Solved cold cases in Oklahoma
3 documented cases.
Erma Jean Goodou
Erma Jean Goodou, a 32-year-old mother, was beaten to death inside her home in the 800 block of East 51st Place North in Tulsa, Oklahoma, early on July 30, 1994, after an intruder broke in through a window in what authorities described as a break-in and attempted rape. Her 13-year-old daughter found her body in the kitchen. Investigators collected fingerprints and DNA at the scene, but no match was found, and the case went cold for nearly two decades. In 2012 Tulsa detectives submitted the crime-scene DNA to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation under a cold case grant, and in 2014 it matched a sample that the Texas Department of Public Safety had taken from Leroy Edward Gilbert Jr. after an unrelated arrest. Gilbert, who had lived within a mile of Goodou and said he had attended high school with her, was arrested in Bonham, Texas, in 2015. A Tulsa County jury convicted him of first-degree murder on September 21, 2017, and recommended life without parole; he was sentenced in November 2017, and the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and life sentence in April 2019.
Jack and Elaine Denney
Jack Denney, 65, and Elaine Denney, 66, were shot to death in their home near Locust Grove, Oklahoma, in December 2007. Prosecutors put the date at December 23. Their daughter and her family found them on Christmas morning. Neighbors knew the couple as the grandparents of the neighborhood, and it was hard for investigators to imagine anyone with a grudge against them. Jack's wallet was empty, but the scene did not look like a typical robbery, and the case reached a dead end. About a year later an inmate in Cherokee County, Justin Walker, wrote a letter claiming responsibility. Investigators treated him as a good suspect, but a palm print from the house did not match his, and prosecutors declined to charge him. After his release in 2012 he recanted. Roughly ten years after the killings, a former mental health professional who had treated Walker told authorities about a conversation she had had with him. A multi-county grand jury indicted him on two counts of first-degree murder in March 2018. In March 2019 he pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 40 years, separate from a 10-year sentence in an unrelated case. His motive was never firmly established.
Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman
On the night of December 29, 1999, Lauria Bible, 16, stayed over at her best friend Ashley Freeman's mobile home outside Welch, Oklahoma, for Ashley's sixteenth birthday. At about 5:30 the next morning firefighters found the home in flames. Kathy Freeman was inside, shot in the head; state agents first suspected her husband Danny of killing her and fleeing with the girls, until Lauria's parents searched the released rubble the next day and found his body too. Lauria's car sat in the driveway with the keys in it. The girls were never found. The case ran through national television, a recanted confession and a 2005 mine search that found nothing. In 2017 a new Craig County sheriff found a crate of old case files left by a previous administration. They led investigators to witness interviews that had been filed away: at least a dozen people said three men from a Picher-area methamphetamine circle, Warren "Phil" Welch II, David Pennington and Ronnie Dean Busick, had bragged about killing the Freemans over a drug debt, holding the girls for days and photographing them bound with duct tape. Welch died in 2007 and Pennington in 2015. Busick was charged with four counts of first-degree murder in April 2018, pleaded guilty in July 2020 to accessory to murder, and got 10 years after a dig he directed found nothing. He was released in May 2023. Lauria and Ashley remain missing.