Denton Family Murder

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This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised.

Can you tell us what happened that night in May of 1970?

Not much that people knew about happened that night, although a neighbor I think did report hearing a scream.

Welcome to The Knife.

I'm Patia Eaton.

I'm Hannah Smith.

This week, we speak with Beth Denton, who in 2009 started to look into the circumstances surrounding a murder of someone in her family.

We talk with Beth about her investigation of the crime that took place in 1970.

There are photos from Beth of her family members that we've posted on our Instagram account at the Knife Podcast.

If you want to see pictures of the people we're talking about in Beth's story, you can see them there.

Let's get into it.

My name is Beth Denton.

My pronouns are she slash they.

Awesome.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm really looking forward to getting into this interview and hearing your story.

It is different from a lot of the pitches that we've received generally for the podcast because it has to do with your whole family.

But before we get into that, can you give us just a little bit of information about who you are and sort of where you grew up?

I'm a special education teacher.

I also have a background in live action role-playing that included a lot of writing, which is sort of the context of this project sort of happened because I had that writing background.

I grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago in Homewood.

My mom actually grew up like one town over.

My dad is actually from, he was born in Little Rock.

He grew up in El Reno, Oklahoma, and came to the South suburbs as a teenager.

Both my parents were teachers.

They met sharing a classroom.

It's kind of the ultimate teacher, meet cute.

Yeah, you know, even now my family is really close knit.

We all moved to Colorado at about the same time.

My parents live in a house about 20 minutes away from me and my sister actually lives in the house right behind theirs.

They have a gate.

So we're still a really tight family.

I love that.

Okay, I have to look up El Reno.

Okay.

The ultimate teacher, meet cute.

That's aspirational.

I love that.

Yeah.

He was hired first.

And the first time he met her, he said, that is the tallest girl I have ever seen.

Well, he hasn't met us.

We're both really tall.

We are.

I mean, at the time, she was six feet tall.

So.

Oh, yeah.

That is tall.

That's how tall my mom is too.

Yeah.

She used to claim to be six feet, but I think technically she was like 5'11 and three quarters or something.

I'd claim six feet too.

She was legit six feet and people would be like, How tall are you?

And she would tell them 5'12.

You got to lean into that tall humor.

You really do.

You really do.

Yeah.

Can you take us to Thanksgiving of 2010?

It might have actually almost been 2009.

It was the year before I student taught.

And I was doing a second round of college to get my teaching degree.

So I had come home from Thanksgiving.

I was probably in the middle of one of my teaching clinicals.

So yeah, we were just hanging out.

And I had a lot of trouble sleeping and my dad had a lot of trouble sleeping.

We both have depression.

And we were watching TV and we were watching some kind of documentary and I turned to him and I said, what happened to the guy who killed cousin Patricia?

And he looked at me and he said, I don't actually know.

After the Thanksgiving leftovers were put away and everyone else went to bed, Beth and her dad stayed up and turned on the TV.

They started watching a true crime documentary.

And this is the moment when that question popped into Beth's head.

Whatever happened to that guy who killed cousin Patricia?

Asking this question out loud made Beth realize she had a lot of questions about Patricia.

She knew Patricia was killed in 1970, years before Beth was born, but the who and why and what actually happened, those were question marks filed away in the back of Beth's mind since childhood.

But that moment, watching TV with her dad on a Thanksgiving night, would launch Beth into her own investigation of the life and untimely death of her cousin Patricia.

I remember being a little kid and my grandma telling me a story about my cousin Patricia not wearing a seatbelt.

She was trying to get me to wear my seatbelt.

This must have been, it was before I was 10 years old, because it was while they were still living in Illinois, because they retired back to Arkansas.

And I remember being like, I have a cousin, Patricia, because Patricia was also my mom, is also my mom's name.

And she was like, well, not anymore.

My grandma sort of had this distinct cross between a British Columbian accident and a southern like Arkansas accent.

And she said, well, she was killed.

And that was sort of the end of that.

When you had this conversation with your dad at Thanksgiving and this question popped up about what happened to the man who killed my cousin, what did that conversation prompt you to do?

So we were sitting on the couch and he said, I don't know.

And I, to me, I was like, wow, we live in the information age.

Like, it should be possible to find out.

And sort of as we tick over into that semester, I started taking a creative writing nonfiction class, just as something to fill my schedule.

And,

you know, they wanted you to present a nonfiction project.

And I said, maybe this would make an interesting nonfiction project.

And I thought at that moment in time, I would be able to do like more research and maybe find some newspaper articles.

or request court documents or something.

And that turned out to be really hard.

What I discovered at that point was that newspapers seemed to be starting as far back in their records and digitizing forwards.

So they just didn't have a lot of digitized material from the 70s at that point.

And it made sense because you'd want to digitize like older things first, but it didn't help with my project.

Yeah.

Yeah.

As you set out to find more information, only very limited articles or maybe one article available, Was it discouraging or were you like, this makes me really feel like I need to dig deeper here?

It made me want to dig deeper.

I have ADHD, so I'm very like, I get really into my projects.

And I sort of had some visions of maybe going into Oklahoma and actually talking to him.

But what I ended up doing was I reached out to the Oklahoma Historical Society and the person who wrote me back, she said, I have to tell you, like, this was a bit of a shock to hear from you asking about this because I lived across the street.

My kids played with her kids, Patricia's kids, Melanie and Joey.

Wow.

Yeah.

And she sent me a a couple photos of them sitting on the front step.

What were the chances that this person at the Oklahoma Historical Society happened to know Beth's family members who she'd been researching?

Patricia and Patricia's two children, Melanie and Joey.

The coincidence felt like a good sign.

So in early 2010, Beth dove headfirst into her research, determined to answer the question, what really happened to Patricia Henderson?

And today, we're telling that story.

We're telling it with the help of Beth's research, including a paper she wrote in college, along with a letter from her grandmother from 1970, conversations Beth has had with her dad, and articles from the Daily Oklahoman, all published in the spring and summer of 1970.

But first, in order to really understand this story, we have to talk about the people who were closest with Patricia, like her mother, Maureen.

So Maureen was my grandfather's sister.

I met her when I was about 10 years old.

Before that, I had only maybe talked to her on the phone, like briefly once.

My grandparents had moved to Arkansas to live across the street from her.

She was a lot like a female version of my grandpa.

And so it's really hard for me to sort of describe her.

She was tough and she was a chain smoker.

And she had sort of gray, white, old lady, curly hair.

I absolutely adored her from the first time I met her.

We'd go to visit my grandparents and we'd go and spend about a week, usually on a school break.

And I tried to spend almost as much time with Maureen as I did with my grandparents.

She had a big organ in her house.

She could play the organ.

And she let me play the organ and didn't care that I had no idea what I was doing.

And when she'd get tired of that, she'd come and she'd play something and teach me to sing.

And all through my adolescence, music was really important.

And she was sort of that first music teacher for me.

And we'd go places and we'd go on trips to go see something or do some tourist thing.

And you'd have to go quite a ways because there just wasn't much going on in the Ozarks at that point.

And I would always want to ride with them, her and her husband, Ray.

She sounds great.

And I love the fact that she could play the organ.

Like, that's such a cool sounding instrument.

Yeah.

And I can just imagine her like chain smoking and playing the organ.

And it's just like so badass.

I don't know if she smoked near it.

Probably not.

Because they have gas in them, but.

Oh, okay.

Probably not then.

I didn't realize that.

Yeah.

Someone once explained it to me that that's how an organ works.

It's got pressurized gas.

You may have just saved Hannah's life.

I mean, I don't imagine that I'll be smoking near an organ anytime soon, but now I know that I should not do it.

At least now you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the movie version, though, cinematically, she'd be smoking, playing the organ.

Yeah.

Beth refers to Maureen as Aunt Maureen, although technically she was her great aunt, her grandfather's sister.

Maureen passed away in the late 1990s, but Beth has so many memories with her.

Gardening, listening to Maureen sing and play the organ, sneaking out for ice cream treats in the middle of the day, and also a few memories of Maureen mentioning that she'd once had a daughter, Patricia.

Maureen even gave Beth one of Patricia's belongings as a gift, a silk scarf.

Even as a kid, it was pretty clear to Beth that it was difficult for Maureen to talk about her daughter who had died.

Beth describes Maureen's relationship with her daughter, Patricia, as deeply loving, but also complicated, like so many mother-daughter relationships are.

One of the things that I distinctly remember learning about Patricia, and I will try to find the video, it's actually eight millimeter film footage that my dad digitized of her that Easter before everything happened, is that she was kind of a rebel.

If you look at the photos, everybody else is sort of dressed nicely and a little conservatively, but appropriately for spring in Oklahoma City.

And she's in the video and she's wearing all black, which, you know, it was 1970 that wasn't quite as common she was the only child of my aunt and my aunt had mostly raised her by herself so I guess Maureen you know she's a single parent trying to raise a kid and I think it was rough I think the way to describe sort of the denton branch of my family is just really stubborn we're all kind of stubborn and a little bit ornery and especially that generation my grandpa and his sister and brother.

Yeah, I can't imagine that it was an easy childhood for her.

She tried to run away once and they found her in the bus station with a ticket to her stepsister's in Texas.

And there was a point where Aunt Maureen and my great-grandmother, Amelia, actually talked about her maybe moving in with my dad and his family, but nothing ever came from it.

So Maureen bought this big old mansion, sort of kind of dilapidated, needed some work in Oklahoma City.

And, you know, they worked on it a little bit at a time just so Patricia would have a place to grow up because she complained about not having a real home.

So her goal was that the servants' quarters behind would be a rental so that she could rent them out to people and that would help them pay for the expense of the house.

A childhood photo of Patricia shows a girl with wavy brown hair, dark round eyes, and a sweet smile.

She was raised in the 1950s and 60s by her single mother, Maureen, a woman as strong-willed as Patricia would later become.

As she grew older, Patricia carved her own path.

She was independent and headstrong, which at times led to friction with her mother.

Wanting to provide stability, Maureen bought them a house in Oklahoma, a place that would become the backdrop for much of Patricia's life.

In the grainy Super 8 footage, the house stands quietly behind this scene of women in pastel dresses milling about the yard.

And then there's Patricia.

She appears in stark contrast, dressed in all black.

kneeling beside her children, Melanie and Joey.

It is the same house where Patricia once played as a child, child, where she came of age as a teenager.

And it's the same house where just months after this Easter of 1970, she would take her final breath.

It's a house layered with memories of Patricia's life.

My dad described it as a big two-story Georgian that had seen better days.

It had like a servant spell system, sort of the remains of it, and inground sprinklers that he and my dad came and got worked for them.

When she was young, Patricia had a lot of hobbies.

She would sort of pick up on one and do it for a while.

She loved to read, and she was the first person who introduced my father to the Lord of the Rings.

And like, it's kind of a big thing in our family.

He read it to my mom when she was pregnant with me.

He read it to me when I was five.

He read it to my sister again when I was five.

All of their cats have Lord of the Rings names, and she was sort of the person who started that.

So she graduated from high school in 1962, and she was supposed to go to business college, and Maureen paid for it all.

And then Patricia went off and got married.

to Gene Henderson.

It was the early 60s and maybe the cultural message that you didn't have to do that if you didn't want to.

I haven't come through yet.

You know, even for me as a sort of a child of the 80s, like I don't know that I would have decided not to get married and not to have kids if I hadn't had like another family member who was a role model for that.

So I could sort of see where she was like, nope, I'm ready.

I'm going to get married and we're going to have kids.

Yeah, I think in that time, right, it was like even sometimes the goals of some women who went to college was to find a husband, you know?

Yeah.

Not to say that people weren't ambitious, but I do think you're right that it was a very different cultural sort of outlook.

Yeah, you know, Maureen had this lived experience of having to be on her own and wanted to make sure that she was ready for that as a possibility.

But Patricia wasn't ready to do that.

So they had two kids, Melanie, who was the older of the two, and then kind of as a try to save the marriage move, everybody thinks then she had Joey, but she was really unhappy.

And

they ended up getting divorced, and Patricia moved back in with Maureen.

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This was the mid-1960s.

Patricia was in her early 20s, now divorced with two young children and living back with her mother, Maureen.

From speaking with Beth, it sounds like Patricia was still trying to find herself, unsure of what she wanted out of life, and she seemed to struggle with depression, although Beth doesn't think she ever got a diagnosis.

She took classes at University Hospital to be an orderly, but like,

she hung out kind of with, you know, motorcycle riders.

And again, it was the mid-60s, so it's still a little early for that.

And she fought with her mom about the kids a lot.

Maureen felt like Patricia did not do a great job of taking care of those kids, that she didn't pay enough attention to them, didn't make sure that they were well taken care of.

And the meanwhile, Maureen was super devoted to them.

Melanie was really shy as a special education teacher.

I've seen this.

She probably had selective mutism.

She just almost refused to talk to anybody.

So Maureen paid for her to go to the Montessori school.

That was sort of where Melanie really started to flourish.

Yeah.

You know, you mentioned that Patricia was unhappy.

Who did she confide in about that unhappiness?

Did she talk to anyone about it?

I think it was just obvious to everybody.

I see.

So it wasn't something people were talking about with her.

It was more of just an observation.

I don't know.

Sometimes I wish I had started this project before my grandma had passed away because I think she would have had more to say about it.

But that was certainly how my dad recalled it, that she was unhappy.

What was the living situation, situation, the living setup like in the house?

They were all back in the big house together for a while.

And then at some point, and it's a little hard to tell, there's some discrepancy between my dad's version of the story and my grandma's in her letter.

At some point, she decided just to make there, to be some kind of break so that she and Maureen would not be at their throats, that the boarder could move into the house.

and that she would go and live in the servants' quarters.

And she tore out a wall to make it, you know, doable.

So at that point in the 70s, when everything happened, they were living in the servants' quarters out back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, which is sort of like a separate back house.

Is that how you understand it?

Yeah.

Okay.

Once upon a time, I had the address and looked it up on Google Maps.

They're still there.

Yeah.

It was tiny.

It was pretty small.

Patricia's mother, Maureen, lived in the main house, along with a man named Ray, who was renting a room from her.

And then a little farther back on the property, there was a separate building, a small apartment.

That's where Patricia lived with her two children, Melanie and Joey.

Beth's father remembers Patricia well.

They were cousins and good friends for a time.

He recalls a trip he took in the spring of 1970.

He and his parents drove from Chicago to Oklahoma City.

It was the last time that he saw Patricia alive.

It was Easter break.

So yeah, they went that Easter and they spent time with the kids.

And that's when the eight millimeter film footage was taken.

And my dad is the sort of person,

I don't love the whole love languages thing because that guy's not even a psychologist, but my dad's absolutely an acts of service sort of person.

So whenever he went out there, he took care of something.

And so this particular trip, he was cleaning up in the yard.

And I think sort of there was a key memory there my dad has.

He noticed that the windows, which were not very high off the ground, he said maybe three feet, were unlocked.

And he talked to Patricia about it.

He said, Patricia, you ought to lock that window.

And she was like, well, I can't because Melanie is little and forgets her key because they walked home from school.

And so Melanie would climb into the window.

I think she would get Joey too and they would get into the house that way.

Yeah, such a different time, right?

Right.

Because Patricia was at work or busy.

So then her children, Melanie and Joey, Melanie was six or so and Joey was, I don't know how old Joey was.

Yeah, four or five at that point, I think.

And they were going to school down close by.

Yeah, in the neighborhood, I think.

And they would just like walk home.

Okay.

That probably like really wasn't that uncommon at that time.

I think the neighbors knew who they were.

Obviously, the people across the street did that I heard from later.

Yeah.

So I think they people looked out for them.

You know, just to kind of give you an idea of where Patricia was in her life at that point.

She took my dad when they were down there to run an errand and she blew a stoplight while they were on the errand.

And then it turned out that she didn't even have a driver's license.

And my dad was like, what can you even do with someone who makes decisions like that?

I think at that point, my dad had started to drift away from her a little because he was sort of getting his life together.

And she, you know, just seemed to be making sort of destructive choices.

Oh, and I guess the other thing that you sort of have to know is she did have a second husband.

His name was Howard Riggs.

It was a scam.

He scammed her.

He like married her and took a whole bunch of stuff from her and Maureen and ran away.

And by the time this happened in the summer of 1970, like how much time had passed between this and when Howard Riggs ran away from them?

I don't know.

I would guess a year or two, but not many.

Okay.

So your dad, during this visit at Easter, there's like these two memories that you point out in your papers that he mentions, oh, you should really get this window.

You should really lock it, you know, that would be safer.

And she decides not to.

And then he also has this memory of Patricia running a red light and then mentioning, well, I don't even have my driver's license.

Yeah.

And so this was sort of his last visit there.

Was there anything else that you recall him saying about that visit?

My grandma in her letter mentions that he went to the store and bought the kids Candyland and he played it with them for hours.

My dad is always super good with little kids.

Just every little kid.

who is even mildly related to him just has always adored him.

And it's because he will, like, he'll buy a game and he'll pay the attention to them.

And he's not bothered by doing the same thing over and over again with them.

And so I think that for him, that's kind of a good part of that memory is getting to spend that final time with them.

Can you tell us what happened that night in May of 1970?

Not much that people knew about happened that night, although a neighbor, I think, did report hearing a scream.

But it was kind of hard to say because Patricia and Maureen argued so much and yelled at each other so much that, you know, that wasn't all that unusual.

The next morning, and I think this is what Maureen told my father, Joey came into the house, into the big house, and he, you know, said,

mom and sissy are sleeping on the floor and I can't get them to wake up.

And I don't know if Ray went with her, but Maureen went with Joey and found their bodies.

Like, I can't even imagine.

Patricia really tried to fight her attacker off with everything that she had in the kitchen.

And Melanie, whose bed was right under that window, had been stabbed.

You know, my dad comments, even now, he's like, it's just a remarkable amount of misogyny.

He just ignored Joey and who stabs a little girl that many times.

Yeah.

So there were clearly signs of a fight in the kitchen.

And at that point, I mean, Maureen was distraught.

And sort of the narrator who next speaks to someone in my family is Ray, who was at that point her boarder.

They had met him very briefly,

you know, when they had been there for the visit, but he was the one to call my grandparents in Parr Forest.

You know, my dad answered the call and didn't think anything about it and passed it off to my grandfather.

And

my grandfather, you know, wandered back out and said, I don't know that I've ever spoken to this person in my life, but he's just said that, you know, Patricia and Melanie are dead and Marina's distraught and we need to get down there.

The bodies of Patricia and her daughter Melanie were discovered on May 3rd, 1970.

The very next day, the Daily Oklahoman's front page read, quote, young mother, child, die of stab wounds in city apartment.

The paper reported that Patricia was just 26 years old and her daughter Melanie was only seven.

Both had been stabbed by an unknown assailant who entered their apartment between the hours of 2 a.m.

and 4 a.m.

on Sunday, May 3rd.

Patricia's five-year-old son, Joseph, was unharmed.

Police suspected whoever killed Patricia and Melanie had entered through a window, probably the window right above Melanie's bed.

Patricia's body was found in her bedroom.

Police also discovered a kitchen knife, which they believed to be the murder weapon.

Nothing was missing from the apartment, so police ruled out robbery as a motive.

The article also mentions that they interviewed one of Patricia's ex-husbands, but they don't name him in the article.

Beth thinks that it was probably Patricia's first husband, the father of her children.

And then, you know, one of the documents that you have from your family is this letter that your grandmother wrote, which is dated May 12th, 1970.

And she's writing to someone else in your family.

Is that right?

Yeah, my grandma was one of eight children.

So she's writing to her sister, Lorraine, and her husband.

Because she had so many siblings to write to, she would write parts of the letter on carbon paper but i think this one might be an original document and she's chronicling in this letter what happened and that they were on their way to oklahoma yeah

it sounds like they basically got the information over this phone call and then were like okay let's pack up the car and drive

Yeah, there was it was the 70s and so there was some stuff that had to be done to the car before you had to take a road trip And so, my dad sat there.

My dad and my grandpa went together to wherever the dealership or the repair shop to get new tires put on the car.

And my dad finished up, it was spring, and he had to do progress reports.

And so, he, and in those days, I'm not even sure he had a calculator, so I'm pretty sure he had to hand do all the grades to put on the progress reports and write, you know, a couple days of sub-plans.

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The letter from Beth's grandmother starts by describing the shock and sadness of learning that Patricia and Melanie were dead.

It describes the state of chaos at Maureen's household that day, a phone ringing off the hook, police officers on the property.

It goes on to say, in part, quote, a neighbor in the night heard someone scream, no, no, don't do it.

And the police figured that was Patricia.

The neighbor had looked out and noticed the door to Patricia's side of the apartment was open and didn't see anything, so went back to bed.

The door was seen open at 6 a.m.

with a lamp burning, but at 8 a.m.

it was closed.

The letter goes on to say that Patricia was small in stature, but quote, put up a terrific struggle, so they figure whoever it was wasn't too big.

Have a man-sized seven and a half shoe print and one fingerprint.

We really feel the murderer got in through the door and was someone Patricia knew, although Maureen flatly refused to believe this at first.

The letter notes about Patricia's daughter, Melanie, who was only seven years old, quote, she had 12 stab wounds in her body, nine of them from the back.

In fact, we also feel she may have recognized someone and that person knew it.

Beth's grandmother is writing this letter from Oklahoma City after she and her family have arrived to support Maureen through the unthinkable loss of her daughter and granddaughter.

The whole letter is a snapshot of grief, confusion, and of a family rallying together to support one another in heartache while simultaneously attempting to piece together how something so terrible could have happened.

In the immediate aftermath of all of this, is there a conversation happening about why her, why her daughter, and who could be angry with them or fixated on them?

Yeah, no one was sure.

Like, it was kind of a mystery.

The police briefly interviewed Jean, her first husband, and I think he had an alibi.

And also, I think it was probably pretty clear from the scene that somebody was going to have defensive wounds.

So no,

I think they just spent a lot of time in just sort of terrible shock.

You know, my dad said that until they got to about Tulsa, and you could start hearing it reported on the news stations, on the radio, it didn't seem real.

Yeah, I think that's something that really stands out in this story.

You know, the time period, 1970, it's like this terrible tragedy happens.

And then you think like, a tragedy is horrible at any time.

If it happens now, you can just quickly get on a plane.

You have your phone and access to the internet where you can sort of quickly find out information and articles and like, what's the latest.

And it was just not that way.

It's like everything is moving in slow motion in a way.

Like they have to take this long road trip to Oklahoma.

And that's a really powerful moment when they get close enough.

when they get to Tulsa, which is like an hour and a half from Oklahoma City, they start to hear it on the news.

You talked a little bit about the police investigation and them questioning both of Patricia's ex-husbands.

You know, it's only in the past year or so that I've actually gone to the Oklahoma Historical Society's website and looked at the articles.

The Daily Oklahoman published an article on May 6th, 1970, three days after the murders.

It stated that the prime suspect was Patricia's estranged second husband, Howard Laverne Riggs.

He'd married Patricia only to steal money and other belongings from both Patricia and Maureen, and then he'd disappeared.

A closer look at Riggs revealed he also had a charge against him from a robbery back in Fort Worth, Texas, but he'd been, quote, committed for mental treatment before the case went to trial.

This all made detectives very suspicious of Riggs.

But Howard Riggs, who sometimes went by the name Howell Briggs, was nowhere to be found.

On May 9th, there was another article, this time with a picture of Howard Riggs.

The police wanted help finding him.

An Oklahoma City homicide detective had gone to Texas looking for Riggs to no avail.

They charged him anyway, not with murder, but with grand larceny for the items he'd taken from Maureen's home.

The police hoped this charge would speed up his apprehension.

The same article says police interviewed over 40 witnesses as part of their investigation, and while they still didn't have a motive, they speculated that this could have been an act of violence committed out of anger or revenge, or could have just been a, quote, very mentally disturbed person.

The Daily Oklahoman published another article 28 days after the murder, May 31st, 1970.

It states that while Howard Riggs remains a suspect, they've still not been able to locate him and are closely scrutinizing at least six other people.

And then, finally, on June 9th, 1970, a suspect was arrested.

But it wasn't Howard Riggs.

It was a man named Ronald Littoral, a 32-year-old man with no connection to the family.

other than he lived just two blocks from Patricia's home.

He was apprehended in Gulfport, Mississippi.

Yeah.

So, I mean, you can sort of see hints of it, like that they've got a suspect.

When you read the news articles, you can sort of see them talking about, oh, there's this person who's had mental illness in the neighborhood that we're questioning.

I think the papers reported for a while that, like, the trail was going cold.

And then someone noticed, like, oh, this guy's in the neighborhood, lives in the neighborhood.

No one's heard from him in a while.

Maybe we want to talk to him.

Yeah.

The Daily Oklahoman reported that Detective Jim Blair happened to connect Ronald Littoral to this case based on a routine missing persons report.

Littoral had been reported missing about the same time as the murders.

That and the fact that he lived two blocks away from Patricia piqued Detective Blair's interest, and he wondered if there was a potential connection.

Littoral's sedan was then found abandoned in the area, and it appeared to have bloodstains inside of it.

Detectives took specimens from his car and sent them to the FBI for analysis.

It was also noted that Littoral was previously a patient at Central State Hospital in Norman, Oklahoma, a mental health hospital.

On June 17th, it was reported that Ronald Littoral had confessed to murdering both Patricia and Melanie Henderson.

Do you know if Maureen or Patricia had had any contact with Ronald prior to him murdering Patricia and Melanie?

Were they friendly or did they know who he was?

I don't think they did.

It's certainly not part of the narrative that came to me.

My guess is, is that the most he was, you know, someone you saw around town.

And so, what was the best explanation that you heard for why he did what he did?

He

later on wrote to Maureen on the advice of his psychiatrist and said that God had told him to kill them.

I don't think that's true.

I think

he wanted an excuse.

What is it that makes you think that?

I mean,

personally, I find it super offensive, the idea that God would tell anybody.

Yeah.

That may be my own issues with religion and faith in general.

But there wasn't something that you learned about the case that you were like, no way was this a hallucination he was having.

This was something else.

Well, I mean, they found him competent to stand trial at the standards of the day.

Okay.

Yeah.

Was there anything that came out that indicated if he had been watching Patricia for a while?

Was this a sort of spur of the moment thing or was it a planned thing?

Was he stalking her?

Did anything like that come out?

Nothing like that came out, although it seems like there's a certain amount of reasonable assumption in that you would almost have to know.

that the windows weren't locked.

Although it was mid-spring in Oklahoma, it was probably a hot night and windows might have been open anyway.

Yeah.

Just breaking into someone's house and killing them like that doesn't seem like something you just do randomly.

He wasn't there to rob them, you know?

Yeah.

And, you know, you mentioned earlier when you said he left Joey alone.

It's horrible that he entered their house at all.

It's horrible for Joey to wake up and realize that his mother and sister have been murdered while he was asleep.

Maybe some of the questioning that I'm asking now, it's like, there's no way to know.

You were not inside his head.

We don't know for sure.

But was your dad's assumption that Ron litterl knew that there were two kids, you know, Melanie and Joey, and that he went in and just targeted Patricia and Melanie and left Joey alone?

I don't know.

He didn't actually, I don't think I ever asked him that specifically.

It's likely.

Joey vaguely remembered waking up in the night and

seeing a man there arguing with his mother.

And then he fell back asleep because he was so small.

So we don't think he was unaware of there being another child in the house.

He just ignored it.

Wow.

I mean, it's just such an awful thing to have happened.

And what happened next?

Like, what happened with Maureen?

You know, how did she sort of move forward after this, having her only daughter and one of her grandchildren murdered?

I mean, I think she did the best she could.

It was really hard for her.

You know, Joey was around after that.

He went to live with his dad, but he was close close enough by that Joey came over and visited pretty frequently until he was 16 when he ran away and joined the Merchant Marines, or at least that's, again, the family story about it.

But so she did still have Joey.

She ended up marrying Ray.

That's my uncle Ray, who was the boarder at the time.

I guess sort of there was some drama bonding, I think, that happened there for him because, you know, he was living in the house.

He was part of their lives.

And I don't know how he felt about Patricia, but he certainly cared about Melanie and Joey.

It was really hard for her, and she went down every path she could to try and make some meaning out of it.

She did sort of crystal power and there were some seance-y things.

And, you know, she missed them desperately.

This all happened before you were born.

Yeah, about eight years before I was born.

You're learning about all of this much later.

And then in 2009-ish, at Thanksgiving with your dad, you know, you had this question about whatever happened to the man who killed Patricia and Melanie.

And from looking it up, it looks like Ron Litterell was convicted September of 1970.

He was convicted of the murders and received two life sentences.

What did you find out when you looked back into it, you know, around 2009, 2010?

Did you find out any information about his status or what had gone on with him since he'd been convicted?

Yeah, Oklahoma has a really detailed offender lookup.

So I looked him up and I was, it was really shocking because there his fixture was, and he just looked like somebody's grandpa.

I wasn't quite quite being prepared, you know, just looking up for the information to get the photo to.

So he was denied every attempt at parole he ever, you know, he ever made.

I got one last notification from the offender registry in 2022.

And it was a little cryptic and I went to school and I asked the school safety officer and he was like, yeah, that means he died in prison.

So

I mean, that's ultimately what happened to him.

I know that he did get some kind of therapy because the therapist had him write letters to Maureen.

I asked my therapist about that, and he was like, Well, that might have been good therapy for him, but like, nobody should have ever given those letters to Maureen.

Like, that was a no.

Seriously, that's pretty shocking, actually.

Yeah.

Like, it might have been therapeutic for him to write it, but it should have never been delivered.

Yeah.

How has sort of looking deeper into this tragedy that happened in your family, how has that affected you?

And how has it affected sort of your relationship with your dad?

Or yeah, what has been sort of the result of that for you?

I mean, it's certainly made my dad's overprotectiveness of his daughters really clear and absolutely understandable, almost in the sense that it doesn't seem like overprotectiveness at all.

You know, when we moved out and we moved to places where we lived in ground floor apartments, there were suddenly, you know, security alarms.

And he was like, nope, no, you know, like there was some clear guidance we were given about our personal safety, like, you know, no butcher knife blocks.

Knives should be kept hidden away in our kitchens, not

out for someone to grab and kill you with, which is still a thing I struggle with.

Like, sometimes I'll have a loaf of bread out and I'll be like, I should put this bread knife away because someone might break into my house.

So, those kinds of things that seemed like a little overprotective and paranoid when we were growing up, like, they don't seem that way anymore at all.

Yeah.

When I was a kid, we would sometimes camp out in the backyard.

You know, it was a corner lot, just like Maureen's lot.

And he had had fences installed.

And when we camped out back there, he padlocked the gates.

He was, you know, just a little extra cautious.

Yeah.

I'm curious if you have anything.

I don't know what the exact question would be, but you had mentioned dealing with depression, yourself and your dad, as well as, you know, going to family therapy.

It's interesting maybe to think back about Patricia's mental health, even though that wasn't something that perhaps was talked about or dealt with, you know, openly at that time.

How do you think about all of that?

Or do you want to talk about how that sort of plays a role in this story?

Well,

so when I was 19, I did a three-day stay for suicidal ideation in the local hospital where I was in college, and it was miserable.

And that was, you know, the late 90s.

So I can sort of imagine, and I haven't seen one flu over the cuckoo's nest, but I've heard about it, what a mental hospital in the, you know, late 60s was like.

So I can imagine that it wasn't very helpful for him and that he just wanted to check the boxes and leave and that he didn't really get the help he needed.

Does that excuse what he did to Melanie and Patricia?

Absolutely not.

My mental health struggles clearly come from both sides of the family.

But my dad's side of the family, like you can sort of see the pattern.

You know, my dad has depression.

My grandpa was diagnosed with depression.

His sister probably had it.

They all were serious chain smokers.

And then, if you go far enough back, there are people who struggled with alcohol and again with smoking.

I think that's kind of how they all coped with that.

So you have tried to connect with Joey over the to locate him over the years and that's been unsuccessful

yeah so we saw him at maureen's funeral and then we saw him shortly after in the next year or so because he drove through he was delivering a piece of maureen's furniture to another relative and he had a locksmith company so he had a little locksmith truck and he could haul this piece of furniture and he stopped and visited us and

That must have been 1999.

And that's the last time I ever saw him.

So when I wanted to write this story, I would have liked to hear from him, but at at the very least, I sort of wanted his blessing to do it.

Like, I found him on Facebook, but his Facebook account had clearly like been a one and done sort of thing.

Like, he never really used it and he never responded.

And at one point, I reached out to my dad's sister, who we don't talk to, and I had my cousin ask, and she hadn't heard from him.

I think I might have even looked him up on like Spokio.

And like, again, the last sort of records, and it's not an uncommon name.

The last sort of records I could trace directly to him were running the locksmith business in Seattle, but not for some time.

So if you were able to reach him, you would mostly have wanted his blessing and having done all of this research.

Is there anything you would say to him now if you were to connect with him?

I mean, not just that I'm sorry that it happened to him, but I'm sorry that it happened to him and he was around people who were maybe not very prepared to help a kid cope.

And in a time when, you know, we think mental health support for kids is in crisis now, but what it must have been like in 1970, you know, I'm sorry that maybe he didn't get what he needed.

Yeah.

So I'm curious why you're interested in telling this story now.

Obviously, it's different than if you were to write a whole book, but why do you think it's important to tell this story?

You know, as my dad gets older, there aren't very many people left who remember them.

And

they were real, they mattered.

And Maureen was real and she was important to me.

And that's why.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

There's so many stories, you know, that just kind of get lost to time.

Yeah.

The general response in your family to looking into this, what did it mean for them to have you sort of try to put some of the pieces together all those years later?

My dad was super helpful.

When I say I wrote the paper, he wrote a lot of it, actually.

I would ask him questions and he would write me these really long responses.

And in some places, you can see that I quote him sort of word for word.

I don't think he wanted to tell it himself.

There have been other stories in his life that he has written down and told, at least to the family, but I think he was content enough and supportive enough for me to do it.

And he was the one who was there, who still left.

And the Joey piece of all of this is really troubling because you don't stop hurting from something like that, no matter how little you were.

And like, that's just.

huge.

And probably there was this other piece of his family that maybe wanted to support him through that and either couldn't or didn't know how.

And

it was a difficult thing.

And I probably would have done something similar in your shoes if I had learned there was this family tragedy, but not a lot done to being as far as like understanding it or keeping some sort of record of it.

And,

you know, I think it's really cool that you and your dad were able to work on it together.

Yeah.

And I think one of the things that I was worried about in 2010 was that without Joey's voice or dad's voice or anybody's voice, that they would give him parole.

So that was sort of the other thing in the back of my head when I wrote this.

You know, and then my dad can sent it and he doesn't have to go and he doesn't have to talk to anybody, you know, that it's available.

It's a valid concern.

I mean, Hannah and I looked at a case a couple of weeks ago where someone had confessed to a murder and he was out after like 12 years and you never know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Having the victim impact statements, I think, can be hugely influential when parole boards consider things like that.

What an episode from Beth Denton.

Yeah, so many stories almost lost to time.

And then someone like Beth comes along.

I really like that.

I'm so appreciative of her treasuring her family enough and wanting to keep these memories alive and tell those stories.

It makes me think about how many stories are truly out there and there's no one to tell them anymore.

And I had a good time going to newspapers.com and searching for these articles and was delighted to find that there were so many articles about what happened.

Obviously, it wasn't delightful that people were murdered, but it was a great resource in piecing together the investigation since there was no one to talk to about the murder investigation.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's so great that that exists.

I have like memories of being an associate producer years ago, being on the newspaper archive and thinking just like, this is so cool, this like window back in in time.

And yeah, I mean, those sort of facts around the case would have probably been lost otherwise.

Yeah.

And, you know, we, we didn't talk a lot with Beth about it in the episode, but we do kind of, we run through the investigation.

But looking at the articles, you could tell that the police had this other suspect who was their main suspect for so long.

They even published a picture of him in the paper.

And it wasn't him.

It wasn't him.

But it made me wish that I could find out more about that guy, Howard Riggs, because he had the signs of a con man.

Like there is a story in and of itself there.

Like, what was he up to?

Yeah.

He married Patricia, then to just steal money from her and like rob Maureen and Patricia of stuff from their home and then disappear.

He robbed a place in Fort Worth, Texas.

He was using multiple names.

Like something's going on with him.

Yeah.

Like he may not have killed her, but he was up to no good.

Yeah.

But I couldn't find anything else about him.

Maybe that's by design.

Howell Briggs.

Howell Briggs, yeah.

You know, it really made me think, like, what else is out there?

Like, what other family stories might exist?

Have you ever gone down the ancestry rabbit hole or looked for any sort of crimes in your family history?

Yeah, so I had a conversation with my mom recently who has done a little bit of that.

And I mean, it's nothing

too exciting, but my mom's maternal grandfather's great-grandfather.

That's like your great great.

Great, great, great, great, great.

Many great.

Really great.

Okay.

Great guy.

He bought up a bunch of land in LaSalle County in Illinois and became very wealthy.

There's an obituary that says when he passed away in 1827, he had a fortune of over $500,000.

And so that would be the equivalent of like 20 million today.

Wow.

I know.

And I'm finding this out.

And I'm like, okay.

So through the years, those people, they weren't thinking about generational wealth.

Like somebody was spending.

Yeah.

That's what now I would like to learn more about.

Oh, okay.

Like what the heck happened?

Where did the money go?

Where did the money go?

Like, what could you even buy back then that you could spend that much money on?

Like, are you just decking out your like horse and buggy?

Like, what do you do?

I don't know.

You're buying spices

from abroad.

I have no idea.

What people do.

So I'm curious about that, but no murders or anything like that, thankfully.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting.

You know, if anyone is listening and you have some crime in your family history that you know about or want to look more into, reach out to us.

We would be interested in hearing about it.

Thanks for listening.

If you have a story for us, we would love to hear it.

Our email is thenife at exactlyrightmedia.com, or you can follow us on Instagram Instagram at the Knife Podcast or a Blue Sky at the Knife Podcast.

This has been an Exactly Right Production, hosted and produced by me, Hannah Smith, and me, Patia Eaton.

Our producers are Tom Breifogel and Alexa Samorosi.

This episode was mixed by Tom Breifogel.

Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport.

Artwork by Vanessa Lilac.

Executive produced by Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark, and Danielle Kramer.

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