Texas Woman, 71, Seeks Parole Decades After Murdering, Dismembering Boyfriend

Helen Hardin Moore had taken out a $150,000 life insurance policy on Casey Elliott just weeks before his body turned up in pieces across four North Texas counties. Now 71 and three decades into a life sentence, Moore appeared before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on April 7, 2026, seeking release from the Murray Unit in Gatesville and reopening one of Young County's most disturbing cases for the family of the man she killed.

Elliott, described by friends as a big, friendly cowboy approaching 300 pounds, was Moore's live-in boyfriend of five years. He was 27 years old and 14 years her junior when he was reported missing on January 16, 1996, from the couple's home in Fort Belknap, a small community roughly 80 miles west of Fort Worth. Five days later, his torso surfaced near a lake in Palo Pinto County. By late March, DNA testing confirmed that body parts found scattered across four separate North Texas counties all belonged to Elliott. Toxicology revealed a lethal amount of morphine in his system.

Moore made methodical attempts to conceal what happened. Investigators found she had scrubbed the trailer with bleach and slaughtered a pig on the property, apparently to obscure blood evidence. The forensic link that ultimately connected her to the deposition site was cow manure, a detail later examined in the 2010 documentary episode "Extreme Forensics: Deep in the Heart of Murder," which holds an 8.2 rating on IMDb. Police arrested Moore in March 1996. When she confessed, she denied money was the motive despite the insurance policy. She pleaded guilty to murder in August 1996 in exchange for a life sentence.

The April 7 hearing marked approximately 30 years of incarceration at the Murray Unit, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice women's prison in Gatesville. Under Texas law governing violent offenses committed on or after September 1, 1993, inmates must serve at least 50 percent of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole consideration, with no good-time credit applied. Elliott's murder in early 1996 places Moore squarely under those stricter rules. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles evaluates candidates using a combined offense severity ranking and a risk-level score; the board weighs that severity against institutional conduct records and any documented rehabilitation.

The case carries a national profile that extends well beyond Young County. Oxygen's "Snapped" featured Moore in Season 21, Episode 14, which aired November 5, 2017, noting that two decades after the crime, Moore had put forward a new account of events. The "Snapped: Women Who Murder" podcast revisited the case in Episode 57 in 2021. That media footprint ensures the board's decision will face scrutiny far outside Fort Belknap.

The board's calculus formally includes victim-impact statements, the severity of the original offense, and any evidence of rehabilitation. For Casey Elliott's family, those procedural abstractions reduce to a single question: whether 30 years is sufficient for the woman who poisoned him, dismembered him, and scattered his remains across four counties while a $150,000 insurance policy waited. No decision had been announced as of April 9, 2026.