CRYSTAL BEACH — Six months after Bridgette Gearen was brutally raped and killed on Crystal Beach, detectives say they are still relentlessly searching for her killer.

But the investigation has been partially hindered by an unusually high number of capital murder cases in Galveston County recently, officials said.

GCSO

Bridgett Gearen and her young child.

“We have never had this many active homicide cases at this time in our recent memories,” said Maj. Ray Tuttoilmondo of the Galveston County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office spent the past six months investigating the homicides of Gearen, 28, a resident of Orange; Riley Ann Sawyers of Spring; A.W. Lacy of Bacliff; and Jose Flores of San Leon. Meanwhile, Gearen’s slaying has cast a pall over this tiny, tight-knit community, causing some residents to fret for their safety.

Gearen’s body was found by campers in the water near Monkhouse Drive about 6:20 a.m. July 15. She had been beaten and was partially clothed.

Tuttoilmondo said detectives continue to follow leads.

“We don’t consider this a cold case at all,” he said.

The sheriff’s office has not released any new information about Gearen’s slaying, but Tuttoilmondo said detectives have been able to eliminate some suspects based on tips. Information that Gearen was last seen near a late-model SUV after she vanished from a beach house helped detectives investigate tips that led to the elimination of about a dozen suspects, Tuttoilmondo said.

“It led us in some potentially interesting directions, and we were able to eliminate suspects through alibis,” he said. “We consider those some small successes.”

Photos and videos taken on Crystal Beach the weekend Gearen vanished did not turn up anything, Tuttoilmondo said. Her missing articles of clothing were never found, he said.

Detectives said they suspect Gearen did not know her killer. They also don’t believe Gearen’s slaying is connected to the any of the infamous Interstate 45 murders, Tuttoilmondo said.

“We do not see any even remote connection there,” he said.

The single mother was spending the weekend at a rented beach house with her 2-year-old daughter, Kyra, and friends from Provost & Umphrey, a Beaumont law firm where she worked as a legal secretary. She vanished just before midnight July 14, when she stepped outside to meet friends for a ride along the beach. She disappeared in the 90 seconds it took her friends to follow her outside the beach house.

“This crime was so brutal,” Tuttoilmondo said. “This is someone’s child. This is the mother of a little girl. It brings out a lot of emotions in us. We really, really want to see something happen with this. Despite our investigative efforts to this point, it just hasn’t happened yet. We’re still looking to the public to think about their own daughters, their own mothers, people who are close to them.”

Crystal beach resident Dee Pedraza, the mother of two teenage girls, said she’s still horrified by the slaying. Pedraza, who used to stroll the beach twice a week in the late afternoon, hasn’t walked the beach alone since Gearen was killed.

“People are paying more attention to what’s going on in our small community,” Pedraza said. “They just can’t believe it. ... It’s really scary, unbelievable. There are killings all the time, all over the place, but down here, it was just unbelievable.”

Tuttoilmondo urged anyone with information to call the sheriff’s office.

“It may seem to them to be absolutely insignificant, but it could be the one thing that we need that breaks the case open for us,” he said.