Did, She said, Johnny, the kids didn't come home last night.

A small town is only as safe as the secrets hidden behind closed doors and the evil that lies behind them.

When the murders happened, it really put everybody on edge, because nothing like that had ever happened in Weatherford before.

She had seen the bodies shaking, actual they've been shot.

This murder case is it's a big deal for such a little town, and it needs to be recognized and finished.

During the nineteen eighties, the bodies of teenagers piled up amid rumors of widespread corruption running all the way to the top.

Forty years later, angry townsfolk, tired of being ignored by law enforcement start talking.

She gets out of the car.

She's turned there and looks at me.

She goes, Mama, I love you, goodbye.

That was the last words I heard from and that was the last time I saw.

Along the central Texas plains, where ranches, rodeos, and cutting forces are the usual topics of conversation, teens are dying, suicides that don't make sense, strange accidents and brutal murders.

And blood inside the car, blood and still dripping out of the car.

Play roll shot in the head.

All these years later, some claim that the people put in charge of stopping the madness are the same group behind it.

We learned real young in life that just because they were law enforcement didn't mean they were good people.

Then all of a sudden, I heard him say, we killed those kids.

Have local power brokers been detecting a sadistic killer for over four decades in what seems to be a plot ripped straight out of breaking bad.

Drugs, alcohol trafficking of people.

I got two text messages on my phone.

One of them was telling me that I need to leave everything alone, let everything die.

A story so unbelievable it's taken years to sort out truth from rumor.

With two courageous women leading the charge who will stop at nothing to see justice served.

There are witnesses.

There are people out there today alive that absolutely know what happened.

He told me that we can't leave her alive and chusht her skull with the rock.

My name is em William Phelps.

I'm an investigative journalist and the New York Times best selling author of dozens of true crime books.

For the past four seasons, of paper ghosts, I've gone face to face with serial killers and been threatened by suspected murderers.

Yet nothing could have prepared me for the unsolved cold case teenage murders in rural Texas.

I began to unravel.

I listen to your podcast.

I'm like, Okay, this guy is a bulldog.

He will go out for the answers and he doesn't care if he steps on some toasts.

As I embarked on the biggest cold case investigation of my twenty five year career, join me for season five of Paper Ghosts the Texas Teen Murders.

They're still looking over their shoulders, you know, forty two years later, they're still afraid.

Listen to Paper Ghosts the Texas Teen Murders, launching November fifth, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.