DNA breakthrough leads to arrest in 1986 Deanna Ogg killing

Montgomery County investigators finally put a name to a case that had sat for nearly four decades, arresting Bobby Charles Taylor Sr. in the 1986 killing of Deanna Ogg. Taylor, 65, was booked into the Montgomery County Jail and charged with capital murder after detectives said advanced DNA technology let them go back to old evidence and connect him to the crime.

The arrest matters because it was built on tools that did not exist in 1986. Investigators said the evidence was there all along, but modern forensic testing gave cold case detectives a way to squeeze answers out of material that once produced dead ends. The sheriff’s office has scheduled a press conference for Wednesday morning at 10:00 a.m. to lay out more of the timeline, the evidence chain, and the role of state and federal partners, including the Texas Rangers and FBI.

Deanna Ogg was 16 when she died in September 1986. ABC13 reported that the New Caney High School student walked about two miles to a convenience store at FM 1314 and Sorters Road and was last seen alive there. Her body was found about two hours later in a wooded area off Old Houston Road. The National Registry of Exonerations says she was found just after 7 p.m. on September 27, 1986, about eight miles from her home in Porter, Texas. The registry lists the cause of death as blunt trauma to the head and multiple stab wounds to the neck, and ABC13 reported that Ogg had been sexually assaulted, beaten, and stabbed.

The case has a painful history beyond Taylor’s arrest. Roy Criner was convicted in 1990 of sexual assault in the case and spent 10 years in prison before DNA evidence cleared him in 2000. The Innocence Project says DNA testing in August 2000 established Criner’s innocence, turning the Ogg case into one of Texas’s better-known examples of a wrongful conviction undone by science. Now, the same scientific shift has pushed the investigation in the opposite direction, toward a new suspect and a new court battle.

For Ogg’s family, the arrest brings the kind of late answer that cold-case victims’ relatives wait decades for, never knowing if it will come. A relative told ABC13 the arrest brings some peace, and Ogg’s mother, now 82, is expected to attend the press conference and focus on her daughter’s life rather than the suspect. The sheriff’s office said surviving family members will also speak as investigators release photos and more details, closing one chapter of a case that has never really left Montgomery County.