Bound in Silence — An unsolved murder 80 years later

Christena Stephens interviewing the Hunt sisters (author photo)

On a nearly moonless night of October 26, 1943, a single gunshot rang out in Littlefield, Texas.

A prominent Texas doctor and his wife were found bound, shot, beaten, and murdered. The only witness: their five-year-old daughter, who was so traumatized by the crime and the events that followed that she refused to speak of it for 70 years.

The heinous crime remains unsolved. For years, the courts tried to convict one suspect, but forensic evidence contracted the prosecution’s case. Investigators, including the famed Texas Rangers, failed to bring anyone to justice. 

Eight decades later, the questions linger over the plains of the Texas Panhandle: who killed the Hunts and why? 

Author and historian Christena Stephens spent more than a decade researching the Hunt murders, re-examining every twist and turn in the legal process, uncovering new evidence, and drawing new conclusions about who might have been responsible. The result is Bound in Silence a true crime tour-de-force, a meticulously researched, impeccably told tale of unsolved murder on the High Plains. 

On the 80th anniversary of the murders, Stephens recounts how she came to write about the Hunt murders in her journey from the first word to the last:

As I turned a yellowed newspaper page, immediately the words “Brutal Murders” caught my eye, a headline emblazoned across top of the Lubbock Morning Avalanche-Journal on October 27, 1943. I froze. The accompanying photo of two little girls grabbed my attention and became ingrained in my memory.

A day earlier, police in the small town of Littlefield, Texas, had discovered the bodies of Dr. Roy and Mae Hunt in their blood-soaked bed. I became engrossed in the story, reading how their bodies were a tangled mess — one shot, the other brutally beaten. The little girls were in the house at the time of the murders.

As I continued reading, questions started popping up in my mind. Who murdered them? Why were they murdered? How exactly were they murdered? Why did the killer not kill the daughters inside the house?  

I stumbled across the story of the murders while searching for answers to my own family history. Captivated by the initial headline and photograph, I copied the newspaper articles and headed to the courthouse to search the case files.

Then life took over. I became involved in the West Texas Historical Association (WTHA) while trying to save a historical ranch on the Llano Estacado. Fantabulous historians — yes, they were and are “fantabulous” — like Dr. Fred Rathjen, Dr. David Murrah, Dr. Paul Carlson, and Dr. Monte Monroe guided my research and writing of history. Back then I was not a historian in any manner. Heck, I was barely a writer.

Following the foundational guidance of these historians, I quickly learned how to research, write, edit, and put facts together to make history come alive. Under their tutelage, I caught the bug of writing, researching, and presenting. When the ranch preservation project fell through, I turned back to my old files and discovered I had enough information to write a 10-page paper on the Hunt murders that had caught my attention.

Ray Westbrook, a former Lubbock Avalanche-Journal reporter, wrote a story on me and my paper that forever changed my life. At a WTHA historical conference, my paper session became one of the most attended presentation ever for the organization—all thanks to Ray.

From that moment on this story and book became a winding path of several coincidences for me to follow. That 10-page paper has now turned into a book. Along this journey, some of the stops I made gave me new directions to follow in my research.

The full significance of the story hit home when I interviewed the Hunt daughters. Jo Ann Hunt had never talked about what happened that cold October night in 1943 until she sat down with me for two separate interviews. Bound in Silence reveals for the first time what she saw the night her parents were murdered. When I hear her voice in my head or read her words, chills run through me.  

Eighty years ago today, the unthinkable happened in a rural community — two lives viciously taken, other lives upended, one daughter bound in silence for seventy years.

From the first word to the last, finding the answers to my initial questions has taken more than a decade. Bound in Silence was not easy to research or to put together. The story and the context around it is complex. The murders were preceeded by an earlier attempt on Roy Hunt’s life. Six different trials and four appeals — all revealing critical insights about the murders— generated mountains of files.

Some of Stephens’ research files

(author photos)

Researching history, especially true crime, becomes a passionate expedition that leads to a single thrill of a discovery. Then, maybe, just maybe you get one answer, which leads you to ask another question or takes you further down the research journey path.

Bound in Silence evolved one paper, one research discovery at a time, with some life hiccups along the way.

I hope readers will come away understanding that children should always have a voice and that even investigators back then were not perfect. I hope it is a story that will envelop readers, especially if you are a history buff and true crime fan.

Bound in Silence: An Unsolved Murder in a Small Texas Town, from Stoney Creek Publishing, is available for pre-order directly from us. You can also order from TAMU Press, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.