The Happiest Meal

Jenks, Oklahoma, sits in Tulsa County about twenty-five minutes from Tulsa, on the Arkansas River. It began in 1904 as a community site for the Midland Valley Railroad and was named after the railroad's owner and director, William Henry Jenks. It was platted in 1905 after a petroleum discovery, and the Glen Pool oil well brought a boom. When oil production waned, agriculture took over, and Bulgarian immigrants began farming in the 1920s. The town flooded repeatedly from the early 1900s into the 1950s; in the floods of the 1920s and 1930s every building but the three-storey school was covered. Two men and one woman stayed on the roof of the school with a shotgun, a boat and a tent for weeks. The Army Corps of Engineers eventually built a levee, and a 1986 flood was contained.

By 1996 Jenks had a population of 24,257. Trisha Jane Ruddick Stemple was thirty. this part of the story is covered for now Both came from religious, conservative families; Sean's father was a minister. Trisha became pregnant soon after they met, they married, and had a son and, five years later, a daughter. Sean drifted through jobs, landscaping, deliveries, pest control, and never settled. Trisha went to work for a Christian ministry, was promoted and became the family's breadwinner, later adding a job at a doctor's office. Sean's main daily duty was driving the children to school. On the way home he stopped at the McDonald's drive-through in Jenks, where he met eighteen-year-old Danny Wood.

The affair became intense and increasingly kinky: Danny would invite other men over while Sean hid in the closet and watched; he tied her up and left her for hours. He told her he would leave his wife. He also had a $600,000 life insurance policy on Trisha and had added $350,000 of accidental-death cover in the past year. Between 1987 and 1996 the couple had made claims from five car accidents, two burglaries and two fires, collecting $213,211.

On October 10, 1996, Sean arranged the first attempt. details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it Sean arrived alone: Trisha was sick. He shouted into the weeds that the bitch could not make it, and the plan was postponed.

On October 24, 1996, Trisha left for Walmart at about two in the morning. At 3.30 a.m. Sean called police to say she had not come home, then drove out to look while officers searched. They found her black Nissan Maxima on the shoulder of US Highway 75 with a flat front tyre and no sign of her. At about seven that morning a man driving to work saw her body in the tall grass about a hundred to two hundred yards away. The autopsy found her skull and several vertebrae crushed, her pelvis crushed, seventeen ribs broken, and her sternum and an arm broken.

A Crime Stoppers caller reported seeing two men and a woman fighting beside a black Nissan Maxima in the middle of the night. A second caller reported an older red pickup parked behind it. Tyre shop owner Rick Robertson examined the tyre: it had not been driven on while flat, and the hole had spiral cuts inside it, as though it had been drilled. Police found tyre tracks running off the road and back on, and burnout marks on the shoulder.

The case stalled until a neighbouring police department called. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed The truck was traced to a seventy-year-old man in Tulsa, who said he had sold it three months earlier to a man in a wig named Sean Stemple. Inspection found blood matching Trisha, cloth fibres similar to her clothing, and front-end damage consistent with running over a person repeatedly.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now Confronted with the truck evidence, he told the whole story. details of the account remain covered until revealed She then told police everything because Sean had said he would have left her there too.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it They videotaped an interrogation in which Sean said he knew how bad it looked, listed the insurance and the affair as motive, motive, motive, whatever, and then said: I was out there that night. People have seen me, so I was there, right? Or close to it. Oh my god, I'm dead. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed He requested a large stuffed-crust pizza with extra cheese, half pepperoni and half Canadian bacon, and a two-litre bottle of orange soda with ice, and gave no last words. Trisha is buried at Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it