Revisiting a 10-Year-Old Cold Case Homicide

A homicide that took place 10 years ago in Fayette County remains unsolved.

On Jan. 23, 2014, Grant Whitaker, a 33-year-old man from San Antonio, was shot in the neck while driving on Hwy. 90 in Engle, located about halfway between Schulenburg and Flatonia. The pickup he was driving wrecked in the ditch along the railroad tracks.

The crash scene with a dead gunshot victim puzzled investigators at first. The Pct. 3 Justice of the Peace at the time, Tommy Tipton, conducted the inquest and initially thought Whitaker’s death might have been a suicide. There was a handgun in Whitaker’s vehicle.

Tipton ultimately ordered an autopsy, and when the results came back, they showed that Whitaker was killed by a bullet that did not match Whitaker’s gun, meaning the bullet had to have come from outside the vehicle. The inquest then turned into a homicide investigation.

In an interview with the Record last week, Lt. David Beyer of the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office said Whitaker’s killer may never be brought to justice. He said investigators identified a main suspect – a man in the Engle area who had been previously accused of shooting at trains on the railroad tracks.

Beyer said investigators built a strong case, but most of the evidence was circumstantial. Investigators were able to rule out as suspects everyone else who lived in the area, as they were away from home at the time of the killing. A security camera at a business in Engle captured video of the pickup crashing. A team from the Texas Department of Public Safety reconstructed the crime scene and determined the most likely path of the bullet’s trajectory came from the suspect’s property. Investigators obtained warrants and searched the man’s property. But they were never able to recover a weapon that matched the fatal bullet.

The Texas Rangers interviewed the suspect. But the man did not confess to shooting that day. Without a weapon or a confession, local prosecutors declined to press charges.

The main suspect in the case has since passed away.

“Some days I think about it and say, ‘Did we have the right person?’” Beyer said. “I still think we did. But maybe we didn’t. Maybe there’s something else out there that will turn up.”