THE DISAPPEARED
For nearly 30 years, Dianne Gonsoulin Hastings tried to discover what befell her big sister.
Donna was petite, rail-thin, and had a distinctive dark-eyed charm. As a girl and young woman, she loved to go crabbing on Pleasure Island, standing for hours on a rocky jetty that poked out into the Gulf of Mexico until night fell and dawn broke. She loved Janis Joplin, another free-spirited Port Arthur native. And she loved to sing outside, belting out Joplin lyrics like “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”
Then she disappeared, leaving no word with her siblings, her large band of close-knit Cajun cousins, or her kids—the two boys she loved.
Donna, Dianne, and their four siblings grew up in a brick house near Port Arthur’s sea wall. Their parents’ marriage fell apart when the girls were small, and their father, a decorated combat veteran, struggled with both post-traumatic stress disorder and alcoholism.
In her teens, Donna left home to marry her childhood sweetheart and soon had her own family. They were happy, until Donna’s husband began to drink heavily too. Dianne got several calls to “rescue” her sister and nephews after he turned violent while drunk. In the last episode, Donna was hospitalized with a broken eye socket and dozens of stitches. “I will never forget what I saw when I walked in the room,” Dianne says.
Quietly, Donna and her boys sought shelter and slipped away. For two years, they lived happily in Austin. But Donna also struggled with substance abuse. In 1989, she brought the boys to live—temporarily, she thought—with their paternal grandmother in Louisiana. She moved to Houston and promised to send for them when she “could rebuild her life.”
In her last call to Dianne, in October 1989, Donna mentioned a trip to Mexico. So when she didn’t get in touch again, Dianne worried but assumed her sister was traveling. Panic set in after months passed, and then years.
Donna’s last mailing address was on Bay Area Boulevard in Clear Lake, a southern suburb of Houston that bumps up against League City and other small coastal cities along Galveston Bay. She lived only a few miles from an abandoned oil field, a 25-acre spot with spiky stands of trees in League City called the “Killing Fields” because it had been used as a dumping ground by an unidentified serial killer.
Dianne heard news stories about that field, where discarded remains of three women were recovered—all strangled, left nude and seemingly posed. First, Heidi Villareal Fye, a local bartender, disappeared in
