1899
In 1899 Jacob Bartles, son-in-law of Delaware Chief Charles Journey Cake, bought a grist mill on the north bank of the Caney River where Bartlesville now stands.
about 0:11:09The story
Dewey sits in Washington County in north-eastern Oklahoma, about fifteen miles from the Kansas border and fifty minutes from Tulsa. In the early 1980s it was a small town of roughly 3,500 people, and it is where the first of this story's two killings happened.
Daryl Wayne Hill was born in 1940 and raised around Sperry, Oklahoma. His father was a career criminal, and Daryl followed him into crime. In 1961, aged twenty-one, Daryl married seventeen-year-old Virginia. They had met at high school, lost touch and met again in a drug rehabilitation facility. Both were heavy users, and they carried on using through Virginia's pregnancy. On 17 March 1962 Virginia gave birth to a son, William Patrick Hill, known as Billy.
When Billy was a month old Daryl announced that he was taking the boy and leaving. Four months after the birth, Daryl and his own father were caught burgling a gas station; police shot and killed Daryl's father. Virginia took Billy to visit him there, and it was the last time the boy saw his father. She was a single mother addicted to drugs, and when Billy was a little over eight months old she gave him up for adoption.
Jeff's adoptive parents already had a well-behaved older daughter. Jeff was different. He was cited for curfew violations and public drunkenness and wrecked two of his parents' cars in alcohol-related accidents.
By August 1982 he had a wife, an infant son and a menial job, and seemed to be putting a normal life together.
On 24 August 1982 the couple took their baby to a party at Gordon Aiken's trailer in Dewey. Jeff and his best friend Greg Brown, who had recently asked Jeff to be his son's godfather, began needling each other and arguing about who would win in a fight. Brown pushed Jeff against the trailer wall and invited him outside. According to Aiken, Jeff went out with a knife hidden behind his back. Aiken went to fetch a rifle, and David Dayton took it from him and pointed it at Jeff. Jeff lunged at Brown and stabbed him twice in the chest, then ran between two cars. Brown collapsed and died.
Jeff ran to Alvin Burns's machine shop and told him, 'I just wasted a guy.' Police picked him up. I don't take that shit off nobody. I cut him twice.'
One judge dissented.
Jeff knew he was adopted and that his birth surname was Hill. Father and son began writing to each other. Daryl said: 'It don't take anyone too smart to look at three generations of outlaws and see that there's a link of some kind, that there's a pattern.'
The man survived the stabbing but was found hanged in his cell two weeks later.
Despite that record, in 1989 Jeff was placed on a minimum-security work crew. He met a woman in a park and slipped away from the crew to have sex with her. On 11 November 1989 he simply walked off and headed for Arizona, hoping to find his birth mother, Virginia, who he had heard was in Yuma.
He stopped in Phoenix. On 13 December 1989 he met Chester Dean Dreyer, forty-two, who worked at a health club and part-time in a bar, at a Burger King. Dreyer was known for picking up younger men and flashing money, and he had just been paid. He took Jeff home and telephoned his friend Michael three times that evening: first to say he had picked up a man named Jeff and they were drinking beer; fifteen minutes later, during sex, to announce that he was having sex with Jeff; and again to ask whether Michael could find Jeff a job. Jeff also spoke to Michael.
On 14 December Dreyer failed to appear at the health club and did not answer his phone. On the Friday a co-worker and two others went to his apartment and found him dead, fully clothed, face down on the bed in a pool of blood with an electrical cord around his neck. He had cuts to his face and puncture wounds across his body; a half-eaten sandwich and a small screwdriver lay beside him. A deck of pornographic playing cards was spread over the bed and the ace of hearts was propped on his back. The flat had been ransacked: drawers and cupboards were open, clothes and newspapers lay on the floor, a Christmas present had been opened and left empty, there were two plates and two forks, an open jar of mayonnaise and a five-pound bag of sugar spilled on the floor with a clear sneaker print in it. The money from his paycheck was the only thing missing. The cause of death was ligature strangulation after he had been knocked unconscious by blows to the head.
Days later police saw Jeff and another man stealing a car and then trying to break into an abandoned house in Phoenix. He first denied knowing Dreyer, then admitted being there but claimed Dreyer had made a sexual advance, so he beat him up and left. Seven fingerprints from the scene matched him and the print in the sugar matched his sneaker, including a cut in the sole.
Jeff refused to let either of them testify and told the judge there were no mitigating circumstances. When he was allowed to speak he called his victim a slur, said the whole thing stank and told the judge that if she wanted to give him the death penalty she should bring it on.
By then his case had become an attempt to argue that his genes and his first six months of life had programmed him to kill: his grandfather, his father and he himself formed three generations of outlaws. A psychologist diagnosed brain dysfunction, and a neuropsychological evaluation in 1998 blamed his genetic makeup, exposure to drugs in the womb, early maternal rejection and his troubled adoptive family.
Two semen samples did not match him, and later blood testing found two contributors, one assumed to be Dreyer and the other not Jeff. His last words were thanks to his family and friends, ending with 'Boomer Sooner'.