Kathy Jo Silverhorn

Date Found: April 1, 1987

Location: Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Investigating Agency: Oklahoma City Police Department

(405) 297-1000

Kathy Jo Silverhorn was found murdered in Oklahoma City on April 1, 1987. She was twenty-seven years old.

Kathy was from Port Huron, Michigan and had been living in the Oklahoma City area for about two years at the time of her murder. She was in the state to attend cosmetology school and had been working in a veterinarian’s office. 

Kathy had been at the Myriad Motor Inn on Classen Drive, when a motel clerk heard screams coming from the room next to hers at around 4:30pm. She called the authorities who found Kathy beaten and strangled in the motel room’s bathroom. Kathy was apparently at the motel visiting the man who was actually renting the room, though this man wasn’t actually in the motel at the time she was murdered. The clerk who lived in the room next door stated she had seen a “foreign looking” man knocking on Kathy’s door. He knocked three times, and when Kathy answered, she began screaming “Oh my God! Somebody help me! Somebody help me!”. The clerk tried to enter Kathy’s room through the adjoining door, however Kathy’s side was locked, preventing the clerk from entering. The police found the room in disarray, furniture and other things tossed around the room. Her body had been left in the bathtub of the motel room. 

The man Kathy had been there to see was cleared as he had been out driving a taxi cab at the time of the attack. Eventually in May 1987, police would charge a man named Ronald Ray Smith with Kathy’s murder. At the time of her murder Smith had be serving time in prison since a nearly fatal knife attack on a woman in 1977. He was involved in a work release program, and according to police had met Kathy once through their mutual friend- this friend being the man who was renting the motel room. While he was charged, this seems to have never went to trial, as there’s no record of him even being charged, let alone tried. He was officially released from prison and parole in 2007 for the knife attack. 

No one else has been charged in the murder of Kathy Jo Silverhorn.

If you have any information regarding the death of Kathy, please contact the Oklahoma City Police Department at 405-297-1000.