On the afternoon of July 13, 1982, three teenagers from Waxahachie, Texas, were murdered at Speegleville Park near Lake Waco. Kenneth Franks, Raylene Rice, and Jill Montgomery had reportedly driven north to socialize near the water. They were confronted by their killers first at a park off Lake Shore Drive, then transported to Speegleville Park off Highway Six, where, according to trial testimony, they were tortured and stabbed multiple times. The case that followed would consume the Texas justice system for over a decade, produce four convictions, one execution, and a trail of innocence claims that outlasted the legal proceedings themselves.
The murders did not begin with a grievance against those three teenagers. Evidence presented at subsequent trials pointed to a murder-for-hire scheme built on a case of mistaken identity. The actual target, prosecutors argued, was a young woman named Gayle Kelley, whose family Kenneth Franks knew. Jill Montgomery, by the account that emerged in court, bore enough resemblance to Kelley that she was misidentified — either by those who contracted the killing, by the perpetrators themselves, or somewhere in the chain between the two. The result was that Montgomery, Franks, and Rice died for someone else's dispute entirely.
That afternoon, Anthony Melendez and his brother Perry Surita had finished decorating work in Bryan, Texas, and decided to make the drive to Waco. Their stated reason for the trip, according to investigative findings, was to purchase amphetamines. By the end of the day they were enmeshed in one of the most prolonged and contested murder prosecutions in Texas criminal history.