Bellingcat Investigator Peter Barth, who grew up in Texas, researched and reported this story in collaboration with the Texas Observer.
William “Invoice” Asher Richardson Jr. pulled into the driveway of his upscale Corpus Christi residence late on a Sunday night time on the finish of summer time. The rich Texas oilman was unloading his Winnebago RV as his spouse and stepson walked inside. Their housekeeper, watching via the entrance window, noticed them first: two males, armed with sawed-off shotguns and sporting jumpsuits, working towards Richardson from the shadows.
And not using a phrase, they fired 4 shells of No. 4 buckshot, sending 45 pellets into Richardson’s head, neck, chest, and arms. The shooters have been gone as rapidly as they arrived, fleeing in a getaway automobile. Richardson’s spouse tried to name for assist, however the telephone line had been minimize. Her son ran to fetch a neighbouring physician. It was too late. Richardson, 40, died sprawled on his driveway.
Richardson’s homicide on Aug. 1, 1971, stays unsolved.
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The case is certainly one of an awesome variety of unsolved homicides in the USA. The Homicide Accountability Venture (MAP) counts nearly 346,000 chilly circumstances of murder between 1965 and 2023—possible an undercount since many homicides from the sooner many years are excluded and never all police departments report back to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, on which MAP is predicated.
Clearance charges for US homicides—usually outlined as the share of circumstances closed through arrest or the dying of a suspect, or dominated to be justifiable—have been declining for years.
In the meantime, on-line crowdsourcing efforts have sprung as much as sort out chilly circumstances together with Uncovered, with nearly 50,000 unsolved homicide and lacking individuals circumstances, and Clear up the Case, a nonprofit based by Aaron Benzick, a detective with the Plano Police Division. “You spotlight these circumstances, and folks come ahead,” Benzick informed Bellingcat. “Even when that doesn’t occur, simply organising these circumstances helps regulation enforcement.”
In 2023, the Corpus Christi Police Division (CCPD), with two detectives on its chilly case squad, started reviewing 100 unsolved murder circumstances relationship again to April 1970—together with Richardson’s. However the metropolis has refused to launch practically all of its recordsdata.
Bellingcat has independently uncovered new details about the homicide that’s by no means been made public. In a years-long open supply overview of Richardson’s homicide carried out in collaboration with the Texas Observer, the retailers examined digitised newspapers, on-line archives, family tree providers, and declassified FBI data. The retailers additionally filed public report requests with native and state regulation enforcement businesses, the FBI, and the Nationwide Archives and Information Administration (NARA).
Two males, together with one who did jail time for a previous homicide, have been charged with Richardson’s dying however not convicted. The retailers’ investigation fleshes out the failed case towards these two people and contributes new particulars to the general public report of what occurred the night time Richardson was killed—together with the potential id of a getaway driver. The investigation additionally reveals alleged hyperlinks between Richardson’s social circle and organised crime and a few proof of one other potential participant within the crime.
The findings illuminate violent collisions between jet-setting Southern playboys on the highest rungs of the social ladder and the murky prison underworld that gripped Texas within the Sixties and ’70s. Public data make clear this peculiar conflict of worlds, although monumental Freedom of Info Act (FOIA) request backlogs, the lack of historic paperwork, and the unwillingness of regulation enforcement businesses to launch all recordsdata make the total story elusive. Crucially, many gamers with firsthand data—the witnesses, the alleged accomplices or killers, victims, police, legal professionals, reporters, and members of the family—are both useless or unwilling to talk.
Richardson’s vibrant life in a landed South Texas oil and ranching household was illuminated in older articles like “The Demise of a Sportsman,” a 1971 function printed within the San Antonio Categorical and Information. However, aside from a single chapter in a 1997 e-book a few Texas Ranger, there are few current media reviews on the unsolved Nineteen Seventies homicide.
Members of the family have described the younger Richardson as a troublemaker who attended three completely different excessive faculties earlier than dropping out. By age 20, he had joined the US Marine Corps and fought within the Korean Struggle, the place he was wounded and later adorned for his service.
His father, William Asher Richardson Sr., had based the Richardson Petroleum Firm. Richardson Jr. constructed his personal firm, Richardson Petroleum Enterprises, Inc. He spent weekends enjoying high-stakes poker, attending prestigious taking pictures tournaments, and on fishing journeys within the Gulf of Mexico. He flew round in a customised P-51 Mustang fighter airplane to handle his oil enterprise.
Tragedy struck in 1963 when Richardson’s father, having fallen into monetary pressure, died by suicide. Lynn Richardson, Invoice’s daughter and William’s granddaughter who was solely six at the moment, remembers listening to about her grandfather’s dying. “Just a little boy got here to the home with a grocery order for US$11, and he was so broke that he couldn’t pay that so he went upstairs and shot himself,” she informed Bellingcat. Eight years later, her father was murdered in his Corpus Christi driveway. “It’s been actually tragic. … They are saying there are generational curses. There’s simply been quite a lot of violence in our household.”
In his ultimate years of life, Invoice Richardson’s oil enterprise dried up, and in 1969 he filed for chapter, owing about $3.3 million (round $28.7 million right now). Roughly half of these money owed have been owed to 125 unsecured collectors, lenders that don’t have any proper to a borrower’s belongings in the event that they declare chapter. Some have been his enemies, enterprise associates later informed investigators.
Richardson turned to the game of Columbaire-style pigeon taking pictures for earnings. A bloodsport standard in Spain, Mexico, and Argentina, it entails a talented thrower—a columbaire—pitching reside birds which can be tough for the shooter standing behind him to hit. Richardson was named one of many sport’s finest shooters and was 3 times chosen to characterize America by its governing physique.
Chapter 1: The Homicide of a Texas Oilman
A beforehand unreleased offence report, obtained by Bellingcat in response to an info request, and an interview with a buddy of the Richardsons carried out by Bellingcat add texture to newspaper narratives of the chaotic minutes earlier than and after the homicide.
Richardson lived along with his household in a brand new four-bedroom home with a Mediterranean-style courtyard in Nation Membership Estates, an upscale neighbourhood in Corpus. On the night time of Aug. 1, 1971, Richardson’s housekeeper, Mary Chavez, was serving to the household settle in after a pigeon shoot in McAllen, Texas.
A stranger had known as the Richardsons’ home to ask when the household would return, Chavez later informed authorities, and she and others had seen suspicious-looking males across the neighbourhood. Police, who discovered a packet of cigarettes and empty beer cans in bushes close to Richardson’s home, theorised that the gunmen had been mendacity in wait.
Round 11 p.m., Richardson and his 11-year-old stepson James LaBarba have been unpacking their motor residence when Chavez, from a entrance window of the home, noticed two males working throughout the garden with shotguns. Each have been sporting baseball caps and sun shades. She later described one as tall and lanky, the opposite as shorter and heavyset.
After the primary shot, James turned and noticed the boys firing sawed-off shotguns at his stepfather. The coroner later logged 45 entry wounds. Investigators described the homicide as a “skilled killing.”
Bellingcat interviewed one of many first individuals to reach on the crime scene, Chip Hogan, the son of Invoice’s shut buddy and fellow pigeon shooter Roger Hogan, who was a teen on the time. He and his father had accompanied Invoice and his household on the journey to McAllen and had simply arrived at their residence after leaving Richardson’s home when the telephone rang.
When proven potential suspects’ images, Chavez allegedly pointed to 2 males from Fort Value: Odis Thomas Hammond and Sam Mena. Each of them have been arrested for the killing.
Hammond was a profession prison with an arrest report for housebreaking and a fame with police for selling prostitution. Richardson was the third individual Hammond had been accused of killing, in keeping with a Bellingcat overview of Texas Division of Public Security digital data and detailed reviews obtained via public info requests.
A June 10, 1957, WBAP-TV newsreel displaying Hammond (proper) giving the Fort Value Assistant District Legal professional a press release on killing his buddy in self-defence the day earlier than. Supply: NBC 5/KXAS Tv Information Assortment (AR0776), College of North Texas Particular Collections.
Hammond confessed to killing a buddy and fellow pimp in a shootout exterior a bar in Fort Value in 1957, however he was by no means prosecuted after a witness failed to look. Two years later, he was convicted of the 1959 homicide of a Houston automobile salesman throughout an armed theft. However, surprisingly, Hammond had finished little jail time: He was sentenced to 30 years in 1962 however was paroled in April 1971.
Hammond had reportedly been arrested greater than 60 instances in Fort Value when he was practically killed by a girl who shot him within the abdomen at a bar in 1958. He and two others additionally had been accused of opening hearth on a person throughout a failed 1959 Midland theft. In response to a FOIA request from Bellingcat, NARA launched a 20-page FBI file on Hammond from a White-Slave Visitors Act (Mann Act) investigation in 1959, detailing FBI brokers’ unsuccessful efforts to find a girl they believed Hammond had trafficked out of state.
Sam Mena additionally had a big prison historical past, together with arrests for housebreaking and theft, and a 1959 jail escape, newspaper articles and data present. Whereas jailed for Richardson’s homicide, Mena allegedly tried to make use of a cellmate to recruit a contract killer to kill Richardson’s housekeeper earlier than she may testify as a witness towards him and Hammond. In accordance with Corpus Christi law enforcement officials’ testimony, the contract killer was “Tommy” Gibbs.
However a cellmate tipped off police to the plot. Detectives have been watching Chavez’s home when Gibbs drove to Corpus Christi shortly after Mena’s arrest. Police adopted, and Gibbs apparently deserted the plan. Six weeks later, Gibbs was shot to dying in Fort Value. His homicide stays unsolved.
Regardless of the entire allegations about Hammond and Mena neither man was finally convicted of the infamous Corpus Christi killing.
Chapter 2: The Suspects—and Their Getaway Driver
“Tommy” Gibbs, the would-be hitman, had one other never-before-published connection to Richardson’s homicide: Police suspected he had been the getaway driver, in keeping with Gibbs’ murder file, which Bellingcat obtained from the Parker County Sheriff’s Workplace.
Gibbs was an expert underworld operator who used a number of names, in keeping with an evaluation of newspaper reviews, start and dying certificates, census knowledge, jail data, and a prisoner-run newspaper. His actual identify was Paul Adams Gibbs, and he used the aliases George Edward Thomas and Tommy Gibbs. A former Marine wounded at Tarawa, Gibbs was arrested in 1944 for stealing a automobile and, by 1950, was serving a jail time period for theft.
In 1951, he and two associates have been arrested for beating and robbing a person, then throwing him out of a automobile. Gibbs was later detained in Dallas as a part of a nationwide sweep of drug traffickers and did time for armed theft. He’s described as an “alleged hitman” within the 1997 e-book by writer Lee Paul about Jim Peters, a Texas Ranger who labored on the Richardson case.
Gibbs himself died mysteriously solely months after failing to hold out successful on Richardson’s housekeeper, one of many witnesses to the homicide. On Nov. 14, 1971, a deer hunter in a wooded space close to the city of Weatherford stumbled throughout a person in a swimsuit and tie mendacity in a pool of blood. Police believed Gibbs had been executed and that his physique had been dragged there from the trunk of a automobile. He’d been shot six instances within the face, with a cheek wound delivered at such shut vary it induced gunpowder burns.
The Parker County sheriff’s newly launched recordsdata on his murder embody a handwritten investigator’s word that claims: “Tommy Gibbs. Lived at 232 Ridgeway, Azle (Texas) with Sam Mena who pimps and in jail in Corpis [sic] for taking pictures down Invoice Richardson with Odis Hammond. Additionally in jail. Gibbs was susp. to have been driving the automobile.”
Some journalists speculated that Gibbs’ dying was tied to a feud between members of the so-called Dixie Mafia, a loosely knit group of underworld crime figures that operated in Texas and different Southern states. Curiously, solely two weeks earlier than his homicide, Gibbs had been shot within the leg however informed authorities the damage was self-inflicted.
Jesse Sublett, writer of two books in regards to the Texas underworld of the Sixties and 70s mentioned the Dixie Mafia was not structured like different crime gangs: “From the skin, ‘Dixie Mafia’ was a conceit, a advertising and marketing time period in order that regulation enforcement and the media may conceptualize the issue and kind of establish their method to coping with what was principally a prison subculture of loosely related individuals who tended to reside exterior the regulation.”
Police officers by no means revealed that they suspected Gibbs had been an confederate in Richardson’s homicide. By the point of the trial, he was already useless.
Chapter 3: The Failed Homicide Trial
Odis Hammond was tried for Richardson’s homicide on Aug. 21, 1972. Hammond’s lawyer moved efficiently to have his shopper tried individually from Mena as a result of, he argued, the proof towards Mena—which included statements he’d organized for Gibbs to kill Richardson’s housekeeper—may hurt Hammond’s case.
The prosecution known as witnesses who positioned Hammond close to Richardson’s resort in McAllen throughout the taking pictures competitors and later at Richardson’s residence on the night time of the homicide. A resort clerk recalled that Hammond informed her he’d made the 500-mile drive to McAllen from Fort Value in a automobile customised to run on each butane and gasoline. Chavez and LaBarba, Richardson’s stepson, each recognized him as one of many killers.
However then the case towards them fell aside.
Hammond’s defence lawyer questioned how witnesses may have seen the boys clearly at midnight. He additionally known as an FBI firearms knowledgeable, who testified that spent shells from the scene couldn’t have come from the kind of shotgun LaBarba claimed to have seen the killers hearth.
The court docket blocked prosecutors’ makes an attempt to point out similarities between Richardson’s killing and a 1959 homicide for which Hammond had been convicted. In that case, Hammond and an confederate gunned down a Houston automobile salesman in his residence. Hammond was paroled months earlier than Richardson’s homicide.
Different witnesses testified that Hammond had been in Fort Definitely worth the weekend of the homicide. One lady claimed she’d spent the night time with him there. Hammond was discovered not responsible and walked out of court docket earlier than {the handcuffs} he’d been sporting for trial had been unlocked, sporting sun shades, and a smile on his face. (By 1977, he was arrested once more for robbing a pharmacy in Dallas: He gave the impression to be sporting a wig when he pulled out a pistol, swiped narcotics, and escaped on foot with an confederate from the 1959 Houston homicide, data present.)
Nueces County prosecutors, having did not convict Hammond, by no means prosecuted Mena for Richardson’s homicide. However, as a felon, Mena additionally had been convicted of unlawful possession of a handgun and did time in jail. By 1974, he was accused of accepting a contract to kill Tarrant County District Legal professional Tim Curry, a plot that failed.
Ten years later, Mena, then 49, was arrested in Houston, this time for dealing cocaine to an undercover policeman. The police report, obtained by Bellingcat, describes Mena sporting a moustache, an all-denim “Canadian tuxedo”, and carrying a loaded .38 revolver.
Each Mena and Hammond spent the remainder of their lives out and in of jail earlier than dying within the Nineties. Neither ever confessed to Richardson’s homicide.
Chip Hogan, the son of Richardson’s buddy, informed Bellingcat that he was requested to establish a person in a police lineup who was seen within the crowd on the pigeon taking pictures match within the days earlier than Richardson’s homicide. He additionally recounted a automobile briefly following Richardson, Jerry LaBarba and his father as they drove residence of their separate automobiles on the day of the homicide.
When proven images of Hammond, Mena, and Gibbs, Chip Hogan informed Bellingcat, “Hammond is acquainted, the imaginative and prescient I’ve of him, his hair was combed, and I used to be considering his hair color was so much lighter really, extra on the blonde aspect. He may have had his hair dyed or I’m fully unsuitable on his hair at the moment”.
Whereas the Corpus Christi police recognized these two males as employed killers, prosecutors admitted to being at a loss for who had contracted them or the motive. Later, extra leads arose from the seemingly unrelated homicide investigation of yet one more rich Texan.
Chapter 4: One other Corpus Millionaire Killed—and Chained to a Block of Concrete
On June 6, 1972, nearly a 12 months after Richardson’s homicide, a corpse washed ashore on Mustang Island, throughout the causeway from the mainland portion of Corpus Christi. A fisherman was shocked to search out the corpse chained by the neck to a concrete block.
The police rapidly recognized the useless man as 32-year-old George Randolph “Randy” Farenthold, an area millionaire whom Texas Month-to-month known as “a playboy euphemistically described as a ‘sportsman’”. Farenthold had befriended Richardson via the high-stakes playing and pigeon-shooting scenes. (He was the stepson of Francis “Sissy” Farenthold, a outstanding state legislator.)
Randy Farenthold was additionally a key authorities witness: He’d been scheduled to testify in a federal fraud trial towards 4 males accused of swindling $100,000 from him in an elaborate scheme involving the acquisition of Treasury notes the males claimed have been owned by the Mafia. His homicide got here weeks earlier than the trial was because of begin. With out the important thing witness, the case collapsed.
Two of the boys accused of defrauding Farenthold, Bruce Lusk Bass III and Tharel Smith, have been companions in a Corpus Christi development agency. Bass was a part of the identical pigeon-shooting and playing clique as Richardson and Farenthold. (“Richardson was concerned with bookmaking,” a Corpus Christi police captain informed reporters. “Farenthold was hanging round with the identical individuals.”)
A break within the Farenthold homicide case got here when Robert “Little Bob” Walters, a person in jail for serving to with a jailbreak, agreed to testify towards Bass. Walters informed a grand jury that he helped Bass and Smith get rid of Farenthold’s physique after the 2 had kidnapped and fatally overwhelmed and strangled him.
Walters additionally testified that Bass had confessed to being a participant in Richardson’s homicide. It’s unclear if Walters knew extra, since the remainder of his grand jury assertion stays beneath seal. In lots of different circumstances, so-called “jailhouse snitch” testimony has additionally usually confirmed unreliable.
Parts of Walters’ grand jury assertion are discovered within the e-book about Ranger Jim Peters and in newspaper articles. In accordance with Walters, Bass was livid with Richardson as a result of he thought he was being pushed out of a high-stakes playing operation the 2 participated in. After pigeon shoots and on personal jet flights to the Bahamas, this unique circle allegedly positioned bets of as much as $50,000 ($388,000 right now) on video games of cube.
In accordance with Walters’ assertion, Bass known as him on Aug. 1, 1971, and mentioned he deliberate to kill Richardson later that day. After Richardson’s homicide, Walters mentioned Bass requested him to get rid of a shotgun and he threw components of it right into a storm drain and into Oso Creek close to Corpus Christi. Regardless of a search of Oso Creek, authorities by no means discovered any proof to assist his allegations.
Bass pleaded no contest to Farenthold’s homicide and was sentenced to 16 years on June 20, 1977. Smith, his enterprise companion, additionally implicated by Walters, was by no means charged and died of a coronary heart assault in 1985. Neither was ever charged within the Richardson homicide.
Lynn Richardson, Invoice’s daughter, informed Bellingcat her father knew Bass effectively. “He was a pigeon shooter. They have been all within the pigeon shoots collectively,” she mentioned. “Bruce Bass was really a fairly good shooter.” A 1964 photograph printed within the Corpus Christi newspaper confirmed Bass and Richardson shaking palms after a match.
She recalled an incident at a resort following a pigeon shoot in McAllen within the early ’60s when, as a younger baby, she jokingly pushed an apparently drunk Bass into the pool. Her father rapidly jumped in, pulled up Bass, and scolded his daughter.
Bass was launched from jail in 1983 after serving solely six years for murdering Farenthold; a 12 months later he was critically wounded in a taking pictures in a Jackson, Mississippi, motel bar.
Two months later, on the twelfth anniversary of Farenthold’s physique washing ashore, Bass argued with the proprietor of a Corpus Christi membership and was gunned down within the parking zone. The taking pictures dying was dominated a case of self-defence.
Chapter 5: Alleged Organised Crime Connections
Bass and others in Richardson’s internal circle had alleged ties to organised crime, in keeping with newly uncovered paperwork—together with FBI data posted on-line and paperwork supplied to Bellingcat through FOIA requests.
In July 1966, 5 years earlier than the Richardson homicide, FBI investigators raided the places of work of Kress Manufacturing Firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The proprietor, Jack Edward Kress, was wished on playing and conspiracy prices issued in Biloxi, Mississippi, a centre of Dixie Mafia exercise. Kress Manufacturing had been producing and distributing unlawful playing tools, together with loaded cube and altered enjoying playing cards, which have been being shipped nationwide. FBI investigators on the case checked out two Texans: Bruce Bass and James “Jerry” LaBarba.
Bass and LaBarba have been Richardson’s mates and taking pictures companions. LaBarba was additionally the ex-husband of Richardson’s spouse—and the daddy of Richardson’s stepson, the younger man who had witnessed his homicide.
FBI paperwork launched for LaBarba and Bass embody a mysterious account of a violent incident, involving unlawful playing, years earlier than Richardson’s homicide. On Dec. 23, 1967, two Portland, Texas, policemen noticed a automobile stopped alongside Freeway 181 at about 2:30 a.m. 5 males have been in and across the automobile, together with two within the entrance seats close to loaded pistols. A person within the backseat was bleeding from a head wound that he attributed to “a slight misunderstanding and scuffle.”
All 5 have been arrested, and a search of the automobile turned up practically 800 units of cube, some described as “crooked,” together with handwritten lists of Louisiana nightclubs. Whereas the FBI redacted the names, the report’s inclusion in LaBarba’s FBI file suggests he could have been certainly one of them, and the presence of a listing of the confiscated cube in Bass’ FBI file suggests he was one other.
Defence attorneys for Hammond claimed throughout the Richardson homicide trial that LaBarba had informed them he knew who had actually dedicated Richardson’s homicide. LaBarba individually testified that he had tried to guard his son by telling “plenty of individuals” that James noticed nothing on the night time Richardson was killed. In an obvious reference to Randy Farenthold’s homicide solely two months earlier, LaBarba informed the court docket this was as a result of “It looks like witnesses have an actual exhausting time staying alive in Corpus Christi”. (LaBarba died in 2009 and his son James died in 2018.)
An unnamed informant informed an FBI agent in 1972 that Jerry LaBarba and Tharel Smith, Bruce Bass’ enterprise companion and alleged confederate in Farenthold’s homicide, had been working as “cash males” for a outstanding Dallas nightclub proprietor, Anthony “Tony” Francis Caterine. Caterine was an affiliate of Jack Ruby, one other Dallas nightclub proprietor who gunned down JFK murderer Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963. Caterine was investigated by the FBI for racketeering and hyperlinks to notorious New Orleans Cosa Nostra boss Carlos Marcello. (The FBI informant was recognized solely as HO 1994-PC. Their relationship with the FBI was finally terminated for “being unproductive.”)
Nevertheless, his allegations line up with different FBI paperwork launched beneath Bellingcat’s FOIAs, which join Bass and Jerry LaBarba to playing and recommend that Richardson’s mates and associates have been concerned in playing and racketeering each earlier than and after his dying.
A ultimate tantalising line of inquiry into the prison intrigue surrounding Richardson, Bass, LaBarba, and their pigeon-shooting and dice-rolling associates issues a “Georgia banker” briefly talked about in newspaper reviews and the e-book about Jim Peters, the Texas Ranger. (Peters is useless, and any reviews he could have written on the Richardson case haven’t been launched.)
The banker, Lamar Hill, steadily chartered planes within the Nineteen Seventies to Texas, Las Vegas, and the Caribbean, reportedly to gamble with mates. In 1973, Hill was convicted in a large embezzlement case, after stealing greater than $4.6 million (about $34 million right now) from his financial institution over 21 years. When requested by reporters how he’d spent it, Hill replied: “I simply don’t know. … That’s a hell of some huge cash.”
In Paul’s e-book, the writer asserts that Peters claimed Richardson and Bass belonged to the identical secretive playing circle as a person who matches Hill’s description: “an influential banker in Georgia … prosecuted for embezzlement.” Paul wrote that the banker “testified that it was his apply to fly a bunch of playing members to the Bahamas, and they might gamble on his airplane, spend a few days within the solar, and fly again.”
Unfastened Ends: Police Information Probably Include Extra Clues
It’s possible that regulation enforcement businesses’ recordsdata maintain extra clues that might assist remedy Richardson’s homicide. The FBI, as an example, has greater than 12,000 pages and greater than two hours of audio recordings associated to Bellingcat’s request for data on Bruce Bass. But it surely launched solely 29 pages.
The ready interval to obtain all of those recordsdata, a spokesman mentioned, is six-and-a-half years. And the FBI has extra recordsdata on Tharel Smith and Jerry LaBarba, too.
The CCPD, which informed Bellingcat it was reviewing the Richardson case “to find out whether or not it could/must be thought of ‘closed’,” possible holds essentially the most related cache of paperwork. Bellingcat and the Texas Observer have argued to the Nueces County district lawyer that these paperwork must be launched within the public curiosity—however the retailers are nonetheless ready for a response.
Anybody with info concerning the unsolved murder of William “Invoice” Asher Richardson, Jr. is strongly inspired to contact the Corpus Christi Police Division’s Theft/Murder Unit at 361-996-2840. Callers wishing to stay nameless can submit ideas via Crime Stoppers at 361-888-TIPS (361-888-8477) or on-line utilizing the Crime Stoppers App.
Peter Barth is an investigator at Bellingcat whose work focuses on organised crime. Contact him at peter@bellingcat.com.
Gyula Csák, Lise Olsen, Beau Donelly, and Tristan Lee contributed analysis for this text. Interactive graphic by Logan Williams. Illustrations by Ann Kiernan, audio clips by Charlotte Maher and Merel Zoet.
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