Original subtitles

It was an awfully brutal, cold day.

One of our city workers was up in a bucket truck working on a light signal.

And he heard what he thought was a backfire.

And he noticed a truck lurching forward

in a very slow and jerky manner.

And he thought the driver suffered some medical emergency.

Bob, what do you got up there?

10-4, all right, he's in trouble.

Spotted a truck on location. Front is stuck in the dirt.

The bullet went through the windshield

and hit him in the chest.

Rex Harper was driving his dump truck.

Witnesses report hearing a single gunshot.

Every town in Oklahoma had a lawless past.

This was the Indian Territory. It was lawless.

It had no organized law enforcement other than

the US Marshal from Fort Smith and the US Calvary.

In the cowboy culture, we had a saying.

"Do it alone. Do it at night.

And don't ever tell anybody about it."

Tommy can hear everybody in Oklahoma right now.

To the red, white, and blue of Old Glory.

Oklahoma's a cowboy state.

Come on, make some noise, now!

You can go any direction

and there's rodeo arenas,

there's horses...

Come on now, cowboy. Come on now.

...there are cowboys.

How 'bout it, everybody? Doc Worthington.

Come on, stay with her. Ride it, now.

Would I trade it?

No. Wouldn't trade it for nothing in the world.

Everybody knew the Harpers.

You could go on any street and mention the Harpers

and everybody knew them.

Bobby, Billy, Ralph, Mark, Rex.

They were Harpers. They grew up right here in Broken Arrow.

And Ralph Harper,

legendary cowboy.

Tougher than a boot.

Rex was the nephew to Ralph Harper.

You know I was talking to Rex before the race down there.

He's a Broken Arrow boy.

I've known him, known him all his life.

After Rodeo, you know, dirt racing is really big in Oklahoma.

My uncle was a big time racer. He was one of the good ones.

He was a spring car racer so we'd go to Tulsa Speedway

and Rujo and Port City.

Rex Harper, running by himself in the fourth row.

I was giving him a hard time

about starting driving so old last time.

He started in his late 20s or 30s.

Rex was very passionate about driving.

You know, he did good for what he had.

But then Rex meet Karie

and he got married, uh, kind of just out of the blue.

I was shocked, but I'm a guy.

And I wasn't going to lecture him on, you know, his decisions.

Rex and I meet in the spring.

It didn't take much for the spark to begin and then fall in love.

And we were married three months after we meet.

I was very excited to marry him and to build a future together.

He was such a kind, gentle person, very funny.

Anything that he could do to get you to laugh,

that was very important to him.

Our wedding was, um, not a big affair.

And, you know, we were young and we were on a budget.

But it was very pretty, very lovely and very romantic.

I went to Rex and Karie's wedding.

It was beautiful. A little chapel in the woods.

We were so happy for them.

Rex was ecstatic when he got married.

He was, he was so proud of her.

She was beautiful and she was fun and the whole family loved her.

They were great until things started to unravel.

I don't think she realized

what was going on behind closed doors.

In Broken Arrow, our crime has been kept fairly low

which I'm proud of.

I can attribute a lot of that to the policing.

Our insignia is BAPD on our collar brass.

That stands for Bad Ass Police Department.

But this particular day was different.

I had gotten back from lunch.

And I got a call from dispatch.

And they said, "Come to the scene immediately.

We've had a homicide on Main Street."

It was sleeting. It was very cold.

And, drove to the crime scene.

And, sure enough, we were confronted with an horrific crime

of a man, driving in his dump truck being shot

with a high-powered rifle, uh, through the chest.

By the time I got here, he was laying in the grass right over there.

I climbed up into the truck and saw the bullet hole

and I thought, "Wow."

It was such a perfectly aimed shot

that if it had been a half an inch lower,

it probably would have hit the hood,

gone through the engine block and not have hit him.

I wasn't here 20 seconds before I was contacting the chief

and telling him, "You need to come down here."

He was incredulous and said,

"Aw, come on, we don't have murderers in Broken Arrow."

And I said, "I know."

Our victim's name was Rex Wayne Harper.

I knew some, some Harpers myself, so...

Good people, hard-working.

I was working there in Broken Arrow and, uh...

And, you know, my dad, he walked up to me and said,

"Hey, they've, they've killed your uncle. You know, we need to go."

So, we drove straight down to Main Street.

I remember pulling up and

Rex's dump truck was sitting there,

kind of over on the curb.

And there was, there was a body lying there.

It was major shocking.

You know, you don't ever think of stuff like that happens to you until it does.

When we went down to Casey's Mattress World

where Rex's wife Karie worked,

I was a little surprised by her response.

She fake teared.

I could not process what was going on.

I was just face to face with him just a few minutes ago.

When you tell me that he has been killed,

I didn't, I couldn't understand what that meant.

And I just kept saying, "I don't understand."

I cannot say that she seemed overly shocked.

Uh, I cannot say that initially she

broke down in any way.

But I also know that people respond to that kind of news

in very different ways.

But I will say that it gave me some pause.

And it was something that I wanted to ponder.

My very first assignment was to canvas the residential area

near where the vehicle ended up.

We knocked on doors and tried to find out

if anybody saw or heard anything.

There were people that heard the shot.

I found nobody that had seen anything.

This was one of the most bizarre murders.

The very fact that someone had the gall, the audacity,

to stand in broad daylight on Main Street.

We had zero eyewitnesses.

And we had no real clues

except his body, his truck, and the bullet hole.

I was born here about three blocks up the street.

Broken Arrow was a great place to grow up.

We'd run around town when we were kids,

barefoot, seeing what kind of trouble we could get in.

There really wasn't nothing.

I never had any real problems with anybody.

Got along pretty good with most folks.

You're going to run into an idiot every now and then

no matter where you are.

Everybody was devastated.

My grandparents were just all in shock.

We just couldn't believe that something like this could happen.

Rex was the good one. Just excellent man.

So we all kind of gathered at my grandpa's house

where everybody tried to talk and cried and mourned and

tried to figure out, you know, what had happened.

We didn't really see Karie much.

We would try to reach out to her,

but I don't recall her ever getting in touch with us.

Our biggest question was how did the shooter know

how to be in that location

at that strip mall in Broken Arrow

at that time to be able to pull the trigger

and kill Rex Harper?

The first thing we needed to do was find out why Rex was shot.

What might have been the motive?

This area is where the business,

Casey's Mattress World was located

that Karie worked at.

Rex would have parked his dump truck

somewhere in this vicinity to visit with her that day.

And as he pulled out, he would have turned

to go out the exit in this direction.

After the shot was fired and Rex was struck,

he slumped over in his truck and his foot hit the gas.

Rex's truck ended up right across the street over there.

Shooting through a windshield in broad daylight

from a hidden position, one shot to kill Rex Harper?

To me that sounded like a professional hit.

But why take out Rex Harper?

We wanted to know if there was any kind of grudge

or any kind of disgruntled situation going on.

We needed to find out who would want this man dead.

We knew that Rex was involved in car racing.

It's a competitive sport.

You know, people drive to win.

And you never know if somebody's going to get bowed up

about maybe him cutting him off and winning a race.

Maybe there was a race car driver

who had issues with Rex.

Rex was not one of the bigger names in the racing community.

Uh, but he was a very well-liked guy.

A lot of fun to be around.

He knew a lot of people.

I do not think that there was anybody at the races

that would have anything against Rex.

That theory didn't last too long.

My partner and I went out to where Rex was working

to see if there'd been any kind of altercations at his place of business.

The boss had nothing but good things to say.

In talking to some of the other employees,

they all seemed to like him.

Rex had no enemies that we knew of.

I mean, he was just a good guy.

I could not come to a conclusion

of how the shooter would have been in the right place

at the right time in front of Karie's business

with Rex being there and him being able to pull the trigger.

And the only thing that I could determine is that

Karie probably had something to do with it.

I decided to go and see Karie.

I took her to a cafe

and just asked her if she had any idea

who might be responsible for killing him.

She seemed distracted.

And there were many times in the interview

where she made the statement, "I didn't kill Rex."

It just seemed very odd that she would continue to say,

"I didn't kill Rex. I didn't kill him. I didn't kill him."

I found it out of place because we knew that.

She was working in the store.

There was no way she could have done it.

Now, there's a lot of rumors in the barber shop.

You never know which ones to believe and which ones not to.

And I take them all with a grain of salt.

The rumor I heard his wife was seeing some guy and

Rex confronted him.

And as he was leaving Rex got shot.

It seems like that guy got him from quite a distance.

Maybe 100 yards or so.

We had no idea that Karie had someone else in her life,

um, until I was with her at the shop one time

and a man came in.

Very angry, throwing all of her stuff around.

And I could hear him yelling and fighting in the back.

I was only, like, 11, so I didn't know what was going on.

And then I find out that was Stan Williamson.

I meet Stan four years prior to my relationship with Rex.

And it was not a good relationship between Stan and I.

Um, he was very controlling.

Um, narcissistic tendencies.

Very manipulative

in the sense that what I could and could not do,

where I could and could not go,

the people that I spoke with.

It wasn't a relationship that I wanted to remain in.

And it took me three years to leave.

Stan was enraged with me for leaving.

And he wanted me to come back.

Stanley Claude Williamson

was quite the icon in rodeo circles.

I mean, he was a hero.

Come on, people. Make some noise. Let me hear you.

Because Stan is a two-time world champion steer wrestler.

The best way to describe steer wrestling

is running down the football field

about 25, 30 miles an hour

and jump off.

And wrestle that steer right down to the ground.

Stanley was a very polished steer wrestler.

If you was at a rodeo competing against Stan,

one of you gonna lose

and it probably wasn't gonna be Stan.

And when you have a champion rodeo hero like Stan,

a lot of people are gonna want to be in his inner circle.

So, it was a daunting task,

finding people willing to talk.

It was like trying to get an interview with a celebrity.

No one would tell us where he was.

I mean, you're either in or you're out of that community.

And, if you're an outsider, you're going to be shunned.

"Stan who? I don't know Stan."

He was a good cowboy. He was a brother.

That cowboy bond. That's how that works.

"I didn't see nothing. I didn't hear nothing.

And I don't know nothing."

Ultimately, we were able to establish that

at the time Rex was shot,

Stan Williamson wasn't in Broken Arrow.

He was in Oklahoma City in a rodeo competition.

And, so, he was unable to actually pull the trigger that day.

So, who pulled the trigger and killed this

man so loved by his family?

We were honestly all scared

because they didn't find the shooter.

So who knows who's next?

It could've been my dad, it could've been my other uncles,

we didn't know what was gonna happen.

Could've been my grandparents.

We talked to Rex's family members, his mom and dad.

And without fail,

they said that he was being harassed by Stan Williamson.

So obviously all eyes are focused on him again.

We had no shortage of people

who told us that they had seen Karie

with Stan Williamson on numerous occasions.

And so I decided to take another run at Karie.

I really went at her pretty hard.

I asked her really hard questions.

Initially she tried the whole, "No, I broke it off with Stan,"

until we confronted her with the names

of people who actually had seen her with Stan.

We basically said, "We know that's a lie."

And we finally got her to admit

that she was still seeing him.

But she insisted that she didn't kill him.

And that she didn't know...

...she didn't know that it was gonna happen.

They kept me in an interrogation room for four hours.

I think I was in so much shock...

...and terror.

I cried for four solid hours.

I couldn't comprehend what was going on.

I don't know if I felt that they thought I was a part of it,

or if they were...

...looking for me to provide additional information that I didn't...

...give them.

But I also believe that

I didn't have whatever it is that they were looking for,

and I just kept telling them that.

"I have no information for you.

I don't know what it is that you need

or what you're looking for.

I don't have the answers."

Feelings changed for Karie when we started realizing that

she took every bit of his belongings.

She didn't try to get with the family and talk about Rex

or talk about what had happened.

It was just...

she was... took his stuff and she was gone.

I do believe that the Harper family think that I didn't care.

And that I was heartless.

And that I didn't care about Rex and...

...it was completely the opposite.

I don't know what I could have done to make them less...

...sad or angry.

One of the things that we found when checking our records

was that Rex had actually filed a Destruction of Private Property Report...

...and listed Stan Williamson as the suspect.

We had a shop that had the dump trucks in it

and my Uncle Rex's rent car was there.

Nice classic cars,

that my brothers and Dad and grandpa had worked so hard for,

and he burned it all down.

We knew he was very jealous.

Very possessive.

And probably very...

...angry that someone would actually have the nerve...

...to break up with him.

We began to suspect that Stan...

...had coordinated some type of murder for hire.

So my partner and I went back to Oklahoma City.

We figured if he was gonna get someone

to commit a crime of this magnitude

it'd probably be somebody in the rodeo circuit.

We knew we had to find the actual person who pulled the trigger.

As a kid growing up...

...get some rope and, you know, rode some bulls.

So I was familiar with the community.

The rodeo community like many cultures

is pretty closed off.

You're not going to just...

...you know, walk into a bar and say,

"Hey, is there anybody here knows about a shooting on Main Street in Broken Arrow?"

We had to kinda seek out

some of the cowboys there to find out if they knew Stan,

and if they'd seen him around.

We kept going because we knew, that eventually,

we would get to the bottom of it if we just stayed with it.

And we actually found someone that said

that they heard Stan Williamson talking

to people about who would be willing

to... kill a man that lived in Broken Arrow.

And so we were finally able to make the headway that we needed.

It was through subpoenaing Stan's Williamson's cellphone records.

that we found a series of calls

ending abruptly the day of the murder.

These were all people who were part of Stan's circle.

There was a man named Bubby Hayes...

...Spider Gibbs...

...and Alton Gibson.

It seemed as though Stan may have solicited all of them at one time or another...

...to commit the crime of murder against Rex Harper.

They were all well-known crooks...

...low lives...

...thieves.

They were pretty much the known...

...thugs in that area.

And then Bubby Hayes went on the run.

So we reached out to the U.S. Marshals.

I became an expert marksman while with the U.S. Marshals.

I do cowboy action shooting.

The Broken Arrow Police Department had contacted me

and said that it may have been a murder for hire.

Stan Williamson was the primary suspect.

And he had many contacts who were rugged and tough

and dangerous enough to pull this off.

But one of them...

...was on the run.

And that was Bubby Hayes.

This was the last known location of Bubby Hayes.

Right over here there's a, uh, house

that he was reportedly living in before he fled.

The file said there was an individual there named Hans Marshal...

He and Bubby Hayes lived together.

Hans Marshall was a known bad guy, he was a dangerous guy.

So my team of marshals approached this house, knocked on the door...

...and Hans Marshall said, "Come in."

So, in we went.

It was fairly dark,

the only light was coming from a lamp and a chair

where Hans Marshall sat quietly, all by himself.

And next to him on a side table...

...is a semi-automatic pistol.

It's pointed right at us.

I step over to him and say...

..."Hans, I'm gonna pick this pistol up

and we're gonna move it outta the way.

I don't think we want this to end up in a gunfight."

Never said a word.

Never moved a muscle.

Just completely quiet.

And when I moved the pistol to the kitchen table,

I saw there were some belongings on the kitchen table.

And sitting at the very top is a map, an old paper map

with the area of downtown Broken Arrow facing out.

And I look at it and there's a tiny pencil circle

drawn right in the area where Rex Harper was killed.

And I turned to Hans and said, "Is this your map?"

And he said, "No, that's Bubby's stuff."

That he was gonna come back and get it, he just never did.

We tracked down...

...Bubby Hayes' girlfriend.

And she was a handful to say the least.

She was as mean as a snake.

We interviewed her multiple times.

And she would just rail at the marshals.

Slam the doors at us, uh, just curse us.

But then she called the marshals office...

...and gave us...

...a tag number.

It was just a change of the winds.

Never knew why.

We ran this tag number...

...it came back to a light blue Ford Bronco.

We put out a BOLO, Be On the Look Out.

And within two days...

...an off-duty police officer working security at a casino...

...found that vehicle sitting in the parking lot in Northern Texas.

Yet, minutes before we got there...

...Bubby Hayes had walked out of that casino...

...got into that Ford Bronco.

And as we are pulling into the parking lot of that casino,

he takes off.

And the police take him down right in front of us.

We polygraphy Bubby Hayes...

...three times.

The first two...

...were inconclusive.

And the third polygraph we came to the conclusion that he was telling the truth.

He was asked some difficult questions.

The problem is that we just didn't have enough

to prove that Bubby Hayes was...

...actually actively involved in this conspiracy.

We kept pushing.

The more we started digging into the possibility of a crime of solicitation,

the more names came up.

And as we began to... to pull the thread of that...

...we found David Gibson.

This call is to an incarcerated individual

at Lexington Assessment and Reception Center.

This call is to an incarcerated individual

at Lexington Assessment and Reception Center.

This call will be recorded and may be monitored.

You may start the conversation now.

David Gibson's name came up

because he was a good friend of Stan

and they ran around a lot together.

He was a marksman.

And in all the people that we talked to,

he was one that could likely have pulled off the shot

that killed Rex Harper that day.

Nevertheless, we had multiple witnesses

who testified that David Alton Gibson asked them...

...uh, if they could take care of Rex Harper.

Ultimately we decided to proceed to trial

with conspiracy to commit murder

and solicitation to commit first degree murder against Stanley Williamson...

...and David Alton Gibson Junior.

We made the decision

not to proceed on the murder charge...

...because we wanted to ensure that double jeopardy did not attach.

Which basically means

that if additional evidence, uh...

...even today...

...is brought forward that can confirm the guilt of one or more individuals

in the actual murder,

we may still be able to proceed,

uh, to ensure that those people are charged and convicted.

Our family felt like we never really got justice,

because three or four years for taking my uncle's life?

That's not... that's not enough.

He deserves more.

It's interesting that during the trial

neither Stan nor anyone else ever suggested that

Karie Harper was complicit in this.

In spite of all my suspicions,

in the eyes of the law, Karie Harper, Rex's wife, is innocent.

Remaining anonymous is important to me...

...to protect my identity.

I don't wanna be scared of what could happen.

After Rex died, I was fearful that...

...my life would be taken as well.

Still, today, I feel responsible for Rex's death.

I feel, had it not been for me, that Rex would still be here.

There's not a day goes by that I don't think about it.

I think about him every single day.

If I had a chance to say anything to the Harper family,

it would be to express my sincere condolences again...

...and that I'm sorry for the loss of Rex.

There was never justice served for... for this, uh, what had happened.

We feel very let down with Broken Arrow Police Department.

We still don't know who the guy was that actually pulled the trigger.

We know it wasn't Stan.

Um, we'd just like to know who it was that pulled the trigger.