A Texas Cold Case: 1989 Murder of Amanda Goodman

0:00 [MUSIC] Sissy Goodman walked out of school in the rain carrying her books and a denim purse. She was 13 headed for home the same way that she always went and people saw her out there walking. Less than an hour later, that purse was on the side of a country road miles outside Brownwood, Texas. Investigators have a theory about how it got there. [MUSIC] Her full name was Amanda Laura Goodman, but everyone called her Sissy.

1:03 So we're going to call her that too. She lived in Brownwood, Texas, which sits out in the middle of the state about two hours southeast of Fort Worth. It's the spring of 1989. Sissy is in the eighth grade. Her mom is Barbara and Sissy has a sister and two brothers. Her birthday was in May and that year she turned 13 years old. The family threw her a party at Coggin Park, a city park right there in Brownwood. That party was only a few days before Tuesday, May 16th. On school days, Sissy walked home at her regular routine and it was a walk that she'd made plenty of times. That Tuesday, it rained in Brownwood. Sissy went to Brownwood Middle School and schooled that out about 3.30.

1:47 She started walking home. People saw her on the way and she had her schoolbooks with her and her denim purse. That's the last solid, for sure time anybody ever saw her alive. What's missing is the last sighting with the name and a time attached to it. Nobody has ever said publicly who saw her last or exactly when. Nobody has said publicly which route she took home either. If you grew up in Brownwood, you might know that walk yourself. You've got a girl walking home in the rain with her books and then a hole in the record about an hour wide. The next time anybody sees Sissy, she's 10 miles out of town. Indian Creek runs south of Brownwood into the country.

2:29 At about 4.25 that afternoon, a driver was on that road and spotted Sissy on the side of it. She had been shot once in the head. Her schoolbooks were right there next to her. The denim purse was there too. That's less than an hour after the bell that let her out of school. She's dead on the side of a road in another town. Investigators came to believe that she was shot somewhere else and then left there by the road. Where that other place was, nobody knows or has said publicly. The rain made collecting evidence out there a complete mess. The autopsy found no sign that she had been sexually assaulted. The first hint Barbara got came over a police scanner. She remembered that a friend from church had one and the friend heard something on it about a body being found.

3:15 If Barbara's memory is right, word of a body was out on the police scanner before anybody officially ever knocked on her door. There's no published police log out there to line her memory up against, which leaves the timing of that evening resting on what Barbara remembered years later. Around five o'clock officers came to Barbara's house. She remembered what they had with them. It was Sissy's denim purse. Sissy had carried that purse out of school maybe an hour and a half earlier. And now it was at her mom's front door being carried by the police. Barbara's pastor went with her to identify Sissy. The same pastor also did the funeral. Sissy Grubs was a brown County lawman and he worked Sissy's case from the day it happened.

3:58 He came out of it with the theory that he carried around for years. He believed Sissy got into that car with somebody she knew. If Grubs was right, somebody she recognized pulled up in the rain and offered her a ride. And she got in. That would explain the clock. A girl on foot needs a ride to get 10 miles out of town in under an hour. A stranger with a car fits that same clock though and investigators never said publicly what exactly pointed them toward somebody she knew. Several people got questioned back then. Nobody was ever indicted. Barbara said the police treated her like a suspect. She took a polygraph and after that she was cleared.

4:39 Investigators tried hypnosis on this case too, which some police departments actually used back then back in the 80s. Nobody ever said who got hypnotized or whether anything useful came of it. They also looked at a brown County man named Ricky McGinn and it's easy to see why his name came up. His stepdaughter Stephanie Flerney was 12 and may of 1993 McGinn killed her and her body turned up in a culvert a few days later. The same County and the same month as Sissy four years later. McGinn's case got famous because of DNA. In 2000 he was minutes away from execution when governor George W. Bush stopped it so that new DNA tests could be run.

5:21 Was the first time Bush had ever handed out a 30 day reprieve? The tests pointed right back at McGinn and Texas executed him that September. Grubs said Sissy's murder didn't fit the way that McGinn operated. The cases looked different too. Stephanie was sexually assaulted and beaten with an axe. Sissy was shot once. By 2009 Grubs said there was a person of interest although he wouldn't say who. Nobody has named that person publicly. Barbara kept pushing the whole time. By 2005 Grubs was the sheriff of Brown County and he reopened Sissy's case and took it to the Texas Rangers cold case squad. He said they ran into dead ends back in 89 and he said her family deserved to know what happened to Sissy.

6:07 Barbara said she wanted to find Sissy's killer to be her life's work from then on. She also begged Sissy's old classmates to come forward with anything that they knew. Those classmates were pushing 30 by then. Grubs said it's like an albatross that I have carried all these years. He said that the Rangers would go back over the old evidence and he named DNA testing as one of the newer tools that they planned on trying to use. By 2009 they still didn't have enough evidence to charge anybody. Grubs said he wanted to see this case solved in his lifetime. In 2013 the Texas Rangers put up a web page of unsolved homicides from all over the state. There were 68 cases on it.

6:48 None of them came from Brown County. When Brown County's chief deputy got asked which of the county's own unsolved cases stood out to him, the first name he said was Amanda Goodman. He called her a young girl who was innocently brutally murdered. Barbara died before the 25th anniversary. A family member said she died without ever getting her answer. Grubs, the lawman who called this case his albatross, died in 2015 with it still open. Sissy's people kept going back to Cogan Park. The same park where she'd had her 13th birthday party a few days before she died. One of those gatherings came in 2009. It landed right around what would have been her 33rd birthday.

7:29 And family and friends lit candles and prayed together in the park. For the 25th anniversary they went bigger. They planned a birthday party for Sissy and invited the whole town. There were a free hot dogs and friends and family released balloons for her. People chipped in for donations to cover the food and some t-shirts. They set it for May 17th, the day after the anniversary of her death. Sissy's cousin Judy Shank helped put it together. Judy was 8 when Sissy died. She said they picked Cogan Park so the town would not forget Sissy. She was only 13 and didn't deserve this. Sissy is buried at Greenleaf Cemetery in Brownwood. Back in 2018 the ground keeper out there was a man named Shane.

8:12 Shane was 19 when Sissy died. He says he keeps visiting her grave because her case is heartbreaking and she never got any kind of justice. In 2018 a sergeant with the Brown County Sheriff's Office said some of the evidence had been sent off for DNA testing and none of it came back with a DNA signature. He said there were no suspects and nobody has ever been arrested. He wouldn't even call it a cold case. To him it was just an unsolved murder. And he said anytime any new information comes in they go right back to it. That no suspects answer sits right next to the person of interest. Grubs talked about in 2009. Nobody ever publicly explained what happened to that particular lead.

8:54 In 2024 Sissy's cousin Judy went on a podcast and talked about new information that she says has turned up. The enforcement hasn't said anything publicly to back it up. The piece that's still missing is the same one from the very start. Somebody saw Sissy walking home that afternoon and nobody has ever said publicly who saw her last. If you were anywhere near Brownwood Middle School that rainy Tuesday and you saw a girl walking home with her school books in a denim purse or you remember a car stopping for a kid near that school that afternoon, you're encouraged to call the Brown County Sheriff's Office. The number is in the show notes of this episode.

9:43 Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, Bingeable True Crime. Hi, I'm Joe, I'm the host. Here's an email, subject, a gap. Hi Joe, the host, something I've been curious about. A lot of these cases sit for years and then break. But I never understand what actually changes. Not the DNA ones, I get those. I understand why those break. I mean the ones where somebody just decides to talk after 15 years of not talking. What happens to a person that makes them pick up the phone in 2008 about something from 1993? If you've got a sense of it from doing these stories so long I'd like to hear it. Seems like it would be the most interesting part and it usually gets like one sentence. Thanks, Sheila and Pueblo Colorado.

10:26 Hi Sheila, thank you so much for taking the time to send me a message and listening to the podcast. Yeah, I do have a theory on that. Obviously, I don't know and it's not going to be applicable for every case out there. But I think that people's conscious gets the best of them sometimes. Maybe they find Jesus or they just, you know, turn their life around, change it in some way and they start feeling more and more guilty about something they did in the past. Or they were a witness to something that happened in the past and it just eats away at them for so long that they can no longer live with themselves unless they talk about it unless they tell someone. And then also I think there's an element of, you have stories like the serial killer, the BTK killer.

11:11 He wasn't going to get caught. He got himself caught because he wanted the recognition. He wanted to, he wanted people talking about him. So that's what got him caught after all of those years. It wasn't a matter of he felt guilty or whatever. He just wanted to have his name back in the news. And so that got him caught. But mostly Sheila, I think that the reason some of these cases break later on, it's about witness guilt that they haven't already come forward and given the information or about the person, the murderer that did it, turning their life around or changing or just even feeling guilty about what they did years later in confessing. I think that's usually how those types of things work. Okay, quick pivot.

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