Thirty-five years and one day ago, off-duty Harris County Sheriff's Corporal Roxyann Allee walked out of the Dillard's entrance at Greenspoint Mall toward her Ford Aerostar van and vanished. She was 34 years old, a wife, a mother of two, and a deputy at the Harris County Jail. Hours later she was found shot to death in a field, and no one has ever been arrested for her murder.
According to the Harris County Sheriff's Office, Allee was abducted after leaving the mall on September 30, 1991, and her case remains unsolved to this day. The timeline of that night, drawn from Houston Chronicle reporting cited by Police1, places the abduction at around 7:30 p.m., as Allee had just finished shopping for a dress. Roughly 90 minutes later, her van was found engulfed in flames in the 1500 block of Laurel Creek near T.C. Jester, about three miles from the mall, the outlet reports. Investigators recovered her badge, her identification card, and blood among the debris, but her purse and her service weapon, which was never recovered, were missing.
A Body Found in a Field Off River Laurel Drive
Several hours after her van was torched, Allee's fully clothed body was discovered in a nearby field off River Laurel Drive, less than a mile from where the vehicle burned, according to Click2Houston. She had suffered multiple gunshot wounds, including three shots to the head, the station reported. The brutality of the crime, paired with the earlier arson, pointed investigators toward a theory that has anchored the case for three and a half decades.
Detectives believe the crime began as an opportunistic carjacking that escalated into murder and arson once the suspects realized Allee was a sheriff's deputy, or discovered her official identification inside the van, per the Houston Chronicle's account. No suspects have ever been formally charged. The same reporting notes that investigators obtained grainy convenience store surveillance footage showing two men buying gasoline shortly before the crime, and that a store clerk separately reported seeing a distraught woman matching Allee's description, details that led to composite sketches depicting two Black males in their late 20s to early 30s.
Her Husband Learned of the Fire on the Job
The personal toll of the case has rippled through one Harris County family for 35 years. Allee's husband, Sgt. Kent Allee, was on duty as a fellow sheriff's deputy when he received the dispatch call reporting that his own family's van was ablaze, the outlet's reporting states. He went on to raise the couple's two teenage children alone, retiring in 2012 after 30 years with the department; the two had met in college at Texas A&M University.
A Standing $30,000 Reward and New Forensic Tools
State and local agencies have kept the case active with financial incentives. In January 2016, the Office of the Governor and the Texas Department of Public Safety created the Fallen Hero Reward — Texas Remembers program, offering up to $20,000 in state-funded rewards for unresolved homicides or incapacitating injuries involving Texas law enforcement officers, administered through Texas Crime Stoppers. Combined with $10,000 jointly offered by Crime Stoppers of Houston and The 100 Club, a total reward of up to $30,000 was offered for information leading to an arrest, according to CBS News, which noted the amount was previously raised around the case's 20th and 25th anniversaries. The current reward is up to $5,000.
HCSO cold case detectives are now re-processing physical evidence using advancements in forensic technology, per the sheriff's office's Facebook post marking the anniversary, in hopes of identifying those responsible and bringing answers to Allee's family. Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers or the HCSO Cold Case Unit.
The Mall Itself Has Since Vanished
The commercial backdrop of the crime has changed dramatically since 1991. Greenspoint Mall, which opened in 1976 at Interstate 45 and Sam Houston Parkway as a major North Houston retail hub, officially closed to commercial tenants in July 2024 and is being redeveloped into the CityNorth Industrial Park logistics center, as Hoodline previously reported.
Thirty-five years on, the field off River Laurel Drive and the site where Allee's van burned remain quiet corners of a changing North Houston landscape, even as the question of who killed her has never been answered. For Kent Allee and the couple's children, and for the detectives still combing through decades-old evidence, the case stays open alongside the standing reward and the phone lines that have waited three and a half decades to ring with the right name.
