Three young women were found dismembered across Oklahoma City between 1976 and 1986, their remains scattered in vacant houses, alleys, and behind garages within roughly the same square mile — and nearly five decades later, the killings remain unsolved. Now the nonprofit group Oklahoma Cold Cases says it plans to dig back into the so-called “OKC Butcher” murders, starting in October.
The case has drawn little public attention over the years beyond a podcast episode or a small article here and there, according to Amanda Newland-Davis of Oklahoma Cold Cases, as reported by KOCO. The nonprofit, which maintains a statewide public database tracking more than 3,000 unsolved homicides, 600 missing persons cases, and 100 unidentified individuals across Oklahoma, is now turning its attention to three victims whose deaths were linked by police decades ago but never resolved.
A Teenager Found in a Vacant House
Cathy Shackleford was 18 when her remains were discovered in 1976 inside a vacant house on Northeast 6th Street in Oklahoma City, per the station's report. She remained unidentified for close to two decades, into the 1990s, before investigators finally matched her case to a 1976 forensic facial reconstruction. That sculpt was the work of Betty Pat Gatliff, and the identification came 17 years after her remains were found, according to the Unidentified Wiki. Shackelford, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, had gone missing earlier that year.
Three years later, in 1979, 22-year-old Arley Killian's remains turned up in a neighborhood along Northeast 10th Street. Additional remains were left in the same location days after police first found parts of her body, the same account notes. Per Oklahoma Cold Cases, children playing outside had spotted a dog carrying a human head before police discovered cleaned body parts wrapped in paper sacks scattered through the neighborhood. Killian disappeared just hours before her remains were found.
A False Confession Muddied the Investigation
Convicted killer Henry Lee Lucas admitted to murdering Killian, a confession that investigators later disproved. Newland-Davis said Lucas was not near Killian at the time of her death, the station's report indicates — and official reviews found he was actually in Jacksonville, Florida, when Killian was killed, and in Maryland during the period Shackelford went missing, according to Oklahoma Cold Cases. Lucas is known to have falsely confessed to hundreds of homicides across the country during the 1980s.
The Third Victim and a Web of Aliases
The final known victim, Marcia “Tina” Sanders, was 23 when her remains were found in 1986. Her left leg and upper torso turned up on March 6 of that year, per the same account, discovered in an alley near Northeast First and Geary. Her skull was later found behind a garage on North Lindsay Avenue near Northeast Fourth. An Oklahoma City police detective said in 1987 that the recovered body parts were identified as belonging to a single body, though investigators found nothing else at the scene.
Sanders had used at least a dozen different aliases across her records, Newland-Davis said, and those multiple identities may have complicated the original investigation. Distinct tattoos on her torso — a Playboy bunny and the words “Lady Aries” — later helped confirm her identity, according to Oklahoma Cold Cases.
Same Square Mile, Different City Today
Police linked all three murders together in 1986, noting that the crime sites sat within roughly the same square mile of Oklahoma City. That shared area has changed dramatically since then, largely reshaped by the construction of Interstate 235, per the station's report. All three victims were young Indigenous women living in homeless, transient, or sexually vulnerable circumstances at the time they were killed, a pattern documented by Crime Solvers Central, which notes that unhoused Native American women have historically suffered from low public visibility in cases like these.
That pattern reflects a broader crisis. Oklahoma has 954 documented active missing persons as of 2026, giving it the highest per capita missing persons rate in the nation, according to prior Hoodline coverage. Oklahoma Cold Cases defines a homicide as cold after two years without resolution, and the state's overall backlog of roughly 3,000 cold cases has held steady for nearly a decade because new unsolved homicides enter the system about as fast as older ones get cleared, according to a statement posted by the group on Facebook.
Legislative Reforms Since the Killings
State lawmakers have since moved to prevent the kind of prolonged identification delay that kept Shackelford unnamed for 17 years. In November 2019, Oklahoma enacted Francine's Law, House Bill 2640, requiring state law enforcement agencies and medical examiners to upload missing persons and unidentified body records into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System within 30 days, according to the Oklahoma Missing Persons Clearinghouse. The law is named for Tulsa murder victim Francine Frost, whose body went unidentified for decades.
The Oklahoma City Police Department maintains its own dedicated Cold Case Unit, staffed by detectives who re-examine historical unsolved homicides, missing persons cases, and sexual assaults using modern forensic tools including advanced DNA analysis, according to Uncovered. Oklahoma Cold Cases says it plans to begin its own review of the three killings in October, meeting with people connected to the case and combing through records — and the group has said it will keep investigating even if a suspect proves difficult to identify.
