A Real Estate Nightmare

The day after Hurricane Alicia tore through Houston, three women walked into their real estate office and never came home.

On August 19, 1983, Elizabeth Shumate, Frances Ivey, and JoAnn Brown were found executed inside a quiet office on Memorial Drive. The city was still reeling from one of the worst storms in its history. Investigators believed the killer had taken advantage of the chaos. Yet despite an intense investigation, countless interviews, and decades of speculation, no one has ever been brought to justice.  

In A Real Estate Nightmare, historian and investigative author Dr. Johnny Teague reopens one of Texas’s most haunting cold cases. Drawing on police records, forensic evidence, witness interviews, and newly uncovered information, he reconstructs the crime step by step, following detectives through a maze of suspects, hidden motives, and unanswered questions.  

Part gripping true-crime investigation, part historical portrait of a city struggling to recover from disaster, this compelling narrative places readers inside the case itself—inviting them to weigh the evidence, examine the theories, and decide what really happened on that summer evening more than forty years ago.