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Thanksgiving night, 1934. Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the back of the Owl Tavern, two doors from the Quaker Drug Store, nineteen-year-old Phil Kennamer, a federal judge's son, opens his coat to show a friend the hunting knife on his belt. He has a date tonight, he says. With Gorrell. At eleven o'clock. He walks out the front door and yells back that he'll be back in five minutes. He never does come back. For nine days before that night, Phil had been telling his friends what he was going to do. He showed them a note. He sent one of them a telegram from Kansas City that ended, "Keep your mouth shut." By the county attorney's count, at least ten people had seen that note. As far as the record shows, not one of them went to the police. John Gorrell was twenty-one: a licensed pilot, a first-year dental student, home for Thanksgiving. This is the story of how he died, and of the young crowd at the Quaker who heard it coming, told through Jack Snedden, the friend Phil called to the Owl that night. It's built from the Tulsa front pages, the wire stories that carried it across the country, and the court's own record of what was said under oath. Back in August 2020, this case got about ten minutes tucked inside another episode. This time it gets two. Part 1 follows it from the fall of 1934 into the winter of 1935. Part 2, A Roman Holiday, is next. Content note: this episode involves violence and the deaths of young men, and one of those deaths was ruled a suicide. If you or someone you love is struggling, you don't have to carry it alone. In the U.S., call or text 988, any time. ON THE BLOG: The Tulsa front pages from that winter, the wire photographs and the court's opinion are all at Section29.com, under The Killing of John Gorrell. IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING: If your family knew the Sneddens, the Gorrells or the Wilcoxes, if you have a photograph of Jack Snedden or of Dr. J. F. Gorrell, or if you've ever come across newsreel footage shot in Tulsa in December 1934, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at Section29.com. And if you have a forgotten Oklahoma case you'd like me to dig into, send it along. Listening on the Forgotten True Crime feed? Okie Investigations is now home to every Oklahoma case we do. Find Okie Investigations wherever you're listening and subscribe, so you'll know when the next one drops. Okie Investigations, by Forgotten True Crime. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com FIND THE SHOW: Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening, and if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

On a Thursday night in May 1977, two Midwest City patrolmen met a few blocks from an apartment complex at Southeast 25th and Douglas so neither one would have to walk in alone. They’d been sent on a welfare check: a man nobody had seen all week. What the older officer found when he opened the refrigerator stayed with him for the rest of his life. The man was Theodore Canatis, a retired Air Force man who worked maintenance at the OU Health Sciences Center. Six months earlier his son Gregory, nineteen and just out of Hawaii, had come to live with him. By the following morning, police said Gregory had told them he killed his father. What came after is the stranger story. Gregory was charged with first-degree murder, but he was never tried and never convicted. Doctors called him insane, the court sent him to a state hospital, and the charge was dropped three years later. Then came a lawsuit over the warning nobody gave, a federal ruling that rewrote Oklahoma’s commitment law, and a grocery store in Norman. For thirty-seven years, nobody could quite decide what to do with him. We first told this story in August 2020. This is the full version, rebuilt from the newspapers of 1977 through 2017, the court filings and the press photographs. Content warning: violence, dismemberment, cannibalism, serious mental illness and self-harm. The newspaper coverage and links to the 1977 press photographs (Oklahoma Historical Society) are at Section29.com. Follow us at⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@Sect29⁠ ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/0TzmO5YuMYA2ECbTiCKdEt⁠ If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time in the U.S. Okie Investigations, by Forgotten True Crime. Hosted by Trevor Shelby.

Monday, the twenty-sixth of November, 2001. Oklahoma City. At Crossings Community Church, a family from Enid is burying a thirty-nine-year-old advertising executive, a deacon, a father of two. His name is Rob Andrew. Six days earlier, he was shot to death in the garage of the house he'd just moved out of, with his children inside. His wife and his children aren't at the funeral, and nobody seems to know where they are. Rob saw it coming. In the weeks before he died, he told his family, a friend at work, and his prayer journal that he was afraid. He took the cut brake lines from his car to the police. Then he went back and told them again. The day before he died, he handed them a cassette tape. This is Rob's story, told the way his family lived it: the boy from the swimming pool in Enid, the marriage, the friend from church who sold him an $800,000 life insurance policy, a search for two missing children, an arrest at the Texas border, two trials, two death sentences, and a handwritten letter that nobody in this case says is true. And it isn't over. Brenda Andrew and Jim Pavatt were both convicted of Rob's murder and sentenced to death. Brenda Andrew still says she's innocent, and her case has been to the U.S. Supreme Court and is headed back there. On October 14, 2026, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board denied Jim Pavatt clemency. He is scheduled to be executed on November 12. Content note: this episode describes a shooting, with children in the house at the time. Nothing in it is graphic, but if that's not for you today, sit this one out. There'll be another one. ON THE BLOG: Everything I found for this episode is at Section29.com: the newspaper coverage from 2001, pages from Rob Andrew's prayer journal, and the court records, from the 2003 and 2004 trials to the Supreme Court. IF YOU KNOW SOMETHING: If you covered either trial, sat in one of those courtrooms, or knew Rob, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out at Section29.com. And if you have a forgotten case you'd like me to dig into, send it along. Okie Investigations, in partnership with Forgotten True Crime. Narrated by me. AI used in post to improve the audio. MUSIC: Music by TrackTribe, copyright-free music for creators. TrackTribe is Mike Chiavaro, Gunnar Olsen, Otis McDonald, and Fred Beteille. tracktribe.com FIND THE SHOW: Blog: Section29.com · YouTube: Forgotten True Crime · Facebook: Forgotten True Crime Subscribe wherever you're listening so you know when the next one drops. And if this episode got you, leave a review and share it with somebody who loves true crime. For an independent show, that's worth more than you'd think.

On a summer afternoon in July 1985, two sisters walked out of their family's house in Bethany, Oklahoma. They said they were going to look for jobs. Their brother remembers one of them calling back, "Hurry up. They're waiting for us down the street." Rozlin Abell was 18. Fawn Abell was 15. Neither has been seen since. There was no newspaper story, and no search. For 25 years the case sat in a file, until a phone call about bones found at a wildlife refuge made a Bethany detective pull it. In this episode we follow that detective through what was written down, and what wasn't. Who was waiting down the street? Why did no one go looking? And why did the law of Oklahoma treat two sisters who walked out the same door on the same afternoon so differently? The case is still open. If you know anything about what happened to Rozlin and Fawn Abell, call the Bethany Police Department at 405-789-2323. Sources, newspaper pages and the timeline are at Section29.com.

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. This is Episode 1 of Okie Investigations. 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. Listener discretion advised. This episode describes the murders of children.

When Jack Leary is found brutally murdered in Cheyenne, Oklahoma, in 1933, the community is left reeling. The investigation that follows spans nearly a decade, punctuated by false confessions, dismissed charges, and a trial that raises more questions than answers. Join Trevor Shelby as he examines the evidence, the key players, and the enduring impact of this baffling case on the town of Cheyenne.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Okie Investigations, the podcast where we look at the darker side of Oklahoma's history. For each episode, we will bring you a different true crime story that was headline news in the Sooner State. We tell the stories that others can't. Make sure you subscribe today so you don't miss a single episode. If you have case that you would like looked into, please contact me on our website truecrime.blog