True Confession

That day, September 30, 1995, was the last day any of Fry's relatives in Florida heard from him. After making a call from Waters' Austin apartment to wish his daughter Lisa a happy 16th birthday, he vanished.

Instead, Fry was lured to a remote spot east of Dallas and shot once in the head and then mutilated, to make it difficult for authorities to identify the body that was left behind.

In his initial statements, Waters told the agents that Karr had shot Fry, and he gave various reasons for the killing, including friction between Fry and Karr at the Warren Inn in San Antonio. But Karr, who is serving a life term in federal prison for convictions related to the abductions, vehemently denied killing Fry and appeared ready to take a polygraph test to prove his story, prompting the agents to confront Waters.

"Karr says, in no uncertain terms, that you're a lying son of a bitch," FBI agent Donna Cowling said to Waters, threatening to withdraw the plea agreement if he was found to be lying. Eventually, when pressed by the agents, Waters said, "I killed Danny Fry." And he soon admitted that Fry's execution had been part of the plan throughout.

"Danny's assistance was chosen because he was considered expendable...from the get-go," he acknowledged.

He said Fry never saw it coming when the three men got out of the car on the bank of the Trinity and began looking for a spot ostensibly to dump the O'Hair bodies.

"We get out of view, you know; I tap Karr so he can stand aside, and shot Danny in the back of the head," he said.

The agents, however, did not believe Waters' claim that Fry was killed on the riverbank on September 30, 1995, almost two days before his body was discovered by a wandering can picker. According to an autopsy, Fry was only about 12 hours dead when discovered, and there was almost no blood on the riverbank with him.

"Here's your problem, David," Cowling said. "Danny's gonna bleed out. There's gonna be blood. There's not blood at the crime scene. There is no way you killed Danny on Saturday. He was found on Monday. I'll tell you what the science says. There's no way," she said.

Authorities have always suspected that Fry might have been killed elsewhere in the Dallas area and dumped on the riverbank later, but Waters stuck to his account, and the matter was dropped.

Waters said it was Karr who butchered Fry's body in the riverbank darkness, using the same large knife he had purchased to cut up the O'Hairs. He explained the perverse logic behind this.

"It was, you know, a kind of sharing of responsibility. One guy shoots him and the other one has to dismember him. I wasn't going to dismember him, so I was essentially elected to shoot him," he said.

After he was killed, Fry's head, hands and clothing were put in a plastic bag that was hidden in the trunk of Waters' Camaro for the drive back to Austin. On the way, he had a flat.

"I had to pull over to the side of the road to change it. Once again, I thought I was going to have a cardiac arrest. The thought occurred to me that a well-meaning state trooper may stop by and check to see if we needed assistance. One never knows if he might decide he wants to have a look-see, and awfully embarrassing it might be if he wanted to know what was in that bag on the floor. Give the devil his due. Karr was not concerned one iota. Very, very composed, very assured of our situation," Waters said.