Texas Bureaucracy Nods Off, Wakes Up To Find It Solved a 42-Year-Old Murder Case

In a stunning display of temporal inertia, the Texas justice system, after a brief, four-decade-long power nap, has finally managed to convict a man for the 1984 murder of a teen girl. Robert Earl Sanborn, 61, was found guilty of murder this week, proving conclusively that if you just leave a cold case simmering on the back burner for long enough, eventually a jury will get around to it. Prosecutors asserted Sanborn supplied the pharmaceuticals that led to the girl's demise, a detail that surely must have been quite fresh in everyone's mind back in, say, 1985. Legal experts are hailing this as a groundbreaking achievement in judicial patience, setting a new precedent for 'better late than never, by a factor of 42.' The 'Texas Killing Fields,' as the desolate region where the victim's remains were found became ominously known, can now potentially shed that moniker and perhaps be rebranded as the 'Texas *Eventually* Getting Around To It Fields.' Critics note that while justice was indeed served, it arrived with the unhurried grace of a particularly slow-moving glacier, leaving ample time for several generations of witnesses and evidence to embark on their own journeys into the great beyond.