The Path

When a bright, young woman living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is found brutally murdered along a popular running trail in the city, everyone who knew her is shocked. Then, as the case drags on, it becomes clear that women are being killed at an alarming rate in Tulsa…but the question still remains, were any of the crimes connected?

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  Hi, park enthusiasts. It's Delia. If you listen to Park Predators, you already know that sometimes the most beautiful places can hide the darkest secrets. But what happens when the danger isn't miles from civilization? It's in your community, and sometimes even in your own backyard. On Crime Junkie, hosts Ashley and Britt dive into real cases every week, from missing persons to unsolved murders, breaking down what we know, what we don't, and the details that still don't sit right. If you care about the stories behind the headlines and the victims at the center of them, you'll want to check out Crime Junkie. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra. And the case I'm going to share with you today came to me in the most unique way. A man named Sean reached out to me last year, asking if I'd consider looking into the 1975 murder of his mom's best friend in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I, of course, got right on it, and when I interviewed his mom, I knew I was never going to be able to put this case down. The brutal killing of 24-year-old Suzanne Oakley in Tulsa's River Parks Trail System stopped me in my tracks. Mostly because it's got so many twists and turns, and in many ways, she represents a lot of people who I know listen to this show. People whose circumstances have brought them, for one reason or another, to live in an

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  urban environment, but who are drawn towards green spaces to escape the buzz of city life. And Tulsa's River Parks Trail System offers that. According to the websites visittulsa.com and riverparks.org, there are 26 miles of paved trails that run along the Arkansas River. These paths take you by sculptures, picnic areas, wildlife habitats, playgrounds, and fountains. It's a place known for hosting concerts, cycling and running competitions, festivals, and so much more. Which is why it's so mind boggling to know that someone managed to commit a heinous crime there on a weekday morning without a soul seeing them. This is Park Predators.

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  Around 8:15 a.m. on Wednesday, August 27, 1975, a woman named Jean Winfrey was inside her office at the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission, watching the clock like a hawk. Jean was expecting company that evening and planned to take off from work around noon so she could get ready and meet up with her friends for dinner. Her coworker, 24-year-old Suzanne Oakley, had promised her the previous day that she'd help with any extra work that arose from Jean slipping out early. During the women's conversation, Suzanne had assured Jean that she'd be in the office on Wednesday by 8 o'clock sharp. But it was already 8:15, and Suzanne was still not there. Naturally, Jean was a bit miffed. Actually, to be honest, she was kind of pissed. But her frustration turned to concern

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  when 8:30 rolled around and Suzanne was still a no-show. That's when Jean decided to call her apartment and check in with Suzanne's roommates to see what was up. Over the phone, one of the women who lived with Suzanne told Jean that she wasn't home, which, on its face, wasn't immediately alarming. You see, Jean knew that Suzanne regularly ran at least one mile in the morning along Tulsa's River Park's trail system. But because of their conversation the previous day, Jean fully expected that Suzanne would have given herself enough time to do that, but also show up on time for work like they'd agreed. When Jean asked Suzanne's roommate to check her room and see if Suzanne's running shoes were gone, the roommate did. And sure enough, the shoes weren't there.

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  Which indicated to Jean that Suzanne had gone running. But what was weird was that she knew her friend always liked to go jogging early, like between 6:45 and 7:00 a.m. And so with it being 8:30 by then, Jean knew Suzanne was very overdue.

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  So she quickly left work and walked across City Hall's Plaza to the Tulsa Police Department. She told an officer there that she wanted to report Suzanne missing. But the officer responded that Jean would need to wait at least 24 hours before filing an official report. Jean didn't want to wait that long, so she did something that I know I would have done if I were in her position. She went above the desk officer's head and straight to the chief of police's assistant. Because she'd been working for this city and within its municipal government for a few years, Jean had gotten to know people. And she especially knew the chief's assistant, this guy named Tom. So after getting no help from the cop at the front desk, she rode the elevator upstairs to speak with Tom and told him that he needed to alert the chief

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  of police because Suzanne was missing. And based on what I gathered, I think Tom was at least familiar with Suzanne since she was also a city employee and worked nearby. Which is why, according to Jean, he quickly jumped into action. Jean knew that Suzanne lived in an apartment on Riverside Drive, which was very close to the River Park's trail system. Back in 1975, the path was mostly dirt and vegetation with some thick overgrowth, but that had not deterred Suzanne from regularly running there. Jean told me that Riverside Drive itself wasn't as long as it is today, so the span of trail that Suzanne usually ran on was only like two miles. So together, Tom and Jean got into his police car and drove straight to the area where

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  they suspected Suzanne would have gone jogging. Which was between 43rd and 61st Street.

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  When they arrived, Jean said Tom got out of his cruiser and began walking down the trail, looking into the brush and shrubs for any sign of Suzanne. When he didn't see anything, he reported back to Jean, who he'd asked to remain in the car, that he hadn't found Suzanne or anything unusual. Jean, who was still processing the situation, was a bit confused by Tom's response. Because she didn't understand why he was looking for her friend in the vegetation. When she questioned him about his approach, he explained that if someone had harmed Suzanne, that person would have likely done so somewhere on the trail that was isolated, like her turnaround point. Jean thought those statements were kind of strange, considering the fact that Suzanne had only been missing for a short time, but she slowly realized that where Tom's mind

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  was going was somewhere much darker than she was capable of handling. It's unclear from speaking with Jean or from reading the source material if Tulsa PD generated an official missing persons report for Suzanne that morning, but what I can tell you is that Jean, unable to do much, ended up having to go back to her and Suzanne's office in City Hall and finish out her shift. She was riddled with worry about what was going on with Suzanne, but helpless to do much else. She told me that for most of Wednesday afternoon, the phones in their office were ringing nonstop with citizens who needed to get ahold of Suzanne ahead of a big planning commission meeting that day. But, of course, the only thing Jean and her coworkers could tell folks was that Suzanne wasn't there, and they didn't know where she was.

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  Finally, after Jean got home from work around 5:30 PM, she got a knock at her door. It was Suzanne's roommates and an elder from Suzanne's church. After the trio came inside, one of the women told Jean that Suzanne had been found, and it wasn't good. Jean learned that Suzanne had been discovered stabbed, sexually assaulted, and strangled in some brush along the River Park's trail system. Jean told me that when she heard the horrific nature of what had happened to her friend, she dropped to the floor in disbelief and sorrow. But she couldn't stay in that state for long, because Tulsa Police detectives were waiting outside her house and expressed that they wanted to speak with her down at the police station. Shortly after she arrived at TPD headquarters,

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  Jean's husband joined her and officers asked them if she would be willing to make a positive ID of Suzanne's body, which she told me she couldn't stomach doing, so her husband did it for her. The reality that her close friend had been brutally murdered was hard for Jean to comprehend. The women had met two years earlier after Suzanne started working at the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission. They were office mates and about the same age, which is why they became such fast friends. According to Jean, as she'd gotten to know Suzanne, she'd learned bits and pieces of her background and life prior to moving to Oklahoma. And from what Jean gathered, it wasn't very rosy. She told me during our interview that Suzanne seemingly had a rough upbringing in Texas,

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  and she suspected that Suzanne's recent radical conversion to Christianity was likely birthed from those experiences, or even prior issues from a possible substance use disorder. Jean never really got the full story because she said Suzanne didn't like to dwell on her past. She just always said she was a new creation and had overcome stuff from her early college years. Jean said that Suzanne told her that while living in Texas, she'd found God after a particularly rough night at a party in which she'd blacked out and woken up without shoes on. While walking home, Suzanne said she'd heard music coming from a local church and went inside. During the service, she decided to become a Christian and completely change her life.

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  Not long after that, she moved to Oklahoma and enrolled in Oral Roberts University, which is a religious college. She graduated from that school in May of 1973 and taken a job with the Planning Commission. Her degree was in social work, which came in handy because her and Jean were what the Commission designated as citizen liaisons. Which meant they'd go out into the community several times a week and meet with citizen groups to discuss what residents wanted to see as far as long-term services with trash and roadways, parks, zoning, and so on.

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  When Suzanne was killed, she and Jean had been working on a big project called Vision 2000, which aimed to iron out what Tulsa would look like in the next 25 years. Of the city's 15 planning districts, Suzanne was a citizen liaison to five of them. Jean told me that one of the reasons Suzanne was so dedicated to going on runs most mornings was because while attending Oral Roberts University, she'd been required to exercise on a regular basis, and after graduating, she'd just continued the habit to stay fit. She'd also gone on a missions trip to Israel earlier that year, and part of preparing for that was to run regularly.

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  According to my interview with Jean and a book about this case titled "Homicide", which was written by retired Tulsa homicide detective Charles Sasser, Suzanne was found in the late afternoon on Wednesday, the 27th, by a group of men from her church, Tulsa Christian Fellowship. One of those men was named Charles Farah, and he pastored Suzanne's church. Another member of the search party was a guy named Arthur, who was an ordained minister and professor at Suzanne's alma mater, Oral Roberts University. Arthur was also the leader of a Christian discipleship program that Suzanne and her roommates were members of. Before moving into their apartment on Riverside Drive, Suzanne and her friends had lived in separate coed houses as part of the discipleship group.

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  When she failed to come home by 4:00 PM on Wednesday afternoon, her roommates had called Arthur for help, and he'd been the one who organized the group of men from church to go out and look for Suzanne. Detective Sasser wrote in his book that not long into searching for her, Arthur, Charles, and maybe some other men in the group had found her body in thick underbrush several feet off the running trail, and reported the discovery to police. It was apparent from drag marks on the ground that she'd likely been attacked on the trail and then pulled into the overgrowth. According to Detective Sasser's book, where her body was found was about a half mile away from her apartment. She was facedown in a patch of poison ivy with her arms behind her back and her shorts pulled down around her ankles. Her blouse had been pushed up to her neck,

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  and around her throat were a pair of men's black socks that had been tied together and fashioned into a garrote. Suzanne had been sexually assaulted, beaten over the head, slashed along the neck, and stabbed multiple times in her left breast.

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  Some of the source material I found stated her bra would have been used to strangle her, but according to Sasser's book, he makes it seem like it was the socks that were used as a ligature. I'm not sure which is accurate, but regardless, that wasn't the only means the suspect had used to kill Suzanne. Authorities also collected what news reports described as a blunt murder weapon not far from her body. But what exactly that item was, is unknown. Jean Winfrey told Two News Oklahoma and me that she was later informed the object was possibly a large tire iron tool, like something one would use to change a tire on a semi truck. Which isn't a detail I saw reported anywhere else, but since Jean's been so diligent at keeping up with Suzanne's case, I tend to put credibility in her claims.

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  Charles Sasser, a former detective on the case, didn't mention a tire iron in his book homicide, but he did reveal that the men's black socks found with Suzanne's body were dirty and appeared to be military style. He surmised that if they belonged to the killer, he probably wasn't a very clean person and might have been in his 30s or possibly older because Sasser didn't know of many young men who wore socks like that. The retired detective also explained that investigators had found a shoe impression on the ground right next to Suzanne's body. And it was believed to have come from a men's size 10 Tom McCann type shoe, or a similar brand that one would purchase at a common shoe store. On Friday, August 29th, two days into the investigation, Suzanne's funeral took place at a funeral home in Tulsa.

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  Arthur, the minister who'd been one of the people who'd found Suzanne, spoke to attendees about what the loss meant. He said in part, "Life has stalked us with tragedy, the silent terror struck without giving us time to brace ourselves for it. You have the right to know if faith will work when the going is rough. Who needs it if it doesn't work? Suzanne is no longer here with us. She is with Jesus, our friend. The Lord gave a friend this word. The butterfly has not been crushed, but only released from its cocoon. Suzanne has gone higher up and knows the secret which we all seek."

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  According to Jean Winfrey, Suzanne's mother and younger brother were believed to be the only next of kin who attended the funeral service. And not long after the ceremony ended, they returned to Texas. According to coverage by Tulsa World, after the funeral in Oklahoma, Suzanne's body was transported to Plainview, Texas, where she was laid to rest. In general, Jean didn't get the sense that Suzanne's relationship with her mother or family was awesome. During their conversations prior to the murder, Suzanne had mentioned that her mom owned a bar, and growing up, she'd allowed her and her siblings to sort of be there whenever they wanted. Jean said that she later learned from coworkers that right after Suzanne was killed, her mom had shown up to the planning commission office demanding that the city write her a

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  check for Suzanne's employee life insurance policy. And she'd made a big scene demanding she get paid. Finally, Jean said the city just wrote her mom a check for $50,000, and after that, she left. But it doesn't seem authorities looked at a financial or family-related motive in Suzanne's case. They were focused on a handful of men in Tulsa. In particular, a man from Suzanne's work and one from her church.

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  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

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  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

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  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

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  That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 17:10Speaker 07

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 17:16Speaker 03

  I'm Ava Kaufman. "The Journey" is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  As part of the investigation, authorities had seized Suzanne's daily journal looking for anything that might point them towards a potential suspect. They wanted to know if she'd gone on any bad dates or was worried about someone following her. But there wasn't a ton of dating history in her life. According to what Jean told me in our interview, Suzanne rarely dated because of her religious beliefs. She said that the discipleship group she was a part of had strict rules about dating, and it was an absolute no-go for people within that group to date one another. The dates Suzanne had gone on were with people from outside of church, and even those were few and far between. But there was one guy she'd seen who worked with her and Jean at City Hall.

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  His name was Dewey, and according to Jean and Suzanne's roommates, the couple's outing to the movies had been, according to Suzanne, pretty miserable. In fact, she described their date to some of her roommates and coworkers as "the worst", and said Dewey was just a "very boring guy". Another woman in their office, who'd also gone on a date with Dewey, described him as "kind of creepy". And when I asked Jean what she remembered about him, she said that Dewey just seemed like the type of guy who "really wanted a girlfriend", so much so that she suspected, when it came to women, he might have made the mistake of being "too nice" or "going overboard" in an uncomfortable way. Naturally, investigators looked into Dewey, and they ended up interviewing a local school

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  teacher who'd gone on a date with him about three or four months before Suzanne's murder. This woman said that one night she'd gotten a very disturbing phone call from him, in which he informed her that he'd been watching her undress through her home's windows, and he wanted her to perform sexually explicit acts on herself, which of course, she did not do, and immediately hung up the phone.

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  Another woman who dated him briefly described him as needy, self-loathing, and awkward. But the main reason she'd broken up with him was because she eventually became fearful of him. For example, she'd suspected him of coming to her home and ringing the doorbell and then just leaving. And she said that one night she'd come home and found a half-empty bottle of wine in her refrigerator that she hadn't purchased. However, it was the same brand and type of wine as the one she and Dewey had drank on their final date together. This discovery freaked her out so much that she'd immediately changed the lock on her door and was more cautious about where she left her spare key. Detectives also spoke with a counselor at what was then known as the Tulsa Psychiatric Foundation, where Dewey went to group sessions.

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  And that person told them that one night, right after Suzanne's murder, he'd broken down in tears and exclaimed in front of the whole group, quote, "I might be the cause of her dying. Suzanne Oakley was beaten, stabbed, and raped yesterday. I feel like I'm personally involved. I'm in agony right now. I went through this last year. I can identify with whoever killed Suzanne because I've also had crazy violet fantasies about women. I can even imagine how the killing was done. I woke up this morning wondering, could I have gone crazy and done it?" He later continued, "I understand how the killer might feel, but my head tells me I just couldn't have done a thing like that." End quote.

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  Obviously, after learning about this therapy session outburst, Detective Sasser brought Dewey in for questioning. And when he got him talking, he learned that where Dewey lived was only about one mile from Suzanne's apartment. According to Dewey, though, his routine on the morning of the crime included waking up at 7:00 a.m., eating breakfast, watching the news, and stopping for gas on his way to work before clocking in at 8:10 a.m. He said he hadn't learned Suzanne was even missing until closer to lunchtime. When Detective Sasser pressed him about prior statements of feeling guilty about what happened to Suzanne, Dewey clarified that, yes, he was an angry person, and had wondered if perhaps he could be capable of such a vicious crime.

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  But not against Suzanne, against another woman he dated. He admitted to daydreaming about being on the trail with Suzanne on the morning she was murdered, but said the reason he felt guilty for what happened to her was because he blamed himself for not being there to protect her. When Sasser and other investigators searched Dewey's apartment, they didn't find any evidence that directly connected him to the crime. He didn't wear size 10 shoes and he didn't own any pairs of black military-style socks like the ones discovered with Suzanne's body. But before cutting him loose, Sasser drove Dewey to the crime scene and continued interrogating him. But Dewey swore that nothing looked familiar, and he wasn't involved. And after that, Sasser believed him. He didn't necessarily think Dewey was the most reliable of people,

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  but the detective felt confident he wasn't their man. But Dewey was far from authorities' final stop with the men of interest in Suzanne's life. Investigators also interviewed Arthur, the discipleship group leader who'd been one of the men who'd found her body. According to what Charles Sasser wrote in his book, Arthur was immediately cooperative and revealed that when Suzanne had first moved to Tulsa, she'd lived with him and his wife for a few months before eventually going to live in his coed ministry's all-female house. When authorities pressed him about how close he and Suzanne were, Arthur admitted that the two of them had jogged a few times together while she'd been living with his family, but he emphasized that the last time they'd gone running was about a year prior to her murder. But Detective Sasser wrote in his book

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  that he and some of the other investigators had doubts about Arthur's story. So a few days after his first interview, which had taken place at his office, authorities asked Arthur to come down to the police station for a chat, which he agreed to. Detectives pressed him about what life had been like while Suzanne had lived with him and his family. He maintained that she was close with both him and his wife, and he saw her as a daughter figure. But in a bold move, Sasser suggested that perhaps things between him and Suzanne had been less platonic and more romantic. Arthur denied the allegation, but when pressed further, ended up admitting to kissing Suzanne at least one time when they were alone together. And the kiss was more than just a peck on the cheek.

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  That admission prompted investigators to consider whether Arthur and Suzanne had perhaps had some kind of extramarital affair. But Arthur swore they'd only kissed that one time, and it was, as he put it, "a moment of weakness on his part." But to be absolutely sure Arthur wasn't lying, authorities asked him to prove he was telling the truth. And they went about this very unconventionally.

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  If you remember, when Suzanne was found, she'd been dragged to a patch of poison ivy, which presumably meant that whoever put her there and sexually assaulted her would have gotten exposed to the same vegetation, likely in their groin area. So during Arthur's interrogation, Detective Sasser asked him to take off his pants and expose himself to determine if he had any irritation above his mid-thigh or on his genitals. And Arthur complied. However, he didn't have any poison ivy reaction in the places that Sasser was confident the killer would have had to have been exposed. And not long after that, detectives moved on from Arthur as a potential person of interest. They vetted additional men in her close circle, but no one emerged as a strong suspect.

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  For example, according to Suzanne's friend Jean Winfrey, there was another man who attended her church who was known for regularly running the same trails she did. That guy had even told people he'd been running on the morning of August 27th, but unfortunately had not bumped into Suzanne. He'd also talked about how he knew the spot where Suzanne usually turned around and would head back home from. Which to me is kind of specific information, and not something you'd voluntarily tell folks if you were involved. So the fact that this guy did freely express these kinds of details sort of suggests to me that he probably wasn't involved, but who knows? Anyway, within a few weeks of the crime, Detective Sasser had run out of leads and his supervisor informed him that new cases

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  needed his attention. But he didn't want to let the case go. Because, you see, Suzanne wasn't the only young woman or teenage girl who'd vanished and been found brutally murdered in Tulsa in 1975. There were two other victims who'd turned up dead just months before her slaying. And it was the proximity and circumstances of those crimes that forced law enforcement in the city to take pause. On February 5th, 1975, roughly seven months before Suzanne's murder, a 28-year-old woman living in Tulsa named Geraldine Martin had vanished after attending a night class at what was then known as Tulsa Junior College. According to Detective Charles Sasser's book, almost three weeks after she disappeared,

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  a group of construction workers found her nude body inside the closet of an abandoned housing project. Investigators quickly determined that she'd been sexually assaulted, stabbed, strangled, and mutilated. Piled neatly next to her body was some of the clothing she'd been wearing when she was last seen. About three months later, in April 1975, a 16-year-old girl from Tulsa named Mary Ann Rosenbaum, who seemed to most often go by Marie, vanished from a grocery store around the corner from her house. Her nude body was discovered a few hours after she disappeared, and just like Geraldine, she'd been sexually assaulted, strangled, and stabbed, and her clothing was piled next to her.

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  Now, there was no physical evidence or witness sightings that linked those victims' cases to Suzanne's, but there was one similarity that stuck out. All three of them had been killed on Wednesdays. However, that might have just been a coincidence. No one knew. Even though the circumstances of the three murders were similar, overall, the victims themselves were very different. Geraldine was described by Detective Sasser as having been divorced a couple of times, and Marie was what news coverage referred to as a teenage go-go dancer. And then there was Suzanne, a church-going city employee. Not much about the three victims' lives overlapped, and of course, there were differences in terms of circumstances at their crime scenes, too.

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  For example, Marie had been stabbed roughly 65 times and dumped in a rural area outside of the city. Geraldine had been mutilated and hidden in an abandoned housing project. And Suzanne had been beaten in the head and stabbed and left in a very public space. It was also later reported that Geraldine's purse and checkbook had been stolen when she was killed. Shortly after her abduction, it was found tossed along an expressway. Someone had cashed one of her checks and tried to use one of her credit cards. There were also witnesses who'd helped police develop a composite sketch in her case. But regardless of the differences in the crimes, authorities had to at least consider the possibility that all of the victims' killers could be one and the same.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Detectives spent months interviewing the usual suspects: peeping toms, parolees, felons who'd committed sex crimes, but one by one, those folks were eliminated. Detective Sasser wrote in his book that as more and more time passed, each victim's case file grew larger and larger. The hundreds of pages of paperwork included investigators' notes, pictures of possible suspects, and interview summaries. Initially like the other murders had, Suzanne's case garnered a lot of media attention. The fact that she'd been killed in a public place that so many people used on a regular basis was shocking. Within days of the crime, Tulsa's mayor proposed adding more lighting on the trail, increasing police patrols, creating a park ranger force, and clearing brush from the

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  path 10 to 15 feet in each direction. He told Tulsa World in part, quote, "There's no way we can provide 24-hour patrols in every park in the city. We're simply trying to minimize hazards and to alert any troublemaker that we are going to be paying much closer attention." End quote. It wasn't until mid-October 1975, nearly two months into Suzanne's murder investigation, that authorities got their next big lead. The Associated Press reported that authorities learned of a 25-year-old man who'd threatened a woman over the phone that he would essentially do to her what he'd done to Suzanne. Now, that tip obviously got the police's attention, but when they questioned the guy for several hours, they determined he likely wasn't involved.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Details are few about who this man was or why he'd allegedly made such a statement. But regardless, police moved on. In mid-February 1976, they arrested another guy who they suspected could be involved in Suzanne's death, as well as Geraldine Martin's murder. But just over 24 hours after taking that man into custody, he was released. After that, all of the cases stalled. The next time the victim's stories made headlines again was in early 1977, when yet another young woman in Tulsa was brutally murdered and discarded in an outdoor space.

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• 31:14Speaker 02

  One day last year, detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion-dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene: a dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived.

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp.

• 31:52Speaker 06

  That's the one time that we called the cops, because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.

• 31:57Speaker 07

  I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?

• 32:02Speaker 02

  I'm Eva Kaufman. "The Journey" is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  According to coverage by Tulsa World and the Amarillo Globe-Times, on Saturday, January 15, 1977, within two years of Suzanne Marie and Geraldine's murders, two hunters who were walking along Polcat Creek, a tributary of the Arkansas River outside of Tulsa, stumbled upon the nude body of a woman. The victim was later identified as 20-year-old Bernice Coolman, who was originally from Canyon, Texas, but had recently relocated to Tulsa. At the time of her murder, she was working for a travel agency in the city. And on the Monday after her body was found, her coworkers noticed she hadn't shown up for work. They reported her missing, and within a short amount of time, that's when everyone, including authorities, put things together.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  It didn't take long for her to be formally ID'd with dental records, and after her autopsy was complete, it was obvious she was a victim of a brutal homicide. She'd been sexually assaulted, strangled with a sock, and beaten. Law enforcement estimated that she'd only been in the creek between 6 and 12 hours before the hunters found her. She'd also put up one hell of a fight. The medical examiner noted that several of her fingernails were broken, which prompted investigators to assume that Bernice had tried to defend herself against her attacker. News articles I read about her case explained that after she was killed, her body had been thrown off an area bridge, which is presumably how she'd ended up in Polcat Creek.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  As horrible as that was, what's noteworthy to me is that, according to Google Maps, where her body was discovered in the city was just a few miles downriver from where Suzanne Oakley was killed. The last time Bernice's friends had seen her alive was at a party around 10:30 PM the Friday night before she was killed. Because she'd been discovered in a remote area that straddled two different counties, the Tulsa Police Department wasn't the lead law enforcement agency assigned to her case. The Creek County and Tulsa County Sheriff's Offices were the entities in charge of her investigation, but they were assisted by TPD. Obviously, all three of those agencies couldn't ignore the fact that some of the circumstances

• 34:24Speaker 02

  surrounding Bernice's death closely resembled aspects of TPD's other unsolved murders, most notably Suzanne's. But interestingly, Tulsa's police chief at the time told Tulsa World reporter David Brown that his department did not think all the victims were subjects of the same killer. He said that he didn't know of anyone in his agency who believed the cases were connected, or that the same man was responsible for all the crimes. In fact detectives were operating on the premise that four different killers were at large. What evidence his department had to support that assumption, though, is unclear. To make progress in Bernice's case, investigators questioned more than 20 people in her life and dug into two locations of interest.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  One was an industrial site on the west side of the city, not far from where her body was found. That's where authorities ended up recovering a coat they believed was hers. The second location they honed in on was an apartment complex on the east side of the city where her car had been found. According to coverage by the Associated Press and the Amarillo Globe-Times, the apartments where the vehicle was located was not where Bernice lived, and they were on the opposite side of Tulsa than where her body had been dumped, which I have to imagine was a detail that puzzled investigators. Near her car, though, was an envelope with the man's name and address written on it, so naturally detectives wanted to find out who the guy was and if he had any connection to her.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  But apparently he didn't, because when detectives visited the address, a guy who answered the door informed detectives that he wasn't the man whose name was on the envelope. He'd just been receiving mail for that guy, so it seems the mystery man was just a former tenant. Anyway, by mid-March 1977, two months into the investigation, authorities admitted that most of their leads had been exhausted, and the case was at a standstill. They learned from Bernice's neighbors that she may have argued with a man at her apartment on the night she was killed, but who that guy was, or any information beyond neighbors just overhearing an argument, was murky. Bernice's family took her death extremely hard. Her mother Lisa was a board member of the Amarillo, Texas Raid Crisis Center, and prior

• 36:35Speaker 02

  to the crime was personally responsible for getting that nonprofit up and running. She told the Canyon News, quote, "For me to be a board member of the Crisis Center and an initial member, then it was no insurance," end quote.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Lisa went on to explain to the newspaper that she and Bernice had previously talked about what sorts of resources would be available to her if she ever were to become a victim of sexual assault. And she said her daughter knew where to turn to if such a scenario occurred. But Bernice had always told her mom that even if she were to be sexually assaulted, she did not think she'd be killed because of it. In that same article, Bernice's father, Alvin, said it was devastating to know that his daughter had not survived the "jungle." He explained that he didn't want to have to live in a society where he couldn't trust people. Lisa later emphasized the gist of his point when she said, "It's terrible we have to be cautious. Ninety-nine percent of the people are loving and outgoing, and the 1% is going to do us

• 37:36Speaker 02

  in." In April of 1977, about a month after giving those interviews, the couple offered up $5,000 of their own money to try and entice someone with information to come forward. But the reward fund didn't help things, and the case continued to languish. Shortly after the one-year anniversary of Bernice's murder, her father publicly criticized the two investigating agencies in charge of her case for not doing enough to solve it. He claimed that both counties' approach to things had been to push off tasks to one another, instead of detectives trying to work together to follow up on leads. Alvin told The Canyon News that every time he tried to give investigators credible information to follow up on, they ignored it or didn't return his phone calls.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  By December 1979, Tulsa law enforcement had three more murders of a teenage girl and young women on their hands, and at that point, they had no choice but to create a task force to examine each killing to figure out if the cases were somehow connected. According to reporting by the Associated Press, this task force was composed of five Tulsa police detectives who combed through Geraldine Martin, Marie Rosenbaum, Suzanne Oakley, and Bernice Coolman's case files from 1975 and 1977, along with three other victims who'd been shot to death in the spring and summer of 1979. By the early 80s, investigators had developed a theory that they felt could explain at least some of the crimes.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  You see, by that time, infamous serial killer Henry Lee Lucas had been arrested and confessed to more than a dozen murders across the country. And it was Tulsa investigators' belief that he might be responsible for Bernice and one of the other murders the task force was looking into. They didn't appear, though, to think he was connected to Suzanne, Marie, Geraldine, or the other two task force victims. But as was the case with so many detectives back then who suspected Henry Lee Lucas could be responsible for unsolved murders in their jurisdictions, he ended up not being formally connected to Bernice's case, and today, her murder is still unsolved. In 2002, a DNA hit to a man named Clyde Carl Wilkerson, who'd been arrested in California

• 39:44Speaker 02

  for two murders, linked him to the slaying of Geraldine Martin. Clyde had worked as a long-distance truck driver and had been committing murders and sexual assaults since at least 1965. It wasn't until the early 2000s, when DNA testing became a commonly-used tool by law enforcement, that he was identified and connected to his past crimes. In 2002, when Tulsa P.D. discovered he was responsible for Geraldine's murder, they told the press that he was someone they'd never heard of before. In 2004, Clyde pleaded guilty to Geraldine's killing and was sentenced to life in prison. In the years after that, Jean Winfrey couldn't help but wonder if he was also responsible for Suzanne's slaying, especially because of the fact that Clyde had worked as a long-distance

• 40:29Speaker 02

  trucker. She told me that the similarities between the two crimes, the locations, the fact that she'd been told a larger-than-normal tire iron-type tool, like what could be used on a semi-truck, had been found near Suzanne, well, it was just too many coincidences to ignore. So, one day in 2018, she spoke with a Tulsa police officer, who happened to be on the board of a nonprofit she was also on, and they discussed the surviving evidence in Suzanne's case. That guy told her that after doing some digging, he learned that at some point, all of the evidence TPD had was turned over to presumably the FBI or state crime lab for additional analysis. Jean specifically asked her cop friend if Clyde Wilkerson's DNA had been compared

• 41:10Speaker 02

  to the evidence in Suzanne's case, and the man told her that it had, but it wasn't a match. So if that's true, Clyde is out as a suspect for Suzanne's murder. I have no idea if his DNA has been tested against Marie or Bernice's case evidence. The one agency that could clear some of this up, obviously, is the Tulsa Police Department. I've attempted several times to get answers from them, as well as ask for additional clarification about where Suzanne's case evidence is today, but to date, no one from TPD's Public Information Office has gotten back with me.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  For a few years after Suzanne's murder, Jean was depressed and paranoid because her name and where she worked had been publicized as part of the case's news coverage. She worried that the killer might come after her and told me she felt like she had to look over her shoulder every second of every day. But now that it's been more than 50 years, that's all gone. She just wants answers. In her heart of hearts, she believes that Suzanne's killer is likely someone totally random, but she's open to whatever the truth is. She's considered a scenario where Suzanne's killer might be a person from one of the planning districts that she served as a citizen liaison for. Jean told me that after the murder, she and her coworkers racked their brains trying to figure out if maybe someone from one of those neighborhoods

• 42:31Speaker 02

  had become angry with Suzanne or fixated on her. Tulsa World's coverage from 1975 stated that the city's Vision 2000 Plan was a controversial one because it was the first time the city was experimenting with direct citizen input. Suzanne was fully on board with hearing from residents, regardless of whether those interactions were good or bad. But there were times when staff, residents, and city leaders would clash over things. Jean said that the five districts Suzanne was responsible for were in areas of Tulsa known for having a lot of crime. But Suzanne had always said she wasn't afraid to go into those places because she believed God would protect her. Jean doesn't remember Suzanne ever complaining about being harassed or followed or anything like that.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  And I don't know for sure if this avenue of investigation was ever pursued by law enforcement back in the 70s, but I have to think they at least would have considered it since it was something Jean and others thought about. When I asked Jean straight up if she suspected any of the men from Suzanne's church or discipleship group could have committed the crime, she told me that she doesn't think so. She said that following Suzanne's death, she personally began attending Tulsa Christian Fellowship and became friends with the church officials and people who'd found Suzanne's body. And she just didn't see it. To her, she knew her friend loved and respected those men so much that the suggestion they somehow were involved just didn't seem likely. Tulsa's former police chief and another retired homicide detective named Mike Huff

• 44:01Speaker 02

  told voices of Oklahoma in 2021 that they believed the department had narrowed in on Suzanne's killer early on and had even interviewed him, but they never had enough to make an arrest. Huff claimed that the case had been thoroughly investigated and there was a unified suspicion among the homicide division that they knew exactly who the perpetrator was, but they just needed physical evidence to prove it. I reached out to Mike Huff for this episode, but after an initial brief conversation over the phone, I haven't heard back from him. Who he and the former chief of police suspected was the killer remains unclear. Today, Jean Winfrey holds no ill will towards the Tulsa Police Department for not solving Suzanne's case.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  She's confident that detectives did their best back in the day and are still working to find the killer. One of the reasons her son reached out to me and why she agreed to an interview was because she wants others to remember her friend for who she was and that she's more than just a homicide victim. Jean is in her 70s and doesn't want Suzanne or any of the other victims like Bernice or Marie to be forgotten. In the wake of Suzanne's murder, the Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission established a scholarship fund in Suzanne's honor. Jean told me that over the years, that fund has continued to provide scholarships to social science majors at Oral Roberts University. To date, they've donated more than $30,000 to young men and women.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  If you were to walk or bike on Tulsa's River Park Trail today, you'd see that it's neatly trimmed, maintained, and beautiful. And it's that way in large part because of what happened to Suzanne. You see, about a month after her murder, the city approved plans to add more light poles to the trail, and hundreds of volunteers cleared out the overgrowth in trees that obscured the path from plain view. By the end of 1975, the city had created a park ranger program that aimed to improve safety along all 30 of its then-public parks. In the years after that, officials put even more effort into keeping the area clear of debris and making it attractive to visitors and residents alike. Something Jean mentioned during our interview that really touched me was just

• 46:09Speaker 02

  how much zest for life and nature that Suzanne had while she was alive. Jean said that she absolutely loved caring for plants, to the point where she'd even bring a bunch of indoor plants to their office suite. When Jean asked her friend why she loved them so much, Suzanne replied, quote, “Because they’re living things. I love life.” Suzanne also had a passion for people. Shortly before her death, she told Jean that she planned to quit her job the following spring and move to Israel for full-time missionary work. She’d visited the country a few weeks before her murder and really enjoyed helping people there. Unfortunately, those future plans were ripped away from her, and the person responsible has never been identified.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Which is why I’m asking you, if you know anything about the August 27, 1975 murder of Suzanne Oakley, please contact the Tulsa Police Department at tulsa police dot org slash submit a crime tip, or call Tulsa Crime Stoppers at 918-596-2677. Bernice Coleman and Marie Rosenbaum’s murders are also unsolved. Profiles about their cases can be found on the department’s website. If you or anyone you know has information to provide to the police about their murders,

• 47:28Speaker 02

  please get in touch with the Tulsa Cold Case Unit at 918-596-9222. Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, at Park Predators.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  I think Chuck would approve.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  In the dark, even the most familiar trail can feel like it leads somewhere else. Every rustle becomes a warning, every shadow a doorway. In Full Body Chills, those doorways open into worlds pulled straight from your nightmares. This spooky season classic returns with chilling new tales, immersive sound, and no promise that you'll find your way back. So step off the familiar path if you dare. Listen to new episodes of Full Body Chills every week wherever you get your podcasts.