# Vanishing Act: The Hunt for Margaret and Cory Ray
A holiday season in Texas begins with the vanishing of a young mother and child. Law enforcement searches for answers, but with no physical evidence, the case goes cold. When the truth finally emerges, one determined prosecutor must take his quest for justice all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
Nobody should die that way. I’ve never seen anything that horrific. One of the duties of a pathologist is to determine the cause of death.
When a mother and child disappear from the tightly knit community of Huntsville, Texas, worried citizens look to Walker County District Attorney David Weeks for answers.
“I don’t think that you can do this job unless you care about people,” Weeks said. “I don’t think you can do it without becoming emotionally involved. And the nature of this crime was so horrendous, I think it makes you more committed to making sure that children are protected, that things like this don’t happen.”
Huntsville, Texas, is 70 miles north of Houston. On the morning of December 27th, 1993, 31-year-old Lindsay Owings prepared for his job as a carpenter at the Huntsville prison. His wife and baby daughter were still asleep when he left for work.
Lindsay and Margaret Owings met when they were both in the Navy. After they married, they moved to Huntsville to raise a family. To supplement their income, Lindsay was also a Navy reservist.
Like most weekdays, Margaret stayed at home to care for the couple’s daughter, 16-month-old Cory Ray. Lindsay Owings called his wife that morning to tell her he would be working in a different area of the prison and wouldn’t be reachable by phone.
A 7-year employee of the state prison system, Owings was working on a special construction project that day. Around 5:20 that evening, Owings arrived back home. Margaret’s car was still in the driveway, as it usually was.
Once inside, he knew something was wrong.
Margaret, the stereo, and the VCR were missing. It looked like a burglary.
“Margaret! Margaret!”
He checked the house and realized that his wife and daughter were gone.
“Margaret!”
He called 911 to report the burglary. He also called his wife’s friends and family, but no one had heard from her all day.
A deputy from the Walker County Sheriff’s Department responded to the Owings house, arriving at 5:48 p.m.
“Look at this place. Somebody’s been in here. It’s ransacked,” Lindsay Owings told him about the missing items and said he hadn’t been able to locate his wife and daughter.
“Do you have any idea who possibly could come in and rob your home like this?”
Margaret’s car was outside, and the two were usually home at that time, and they’re nowhere to be found.
“Dispatch, this is Officer Seals. Like to request a backup.”
The deputy called for a detective, an evidence technician, and a VIPS person. It was now nearly an hour since Owings had first arrived home.
“Somebody’s been here, messed up the whole part down,” Owings said. He still hadn’t heard from his wife.
“This is how you found it when you got here?”
“She always called as she went out.”
“Is anything in here been moved?”
It was clear there had been a burglary, but nothing indicated where the mother and baby were or if their disappearance was connected to the crime.
In the bedroom, they found Margaret Owings’s purse. No cash was inside, but credit cards and other valuables remained. Technicians recovered dozens of fingerprints.
They would be compared to those of the Owings family to determine if anyone else had been in the house.
“Had they had a fight? Anything you can think of?”
Investigators further questioned Lindsay Owings. He reiterated that he had been at work all day and said he had no idea where Maggie and Cory Ray could be.
“My wife, my daughter—gone.”
Investigators finally found a clue. There were drag marks leading away from the house. The stereo in the house indicated that whoever took the stereo cabinet probably dragged it out the front door.
But no footprints were discernible, and no tire tracks were left on the street.
Investigators hoped a neighbor had seen something. Walker County Sheriff’s Detective Judy James was briefed on the case. Like the other investigators, she was struck by Lindsay Owings’s demeanor when he was interviewed.
“We just felt that due to the fact that he seemed so calm about reporting his wife in the beginning, that he was possibly a suspect.”
Yet no hard evidence indicated Owings had done anything wrong.
The Walker County Sheriff’s Department put out an all-points bulletin to nearby law enforcement agencies, releasing the descriptions of Margaret and Cory Ray.
“Can you give us a radio check?”
Authorities searched through the night looking for any clue that would lead them to the mother and child. A helicopter scanned the vicinity of the Owings house and nearby wooded areas but came up with nothing.
The next day, police began using the local media to ask the community for help. The Walker County Sheriff’s Department also asked District Attorney David Weeks for his assistance.
“We’re a small county, so in the process of any involved investigation, they’re going to be contacting us, and we’ll be working with them. At that point, we were looking for, trying to figure out what we did have, because of the nature of the disappearance. It was just so complete.”
Margaret Owings had no immediate family nearby, so detectives questioned every one she knew in Huntsville. One neighbor said she hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary on the 27th, and she hadn’t heard from Margaret since then.
Considering the area, this was not unusual. “You have to remember, this is a rural area, so canvassing the neighbors in the immediate area, we’re talking hundreds of yards away.”
Another neighbor said he had last seen Margaret a week earlier while he was looking for his dog. No one they spoke to had any new information. Investigators were frustrated.
“No one came up with anything in terms of that canvas. Nobody who had seen them that day, nobody who noticed anything unusual, nothing that we could act on or follow up on.”
Volunteers and search units from the Walker County Sheriff’s and fire departments combed the area around the Owings home, looking for Margaret and 16-month-old Cory Ray.
“There was a close search of probably close to a four-mile radius of the home, and some of this is very deep brush, which made it quite difficult to get through.”
Canine units tried to track the missing mother and child in the woods. Divers from two local agencies checked lakes and ponds in the area.
“Despite all our efforts, we found nothing.”
It was as if Maggie and Cory Ray Owings had just disappeared into thin air.
Authorities continued to search for information on the disappearance. The community was asked to call with any sightings or leads. Police followed up on everything that came in, even rumors and speculation.
They were desperate for solid leads, but none came.
Fingerprint experts analyzed the prints lifted from the Owings home on the day of the disappearance. They found only those of Margaret Owings and her husband Lindsay. Examiners found no foreign hairs or fibers that suggested an intruder had been there.
It was possible that Margaret had left on her own before the burglary.
“You look into the possibility that maybe there was a problem with the marriage and maybe she left without letting him know, for whatever particular reason.”
Detectives checked with friends and family and learned that Margaret hadn’t contacted anyone since the day she disappeared. She hadn’t accessed her checking account or used any credit cards.
With no other suspects emerging from the investigation, they had to consider that Margaret’s husband, Lindsay Owings, might be involved in the disappearance.
“That’s one of the basic rules of investigation. If you have a spouse who’s missing or dies under suspicious circumstances, the first thing you do is look at the surviving spouse.”
Within weeks of the disappearance, Walker County asked the FBI to administer polygraph examinations to Owings. The tests would help them focus their investigation either toward Lindsay Owings or away from him.
“Do you know for sure the location of your wife and daughter right now?”
“Is there something else you’re afraid I’ll ask you about, even though I’ve told you I would not?”
“And when the FBI finally did their polygraphs, it took about five one night, and the examiner looked at me and said, ‘You know, there’s not a doubt in my mind from all these tests that I know you didn’t do it.'”
Authorities were convinced, but some residents in Huntsville were not.
“As far as law enforcement was concerned, his involvement was discounted very early on. However, I don’t think that word really got to the community at large. Lindsay Owings went through a very rough time.”
“I felt bad. These folks, you know, they’re looking at me like, you know, I’m the big baby killer of Huntsville, you know? Or, you know, ‘We know he did it.
What did he do with them?’ You know? Am I going to be—just that kind of stuff.
You can tell by the look on their face.”
Despite the pressure from some members of the community, Owings could not stay at home waiting. He was desperate to find Maggie and Cory Ray.
“Every day after work, I’d be searching for them. I mapped out a lot of the area and just went searching, going through a lot of pastures and just walking around, turning things over, looking in old wells, up underneath houses, whatever.”
“Having your wife and daughter missing, you know, it’s just a piece of your heart.”
With Owings eliminated as a suspect and no evidence pointing toward anyone else, the investigation stalled. But the young father would not give up.
“There’s always that big ray of hope that they are going to be alive somewhere. And just a big mental stress trying to stay focused to where you can continue on, because you have to have a job. I mean, you know, got to keep the lights on in the house.
But yet, you know, your heart’s torn out. You’re trying to recover that, and it’s a hard balance. Real hard balance.”
As the weeks passed and the investigation went cold, the community of Huntsville worried the young mother and her daughter might never be found.
Margaret Owings and her 16-month-old daughter Cory Ray disappeared from their Huntsville, Texas home on December 27th, 1993. Police suspected foul play but had no suspects.
Five months later, authorities picked up Raymond Cobb, a neighbor of the Owings, in connection with an unrelated 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 charge. Cobb, an 18-year-old high school senior, was brought in for questioning. During an interview at the station, police asked him about the burglary and his missing neighbors.
He denied knowing anything.
Cobb made bail on the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 charge. Police had nothing else to hold him on.
“Thanks a lot. Appreciate it though.”
They kept working the case. Investigators developed no new information over the next two months. Again, they were at a standstill.
Then, in July 1994, detectives received an anonymous tip that led them back to Cobb. It was the lead District Attorney David Weeks was waiting for.
“Our first real break in this case was when investigators with the Walker County Sheriff’s Department received information which led us to the recovery of the property that was missing from the Owens home. That property was traced back to Raymond Cobb, who lived across the street.”
In a twist of law, Cobb was their only lead on the disappearance. Having him in custody gave police another opportunity to question him about that case. Though he had denied involvement before, detectives believed he might be holding back information.
To their surprise, he confessed to burglarizing the Owings home on December 27th, 1993.
“His claim was that he went over to the house, did not see anybody around, came in, saw the opportunity, took the stereo, the VCR, the stereo cabinet, and took them over to his home.”
But Raymond Cobb was adamant that he knew nothing about Maggie and Cory Ray.
Walker County Detective Judy James believed Cobb was not telling all he knew. He was asked to take a polygraph, which he agreed to do. They asked him questions about the burglary, and he passed that.
But the questions about the disappearance of Cory and Maggie Owings, he showed deception.
Since they’re not admissible in court, the polygraph results were not enough to hold him. He was charged with burglary, and his father, Charles Cobb, helped him make bail.
“Talk to Raymond the next couple weeks, see if you can get some information.”
Raymond moved 500 miles west to Odessa, Texas, to live with his father until his burglary trial.
The district attorney believed the suspect had more information, but it didn’t seem likely Cobb could have harmed the young family.
“There was nothing really in his background, as far as criminal history, that would indicate to you that he would be capable of something like this. At the same time, we felt that he knew—he had to know something about Raymond.”
That fall, when Cobb returned to Huntsville for a pre-trial hearing, Walker County authorities questioned him again, this time with his attorney present. Cobb again denied involvement.
“So that was it?”
But he said he had a feeling the bodies might be somewhere in the area’s woods.
“I don’t know a thing.”
“That was an indicator to us that he probably was responsible for their disappearance, but we had no charges to keep him in custody, so he was allowed to go.”
Their prime suspect again crossed the state to Odessa, well beyond the reach of Walker County authorities.
“No one came out, did they?”
Investigators were frustrated.
“We were not getting any sort of forward progress. We had a focus, Raymond Cobb. We were looking at people around him, possibilities, other individuals that might know something.
We were constantly working those angles. But Cobb had essentially stopped us, because without him giving us some further information or us finding some physical evidence, we were stuck.”
A month later, Cobb’s father contacted David Weeks. His son was drinking too much and had become violent with his pregnant girlfriend. Raymond’s behavior had become erratic.
There was something going on with him, and he wanted to, in his words, help him.
“We put Charles Cobb in contact with Judy James.”
The detective called Mr. Cobb, hoping the father could do what police had not been able to.
“Mr. Cobb asked me what he should do, and I told him that he needed to have Raymond call me, and he said that he was going to find out from Ray what was going on that night.”
The concerned father went to his son’s apartment in Odessa. He asked Raymond to talk with him in the car. He wanted to learn the truth, no matter what that might be.
“Listen, I’m tired of all the lies. Tell me the truth.”
He learned that Margaret and Cory Ray Owings were dead.
“I killed them.”
And his son was involved.
“Oh, my son. Why?”
That night, Charles Cobb had to make a decision. He had critical information that would help another worried father. But sharing that information meant giving up his own son.
In Odessa, Texas, Raymond Cobb had admitted to his father that he was involved in the deaths of a woman and child in Huntsville. Charles Cobb called Huntsville detectives, who asked him to give a statement to the Odessa Police.
On November 11th, 1995, Charles Cobb met with Odessa Police Detectives Harold Thomas and Vic Sykes.
“Talking to my boy the other day about—he told me that he had met with his son at the request of an investigator in Huntsville, trying to shake something open in this case, and that his son admitted to him that he had killed a woman and child.”
“I never thought of that. You know where he’s at?”
After taking the statement, the Odessa Police contacted authorities in Huntsville, including Walker County District Attorney David Weeks.
“There were several things going on at the same time. You had Thomas and Sykes in Odessa talking with the father. My staff was in Huntsville preparing the affidavit for an arrest warrant, also contacting a local judge to give us the arrest warrant.”
While the warrant was being processed, Detective Thomas and his partner began looking for Raymond Cobb in Odessa.
“After we had gotten a statement from Charles Cobb, I was able to locate where Raymond was living at the time. But the car wasn’t there. And having information that the girlfriend then was pregnant, nine months pregnant, and she was due any time, that we began checking the hospitals.”
They located Cobb’s girlfriend and learned the suspect was with her. The detectives set up surveillance. They were ready to make an arrest once the warrant came through from Huntsville.
“The warrant is active.”
“My cell phone rang back to me. They said the warrant was issued. We moved up to the front of the hospital.
Supposed to be headed out now. And as he exited the building, it was like perfect timing. I mean, we moved up here, he came right out with his girlfriend.
We walked up to him, identified ourselves as police officers and detectives. We informed him he was under arrest for capital murder out of Walker County, and he offered no resistance.”
“What’s going on?”
“As a matter of fact, the look on his face was no surprise. He knew it was coming.”
Nearly two years after the Owings disappeared, police finally had a suspect in custody. After reading him his rights, they charged Raymond Cobb with murder in the deaths of Margaret and Cory Ray Owings.
Detectives Sykes and Thomas learned of the earlier unsuccessful attempts to elicit information from Cobb. The two planned their approach.
“Judy James down in Huntsville—as long as you observe their rights, their right to remain silent, their right to counsel, their right to end the interview, the tactics of questioning these people is pretty much open, so long as you don’t coerce them or threaten them or promise them something. Sometimes the angry approach works. Sometimes the very calm approach works.
Sometimes the emotional approach works. There is no threatening. There is no getting up in people’s faces and making gestures that you’re going to harm them physically.
It’s not necessary.”
Before that interview started, they read him his rights again and made certain that he understood them and that he wanted to talk to them.
“Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to talk to a lawyer and have him present with you while you’re being questioned. Do you understand these rights?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to proceed?”
“Fine.”
It was the old good guy, bad guy routine.
“He told us—Detective Sykes played the bad guy, get him agitated—and the baby. And once he got to that point, I kind of stopped the interview and said, ‘Let’s take a break,’ and asked Raymond if he wanted a cup of coffee, and he did, with a little sweetener in it. We took about a five-minute break.
I got a cup of coffee myself and sat back down in the interview room.”
“Your father was buying here this afternoon.”
As the interview continued, he told them the whole story. Sykes reminded Cobb of what they knew already. Maybe it was an action.
Then Thomas asked Cobb if he wanted to unburden his conscience.
“Maybe maybe you were just surprised.”
He got pretty mad at me, and it was decided between Harold and I that a softer approach might be in order.
“Have a cigarette? Sure.”
Raymond looked up at Detective Sykes and said, “You know, light this cigarette for me.” And Detective Sykes lit it and said, “Just go ahead and tell us,” in a very soft voice.
“It was at that point that I knew for sure that he was fixing to tell us what had happened.”
“I tell you this thing. I’m only going to be gone a long time.”
Cobb admitted that he had killed Margaret Owings during the burglary.
“I killed Miss Owings.”
He said he stabbed her, but he didn’t mean to. He claimed it was an accident. He said he took her body and the 16-month-old baby to the woods and buried them there.
“I’ll be right back.”
Cobb signed a transcript of his confession. But detectives still needed to know where the bodies were. In return for that information, they granted him a favor.
“The right thing to do—we allowed him to call his girlfriend and for them to come down and meet and talk together a few minutes. And that’s kind of a give and take.”
Cobb said he would take them to the bodies back in Huntsville.
“Now just take your time. Sit back.”
Before they left Odessa, he gave them consent to search his apartment. While they waited for the travel to Huntsville to be arranged, Cobb went with the detectives to his apartment.
“You got any weapons in here?”
He pointed out several knives, though he said he didn’t remember where the murder weapon was.
“See, you got a lot of stuff cut out.”
They saw that Cobb had saved newspaper articles about the case.
“You cut out?”
“While we were there, I was standing over near a bookshelf, and he reached past my shoulder and picked up a small wedding band out of a small balance scale that appeared to be like a scale of justice, and handed me the wedding band and said, ‘This is the wedding band I took from Margaret Owings after I killed her.'”
It was the first physical evidence in the case.
Odessa Police faxed the confession to the Walker County District Attorney.
“Once we had Raymond Cobb’s confession, our focus was to get him back to Walker County, make arrangements for his transportation back, keeping contact with Sykes and Thomas because they had developed a relationship with Cobb.”
The Odessa investigators flew with Cobb 500 miles east back to Huntsville. Upon landing at the municipal airport, he was immediately arraigned on capital murder charges.
“We have a car waiting at the exit terminal.”
“Having found a justice of the peace from that county, there was—soon as we deplaned, they took us into a room there at the airport, and that justice of the peace arraigned him, reread him his rights, which is basically Miranda. No bond for you.”
“From that point, we loaded up—myself, Detective Sykes, and Raymond Cobb—and drove out to the house where the crime was committed.”
Cobb had promised to show them where he buried the bodies.
“Look, look. He said he had dragged Margaret Owings out into the woods behind the house.”
“Out here? Down here? Is it up here?”
They walked several hundred yards out through a field, through a then over a barbed wire fence, and a kind of drainage ditch, and then back into the woods. And once he got to where the approximate area was where he thought he buried them, he couldn’t be sure. Two years had passed.
Vegetation and trees had changed. He could only get them into the approximate area.
They brought in a cadaver dog to help locate the bodies. They scoured the thick woods for any sign of the two victims.
As the search continued, police told Lindsay Owings what they had learned.
“I was relieved that somebody had fessed up, or that the law had found the person who did it, and was going to lead them to the remains so they could be put to rest.”
Eventually, the searchers discovered articles of clothing that matched what Margaret and Cory Ray had worn.
“We immediately cordoned off the area, left an officer out there on the scene that night, and then began the excavation, which was basically an archaeological dig the next morning.”
They began again at daybreak. For the next three days, investigators carefully sifted through leaves and soil. They recovered more clothing and pieces of bone, including a skull, that forensic testing would prove to be Margaret Owings.
After nearly two years of almost no information, the case had finally broken wide open.
“We’re talking about going from having no information to knowing who did it, knowing how they did it, knowing where the bodies were.”
Charged with capital murder, Raymond Cobb met with his attorney, Hal Ridley, who was representing him on the burglary case. The attorney was furious that he wasn’t contacted before the interview in Odessa.
“Here is a man I’d been representing for—you’re talking almost two years later—then come to find out that Odessa police extract a confession out of him. My reaction at that time was not only anger but shock and surprise and disappointment that I wasn’t included in the process.”
Ridley filed a pre-trial motion to throw out the confession, arguing his client’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel had been violated.
“The confession was crucial to our case. Everything that we had that connected Raymond Cobb to the murder of Maggie and Cory Ray Owens flowed from that confession. If that confession was thrown out, we would lose everything.
As a result of the search, everything from the crime scene is gone.”
Raymond Cobb was in custody for the murders of Margaret Owings and her baby Cory Ray. In an interview without an attorney present, he had confessed to killing the two during a burglary.
At a pre-trial suppression hearing before District Judge William McAdams, Cobb’s attorney Hal Ridley fought to have the confession thrown out, claiming he had not been informed of his client’s arrest before the interview.
“Confession is signed, Your Honor.”
Prosecutors argued that Ridley was only Cobb’s attorney on the earlier burglary charge, and they weren’t required to contact him when a new charge was filed.
“Confession stays in. Counselors, get ready for trial.”
Judge McAdams ruled to allow the confession.
“I found the offenses to be separate and that counsel had not attached in the capital murder cases, as opposed to the existing burglary charge, and that the Odessa police had given Mr. Cobb his Miranda warnings as required on those new and separate offenses, and therefore it was a statement, a confession, that was voluntary and within the law as set out by the United States Supreme Court and the Texas Courts.”
On February 19th, 1997, in Walker County, Texas, the trial of Raymond Cobb began. In his opening statement, District Attorney David Weeks tried to illustrate the brutality of the crime to the jury.
“There are some crimes that are so horrendous, so far beyond the pale of human experience, that the crime itself demands the ultimate punishment. In my view, this case demanded the ultimate punishment. To take this mother and child out into those cold, dark woods two days after Christmas.
A 16-month-old baby who couldn’t hurt him at all, who couldn’t testify against him, who was no threat to him.”
“Thank you, Mr. Weeks.”
If ever a case called for the death penalty, this was it.
Cobb’s defense attorney Hal Ridley chose not to give an opening statement.
“We knew from the suppression hearing that the confession was coming in, and our focus after that point in time was to re-urge our suppression issues and get that information back out to the jury. And then at that point in time, we were basically trying this for—we were trying to set it up for a life sentence on punishment.”
“Charles, you want to tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth?”
“I do.”
“Just because you become a murderer, you become—”
The district attorney called the defendant’s father, Charles Cobb.
“Ray’s dead.”
He asked about the conversation he had with his son on November 10th, 1995.
“I told him I’d like to talk to him, so we went and sat down in the car, and we talked about it.”
“Yes. Tell the court and the jury exactly what came from that conversation.”
“He told me that he had gotten mixed up in drugs that night.”
His son admitted that he had killed Margaret Owings.
“Did your son confess to you?”
“The baby was dead too. He said that too.”
Though that confession was limited, it was extremely important in explaining to the jury what happened next and taking them to the next step.
“Mr. Thomas, how are you employed?”
Odessa Police Sergeant Harold Thomas was sworn in as a witness. The prosecution needed to detail Cobb’s confession and explain its legality.
“Yes, I did.”
The jury had to believe and understand that that confession was voluntary, and they had to understand how it was acquired—that the police didn’t use any wrongful tactics.
Sergeant Thomas described how he and his partner had arrested Cobb on the Huntsville murder warrant and informed him of his rights. Cobb waived his right to an attorney and agreed to talk.
“During the process of this confession, have you made him any promises?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you threatened him or coerced him in any way?”
“No.”
“Did you give him his Miranda warnings?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He told us that he had gone over to the Owens house with the intention of burglarizing it.”
Cobb told Sergeant Thomas that as he was stealing the stereo, Margaret Owings came into the room and rushed toward him. He said he had a knife. During that altercation, he admitted to stabbing her, although he minimized it at some degree because he claimed that she ran into the knife, that he didn’t actually stab her.
According to the confession, Cobb then realized he had to dispose of the body, and he did admit to taking her several hundred yards out into the woods, and then taking the sleeping baby out of the woods with the mama, and then going to his house and getting a shovel.
Cobb took a long time digging a grave where it wouldn’t easily be found.
“He said that the child woke up and fell in the hole he had just dug, and he rolled Mama on top of the live child in the hole, and then buried that child alive.”
The experienced detectives were shocked at the brutality of the crime.
“That’s so—I asked him, I said, ‘So the baby was alive whenever you covered her up?’ And he said yes. And then he said that he threw the shovel into a pond near his home, and he went back to his normal living and didn’t say anything to anybody.”
Cobb said he couldn’t remember what he had done with the knife.
“I show you what’s been marked as State’s Exhibit Number 20 and ask if you can identify that.”
“Yes, sir. That’s the original statement taken by Detective Sykes, signed by Raymond Cobb.”
The confession was transcribed, and Cobb signed it. For the most part, when they went to Cobb’s apartment, he gave the detectives Margaret Owings’s wedding ring, telling them he had taken it off her finger after killing her.
“Prior to the day in question, what was the defense?”
The defense cross-examined Thomas.
“In this situation, you’re talking about a 19-year-old boy who tells his dad in confidence that he may have a problem. His dad tells the police. The police go out there, they pursue this boy, and then keep him held up for 11 hours interrogating him.
And I just have something fundamentally wrong with that when all they had to do is pick up the phone and call me.”
A forensics expert testified that the remains of Margaret Owings indicated she had suffered multiple stab wounds, which contradicted the defendant’s claim that she fell on the knife.
“There was a stab wound here, here, and here. Evidence of a very sharp object entering the body.”
Perhaps the most heart-wrenching testimony came from Lindsay Owings, who had lost his wife and daughter. The prosecution wanted to personalize the victims for the jury.
“That sense, in that emotional sense, of making Cory Ray and Maggie living people. Lindsay Owings was crucial to that, because they had to come to see them through his eyes as living, breathing human beings.”
“Mr. Ridley, at the time the defendant has a right to produce evidence—”
In a surprise move, Cobb’s lawyer decided not to present a case.
“There were no witnesses. The only other witness I could have had—and we interviewed a lot of people—the only other potential witness I would have had would have been Raymond himself, and I wasn’t going to put him on the stand. My tactic going into the case was to try this case on punishment, to try to get him a life sentence, because we felt we had some very bona fide legal issues with regard to the confession.”
After four hours of deliberation, the jury found Raymond Cobb guilty of capital murder.
“Raymond Levi Cobb, they recommended the death penalty. Capital murder as charged in the indictment.”
“This case was about punishment. It wasn’t about guilt. The guilt was clear.”
But it was far from over. Cobb’s defense team was not willing to give up, and soon the community of Huntsville would be shocked by a stunning turn of events.
In 1997, Raymond Cobb was found guilty by a Huntsville, Texas jury of the Christmas-time murders of Margaret Owings and her infant daughter Cory Ray. Cobb was sentenced to death.
Three years after the conviction, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals heard arguments on the case. Appeal specialist Roy Greenwood joined the defense team.
In their appeal, Cobb’s attorneys argued that their client’s Sixth Amendment right to counsel was violated when Odessa police interviewed him without first contacting his attorney.
“Even though there were 11 or 12 points of error that we had raised in the case, the main issue of which everything revolved on was the admission of Mr. Cobb’s confession. The reason for that is simple: without this confession, Mr.
Cobb could not have been tried.”
In March of 2000, the Texas Court of Appeals overturned the conviction and sentence. Cobb’s chief counsel was Hal Ridley.
“We felt vindicated about our trial strategy, what we had done and the way we had conducted the trial. As a criminal defense lawyer, you got somebody’s life in your hands, and you get the word from the highest court in your state that agrees with you, and that you have a man that’s going to be coming off death row—I don’t think there’s any better feeling in the law, if you’re a criminal defense attorney.”
The court ruled that when police did not contact the attorney appointed to Cobb on the burglary charge, his Sixth Amendment right to counsel on the murder charge had been violated. It meant that if District Attorney David Weeks did not retry without using the confession, the admitted killer would go free.
“When we received word that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals had overturned the Cobb case, I was devastated, depressed, angry. The bad part was I had to call Lindsay Owings and break the news to him.”
“We immediately began the process of filing our writ to the Supreme Court. I felt we had a good, strong case if we could get them to take it.”
A year later, the high court agreed to hear the case. In a 5-to-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court overturned the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruling.
“The first thing I did was call Lindsay Owings. And that’s truly one of the greatest events of my professional life, to be able to call him and tell him the Supreme Court of the United States agreed with us and had reinstated the conviction and death sentence of Cobb.”
The decision would affect law enforcement agencies nationwide. According to Judge William McAdams:
“The police, I believe, now have received clarification from the highest court in the land that although a person might be charged in a particular case, that does not mean that they cannot conduct investigations if a defendant in a particular case is willing to talk to them about another case, another offense. They can do that, so long as the law is followed with regard to Miranda warnings and respect for the right to counsel in each case, each offense.”
Yet the reinstated verdict was only partial consolation to those who had hoped to find the young mother and her daughter alive.
“You know, it’s not going to bring Cory Ray and Maggie back. It’s not going to make that better. I think it will make the world safer, and that’s a good thing.”
