Execution of killer is tonight
By BARBARA HOBEROCK World Capitol Bureau
Corey Hamilton is to die for killing four employees of a Tulsa restaurant during a robbery in 1992.
OKLAHOMA CITY -- It's a scene that Tulsa Police Sgt. Mike Huff won't forget, even after 14 years:
Three bodies on the floor of a restaurant freezer, each shot in the head.
One young man clenching his fist, as if, in Huff's view, he knew what was coming.
A fourth victim died a few hours later at a hospital.
The alleged triggerman, Corey Duane Hamilton, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection shortly after 6 p.m. Tuesday at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
He was the only one of four co-defendants to receive the death penalty for the Aug. 17, 1992, murders of Joseph Gooch, 17, Ted Kindley, 19, Sendy Lara, 27, and Stephen Lee Williams, 24, during a robbery at Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken in Tulsa. The others, including a former employee of the restaurant, received life terms.
Emily Lang, a spokeswoman for Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson, said 22 relatives and friends of the victims are expected to travel to the prison for the execution.
The state parole board unanimously denied clemency to Hamilton on Dec. 27, despite allegations from Hamilton's
| attorney that he was not the shooter. When Huff, now a supervisor of the Tulsa Police Department Homicide Unit, got to the scene, Kindley's body was just being removed. The scene was overwhelming, Huff said. "You could just see them down on their knees, their faces against the wall where they were shot," he said. "It was obvious they were just executed. It was a very sad scene." The victims had no defensive wounds, Huff said. "It appeared to me the victims were being totally compliant to the suspects, and then the suspects made the decision to kill them," he said. Huff has worked on scores of murder cases. This is one that still troubles him. "There was one victim that was against the wall that had his hand gripping his thumb, knowing he was due to be shot," Huff said. "You could just tell. It was a kind of terror." Wayne Allen was the supervisor of the Homicide Unit at the time. Allen, who is now an investigator for the Tulsa County District Attorney's Office, said that what everyone remembers is the coldness in the murders of four young people in the walk-in freezer. In interviews with the three other co-defendants, it became clear that the four employees did not have to die, Allen said. Hamilton made a conscious decision to kill, he said. He called the crime scene "shocking." The freezer was covered in the blood of the four young people who were down on their knees, he said. "The last one or two knew it was coming," Allen said. "They heard the gunshots from the first victim." Allen said he never got used to working homicides. The needless brutality of what people do to one another amazes him, he said. The crime wasn't hard to crack, he said. One of the co-defendants turned himself in. Allen does not believe that anyone other than Hamilton was the shooter. "He took the lives of four innocent people," he said. Gaylon Frazier, who worked at the restaurant, went there because he was going to spend the night with Kindley. Arriving at about 10:25 p.m., he saw a dirty table and the locked doors. He went to the drive-through window and crawled inside. After calling out and looking around, he went to the walk-in freezer. Its door was shut. He opened it. "I saw everyone lying down," Frazier said in court. "I saw Ted and Sendy and Joseph and Steve. They were all bleeding." He grabbed Kindley's leg and heard a moan. He went home and called 911. At Hamilton's trial, the victims' relatives talked about their loved ones. Patricia Hudson gave birth to Gooch when she was 14 and took him home on her 15th birthday. He was her only biological son. "God only knows the fear and sheer terror and pain and the intense agony those last few moments of his life brought him," she said at trial. "How cold he must have been in that freezer." Hamilton's attorney, Timothy R. Payne, an assistant federal defender for the Western District, did not return a call seeking comment.
Barbara Hoberock (405) 528-2465 |
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