On February 2, 1963, a tanker with thirty-nine men aboard departed Beaumont and never returned. In the mid-spring of 1882, Billy the Kid’s friend, foe and equal escaped Huntsville Penitentiary and vanished. On December 9, 1961, a young boy in Wichita Falls disappeared without a trace. On November 18, 1936, a father and son were swallowed by a “Walled Kingdom.” On December 23, 1974, three girls went to a Fort Worth mall and were never seen or heard from again. This collection explores twenty baffling disappearances that investigators have studied for decades, to no avail. Homicide, patricide, filicide, genocide, devil worship, the Devil’s Triangle, the Devil’s River, the assassination of JFK, UFO abductions, legal limbo, literal limbo—oblivion. Award-winning author E.R. Bills drags the facts of these mystifying cases back from the void.

Award-winning writer E.R. Bills is the author of Texas Obscurities: Stories of the Peculiar, Exceptional and Nefarious (The History Press, 2013), The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas (The History Press, 2014), Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror (Eakin Press, 2015), Texas Far & Wide: The Tornado with Eyes, Gettysburg’s Last Casualty, the Celestial Skipping Stone and Other Tales (The History Press, 2017) and The San Marcos 10: An Antiwar Protest in Texas (The History Press, 2019). Bills has also written for the Austin American-Statesman, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas Co-Op Power magazine and the Fort Worth Weekly. He currently lives in North Texas with his wife, Stacie.

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