A few months ago, I wrote on this blog about the Girl Scout murders that occurred in Mayes County, Oklahoma, in 1977, and I mentioned that the crime is officially considered an unsolved case, although many observers, including many law enforcement officials, felt sure that the man arrested and tried for the crime, convicted rapist Gene Leroy Hart, was guilty, even though he was acquitted. However, the Girl Scout case was not the first notorious unsolved murder case in Mayes County history.
On the evening of June 7, 1952, county prosecutor Henry Lawrence "Jack" Burris was working on an air conditioning unit in his back yard in the small town of Locust Grove, using the lights of his tractor to illuminate his work area, when an assailant came out of the dark and shot him dead with a .12 gauge shotgun blast to the face. Several theories emerged as to the motive for the crime and several suspects were identified, including a cousin of Burris's second wife, who supposedly held a personal grudge against the man. The most prevalent theory, however, was that Burris had been killed by someone with underworld connections because of Burris's vigorous prosecution of liquor law violations in what was then a dry state. In pursuing this theory, law officers made at least one arrest and announced that others were imminent.
However, no one ever came to trial in the case, and Burris's murder is considered one of the most notorious unsolved murder cases in Oklahoma history.
5 comments:
who were the other suspects involved in this murder and do you know anymore information about Henry Lawrence Jack Burris?
No, I haven't really researched this incident very much. Just did a little cursory research in order to write the blog entry. So, I don't know much about Burris or who all was suspected in his killing. Not without going back and researching it some more.
okay. I appreciate it. do you know if there is any place I can look to find this information?
The best place to research this would probably be a newspaper database like Newspapers.com, but Newspapers.com is a subcription service. Chronicling America, another newspaper database, is free, but it doesn't seem to have a lot about the Burris case.
Our local library. Our newspaper was called the Jefferson back then. That's where I have done all my reading.
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