September 23, 1983. It’s the end of the evening shift for the staff at the Kentucky Fried Chicken
outlet in Kilgore, Texas. As the last customers leave, there’s a lot of laughing and joking.
It’s Friday night. Time to have some fun. The main door then swings open. A warm
breeze hits the startled staff. “We’re closed,” says the assistant manager.
None of them return home that night. The next time anyone sees them,
they are lying dead on the ground, executed. Let’s now try our best to understand what
happened that night. First, the victims.
They were Opie Hughes (39), Mary Tyler (37), David Maxwell (20), Joey Johnson (20), and Monty Landers
(19). Tyler was the assistant manager. Hughes was one of the staff, as were Johnson and Maxwell.
Landers shouldn’t even have been there that day. He’d just popped in to see the two young men.
We know that the staff had already pretty much finished for the night. They’d almost finished
cleaning up the place. The money had been counted and the franchise headquarters had been called
and been told about the takings. During that call, though, some voices could be heard in the
background, possibly the voices of the killers. That phone call was the last time anyone heard the
staff speak, besides the killers of, of course. Around 11 pm, Mary Tyler’s daughter, Kim, walked
into the restaurant expecting to see her mom. What she found instead was an eerie silence. Perplexed,
shouting her mom’s name, she looked down at the floor. She panicked when she saw fresh blood.
The cops were soon on the scene, but none of the staff could be found. At first,
police assumed that some hijinks had taken place and the staff had maybe had a fight,
or someone had had an accident, and possibly they were all nearby. No one thought “massacre.”
But that’s what it was. The next day, about 15 miles from the restaurant
at a remote field close to an oil well, all five victims were found. The first police on the
scene couldn’t believe what they saw. It looked like an execution from a war crime photograph.
All the victims were lying face down in the grass and dirt, their arms tucked under their bodies,
their heads all pointing northwards. Four of them were close together, while the other body of Opie
Hughes lay not so far away. They’d all been shot in the back of the head, with at least one
of them also taking a bullet to the back. Danny Pirtle, who would lead the investigation,
later said in court that it was plainly obvious how they had died without having to
wait for the autopsy. What he didn’t know is that the carnage he was looking at would become one of
the worst unsolved crimes in modern US history. Well, it remained unsolved for over two decades,
and to some extent, still is partly unsolved, but we’ll get around to that.
As some of you sleuths out of there already know, a lot of murders are committed by people
very close to the victim. You rarely have to look further than a spurned ex-lover,
a jilted friend, or an angry business associate, to find the person responsible.
But in this case, things just didn’t look that way.
The murderers got away with around $2,000 that night, but even so, killing five people over
such a small sum didn’t make sense. What’s more, it wasn’t as if the staff were all
connected other than the fact they worked together. Sure, the young guys were friends,
but police knew fairly certain that they weren’t involved in gangs or high-level drug activity,
and they weren’t prone to hanging out with women in their late thirties.
The crime looked like the work of a maniac, but then the most messed up killers out there don’t
tend to take the money, too. They kill for fun, for sport, to attend to some crazed sexual fetish,
but they don’t usually run off with the loot. At first, the investigators wondered if the
murders had anything to do with a methamphetamine ring that had filled the streets of Kilgore with
that pernicious drug. They knew that the ring was looking for a “new recipe” for cooking meth.
Aside from that, after prolonged bignes meth-heads do tend to lose the plot sometimes.
But when they spoke to the manager of the branch, that manager said no way. Those folks were not
part of any ruthless criminal gang. They weren’t meth sellers, and she believed they weren’t even
meth consumers. Speaking later of the two 20-year old men, she said, “They were good,
they were exceptional. They were good kids.” The police started looking at Kim,
Mary’s 17-year old stepdaughter. She’d recently started working at that KFC and she had a somewhat
checkered past for a young person. So much so, she spent some time at the Louisiana home for girls
after exhibiting behavioral problems. But why would she have had her mother
killed? Why would this young woman have a beef with a bunch of guys just a little older than
her? That line of inquiry led to nothing because Kim had absolutely no reason to have anyone shot.
It seemed to police that a robbery had taken place, but perhaps one or more of
the staff had refused to hand over the cash. Some kind of fight ensued, in which one of
the staff was injured. Not wanting to leave any witnesses, the gunmen then abducted the staff
and took them to that oil field to kill them. Still, the autopsy didn’t state that anyone had
died before anyone else. It revealed that all of them were lined up at the oil field
and they were shot one by one. Only Hughes, who was dragged away, was shot separately.
There were few clues to work with. Cops found a fingernail in the clothing of one of the bodies.
They found traces of another human on Hughes’s body. But the best clue was a bit of blood on the
ground and a blood-stained napkin lying nearby. As we said, there was also some blood in the
restaurant. It didn’t look as though it had come from any of the victims. Perhaps, the
police thought, one of the staff really had put up a good fight and injured one of the perpetrators.
People came forward and said they saw a van at the restaurant that night,
which could have taken the victims away. But there was no CCTV back then in the area and
those witness statements were vague at best. Police also looked at two men named Romeo
Pinkerton and Darnell Hartsfield. They were cousins and they both had a checkered past,
while another man linked to those two was also on the police radar. But then jail records seemed to
point to the fact that Hartsfield was in jail at the time of the murders, so that trail went dry.
Such a slaying, something of the utmost brutality, put a lot of pressure on the
cops. That’s not always a good thing. It can make police join too many dots and as we all now know,
many an innocent man has gone to jail when the police can’t quite look past the picture
they’ve already formed in their mind. It’s called having a “cognitive bias” and quite a few people
have spent time on death row because of it. The police were too quick to join the dots
when they arrested a man named James Earl Mankins Jr. He had a pretty colorful rap
sheet, but mostly for drug convictions. Notably, Mankins’ father was a State Representative.
Police discovered that the fingernail they found looked as though it came
from him. He was also missing a bit of his. A man named James Rowe said he approached the
police by himself a few months after the crime. That night he said he saw men driving a van
and he noticed that in the back of the van were people wearing uniforms. What’s scary is that he
said he heard them yelling and screaming. He also said the driver of the van was a
white guy with long hair and a beard. That fit the description of Mankins,
although Rowe was never asked to testify. Why police never approached him again we
don’t know. It wasn’t until 20 years later that he did testify, and he said he went to school
with Mankins and the man in that van wasn’t him. Later in 1995, DNA evidence pointed to Mankins’
innocence and the case against him was dropped. Some years later it
would be discovered that this fingernail the police had been so dead set on investigating
actually came from one of the victims. Mankins later told the press, “The worst
part was the six months in jail over there thinking about being put to death for something
I didn't do. And more than likely if it wasn't for that DNA, I would have been on death row.”
The case went cold again, and it looked as though they’d never find the killers.
A detective later admitted that the police had spent way too much time focusing on Mankins.
Tunnel vision is an investigator’s worst enemy, so sometime later,
the Rusk County Sheriff’s Office called a former FBI agent named George Kinney and asked
him to look at the case from different angles. It seemed to Kinney, that given the severity of
the crimes, whoever had done it had very likely committed more crimes in the years that had
passed. It would be fair to assume, he thought, that the murderers were in prison for other crimes
as he began his investigation in the early 2000s. In 2001, a forensic scientist named Lorna Beasley
retested the DNA evidence the police had and ran it through something called the
“Combined DNA Data Indexing System.” That way she could ascertain if the DNA from the blood
found at the crime scene matched any DNA of violent offenders currently behind bars.
Two names popped up. They were Romeo Pinkerton and Darnell Hartsfield.
Hmm, she thought, those guys were suspects at the start but were rubbed from the list when
it was discovered one of them was in jail when the murders happened. That wasn’t true. The cops
had messed up in this regard. On the night of the slayings, he’d been out of prison two days.
But the evidence still wasn’t enough to charge the men for the crime.
It took two more years for Texas Attorney General prosecutor Lisa Tanner to get on
the case. She had doubts about finding the culprits so many years after the crime.
Witnesses were getting old, and she said there were quite a few holes in the entire story.
She also realized that DNA evidence pointed to three men committing the crime, not two.
What she needed was DNA from one of the two suspects for who she did have names. One
of them was Hartsfield and investigators got a break in 2003 when he was arrested.
Now investigators just needed a DNA sample from him, but he wasn’t exactly forthcoming about that.
So investigators embarked on a plan that had fooled many criminals in the past- offering
drinks or chewing gum and then testing the remains. With Hartsfield, they got an added bonus.
He flat-out refused to give investigators a DNA sample, and that was his legal right. He even
stated that in a letter. Oops.
Tanner later told the press this: “He told us he wasn’t going to give
us his blanket blank DNA. And then he was so adamant about it, he wrote us a letter saying,
‘I’m not giving you my DNA, and you can’t make me give you my DNA,’ and then, of course, he
licked the envelope and sent it to us.” In 2007, facing the death penalty
due to the new DNA evidence, he admitted to murdering those five people. Still,
he said he only did so because five life sentences was better than a shot of lethal drugs into the
arm. Pinkerton also received five life sentences. Hartsfield has since spoken from his cell, and he
hasn’t changed his story of being innocent. He once said, “I might’ve had crimes that I did do.
You know what I’m saying? But no one ever got hurt. I would never kill those people,
and from day one, I have stated my innocence, and I’m still stating my innocence.”
The investigators say they’ve now joined the dots and the picture they have come up
with they are sure is real. They say the guys, possibly three guys, heard someone talking about
the takings that evening. But, they mistakenly heard $15,000, not $1,500. Some reports we found
said $2,000 was taken and some said $3,000, so we can’t be sure just how much was stolen.
Investigators think the robbery just went wrong, and for some reason, they abducted
the five people. Why they murdered them all, they just don’t know. They admit that the crime cannot
be said to be solved until that third person is arrested. The DNA evidence found on Hughe’s
body does not match Hartsfield, Pinkerton, or Mankins, or anyone else in the DNA database.
The guy we mentioned at the start, former detective Pirtle, said, “I think about it
every day, and I lie awake some nights with it on my mind. It has been a big part of my life,
and though I am retired now, I still want the third person.”
Hartsfield fought his conviction and in 2010 a court upheld it, saying the evidence against him
was solid. He still claims his innocence today, saying the “real killer” is still out there.
Now you need to watch something spookily similar “Brutal True Story of What They
Didn't Tell You About the Burger Chef Massacre.” Or, have a look at this maniac
“The Werewolf - World's Worst Serial Killer.” Kentucky Fried Murders - America's Worst Killers