A cold case that has haunted the Porter community for nearly 40 years has finally been cracked. Police say new technology led them to a man hiding out in Mexico for the murder of a teenage girl that happened back in 1986. On the evening of September 27th, 1986, a group of teenagers riding three-wheelers through the woods off Old Houston Road in Montgomery County, Texas, came across the body of a 16-year-old girl beside an old logging road.
She had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and stabbed in the neck. A Marlboro cigarette filter lay on the ground near her body. A clump of blonde hair was clutched in her right hand. No lab in 1986 could read a saliva sample like the trace on that filter. Another man went to prison for her murder and stayed there for 10 years before DNA could prove he did not do it.
The killer’s own profile sat in a federal database for another 20 years and never once matched a name. The system kept arresting him for other things. It just never matched him to her. Her name was Deanna Ogg. She was 16 years old, a student at New Caney High School in Porter, Texas. People who knew her said she loved music and fashion and liked to wear her mother’s dresses and her older brother’s concert T-shirts.
Porter sat in the unincorporated stretches of Montgomery County, north of Houston. It was not a city. It was a scattering of homes and small roads carved into wooded land where neighbors knew each other by sight and a trip to the store meant a walk down a two-lane farm road. On the afternoon of Saturday, September 27th, 1986, Deanna left her home
around 5:00 p.m. and walked 2 miles to a convenience store at Farm to Market 1314 and Sorters Road. There was a family gathering that night and she was trying to catch a ride. The store at the crossroads was where neighbors picked each other up. That was the last place anyone saw her alive. Two hours later, around 7:00 p.m.
, the teenagers on the three-wheelers found her body in the 17,000 block of Old Houston Road. The location was a secluded stretch of timber about 7 miles from the convenience store. A vehicle had moved her there. At the scene, investigators recovered sperm from vaginal and rectal smears. They collected the Marlboro filter from the ground beside her body and bagged the hair from her hand.
The pathologist ruled the cause of death blunt trauma to the head and multiple stab wounds to the neck. He noted no trauma to the vaginal area. The biological material, the cigarette filter, and the hair each went into their own evidence bags. The bags went into the Montgomery County evidence room and stayed there.
About a month after the murder, on October 29th, 1986, Montgomery County deputies arrested a 21-year-old logger named Roy Wayne Cryer. The charge was murder. They had no fingerprints from the scene that matched him, no fibers, no blood, nothing physical tied him to Old Houston Road, to Deanna Ogg, or to the logging road where her body had been found.
What they had was a story. Three of his acquaintances told investigators that he had bragged about picking up a female hitchhiker around the time of the murder. He had threatened her with a screwdriver, they said, and he had told them he had to get rough with her. Three people repeating words they said he had told them on a single night.
The next September, the murder charge was dismissed. The state told the court there was not enough evidence to prosecute him for murder. They kept the sexual assault charge. The evidence base was the same. The trial did not take place until April of 1990, more than 3 years after Deanna was killed. District Judge John C.
Martin presided over the trial, and the three acquaintances took the stand. On cross-examination, their accounts were inconsistent with each other, with the known facts of the crime, and with what they had originally told police. None of them could place Kryner in Porter that Saturday. The screwdriver he had supposedly mentioned had never been found at the scene.
His defense attorney described him as nearly [ __ ] The state forensic serologist, Morita Howarth, took the stand for the prosecution. Her tests had eliminated Kryner as the source of the hairs from the scene. The technology in 1990 could not link him to the semen. The jury heard the science say, “No.” They heard the three acquaintances say, “Yes.
” On April 26th, 1990, they convicted him of aggravated sexual assault. He was sentenced to 99 years and sent to a Texas prison on May 1st, 1990, having just turned 25. The conviction had been built on hearsay, nothing else. Seven years passed. He served them inside a Texas prison. In June of 1997, the Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office agreed to submit the vaginal and rectal swabs from Diana’s evidence kit for genetic testing.
The science had matured since 1986. Labs could now extract genetic profiles from biological material that older methods could not have processed. The results came back in August. Roy Kryner was not the source of the semen. The Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office ordered a second round of testing at the state lab to confirm.
Same result. His attorney, Mike Charlton, who had spent years pushing the state to test the swabs, filed a state writ of habeas corpus that same month. The argument was simple, and it did not end it. In January of 1998, Montgomery County District Judge Michael Mayes reviewed the new lab results and recommended a new trial.
The case went to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal court in the state. In May of 1998, in an unpublished ruling, the court denied the writ. The lab results, the court decided, did not establish innocence. The opinion was written by Judge Sharon Keller. She suggested that maybe Krainer had been wearing a condom.
Maybe he had failed to ejaculate. Maybe the semen came from someone else Diana had been with before Krainer attacked her. Keller also cited testimony that the 16-year-old had said she loved sex. Her theory was that Diana had been with another man earlier in the day and then encountered Krainer. Defense attorneys had a term for that kind of theory.
They called it the unindicted co-ejaculator. The argument was this. A teenager walking to a corner store on a Saturday afternoon, on her way to see relatives, had also had sex with an unknown man earlier that day. The semen inside her, by this theory, belonged to that earlier man, not to her killer. None of these arguments had been made to the jury at trial.
They appeared for the first time in Keller’s opinion, eight years after the conviction. The ruling was unpublished, which meant it carried no precedent and almost no scrutiny outside the legal community. Judge Tom Price, who later dissented in another Keller decision, said the case made the court a national laughingstock. The logger stayed in prison.
The DNA had cleared him, and the highest court in the state said that was not enough. The answer had been sitting in an evidence bag since 1986. The Marlboro cigarette filter recovered from beside Diana’s body had never been tested. The science to read saliva off a paper filter had not existed in 1986. By the late 1990s, extraction methods had advanced enough to pull a DNA profile from saliva dried onto paper.
The amount of biological material on a single filter was small, but the new techniques could amplify it into a complete genetic profile. A private lab in Richmond, California, called Forensic Science Associates, took the filter and ran the test. DNA from the saliva on the filter matched the semen sample collected at the scene.
Same man. Two different biological samples collected from two different objects at the same crime scene, and both came from the same person, and it was not Roy Criner. He was excluded from both. That changed the math. The Court of Criminal Appeals had been willing to imagine that the semen came from a consensual encounter unrelated to the crime.
But the cigarette put the unknown man at the spot where Diana had been killed. The semen donor and the smoker were the same person. He had been in the woods with her on the night she was killed. Media attention followed. The Houston Press ran detailed reporting on the case.
In January of 2000, PBS aired a Frontline documentary called The Case for Innocence, produced by Ofra Bikel. Criner’s story was a centerpiece. A national audience watched a man sit in prison while Judge Sharon Keller, on camera, defended the ruling that had kept him there. Mike Charlton told the producers that he was trying to win an appeal where the science was on his client’s side and the law was not.
He said he had argued the case in front of a court that did not want to hear the argument. The documentary profiled three long-term inmates whose lab results said they could not have committed the crimes they were in prison for. Within 18 months of the broadcast, all three were free. Public pressure built quickly after the broadcast.
In July of 2000, Judge Michael Mayes concluded that Criner was innocent and signed a request for a pardon. Montgomery County District Attorney Mike McDougal co-signed it. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles almost never granted such requests. They voted 18 to nothing in favor. On August 14th, 2000, Texas Governor George W.
Bush granted the pardon. He was the Republican nominee for president. The Frontline broadcast had aired nationally 7 months earlier, and the case had become a national story. Bush had been in office since January of 1995 and had presided over the most active death chamber in the country. In those years, he had granted only a handful of pardons.
He said the new evidence raised substantial doubt about the guilt of Roy Krainer. Krainer walked out a free man. He had gone in at 25 and come out at 35. He received a lump sum payment of $130,000 from the state plus a $2,200 monthly annuity for the rest of his life. A decade was gone. The man who had actually killed Deanna Ogg was still unknown.
The killer’s profile, read twice now from two different objects, was the only thing the case had. With the conviction overturned, the question turned over and started again. If he had not killed Deanna Ogg, who had? Detectives uploaded the killer’s profile to CODIS, the FBI’s national database for unsolved cases. From that point on, every new offender profile entered anywhere in the country would run automatically against the one from Old Houston Road.
If a match came back, the system would flag Montgomery County. Nothing flagged. The unknown man’s profile sat in the system. Hundreds of thousands of other profiles surrounded it. There were only a few possible reasons. Either he had never been arrested for something serious enough to put his profile in the system, or he had been arrested somewhere that did not collect a sample at booking, or his sample was in the index, but in a way that kept it from being compared.
The result was the same regardless of the reason. Year after year, nothing changed. In Porter, Diana’s mother grew older. She watched her daughter’s classmates graduate and marry and have children of their own. Diana was still 16. New detectives inherited the file, reviewed the evidence, and arrived at the same place their predecessors had.
Kriner, free since the summer of 2000, lived quietly in East Texas. He had gone back to working in the woods, the trade he had been doing when deputies arrested him. The state had paid him for the years. Nothing in Texas could give him back what was taken. A system that had taken 10 years from one man and left another free in the same state had no plan for fixing what it had done.
The DNA was the only thread the case had left. For 20 years after Kriner walked out of prison, the man who had killed Diana Aug remained unknown to every law enforcement system in the country. In March of 2020, the Texas Rangers flagged Diana’s case for the federal sexual assault kit initiative.
The program had been created by the US Department of Justice to help states reopen older sexual assault cases where evidence had gone untested or where newer methods might produce results that older ones could not. Diana’s evidence had been tested years before. What the funding gave the case was access to something newer.
It opened the door to a lab that had not existed when the crime happened. In 2021, evidence from Diana’s case was submitted to Bode Technology, a private forensics lab in Lorton, Virginia, for advanced testing and forensic genetic genealogy. Genealogy worked differently than CODIS. Instead of looking for an exact match against a closed database of criminal profiles, the analysts uploaded the unknown profile to public ancestry websites, the kind people use to find their grandparents and great aunts.
There they searched for partial matches, distant relatives who had submitted their own DNA for personal reasons. From those distant relatives, the analysts built outward. They worked through birth records, death certificates, census data, and old addresses. They moved sideways across siblings and cousins, then down through generations, mapping who had lived where and who their children had been.
Each branch they confirmed let them eliminate dozens of others. The tree spanned generations. The work was slow and detailed. Analysts were not looking for the killer directly. They were looking for his cousins and aunts and second cousins twice removed. Working backward through the branches of the family tree, they narrowed the pool.
They needed someone who had been near Porter in 1986, who would have been around 20 years old at the time, and whose profile matched the one from the logging road. Only one person fit. The work took 3 years. In 2024, it produced a name. The DNA match probability was 1 in 27 octillion.
Investigators noted that finding a second person on Earth with the same profile would require thousands of times the current population of the planet. For 38 years, Diana’s killer had been a profile without a name. His name was Bobby Charles Taylor Sr. Taylor had been living in the Porter and Conroe area in the 1980s. Authorities said his address in September of 1986 was about 2 miles from the spot off Old Houston Road where Diana’s body was found.
The same Crossroads store was within walking distance of where he lived. He and Diana did not know each other. On the day she was killed, Taylor was 4 days short of his 21st birthday. He turned 21 four days after she was buried. He went on with his life from there. Diana had not been on this earth for more than 16 years.
Sheriff’s deputies pulled up his record. There were seven prior arrests on it spanning from 1985, the year before Diana’s murder, all the way to 2020. The Sheriff’s office released all seven mug shots at the press conference. A young man in his 20s, then a man in his 30s, in his 40s, in his 50s. The convictions included burglary, driving while intoxicated, and assault.
He had a felony driving while intoxicated conviction on his record. He had fled the state rather than serve the sentence, which had given the courts a felony bond jumping charge that had been hanging over him for years. None of those seven arrests had ever put his DNA into CODIS. The reasons were procedural.
Some of the bookings predated DNA collection laws in Texas. Some happened in jurisdictions that did not require samples for the offense charged. Whatever the combination, he had stayed invisible to the national database that should have caught him. CODIS had been built precisely for cases like this. For 20 years after the pardon, it had failed seven separate times.
The investigators had a question they did not yet have an answer to. Someone with seven arrests across four decades, his DNA in a teenage girl’s murder, and an address two miles from where her body was found, rarely has only one victim. The Sheriff’s office asked anyone who had known Taylor in the 1980s, who had worked with him, who had any connection to him at all, to contact their cold case squad.
By the time the genealogists in Virginia had a name, Taylor was not at any known Texas address. The felony bond jumping case had been open for years. The exact date he crossed into Mexico is not in the public record. What is known is that by the time the warrant cleared, he was already across the border. The Texas Rangers coordinated with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI’s Mexico City Office.
Prosecutors added charges for bond jumping. The new charges gave federal authorities a vehicle for extradition while the capital murder case was still being built. They wanted Taylor back in Texas. The bond jumping charge gave them a paper trail across an international border. All of it took months.
On April 24th, 2026, Taylor walked into the FBI’s office in Mexico City and surrendered to federal agents. He was initially taken into custody on the outstanding Texas warrant that had pushed him into Mexico in the first place. The capital murder charges had not yet been filed. The next day, agents flew him back to Texas.
10 days later, on May 4th, 2026, the Montgomery County District Attorney charged him with capital murder in the death of Deana Ogg. He was 60 years old and was placed in the Montgomery County Jail. If convicted, he could face the death penalty. His daughters released a statement after the charges were filed.
They asked the public to remember that their father was more than a headline or a suspect and said they believed his innocence would become clear when the truth came out. Prosecutors noted that Taylor is presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court. The case was moving toward trial.
The press conference was held on May 7th, 2026. Sheriff Wesley Doolittle opened it by telling reporters the case had seen many chapters. Through persistence and through working together, he said, they had identified the person responsible for her death. Deana’s mother, Patricia, sat in the room. She was 82 years old and had been 42 when her daughter was killed.
For the past 40 years, she had answered letters and watched detectives come and go on the case. Few people in Montgomery County had been with the case longer than she had. She had lived with the unanswered question longer than her daughter had been alive. Doolittle read a letter on her behalf. In it, Patricia returned to who Deanna had been.
The music, the fashion, the dresses and the t-shirts. She wrote that Deanna was not on this earth for a long time, but that she was here for a good time. Her daughter’s love of Jesus and love of family, the letter said, had withstood a lifetime. Patricia had chosen to focus her remarks on her daughter’s life and not on the man now accused of taking it from her.
The family also extended their compassion to Taylor’s relatives. Patricia wrote that the Augs had had 40 years to grieve and that the Taylor family was only at the beginning of theirs. Doolittle addressed the DNA directly. He told reporters that the level of confidence in the match was one in an octillion. The number was so large, he said, that it would be unreasonable to think it was not Taylor.
Doolittle told the room that Taylor, if convicted, had taken away everything Deanna had and everything she would ever have. He had taken from her family every graduation, every wedding, every holiday, and every birthday they would have shared with her. A relative of Deanna’s spoke to reporters after the conference.
He described Taylor as a monster and said the arrest had brought a sense of peace to the family. Roy Kreiner did not speak publicly. The arrest of a different man, 26 years after his pardon, was the closest thing to a public exoneration he had ever been given. A 16-year-old girl walked 2 miles down a farm road to catch a ride to a family gathering.
The man who took her into the woods left a Marlboro filter on the ground. A clump of blond hair stayed in her right hand. The filter stayed in an evidence bag for the next 40 years. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.
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