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
