Naman Shrestha
In 2005, when Bobbie Sue Hill’s lifeless body was found near Aledo, Texas, the police launched a criminal investigation while the entire community was left shell-shocked, especially the victim’s family members and friends. Nearly a decade of investigation finally led the authorities to get a major suspect convicted, only for questions to arise about the credibility of the confession and conviction. The entire case is covered in a detailed manner in AMC’s ‘True Crime Story: It Couldn’t Happen Here: Aledo, Texas,’ which also includes exclusive interviews with experts involved in the case and the loved ones of Bobbie.
Bobbie Sue Hill Was Found Dead in a Creek Bed in Parker County
Bobbie Sue Hill, daughter of Janice Sue Goff, was welcomed into the world on April 26, 1975, in Fort Worth, Texas. She was raised by her mother in the company of a brother, Travis Hill. Bobbie spent her childhood in Panther City in Tarrant County, likely surrounded by the love of her family, comprising her mother, brother, stepfather Jimmy Goff, and several nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins. She grew up to be a free-spirited individual. She flaunted a beautiful smile and had a personality that could light up the room.
As per her family members, Bobbie dropped out of high school and married young, but her husband passed away in an accident, reportedly after over a decade of togetherness. Bobbie’s world revolved around the five pieces of her heart: her kids—Ashley, Toubee, Jonathan, Andrew, and Kayla Lor. She aimed to do everything in her power to give them a better life than she had. Unfortunately, the 29-year-old lost her mother in 2004. It was reportedly in the same year that Bobbie began engaging in sex work to support her family financially.
Sadly, tragedy struck the Hill-Goff household once again the following year, on March 6, 2005, when two hikers spotted a body covered in plastic in a creek bed near a bridge in the city of Aledo in Parker County, Texas. Located precisely in the 1300 block of Jenkins Road, the tattoos aided the authorities in identifying the remains and confirming that they belonged to Bobbie. The cause of death of the mother of five was determined to be strangulation. An investigation was launched, but authorities didn’t find any straightforward evidence to assist in their quest to uncover the perpetrator/s behind the brutal crime.
Bobbie Sue Hill’s Alleged Killer Was Caught After a Decade
As the investigators delved deeper into the case, interviewing loved ones of Bobbie Sue Hill, they were told by her boyfriend/pimp that he had seen her driving off with a strange man in a white minivan a few days prior to her demise. Collaborating with the witness, the police managed to come up with a rough sketch of the said suspect. Despite their best efforts, they could not find any concrete leads or evidence and ended up running into dead ends. Soon, when there was no development, the case went cold for almost a decade until October 2014, when the Texas Rangers decided to review the details of the case in a new light.
Bobbie’s boyfriend, who was one of the key witnesses, was asked to undergo forensic hypnosis in a prison cell, where he was serving time for unrelated charges. Due to the hypnosis, his description of the suspect and the appearance of the van changed significantly. The talented sketch artist took into consideration the passage of time as he aged the sketch of the alleged killer. The image was used to spread awareness about the individual by circulating it in the local media. A tipster called the investigators, claiming that the sketch matched the appearance of his acquaintance, Larry Driskell.
Without wasting any time, Larry was arrested on January 14, 2015, for capital murder and brought in for questioning, which went on for several days. Eventually, the detectives were able to crack him down and get a confession from him, after which the Aledo man was taken into custody and held on bond. In his confession, he claimed that he picked up Bobbie outside a convenience store near East Lancaster Avenue in Fort Worth. But when he sensed that she was trying to rob him, he used his force and choked her to death, as per Larry’s claims.
Larry admitted that he put her body in a bag and disposed of it in a creek bed in the 1300 block of Jenkins Road in Aledo, just eight miles from his home. However, he recanted his confession, claiming that he was coerced by a Texas Ranger into admitting his guilt for a crime he did not commit. Interestingly, several details of his confession were not similar to the crime. During the questioning, the authorities reportedly used various common tactics, such as lying about the evidence, a fake polygraph test, and hypnosis.
Larry Driskell is Out on Parole and Working to Prove His Innocence
After waiting for more than two years for his trial, in July 2017, Larry Driskell decided to plead no contest in the murder case of Bobbie Sue Hill in exchange for a 15-year imprisonment sentence. After serving seven years of his sentence, he was released on parole in September 2022. However, he still remained convicted of and tied with the murder of Bobbie. Numerous years into his sentence, his pleas for help were noticed by the Innocence Project of Texas, an organization consisting of Texas criminal defense attorneys who work to reverse the convictions of innocent inmates and give them justice.
Larry Driskell was in luck, as the Innocence Project believed his story, and the organization put in a formal request that the evidence collected from the crime scene of Bobbie’s murder be tested for DNA. After agreeing to the request, several items were sent for tests and DNA analysis. To this day, he maintains his innocence and claims that he was made to admit guilt for a crime that he did not have any hand in.
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