The Sirloin Stockade Murders

COLD OPEN

Northeast Oklahoma City. The third of September, nineteen seventy-eight.

A boy comes around the side of the house carrying a paper sack, and he asks his father the question that every ten-year-old boy in America has asked at least once.

Daddy, can I have a real gun?

And his father says what fathers say. Of course you can't.

And the boy says, I've already got some.

And he holds up the sack.

There are three pistols in it. Not toys. Not a starter's pistol out of somebody's garage. Three handguns, in a paper sack, in a vacant patch of northeast Oklahoma City, where a ten-year-old could put his hands on them.

His father called the police. The police took the guns downtown. And in a room where a man's whole job was to look at the marks a barrel leaves on a bullet — the little scratches, the fingerprint a gun leaves behind every time it's fired — somebody started making comparisons.

The first match came back to a field beside Interstate 35 in McClain County, seven weeks earlier.

The second match came back to a walk-in freezer at a steakhouse in south Oklahoma City, forty miles away and seven weeks later.

Nobody had put those two things together. There was no reason to. One was a family. One was a room full of kids. Different counties, different weeks, different kinds of terrible.

And now three pistols in a paper sack were telling the state of Oklahoma that the same hands did all of it.

Which left the men working this case with exactly one problem.

They had the guns.

They still had no idea who they belonged to.

INTRO

Welcome to Okie Investigations. I'm Trevor Shelby.

This show goes looking for Oklahoma's own. The cases that happened in our counties, to our neighbors, in towns most of us drive through without slowing down. Some of them the whole state remembers. Some of them nobody has said out loud in forty years. I think both kinds deserve better than a headline, and both kinds deserve somebody who actually sat down and read the file.

Fair warning on this one — it's a violent case, and I'm not going to sand the edges off it. If you've got young ears in the car, this is your spot to hit pause.

Everything you're going to hear comes from court records, police statements, and reporting from the time. On this case those sources disagree with each other constantly — about ages, about times, about names — and when they do, I'll tell you so instead of picking the version that sounds better. Everything I worked from is posted at Section29.com.

One more thing before we start, and I'll come back to it at the end.

This case isn't finished.

There is a decision being made about it this week.

Now.

Oklahoma. The summer of nineteen seventy-eight.

SECTION 1 — THE HOOD UP

McClain County. Thursday morning, the twenty-second of June.

Interstate 35 runs straight down the middle of Oklahoma there, north to Oklahoma City, south toward Purcell and the Texas line. On either side of it there is farm ground and pasture and not much else, and if you pull off onto the shoulder at night, the dark starts about ten feet past your headlights and doesn't stop.

In a field just off that shoulder, somebody found two bodies.

A man and a woman. Adults. Shot.

The man had identification on him. He was a sergeant in the United States Air Force. Melvin Lorenz, thirty-eight years old. The woman was his wife, Linda, and she was in the service too — thirty-one, and the reporting from that summer gives her a sergeant's stripes as well. They were stationed in Texas.

They were a long way from anywhere they were supposed to be.

The bodies had been dragged. That was one of the first things the field said out loud — that they hadn't fallen there. They'd been moved off the highway and put where the grass would take a few hours longer to give them up.

Their vehicle was gone. A blue Ford Ranger pickup with a white camper shell over the bed. That truck turned up later, abandoned in a parking lot at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City, which told investigators something and nothing at the same time — it told them whoever did this had come to the city, and it told them the truck had been sitting in the one place in Oklahoma where a strange vehicle can sit for days and nobody thinks a thing about it.

And then there was the part nobody was ready for.

A quarter of the way through the next morning — three-quarters of a mile up that same highway, in a different field, on the other side of a fence line — they found a third body.

A boy. Twelve years old. Richard Lorenz. His family called him Ricky.

He hadn't been left with his parents. He'd been driven away from them first.

Now here is what investigators had to sit with, and it's the thing that has never stopped being the ugliest fact in this case.

The Lorenz family was going to a funeral.

Melvin's mother, Agnes, had died in North Dakota. She'd been sick with cancer. She died on the twenty-first of June — the day before, the same day her son and his wife and her grandson loaded a camper in Texas and started driving, nearly nine hundred miles, to bury her.

They had luggage in that truck. They had the boy in the back. They had two dogs.

Let me tell you what little I can about them, because they've spent forty-eight years being "the family on the highway" and they were not that.

Melvin Lorenz was from North Dakota — Spiritwood, a place you could drive through and never know you'd been in. He'd gone into the Air Force and made sergeant and ended up in Texas, which is how most people from small towns end up nine hundred miles from where they were born. Linda was a Georgia girl. They'd been married about six years. Ricky was twelve, and he was in the back of that camper with the dogs, which is exactly where a twelve-year-old wants to be on a long drive.

Here is the detail about those three that I did not expect and have not gotten over. They are not buried together. Melvin is in a cemetery in Jamestown, North Dakota, near where he grew up. Linda is in Tifton, Georgia, near where she grew up. They died within about ten seconds of each other on the same square of grass in Oklahoma and then their families took them home in opposite directions, and neither one of them ever got to the funeral they were driving to.

And somewhere on a dark stretch of I-35, between one town and the next, they stopped.

That was the piece the investigators couldn't make sense of at first. Because if you're a father with a wife and a child and a dead mother waiting on you, you do not pull over on a black highway at night for no reason. Not in nineteen seventy-eight. Not ever.

Something made him stop.

Melvin Lorenz's father — Ricky's grandfather — said the only thing there is to say about it, a year later, and it's the sentence I keep coming back to.

My wife had just died the day before. My son's murdered the next day. You can read about these things, but it's hard to imagine.

Three people in two fields. A stolen truck at an airport. No witnesses. No weapon. No motive anybody could name — because whatever was taken out of that man's wallet, nobody has ever been able to tell me how much it was, and I've looked. It doesn't appear in a single record I can find.

Somebody killed an entire family on the side of a highway, and the best guess anyone could make about why was: whatever cash a sergeant carries.

There was one more thing in that field that the investigators wrote down and couldn't use yet.

The dogs were alive.

SECTION 2 — THE MAN IN STILLWATER

Seventy miles northeast of that field, in Stillwater, a man named Ray Tackett stopped at a convenience store at about seven o'clock on the morning of the twenty-second.

Parked outside was a pickup with a camper shell on it. Two men were with it. Tackett got a good look at both of them — the kind of good look most of us never get and never need.

About half an hour later he saw the same truck outside a restaurant in Stillwater. He went in. The same two men were sitting there. And this time there was a woman with them.

Then he went about his day.

Over the twenty-second and twenty-third, the news came out of McClain County. A family. A highway. A missing pickup.

And Ray Tackett did the thing that almost nobody does. He picked up the phone.

He called the Stillwater police. He told them about the truck and the two men and the woman. On the twenty-sixth, investigators sat down with him, and on the twenty-seventh he sat with an artist from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and worked, line by line, until two faces came up out of the paper that looked like the men he'd seen.

The woman took longer. It was roughly six months before he went back and did a third sketch, of her.

I want to be honest with you about something here, because it matters later and I'd rather you hear it from me.

Investigators in the seventies used hypnosis. It was a real technique, taken seriously by real agencies, and it was used on more than one witness in this case, including Ray Tackett. And the first time he was shown a photo lineup, he wasn't sure — and he picked the wrong man.

Hold onto that. Both halves of it.

But in June of nineteen seventy-eight, none of that mattered yet, because there were no photographs to be unsure about. There were three sketches, three strangers, and a state that had no idea what it was looking at.

And then, for weeks, nothing happened at all.

SECTION 3 — SUNDAY NIGHT

Sunday, the sixteenth of July. Oklahoma City.

Sixteen-twenty Southwest Seventy-Fourth Street, at the corner of Seventy-Fourth and Pennsylvania. A Sirloin Stockade. If you weren't around then — it was a family steakhouse. Cafeteria line, cheap steak, a salad bar, families after church. There was one in every town of any size in this part of the country.

Six people were working the close that night.

At about a quarter past ten, a sixteen-year-old named Carlos Joy pulled into the lot.

He wasn't there to eat. He was there for his girlfriend. Her name was Terri Horst, she was fifteen, she waited tables there, and the two of them had known each other since they were little kids growing up across the street from one another. He'd come to drive her home.

The lot was quiet. He went to the door, and he hollered the way a sixteen-year-old hollers.

Hey Terri. You ready to go home?

Nothing came back.

He sat out there for a while. Somewhere around ten fifty-five he checked the time, and — this is a sixteen-year-old boy's answer to a bad feeling, and I love him for it — he got on the speaker in his car, pointed it at the building, and announced that this was the police and they had the place surrounded.

Nothing came back from that either.

A few minutes later another car pulled in. A man got out and called into the building the same way — hello, anybody here — and Carlos recognized the voice. It was one of the managers, Michael Click. He hadn't come because he was worried. He'd come because nobody had phoned in the night's receipts, and it was getting late, and he figured he'd better see what was going on.

The two of them went in together.

And what Michael Click found, he first understood as a beating. That's what he told the boy. They're all in the freezer. Somebody must have come in here and beat them up.

They had not been beaten.

The first Oklahoma City police officer through that freezer door was a sergeant named Lannie Mitchell, and years later, when somebody finally asked him, he did not reach for a careful word.

I opened the freezer door, he said, and all I could see was blood and brains.

It was a walk-in freezer. Not a room. The size of a closet. When investigators photographed it, there were five people on that floor, some of them fallen against stacks of cardboard boxes — boxes of ground beef patties, boxes of blue cheese — and the blood had run out across the floor and soaked into the cardboard.

Five.

Because a few minutes before those photographs were taken, paramedics had carried a sixth person out of that room alive.

Now I'm going to slow down, because this is the part of every story like this that gets rushed, and it's the only part that actually matters.

Six people.

Isaac Freeman was fifty-six years old. He was the janitor. He had turned fifty-six three days earlier.

Louis Zacarias was forty-three. He was the manager on that night — he's the one who went to the door. He'd built himself up from nothing; the way one of his daughters says it, he fought and clawed and made his business work. He had teenage girls at home. Four of them, by one account.

David Lindsey was seventeen.

David Salsman was fifteen — thirteen days short of his sixteenth birthday. Some accounts say sixteen, including people in his own family, and I'm not going to argue with his family about how old he was.

Those two boys, Lindsey and Salsman, had finished. They'd clocked out. Carlos Joy watched them from the parking lot, horsing around with each other in the back doorway on their way out into the summer night — and then he watched them turn around, like somebody had called them, and go back inside.

Like good employees do.

Anthony Tew was seventeen. His family called him Tony. He was working a summer job to save up for a promise ring for his girlfriend. And he was not supposed to be there that night at all. He was covering a shift for somebody who had called in.

Terri Horst was fifteen. She's the one who came out of that freezer alive.

They took her to Oklahoma Children's Memorial Hospital with gunshot wounds to her head and her chest. She died before anybody could get her into an operating room. There is a disagreement in the record about whether she was still breathing when the ambulance arrived at the hospital or whether she went in the back of it, and I'm not going to pretend I can settle that. What is true either way is that she was alive when they carried her out of that room, and it did not save her.

Her boyfriend was standing in the parking lot.

Four of the six were teenagers. Two of them had already finished their shift. One of them was covering for somebody else. One of them had a boy waiting outside in a car to take her home.

That's what a Sunday night close at a steakhouse in nineteen seventy-eight looked like. That's who works it. Kids saving for something, and grown men doing the jobs that keep a building running after everyone else goes home.

The office safe was open. About twelve hundred and ninety dollars was gone out of it. The registers had already been emptied for the night.

Twelve hundred and ninety dollars.

I want to sit on that number for a second, because everything else in this episode hangs off it. Six people were shot to death in a freezer the size of a closet, in a steakhouse, on a Sunday night, for less money than a lot of people in this country carry as a car payment.

And the men standing in that room had no suspect, no witness who saw a face, and no idea — not the faintest idea — that they had already been looking for these people since June.

SECTION 4 — A CITY THAT STARTED LOCKING ITS DOORS

You have to understand what Oklahoma City was in the summer of nineteen seventy-eight, because it is not the Oklahoma City you're driving through now.

Grease was in the theaters. So was Jaws 2. Andy Gibb was all over the radio. Gas was somewhere around sixty-five cents. The Sooners were about to be very good again. It was hot, the way it is here, and people ran their errands early and sat out late.

And nothing like this had ever happened here.

The district attorney at the time was a man named Andy Coats, and decades later he described it about as plainly as it can be described.

It was almost like a rite of passage for Oklahoma City. We'd never had any — we'd had murders occasionally, but nothing like this.

The people who were working in this town that summer tell it the same way. A television photographer who covered it said the biggest thing they'd had going before that was tornadoes. A young man named Kevin Ogle — twenty years old, home from college, who'd spend the next forty years anchoring the news in this city — sat and watched the coverage with his girlfriend and couldn't believe it, because nothing like that had ever happened like that in Oklahoma.

And what he remembers most is the fear.

People were afraid until they were caught. I remember a lot of people loading up at the home to make sure nobody did that to them.

That's the phrase that got attached to this case and never came off. It was the crime that made people in Oklahoma City start locking their doors.

The restaurant chain put up a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for whoever committed what its own vice president called the execution-style murders of the restaurant crew.

Investigators went at it the only way you can go at a case with no name in it. An OSBI agent and an Oklahoma City detective traveled through seven states and interviewed sixty-eight people in four days. Hundreds of officers touched this thing.

And for eight months, they got nowhere.

Eight months. Think about what that is. That's a school year. That's Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's. That's four families in this city putting up a tree with a kid missing from the room, and nobody at any door with an answer.

And I want to say something about what that does to a place, because I think it's the part that gets left out when a case like this gets retold as a piece of trivia.

A murder with a suspect is a tragedy. A murder with no suspect is something else. It's a door that doesn't close. Every stranger in the parking lot is a maybe. Every kid who works a closing shift gets a phone call from a mother who won't go to bed. The restaurant on Seventy-Fourth reopened, and then it was a different restaurant, and then it was a different one after that, and then the building came down — and people in this city will still tell you exactly where it stood, in a parking lot, forty-eight years later.

There is no marker there. No plaque, no monument, nothing with six names on it. I looked. In a state that memorializes almost everything, six people were shot to death in a freezer and there is nothing at all on that corner to say so.

Meanwhile, out at the Bureau and downtown at the police department, men were doing the only thing there was to do — running down a station wagon somebody almost hit, running down every gun report in three states, and waiting for something they couldn't manufacture.

SECTION 5 — THE SACK

Which brings us back to a paper sack.

The third of September, nineteen seventy-eight. Northeast Oklahoma City. A boy holding up three pistols and asking if he can keep one.

When those guns hit the comparison microscope, the case broke open in a way that nobody had prepared for — because they matched in two directions at once.

They matched the bullets from the freezer.

And they matched the bullets from a field beside Interstate 35 in McClain County.

Two of those three pistols had belonged to Melvin Lorenz. The Air Force sergeant. They had been his — taken off him or out of his truck on the night he died — and then carried into a steakhouse twenty-four days later and used on six children and grown men in a walk-in freezer.

The third gun traced back to a pawn shop down in Purcell that had been broken into.

So now the state of Oklahoma knew something it had not known that morning.

This was one case. Nine people. One set of hands, or one set of people, moving around this state in the summer, killing whoever was in front of them for whatever was in the register.

Now — I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this floating around online that tells you exactly which one of them carried which make and model of pistol, right down to the manufacturer. I chased that all the way down. It traces back to a website that cites a court record, and the court record doesn't say it. Not one opinion in this entire case names a make, a model, or a caliber.

So I'm going to tell you what the record actually supports. Three pistols. In a sack. Found by a ten-year-old.

What the state still didn't have was a name.

What it had was three sketches — two men and a woman, drawn from the memory of Ray Tackett, the man in Stillwater who'd made one phone call and then gone back to his life.

In the first days of January, nineteen seventy-nine, those sketches went out everywhere. Television. Newspapers. Statewide.

And then the phone rang.

A man called in. He was drunk. He said he was a truck driver. He said he recognized two of the three faces on those sketches — said he'd partied with them, up in Tulsa.

And then he gave the police their names.

Harold Stafford.

And Verna Stafford.

He did not give his own name. He hung up.

Here's the thing.

There were three faces on those sketches.

He'd named two of them.

The third one was him.

I have read a lot of case files, and I have never gotten over this one. The single break in the biggest murder case in the history of this state — eight months, hundreds of officers, seven states, sixty-eight interviews in four days — came from the killer, drunk, on the telephone, turning in his own brother and his own wife.

The court that later reviewed all of it put it in about the flattest language a court can manage. The sketches prompted him to call the police himself and identify Harold and Verna. And it was that phone call which set in motion the events that ended in his arrest.

His name was Roger Dale Stafford. He was twenty-seven years old.

SECTION 6 — CHICAGO

Harold Stafford was the easy one to find, and the impossible one to talk to.

He was already dead.

Six days after that Sunday night at the steakhouse — the twenty-second of July, nineteen seventy-eight — Harold Stafford went down on a motorcycle in Tulsa and was killed. He was never questioned. He was never charged. He never answered one single question about any of it, and he never will.

But a body has visitors.

And the way one account of this case has it, a woman came to the funeral home in Tulsa to see Harold Stafford's body — and investigators, eventually, traced her.

To Chicago.

That's where Verna Stafford was. In Chicago, with her children.

There are three or four versions of exactly how she was located and brought back, and they don't line up cleanly with each other. What isn't in dispute is where she ended up: in an interview room in Oklahoma City, on the eighth of March, nineteen seventy-nine, across from an Oklahoma City detective named Harrison and an OSBI agent named Greg Shields.

She started by telling them she had never been to Oklahoma City.

She told them none of them had. Not her, not Harold, not Roger. Never been here.

That interview ran a hundred and sixty-six pages.

I want you to hold that number the way I do. A hundred and sixty-six pages of transcript is not a conversation. That is hours. That is a woman in a room with two men who already know she's lying, and a table, and a tape running, and no exit — and everything she says in the first stretch of it is a wall.

Somewhere in those hundred and sixty-six pages, she stopped.

And then she started telling them things nobody could have known unless they were standing in the room.

She drew them a diagram of the inside of the Sirloin Stockade. She went through the guns — what kinds, who had them. She took investigators to the pawn shop down in Purcell where one of the pistols came from. She took them out to the spot on Interstate 35 and showed them where the family had been standing.

And she took them to the restaurant.

And when they got there, the way it was reported at the time, she put her hands over her face and said three words.

All that blood.

On the eleventh of March, a woman named Pam Lynch — who, seven days after the steakhouse murders, had told an Oklahoma City detective about a station wagon that nearly hit her leaving the area that night, and about the man behind the wheel — was shown a set of photographs. She had never been shown a picture of him. She had never seen the sketches.

She picked him out.

Two days later, on the thirteenth of March, nineteen seventy-nine, Chicago police walked into the lobby of a YMCA and arrested Roger Dale Stafford.

He didn't fight extradition. According to the papers at the time, he waived it — because he wanted to come to Oklahoma.

He wanted to clear his name.

Think about the shape of that for a second. Eight months earlier he had been a man nobody in the state of Oklahoma could have picked out of a crowd. He got drunk and called the police and handed them his brother and his wife. His brother was already dead in a ditch outside Tulsa. His wife had already sat in a room for a hundred and sixty-six pages. And when they finally put a hand on him in a YMCA lobby in Chicago, his instinct was to hurry back here.

Nine months in, this case had gone from having no name in it to having every name in it — and almost none of it came from police work. It came from a boy with a sack, a man in Stillwater who made a phone call, and a family that turned on itself.

SECTION 7 — WHAT SHE SAID HAPPENED

Now we come to the part of this case that I have to hand to you carefully, because everything from here forward rests on one person.

Almost everything we know about what happened on that highway, and inside that freezer — who spoke, what was said, what order it happened in, why it happened at all — comes from Verna Stafford's mouth. The guns are physical evidence. The bodies are physical evidence. The story is not. The story is hers.

And she was a woman with every reason on earth to shape it.

So here it is. And I'll tell you where it's backed up and where it isn't.

They had come to Tulsa in June, all of them, with nothing. Roger, Verna, and their three children — the record calls them transients, which is a clean word for a family living out of a car. Harold turned up. They were broke, and they got to talking about what to do about that.

On the night of the twenty-first of June, the three of them drove down to Oklahoma City looking for something to rob. Everything they looked at was too busy. So they went down to Pauls Valley and drove motel parking lots, counting cars, trying to work out which one would have money in the drawer. None of them were worth it.

And on the way back north on Interstate 35, they came up with something better.

They pulled over. They raised the hood.

And Verna Stafford stood out where the headlights would find her, while the two men lay down in the dark beside the car.

That's the whole plan. That's the entire idea. Stand a woman by a broken-down car at night in Oklahoma and wait for somebody decent.

They didn't have to wait long.

A blue pickup with a white camper shell came off the road. A man got out. He walked over, and he looked at the engine, and he told her he couldn't find anything wrong with it.

Then the two men came up out of the dark and told him to hand over his wallet.

And Melvin Lorenz — thirty-eight years old, a long way from home, with his wife and his boy sitting in that truck behind him and his mother lying in a funeral home in North Dakota — told them where he was going. He told them he was on his way to his mother's funeral. And he told them he would give them some of his money, but not all of it.

He was shot twice.

His wife heard it and came running. Verna Stafford knocked her to the ground, and Roger Stafford shot her as she went down.

And then they heard the dogs.

And under the dogs, a child's voice, calling from the back of the camper.

Verna Stafford's account of what got said next is the worst thing in this file, and I'm going to give it to you the way she gave it. Harold said there was no sense in killing the little boy, because he couldn't testify. And Roger said it wasn't wise to leave anybody to testify to anything.

He took out a knife. He cut a hole in the screen of that camper. And he fired into the dark, at a voice.

Then they dragged the parents into a field, and drove the boy three-quarters of a mile up the road and left him in a different one.

Twenty-four days later they drove to Oklahoma City and sat in a parking lot until the last customer left the Sirloin Stockade.

Roger Stafford knocked on the side door. Louis Zacarias opened it and found two guns pointed at him. They walked him to the register, and then to the office, and while they emptied the safe, Zacarias — forty-three years old, with a gun on him and his crew in the building — argued with them. He told them he couldn't understand why a man would rob other people instead of working for himself.

Then everybody was put in the freezer and told to sit down on the floor.

They asked, more than once, if they were going to be okay.

And they were told, more than once, that nobody was going to get hurt.

Then Roger Stafford asked his brother to come help him in the freezer, and Harold said the thing that tells you what the plan had actually been.

He said nobody was supposed to be hurt.

And his brother said: they are going to get what they deserve.

He shot Isaac Freeman first. And there is no soft way to say the next part, so I'm going to say it the way the record says it, which is that of the six people in that freezer, the one he turned to first was the only Black man in the building.

Then Louis Zacarias.

Then both of them opened up on the four teenagers.

Verna Stafford said she was outside the freezer, and that what she heard was a lot of gunfire, and a lot of screaming.

And then, she said, her husband came out, and took her hand, and put his gun into it.

And helped her pull the trigger.

That sentence is the reason we are talking about this case in twenty twenty-six instead of leaving it in nineteen seventy-eight where it belongs. Everything that has happened to Verna Stafford in the last forty-six years turns on that one moment — on whether it was the second she became a murderer, or the second she was made into one.

And I have to be straight with you about it: that account of that moment comes from her.

Here's the one thing outside her own mouth that speaks to it.

The next night, at midnight, in the parking lot of a motel in Tulsa, a woman who worked there as a maid heard yelling outside her window and looked out. She saw Roger Stafford slap his wife hard enough to put her back against the car. She heard Verna say she was going to call the police. And she heard him answer.

Go ahead. You'll be in as much trouble as I would.

And in one telling of what that maid heard, Verna Stafford said this back to him:

But I didn't kill them, Roger. You did.

I'll tell you honestly — that maid gave that testimony twice, in two different rooms, and the two versions of it that survive are not identical. In one, that line is there. In the other, it isn't; she just says "no."

So take it for exactly what it is. Somebody standing in a motel parking lot at midnight, listening to two people who had just done something, argue about which one of them did it.

They've been arguing about it ever since.

SECTION 8 — THE RECKONING

In October of nineteen seventy-nine, Roger Dale Stafford went on trial in Oklahoma County for the six people in the freezer.

His lawyers had asked to move it somewhere else, and you can see why. But to move a trial you have to bring the court sworn statements from people in the county saying he couldn't get a fair hearing there. The defense came in with nine. The state came back with fifty. And his own attorney told the court that he had interviewed a hundred and fifty-one people to get those nine — that the rest of them either didn't want to be involved, or told him flat out that Roger Dale Stafford ought to be tried and hanged right there in Oklahoma County.

The trial stayed put.

There was a camera in that courtroom. Stafford agreed to it on the record. It was one of the first times — possibly the first time — a camera was ever allowed into a courtroom in Oklahoma County, which tells you exactly how big this had gotten.

His defense was that he was drunk at home in Tulsa that night. They put in a time card from a factory. They pointed out that he didn't wear glasses and the sketch did.

The jury was out twenty-seven minutes.

Then they came back a second time, after another forty-eight minutes, and recommended that he die. Six times. Once for each person in the freezer.

Five months later they tried him again, down in Purcell, for the Lorenz family. Three more counts. Three more death sentences.

And at that second sentencing — the one where a man's life is supposed to be argued over — neither side put on any evidence at all. Not the state, and not the defense. Years later a federal appeals court would look at what his lawyer did in that phase and say it fell well below the professional standard.

And then affirm the death sentences anyway.

There's one more thing about those trials that I don't want to skip, because it's the part the families had to live through twice.

The photographs from that freezer went in front of both juries. His lawyers fought to keep them out — that's their job, and honestly it's the right fight to pick, because photographs like that don't inform a jury so much as they detonate in one. The court let them in anyway, and the reason it gave is worth hearing. It said the pictures showed where the bodies were and how the wounds were made.

And it said they corroborated Verna Stafford.

That's the whole architecture of this case in a single line. Six photographs of five dead people, admitted in part to prop up the credibility of the woman who was standing outside the door.

Now. Verna.

On the fourteenth of March, nineteen eighty — one week after her husband was convicted of killing the Lorenz family, and three days before he was sentenced for it — Verna Stafford pleaded guilty.

Not to nine murders. Not to six. To two counts of second-degree murder.

One count for Linda Lorenz.

One count for Terri Horst.

The woman who ran toward her husband on a highway, and the fifteen-year-old waitress whose boyfriend was waiting in the parking lot. The two females among the nine.

And her sentence was ten years to life on each count, running at the same time.

Which brings me to the single most misreported fact in this entire case, and I want to walk you through it slowly, because almost every article written about Verna Stafford in the last two months gets it wrong.

In nineteen eighty-nine, Verna Stafford went back to court and asked for her sentence to be cut. Her argument was technical and it was correct: the sentencing law they'd used on her in nineteen eighty had been taken off the books in nineteen seventy-six. Her sentence wasn't just harsh. It was legally void. She asked the court to make it a flat ten years.

She was right.

The judge agreed with her, and threw the sentences out. And then he offered her something — the chance to take her guilty pleas back and start over.

She said no.

And he sentenced her to two life terms, to be served one after the other.

She asked for ten years. She walked out with two consecutive life sentences. Her conviction was never overturned. There was never a second trial. And that decision — hers — is the reason she is still in a cell in Oklahoma tonight.

SECTION 9 — SEVENTEEN YEARS

What happened to Roger Dale Stafford after that took seventeen years, and it changed the law of this country.

His case went up and came back and went up again. The Supreme Court of the United States sent it back once. The Oklahoma courts reweighed his death sentences twice — including throwing out one of the legal findings the Lorenz death sentences had been built on, and then rebuilding them without it. A federal appeals court found real fault with his lawyer and affirmed anyway. By one senator's count, Roger Dale Stafford made at least eighteen appearances in state and federal courts, six of them at the Supreme Court of the United States.

And there is a detail in there that will bother you if you let it. He was convicted twice, in two counties, for nine murders — and the warrant they actually executed him on was the highway. The Lorenz family. The federal appeal on the six people in the freezer was still pending when he died; a week later a court dismissed it, because there was no longer anybody to argue about.

The men and the boys and the girl in that freezer are the reason this case has a name. And legally speaking, they are not why he was put to death.

By the summer of nineteen ninety-five he had become a symbol, and everybody in Oklahoma politics reached for him. On the seventh of June that year — six weeks after the Murrah Building came down in downtown Oklahoma City — Senator Don Nickles stood up on the floor of the United States Senate and used Roger Dale Stafford as his central exhibit in the fight over how long a death penalty appeal ought to take.

Seventeen years ago he murders teenagers, Nickles said. He murders an innocent family that is trying to help him out, and he is still on death row. That is not justice delayed, that is justice denied.

The reforms he was arguing for became federal law the next year.

Nickles also mentioned, almost in passing, that Stafford's appellate attorney had just been appointed to represent a man named Timothy McVeigh.

On the twenty-sixth of June, nineteen ninety-five, a clemency board heard from Louis Zacarias's widow.

The wounds have never healed in seventeen years, she told them. Let this final appeal be the end of our nightmares and the beginning of a healing for all.

At twenty-two minutes past midnight on the first of July, nineteen ninety-five, at the state penitentiary in McAlester, the drugs started.

He had spoken for about three minutes before that. He told the witnesses they were watching an innocent man be murdered. He asked somebody, somewhere, somehow, to exonerate him. He told his third wife — a woman he'd married on death row seven years earlier — that he loved her, and that she should meet him at heaven's gate.

Two minutes after it started, he said two more words. Oh, God.

He was pronounced dead at twelve-thirty in the morning.

And two days later, on the third of July, an envelope was mailed from McAlester, Oklahoma to an assistant attorney general named Sandy Howard — the lawyer who had spent four and a half years fighting his appeals.

Inside it was a five-dollar gift certificate to a Sirloin Stockade restaurant. Bought at a location in El Reno the year before. The front of it said: Five Dollar Sirloin Stockade Gift Certificate. Always in Good Taste.

On the back, in his handwriting:

Hey, you got away with it. I am murder and you help do it. I am innocent and you know it.

And it was signed with his name and his prison number.

The morning he died, the newspaper in this city ran a line about him that I don't think has ever been improved on.

He spent more time on death row than two of his victims — the Lorenz boy and Terri Horst — were alive on Earth.

SECTION 10 — MONDAY MORNING

Roger Dale Stafford has been dead for thirty-one years. Harold Stafford has been dead for forty-eight.

Verna Stafford is seventy-three years old, and she is in a prison in the state of Oklahoma, and this week the state has to decide what to do with her.

She has been turned down for parole before. In two thousand eleven — unanimously. Again in two thousand fourteen. Again in seventeen. Again in twenty. Again in twenty twenty-three.

This year is different, and here's the technical reason why. Her two life sentences run one after the other, and the second one only became eligible for parole on the first of June this year. Both of them are on the table at the same time for the first time in her life.

In June, the Pardon and Parole Board voted to move her forward. Not to release her — to advance her to the next stage. It was not unanimous. On the tenth and eleventh of August, she goes back in front of that board in person.

So let me put both sides of it in front of you, as fairly as I know how.

For her: there would be no case without her. Nobody was ever going to be convicted of nine murders on three pistols in a paper sack. She talked, and she kept talking, and she drove investigators to the pawn shop and the highway and the restaurant. She has served forty-six years. And the district attorney who prosecuted this case said publicly, years later, that he did not contemplate she'd be in prison for the rest of her life.

Against her: she is the one who stood in those headlights. She is the reason that truck stopped. She knocked Linda Lorenz to the ground. She held six people at gunpoint in a steakhouse while the safe was emptied. And by her own account, her hand was on the gun at the end.

And there is a third thing, which is neither for her nor against her, and which is the reason I wanted to do this case tonight instead of in six months.

Nobody is neutral about this and nobody is quiet about it. The president pro tempore of the Oklahoma Senate wrote the board a letter last week and asked its members, before they voted, to sit and read nine names and the ages the people attached to them were when they died. A niece of one of the victims has a petition going. Two of the families have gone on television in the last eight weeks and said out loud what it's like to get a letter in the mail telling you that this is happening again.

Because that's the part nobody mentions. Every time she comes up for parole, seven families get notified. Every three years, since at least two thousand eleven, somebody's phone rings.

Anthony Tew's niece put it in a sentence that I have not been able to shake.

She still has birthdays. She still has Christmases. She still has meals. She still sleeps and wakes up every morning. And we don't get that.

And Louis Zacarias's daughter said this.

All the victims are serving the life sentences. And we, as the families, have continued to serve that life sentence.

Here's where I land, and then I'm going to get out of your way, because it isn't my vote and it isn't yours.

I keep going back to a paper sack in a vacant lot, and a ten-year-old boy who could have shot himself with somebody else's murder weapon. That's how close this came to never being solved at all. It wasn't good police work that broke this case, in the end. It was a child, and a drunk phone call, and a woman who decided to talk.

Nine people are dead. One person who was standing there is still alive. And she is alive, and out of a death sentence, and up for parole this week, precisely because she is the one who told us what happened.

I don't know what you do with that.

I'm not sure anybody does.

SIGN-OFF

That's the case.

If you want the court records, the parole docket, the sketches — all of it's at Section29.com, and so is a list of everywhere the sources contradict each other, because on this one they do it constantly.

Thank you for spending this hour with me. Take care of the people in your house. And just know that you are unique, you are special and you are loved.

I'll see you next time.

[SUPPORT ASK — after the sign-off]

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