lakes run deep, and the people who know things tend to hold them close. But even though secrets carry weight, some of them eventually rise to the surface.

00:51:27
Speaker 10: People like this that may have been involved, maybe thinking that they’re out of the woods and that they may be getting complacent, But I would just remind them that there are investigators out there who never stop and are always pursuing, just as so they need to keep an eye in their rearview mirror because we’re coming.

00:51:51
Speaker 1: Figuring out what happens to Bill won’t bring back Jenna and Bailey’s fathers, but for the last surviving Rolands, it would help close the circle of the mystery that has shadowed lives. They heard Bill’s name in parking lots and on deer leases and from old women who still remember his laugh. They lost their fathers to the unanswered question that is Bill’s disappearance, but they’re still here in Lufkin, in Angelina County, in the place their family has always been waiting for answers.

00:52:20
Speaker 3: It’d be huge for us. There’s me and Bailey. We’ve really the only Roland’s left, and so that’d be huge for us. We would love to see or love to hear what truly happened. That’d be closure for our family that our family has wanted for a long time.

00:52:34
Speaker 6: Now.

00:52:40
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you have any information on what might have happened to Bill Roland. You can submit a tip through the Texas Rangers Cold Case website or through the Texas Crime Stoppers hotline. That number is one eight hundred two five two eight four seven seven. We’ll post that number and links to submit a hip on the case file for this episode, which you can find by going to the meeater dot com slash blood Trails.

00:53:06
Speaker 2: There you can also.

00:53:07
Speaker 1: See images of Lake Sam Rayburn, Bill and his sons, and the neighborhood where he disappeared. You can also check out the footage we captured of this area and our in person interviews by watching the video version of this podcast on YouTube. Huge thanks to everyone who contributed to this episode, Jenna Sprinkle, Bailey Rowland, Texas Rangers, Don Morris, Chris Perkins and Sam Latner, Michael Hadsl, Delwyn Williams, and the Rayburn Country Resort. Also shout out to David McDaniels for his incredible video work and on the ground reporting.

00:53:39
Speaker 2: See you next time. Stay safe out there,