1887
The city of Woodward was established in 1887.
about 0:04:56The story
In September 1974 Woodward, Oklahoma, a small oil town in western Oklahoma, was the scene of one of the worst crimes in Woodward County's history. Mervyn Thrasher, 28, and his wife Sandra, 27, had moved to Woodward in January with their five-year-old daughter Penelope and their 18-month-old son Robert. In late August someone broke into their house during the day and took a .22 rifle and a number of Eisenhower silver dollars.
On 2 September, the Monday of Labor Day weekend, Mervyn's boss, Bob Pattee, telephoned at 4.30 in the morning and asked him to come in. Mervyn went and helped repair an engine. At eight o'clock Pattee called again; Mervyn said he could not return for a couple of hours and never came back. On the Tuesday he did not appear at all and did not answer the telephone. After a long day at work Pattee drove to the house at about 10.30 that night. He shone a flashlight through a window, saw Sandra on the floor and called the police.
Officers found Mervyn and Sandra face down on the bedroom floor. Mervyn's feet were tied and his hands bound behind his back; he had been shot three times in the head. Sandra had been hogtied, her feet pulled up and tied to her hands, and shot twice in the head. In another room the two children were dead in their bunk beds. Robert had been shot twice, in the tip of his nose and the base of his head; Penelope three times. All four were fully clothed, jewellery and valuables were untouched, and the medical examiner found that Sandra had also been raped. The murder weapon, a .22, was gone, but shell casings in the bedroom matched casings found in the yard of the family's old house in Guyman.
The state crime bureau set up roadblocks and searched every vehicle leaving Woodward. He was discharged from the reformatory in December 1972, seven months early. He moved to Woodward in the summer of 1974 and took the job at the truck stop.
At first he denied the burglary and said a hitchhiker called Jerry Prowess had turned up at his house on 28 August with cigarettes, a shaver and a rifle, and left on 1 September. Then he admitted taking part in the burglary. Then he said he had gone to the house on the day of the murders but left before Prowess did anything. The hitchhiker, he said, was a bearded, long-haired man, 5ft 9in and 170lb, who threatened to kill him. In one statement he said, 'I can see them in my sleep at night... that little girl was still asleep... that little boy just looked at the gun.' He later denied saying it. He said he drove Prowess eight miles north of Woodward and left him walking away with a knapsack and the .22 lever-action rifle.
No Jerry Prowess could be found. Enquiries to every state were negative; New Jersey had a record for a Jerry Prowell, with two l's, who was dead, 93 and half blind. His alibi was that he left work at 6.30 on the morning of the murders and drove towards Canadian, Texas, got lost near the Kansas border, returned at 9.15 and bought tennis shoes at Gibson's Discount Store. The shoes' tread matched footprints at the house, but the store did not open until 8.55 and the receipt was after the killings. His fingerprints were not found at the scene; the technician said many prints were smudged.
By 2009 the rifle had been recovered: someone had pulled it out of a pond in Woodward in the 1980s and it was identified as the murder weapon.