Your cart is currently empty!
Lawton Part One:
“To the living we owe respect, and to the dead we owe the truth.” ~Voltaire
I’ve known about the killings attributed to the Lawton serial killer ever since I started working in Oklahoma. Here and there I would look into the cases, mostly because they bore a striking similarity to another case that I had researched in the past out of Chillicothe, Ohio. Last year, though, I sat down and finally told my partner here that it was time: we needed to dig into these murders and see where it went. We knew as much as anyone else did in the beginning. Five women, all stated by law enforcement to have been prostitutes along Cache Road, were found naked and either in or near some form of water from the years 1999-2003. Causes of death either could not be determined or were never publicly stated, but all of them had a high enough level of narcotics in their systems to have possibly contributed to their deaths.
It seems that even now, a lot of people do not realize that these murders were attributed to a serial killer. Sometimes people know of one victim, but not the others. One really big reason for this is that the killings of prostitutes tend to rank decently low on the media’s radar, especially when they’re in “nowhere” Oklahoma. People do not want to hear about dead girls in ditches. Its blunt, but it’s true.
They especially do not want to hear about girls linked to drugs and prostitution who have been found dead in ditches. Those girls remind people that there is, in fact, a darker side to society. A seedy underbelly to our happy lives, and people are more than content to not be reminded that there are real monsters out there.
At any rate, in 2004 the killings in Lawton were overshadowed by the fact that an analyst within the OSBI had put some puzzle pieces together to connect other murders of prostitutes; murders that occurred along Interstate 40 and over three different states. Those killers, a man and his girlfriend, are currently serving prison sentences. So why are the “Cache Road Girls” so different? Its how they were killed for one, the Interstate 40 killers were indiscriminate in their methods of killing. For two, these girls ended up places where a semi wasn’t likely to have gotten to. After 2003, the killings of Cache Road girls stopped- and so did practically any media coverage, what little there was to begin with. The end result is this: we are now twenty years out from the first attributed killing of the Lawton serial killer and it seems authorities are no closer now than they were then of knowing who was responsible.
Our opinion is this, one reason that it’s so cold is that there are likely more than five victims. From research we’re comfortable in saying, to our knowledge, girls who have fallen victim to the same killer started going missing as early as 1991. To say that we went through hundreds of cases trying to narrow down who might be a victim, is not an underestimation. In the beginning, we had somewhere in the number of 80 potential victims of the same killer. It very quickly became much larger than almost anyone could have guessed. At one point, my white board was covered with pictures of murdered girls from all across Oklahoma. We needed to narrow it down, and we did so by starting with Barbara Berry.
In 1993, nineteen-year-old Barbara Berry went missing from Lawton. When she went missing Barbara was sometimes working at the Deluxe, a topless bar in Lawton, but was also working the streets in order to pay for a drug habit. If Barbara’s disappearance was reported by the media, I’ve never been able to find it. In fact, there’s only one article I’ve been able to find pertaining to Barbara- the one reporting her death. Over a year after she went missing, Barbara would be found, her remains left in a box in a field in rural Comanche County, where I’m sure someone was very much hoping she wouldn’t be found at all. It took me a while before it clicked that Barbara very well might have fallen prey to the same monster that the Cache Road Girls did- but eventually it was Barbara that finally brought us to look at the Cache Road case.
Barbara has been described as a bright, fun, and beautiful person by every single friend we’ve managed to find. She was wild though. A bit too wild for her older parents to handle at times, I think. Not that it made them love her or want her any less. I won’t lie and tell you I don’t feel connected, somehow to Barbara- I do. In fact, its her case that’s kept me researching. It was the thought that when they figured out she was missing, her mom went down to where Barbara would hang out to pass out missing fliers for her only child, crying as she did so. People would look at her and laugh; they wouldn’t even take the flier. It’s the words that a detective said to me at the very beginning that had been said to him, “What about Barbara Berry?”.
What about Barbara indeed.