The murder of Ester Collins – Cold Case from 1987 (Katy, TX)
It has been almost 40 years since the murder of Ester Darlene Collins. It happened on a Friday afternoon in Katy, Texas.
Ester was working in a model home. It was a pretty house in the $80,000 range in 1987 (which would be about $300,000 now). The home and neighborhood seemed to be comfortable and secure, but nearly four decades later, the person who killed her has never been identified.
Ester Collins was thirty-five years old when she died. She was a mother of two sons, Troy and Shannon, and by every account she was deeply devoted to them. Troy later described her as the kind of mother who never missed a single one of his high school football games.
She worked hard, managed her responsibilities, and showed up for her children. Troy immediately sensed something was wrong on the evening of Friday, November 6, 1987, when his mother failed to appear at his game. By the end of the night, he would learn that his instincts were right.
Ester Collins
At the time of her death, Ester worked as a sales agent for Standard Pacific Homes, staffing a model home in a newly developed subdivision near Mason Road and Highland Knolls.
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Sometime between noon and 4:30 p.m. that Friday, Ester was attacked upstairs in one of the model home’s bedrooms, where she was bound, gagged, and stabbed numerous times. The violence was extreme, and the scene was left remarkably clean.
The House Where it Happened
One investigator described it as almost sterile, as though no struggle had occurred at all. The clean state of the site would limit physical evidence from the start and haunt the investigation for decades.
The last confirmed contact anyone had with Ester occurred at approximately 12:30 p.m. that day, when she answered a phone call from a woman who lived nearby asking about warranty work on a nearby house. Ester told the caller that a work crew was currently in her office.
That detail would later become one of the most troubling unresolved aspects of the case. Investigators have never conclusively identified or cleared every worker who may have been present at the model home that afternoon, and Ester’s family has long believed that possibly, it was one of the workers who caused her death.
On the Wednesday night before the murder, Ester reportedly received four phone calls at work. After the first three calls, she hung up, saying, “No, no, no.”
After the fourth call, her response reportedly changed to, “OK, I’ll meet you.” Shortly afterward, she asked a neighbor whether she had ever been harassed by someone. At the time, it may have seemed like an uncomfortable but isolated incident. In hindsight, it feels like a warning—one that no one realized the gravity of until it was too late.
Sometime between 4:15 and 4:30 p.m. on November 6, a couple of prospective homebuyers entered the model home and went upstairs. What they found stopped them cold. Ester Collins lay bound and stabbed in the upstairs bedroom, left where she had been attacked. The couple fled and alerted a neighbor, who called the police. By the time law enforcement arrived, the opportunity to capture fleeting evidence—and possibly the killer—had already slipped away.
In the hours after Ester’s death, another critical clue emerged. Her ATM card was used at two different locations, withdrawing just over four hundred dollars from her account. Since no additional clues came from this, we can guess that perhaps in 1987 the ATM machine didn’t have cameras.
To Ester’s family, it was obvious. Troy Collins has always believed that the ATM withdrawals pointed directly to motive. Someone didn’t just kill his mother; someone used her bank card afterward, risking detection for relatively little money. That trail, however, was never fully followed to a conclusion, and no suspect was ever identified through it.
There were other loose ends as well. A witness reported seeing a man who looked like a salesman leaving the model home around the time of the murder. He was never identified, never questioned, and never publicly accounted for. Like so many elements of this case, he vanished into the sprawl of late-1980s suburban Texas, leaving behind only a description and unanswered questions.
From the very beginning, Ester’s family believed the investigation was mishandled. Detectives initially focused on her ex-husband, Jerry Collins. Although he cooperated fully and was eventually cleared, the family has long believed that this narrow focus cost valuable time while other leads went cold. Neighbors complained in 1987 that detectives were not listening to them, and years later the family discovered that some investigators were not even aware the case existed until a private detective was hired and pressure was applied. Those early missteps had lasting consequences. With little physical evidence and fading memories, investigators were left almost entirely dependent on public tips.
Refusing to let the case die, Ester’s sister stepped into an investigative role herself. She went door-to-door, took detailed notes, and collected information that would later become central to the case, including the warranty phone call from the woman mentioned at the beginning of this article and the suspicious ATM withdrawals. Her efforts preserved details that might otherwise have been lost forever. Ester’s son, Troy Collins, has said plainly that without his aunt’s work, the family would have had no chance at all.
Over the years, Ester Collins’s case has resurfaced repeatedly in the media, but not enough. One of her sister’s real estate clients tipped me off about this story, and I am sharing it to push for another look at this cold case.
A cold case team was able to find DNA a few years back, but so far, there has not been a hit. After all these years, justice is still possible. Someone might slip up and say something. Please call if you hear of anything or have information.
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You can contact Crime Stoppers or the Harris County Sheriff’s Office Cold Case Unit. Tips can be made anonymously.
The main phone number for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) Homicide Division, which includes the Cold Case Unit, is 713-274-9100.
CRIME STOPPERS – 713.222.TIPS (8477)
Website: crime-stoppers.org
Brenda, Vintage Texas Crimes
If you need to reach me or have a correction for this article, leave a comment or text me at 979-217-2589.