Kimberly Langwell's Hidden Grave

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2:42I think we have to fight hard for our loved ones, and we have to listen to them and be cautious about the people that we allow into our lives. I wish so much that I would have fought harder for mom.

3:01I'm an only child of Kim Langwell. She made me her whole world. She was my best friend. In July of 1999, I was a normal 15-year-old teenager. Everything seemed pretty perfect in life.

3:28July 9th. What are your plans for that night? We were going to go out to eat. She called me after work just to make sure that I was on track, you know, ready for dinner that night. And then I can't get a hold of her. I immediately start texting her 911. She just never called. And all I could think about was, well, maybe there's something, you know, that she's just not telling me. And you just keep thinking, she was just there. She was just on the phone. What do I do? I woke up to my phone ringing, and it was Ken Weatherford, my mom's boyfriend. Hey, did your mom come home? And I said, no, she's not here.

4:11And he said, well, Tiffany, I didn't tell you last night what I was looking for. and I saw her car. I think you need to call somebody. I think something's wrong. So, Detective, where was her car? Her car was parked right about where I'm parked now. You're looking for physical evidence. We were looking for blood, and we were looking for a body, looking for a crime scene, and we had none of that. She just disappeared. I think for the first year, I kept it together, and then after that, it just falls apart. The person that you depend on for everything is now gone.

4:57In the spring of 2023, my supervisors filled me in on reopening the investigation. Our overall goal was just to get answers for the family. We definitely got the feeling that people were not being completely honest in their statements that they had provided back in 1999. She had a social life and she interacted with a lot of people. This man was writing her love letters. There is a stack an inch and a half thick. This is a lot of love letters. It's a lot. Kim, I have developed this terribly strong crush on you. Something must be done about it. We're seeing obsessive behavior here. We didn't want to get tunnel vision.

5:38Do we have any named suspects in this file? You know, some cases rely on the physical evidence. There's DNA, there's a body. This doesn't exist. We cannot find Kimberly. We called Tim Miller. He's the founder of Texas EquiSearch, and they actually specialize in looking for missing people. Doesn't matter when we get that phone call. We're there to help the family, help law enforcement. We took a chance, and it was a good choice. This house is where we found the most disturbing scene, something I've never seen or heard of in my law enforcement career.

6:20Peter Van Sant reports. Kimberly Langwell's hidden grave.

6:29This case, even after I retired, this case has haunted me because I couldn't find her.

6:42I felt like I had failed. And you felt that you failed the family? Yes. And her. It has been more than two decades since 34-year-old Kim Langwell disappeared. appeared and former Beaumont, Texas, detective Joe Ball still relives those early days of the investigation over and over again. On July 10th, 1999, a day after Kim Langwell failed to arrive home, Detective Ball was summoned to a strip mall parking lot in front of an Eckert pharmacy. My mom's car is there and nobody's checked it out. We need to see what's in the car. Kim's daughter, Tiffany McInnes, who was just 15 at the time, and Kim's sister, Susan Butts, had already arrived at the scene.

7:39When you looked through the window, what did you see in the car? I saw her briefcase and a phone. No purse, no wallet, no keys. Yeah, the purse was not in there. The car was locked. No keys inside? Mm-mm, nothing. It just looked like somebody walked away. This is where Kim's vehicle was. This is where Kim's vehicle was parked. And what did that suggest to you? They suggested to me that she either met someone here and left with them, or that she had been kidnapped out of this parking lot. But no one could recall seeing anyone get in or out of Kim's car. I do know that they said to me, maybe she just went off.

8:16Maybe she just had started a new life and left her child. No, she didn't. She didn't do that. Esther Randall was like a second mom to Kim, who called her Mimi. I thought of her as my own. We adored her. She was easy to love. She was fun. She was an amazing mom. She had me at a very young age, but she treated me like I was everything. Hi, Mommy. It became clear to Detective Ball that Kim would never abandon her only child. I was pretty sure that something had happened to her. So we focused on those who were closest to Kim, starting with Kim's boyfriend, Ken Weatherford. He was the one who discovered her abandoned car in the parking lot the evening she disappeared.

9:11He seemed like a really nice guy. He cared about my mom. He cared about me. Kim and Ken had met at the mobile chemical plant where they both worked. They had been dating for just six months. Weeks before Kim disappeared, they took a trip to Cozumel, Mexico. She had a great time, and she had a tan, and it was fun. Did you sense they were both in love? Yes. She was like, I'm happy, Mimi. However, Detective Ball says he was suspicious of Weatherford, mostly because of what he didn't do the night Kim disappeared. He saw her car in the parking lot, but he did nothing. He didn't tell anybody. He waited until the next day before he told anybody that he knew where Kim's car was.

9:57And did you think to yourself, this man may be hiding something from me? I suspect everybody. Everybody's a suspect. And that included co-workers and former bosses, like Frank McCormick. This is an ID photo taken of him decades later. Frank McCormick was a supervisor out in Mobile, and he worked in the same building as my mom. Tiffany says McCormick, who was married, often came around their house and left Kim presents, like chocolates from Paris. He adored her. He talked about her big blue eyes and how sweet she was. And then it went from that to a little darker. McCormick began sending Kim love letters, dozens of them.

10:42He also sent disturbing photo collages. These are grainy copies that were given to 48 Hours by investigators. Pictures of all kinds of women with Kim's face on the bodies. Esther said that Kim was upset about McCormick's bizarre behavior, but she didn't report him for fear of retribution. Kim was nice to everybody, but I think he just thought because she was nice to him that she liked him. Detectives say despite McCormick's obsessive behavior, he had an alibi. Around the time Kim disappeared, he told investigators he was at a grocery store to buy some chips for a poker game. And he had the receipt to prove it.

11:29We looked at him, we talked to him, and we were able to rule him out as a suspect. But authorities had someone else on their radar. Terry Rose, Kim's ex-boyfriend. Kim and Terry dated and lived together for about six years. After they broke up, the two stayed in contact. I do know that she kept a friendly relationship. He would help her do things. In fact, the night Kim disappeared, Kim had stopped by Terry Rose's house on the way home from work. He was doing something in the house and needed help hanging some boards, which I thought was strange. Just two days after Kim's disappearance, Terry Rose willingly came into the police station and provided a statement.

12:16Terry said on the evening she disappeared, Kim arrived about 5.10 or 5.15 p.m. and was at his house for just a short time before leaving to meet Tiffany. Terry claimed he had not heard from her since. I felt like Terry was not being completely truthful with us. It was the tone of the whole interview and how vague he was about details. Yet Terry Rose was cooperative. He allowed police to search in and around his house. We went into every room in that house. It was just a very junky house. There was stuff everywhere. Made it very difficult to conduct a search. Ball says there were no signs of Kim at the house and no evidence that any violence had taken place there.

13:05But he had Terry take a polygraph test, and he failed. At that point, I was pretty focused on Terry. I was pretty sure that he was lying, but I didn't have any evidence to confront him with. If not even the authorities can do something to find my mom, who's going to help us?

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16:30Once mom was gone for a little while, you know, you come to realize that, hey, she's not going to come back. Tiffany McInnes endured the typical teenage growing pains under the shadow of her mother's missing person investigation. I got to a point of just complete denial. You just don't want to look anymore. Aunt Susan did a really good job keeping it going. She did searches and stuff like that. Like investigators, Susan says she became more and more convinced who was responsible. It just always ended up right back at Terry. Esther says Kim had shared her fear of Terry Rose well before her disappearance.

17:16I'm afraid he's going to kill me. If I leave, he's going to kill me. Kim had described Terry's obsessive and possessive behavior during their six-year relationship, says Esther, which she sometimes witnessed firsthand. She came to my house, my phone rang the entire time she was there. When are you coming? Are you still there? Is she still there? Controlling. Unbelievably controlling. Esther says Kim told her that at times that need for control boiled over into violence. And what are some of those things he did to her? Strangled her. They threw her on a bed and strangled her till she couldn't breathe anymore.

17:56And then she woke up and he was gone. Tiffany believes her mother shielded her from witnessing any abuse. but says she did experience Terry Rose's obsession firsthand after the relationship finally ended. He would call the house at all times during the day, night, if mom wasn't home. He questioned me, you know, where is she at? Where has she been? When do you expect her home? We had found him lurking outside the house. But that all stopped abruptly once Kim was gone. Was Terry concerned about your sister? No, not at all. Did he help look for her? No, never. In 2001, two years after Kim's disappearance, the FBI assisted by interviewing Terry Rose.

18:47He admitted to one physical confrontation with Kim where he slapped her in the face. And he acknowledged that he had no alibi for the crucial hours from approximately 5.30 p.m. on the day Kim went missing, until he met up with a friend that evening. He called his friend David Wiley, and they shot pool from about 9.30 until probably midnight or a little after. But after I talked to David Wiley, I was even more suspicious because I was pretty sure David Wiley was lying to me too. But investigators still lacked any physical evidence of an actual crime, and the case went cold. Decades passed. Until 2023, when the TV program Cold Justice chose to investigate the unsolved case, and the Beaumont PD appointed detectives to work alongside them.

19:46When I got assigned the case, we set the bar pretty low. Detective Heather Wilson became the lead investigator, working alongside Lieutenant Mitch Sligar and Detective Jesus Tamayo. They began by looking at all the original suspects once again, like Kim's last boyfriend, Ken Weatherford. We had already narrowed down the time frame when we believed something happened to Kim. Weatherford declined an interview with 48 Hours. He was actually with Tiffany around the time Kim went missing. So investigators ruled him out. We also looked into a former boss of Kim's named Frank McCormick. That boss who had sent Kim all those disturbing love letters and images.

20:31You have to ask yourself, how far was he willing to go to get her attention? Because obsession can lead to something dangerous. Absolutely. Frank McCormick declined an interview with 48 Hours, but he did speak to investigators. Detective Wilson confronted him with a stack of those letters. Let's bring him back some memories for you. It's been a long time. Oh, I bet it's a... As I sit here, it's hard for me to believe I wrote this. Obviously, it's my handwriting. Regardless of what he said he remembered, McCormick still had that alibi. documented by the grocery store receipt from around the time Kim disappeared.

21:11So ultimately we felt like Frank was not relevant to this case. Who became your top suspects in the disappearance of Kim? Our top suspect was Terry Rose. He's showing all the typical behaviors of someone who is abusive. He just couldn't let go. but when approached more than two decades later terry rose now 66 years old was still adamant he had nothing to do with kim langwell's disappearance i mean what's your theory on what happened to her what do you think i don't really know once we broke it off i figured just leave her alone and so we're trying to find his inner circle so we wanted to find these people that were close to Terry.

21:58One of those people was David Wiley, who Terry Rose played pool with the night Kim went missing. We could feel that David was the weakest link.

22:12Detective Jesus Tamayo showed up at David Wiley's door in 2023 and interviewed him in his patrol vehicle. Knowing Terry like he knew Terry, Did he have anything to do with Kimberly's appearance? I don't think so. Not at all. And I just don't think he's that type of person. Investigators were convinced Wiley wasn't telling them everything he knew. So in April of 2024, the DA convened a grand jury, where Terry Rose and David Wiley would have to testify under oath. Rose stuck to his original story, but Wiley, while also consistent, seemed uneasy. He was very nervous. He seemed very uncomfortable.

22:58So we decided to call David Wiley and see if he would just be willing to come in and take a polygraph test. He immediately was like, you're gonna need to contact my attorney and ended the phone call. So we knew at that point that we were onto something. That hunch was confirmed when Wiley's attorney called back. He does have information for y 'all that's going to help you find her.

23:34How are you doing today? Good, how are you doing? Doing great. In April 2024, more than two decades after Kim Langwell disappeared, David Wiley was ready to talk to investigators. This was huge. This is what we needed. But only under one condition. His attorney told us he wants full immunity from any kind of prosecution. He said, okay, we kind of need to know what we're working with here. Detectives wondered if Wiley could have been an accomplice. He said, no, he didn't. He's not saying that he killed her, that he just has information of what happened to her. So we're like, we can work with that.

24:10With assurances of an immunity deal, David Wiley met with investigators at his attorney's office. Our goal is you're here to tell the truth, okay? Wiley told detectives that on July 9th, 1999, the day Kim disappeared, he received a call around 6.15 p.m. from his friend and former boss, Terry Rose. He called me and asked me to pick him up at Walmart. He just said, when you get close to the parking lot, called me. I called, and he was in Kim's car. When I pulled up next to him, he said that he did not like that parking lot and to follow him. Did you ask him why are you in the car? No, I did not ask.

25:01So y 'all left Walmart and you followed him to Colonnade? Turned into the Colonnade shopping center parking lot. He stopped in a spot, got out and got in my truck, and I took him and dropped him off at his house and went back to my little trailer I was living in. Later that evening, Wiley said he met up with Terry to play pool. The two then had breakfast the next morning. Wiley was foggy on the timing, but says Terry, out of the blue, told him a horrific story about what had happened to Kim. They told me that she was at his house, and I guess they argued, and then he shot her.

25:46And then after that, did he say what he do with the body? He told me that he put her under the slab in one of the bedrooms. One of the bedrooms? I mean, did he say which one? No, he did not say which one.

26:09We couldn't quite comprehend she's under the slab in a bedroom in his house. Days later, David Wiley was given a polygraph test. Did Terry tell you he shot Kim? Yes. Did Terry tell you where he buried Kim? Yes. And passed. But before they could arrest Terry Rose, the district attorney's office insisted they get physical evidence that would back up Wiley's story. We still had a lot of work to do. We're going to be cracking the slab of this house. We're going to be looking under the floor as David described where she was. It was going to be a huge operation. And it would take intricate and secretive planning.