Houston Police Crack a Cold One

Houston, TX -- Go back, back to 1979. Back to that November. Donna Summer and Chic were burning up the charts.

Dan Pastorini and Earl Campbell were carrying the Oilers on a run that would, eventually, take the team to within sight of the Super Bowl.

The Ayatollah had called on Iranians to kick the Great Satan out of the country. A call that would, inevitably, lead to a 444 day-long crisis.

And on November 3, Stephan Tramble Chambers was murdered.

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Chambers, 23, was chilling in a parking lot in the 9200 block of Buffalo Speedway -- now a tony residential neighborhood.

He was part of a crowd that had gathered around a brother in a black and yellow '73 Mercury who was throwin' down with a waitress. What got the two into the argument is lost to the HPD records room.

One thing led to another, the brother pulled a gat and started spraying. Chambers got hit, along with a cat named Charles Eugene Philleo, 25.

Philleo caught a round in the mouth and survived. Chambers wasn't so lucky. He was taken to Ben Taub, where he was pronounced D.O.A. The brother in the Mercury peeled out.

A few days later, November 7, Five-Oh came up with an ID. They said Leon Dudley was the alleged shooter, and charged him with Chambers' murder.

The thing is, Dudley had split. He'd taken the bus Gus and was in the wind. He stayed gone and the case was officially declared cold.

Until a little while back when word got to HPD that Dudley was staying in Euclid, OH--a lake front suburb of Cleveland, about 10 miles east of The Land on I-90.

An Ohio task force picked-up Dudley on the warrant for Chambers' killing. HPD sent a cop to talk to him, but the cat had nothing to say. Dudley's cooling his heels in an Ohio jail waiting to be brought back to Texas.