A jury in Texas found a man guilty of manslaughter in connection with the 1984 death of a teenage girl, bringing one part of a decades-long notorious cold case to a close this week.
The jury in Galveston County on Thursday sentenced the man, James Dolphs Elmore, to 20 years in prison for his role in the death of 16-year-old Laura Miller. Mr. Elmore, now 61, was accused of providing the drugs that were used to kill Laura, a high school student who went missing from a local convenience store in League City, Texas, in September 1984.
Laura’s remains were found 17 months later in a rural field along the interstate between Houston and Galveston where the bodies of about 30 other slain women and girls have also been found. The area has become known as the Texas Killing Fields, and most of the cases remain unsolved.
Prosecutors built their case against Mr. Elmore with the help of Tim Miller, 79, Laura’s father, who said he received a phone call in 2022 from Mr. Elmore, who claimed to have been present when Laura died. Over the next four years, Mr. Miller met several times with Mr. Elmore, who shared detailed information about how Laura was killed, Mr. Miller said at trial.
The call from Mr. Elmore in 2022 was a breakthrough. Mr. Miller testified that he had paid Mr. Elmore $33,000 to provide information on his daughter’s death to help build a case.
According to prosecutors, Mr. Miller recorded some of the conversations in which Mr. Elmore confessed. Mr. Elmore told Mr. Miller that after Laura disappeared, a man named Clyde Hedrick raped her, and then Mr. Elmore prepared a large dose of cocaine and handed it to Mr. Hedrick, who administered it to Laura, causing an overdose. A few days later, Mr. Elmore helped Mr. Hedrick dump Laura’s body in the field.
Mr. Hedrick, who had been friends with Mr. Elmore, killed himself while in custody in March, shortly before prosecutors were going to bring his case in Laura’s death to a grand jury. (Mr. Hedrick was convicted in 2014 of killing another young woman and was accused of killing at least one other woman.) Mr. Elmore was arrested soon after Mr. Hedrick’s death and was charged in April.
Mr. Elmore had pleaded not guilty to manslaughter, and his defense lawyers tried to cast doubt on the reliability of his memory. His lawyer did not immediately return requests for comment on Thursday. Mr. Elmore indicated he plans to appeal the verdict, court records show.
Adam Poole, an assistant district attorney in Galveston County, said prosecutors were pleased the jury had convicted Mr. Elmore and happy that Mr. Miller “got to tell his story and get the justice he’s been looking for for 42 years.”
The trial began on Monday, and the jury returned a guilty verdict after about one hour of deliberations on Wednesday. On Thursday, the 12 jurors took about 30 minutes to return with the sentence, giving Mr. Elmore the maximum possible punishment for manslaughter.
During emotional testimony on Tuesday, Mr. Miller took the stand and looked squarely at Mr. Elmore, telling him that he had caused his daughter’s death.
“You handed it to Clyde Hedrick,” he said to Mr. Elmore, referring to the vial of cocaine. “You handed it.”
After the verdict, Mr. Miller, who had been visibly emotional inside the courtroom, told reporters, “There was a weight lifted off.”
“There was a lot of anger that came in,” he continued, “because I think for these 42 years of knowing Laura was dead, there was still some denial of what really happened.”
Mr. Miller had spent much of his life trying to solve his daughter’s case. He founded a nonprofit organization, Texas EquuSearch, which provides search and recovery services to families of missing persons.
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