Town note
Known as the Cowboy Capital of the World.
about 0:05:40The story
Susan Jeanette Atkins was born in 1957 in Stephenville, Texas, the daughter of Joe and Irma Atkins. She played clarinet in the school band and graduated from Stephenville High School in 1975. She went to work at a sandpaper factory, Norton Industries, and stayed there for a decade. In the late 1970s she met Michael R. Woods, a long-haired guitarist who had come to Stephenville from El Paso to drive a friend's truck and decided to stay. Her family disliked him on sight; her father showed him a pistol and warned him not to hurt her. In 1980 Woods talked her into moving to El Paso, where they married before a justice of the peace after her parents objected to them living together unmarried. The promised job did not exist and they soon drifted back to Stephenville, with a short spell in Indianapolis.
Woods could not hold a job and was widely said to sell marijuana. In about 1985 Susan found a bungalow on McNeil Street near downtown Stephenville and they moved in. In the summer of 1986 he gave her an ultimatum, Texas or him, and she chose Texas. He went to Indianapolis, they spoke on the phone and wrote to each other, and he agreed to return for one last attempt. By February 1987 it was over. He left, took their yellow Mustang, and left cassette tapes and handwritten notes scattered through the house telling her what a bitch she was and blaming her for the marriage. Susan filed for divorce, stayed in the bungalow alone, and let Cindy's boyfriend Roy Hayes nail the windows shut and lend her a pistol. By the summer of 1987 she was thirty, working six days a week, and beginning to enjoy life again. In July, Roy and Cindy took her to a carnival and then to a Dairy Queen, where she ordered two hot fudge sundaes in a row.
He joined the Air Force Reserve in 1984, trained as a munitions specialist, married a woman he met at technical school in Colorado, followed her to Guam, and came home broken and drinking heavily after the marriage collapsed. Back in Stephenville he worked for his father, embezzled from his employer, and invented a daily drink of vodka, cough syrup and Pepsi that he called V syrup. He was twenty-one, eight years younger than Susan, and knew her and Michael; he later claimed the first marijuana he ever bought came from Michael.
On the following Sunday night, 26 July 1987, he drove to her house unannounced. She let him in because she knew him. They listened to records and smoked cigarettes. He wrote that he overstepped his bounds, that she slapped him, and that by the time he came out of the fog he had brutalised her. When she said she would tell, then promised not to if he let her go, he asked whether she believed in God, told her she had better start praying, and killed her. He suffocated her with a pillow.
Two days later, after Susan failed to appear at work without calling, her father Joe went to the house. It was dark and the door was unlocked. He found her in the bathroom with her head in the bathwater and ran to the living room to call the police. Officers found that she had been raped and sodomised, with a red line across her throat, an electrical cord on the bed and a pillowcase stained with mascara that held the outline of a face. Nothing had been stolen.
Lieutenant Ken Maltby took the case alone, telling the department no other detective would work it; a colleague said he wanted to be a hero. Later Maltby and a Texas Ranger came to Indianapolis and told him to get in a car for the airport; Woods pulled up his shirt to show a .357 and refused. On his lawyer's advice he withheld affidavits from a dozen people placing him in Indianapolis at the time. In October Maltby moved to the narcotics unit and Donnie Hensley took over in his spare time, finding no written reports at all. Hensley's interviews all pointed to Woods. He traced J.C. Bauman, a bartender in Granbury who had had a brief affair with Susan, but Bauman passed a polygraph and his prints did not match.
The prints did not match. Hensley was later reassigned to patrol after nearly attacking a superior who suggested closing the case as an accidental sex game.
In September 1987 he held a knife to her throat when she told him to stop during sex. In July 1988 he took her to a roadside park south of town, raped and beat her for six hours, and pushed her face into a spring. She escaped at dawn, was taken to hospital for a rape kit, and told the sheriff's deputies everything.
In 1989 Susan's parents sued Woods for the $11,000 life insurance benefit, and a judge, with Woods absent, awarded them the $11,000 plus a $700,000 wrongful death judgment and ordered him to give DNA. He stayed in Indiana. Hensley resigned in 1993 and went to work for a United Nations arm investigating atrocities in Kosovo. His daughter was injured in a car accident, his wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and used a wheelchair, a tornado damaged their apartment complex, and a drunk driver destroyed their duplex. In the late 1990s he was promoted to help run a warehouse in Round Rock and moved the family back to Texas.
In the summer of 2005 Michael Woods broke down after a gig at a birthday party and told the host, Barbara Gary, about the murder. She emailed the Stephenville police. Miller contacted Woods, who agreed to give a sample and then cancelled. Miller and his partner flew to Indianapolis anyway and took the sample on the porch. It did not match.
He seemed bored, admitted that he might have had sex with Susan but did not remember, and agreed to give DNA. It matched the cigarette butts. Miller told Joe Atkins on the golf course, and Joe refused to believe him, insisting it was Michael Woods; Roy and Cindy did not believe him either at first. He was sent to Huntsville, where he claimed to have found religion and wrote hundreds of pages about his life and the killing.
He went to a halfway house in Midland, repaired oil field trucks, was laid off at the start of Covid, and moved to an RV park outside Abilene to be near his daughter Amanda. On Halloween 2021 he told her that the cancer had returned and spread to his spine. He was found dead in the RV on 9 December 2021, the day he was due to start chemotherapy. His obituary described a truck driver who loved his family and had served 12 years for a crime committed in 1987, and his daughter wrote that cancer had stolen a great man. After his death his writings were found, and in them he described the murder in detail, including that he had suffocated Susan with a pillow rather than drowning her, and said that a basic investigation would have identified him within days.