Oklahoma, the summer of 1978. A family pulls over on Interstate 35 to help a woman with a broken-down car. Twenty-four days later, six people are shot to death in a walk-in freezer at a steakhouse in south Oklahoma City.

For eight months, nobody knew the two crimes were connected — until a ten-year-old boy came around the side of his house holding a paper sack.

Nine people died: Melvin, Linda and Richard Lorenz on the highway near Purcell, and Isaac Freeman, Louis Zacarias, David Lindsey, David Salsman, Anthony Tew and Terri Horst inside the Sirloin Stockade on SW 74th. Roger Dale Stafford was executed in 1995. His brother Harold died six days after the massacre and never answered a single question about it.

And Verna Stafford is 73 years old, still in an Oklahoma prison, and standing in front of the Pardon and Parole Board this week.

She is the only person still alive who was in that building.

She is also the only reason the case was ever solved.

Court records, the appellate opinions, the parole docket, and a full list of every place the sources contradict each other — and on this case they do it constantly — are at ⁠Section29.com.⁠

Music by TrackTribe.

Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio.

Listener discretion advised. This episode describes the murders of children.