NewsmakersNG presents the full True Detective story of a mortician and a money-hungry blond that was published in 1959, and still has lots of lessons for detectives today.
They fled Georgia with the dead man, dumped his body in Arkansas, but murder caught up with them in Oklahoma
BY JACK JONES
A COOL, MOIST WIND whipped through the Ozark Mountain tops as the ancient, World War II army surplus jeep slowed and pulled off on the shoulder of the highway. Its driver, Joe Rizley, grinned and pointed up the side of White Rock Mountain. “There it is!” he shouted. “There’s the best squirrel hunting woods in the Ozarks!”
His companion, Bob Pilgrim, squinted as he scanned the steep ridge leading to the peak. “How’re we going to get up there?”
“The road, of course,” Rizley laughed. “I came up here once last year.” He shifted into four-wheel drive and the gears meshed and whined as the jeep lurched across a shallow bar ditch and turned up a faint trail.
Pilgrim secured a firm grip on the side of the jeep to keep from pitching out. “Are you sure this is a road?” he called, trying to make his voice heard over the straining engine.
“It’s a logging road,” Rizley answered. “Tractors haul logs down off the mountain about once a year.”
Pilgrim nodded uncertainly and glanced up at the sky. “We’ve got about two hours of daylight left. How far did you say we had to go up this road?”
“Not far. About a mile,” Rizley laughed. “Don’t worry. We’ll make it. And we’ll get our squirrels. You can bet on that.”
The jeep slowed to negotiate a sharp curve and Pilgrim pointed to the road. “I can see some fresh car tracks,” he said. “Somebody’s been up here ahead of us.”
“Maybe,” answered Rizley. “But I’ll bet they didn’t get far unless they were in a jeep or a tractor.”
Pilgrim nodded and ducked his head to avoid being whipped in the face by a low branch.
The jeep had proceeded another 100 feet when Rizley jammed on the brakes. He stood up and pointed to a small clump of brush beside the road. “Look!” he yelled. “What’s that?”
Pilgrim’s eyes followed Rizley’s hand and then he was suddenly scrambling out of the jeep and running to the clump of brush. He bent low, then jumped back, his face pale. “It’s a man!” he called to Rizley. “He’s dead. Somebody killed him!”
Rizley shifted the jeep into reverse. “Come on,” he called, “we’d better go phone the sheriff.” He backed the jeep down the logging road to the highway and they sped two
miles down the road to a gas station where there was a telephone.
It was 5:30 p.m. on October 6th, 1958, when Crawford County Sheriff Tommy Wilbanks received the call in Van Buren, Arkansas, that two squirrel hunters had found the body of a man on the old logging road leading up White Rock mountain.
The sheriff, accompanied by N. D. Edwards, Crawford County prosecutor, left for the scene at once. It was 30 miles from Van Buren and the officers arrived there shortly after 6 p.m. Pilgrim and Rizley were standing by on the highway to direct them to the spot when they arrived. Wilbanks and Edwards found the body to be that of a man about 50 years old, although his face was so battered it was difficult to be reasonably certain about his age.
The body was lying stiffly on its side, the legs curled up beneath it, the back curved in a tight arc. It was dressed in a suit that was obviously an expensive one. After photographing the scene, Wilbanks and Edwards rolled the body over and searched its pockets for identification. Except for a brand new crisp $1 bill wadded up inside a trouser pocket, they found nothing.
“Recognize him?” Wilbanks asked Edwards, studying the body’s features.
The prosecutor shook his head. “If he’s from around here, he’s a new one to me. I never met him.”
“Let’s get him into town and see if we can find out who he was,” Wilbanks said.
“Good idea,” said Edwards.
While waiting for a hearse and coroner to drive out from Van Buren, Edwards and Wilbanks made a search of the ground and underbrush in the vicinity of the body and along the logging road back down to the highway. They were especially interested in the car tracks.
Wilbanks judged them to be at least a day old. “From the looks of the tracks,” he said, “somebody pulled off the highway, drove up here and dumped him.”
Edwards nodded. “But I don’t think he was killed up here,” he said. “There’s not enough blood on the ground for that. He’s lost a lot of blood, but he didn’t lose it here.”
Cast imprints were made of the tire tread marks and the two officers continued their search of the underbrush until it was dark. En route back to Van Buren they stopped at a gas station a half-mile from the logging road and asked the operator if he knew anyone who had been up the road lately. The operator said his son had been up the road on a hike the day before, which was Sunday afternoon, but had not seen the body there then.
When they returned to Van Buren the body was stripped and examined closely by physicians. An autopsy was performed almost immediately. It showed that the man had been shot twice in the right temple with a .25 caliber weapon. He also had been severely beaten about the head and face with a sharp-edged instrument before he was shot.
The report further indicated the victim was between 45 and 50 and that he had been dead at least two days. How long his body had been on the old logging road was a matter of conjecture but, according to the gas station operator’s report, it was probably not more than a day.
Physicians also said the victim’s body already had become stiffened by rigor mortis at the time. It was placed on the old road. From the curled-up position of the legs and arms physicians concluded the body had been confined in some small place, perhaps a clothes trunk or even the trunk of an automobile. A detailed inspection of the clothing yielded only a laundry mark in the collar of the victim’s shirt.
Sheriff Wilbanks grimaced as he studied the autopsy report. “He sure died the hard way, didn’t he?”
Edwards nodded. “But where? That’s the big question right now.”
Sheriff Wilbanks failed to find anyone fitting the description of the murdered man in the Crawford County missing persons reports. A check with the police department in nearby Fort Smith also failed to turn up any reports on any missing person who might have been the victim. A call to the state police at Little Rock produced similar negative results. Efforts to trace the laundry mark in the shirt locally also failed to turn up any lead. A search of state directories yielded nothing to identify the mark.
A man, two days dead, a set of car tracks, a laundry mark and a crumpled $1 bill seemed to be slim clues to help Edwards and Wilbanks put together the missing pieces of the puzzle.
The dead man’s fingerprints were airmailed that night to the FBI identification laboratory in Washington, D. C, along with photographs of the tire imprints.
“The fingerprints might help,” remarked Wilbanks, “but again they might not. If he doesn’t have a record, we won’t be able to learn much. But the tire tracks seemed new. If it was a new car, we might be able to learn what model it was. It could be something to start with.” In either event, however, Wilbanks knew it would take time to hear from the FBI laboratory and at the moment the sheriff considered time to be a vital commodity in catching the killer.
“It could be somebody who was just passing through,” the sheriff speculated. “If so, it might be days,’ even weeks, before somebody discovers him missing and starts looking for him down this way. And all the time the killer is probably making tracks away from here.”
“If this part of the country wasn’t on the victim’s normal itinerary, we may never know who he was,” observed Edwards.
But Sheriff Wilbanks figured he had one advantage which the killer had not counted on. That was the fact that the body was discovered as soon as it was.
“Whoever dumped the body up there on that mountain didn’t figure on it being found for a long time,” said Wilbanks. “And it was a stroke of luck that those two hunters went up there. With the tourist season over, it’s doubtful if anybody will venture off the highway up that old logging trail again until next spring. By that time we wouldn’t have as much to go on as we have now.”
It was agreed at once that the car which had been used to transport the body to its place of concealment would be the quickest and surest way of identifying the slayer—providing the car could be identified.
Sheriff Wilbanks and Edwards felt certain the car would bear bloodstains and a team of officers was assigned to call on all local car-wash operators and gas stations, in an effort to learn if a bloodstained car had been brought in recently for servicing.
At the same time a detail was assigned to check all recent stolen-car reports, taking the off-chance that one of them might involve cars equipped with tires which would fit the tread marks left at the scene of the murder.
At the outset, from the lack of clues in the local or state missing persons files, it seemed apparent that the victim was probably an out-of-state man.
This conclusion in turn raised a number of other questions. Was the slain man victim of a hitchhiker? Killers hitchhiking highways had been making the front pages of newspapers frequently during the past few weeks. Or was the victim himself a hitchhiker? Such things, Wilbanks and Edwards knew, did happen. But the expensive suit the victim was wearing caused the two investigators to favor the first theory, that the victim was not a hitchhiker.
Another question that plagued the investigators was the location of the place where the victim was killed. The autopsy report indicated the man had been dead two days, but a witness had been on the logging road the previous Sunday afternoon and didn’t see the body. Was it possible that the victim had been hauled cross-country for an entire day in a car? It seemed unlikely, but the two investigators did not discount it.
“It all comes back to the identity of the victim,” sighed Wilbanks. “If we knew who he was, we could find out what kind of car he had, where he was going. We’d at least have something to work on.” „
Edwards nodded. “I’d give $1 right now, just to know what state the victim lived in.”
Wilbanks’ eyes lifted. He jumped up from his chair, snapping his fingers. “You just might have something there!” he cried.
“What’s that?”
“The $1 bill in the man’s pocket. It was a new one, wasn’t it?”
Edwards frowned. “There’s only 50 or 60 billions of those $1 bills circulating around the country, you know.”
“Not new ones. It’s got a serial number, hasn’t it? If we can find out which federal reserve bank issued that serial number, there’s a good chance that we’d at least know the state that the bill came from. It couldn’t have been in circulation too long.”
Edwards agreed it was worth a try. A query to the FBI resulted in information that bills bearing the series of numbers on that $1 bill had been issued recently by the reserve bank at Atlanta, Georgia. Sheriff Wilbanks was on the telephone calling Atlanta police department a few minutes later and was connected with Lieutenant Tommy Thomas.
Wilbanks quickly explained the discovery of the body, gave the lieutenant the laundry marks on the shirt, and requested that an investigation be made immediately to determine if the laundry mark had been made by an Atlanta firm. “If we can identify this man quickly enough,” explained Wilbanks, “there’s a good chance we can find the killers still in his car.”
“We’ll get on it right away,” Lieutenant Thomas said. “I’ll call you back as soon as we find out anything.”
Sheriff Wilbanks glanced at his watch as he hung up. It was then 11 p.m. He turned to Edwards. “There’s nothing to do now but wait.”
“And,” added Edwards, “pray a little that our luck holds.”
At midnight the detail checking stolen-car reports returned and announced it had been unable to find any owners of stolen cars equipped with tires whose treads would fit the description of those found on White Rock mountain.
At 1:30 a.m. the detail checking gas stations and car wash establishments reported in empty-handed.
It was 2 a.m. when Lieutenant Thomas telephoned Sheriff Wilbanks at Van Buren. “We’ve been able to identify that laundry mark,” Lieutenant Thomas said. “It checks to a suburban laundry near Atlanta. We got the owner out of bed and he went down to check his records. The records show the shirt was laundered here last week for a man named Virgil Glen Gray who lives over at Lawrenceville, Georgia.”
“Have you checked him out yet?” asked Sheriff Wilbanks.
“Yes,” answered Lieutenant Thomas. “He’s 49 years old and is employed as a mortician by a funeral home in Lawrenceville. He’s fairly well-to-do and he’s been missing since Saturday night.”
The physical description of the missing man, including the clothing, fit that of the body found in Arkansas more than 600 miles away. From Lieutenant Thomas, the Arkansas sheriff learned that Gray had started for Decatur, Georgia, to visit his mother, Mrs. Virgil Glen Gray Sr., at about 11 a.m. the previous Saturday. He arrived safely at his mother’s home and at 6 p.m. he left to do an errand for her at a drugstore. He never returned.
The mother was able to furnish a description of Gray’s car, a 1958 model Ford sedan with Georgia license 20-8904. The mother said Gray was carrying about $100 in cash with him, as well as some expensive Shriner’s jewelry, at the time he disappeared. She said her son never picked up hitchhikers and she was at a loss to explain his disappearance. Lawrenceville police said they had been unable to find a trace of Gray and Decatur police gave a similar report.
At 4 a.m. on Tuesday, October 7th, 1958, less than 12 hours after the discovery of the body, a 10-state alarm was broadcast in the South and Midwest for Gray’s car.
In McAlester, Oklahoma, a night highway patrol radio dispatcher monitored the Van Buren broadcast and at 4:15 a.m. he re-broadcast it to all Oklahoma points.
Some 125 miles away, in Bethany, Oklahoma, a suburban city of 12,000 on the west fringe of the metropolitan Oklahoma City district, two policemen, Lester and Chester Longacre, twin brothers, listened to the McAlester broadcast and jotted the license number down in a book.
“I’d like to catch that guy,” Chester commented.
Lester smiled. “Why not? U. S. Highway 66 runs right down the middle of our town. We’ve got as good a chance as anybody.”
At 8:30 a.m. the brothers were cruising east on U. S. 66 on the outskirts of Bethany. They saw a 1958 Ford sedan approaching, traveling west. It looked like a dozen other Ford automobiles they had checked that morning. This one was occupied by a man and a woman.
“There’s another Ford,” observed Lester. “Make a U-turn and let’s check his tag.”
Chester slowed the police cruiser, made a U-turn and fell in behind the car. It bore the license number of the wanted car.
“That’s him!” exclaimed Lester. “Crowd him over to the curb.”
Chester touched the siren button and pulled up even with the car. He motioned for the driver to pull over. The driver, a dark, slender man with a burr haircut, turned a startled face to the police car and then stopped. The Longacre twins had shotguns in their hands when the car’s occupants stepped out in the street.
“What’s this all about?” the driver demanded, raising his hands. The movement caused his sport coat to fall open in front, displaying the handle of a .38 revolver in his belt.
“Just keep your hands up,” Lester Longacre said grimly, “until I get that gun out of your belt.”
The man and woman were handcuffed and the Longacre brothers examined the car. They found bloodstains on the front seat and in the trunk. The couple was taken immediately to Bethany police headquarters, to be questioned by Fletcher McLain, chief of police.
The driver of the car refused to give his name. His wallet, however, carried an identification card bearing the name of William Hoyt Ledford, 43. There were five pieces of expensive-looking, leather luggage in the auto, all bearing the monogram, WHL, and filled with men’s clothing.
When the woman was asked her name, her companion turned to her and snapped, “Shut your mouth. Don’t say a thing to anyone.” The woman remained silent. Her purse, however, was found to contain a .25 caliber automatic pistol.
Under questioning, both denied any knowledge of a man named Virgil Glen Gray. They were taken to Oklahoma County jail in Oklahoma City for further interrogation by Sheriff Bob Turner and FBI agents. Sheriff Wilbanks, notified of the arrest of the pair, left at once for Oklahoma City.
Despite the prisoners’ denials of any knowledge of the crime, the officers felt certain, in view of the bloodstained car, that they had the killers in custody, and that their victim was Virgil Glen Gray. The identity of the body was finally confirmed in the late afternoon, when an 18-year-old coworker of the missing mortician, who had traveled from Atlanta for the purpose, viewed the corpse in Van Buren, and made positive identification.
Although the prisoners were still standing mute about their identities and activities, the officers had little doubt that shortly they would be able to establish who the two were. The problem was to tie down the murder case which they felt sure that they had against the couple. It was necessary, first of all, to pinpoint the exact spot of the murder to settle jurisdictional problems in future prosecutions. Laboratory examination of bloodstains in the car indicated Gray had been carried in the trunk at least one day, possibly a day and a half. Investigators began studying road maps and calculating probable distances and routes traveled by the car from Decatur, Georgia.
Dirt particles in the trunk were carefully collected by technicians and Georgia officers began studying terrain around Atlanta for matching types of soil. The automobile was combed for telltale match books, pieces of paper or other articles which might indicate where the occupants had stopped for meals or sleeping accommodations in the cross-country flight.
Meanwhile the questioning of the two suspects continued. Teams of interrogators fired questions at them in separate rooms.
Finally, the man admitted that he was William Hoyt Ledford. “You’d find out about it sooner or later anyway,” he said. “I’m on parole from the federal pen in Atlanta.” Ledford said that he had been given a conditional release from the U. S. prison only a week earlier, on September 30th, after serving three years of a five-year sentence. The officers’ eyebrows went up when they learned that the man had been serving sentences aggregating 35 years, on convictions of robbery, kidnapping and larceny of an auto, in the Georgia State Penitentiary, and had been paroled to federal authorities after serving 10 years, so that he could serve the lesser federal sentence.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know about me up until I was paroled,” Ledford said calmly. “But I won’t answer any questions which concern my activities since that time.”
Throughout the afternoon and early evening hours he stuck to the vow, maintaining a cool, unconcerned front that frustrated even the most veteran interrogators. His woman companion adopted a silent attitude that was even more exasperating. She wouldn’t give her name and answered all questions with silence and sullen glances.
The questioning continued through the late hours. Ledford continued to show no signs of weakening. The woman, however, began to exhibit traces of remorse as one questioner after another asked her, “Why did you kill him?”
It was 2 a.m. when she turned to Sheriff Turner and said quietly, “All right. I’ll tell you about it.” She broke down then, sobbing and holding her hands over her eyes, as if she were trying to erase some horrible specter from her mind. “Ledford killed him,” she said. “I had to go along with him or he would have killed me, too.” With pleading eyes she begged, “Please understand that.”
Turner summoned a stenographer to the interrogation room to take the statement. An hour later she had finished telling a tale so grisly and so cold-blooded that it left even the officers sick.
Her name, she said, was Mrs. Loraine Icey Tate Stanga. She was 28 and formerly was married to an Oklahoma state-highway department employee.
The woman said that she met Ledford on September 30th, on a date in Atlanta. They had hit it off well, and she saw him again on September 2nd. Since then, she said, she had been with the man “almost constantly.”
They didn’t really have to talk; evidence spoke for them.
She described Gray as a “very good friend” of about three months’ standing whom she had dated on several occasions. On Saturday, October 3rd, she said, she had another date with Gray, in Decatur. Afterward, she said, they went to her apartment where to her surprise she found Ledford waiting for them. He had apparently concealed himself behind a door, she said, and stepped out to confront her and Gray when they had entered the apartment.
“When Ledford stepped from behind the door,” she told the interrogators, “he had a .38 pistol in his hand. He pointed the gun at Mr. Gray and me and told us to do as he said or he would kill us both.
“He told me to get in Mr. Gray’s car, in the driver’s seat, and Mr. Gray to get in the front seat on the passenger’s side. Ledford got in the back seat and ordered me to drive where he told me. I drove out in the country and I drove about 40 or 45 minutes and every time Mr. Gray would murmur, Ledford would pistol-whip him. Ledford finally told me to turn off on a country road and stop.”
Mrs. Stanga fell silent, her voice failing, as she recounted the tale. Her eyes stared off into space, as if reliving the terrible experience.
“When I got stopped Ledford got out and went around to the side of the car,” she continued finally. “He started shaking Mr. Gray down and taking things out of his pockets. He told me to take his wallet and everything that was in his pockets on my side.
“Ledford then took Mr. Gray by the collar and pulled him out of the car on the right side and knocked him down on the ground. Then he hit him over the head several times with the gun.
“Ledford thought Mr. Gray was dead and he grabbed Gray by the coat and told me to get hold of his legs and he started dragging him toward the back of the car.
“Then he discovered that Mr. Gray was not dead, so he made Mr. Gray get up and walk to the back of the car and get inside the trunk. Then he started hitting Mr. Gray over the head again until he thought he was dead. And he made me get back in the car and drive back to town to Ledford’s apartment.
“He picked up his clothes and then drove over to my apartment where he ordered me to go inside and get my clothes. He also made me get a .25 automatic that I had in the house. When we left my apartment he made me get back in the car and told me to start driving. I asked him where we were going and he told me Tennessee. We drove north out of Atlanta.
“Mr. Gray started moaning in the trunk and Ledford told me to turn off on the first country road I came to. I drove about 25 or 30 minutes and turned right and went down a country road until I came to another road and turned left and drove about 1000 yards.”
Mrs. Stanga’s voice trailed off again then and she started to cry. Sheriff Turner handed her a cigarette. “Go on,” he said sternly. “You’ve gone this far, you might as well finish.”
“Ledford,” Mrs. Stanga continued, “told me to stop and he got out of the car with the gun in his hand. He had both of the guns, the .25 automatic in his hand and the .38 pistol in his belt. He then told me to get out of the car and open the trunk.
“He made me stand there at the back of the car. Mr. Gray was conscious and was begging for a drink of water. Ledford told him to come out and he would give him a drink. Then he took the .25 automatic and shot Mr. Gray as he started to get out. Ledford shot him once and then reached up and felt of his ear lobe and pulse.
“Then he shot Mr. Gray again and I could see the blood spray up from his head. Ledford closed the trunk and he took one of my dresses and wiped all of the blood off the car and then he wiped the blood from the front seat where Mr. Gray had bled when he was hit on the head with the pistol. Finally, Ledford wiped the blood from his own hands and face.”
Ledford made her start driving again, Mrs. Stanga said, and she drove across Tennessee and Arkansas to the rugged Ozark mountains near Oklahoma. She said Ledford wanted to hide the body in the Ozarks because it wouldn’t be found there.
They inspected several likely places, including a lake, but finally decided upon the logging road. After dumping the body they drove to Bristow, Oklahoma, where they stayed in a motel Monday night. It was Tuesday morning when they were arrested in Bethany.
When told that the Stanga woman had confessed, Ledford paled and swore softly. When told what she had said in her confession, he swore on a louder and higher indignant note.
“All right,” he said. “If that’s her story, I’ll tell you mine, and then you can decide between them.”
According to Ledford’s statement, equally as detailed as his companion’s, the Stanga woman was a willing accomplice in the robbery and murder. Ledford agreed that he had met the woman in Atlanta September 30th, as she had said, in a hotel. He said they met a second time at the same hotel.
“I checked into the hotel after that,” said Ledford. “And then we went out to her apartment.” They had definitely been together a great deal since that time, he agreed. But then his story veered sharply in its details from that told by his woman friend.
“She told me a lot about this guy Gray,” said Ledford. “She told me he had a lot of money, and would have a lot of money on him.” She, in effect, planted the idea of robbing her other boy friend, the well-heeled mortician, the parolee claimed.
“We agreed to rob him,” Ledford continued. “Last Saturday, she had a date with him. They left her apartment about 6 p.m. I waited in the apartment until they returned about 9 p.m. and when he walked in the door I put the gun on him.
“He resisted a little, and I hit him.”
Ledford’s story agreed in general with Mrs. Stanga’s from then on. In vital details, however, it differed. He said the shooting took place somewhere near Cedartown, Georgia, when they heard a “racket” in the trunk, where Gray had been thrown after the slugging. Ledford also said that the woman made She decision to “dispose of” Gray, and that when they had opened the car trunk, “she handed me the .25 caliber pistol, pulled his head over on her lap and I shot him twice. Then we closed the trunk and drove on.”
Continuing to paint the Stanga woman as the instigator of the plot, Ledford said that as they drove, she told him about some isolated mountains in Arkansas, where they could get rid of the body. That night we drove to Arkansas, and spent the night at a motel,” said Ledford. “The next morning, she drove me down to some lake, but it was a boat dock, so we turned around. Then we went up a mountain and almost at the top we found this little road. I got him by the belt and finally we got him out of the car.”
Ledford said that he had known the woman not as Lorraine Stanga, but as “Susan Jeffrey.” He said that the robbery had netted, not the sizable amount of cash which they had expected, but only $21 altogether.
The Oklahoma officers, relaying what they had learned to Georgia authorities, enabled officers in the Atlanta area to narrow the scene of the crime to a small section of dirt road near Cedartown. Meanwhile, other Oklahoma investigators found a lonely roadside spot near Bris-tow. Oklahoma, where charred papers and the wrist watch belonging to the murder victim had been buried in a creek bed.
There still were a number of questions unanswered. Why had the victim told his mother he was going to the drugstore when he actually was keeping a date with the Stanga woman? If he was carrying $100 with him, why had they gotten only $21 from the robbery? What had happened to his expensive diamond stickpin and ring? And how had Ledford, in the month since his release from prison, gotten enough money to procure the five pieces of expensive, monogrammed luggage, which, police found, contained more than $500 worth of top-quality men’s clothing?
Conceding that these questions needed answers, the officers in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Georgia felt that they had enough evidence already to file murder charges, and on October 9th, the man and woman were returned to Georgia, to await final determination of the murder scene. Unfortunately, the road upon which the crime was committed straddles a county line, and until the jurisdictional question is settled, the due process of law may be delayed temporarily.
Culled from January 1959 edition of True Detective magazine.
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