Forty Year Old Mystery Solved, And Then Not ....

  

Dean, Tina and baby Holly Marie Clouse 

 

A very young couple, the loving parents of a toddler daughter, but also the murder victims in an unsolved 1981-mystery that's intriguing, even 40 years after their death. Tina was 15 when she met Dean, who was 19 at that time, and they married shortly after. When their daughter, Holly Marie, was born, everything looked good for the young family who had moved from Florida to Texas where they intended to start an enterprise in cabinet making, which was Dean's specialty. However, their families got worried about them as they suddenly stopped communicating with them. 

 

 

Dean Clouse's mother did her best to find the family, but in vain. The police didn't do much about the mystery, which was seen as a voluntary disappearance of a young couple who wanted to start all over in Texas. Not even when a dog in Houston brought the decomposed arm of a human home to his/her family did anyone think of Tina and Dean as murder victims because that happened 250 miles from their new address. The decomposed bodies of a young, murdered couple that were found after the dog brought back the arm of one of them were buried with the romantic name of “The Harris County Does”, and nobody knew that a young child was missing. That is, not until 2022, when DNA from Dean revealed a biological link to a relative in Kentucky. The family told the police about baby Holly Marie who was still missing, as she had not been found with her dead parents. 

 

When Tina and Dean were identified, the investigation led to the discovery of what happened to their daughter. She herself didn't remember anything, but it appears that at the time of the murder she had been brought to a church in Arizona by two barefoot women, who also had her birth certificate. The pastor, Philip McGoldrick, at that church took her in and adopted her. Forty years later, when she was 42 years old, she had become the mother of five children. When describing the two women, Philip McGoldrick, called them "Jesus freaks", and he said that they presumably lived in the desert in some kind of Christian community. 

 

 

The grown Holly Marie meeting some of her relatives for the first time in 40 years

 

The murderer of Dean and Tina has not been found, but there is an ongoing investigation, so who knows, it may not be too late to bring him/her to trial. Over time, stranger things have happened than that. I, for one, suspect that Holly Marie's parents were murdered because someone wanted to kidnap her and raise her as her own daughter. Otherwise there is no reason also to steal her birth certificate ....  
  

 

https://abcnews.com/US/baby-holly-speaks-1st-time-after-missing-40/story?id=104425263 

 

 

Wikipedia