Part Four:

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

On June 17th, 2000, at around 4:00 in the morning, a deputy with the Comanche County sheriff’s office was reportedly doing a routine check of an area off of Bethel Road. He was out there because the area was commonly used as a dumping ground for meth dealers to dump remains of their labs once they were done making their product.

That morning what he found wasn’t a meth lab, but a body of a young woman.

Mandy Ann Raite went missing on approximately June 14th, 2000. She was twenty-one years old at the time and had a small child. Three days later her body would be found in that small creek off of Bethel Road. Like the two women that had come before her, Mandy was found naked. But unlike the others, her death was determined to be caused by an accidental cocaine overdose. At the time she was found, there were also no outward signs of trauma that could be discerned; other than her body, no evidence was found at the scene. Interestingly, according to an interview given to the Lawton Constitution, the sheriff’s department kept the area that Mandy was found “highly monitored”, yet they would say that her body had likely been there for at least four days.

By all accounts, Mandy had started getting her life back together, even though she was a known prostitute in the area. Even though she struggled with drug addiction, she called her mother every day. The last time her mother would speak with Mandy would be June 9th, which was also the last time she physically saw Mandy.

Two days later, on June 11th, Mandy had phoned her grandfather asking if she could come and stay at his house, however she never arrived. The last reported person to see Mandy alive was a friend of hers who stated she saw Mandy leaving the Sheridan Inn on June 14th. The Sheridan Inn is where Mandy and her boyfriend at the time of her murder had been living; Mandy’s mother would find out that her daughter was missing when Mandy’s boyfriend called her after he had been released from jail on June 21st. He had been arrested on June 11th on an absent without leave charge from the military, and had been turned in by Mandy after they had had an argument. He had told Mandy’s mother that he couldn’t find her and that she was driving his car. At the time of Mandy’s murder, she and her boyfriend had been planning on moving to Texas; jewelry that Mandy always wore- a gold chain that had two baby rings on it has never been found. Neither has an address book or some of her clothing that went missing at the same time she did. The boyfriend’s car would be found with its windows down, parked at an apartment complex in Lawton around two days after Mandy’s body was found.

Mandy wanted to break free of the chains of drug addiction. She wanted more from life. She wanted to be an artist and she wanted to be a mother. Someone stole that from her, and it’s very likely that someone out there knows who that someone is. Even though Mandy was the third woman found that would eventually be publicly attributed to the Lawton serial killer, authorities at the time still hadn’t put it together to know what they were looking at. She was just another street girl who had the misfortune of winding up dead; this is partially because Jane, Cassandra, and Mandy were all found in different counties, and partially because calling up colleagues to let them know you have another dead prostitute doesn’t really happen often- unless you have cause to. After Mandy, the next technical case attributed to the Lawton serial killer happens at the beginning of 2002, but it’s my opinion that an unidentified Jane Doe that was discovered in 2005 was very possibly a victim whose death occurred in between.

She’s known as Kiowa Jane Doe, or Namus number 7246. She was discovered by a farmer on July 13th, 2005 just off of highway 54 in Kiowa County. No clothing or other belongings were found with her. In fact all that was found was a partial skull. Not even enough to determine how she died; just enough to know that she was a woman, and an approximate age. She was likely anywhere from seventeen to thirty years of age at the time of her death and she had been dead any time from 1987 to 2002. She has yet to be identified. My theory is she was probably killed sometime between June of 2000 and December 2001 by the same killer of the other women in Lawton. Someone who thinks these women are just to be thrown out like garbage.

They’re not garbage though…someone loved them. They belonged to someone. We owe it to these victims to keep telling their story, to not forget them. I do wish that this was it, the last chapter, but this wasn’t over. Not by a long shot