A Hurricane, a Real Estate Office, and a Houston Cold Case That Was Never Solved

On August 18, 1983, Hurricane Alicia slammed into the Texas coast and swept through Houston. It was one of the most destructive storms in the city's history. Windows shattered in downtown skyscrapers, trees came down across neighborhoods, power went out for huge parts of the region, and a city of millions was left cleaning up the wreckage.

The very next day, three women walked into their real estate office on Memorial Drive. They never came home.

On August 19, 1983, Elizabeth Shumate, Frances Ivey, and JoAnn Brown were found dead inside that quiet office. Investigators believed the killer had taken advantage of the chaos left by the storm. Despite an intense investigation, countless interviews, and decades of speculation, no one has ever been brought to justice. More than forty years later, it remains one of the most haunting cold cases in Texas.

In A Real Estate Nightmare, historian and investigative author Dr. Johnny Teague reopens the case. Drawing on police records, forensic evidence, witness interviews, and newly uncovered information, he reconstructs the crime step by step. Readers follow the detectives through a maze of suspects, hidden motives, and unanswered questions, seeing both what investigators knew and where the trail went cold.

What sets this book apart from many true-crime accounts is the way it treats the storm as more than a backdrop. Disasters change everything about how a city functions. Phones go down, roads are blocked, police and emergency services are stretched to their limits, and ordinary routines collapse. Neighbors are distracted, witnesses are scattered, and the normal flow of information that helps solve crimes breaks down. Teague explores how those conditions may have shaped both the crime and the investigation that followed, turning the book into part true-crime investigation and part historical portrait of a city struggling to recover.

That historical dimension is one of the book's great strengths. Teague is a historian by training, and it shows. He brings early-1980s Houston vividly to life: a booming city built on oil and growth, suddenly brought to its knees by nature. Readers who remember Alicia will find the details powerfully familiar, and those who don't will come away understanding just how much the storm upended daily life.

The book also invites readers into the investigation itself. Rather than handing over a tidy solution, Teague lays out the evidence and the theories and asks readers to weigh them, to consider what really happened on that summer evening more than forty years ago. It's an approach true-crime fans will appreciate, and it reflects the honest reality of a case that remains open.

Above all, Teague keeps the victims at the center. Elizabeth Shumate, Frances Ivey, and JoAnn Brown were not just names in a case file. They were women with families, careers, and lives that were cut short. Cold cases have a way of fading from public memory as the years pass. Books like this one keep them alive, and sometimes renewed attention is exactly what a long-unsolved case needs.

Johnny Teague is a pastor, historian, and author whose work includes investigations into unsolved Houston crimes, including his book The Lovers' Lane Murders. He brings to true crime the patience of a researcher and the compassion of someone who has spent a career caring for people in their hardest moments.

A Real Estate Nightmare is a must-read for true-crime fans, Houston history buffs, and anyone drawn to cold cases that still cry out for answers.

A Real Estate Nightmare by Johnny Teague is available now in paperback.