On the night of Friday, the seventh of April, 1944, a posse of farmers and twenty-five sailors from the naval firing station at Shawnee, Oklahoma, put about a hundred and fifty shots into a patch of brush.

Twelve days after they pulled a man out of it, he had pleaded guilty to three murders and been sentenced to die.

Twelve days. From three bodies to a death sentence.

There was no trial. The defense called no witnesses. It called nobody at all.

Four days before the shooting in the brush, a forty-seven-year-old farmer named Roy Schat drove into Oklahoma City to sell hogs and buy feed, and did not come home. That same afternoon, forty miles east, a woman named Victoria Gorski and her three-year-old daughter Martha were killed in the hallway of their own barn. One of the older girls found them when she came home to gather the eggs.

Depending on which newspaper you read that week, that farm was in one of four different counties.

This is the story of twelve days in the spring of 1944. It's also the story of two Oklahoma City detectives named Ernest Jones and Nathaniel "Bo" Baker, who broke this case in a rented room on North Missouri Street, and who survive in the official record as "E. E. Jones and Nathan Baker, two negro policemen."

One newspaper in that city printed their names. It printed their photographs. It ran an editorial about what it meant. It was not one of the white papers.

I tell this one as Andrew Orr, the sheriff of Lincoln County — what he couldn't find out, you don't find out either.

And on the afternoon he was sentenced to death, Amon Johnson got into a car with Sheriff Orr and told him why he had done it. It is not what he told the court. Nobody in that courtroom ever heard it.

The State of Oklahoma put him to death eleven months later.

It never did establish how old he was.

If you know anything about a young woman named Elouise Chandler — nineteen years old in 1944, living in Oklahoma City — I would like to hear from you. She is the reason this case was solved, and after that she goes out of the record completely. I'd also like to hear from anyone descended from the Schat or the Gorski families.

Content note: this episode describes three murders, one of them a three-year-old child, and it ends with an execution. It also quotes 1944 newspapers in the language they were printed in, which I'm not going to clean up for them. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one.

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

Music by TrackTribe — copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com