Texas murder mystery of Dean and Tina Clouse and the discovery of Baby Holly will be the subject of a new long-form, true crime podcast.
www.houstonchronicle.com
Texas' Baby Holly murder mystery to get 9-episode true crime podcast
Cristina Corbin had spent months digging into the
decades-old murder of Dean and Tina Clouse when her phone rang from an unknown caller.
On the other end was "Sister Susan," a former member of the Christ Family cult, to which the couple had belonged shortly before their murder in 1981.
"She was not happy," Corbin recalled. "She was upset with any suggestion, any implication she might be connected to these crimes."
The interview is one of several key moments in a new podcast, "
What About Holly?" that examines the murder of Dean and Tina Clouse and the hunt for their baby daughter, Holly Marie.
Corbin, a podcast host and producer with Fox News' Investigative Unit, embarked on the project after reading a story in the Chronicle in January, which
broke the news of the identification of Dean and Tina's remains.
"The headline really grabbed me," she recalled. "As I read the story, I realized this was more than two unsolved murders -- there was a missing baby, a cult, it had broad appeal. ... I thought it was a perfect story."
The Chronicle's story detailed how the slain couple had recently moved to Texas from Florida and
then disappeared in late 1980, a disappearance that had left the couple's relatives wondering, for decades, what had happened to their loved ones. The paper spent the next 10 months writing about
Texas' missing and nameless dead. Stories examined
unidentified remains in Harris County and the
identification of Peggy Dodd, in Fort Bend County, after decades.
The newspaper's stories recounted
the anguish the couple's relatives had experienced; and details about a strange call Dean's mother, Donna Casasanta, received from a person offering to drive his car back to her from California.
Casasanta ultimately met Sister Susan at the Daytona Speedway to recover her car — but the meeting failed to provide any clarity on what had happened to her son and his wife.
Corbin spent 10 months digging deeper into the case on an investigation that would take her to Texas, Florida and elsewhere. Her investigation unearthed new information — including unreported details from the Harris County Sheriff's Office's case file, interviews with members of the "Christ Family" -- the religious group that Dean and Tina had connected with at one point, and Holly Marie's first public statement.
In March, she traveled to Houston with Casasanta
to visit the site where the couple's bodies were found.
"It was heart wrenching," she said, watching Casasanta, now in her 80s, pick her way through the scrubby forest to stand at the spot where police had found his body. "She wanted to pray over the spot where the remains were found."
Months later, as she was wrapping up production, she got the call from Sister Susan. They spent more than an hour negotiating, and soon, Corbin was on a plane to interview her. The next day, they met in a hotel room, where they spoke for several hours.
Sister Susan answered all of Corbin's questions, but her version "differed dramatically" from Casasanta's recollection of the evening her son's car was returned to her.
"It was very difficult to reconcile those differences," Corbin said. "I have no idea if she was telling the truth. She seemed very convincing, and you want to take someone at their word, but it's up to the prosecutor (or other investigators) to figure that one out."
