AUSTIN (KXAN) — Lise Olsen, a Texas-based investigative reporter, editor, and true-crime author, visited Austin this week for a book-release event at Book People for “The Scientist and the Serial Killer: The Search for Houston’s Lost Boys.”
While here, Olsen stopped by KXAN to talk about her newest release, which centers the story of a series of 1970s murders that occurred in Houston.
“It remains one of the worst murders in Texas history,” Olsen said of the case. It became known as the Houston Mass Murders, whose victims were called “Houston’s Lost Boys.”
“More than two dozen boys and young men were kidnapped, tortured and killed without even police opening one case. They were all presumed to be runaways,” Olsen explained. “But what a lot of people forgot about is that about a third of the victims were never identified. So this story is about lost identity, regaining those identities, and what secrets are revealed when those identities come to light. There’s a lot of unevenness across the U.S. about how many of these kinds of cases get investigated.”
According to the book’s info page on Olsen’s website, the book “brings to life the teens who were hunted by a killer hiding in plain sight and the extraordinary woman who helped his unknown victims recover their identities.”
Olsen is a Houston-based investigations editor at the Texas Observer who has done several investigations, including “crooked judges, an unjust execution, massive environmental disasters, myriad cases of corporate and public corruption, and unsolved serial killings,” according to the Texas Observer.
Olsen said she got interested in the case of Houston’s Lost Boys because before living in Texas, she lived in Seattle, where “perhaps the worst serial killer, the Green River Killer” was, she said. ” He got away with those crimes much longer because some of his victims were not identified, police cannot even start an investigation before that happens.”
“So I got really interested in this issue of lost identity and how those could be restored through forensic science and forensic anthropology. And you know, lead to answers for families,” Olsen said. “And — new answers about crimes too.”
Olsen also talked about some of the changes to criminal investigations that have come since then, and what she was able to uncover about the case.
“Like I said, they didn’t even identify that these kids had been taken by a killer. They were presumed to be runaways. Of course, today we would have Amber Alerts. We would have analysis of crime data, and hopefully these kind of clusters of disappearances would have been red-flagged,” Olsen said.
“But I think the kind of concerning thing is we still have, you know, disappearances of kids today. We still don’t have enough resources,” she continued.
“In this case, though, I track how the forensic anthropology and the other science helped identify these kids, even decades later, and give their families answers that they needed,” Olsen noted. “And also illuminated the fact that this serial killer happened to be part of an organized crime ring that had some other members who were never previously identified. He was part of a group of people who took erotic photos of some of these kids — at least 11 of the victims’ photos had been distributed internationally.”
“So that was part of the crime that was really hidden back in the 70s. And I think it’s something, you know, that’s really important for people to know about today, that when victims are not identified crimes, then some things can get covered up.”
