Dean and Tina Clouse

Case background and investigation

Harold Dean Clouse Jr. and Tina Gail Linn married in June 1979 and had a daughter, Holly Marie, in January 1980. According to the Texas Observer, the family moved from Florida to Lewisville, Texas, in 1980 after Dean found construction work there. Relatives stopped hearing from them late that year. Wikipedia gives Dean's age at death as 21 and Tina's as 17.

On January 12, 1981, the remains of a man and a woman were found in a wooded area off Wallisville Road in Harris County, in the Houston area. According to the Texas Observer, the bodies lay several feet apart. The man had been beaten to death and the woman had been strangled. Investigators believe they were killed between December 1980 and early January 1981, FOX 7 Austin reported. No child was found at the scene, and the two victims could not be identified.

In the months after the couple fell out of contact, their families had an unusual encounter. FOX 7 reported that relatives received a call from a woman calling herself "Sister Susan," who said the couple had joined a religious group and were giving up their possessions. The Texas Observer reported that women in white robes returned the couple's car to Florida and asked for money. The families did not know that Dean and Tina were dead.

The remains stayed unidentified for four decades. In 2021, Identifinders International, a firm that performs genetic genealogy for law enforcement, identified them as Dean and Tina Clouse, according to ABC13 Houston. The identification raised a new question: what had happened to Holly.

In June 2022, the Texas Attorney General's Cold Case and Missing Persons Unit announced that Holly had been found alive, aged 42, living in Oklahoma. ABC13 reported that as a baby she had been left at a church in Arizona by two barefoot women in white robes who belonged to a nomadic religious group, and that she was subsequently raised by an adoptive family. Officials said the family that raised her is not suspected of any involvement. ABC13 noted that she was located on what would have been her father's birthday.

No one has been arrested or publicly named as a suspect in the killings. FOX 7 reported that the Texas Attorney General's Office was asking members of the public with information to contact its cold case unit. Authorities have not publicly linked any individual to the deaths, and the investigation remains open.