“Something Went Wrong”: The Double Murder That Austin Nearly Forgot

Stephen Harrigan met John White while a student at the University of Texas. He remembers him well, but Harrigan has “often wondered whether my memory of John White is so vivid because of the power of that first impression—or because only a week or so later he was murdered.” White was brutally killed along with his new girlfriend, Keitha Morris, during a trip to Bull Creek, a shallow stream to the west of Austin. The tragedy shook the community, but the murderer was never able to give a reason for his crime, and people were quick to move on. While Harrigan has no new information to share, as a peer of the couple, he offers a particularly nuanced study of this horrific tragedy.

“All we thought we had then was one dead boy,” a deputy sheriff, Billy Webb, told a reporter. “There was no indication anyone had been there with him.”

That understanding changed later that night when Webb visited the Pearl Street house where John lived, to deliver the news that he was dead and to enlist one of John’s roommates to make an identification. That was when Webb learned that one of the roommates, David Bond, and his girlfriend, Dawn Horak, had been at Bull Creek that day with John and Keitha. They had driven in a separate car, hung out with them for much of the afternoon, and then left them alone, perhaps an hour or so before John’s body was found.

So where was Keitha? The deputies went back to the creek with flashlights, searching deep into the night. They found footprints—in an erratic pattern that seemed to indicate someone might have been running—but nothing else to add to their understanding of the crime scene or of where the missing girl might have gone.