LAURA SMITHER

When a Texas girl first went missing in 1997, what no one knew at the time was that she had been the victim of a serial killer. William Reece would go on to murder three young women that same year before he was eventually identified by DNA.

Parents’ determination, an interstate agreement, and 25 years of constant police work helped bring William Reece back to Texas after he received a death sentence in Oklahoma. The result: Reece pleading guilty to the 1997 murders of Laura Smither, Jessica Cain and Kelli Ann Cox.

A man already sentenced to death for a cold-case killing in Oklahoma pleaded guilty to murder Wednesday in the deaths of three girls whose disappearances in Texas also went unsolved for decades. William Reece, 62, pleaded guilty in a courtroom in Galveston in the 1997 killings of 12-year-old Laura Smither of Friendswood and 17-year-old Jessica Cain of Tiki Island.

William Lewis Reece was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to capital murder in the deaths of Laura Smither and Jessica Cain, who were killed 25 years ago.

An Oklahoma judge affirmed a jury’s death sentence for a man accused of a string of murders in 1997.

A jury in Oklahoma has recommended a death sentence for an alleged serial killer who was convicted of kidnapping a woman from a car wash and killing her more than 20 years ago.

A jury in Oklahoma has recommended a death sentence for an alleged serial killer who was convicted of kidnapping a woman from a car wash and killing her more than 20 years ago. The jury on Wednesday recommended the death penalty for William Lewis Reece, who was convicted last week of first-degree murder for the 1997 kidnapping and killing of 19-year-old Tiffany Johnston. Reece did not testify at his trial, but the jury heard recordings of his confessions to police in which he admitted killing Johnston and three other people in Texas, The Oklahoman reported.

An Oklahoma jury sentenced accused serial killer, William Lewis Reece, to death for the 1997 murder of Tiffany Johnston.

Accused serial killer William Lewis Reece has been found guilty of murder for the first time since a series of young girls were murdered in Texas and Oklahoma in 1997. It took an Oklahoma County jury less than 2 hours to find Reece guilty of murdering Tiffany Johnston in the town of Bethany. The case remain unsolved until Reece was charged with the crime in 2015 after DNA linked him to Johnston’s body and a phone card linked him to the area where she disappeared.