In August 1970, 26-year-old schoolteacher Linda Jane Phillips, daughter of Kaufman County School Superintendent Jimmy Phillips, vanished while driving home from a Dallas wedding party. Two days later, her mutilated body was discovered in a hedgerow near Post Oak, Texas.

The case shocked Kaufman County—a quiet, rural community east of booming Dallas—and became one of North Texas’s most haunting unsolved murders. Investigators found her car abandoned along Farm Road 1641, its window shattered, her clothing scattered along the roadside for nearly a mile. Despite hundreds of volunteers searching and an intensive investigation led by Sheriff Roy Brockway, no suspect was found.

Over the following decade, a wave of similarly brutal killings of women swept across North and East Texas. Lawmen speculated about a single “lust killer” operating around Dallas, connecting Linda’s death to others in Garland, Irving, Plano, and Grapevine. Yet no pattern held.

Then, in 1984, serial confessor Henry Lee Lucas—already infamous for hundreds of claimed murders—pleaded guilty to Linda’s killing. Kaufman County briefly marked the case “cleared.” But Lucas’s confession later fell apart. Records showed he was still in Michigan at the time of her death.

Fifty-five years later, Linda’s murder remains officially unsolved. What endures is the picture of a kind, capable young woman caught between the growing city and the fading quiet of small-town Texas—and a reminder of how easily a search for closure can bury the truth.

If you have information about the murder of Linda Jane Phillips, please contact the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office at (972) 932-4337.

Sources: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Tyler Morning Telegraph, The San Antonio Express-News, The Odessa American, The Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, The Longview Daily News, The McKinney Courier-Gazette, The Austin American-Statesman, The Brownsville Herald, The Mesquite Daily News, and Henry Lee Lucas files

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