Sherry Lakins

Date Found: March 5, 1982

Location: Tulsa, Oklahoma

Investigating Agency: OSBI
800-522-8017

The morning of March 5, 1982 Sherry Lakins six-year-old son was found running down the street that he lived on screaming and crying. He had woken up that morning and come into their living room to a horrifying sight, his mother had been strangled and stabbed to death, and was laying propped up against a piece of furniture.

Sherry was a 27-year-old custodian at the Boley State School for boys at the time of her death. She had two children, a six-year-old son and a nine-year-old daughter. Any motives for the crime were never discussed publicly by law enforcement. Sherry had been strangled with her shirt and stabbed repeatedly in her stomach with a meat fork; the stabbings were in a pattern though what the pattern made has never been made public.

In 1991, then police chief Ron Luttrell told Tulsa World that his department had the case solved. That he was confident that they knew who had committed the murder after they had tested six sets of fingerprints that had not been originally tested from the crime scene. Luttrell had apparently turned the evidence and the names of the suspects over to the DA, who apparently never filed charges against the suspects. In 2018 the OSBI was again asking for help in the case, asking for anyone who knew anything to come forward.

Sherry Lankins sister and her children- especially her son who discovered her- have spent a lifetime being haunted by her senseless and horrific murder. They deserve closure. They deserve justice. So does Sherry.

If you have any information regarding the murder of Sherry Lakins please contact the OSBI at 1-800-522-8017