Part Five:

“People should care, quite frankly. Because if you’re silent about injustice you’re giving consent to it.” – Mark Konrad

In late February 2002 an OSBI agent stationed in Lawton would get a frantic call from his neighbors. They had found a dead body in a pond a short distance from their two homes, the body was under an old bridge and would come to be identified as twenty-nine year old Janice Marie Buono. Janice had been missing since New Year’s Day 2002.
Like the other girls I’ve talked about in my other posts, Janice was also battling a drug addiction and generally paid for said addiction by working the streets. She was a young mother and had three children, all of whom were raised by their grandmother after their mother was murdered. Shortly before Janice went missing she had called home saying that she had found out she had cancer, that she wanted to come home, however she never made it there. When she went missing, Janice had been staying at the Sheridan Inn with a girl named Lisa; the two had been sharing a room that was actually Lisa’s, but Janice would give Lisa money so she could stay there. Lisa is the last known person to see Janice alive.
I’ve spoken with Lisa, as have the police, and she saw nothing out of the ordinary the day that Janice was last seen. Janice simply turned one way, and Lisa the other. Janice was never seen alive again.
What’s odd about Janice is that she was found only about three miles away from where Mandy Raite was found just shy of two years earlier. Her cause of death would be determined as being an overdose of meth and cocaine, though like the others there was again no obvious outward trauma.

It was at this point that the media would become aware of the fact that there was a serial killer loose in their backyard.

All of the woman would be described as prostitutes who were white and in their 20s. Something that was a bit of a slap in the face since they were not JUST prostitutes and they were NOT all white women. Janice was a Native American woman, proudly so.

I’d like to say that the media had their story and they ran with it, but realistically that really didn’t happen. I can probably count on two hands how many times any of these woman’s names have appeared in the press from 1999 to today, and that’s sad. Though, the fact that any of them appeared in the press probably got the killer to go underground for a bit. The next killing didn’t happen as far as anyone knows until June 2003, however, I think it’s possible that Rebecca Walden Boyd might have fallen victim to the killer.

Rebecca was a young mother in June of 2002, when she went missing from Lawton. At the time she was fighting a drug habit, but she was trying to get on her feet. She was living with her grandparents in Rush Springs when she made her way into Lawton to talk to her estranged husband.

To be fair, my connection of Rebecca, known as Becky, to the case is tenuous at best; however, in the police report that was filed when she was reported as missing, it was stated that she was friends with a cab driver and often took a cab places she needed to be. A leading theory of the Lawton serial killer is that the killer is a cab driver, as that would be a vehicle all the girls would be willing to get into without question. The last verifiable place that Becky was seen was walking away from her estranged husband’s place of employment, though namus has her possibly being seen walking away from a gas station after having had an argument with someone on a payphone. Becky remains missing as of this posting.

These women were loved. By their children, and by their families. Sure they had faults, but WE ALL have faults, and I certainly hope that if something happened to me, the media wouldn’t decide that my faults weighed more than anything else that makes up what I am as a person. They deserve justice.

UPDATE: In September 2021 Rebecca Walden was positively identified as being Kiowa Jane Doe, an unidentified woman that was found in Roosevelt, Oklahoma in 2005. It is still very possible she was a victim of the Lawton killer.