The envelope was postmarked “Aug 12, 1986 – Houston, Texas” and it had made its way to the Freeport post office where it had been sorted and placed into the box of the addressee. The envelope was marked with “Personal” and “Urgent!” and the name on it was that of Rebecca’s grandfather, Mr. Leon Buchanan.
This is how it began:
“August 13, 1986
Dear Mr. Buchanan,
Please forgive me for not giving my name, but because of my family I cannot. I have been praying that this story is not true but there is just too many coincidenses. Since Becky has not shown up yet, I feel it is worth a try…”
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Hello friends. It’s Brenda from Vintage Texas Crimes with Part 4 of the story of Rebecca Beard’s murder for you. Today we are talking about the anonymous letter from August 1986 and Paul Taylor, the person convicted of Rebecca Beard’s murder. In Part 3, we discussed how there are two stories, the one the family knew in 1986 and the story the family knew nothing about. The anonymous letter is part of the publicly known story … it was the story the family was fed, for lack of a better word. The letter, in my opinion, was a bull-you-know-what story fed to the family, the public, and anyone else who would listen.
So, let’s get started … and thank you for following this page and Finding Becky Beard ’s story.
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The letter was sickening; Mr. Buchanan took it to the Freeport Police Department immediately. The letter, just as it was typed by the sender, continues below. Notice that the sender claims to have already talked to the sheriff. And, by the way, the ridiculous errors in the letter came from the writer, not me.
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He or she continued …
“When I first heard this, I immediately went to Sherrif Joe King. I told him my name and told him everything. He assured me they would watch him, but not to worry because he would probably be put in Jail because of all the DWI’s he has. Rite now he is in Jail for the DWI’s, but as far as I know nothing has been done about the other.
It was a monday and he came to my office and said he needed someone to talk to, that he’d done something terrible saturday nite. This is what he told me:
‘I was at the Excalibur Club in Freeport and I met this girl, she asked me for a ride home. We stopped by my house first and we ended up in bed, when all of a sudden she started screaming rape, I tried to stop her but she continued.’
‘I paniced and grabbed a gun. it went off! I couldn’t believe I had shot her! There was blood on the matress, so I loaded it in my truck. Then I rolled the body up in my rug and loaded it too. I threw the gun in the bayou and burried her on a country road. Then I shredded the mattress up and deposited it in several dumpsters around town. ’
I couldn’t believe my ears, and I demanded that he immediately turn himself in! When he saw my reaction he claimed he was only joking and began laughing at my hysteria. I told him at the time that was a sick joke! Anyway I put it out of my mind until Wednesday when one of my salesmen brought me a flyer about Becky. Immediately I rushed over to Pauls house while he was at work and let myself in. Sure enough the matress and rug was missing and there was stains of blood on the floor. I called Joe King next and told him my name. He assured me something would be done. The mans name is Paul Taylor of Freeport, he did work at Dow or Badische, but now he is serving some time for DWI’s.
I hope you follow this lead and get down to the bottom of this. Becky was a friend of mine.
I figured with your financial backing and your position in the community you might be able to get to the bottom of this. My prayers are with all of you, and I hope this is not true, but I Just couldn’t let this go on anymore!
August 13, 1986”
[Weirdly, the bottom was dated, too.]
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Until the anonymous informant surfaced, Paul Taylor’s name had not appeared in police reports; no eyewitness saw him with Rebecca that night, no one saw him at the club, his name had not been mentioned to Linda Barnes, Rebecca’s mother, when she had been in Excalibur on March 4 asking about the night her daughter had been there. Paul Taylor had not been linked in any way to Rebecca’s disappearance.
As I recall, the newspaper only gave a sketch of what Taylor’s alleged confession said, and those 1986 issues of The Facts are not available online.
In the beginning, the anonymous letter was reported by The Facts as coming from a female who was a sister-in-law to one of Paul Taylor’s friends, Rick Brown, but she didn’t write it.
I’m about to get down into the weeds a little now talking about dates, but dates and timelines always have something to say if you listen.
The date of the letter was August 13, 1986 (stated both on the top and bottom), but the date postmarked on the letter was Monday, August 12, so it is likely the letter was actually received by Mr. Buchanan on August 13. (Who knows why the anonymous letter writer used the wrong date … it could have been an error.)
The writer claims to have put the Rebecca Beard disappearance out of mind “until Wednesday” when a salesman who worked at the letter writer’s business brought in a missing person poster with Rebecca’s picture on it. “Wednesday” would have been August 6, 1986. The anonymous one claims to have gone to Taylor’s house and “let myself in,” during which time he or she observed a missing mattress and blood stains on the floor in Taylor’s house on that date.
Look, I don’t know what the relationship is with the sheriff and the letter writer, but doesn’t it seem like the sheriff would be eager to solve this crime? The letter writer professed to have gone to the sheriff early, right after Paul Taylor allegedly confessed he killed Rebecca Beard for screaming rape. The letter writer went back again to the sheriff after seeing Taylor’s house on August 6. Yet the sheriff still had not pursued the lead seven days later!
Does that seem right? To me, it sounds like the sheriff wasn’t sold on the idea that Paul Taylor was the right person.
Also on August 13, investigators Det. Lt. Larry Bullard and Det. Sgt. Rubin Gonzales paid a visit to Paul Taylor, who was incarcerated in the Brazoria County Jail, and they questioned him about Rebecca. According to them, Taylor refused to discuss it; he wouldn’t say another word. The next day was a big deal, but before we get to that, let’s talk about Taylor’s grandparents briefly.
We are going back to the winter of 1939, while the Great Depression still hovered over Americans, but they were beginning to see that, after ten years of tough financial times, things might get better. In those days, Taylor’s grandfather, Lindsay Paul Taylor, worked as a night watchman at what used to be called the Clemmons State Prison Farm (now the Clemmons Unit) between Brazoria and Jones Creek on Highway 36. On the night of February 12, 1939, Lindsay Taylor died in Freeport at age 50; he had been riding the running board on the side of a car when he fell off and cracked his skull. (I’ve attached his death certificate with the details.)
What made matters worse is his wife, Velma Mae Taylor, was only 33 that night when the hardest of times fell on her and her three children. Her girls were ages 15 and 3; Paul Taylor’s father, Paul Taylor, Sr., was then 9 years old. Somehow, Mrs. Taylor held it together, raised her children, and she never remarried. That was quite a feat.
In 1950, with Velma Taylor’s children then grown, except for Nella June, her youngest daughter, The Freeport Facts reported she went to work for Brazoria County as a radio dispatcher making $177 per month.
The public record of Brazoria County shows that Velma worked for Sheriff Jack Marshall in her new job, and she continued with the department until there was a new sheriff, Sheriff Robert Gladney, in 1965. Sheriff Gladney also swore in Velma Taylor to work in his office. Presumably, she worked for the county for another few years, at least until she was 62. At that point, around 1968, it appears Velma took over the Courthouse Coffee Shop contract and ran it for several years. In 1980, a DPS officer named Joe King ran against Robert Gladney and won the election.
I’ve been told Velma Taylor and Joe King were friends.
The purpose of telling Velma Taylor’s history is two-fold. First, to collect facts we are still missing … if anyone has additional verifiable details on Velma Taylor’s history (or any other information you want to share), please email me at vintagetexascrimes@gmail.com, message me on Facebook Messenger, or if you would rather, send a message to Finding Becky Beard. The family will eventually want to write a full book or go all in on something bigger than what I am capable of. I’m a vintage crime storyteller, but this story isn’t over. It needs to be solved. The case seemed to be solved for nearly 40 years, but it really isn’t, according to the people who have been willing to talk in the shadows … there is no body, no confession, and no weapon.
My function here is to pull the facts together and, hopefully, make it appealing to the right person or people with a large audience, investigators, and the know-how to accomplish what the family wants done.
The other reason for discussing Paul Taylor’s grandmother is so that we can all recognize that Velma Taylor was a face that people in the county system knew for years, and that wasn’t bad for Paul Taylor when the mid-1980s rolled around.
Paul Taylor was an out-of-control drinker. He couldn’t seem to get into a car without having alcohol in his body. I’ve uncovered seven felony DWI or DUI convictions, and I’ve heard there were more than eleven. Paul Taylor’s alcoholism and his inability get well from it made him the perfect one to blame for Rebecca’s disappearance. It’s kind of a no-brainer to see he was the fall guy for this when you consider that he was not at the club the night that Rebecca Beard disappeared, and he wasn’t at the party in Surfside where Rebecca was seen after Excalibur closed. And the more you look at this situation, the more it appears that doing-away-with-Rebecca wasn’t a crime of opportunity; it seems to have been a crime someone wanted to happen, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s slip back now to August 13, 1986 when Paul was in the county jail and he was visited by Freeport investigators, Bullard and Gonzales … the day the letter had landed on Mr. Buchanan’s desk saying Paul Taylor had killed Rebecca … the day Taylor supposedly shut down and would not discuss it. The NEXT day, August 14, Paul Taylor was shelving books in the jail library one minute, and the next, he was gone.
That means Taylor, wearing obvious jail clothing, was upstairs on the fifth floor where the jail was at the time, and he had to get to the bottom floor on the stairs or on one of the elevators. Taylor wandering around in that state would have drawn attention. Yet, when he got to the bottom floor, Taylor walked out of those courthouse doors and disappeared.
Now, back then, prisoners often mowed and tended lawns and flower beds around the courthouse on county property, but they didn’t do it by themselves without someone from the Sheriff’s department watching them or at least with other trusty-level inmates. As a lone prisoner, he would have stuck out like a sore thumb walking away from the courthouse and crossing any street on the four sides of the courthouse complex in his prisoner’s clothes. That was a busy area, and I find it hard to believe he did that with no help at all.
Once he was out, he ghosted Brazoria County. Paul Taylor was gone.
August turned into fall, then winter, and still there’s no sign of Taylor … until one night in January 1987, a call comes in to the Lake Jackson Police Department, and it goes something like this. “This is the bartender at The Ocean Club in Atlanta, Georgia … there’s a guy in here who is bragging about how he’s wanted for the murder of a girl in Brazoria County, Texas …”
Before the night was over, Paul Taylor was in the back of an Atlanta police car and on his way back to Brazoria County the next day … and that’s where we will pick right back up in a couple of days and talk a little more about Paul.
We still need to cover Rebecca’s birthday with Tucker Black in February 1986, the death of Sue White (her real name) at the convenience store across the street, who Rebecca left with that night, and the things the family were not aware of taking place and how many people say they couldn’t talk about this crime for years … and what witnesses at the Surfside party have said to the family about Rebecca’s departure from the party that night.
There are so many little pieces of this puzzle scattered everywhere … we’re trying to get them collected, and this time, they won’t be swept under the rug.
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Thanks again for reading. If you find a fact that needs to be corrected, or a typo, feel free to let me know via messenger and I will fix it as soon as I can.
Have a great Friday, everyone!