August 21, 2025 • 49 mins
Beth Denton has always wondered what really happened to her cousin Patricia, who was murdered in 1970 in her home in Oklahoma City. Decades later, she decided to find out. This week, we speak with Beth as she unravels this family tragedy and tells the story of Patricia's life and untimely death.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Can you tell us what happened that night in May
of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Not much that people knew about happened that night, although
a neighbor I think did report hearing a scream.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Patia Eton, I'm Hannah Smith.
This week we speak with Beth Denton, who in two
thousand and nine started to look into the circumstances surrounding
a murder of someone in her family.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
We talk with Beth about her investigation of the crime
that took place in nineteen seventy. There are photos from
Beth of her family members that we posted on our
Instagram account at The Knife Podcast. If you want to
see pictures of the people we're talking about in story,
you can see them there.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
My name is Beth Dunn. My pronouns are she, slash,
they awesome.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really looking
forward to getting into this interview and hearing your story.
It is different from a lot of the pitches that
we've received generally for the podcast because it has to
do with your whole family. But before we get into that.
Can you give us just a little bit of information
(01:32):
about who you are and sort of where you grew up.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I'm a special education teacher. I also have a background
in live action role playing that included a lot of writing,
which is sort of the context of this project. Sort
of happened because I had that writing background. I grew
up in the South suburbs of Chicago in Homewood. My
mom actually grew up like one town over. My dad
is actually from He was born in Little Rock. He
grew up in el Reno, Oklahoma, and came to the
(01:58):
South Suburbs as a teenage. Both my parents were teachers.
They met sharing a classroom. It's kind of the ultimate
teacher meet cute. Yeah, you know, even now, my family's
really close knit. We all moved to Colorado at about
the same time. My parents live in a house about
twenty minutes away from me, and my sister actually lives
in the house right behind there, so they have a gate.
So we're still a really tight family.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Okay, I have to look up elren now, Okay, the
ultimate teacher meet cute. That's aspirational.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, he was hired first and the first time he
met her, he said, that is the tallest girl I
have ever seen.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Well, he hasn't met us. We're both really tall.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
We are.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, I mean at the time she was six feet tall.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So oh, yeah, that is tall. Yeah, that's how tall
my mom is too. Yeah, she used to claim to
be six feet, but I think technically she was like
five eleven and three quarters or something.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I'd claim six feet too.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
She was legit six feet and people would be like,
how tall are you and she would tell them five twelve.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
You got to lean into that tall humor.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
You really do? You really do? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Can you take us to Thanksgiving of twenty ten?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It might actually almost been two thousand and nine. It
was the year before I student taught, and I was
doing a second round of college to get my teaching degree.
So I had come home from Thanksgiving. I was probably
in the middle of one of my teaching clinicals. So yeah,
we were just hanging out and I had a lot
of trouble sleeping and my dad had a lot of
trouble sleeping.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
We both have depression.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
And we were watching TV and we were watching some
kind of documentary and I turned to him and I said,
what happened to the guy who killed cousin Patricia? And
he looked at me and he said, I don't actually know.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
After the Thanksgiving leftovers were put away and everyone else
went to bed, Beth and her dad stayed up and
turned on the TV. They started watching a true crime documentary.
And this is the moment when that question popped into
Beth's head, whatever happened to that guy who killed cousin Patricia?
Asking this question out loud made Beth real she had
(04:01):
a lot of questions about Patricia. She knew Patricia was
killed in nineteen seventy years before Beth was born, but
the who and why and what actually happened those were
question marks filed away in the back of Beth's mind
since childhood. But that moment watching TV with her dad
(04:21):
on a Thanksgiving night would launch Beth into her own
investigation of the life and untimely death of her cousin Patricia.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I remember being a little kid and my grandma telling
me a story about my cousin Patricia not wearing a seatboat.
She was trying to get me to wear my seatbolt.
This must have been it was before I was ten
years old, because it was while they were still living
in Illinois because they retired back to Arkansas. And I
remember being like, I have a cousin, Patricia, because Patricia
was also my mom is also my mom's name, and
(04:51):
she was like, well, not anymore. My grandma sort of
had this distinct cross between a British Columbian accident and
a southern Arkansas accent, and she said, well she was.
And that was sort of the end of that.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
When you had this conversation with your dad at Thanksgiving
and this question popped up about what happened to the
man who killed my cousin. What did that conversation prompt
you to do?
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So we were sitting on the couch and he said
I don't know, and I to me, I was like, whoile.
We live in the information age, like it should be
possible to find out. And sort of as we tick
over into that semester, I started taking a creative writing
nonfiction class just as something to fill my schedule, and
you know, they wanted you to present a nonfiction project,
(05:37):
and I said, maybe this would make an interesting nonfiction project.
And I thought at that moment in time I would
be able to do like more research and maybe find
some newspaper articles or request court documents or something, and
that turned out.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
To be really hard.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
What I discovered at that point was that newspapers seemed
to be starting as far back in their records and
digitizing forwards, so they just didn't have a lot of
digitized material from the seventies at that point. And it
made sense because you'd want to digitize like older things first,
but it didn't help with my project.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah. Yeah, as you set out to find more information,
only very limited articles or maybe one article available. Was
it discouraging or were you like, this makes me really
feel like I need to dig deeper here.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
It made me want to dig deeper. I have ADHD,
so I'm very like I get really into my projects.
And I sort of had some visions of maybe going
into Oklahoma and actually talking to him. But what I
ended up doing was I reached out to the Oklahoma Historical Society,
and the person who wrote me back, she said, I
have to tell you, like, this was a bit of
a shock to hear from you asking about this because
(06:44):
I lived across the street. My kids played with her kids,
Patricia's kids, Melanie and Joey.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, And she sent me a couple photos of them
sitting on the front step.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
What were the chances that this person at the Oklahoma
Historic Society happened to know best family members who she'd
been researching, Patricia and Patricia's two children, Melanie and Joey.
The coincidence felt like a good sign, So in early
twenty ten, Beth dove headfirst into her research, determined to
(07:17):
answer the question what really happened to Patricia Henderson? And
today we are telling that story. We're telling it with
the help of best research, including a paper she wrote
in college, along with a letter from her grandmother from
nineteen seventy, conversations Beth has had with her dad, and
articles from the Dally, Oklahoma all published in the spring
(07:39):
and summer of nineteen seventy. But first, in order to
really understand this story, we have to talk about the
people who were closest with Patricia, like her mother, Maureen.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
So Maureen was my grandfather's sister. I met her when
I was about ten years old. Before that, I had
only maybe talked to her on the phone, like briefly,
once my grandparents had moved to Arkansas to live across
the street from her. She was a lot like a
female version of my grandpa, and so it's really hard
for me to sort of describe her. She was tough,
and she was a chainsmoker, and she had sort of
(08:15):
gray white, old lady curly hair, and I absolutely adored
her from the first time I met her. We'd go
to visit my grandparents and we'd go and spend about
a week, usually on a school break, and I tried
to spend almost as much time with Marine as I
did with my grandparents. She had a big organ in
her house. She could play the organ, and she let
me play the organ and didn't care that I had
(08:36):
no idea what I was doing. And when she'd get
tired of that, she'd come and she'd play something and
teach me to sing. And all through my adolescence, music
was really important. She was sort of that first music
teacher for me. And we'd go places, and we'd go
on trips to go see something and do some tourist thing,
and you'd have to go quite a ways because there
just wasn't much going on in the Ozarks at that point,
and I would always want to ride with them, her
(08:57):
and her husband Ray.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That's great, and I love the fact that she could
play the organ, like that's such a cool sounding instrument. Yeah,
And I can just imagine her like chain smoking and
playing the organ and it's just like so badass.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I don't know if she smoked near it. Probably not
because they have gas in them, but oh.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Okay, probably not. Then I didn't realize that.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, someone once explained it to me that that's how
an organ works. It's got pressurized gas.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
You may have just saved Hannah's life.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I mean, I don't imagine that i'd Lea's smoking near
an organ anytime soon, but now I know that I should.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Not, at least now, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, yeah in the movie version, though cinematically she'd be
smoking playing the organ.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Beth refers to Marine as aunt Marine, although technically she
was her great aunt, her grandfather's sister. Marine passed away
in the late nineteen nineties, but Beth has so many
memories with her gardening, listening to Marine sing and play
the organ, sneaking out for ice cream treats in the
middle of the day, and also a few memories of
(10:02):
Marine mentioning that she'd once had a daughter, Patricia. Maureen
even gave Beth one of Patricia's belongings as a gift
a silk scarf. Even as a kid. It was pretty
clear to Beth that it was difficult for Marine to
talk about her daughter who had died. Beth describes Marine's
relationship with her daughter Patricia as deeply loving but also complicated,
(10:27):
like so many mother daughter relationships.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Are one of the things that I distinctly remember learning
about Patricia, and I will try to find the video.
It's actually eight milimeter film footage that my dad digitized
of her that Easter before everything happened. Is that she
was kind of a rebel. If you look at the photos,
everybody else is sort of dressed nicely and a little
conservatively but appropriately for springing in Oklahoma City, and she's
(10:50):
in the video and she's wearing all black, which you know,
it was nineteen seventy that wasn't quite as common. She
was the only child of my aunt, and my aunt
had mostly raised her by herself, so I guess, Maureene,
you know, she's a single parent trying to raise a kid,
and I think it was rough. I think the way
to describe sort of the Denton branch of my family
is just really stubborn. We're all kind of stubborn and
(11:13):
a little bit ornery, and especially that generation my grandpa
and his sister and brother. Yeah, I can't imagine that
it was an easy childhood for her. She tried to
run away once and they found her within the bus
station with a ticket to her stepsisters in Texas. And
there was a point where Ann Marine and my great
grandmother Amelia actually talked about her maybe moving in with
(11:34):
my dad and his family, but nothing ever came from it.
So Marine bought this big old mansion sort of kind
of dilapidated, needed some work in Oklahoma City, and you know,
they worked on it a little bit at a time,
just so Patricia would have a place to grow up,
because she complained about not having a real home. So
her goal was that the servants' quarters behind would be
a rental so that she could rent them out to
(11:55):
people and that would help them pay for the expense
of the house.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Childhood photo of Patricia shows a girl with wavy brown hair,
dark round eyes, and a sweet smile. She was raised
in the nineteen fifties and sixties by her single mother, Maureen,
a woman as strong willed as Patricia would later become
as she grew older. Patricia carved her own path. She
was independent and headstrong, which at times led to friction
(12:23):
with her mother. Wanting to provide stability, Marine bought them
a house in Oklahoma, a place that would become the
backdrop for much of Patricia's life. In the grainy Super
eight footage, the house stands quietly behind this scene of
women in pastel dresses milling about the yard, and then
there's Patricia. She appears in stark contrast, dressed in all black,
(12:47):
kneeling beside her children, Melanie and Joey. It is the
same house where Patricia once played as a child, where
she came of age as a teenager, and it's the
same house where, just months after this Easter of nineteen
ten seventy, she would take her final breath. It's a
house layered with memories of Patricia's life.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
My dad described it as a big, two story Georgian
that had seen better days. It had like a servant
spell system sort of the remains of it, and in
ground sprinklers that he and my dad came and got
worked for them. When she was young, Pittrica had a
lot of hobbies. She would sort of pick up on
one and do it.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
For a while.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
She loved to read, and she was the first person
who introduced my father to the Lord of the Rings,
and like, it's kind of a big thing in our family.
He read it to my mom when she was pregnant
with me. He read it to me when I was five,
He read it to my sister again when I was five.
All of their cats have Lord of the Rings names,
and she was sort of the person who started that.
So she graduated from high school in nineteen sixty two,
(13:42):
and she was supposed to go to business college and
Marine paid for it all. And then Patricia went off
and got married to Jean Henderson. Was the early sixties,
and maybe the cultural message that you didn't have to
do that if you didn't want to haven't come through yet,
even for me as a sort of a child of
the eighties, like, I don't know that I would have
decided to get married and not to have kids if
I hadn't had like another family member who was a
(14:03):
role model for that. So I could sort of see
where she was like, Nope, I'm ready, I'm gonna get
married and we're going to have kids.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Yeah, I think in that time, right, it was like
even sometimes the goals of some women who went to
college was to find a husband. You know, not to
say that people weren't ambitious, but I do think you're
right that it was a very different cultural sort of outlook.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
You know, Marine had this lived experience of having to
be on her own and wanted to make sure that
she was ready for that as a possibility. But Patricia
wasn't ready to do that. So they had two kids, Melanie,
who was the older of the two, and then kind
of as a try to save the marriage move, everybody thinks,
then she had Joey, which she was really unhappy, and
they ended up getting divorced and Patricia moved back in
(14:46):
with Marine.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
This was the mid nineteen sixties. Patricia was in her
early twenties, now divorce with two young children and living
back with her mother, Maureen. From speaking with Beth, it
sounds like Patricia was still trying to find herself, unsure
of what she wanted out of life, and she seemed
to struggle with depression, although Beth doesn't think she ever
(15:15):
got a diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
She took classes at University Hospital to be at orderly,
but like she hung out kind of with you know,
motorcycle riders, and again was the mid sixties, so it's
still a little early for that, And she fought with
her mom about the kids a lot. Maureene felt like
Patricia did not do a great job of taking care
of those kids, that she didn't pay enough attention to them,
didn't make sure that they were well taken care of,
(15:39):
and the meanwhile, Marine was super devoted to them. Melanie
was really shy as a special education teacher. I've seen this.
She probably had selective mutism. She just almost refused to
talk to anybody. So Marine paid for her to go
to the Montessori school. That was sort of where Melanie
really started to flourish.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, you know, you mentioned that Patricia was unhappy. Who
did she confide in about that unhappiness? Did she talk
to anyone about it?
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I think it was just obvious to everybody I see.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
It wasn't something people were talking about with her. It
was more of just an observation.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Sometimes I wish i'd started this project before my grandma
had passed away, because I think she would have had
more to say about it. But that was certainly how
my dad recalled it, that she was unhappy.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
What was the living situation, living set up like in
the house.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
They were all back in the big house together for
a while, and then at some point, and it's a
little hard to tell, there's some discrepancy between my dad's
version of the story and my grandma's in her letter,
at some point she decided just to make there to
be some kind of break so that she and Maureen
would not be at their throats, that the border could
move into the house, and that she would go and
(16:54):
live in the servants quarters, And she tore out a
wall to make it, you know, doable. So at that
point in the seventies when everything happened, they were living
in the servants quarters all back.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, so, which is sort of like a separate back house.
Is that how you understand it?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, Okay, once upon a time I had the address
and looked it up on Google Maps. They're still there.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Yeah. It was tidy, it was pretty small.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Patricia's mother, Marine lived in the main house, along with
a man named Ray who was renting a room from her,
And then a little farther back on the property there
was a separate building, a small apartment. That's where Patricia
lived with her two children, Melanie and Joey Beth's father
remembers Patricia well. They were cousins and good friends for
(17:40):
a time. He recalls a trip he took in the
spring of nineteen seventy. He and his parents drove from
Chicago to Oklahoma City. It was the last time that
he saw Patricia alive.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
It was Easter break.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
So yeah, they went that Easter and they spent time
with the kids, and that's when the eight millimeter film
footage was taken. And my dad is the sort of
person I don't love the whole love languagest thing because
that guy's not even a psychologist. But my dad's absolutely
an active service sort of person. So whenever he went
out there, he took care of something. And so this
particular trip, he was cleaning up in the yard and
(18:17):
I think sort of there was a key memory there
my dad has. He noticed that the windows, which were
not very high off the ground, he said maybe three feet,
were unlocked, and he talked to Patricia about and he said, Patricia,
you ought to lock that window, and she was like, well,
I can't because Melanie is little and forgets her key.
Because they walked home from school and so Melanie would
climb into the window. I think she would get Joey too,
(18:38):
and they would get into the house that way.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Such a different time, right right, because Patricia was at
work or busy. So then her children, Melanie and Joey.
Melanie was six or so and Joey was I don't
know how old Joey was.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Yeah, four or five at that point, I think.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And they were going to school down close.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
By, yeahighborhood, I think, and.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
They would just like walk home. Okay, that probably really
wasn't that uncommon at that time.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
I think the neighbors knew who they were. Obviously, the
people across the street did that I heard from later. Yeah,
so I think they people looked out for them, you know.
Just to kind of give you an idea of where
Patricia was in her life at that point. She took
my dad when they were down there to run an errand,
and she blew a stoplight while they were on the errand,
and then it turned out that she didn't even have
(19:28):
a driver's license, and my dad was like, what can
you even do with someone who makes decisions like that.
I think at that point my dad had started to
drift away from her a little because he was sort
of getting his life together and she, you know, just
seemed to be making sort of destructive choices. Oh, and
I guess the other thing that you sort of have
to know is she did have a second husband. His
name was Howard Riggs. It was a scam. He scammed her,
(19:50):
he like married her and took a whole bunch of
stuff from her and Maureen and ran away.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And by the time this happened in the summer of
nineteen seventy, like, how much time had passed between this
and when Howard Riggs ran away from them?
Speaker 4 (20:03):
I don't know. I would guess a year or two,
but not many.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Okay, So your dad during this visit at Easter, there's
like these two memories that you point out in your
papers that he mentions, Oh, you should really get this window,
you should really lock it, you know, that would be safer,
and she decides not to. And then he also has
this memory of Patricia running a red light and then mentioning, well,
(20:27):
I don't even have my driver's license. Yeah, and so
this was sort of his last visit. There was there
anything else that you recall him saying about that visit.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
My grandma or letter mentions that he went to the
store and bought the kid's candy Land and he played
it with them for hours. My dad is always super
good with little kids. Just every little kid who's even
mildly related to him just has always adored him. And
it's because he will, like he'll buy a game, and
he'll pay their attention to them, and he's not bothered
by doing the same thing over and over again with them.
(20:59):
And so I think that for him, that's kind of
a good part of that memory is getting to spend
that final time with them.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Can you tell us what happened that night in May
of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Not much that people knew about happened that night, although
a neighbor I think did report hearing a scream, but
it was kind of hard to say because Patricia and
Maureene argued so much and yelled at each other so
much that you know, that wasn't all that unusual. The
next morning, and I think this is what Maureen told
(21:33):
my father. Joey came into the house, into the big house,
and he, you know, said, Mom and Sissy are sleeping
on the floor and I can't get them to wake up.
And I don't know if Ray went with her, but
Maureen went with Joey and found their bodies. I can't
even imagine. Patricia really tried to fight her attacker off
(21:57):
with everything that she had in the case, and Melanie,
whose bed was right under that window, had been stabbed.
You know, my dad comments even now, he's like, it's
just a remarkable amount of misogyny. He just ignored Joey,
and who stabs a little girl that many times? Yeah,
So there were clearly signs of a fight in the kitchen,
(22:20):
and at that point, I mean, Marine was distraught and
sort of the narrator who next speaks to someone in
my family is Ray, who was at that point her border.
They had met him very briefly, you know, when they
had been there for the visit. But he was the
one to call my grandparents in in par forest.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
My dad answered the call and didn't think anything about
it and passed it off to my grandfather, and my grandfather,
you know, wandered back out and said, I don't know
that I've ever spoken to this person in my life,
but he's just said that, you know, Patricia and Melanie
are dead, and Marine is distraught, and we need to
get down there.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
The bodies of Patricia and her daughter Melanie were discovered
on May third, nineteen seventy. The very next day, the
Daily Oklahoma's front page read quote, young mother child die
of stab wounds in city apartment. The paper reported that
Patricia was just twenty six years old and her daughter,
Melanie was only seven. Both had been stabbed by an
(23:18):
unknown assailant who entered their apartment between the hours of
two am and four AM on Sunday, May third. Patricia's
five year old son, Joseph, was unharmed. Police suspected whoever
killed Patricia and Melanie had entered through a window, probably
the window right above Melanie's bed. Patricia's body was found
(23:39):
in her bedroom. Police also discovered a kitchen knife, which
they believed to be the murder weapon. Nothing was missing
from the apartment, so police ruled out robbery as a motive.
The article also mentions that they interviewed one of Patricia's
ex husbands, but they don't name him in the article.
Beth thinks that it was probably Patricia's first husband, the
(24:02):
father of her children.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
And then, you know, one of the documents that you
have from your family is this letter that your grandmother
wrote which is dated me twelfth, nineteen seventy. And she's
writing to someone else in your family, is that right?
Speaker 4 (24:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
My grandma was one of eight children, so she's writing
to her sister Lorraine and her husband. Because she had
so many siblings to write too, she would write parts
of the letter on carbon paper. But I think this
one might be an original document.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
And she's chronicling in this letter what happened and that
they were on their way to Oklahoma. Yeah, it sounds
like they basically got the information over this phone call
and then we're like, okay, let's pack up the car
and drive.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Yeah, there was.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
It was the seventies, and so there was some stuff
that had to be done to the car before you
had to take a road trip. And so my dad
sat there. My dad and my grandpa went together to
wherever the dealership or the repair shop to get new
tires put on the car, and my dad finished up.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
It was spraying, and he had.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
To do progress reports, and in those days, I'm not
even sure he had a calculator, so I'm pretty sure
he had to hand do all the grades to put
on the progress reports and write, you know, a couple
days of subplans.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
The letter from Beth's grandmother starts by describing the shock
and sadness of learning that Patricia and Melanie were dead.
It describes the state of chaos at Marine's household that day,
a phone ringing off the hook, police officers on the property.
It goes on to say, in part, quote, a neighbor
in the night heard someone scream no, no, don't do it,
(25:48):
and the police figure that was Patricia. The neighbor had
looked out and noticed the door to Patricia's side of
the apartment was open and didn't see anything, so went
back to bed. The door was seen open at six
am with a lamp burning, but at eight am it
was closed. The letter goes on to say that Patricia
was small in stature, but quote put up a terrific struggle,
(26:12):
so they figure whoever it was wasn't too big, have
a man size seven and a half shoe print and
one fingerprint. We really feel the murderer got in through
the door and was someone Patricia knew, although Marine flatly
refused to believe this at first. The letter notes about
Patricia's daughter, Melanie, who was only seven years old, quote,
(26:35):
she had twelve stab wounds, in her body, nine of
them from the back. In fact, we also feel she
may have recognized someone and that person knew it best.
Grandmother is writing this letter from Oklahoma City after she
and her family have arrived to support Marine through the
unthinkable loss of her daughter and granddaughter. The whole letter
(26:57):
is a snapshot of grief, confusion, and of a family
rallying together to support one another and heartache, while simultaneously
attempting to piece together how something so terrible could have happened.
In the immediate aftermath of all of this, is there
a conversation happening about why her why her daughter? And
(27:21):
who could be angry with them or fixated on them?
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah, no, one was sure, like it was kind of
a mystery. The police briefly interviewed Jean, her first husband,
and I think he had an alibi. And also I
think it was probably pretty clear from the scene that
somebody was going to have defensive wounds. So no, I
think they just spent a lot of time in just
sort of terrible shock. My dad said that until they
(27:49):
got to about Tulsa and you could start hearing it
reported on the news stations on the radio, it didn't
seem real.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah, I think that's something that really stands out in
this story. You know, the time period, nineteen seventy, It's
like this terrible tragedy happens, and then you think, like
a tragedy is horrible at any time. If it happens now,
you can just quickly get on a plane. You have
your phone and access to the internet where you can
(28:16):
sort of quickly find out information and articles and like
what's the latest. And it was just not that way.
It's like everything is moving in slow motion in a way,
like they have to take this long road trip to Oklahoma,
and that's a really powerful moment when they get close enough,
when they get to Tulsa, which is like an hour
and a half from Oklahoma City, they start to hear
it on the news. You talked a little bit about
(28:39):
the police investigation and them questioning both of Patricia's ex husbands.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, it's only in the past year or so that
I've actually gone to the Oklahoma Historical Society's website and
looked at the articles.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
The Daily Oklahoma published an article on May sixth, nineteen seventy,
three days after the murders. It stated that the prime
sus was Patricia's estranged second husband, Howard Laverne Riggs. He'd
married Patricia only to steal money and other belongings from
both Patricia and Marine, and then he'd disappeared. A closer
(29:15):
look at Riggs revealed he also had a charge against
him from a robbery back in Fort Worth, Texas, but
he'd been quote committed for mental treatment before the case
went to trial. This all made detectives very suspicious of Riggs,
but Howard Riggs, who sometimes went by the name Howell Briggs,
(29:36):
was nowhere to be found. On May ninth, there was
another article, this time with a picture of Howard Riggs.
The police wanted help finding him. An Oklahoma City homicide
detective had gone to Texas looking for Riggs, to no avail.
They charged him anyway, not with murder, but with grand
larceny for the items he'd taken from Marine's home. The
(29:58):
police hoped this charge which would speed up his apprehension.
The same article says police interviewed over forty witnesses as
part of their investigation, and while they still didn't have
a motive, they speculated that this could have been an
act of violence committed out of anger or revenge. Or
could have just been a quote very mentally disturbed person.
(30:20):
The Daily Oklahoma published another article twenty eight days after
the murder May thirty first, nineteen seventy. It states that
while Howard Riggs remains a suspect, they've still not been
able to locate him and are closely scrutinizing at least
six other people. And then, finally, on June ninth, nineteen seventy,
(30:42):
a suspect was arrested, but it wasn't Howard Riggs. It
was a man named Ronald Litteral, a thirty two year
old man with no connection to the family other than
he lived just two blocks from Patricia's home. He was
apprehended in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah, so, I mean you can sort of see hints
of it, like that they've got a suspect. When you
read the news articles, you can sort of see them
talking about, Oh, there's this person who's had mental illness
in the neighborhood that we're questioning. I think the papers
reported for a while that, like the trail was going cold,
and then someone noticed like, oh, this guy's in the neighborhood,
(31:22):
lives in the neighborhood. No one's heard from him in
a while. Maybe we want to talk to him.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
The Daily Oklahoma reported that Detective Jim Blair happened to
connect Ronald Litterell to this case based on a routine
missing person's report. Literal had been reported missing about the
same time as the murders. That and the fact that
he lived two blocks away from Patricia peaked detective Blair's interest,
and he wondered if there was a potential connection. Literal said,
(31:51):
Dan was then found abandoned in the area and it
appeared to have bloodstains inside of it. Detectives took specimens
from his car and said them to the FBI for analysis.
It was also noted that Literal was previously a patient
at Central State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, a mental health hospital.
(32:11):
On June seventeenth, it was reported that Ronald Literal had
confessed to murdering both Patricia and Melanie Henderson.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Do you know if Marine or Patricia had had any
contact with Ronald prior to him murdering Patricia and Melanie?
Were they friendly or did they know who he was?
Speaker 2 (32:31):
I don't think they did. It's certainly not part of
the narrative that came to me. My guess is that
the most he was someone you saw around town.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
And so what was the best explanation that you heard
for why he did what he did.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
He later on wrote to Mariene on the advice of
his psychiatrist, and said that God had told him to
kill them. I don't think that's true. I think I
think he wanted an excuse.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
What doesn't that makes you think that?
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I mean, personally, I find it super offensive the idea
that God would tell anybody. Yeah, that may be my
own issues with religion and faith in general.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
But there wasn't something that you learned about the case
that you were like, no way, was this a hallucination
he was having? This was something else?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Well, I mean they found him confident to stand trial
at the standards of the day.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Was there anything that came out that indicated if he
had been watching Patricia for a while. Was this this
sort of spur of the moment thing or was it
a planned thing? Was he stalking her? Did anything like
that come out?
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Nothing like that came out, Although it seems like there's
a certain amount of reasonable assumption and that you would
almost have to know that the windows weren't locked, although
it was midspring and Oklaho, it was probably a hot
night and windows might have been open anyway. Yeah, just
breaking into someone's house and killing them like that, it
doesn't seem like something you just do randomly. He wasn't
there to rob them, you know.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, And you know you mentioned earlier when you said
he left Joey alone. It's horrible that he entered their
house at all. It's horrible for Joey to wake up
and realize that his mother and sister have been murdered
while he was asleep. Maybe some of the questioning that
I'm asking now, it's like, there's no way to know
you were not inside his head. We don't know for sure,
but yeah, was your dad's assumption that Ron literal knew
(34:35):
that there were two kids, you know, Melanie and Joey,
and that he went in and just targeted Patricia and
Melanie and left Joey alone.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
I don't know he didn't. Actually, I don't think I
ever asked him that specifically. It's likely Joey vaguely remembered
waking up in the night and seeing a man there
arguing with his mother, and then he fell back asleep
because he was so small, so we don't think he
was unaware of there being another child in the house.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
He just ignored it.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Wow. I mean, it's just such an awful thing to
have happened. And what happened next, like what happened with Maureen.
You know, how did she sort of move forward after this,
having her only daughter and one of her grandchildren murdered.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I mean, I think she did the best she could.
It was really hard for her. You know, Joey was
around after that. He went to live with his dad,
but it was close enough by that Joey came over
and visited pretty frequently until he was sixteen when he
ran away and joined the Merchant Marines. Or at least
that's again the family story about it. But so she
did still have Joey. She ended up marrying Ray. That's
(35:44):
my uncle Ray, who was the border at the time.
I guess sort of there was some trauma bonding. I
think that happened there for him, because you know, he
was living in the house. He was part of their lives,
and I don't know how he felt about Patricia, but
he certainly cared about Melanie and Joey. It was really
hard for her and she went down on every path
she could to try and make some meaning out of it.
She did sort of crystal power and there were some
(36:06):
seancey things, and you know she missed them desperately.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
This all happened before you were born.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Yeah, about eight years before I was born.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
You're learning about all of this much later. And then
in two thousand and nine ish, at Thanksgiving with your dad,
you know, you had this question about whatever happened to
the man who killed Patricia and Melanie, And from looking
it up, it looks like Ron Litterrell was convicted September
of nineteen seventy. He was convicted of the murders and
(36:38):
received two life sentences. What did you find out when
you looked back into it, you know, around twenty nine,
twenty ten, did you find out any information about his
status or what had gone on with him since he'd
been convicted.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, Oklahoma has a really detailed offender look up. So
I looked him up and I was it was really
shocking because there's fixture was and he just looked like
somebody's grandpa. I wasn't quite quite being prepared, you know,
just looking up for the information to get the photo too.
So he was denied every attempt at parole he ever,
(37:13):
you know, he ever made. I got one last notification
from the offender registry in twenty twenty two, and it
was a little cryptic, and I went to school and
I asked the school safety officer and he was like, yeah,
that means he died in prison. So I mean, that's
that's ultimately what happened to him. I know that he
did get some kind of therapy because the therapist had
him write letters to Marine. I asked my therapist about that,
(37:34):
and he was like, well, that might have been good
therapy for him, but like, nobody should have ever given
those letters to Marine.
Speaker 4 (37:39):
Like that was a no.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Seriously, that's pretty shocking.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Actually, Yeah, Like it might have been therapeutic for him
to write it, but it should have never been delivered.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah. How has sort of looking deeper into this tragedy
that happened in your family, how has that affected you
and how is that affected sort of relationship with your
dad or Yeah, what has been sort of the result.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Of that for you?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I mean it's certainly made my dad's overprotectiveness of his
daughters really clear and absolutely understandable, almost in the sense
that it doesn't seem like overprotectiveness at all. You know,
when we moved out and we moved to places where
we lived in ground floor apartments, there were suddenly, you know,
security alarms, and he was like, nope, no, you know,
like there were some clear guidance we were given about
(38:26):
our personal safety, like, you know, no butcher knive blocks.
Knives should be kept hidden away in our kitchens, not
not out for someone to grab and kill you with,
which is still a thing I struggle with. Like sometimes
I'll have a loaf of bread out and I'll be like,
I should put this bread knife away because someone might
break into my house. So those kinds of things that
seemed like a little overprotective and paranoid when we were
(38:47):
growing up, Like, they don't seem that way anymore at all. Yeah,
when I was a kid, we would sometimes camp out
in the backyard. You know, it was a corner a lot,
just like Maureen's lot, and he had had fences installed
and when we camped out back there, he pad locked
the gates. He was, you know, just a little extra causis.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, I'm curious if you have anything. I don't know
what the exact question would be, but you had mentioned
dealing with depression yourself and your dad as well as
you know, going to family therapy. It's interesting maybe to
think back about Patricia's mental health, even though that wasn't
something that perhaps was talked about or dealt with, you know,
(39:23):
openly at that time. How do you think about all
of that or do you want to talk about how
that sort of plays a role in this story.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Well, So, when I was nineteen, I did a three
day stay for suicidal ideation in the local hospital where
I was in college, and it was miserable. And that was,
you know, the late nineties. So I can sort of
imagine and I haven't seen one flu over the Kugoo's nests,
but I've heard about it what a mental hospital in
the you know, late sixties was like. So I can
(39:53):
imagine that it wasn't very helpful for him, and that
he just wanted to check the boxes and leave, and
that he didn't really get the help he needed.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
Does that excuse what he did to Melanie and Patricia?
Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
My mental health struggle is clearly comforta both sides of
the family, but my dad's side of the family, Like
you can sort of see the pattern, you know, my
dad has depression. My grandpa was diagnosed with depression. His
sister probably had it. They all were serious chainsmokers, and
then if you go far enough back, there are people
who struggled with alcohol and again with smoking. I think
that's kind of how they all coped with that.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
So you have tried to connect with Joey over to
locate him over the years, and that's been unsuccessful.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
So we saw him at Marine's funeral, and then we
saw him shortly after in the next year or so,
because he drove through. He was delivering a piece of
Marine's furniture to another relative, and he had a locksmith company,
so he had a little locksmith truck and he could
haul this piece of furniture and he stopped and visited us.
And that must have been nineteen ninety nine, and that's
the last time I ever saw him. So when I
(40:58):
wanted to write this story, I would have liked to
hear from him, but at the very least I sort
of wanted his blessing to do it. Like I found
him on Facebook, but his Facebook account had clearly like
been a one and done sort of thing, like he
never really used it, and he never responded and at
one point, I reached out to my dad's sister, who
we don't talk to, and I had my cousin ask,
and she hadn't heard from him. I think I might
(41:20):
have even looked him up on like Spoko and like again,
the last sort of records and it's not an uncommon name,
the last sort of records I could trace directly to
him were running the locksmith business in Seattle, but not
for some time.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
So if you were able to read Jim, you would
mostly have wanted his blessing. And having done all of
this research, is there anything you would say to him
now if you were to connect with him.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
I mean, not just that I'm sorry that it happened
to him, but I'm sorry that it happened to him,
and he was around people who were maybe not very
prepared to help a kid cope, and in a time
when you know, we think mental health support for kids
in crisis now, but what it must have been like
in nineteen seventy. You know, I'm sorry that maybe he
didn't get what he needed.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yeah, so I'm curious why you're interested in telling this
story now. Obviously it's different than if you were to
write a whole book, But why do you think it's
important to tell this story?
Speaker 2 (42:14):
You know, as my dad gets older, there aren't very
many people left who remember them and they were real,
they mattered, and Maureen was real and she was important
to me, And that's why.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
That makes sense. Yeah, there's so many stories, you know
that just kind of get lost the time.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Yeah, the general response in your family to looking into this,
what did it mean for them to have you sort
of try to put some of the pieces together all
those years later.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
My dad was super helpful. When I say I wrote
the paper, He wrote a lot of it. Actually, I
would ask him questions and he would write me these
really long responses, and in some places you can see
that I quote him sort of word for I don't
think he wanted to tell it himself. There have been
other stories in his life that he has written down
and told at least the family. But I think he
was content enough and supportive enough for me to do it,
(43:10):
and he was the one who was there was still left.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
And the joey piece of all of this is really troubling,
because you don't stop hurting from something like that, no
matter how little you were, and like, that's just huge
and probably there was this other piece of his family
that maybe wanted to support him through that and either
couldn't or didn't know how. And yeah, it's a difficult thing.
And I probably would have done something similar in your
(43:38):
shoes if I had learned there was this family tragedy,
but not a lot done to being as far as
like understanding it or keeping some sort of record of it.
And you know, I think it's really cool that you
and your dad were able to work on it together.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, And I think one of the things that I
was worried about in twenty ten was that without Joey's voice,
her dad's voice, or anybody's voice, that they would give
him parole. So that was sort of the other thing
in the back of my head when I wrote this.
You know, and my dad consent it, and he doesn't
have to go and he doesn't have to talk to anybody.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
You know that it's available.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
It's a valid concern. I mean, Hannah and I looked
at a case a couple of weeks ago where someone
had confused to a murder and he was out after
like twelve years, and you never know.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Yeah, yeah, having the victim impact statements I think can
be hugely influential when parlled words. Consider things like that,
what an episode from Beth Denton. Yeah, so many stories
almost lost to time. Yeah, someone like Beth comes along.
(44:43):
I really like that. I am so appreciative of her
treasuring her family enough and wanting to keep these memories
alive and tell those stories. It makes me think about
how many stories are truly out there and there's no
one to tell them anymore. And I a good time
going to newspapers dot com and searching for these articles
(45:05):
and was delighted to find that there were so many
articles about what happened. Obviously, it wasn't delightful that people
were murdered, but it was a great resource and piecing
together the investigation since there was no one to talk
to about the murder investigation.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
Oh yeah, I mean it's so great that that exists.
I have like memories of being an associate producer years ago,
being on the newspaper archive and thinking, just like this
is so cool, this like window back in time. And yeah,
I mean those sort of facts around the case would
have probably been lost otherwise.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, and you know, we we didn't talk a lot
with Beth about it in the episode, but we do
kind of we run through the investigation. But looking at
the articles, you could tell that the police had this
other suspect. It was their main suspect for so long.
They even published a picture of him in the paper
and it wasn't him from him. But it made me
(46:00):
wish that I could find out more about that guy,
Howard Riggs, because he had the signs of a con man,
Like there is a story in and of itself there,
Like what was he up to? Yeah, he married Patricia
then to just steal money from her and like rob
Marine and Patricia stuff from their home and then disappear.
He robbed a place in Fort Worth, Texas. He was
(46:23):
using multiple names, Like something's going on with him.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Yeah, Like he may not have killed her, but he
was up.
Speaker 4 (46:29):
To no good.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Yeah, But I couldn't find anything else about him.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Maybe that's by design, Mael Briggs.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Howel Briggs. Yeah, you know, it really made me think,
like what else is out there? Like what other family
stories might exist? Have you ever gone down the ancestry
rabbit hole or looked for any sort of crimes in
your family history?
Speaker 4 (46:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (46:52):
So I had a conversation with my mom recently, who
has done a little bit of that, and I mean,
it's nothing too exciting. But my mom's maternal grandfather's great grandfather.
That's like, you're great great great great great great great
many really great, Okay, great guys. He bought up a
(47:14):
bunch of land in LaSalle County in Illinois and became
very wealthy. There's an obituary that says when he passed
away in eighteen twenty seven, he had a fortune of
over five hundred thousand dollars and so that w'ud be
the equivalent of like twenty million today.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Wow, I know.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
And I'm finding this out and I'm like, okay, So
through the years, those people, they weren't thinking about generational wealth,
like somebody was spending Yeah that's what now I would
like to learn more about. Oh okay, like what the
heck happened?
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Where did the money go?
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Where did the money go? Like what could you even
buy back then that you could spend that much money on?
Like are you just decking out your like horse and buggy?
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Like what would you do? I don't know, you're buying spices. Yeah,
I'm abroad. I have no idea, So.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
I'm curious about that. But no murders or anything like
that thankfully.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Yeah, well it's interesting. You know, if anyone is listening
and you have some crime in your family history that
you know about or want to look more into, reach
out to us. We would be interested in hearing about it.
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is The Knife at exactly
rightmedia dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram
at the Knife Podcast or Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me Paytia Ety. Our producers
are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Amorosi. This episode was mixed
by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. Our
theme music is by Birds in the Airport Artwork five
vansa Lilac executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia Hardstark and
(48:57):
Danielle Kramer.
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Can you tell us what happened that night in May
of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Not much that people knew about happened that night, although
a neighbor I think did report hearing a scream.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Patia Eton, I'm Hannah Smith.
This week we speak with Beth Denton, who in two
thousand and nine started to look into the circumstances surrounding
a murder of someone in her family.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
We talk with Beth about her investigation of the crime
that took place in nineteen seventy. There are photos from
Beth of her family members that we posted on our
Instagram account at The Knife Podcast. If you want to
see pictures of the people we're talking about in story,
you can see them there.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Let's get into it.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
My name is Beth Dunn. My pronouns are she, slash,
they awesome.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
Thank you so much for joining us. I'm really looking
forward to getting into this interview and hearing your story.
It is different from a lot of the pitches that
we've received generally for the podcast because it has to
do with your whole family. But before we get into that.
Can you give us just a little bit of information
(01:32):
about who you are and sort of where you grew up.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I'm a special education teacher. I also have a background
in live action role playing that included a lot of writing,
which is sort of the context of this project. Sort
of happened because I had that writing background. I grew
up in the South suburbs of Chicago in Homewood. My
mom actually grew up like one town over. My dad
is actually from He was born in Little Rock. He
grew up in el Reno, Oklahoma, and came to the
(01:58):
South Suburbs as a teenage. Both my parents were teachers.
They met sharing a classroom. It's kind of the ultimate
teacher meet cute. Yeah, you know, even now, my family's
really close knit. We all moved to Colorado at about
the same time. My parents live in a house about
twenty minutes away from me, and my sister actually lives
in the house right behind there, so they have a gate.
So we're still a really tight family.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
Okay, I have to look up elren now, Okay, the
ultimate teacher meet cute. That's aspirational.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, he was hired first and the first time he
met her, he said, that is the tallest girl I
have ever seen.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
Well, he hasn't met us. We're both really tall.
Speaker 1 (02:34):
We are.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah, I mean at the time she was six feet tall.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
So oh, yeah, that is tall. Yeah, that's how tall
my mom is too. Yeah, she used to claim to
be six feet, but I think technically she was like
five eleven and three quarters or something.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
I'd claim six feet too.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
She was legit six feet and people would be like,
how tall are you and she would tell them five twelve.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
You got to lean into that tall humor.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
You really do? You really do? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Can you take us to Thanksgiving of twenty ten?
Speaker 2 (03:04):
It might actually almost been two thousand and nine. It
was the year before I student taught, and I was
doing a second round of college to get my teaching degree.
So I had come home from Thanksgiving. I was probably
in the middle of one of my teaching clinicals. So yeah,
we were just hanging out and I had a lot
of trouble sleeping and my dad had a lot of
trouble sleeping.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
We both have depression.
Speaker 2 (03:25):
And we were watching TV and we were watching some
kind of documentary and I turned to him and I said,
what happened to the guy who killed cousin Patricia? And
he looked at me and he said, I don't actually know.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
After the Thanksgiving leftovers were put away and everyone else
went to bed, Beth and her dad stayed up and
turned on the TV. They started watching a true crime documentary.
And this is the moment when that question popped into
Beth's head, whatever happened to that guy who killed cousin Patricia?
Asking this question out loud made Beth real she had
(04:01):
a lot of questions about Patricia. She knew Patricia was
killed in nineteen seventy years before Beth was born, but
the who and why and what actually happened those were
question marks filed away in the back of Beth's mind
since childhood. But that moment watching TV with her dad
(04:21):
on a Thanksgiving night would launch Beth into her own
investigation of the life and untimely death of her cousin Patricia.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
I remember being a little kid and my grandma telling
me a story about my cousin Patricia not wearing a seatboat.
She was trying to get me to wear my seatbolt.
This must have been it was before I was ten
years old, because it was while they were still living
in Illinois because they retired back to Arkansas. And I
remember being like, I have a cousin, Patricia, because Patricia
was also my mom is also my mom's name, and
(04:51):
she was like, well, not anymore. My grandma sort of
had this distinct cross between a British Columbian accident and
a southern Arkansas accent, and she said, well she was.
And that was sort of the end of that.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
When you had this conversation with your dad at Thanksgiving
and this question popped up about what happened to the
man who killed my cousin. What did that conversation prompt
you to do?
Speaker 2 (05:16):
So we were sitting on the couch and he said
I don't know, and I to me, I was like, whoile.
We live in the information age, like it should be
possible to find out. And sort of as we tick
over into that semester, I started taking a creative writing
nonfiction class just as something to fill my schedule, and
you know, they wanted you to present a nonfiction project,
(05:37):
and I said, maybe this would make an interesting nonfiction project.
And I thought at that moment in time I would
be able to do like more research and maybe find
some newspaper articles or request court documents or something, and
that turned out.
Speaker 4 (05:50):
To be really hard.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
What I discovered at that point was that newspapers seemed
to be starting as far back in their records and
digitizing forwards, so they just didn't have a lot of
digitized material from the seventies at that point. And it
made sense because you'd want to digitize like older things first,
but it didn't help with my project.
Speaker 3 (06:09):
Yeah. Yeah, as you set out to find more information,
only very limited articles or maybe one article available. Was
it discouraging or were you like, this makes me really
feel like I need to dig deeper here.
Speaker 2 (06:24):
It made me want to dig deeper. I have ADHD,
so I'm very like I get really into my projects.
And I sort of had some visions of maybe going
into Oklahoma and actually talking to him. But what I
ended up doing was I reached out to the Oklahoma Historical Society,
and the person who wrote me back, she said, I
have to tell you, like, this was a bit of
a shock to hear from you asking about this because
(06:44):
I lived across the street. My kids played with her kids,
Patricia's kids, Melanie and Joey.
Speaker 4 (06:51):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
Yeah, And she sent me a couple photos of them
sitting on the front step.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
What were the chances that this person at the Oklahoma
Historic Society happened to know best family members who she'd
been researching, Patricia and Patricia's two children, Melanie and Joey.
The coincidence felt like a good sign, So in early
twenty ten, Beth dove headfirst into her research, determined to
(07:17):
answer the question what really happened to Patricia Henderson? And
today we are telling that story. We're telling it with
the help of best research, including a paper she wrote
in college, along with a letter from her grandmother from
nineteen seventy, conversations Beth has had with her dad, and
articles from the Dally, Oklahoma all published in the spring
(07:39):
and summer of nineteen seventy. But first, in order to
really understand this story, we have to talk about the
people who were closest with Patricia, like her mother, Maureen.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
So Maureen was my grandfather's sister. I met her when
I was about ten years old. Before that, I had
only maybe talked to her on the phone, like briefly,
once my grandparents had moved to Arkansas to live across
the street from her. She was a lot like a
female version of my grandpa, and so it's really hard
for me to sort of describe her. She was tough,
and she was a chainsmoker, and she had sort of
(08:15):
gray white, old lady curly hair, and I absolutely adored
her from the first time I met her. We'd go
to visit my grandparents and we'd go and spend about
a week, usually on a school break, and I tried
to spend almost as much time with Marine as I
did with my grandparents. She had a big organ in
her house. She could play the organ, and she let
me play the organ and didn't care that I had
(08:36):
no idea what I was doing. And when she'd get
tired of that, she'd come and she'd play something and
teach me to sing. And all through my adolescence, music
was really important. She was sort of that first music
teacher for me. And we'd go places, and we'd go
on trips to go see something and do some tourist thing,
and you'd have to go quite a ways because there
just wasn't much going on in the Ozarks at that point,
and I would always want to ride with them, her
(08:57):
and her husband Ray.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
That's great, and I love the fact that she could
play the organ, like that's such a cool sounding instrument. Yeah,
And I can just imagine her like chain smoking and
playing the organ and it's just like so badass.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
I don't know if she smoked near it. Probably not
because they have gas in them, but oh.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Okay, probably not. Then I didn't realize that.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
Yeah, someone once explained it to me that that's how
an organ works. It's got pressurized gas.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
You may have just saved Hannah's life.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
I mean, I don't imagine that i'd Lea's smoking near
an organ anytime soon, but now I know that I should.
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Not, at least now, you know.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
Yeah, yeah in the movie version, though cinematically she'd be
smoking playing the organ.
Speaker 4 (09:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
Beth refers to Marine as aunt Marine, although technically she
was her great aunt, her grandfather's sister. Marine passed away
in the late nineteen nineties, but Beth has so many
memories with her gardening, listening to Marine sing and play
the organ, sneaking out for ice cream treats in the
middle of the day, and also a few memories of
(10:02):
Marine mentioning that she'd once had a daughter, Patricia. Maureen
even gave Beth one of Patricia's belongings as a gift
a silk scarf. Even as a kid. It was pretty
clear to Beth that it was difficult for Marine to
talk about her daughter who had died. Beth describes Marine's
relationship with her daughter Patricia as deeply loving but also complicated,
(10:27):
like so many mother daughter relationships.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Are one of the things that I distinctly remember learning
about Patricia, and I will try to find the video.
It's actually eight milimeter film footage that my dad digitized
of her that Easter before everything happened. Is that she
was kind of a rebel. If you look at the photos,
everybody else is sort of dressed nicely and a little
conservatively but appropriately for springing in Oklahoma City, and she's
(10:50):
in the video and she's wearing all black, which you know,
it was nineteen seventy that wasn't quite as common. She
was the only child of my aunt, and my aunt
had mostly raised her by herself, so I guess, Maureene,
you know, she's a single parent trying to raise a kid,
and I think it was rough. I think the way
to describe sort of the Denton branch of my family
is just really stubborn. We're all kind of stubborn and
(11:13):
a little bit ornery, and especially that generation my grandpa
and his sister and brother. Yeah, I can't imagine that
it was an easy childhood for her. She tried to
run away once and they found her within the bus
station with a ticket to her stepsisters in Texas. And
there was a point where Ann Marine and my great
grandmother Amelia actually talked about her maybe moving in with
(11:34):
my dad and his family, but nothing ever came from it.
So Marine bought this big old mansion sort of kind
of dilapidated, needed some work in Oklahoma City, and you know,
they worked on it a little bit at a time,
just so Patricia would have a place to grow up,
because she complained about not having a real home. So
her goal was that the servants' quarters behind would be
a rental so that she could rent them out to
(11:55):
people and that would help them pay for the expense
of the house.
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Childhood photo of Patricia shows a girl with wavy brown hair,
dark round eyes, and a sweet smile. She was raised
in the nineteen fifties and sixties by her single mother, Maureen,
a woman as strong willed as Patricia would later become
as she grew older. Patricia carved her own path. She
was independent and headstrong, which at times led to friction
(12:23):
with her mother. Wanting to provide stability, Marine bought them
a house in Oklahoma, a place that would become the
backdrop for much of Patricia's life. In the grainy Super
eight footage, the house stands quietly behind this scene of
women in pastel dresses milling about the yard, and then
there's Patricia. She appears in stark contrast, dressed in all black,
(12:47):
kneeling beside her children, Melanie and Joey. It is the
same house where Patricia once played as a child, where
she came of age as a teenager, and it's the
same house where, just months after this Easter of nineteen
ten seventy, she would take her final breath. It's a
house layered with memories of Patricia's life.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
My dad described it as a big, two story Georgian
that had seen better days. It had like a servant
spell system sort of the remains of it, and in
ground sprinklers that he and my dad came and got
worked for them. When she was young, Pittrica had a
lot of hobbies. She would sort of pick up on
one and do it.
Speaker 4 (13:21):
For a while.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
She loved to read, and she was the first person
who introduced my father to the Lord of the Rings,
and like, it's kind of a big thing in our family.
He read it to my mom when she was pregnant
with me. He read it to me when I was five,
He read it to my sister again when I was five.
All of their cats have Lord of the Rings names,
and she was sort of the person who started that.
So she graduated from high school in nineteen sixty two,
(13:42):
and she was supposed to go to business college and
Marine paid for it all. And then Patricia went off
and got married to Jean Henderson. Was the early sixties,
and maybe the cultural message that you didn't have to
do that if you didn't want to haven't come through yet,
even for me as a sort of a child of
the eighties, like, I don't know that I would have
decided to get married and not to have kids if
I hadn't had like another family member who was a
(14:03):
role model for that. So I could sort of see
where she was like, Nope, I'm ready, I'm gonna get
married and we're going to have kids.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Yeah, I think in that time, right, it was like
even sometimes the goals of some women who went to
college was to find a husband. You know, not to
say that people weren't ambitious, but I do think you're
right that it was a very different cultural sort of outlook.
Speaker 4 (14:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (14:25):
You know, Marine had this lived experience of having to
be on her own and wanted to make sure that
she was ready for that as a possibility. But Patricia
wasn't ready to do that. So they had two kids, Melanie,
who was the older of the two, and then kind
of as a try to save the marriage move, everybody thinks,
then she had Joey, which she was really unhappy, and
they ended up getting divorced and Patricia moved back in
(14:46):
with Marine.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
This was the mid nineteen sixties. Patricia was in her
early twenties, now divorce with two young children and living
back with her mother, Maureen. From speaking with Beth, it
sounds like Patricia was still trying to find herself, unsure
of what she wanted out of life, and she seemed
to struggle with depression, although Beth doesn't think she ever
(15:15):
got a diagnosis.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
She took classes at University Hospital to be at orderly,
but like she hung out kind of with you know,
motorcycle riders, and again was the mid sixties, so it's
still a little early for that, And she fought with
her mom about the kids a lot. Maureene felt like
Patricia did not do a great job of taking care
of those kids, that she didn't pay enough attention to them,
didn't make sure that they were well taken care of,
(15:39):
and the meanwhile, Marine was super devoted to them. Melanie
was really shy as a special education teacher. I've seen this.
She probably had selective mutism. She just almost refused to
talk to anybody. So Marine paid for her to go
to the Montessori school. That was sort of where Melanie
really started to flourish.
Speaker 1 (15:57):
Yeah, you know, you mentioned that Patricia was unhappy. Who
did she confide in about that unhappiness? Did she talk
to anyone about it?
Speaker 4 (16:07):
I think it was just obvious to everybody I see.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
It wasn't something people were talking about with her. It
was more of just an observation.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Sometimes I wish i'd started this project before my grandma
had passed away, because I think she would have had
more to say about it. But that was certainly how
my dad recalled it, that she was unhappy.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
What was the living situation, living set up like in
the house.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
They were all back in the big house together for
a while, and then at some point, and it's a
little hard to tell, there's some discrepancy between my dad's
version of the story and my grandma's in her letter,
at some point she decided just to make there to
be some kind of break so that she and Maureen
would not be at their throats, that the border could
move into the house, and that she would go and
(16:54):
live in the servants quarters, And she tore out a
wall to make it, you know, doable. So at that
point in the seventies when everything happened, they were living
in the servants quarters all back.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:05):
Yeah, so, which is sort of like a separate back house.
Is that how you understand it?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
Yeah, Okay, once upon a time I had the address
and looked it up on Google Maps. They're still there.
Speaker 4 (17:15):
Yeah. It was tidy, it was pretty small.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Patricia's mother, Marine lived in the main house, along with
a man named Ray who was renting a room from her,
And then a little farther back on the property there
was a separate building, a small apartment. That's where Patricia
lived with her two children, Melanie and Joey Beth's father
remembers Patricia well. They were cousins and good friends for
(17:40):
a time. He recalls a trip he took in the
spring of nineteen seventy. He and his parents drove from
Chicago to Oklahoma City. It was the last time that
he saw Patricia alive.
Speaker 4 (17:54):
It was Easter break.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
So yeah, they went that Easter and they spent time
with the kids, and that's when the eight millimeter film
footage was taken. And my dad is the sort of
person I don't love the whole love languagest thing because
that guy's not even a psychologist. But my dad's absolutely
an active service sort of person. So whenever he went
out there, he took care of something. And so this
particular trip, he was cleaning up in the yard and
(18:17):
I think sort of there was a key memory there
my dad has. He noticed that the windows, which were
not very high off the ground, he said maybe three feet,
were unlocked, and he talked to Patricia about and he said, Patricia,
you ought to lock that window, and she was like, well,
I can't because Melanie is little and forgets her key.
Because they walked home from school and so Melanie would
climb into the window. I think she would get Joey too,
(18:38):
and they would get into the house that way.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:41):
Such a different time, right right, because Patricia was at
work or busy. So then her children, Melanie and Joey.
Melanie was six or so and Joey was I don't
know how old Joey was.
Speaker 4 (18:54):
Yeah, four or five at that point, I think.
Speaker 1 (18:56):
And they were going to school down close.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
By, yeahighborhood, I think, and.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
They would just like walk home. Okay, that probably really
wasn't that uncommon at that time.
Speaker 2 (19:06):
I think the neighbors knew who they were. Obviously, the
people across the street did that I heard from later. Yeah,
so I think they people looked out for them, you know.
Just to kind of give you an idea of where
Patricia was in her life at that point. She took
my dad when they were down there to run an errand,
and she blew a stoplight while they were on the errand,
and then it turned out that she didn't even have
(19:28):
a driver's license, and my dad was like, what can
you even do with someone who makes decisions like that.
I think at that point my dad had started to
drift away from her a little because he was sort
of getting his life together and she, you know, just
seemed to be making sort of destructive choices. Oh, and
I guess the other thing that you sort of have
to know is she did have a second husband. His
name was Howard Riggs. It was a scam. He scammed her,
(19:50):
he like married her and took a whole bunch of
stuff from her and Maureen and ran away.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And by the time this happened in the summer of
nineteen seventy, like, how much time had passed between this
and when Howard Riggs ran away from them?
Speaker 4 (20:03):
I don't know. I would guess a year or two,
but not many.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Okay, So your dad during this visit at Easter, there's
like these two memories that you point out in your
papers that he mentions, Oh, you should really get this window,
you should really lock it, you know, that would be safer,
and she decides not to. And then he also has
this memory of Patricia running a red light and then mentioning, well,
(20:27):
I don't even have my driver's license. Yeah, and so
this was sort of his last visit. There was there
anything else that you recall him saying about that visit.
Speaker 2 (20:38):
My grandma or letter mentions that he went to the
store and bought the kid's candy Land and he played
it with them for hours. My dad is always super
good with little kids. Just every little kid who's even
mildly related to him just has always adored him. And
it's because he will, like he'll buy a game, and
he'll pay their attention to them, and he's not bothered
by doing the same thing over and over again with them.
(20:59):
And so I think that for him, that's kind of
a good part of that memory is getting to spend
that final time with them.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
Can you tell us what happened that night in May
of nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2 (21:12):
Not much that people knew about happened that night, although
a neighbor I think did report hearing a scream, but
it was kind of hard to say because Patricia and
Maureene argued so much and yelled at each other so
much that you know, that wasn't all that unusual. The
next morning, and I think this is what Maureen told
(21:33):
my father. Joey came into the house, into the big house,
and he, you know, said, Mom and Sissy are sleeping
on the floor and I can't get them to wake up.
And I don't know if Ray went with her, but
Maureen went with Joey and found their bodies. I can't
even imagine. Patricia really tried to fight her attacker off
(21:57):
with everything that she had in the case, and Melanie,
whose bed was right under that window, had been stabbed.
You know, my dad comments even now, he's like, it's
just a remarkable amount of misogyny. He just ignored Joey,
and who stabs a little girl that many times? Yeah,
So there were clearly signs of a fight in the kitchen,
(22:20):
and at that point, I mean, Marine was distraught and
sort of the narrator who next speaks to someone in
my family is Ray, who was at that point her border.
They had met him very briefly, you know, when they
had been there for the visit. But he was the
one to call my grandparents in in par forest.
Speaker 4 (22:40):
You know.
Speaker 2 (22:41):
My dad answered the call and didn't think anything about
it and passed it off to my grandfather, and my grandfather,
you know, wandered back out and said, I don't know
that I've ever spoken to this person in my life,
but he's just said that, you know, Patricia and Melanie
are dead, and Marine is distraught, and we need to
get down there.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
The bodies of Patricia and her daughter Melanie were discovered
on May third, nineteen seventy. The very next day, the
Daily Oklahoma's front page read quote, young mother child die
of stab wounds in city apartment. The paper reported that
Patricia was just twenty six years old and her daughter,
Melanie was only seven. Both had been stabbed by an
(23:18):
unknown assailant who entered their apartment between the hours of
two am and four AM on Sunday, May third. Patricia's
five year old son, Joseph, was unharmed. Police suspected whoever
killed Patricia and Melanie had entered through a window, probably
the window right above Melanie's bed. Patricia's body was found
(23:39):
in her bedroom. Police also discovered a kitchen knife, which
they believed to be the murder weapon. Nothing was missing
from the apartment, so police ruled out robbery as a motive.
The article also mentions that they interviewed one of Patricia's
ex husbands, but they don't name him in the article.
Beth thinks that it was probably Patricia's first husband, the
(24:02):
father of her children.
Speaker 3 (24:04):
And then, you know, one of the documents that you
have from your family is this letter that your grandmother
wrote which is dated me twelfth, nineteen seventy. And she's
writing to someone else in your family, is that right?
Speaker 4 (24:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
My grandma was one of eight children, so she's writing
to her sister Lorraine and her husband. Because she had
so many siblings to write too, she would write parts
of the letter on carbon paper. But I think this
one might be an original document.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
And she's chronicling in this letter what happened and that
they were on their way to Oklahoma. Yeah, it sounds
like they basically got the information over this phone call
and then we're like, okay, let's pack up the car
and drive.
Speaker 4 (24:52):
Yeah, there was.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
It was the seventies, and so there was some stuff
that had to be done to the car before you
had to take a road trip. And so my dad
sat there. My dad and my grandpa went together to
wherever the dealership or the repair shop to get new
tires put on the car, and my dad finished up.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
It was spraying, and he had.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
To do progress reports, and in those days, I'm not
even sure he had a calculator, so I'm pretty sure
he had to hand do all the grades to put
on the progress reports and write, you know, a couple
days of subplans.
Speaker 1 (25:25):
The letter from Beth's grandmother starts by describing the shock
and sadness of learning that Patricia and Melanie were dead.
It describes the state of chaos at Marine's household that day,
a phone ringing off the hook, police officers on the property.
It goes on to say, in part, quote, a neighbor
in the night heard someone scream no, no, don't do it,
(25:48):
and the police figure that was Patricia. The neighbor had
looked out and noticed the door to Patricia's side of
the apartment was open and didn't see anything, so went
back to bed. The door was seen open at six
am with a lamp burning, but at eight am it
was closed. The letter goes on to say that Patricia
was small in stature, but quote put up a terrific struggle,
(26:12):
so they figure whoever it was wasn't too big, have
a man size seven and a half shoe print and
one fingerprint. We really feel the murderer got in through
the door and was someone Patricia knew, although Marine flatly
refused to believe this at first. The letter notes about
Patricia's daughter, Melanie, who was only seven years old, quote,
(26:35):
she had twelve stab wounds, in her body, nine of
them from the back. In fact, we also feel she
may have recognized someone and that person knew it best.
Grandmother is writing this letter from Oklahoma City after she
and her family have arrived to support Marine through the
unthinkable loss of her daughter and granddaughter. The whole letter
(26:57):
is a snapshot of grief, confusion, and of a family
rallying together to support one another and heartache, while simultaneously
attempting to piece together how something so terrible could have happened.
In the immediate aftermath of all of this, is there
a conversation happening about why her why her daughter? And
(27:21):
who could be angry with them or fixated on them?
Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah, no, one was sure, like it was kind of
a mystery. The police briefly interviewed Jean, her first husband,
and I think he had an alibi. And also I
think it was probably pretty clear from the scene that
somebody was going to have defensive wounds. So no, I
think they just spent a lot of time in just
sort of terrible shock. My dad said that until they
(27:49):
got to about Tulsa and you could start hearing it
reported on the news stations on the radio, it didn't
seem real.
Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah, I think that's something that really stands out in
this story. You know, the time period, nineteen seventy, It's
like this terrible tragedy happens, and then you think, like
a tragedy is horrible at any time. If it happens now,
you can just quickly get on a plane. You have
your phone and access to the internet where you can
(28:16):
sort of quickly find out information and articles and like
what's the latest. And it was just not that way.
It's like everything is moving in slow motion in a way,
like they have to take this long road trip to Oklahoma,
and that's a really powerful moment when they get close enough,
when they get to Tulsa, which is like an hour
and a half from Oklahoma City, they start to hear
it on the news. You talked a little bit about
(28:39):
the police investigation and them questioning both of Patricia's ex husbands.
Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, it's only in the past year or so that
I've actually gone to the Oklahoma Historical Society's website and
looked at the articles.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
The Daily Oklahoma published an article on May sixth, nineteen seventy,
three days after the murders. It stated that the prime
sus was Patricia's estranged second husband, Howard Laverne Riggs. He'd
married Patricia only to steal money and other belongings from
both Patricia and Marine, and then he'd disappeared. A closer
(29:15):
look at Riggs revealed he also had a charge against
him from a robbery back in Fort Worth, Texas, but
he'd been quote committed for mental treatment before the case
went to trial. This all made detectives very suspicious of Riggs,
but Howard Riggs, who sometimes went by the name Howell Briggs,
(29:36):
was nowhere to be found. On May ninth, there was
another article, this time with a picture of Howard Riggs.
The police wanted help finding him. An Oklahoma City homicide
detective had gone to Texas looking for Riggs, to no avail.
They charged him anyway, not with murder, but with grand
larceny for the items he'd taken from Marine's home. The
(29:58):
police hoped this charge which would speed up his apprehension.
The same article says police interviewed over forty witnesses as
part of their investigation, and while they still didn't have
a motive, they speculated that this could have been an
act of violence committed out of anger or revenge. Or
could have just been a quote very mentally disturbed person.
(30:20):
The Daily Oklahoma published another article twenty eight days after
the murder May thirty first, nineteen seventy. It states that
while Howard Riggs remains a suspect, they've still not been
able to locate him and are closely scrutinizing at least
six other people. And then, finally, on June ninth, nineteen seventy,
(30:42):
a suspect was arrested, but it wasn't Howard Riggs. It
was a man named Ronald Litteral, a thirty two year
old man with no connection to the family other than
he lived just two blocks from Patricia's home. He was
apprehended in Gulfport, Mississippi.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
Yeah, so, I mean you can sort of see hints
of it, like that they've got a suspect. When you
read the news articles, you can sort of see them
talking about, Oh, there's this person who's had mental illness
in the neighborhood that we're questioning. I think the papers
reported for a while that, like the trail was going cold,
and then someone noticed like, oh, this guy's in the neighborhood,
(31:22):
lives in the neighborhood. No one's heard from him in
a while. Maybe we want to talk to him.
Speaker 4 (31:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:28):
The Daily Oklahoma reported that Detective Jim Blair happened to
connect Ronald Litterell to this case based on a routine
missing person's report. Literal had been reported missing about the
same time as the murders. That and the fact that
he lived two blocks away from Patricia peaked detective Blair's interest,
and he wondered if there was a potential connection. Literal said,
(31:51):
Dan was then found abandoned in the area and it
appeared to have bloodstains inside of it. Detectives took specimens
from his car and said them to the FBI for analysis.
It was also noted that Literal was previously a patient
at Central State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, a mental health hospital.
(32:11):
On June seventeenth, it was reported that Ronald Literal had
confessed to murdering both Patricia and Melanie Henderson.
Speaker 3 (32:19):
Do you know if Marine or Patricia had had any
contact with Ronald prior to him murdering Patricia and Melanie?
Were they friendly or did they know who he was?
Speaker 2 (32:31):
I don't think they did. It's certainly not part of
the narrative that came to me. My guess is that
the most he was someone you saw around town.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
And so what was the best explanation that you heard
for why he did what he did.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
He later on wrote to Mariene on the advice of
his psychiatrist, and said that God had told him to
kill them. I don't think that's true. I think I
think he wanted an excuse.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
What doesn't that makes you think that?
Speaker 2 (33:07):
I mean, personally, I find it super offensive the idea
that God would tell anybody. Yeah, that may be my
own issues with religion and faith in general.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
But there wasn't something that you learned about the case
that you were like, no way, was this a hallucination
he was having? This was something else?
Speaker 2 (33:28):
Well, I mean they found him confident to stand trial
at the standards of the day.
Speaker 4 (33:33):
Okay, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (33:35):
Was there anything that came out that indicated if he
had been watching Patricia for a while. Was this this
sort of spur of the moment thing or was it
a planned thing? Was he stalking her? Did anything like
that come out?
Speaker 2 (33:50):
Nothing like that came out, Although it seems like there's
a certain amount of reasonable assumption and that you would
almost have to know that the windows weren't locked, although
it was midspring and Oklaho, it was probably a hot
night and windows might have been open anyway. Yeah, just
breaking into someone's house and killing them like that, it
doesn't seem like something you just do randomly. He wasn't
there to rob them, you know.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, And you know you mentioned earlier when you said
he left Joey alone. It's horrible that he entered their
house at all. It's horrible for Joey to wake up
and realize that his mother and sister have been murdered
while he was asleep. Maybe some of the questioning that
I'm asking now, it's like, there's no way to know
you were not inside his head. We don't know for sure,
but yeah, was your dad's assumption that Ron literal knew
(34:35):
that there were two kids, you know, Melanie and Joey,
and that he went in and just targeted Patricia and
Melanie and left Joey alone.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
I don't know he didn't. Actually, I don't think I
ever asked him that specifically. It's likely Joey vaguely remembered
waking up in the night and seeing a man there
arguing with his mother, and then he fell back asleep
because he was so small, so we don't think he
was unaware of there being another child in the house.
Speaker 4 (35:04):
He just ignored it.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Wow. I mean, it's just such an awful thing to
have happened. And what happened next, like what happened with Maureen.
You know, how did she sort of move forward after this,
having her only daughter and one of her grandchildren murdered.
Speaker 2 (35:23):
I mean, I think she did the best she could.
It was really hard for her. You know, Joey was
around after that. He went to live with his dad,
but it was close enough by that Joey came over
and visited pretty frequently until he was sixteen when he
ran away and joined the Merchant Marines. Or at least
that's again the family story about it. But so she
did still have Joey. She ended up marrying Ray. That's
(35:44):
my uncle Ray, who was the border at the time.
I guess sort of there was some trauma bonding. I
think that happened there for him, because you know, he
was living in the house. He was part of their lives,
and I don't know how he felt about Patricia, but
he certainly cared about Melanie and Joey. It was really
hard for her and she went down on every path
she could to try and make some meaning out of it.
She did sort of crystal power and there were some
(36:06):
seancey things, and you know she missed them desperately.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
This all happened before you were born.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Yeah, about eight years before I was born.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
You're learning about all of this much later. And then
in two thousand and nine ish, at Thanksgiving with your dad,
you know, you had this question about whatever happened to
the man who killed Patricia and Melanie, And from looking
it up, it looks like Ron Litterrell was convicted September
of nineteen seventy. He was convicted of the murders and
(36:38):
received two life sentences. What did you find out when
you looked back into it, you know, around twenty nine,
twenty ten, did you find out any information about his
status or what had gone on with him since he'd
been convicted.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, Oklahoma has a really detailed offender look up. So
I looked him up and I was it was really
shocking because there's fixture was and he just looked like
somebody's grandpa. I wasn't quite quite being prepared, you know,
just looking up for the information to get the photo too.
So he was denied every attempt at parole he ever,
(37:13):
you know, he ever made. I got one last notification
from the offender registry in twenty twenty two, and it
was a little cryptic, and I went to school and
I asked the school safety officer and he was like, yeah,
that means he died in prison. So I mean, that's
that's ultimately what happened to him. I know that he
did get some kind of therapy because the therapist had
him write letters to Marine. I asked my therapist about that,
(37:34):
and he was like, well, that might have been good
therapy for him, but like, nobody should have ever given
those letters to Marine.
Speaker 4 (37:39):
Like that was a no.
Speaker 1 (37:40):
Seriously, that's pretty shocking.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
Actually, Yeah, Like it might have been therapeutic for him
to write it, but it should have never been delivered.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah. How has sort of looking deeper into this tragedy
that happened in your family, how has that affected you
and how is that affected sort of relationship with your
dad or Yeah, what has been sort of the result.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Of that for you?
Speaker 2 (38:05):
I mean it's certainly made my dad's overprotectiveness of his
daughters really clear and absolutely understandable, almost in the sense
that it doesn't seem like overprotectiveness at all. You know,
when we moved out and we moved to places where
we lived in ground floor apartments, there were suddenly, you know,
security alarms, and he was like, nope, no, you know,
like there were some clear guidance we were given about
(38:26):
our personal safety, like, you know, no butcher knive blocks.
Knives should be kept hidden away in our kitchens, not
not out for someone to grab and kill you with,
which is still a thing I struggle with. Like sometimes
I'll have a loaf of bread out and I'll be like,
I should put this bread knife away because someone might
break into my house. So those kinds of things that
seemed like a little overprotective and paranoid when we were
(38:47):
growing up, Like, they don't seem that way anymore at all. Yeah,
when I was a kid, we would sometimes camp out
in the backyard. You know, it was a corner a lot,
just like Maureen's lot, and he had had fences installed
and when we camped out back there, he pad locked
the gates. He was, you know, just a little extra causis.
Speaker 1 (39:03):
Yeah, I'm curious if you have anything. I don't know
what the exact question would be, but you had mentioned
dealing with depression yourself and your dad as well as
you know, going to family therapy. It's interesting maybe to
think back about Patricia's mental health, even though that wasn't
something that perhaps was talked about or dealt with, you know,
(39:23):
openly at that time. How do you think about all
of that or do you want to talk about how
that sort of plays a role in this story.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Well, So, when I was nineteen, I did a three
day stay for suicidal ideation in the local hospital where
I was in college, and it was miserable. And that was,
you know, the late nineties. So I can sort of
imagine and I haven't seen one flu over the Kugoo's nests,
but I've heard about it what a mental hospital in
the you know, late sixties was like. So I can
(39:53):
imagine that it wasn't very helpful for him, and that
he just wanted to check the boxes and leave, and
that he didn't really get the help he needed.
Speaker 4 (40:01):
Does that excuse what he did to Melanie and Patricia?
Absolutely not.
Speaker 2 (40:06):
My mental health struggle is clearly comforta both sides of
the family, but my dad's side of the family, Like
you can sort of see the pattern, you know, my
dad has depression. My grandpa was diagnosed with depression. His
sister probably had it. They all were serious chainsmokers, and
then if you go far enough back, there are people
who struggled with alcohol and again with smoking. I think
that's kind of how they all coped with that.
Speaker 3 (40:28):
So you have tried to connect with Joey over to
locate him over the years, and that's been unsuccessful.
Speaker 4 (40:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:37):
So we saw him at Marine's funeral, and then we
saw him shortly after in the next year or so,
because he drove through. He was delivering a piece of
Marine's furniture to another relative, and he had a locksmith company,
so he had a little locksmith truck and he could
haul this piece of furniture and he stopped and visited us.
And that must have been nineteen ninety nine, and that's
the last time I ever saw him. So when I
(40:58):
wanted to write this story, I would have liked to
hear from him, but at the very least I sort
of wanted his blessing to do it. Like I found
him on Facebook, but his Facebook account had clearly like
been a one and done sort of thing, like he
never really used it, and he never responded and at
one point, I reached out to my dad's sister, who
we don't talk to, and I had my cousin ask,
and she hadn't heard from him. I think I might
(41:20):
have even looked him up on like Spoko and like again,
the last sort of records and it's not an uncommon name,
the last sort of records I could trace directly to
him were running the locksmith business in Seattle, but not
for some time.
Speaker 3 (41:34):
So if you were able to read Jim, you would
mostly have wanted his blessing. And having done all of
this research, is there anything you would say to him
now if you were to connect with him.
Speaker 2 (41:44):
I mean, not just that I'm sorry that it happened
to him, but I'm sorry that it happened to him,
and he was around people who were maybe not very
prepared to help a kid cope, and in a time
when you know, we think mental health support for kids
in crisis now, but what it must have been like
in nineteen seventy. You know, I'm sorry that maybe he
didn't get what he needed.
Speaker 1 (42:03):
Yeah, so I'm curious why you're interested in telling this
story now. Obviously it's different than if you were to
write a whole book, But why do you think it's
important to tell this story?
Speaker 2 (42:14):
You know, as my dad gets older, there aren't very
many people left who remember them and they were real,
they mattered, and Maureen was real and she was important
to me, And that's why.
Speaker 1 (42:31):
That makes sense. Yeah, there's so many stories, you know
that just kind of get lost the time.
Speaker 3 (42:37):
Yeah, the general response in your family to looking into this,
what did it mean for them to have you sort
of try to put some of the pieces together all
those years later.
Speaker 2 (42:48):
My dad was super helpful. When I say I wrote
the paper, He wrote a lot of it. Actually, I
would ask him questions and he would write me these
really long responses, and in some places you can see
that I quote him sort of word for I don't
think he wanted to tell it himself. There have been
other stories in his life that he has written down
and told at least the family. But I think he
was content enough and supportive enough for me to do it,
(43:10):
and he was the one who was there was still left.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
And the joey piece of all of this is really troubling,
because you don't stop hurting from something like that, no
matter how little you were, and like, that's just huge
and probably there was this other piece of his family
that maybe wanted to support him through that and either
couldn't or didn't know how. And yeah, it's a difficult thing.
And I probably would have done something similar in your
(43:38):
shoes if I had learned there was this family tragedy,
but not a lot done to being as far as
like understanding it or keeping some sort of record of it.
And you know, I think it's really cool that you
and your dad were able to work on it together.
Speaker 2 (43:54):
Yeah, And I think one of the things that I
was worried about in twenty ten was that without Joey's voice,
her dad's voice, or anybody's voice, that they would give
him parole. So that was sort of the other thing
in the back of my head when I wrote this.
You know, and my dad consent it, and he doesn't
have to go and he doesn't have to talk to anybody.
Speaker 4 (44:11):
You know that it's available.
Speaker 3 (44:13):
It's a valid concern. I mean, Hannah and I looked
at a case a couple of weeks ago where someone
had confused to a murder and he was out after
like twelve years, and you never know.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Yeah, yeah, having the victim impact statements I think can
be hugely influential when parlled words. Consider things like that,
what an episode from Beth Denton. Yeah, so many stories
almost lost to time. Yeah, someone like Beth comes along.
(44:43):
I really like that. I am so appreciative of her
treasuring her family enough and wanting to keep these memories
alive and tell those stories. It makes me think about
how many stories are truly out there and there's no
one to tell them anymore. And I a good time
going to newspapers dot com and searching for these articles
(45:05):
and was delighted to find that there were so many
articles about what happened. Obviously, it wasn't delightful that people
were murdered, but it was a great resource and piecing
together the investigation since there was no one to talk
to about the murder investigation.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
Oh yeah, I mean it's so great that that exists.
I have like memories of being an associate producer years ago,
being on the newspaper archive and thinking, just like this
is so cool, this like window back in time. And yeah,
I mean those sort of facts around the case would
have probably been lost otherwise.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
Yeah, and you know, we we didn't talk a lot
with Beth about it in the episode, but we do
kind of we run through the investigation. But looking at
the articles, you could tell that the police had this
other suspect. It was their main suspect for so long.
They even published a picture of him in the paper
and it wasn't him from him. But it made me
(46:00):
wish that I could find out more about that guy,
Howard Riggs, because he had the signs of a con man,
Like there is a story in and of itself there,
Like what was he up to? Yeah, he married Patricia
then to just steal money from her and like rob
Marine and Patricia stuff from their home and then disappear.
He robbed a place in Fort Worth, Texas. He was
(46:23):
using multiple names, Like something's going on with him.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Yeah, Like he may not have killed her, but he
was up.
Speaker 4 (46:29):
To no good.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Yeah, But I couldn't find anything else about him.
Speaker 3 (46:33):
Maybe that's by design, Mael Briggs.
Speaker 1 (46:36):
Howel Briggs. Yeah, you know, it really made me think,
like what else is out there? Like what other family
stories might exist? Have you ever gone down the ancestry
rabbit hole or looked for any sort of crimes in
your family history?
Speaker 4 (46:52):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (46:52):
So I had a conversation with my mom recently, who
has done a little bit of that, and I mean,
it's nothing too exciting. But my mom's maternal grandfather's great grandfather.
That's like, you're great great great great great great great
many really great, Okay, great guys. He bought up a
(47:14):
bunch of land in LaSalle County in Illinois and became
very wealthy. There's an obituary that says when he passed
away in eighteen twenty seven, he had a fortune of
over five hundred thousand dollars and so that w'ud be
the equivalent of like twenty million today.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Wow, I know.
Speaker 3 (47:32):
And I'm finding this out and I'm like, okay, So
through the years, those people, they weren't thinking about generational wealth,
like somebody was spending Yeah that's what now I would
like to learn more about. Oh okay, like what the
heck happened?
Speaker 1 (47:46):
Where did the money go?
Speaker 3 (47:48):
Where did the money go? Like what could you even
buy back then that you could spend that much money on?
Like are you just decking out your like horse and buggy?
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Like what would you do? I don't know, you're buying spices. Yeah,
I'm abroad. I have no idea, So.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
I'm curious about that. But no murders or anything like
that thankfully.
Speaker 1 (48:10):
Yeah, well it's interesting. You know, if anyone is listening
and you have some crime in your family history that
you know about or want to look more into, reach
out to us. We would be interested in hearing about it.
Thanks for listening.
Speaker 3 (48:25):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is The Knife at exactly
rightmedia dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram
at the Knife Podcast or Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.
Speaker 1 (48:35):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me Paytia Ety. Our producers
are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Amorosi. This episode was mixed
by Tom Bryfogel. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. Our
theme music is by Birds in the Airport Artwork five
vansa Lilac executive produced by Karen Kilgareff, Georgia Hardstark and
(48:57):
Danielle Kramer.
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