Hard Boiled News

True Crime and News of the Weird from around the Globe

Cold Case Child Killer Strangled to Death By Cellmate in Oklahoma Prison

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Child Killer Anthony Palma (l) was found slain in the cell he shared with Raymond Pillado

McALESTER, Oklahoma  — A convicted child killer serving a life sentence for a 1997 cold case slaying of an 8-year-old girl was strangled to death in prison by his cellmate, authorities said.

Anthony Palma, 59, died from “ligature strangulation and blunt force trauma to the head,” according to a report released by the Oklahoma state medical examiner’s office.

Palma was found lying in a pool of blood in his cell at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary during a routine security check on Jan. 11 and could not be revived.

His cellmate, Raymond Pillado, 35, was also serving a life sentence for first-degree murder for killing three people.

Palma was convicted in 2017 of the murder of 8-year-old Kirsten Hatfield, who was abducted from her Midwest City home in 1997. Her killing had remained unsolved for two decades until DNa evidence linked Palma to the case.

He had lived two doors down from the Hatfield family and was arrested for the murder in 2015 after investigators reexamined some of the evidence from the cold case and he matched DNA recovered from blood found on the girl’s bedroom window and her underwear.

The girl’s body was never recovered.

Authorities told KFOR-TV that they had plans to interviewing Palma later this year in the hopes of  extracting information that could lead them to her body.

‘We’ve not had closure on this case and we may never have closure because we wanted to find her body and bring her home,’ said Midwest City Police Chief Brandon Clabes.

 

Oklahoma Zookeeper and Gov. Candidate, ‘Joe Exotic,’ Busted in Murder-For-Hire Plot

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Joe Exotic kept more than 200 big cats at his roadside zoo in Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY — The operator of a roadside zoo who ran for governor in Oklahoma earlier this year, has been charged in a murder-for-hire plot for allegedly trying to hire people to bump off the owner of a big cat rescue group in Florida, federal prosecutors say.

Joseph Maldonado-Passage, 55, who is known as “Joe Exotic” runs the Greater Wynnewood Exotic Animal Park and has been accused by animal rights groups of mistreating the big cats he keeps there.

Prosecutors say he allegedly tried to hire two separate people to kill Carole Baskin,, CEO of BIg Cat Rescue in Tampa with whom he had been engaged in a dispute with for years. She wasn’t harmed.

Maldonado had threatened Baskin online in recent  years including a video of him shooting in the head a blow up doll dressed to look like her.

“Maldonado ran, in our view, one of the most notorious cub petting roadside zoos in the country,” Baskin said.  “Years ago he also operated a traveling exhibit that would bring cubs to malls throughout the Midwest and Southwest. When Big Cat Rescue educated the malls about the miserable life this created for the cubs and the malls started cancelling Maldonado’s traveling exhibit, Maldonado retaliated by renaming his traveling show “Big Cat Rescue Entertainment” in order to confuse the public into thinking the show was operated by Big Cat Rescue.”

“In 2011, Big Cat Rescue sued for violations of its intellectual property rights and in 2013 was granted a consent judgment for over $1 million. Litigation to collect on the judgment has been ongoing since then in Oklahoma,” she said.

According to the indictment, Maldonado-Passage gave an unnamed person $3,000 to travel from Oklahoma to Florida to kill Basin. He allegedly agreed to pay thousands more after the deed, officials say.

Maldonado-Passage also repeatedly asked a second person to kill Baskin in exchange for money. But that person ultimately put him in contact connected him with an undercover FBI agent, who met with Maldonado-Passage in December 2017.

Known for his blonde mullet and expletive-laden rants on YouTube, Maldonado-Passage finished third in a three-way Libertarian primary for Oklahoma governor in June.

In October 2017, Maldonado-Passage was investigated by police when his then-husband, 23-year-old Travis Maldonado, shot himself in the head in the zoo gift shop. Garvin County Sheriff Larry Rhodes said at the time that witnesses reported Travis Maldonado put a loaded firearm to his head and pulled the trigger to prove the weapon would not fire with the magazine removed.

Maldonado married another man, Dillon Jacob Passage, in December.

 

Oklahoma School Shut Amid Threats Against Transgender 7th Grader

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Officials shut the school down because they worried about demonstrators by out-of-towners against a transgender student

ACHILLE, Oklahoma — Officials were forced to shut down a school in a tiny Oklahoma town for two days after people posted violent threats online against a transgender 7th grade girl.

Brandy Rose says the trouble started on the first day at the Achille Public School last week when her 12-year-old daughter, Maddie, used the girl’s bathroom, triggering a flurry of threatening messages on a Facebook page for parents.

“If he wants to be a female, make him a female. A good sharp knife will do the job really quick,” one message read, according to KFOR-TV. Other messages referred to Maddie as “it.”

In one post, a person wrote: “You know we have open hunting seasons on them kind. Ain’t no bag limit either.”

Rose said her daughter has publicly identified as female since before they moved to the town of 500, so no one there had ever known Maddie as a boy.

“She’s been living as female for years– she started at Achille as Maddie,” Rose told KXII-TV. “We had no problems when we first started.”

For the past two years, Maddie had used the teacher’s bathroom after being falsely accused of trying to look under a stall partition at another student. But when she started middle school last week, she didn’t know where the staff bathroom was in the new building, so used the regular toilets.

“She’s an awesome kid. To see any fear in her,I can’t explain how bad that hurts me for them to hurt her,” Rose said.

School officials said they thought the threatening posts were made by people who do not live in the school district and don’t have kids who attend the school. Local police advised them to close the school for the first two days of the week, because they worried about demonstrators coming from out of town.

 

Tinder Slay Suspects Bought Tools to Chop Up Body Before Victim Died: Cops

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Sydney Loofe’s dismembered body was found after going on a Tinder date with one of the suspects

ROSE, Oklahoma — The two suspects eyed in the death of an Oklahoma woman who disappeared following a Tinder date, are believed to have bought supplies to dismember her body in the hours before her death, new evidence revealed.

According to newly unsealed court documents, suspects Aubrey Trail and Bailey Boswell  were caught on camera at a Home Depot on Nov. 15 buying tools cops think they later used to dismember 24-year-old Sydney Loofe’s body.

But at the time they were shopping, Loofe was still alive and working a shift as a cashier at Menards in Lincoln. It is believed Loofe met with Trail and Boswell later that night. She was reported missing the next day and her dismembered remains were found in early December, stuffed in garbage bags in a field some 90 miles away.

Prosecutors say that Trail told investigators he strangled Sydney Loofe with an extension cord. Investigators believe Boswell, who lived with Trail, helped him dismember Loofe’s body and dump her remains.

In a series of phone calls to the Omaha World-Herald, Trail admitted killing Loofe but said it was an accident that occurred while they were engaged in a sexual fantasy with him and at least two other woman.

“It wasn’t supposed to go to the extreme it went, of course not,” he said. “It wasn’t meant that she was to die.”

Aubrey Trail (l) and Bailey Boswell

Prosecutors, however, have charged the pair with premeditated murder, not an accidental death.

On Tuesday, Trail, 51, and Boswell, 23, appeared in Saline County Court to face charges of first-degree murder and the improper disposal of human skeletal remains.

The pair, who met Loofe on Tinder in the days before she disappeared, became suspects early on, and were arrested initially in November on unrelated fraud charges.

In an online tribute, Loofe’s parents wrote that their daughter had many friends, but was looking for a soulmate when she was killed.

“She was looking for that one special person with whom she could spend time,” her parents wrote. “She took to Tinder to look for that person and unfortunately, found someone that had nothing but evil plans for her.”

 

Prolific Sugar Daddy Predator Busted for Luring ‘Staggering’ Number of Underage Girls for Sex

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Troy Dustin Clark is accused of posing as a drug dealer, sugar daddy or terminally ill to lure underage girls for sex

MUSKOGEE, Oklahoma — A shape-shifting sexual predator who posed as a sugar daddy, a drug-dealing gangster or a man with just months to live has been busted for trying to lure what cops say was a “staggering” number of underage girls online into having sex.

Troy Dustin Clark, 38, was arrested after trying to set up a rendezvous with what he believed was a 15-year-old girl, but was actually a detective from the Wagoner County Sheriff’s office in Oklahoma.

“This Dusty Clark character is one prolific predator,” said Sheriff Chris Elliott. “Unbeknownst to Clark, one of his “young girls” was actually a team of full-grown, adult male Wagoner County investigators.”

Cops say Clark groomed victims with “stories that he was dying and wanted to spend his remaining months pampering his special girl.” They said he also ”impressed more hardened victims by portraying himself as a drug dealer and hustler.”

“To others, he was a successful businessman seeking to be a ‘super secret sugar daddy,’” the sheriff’s office said.

“We’re talking about a textbook sexual predator who gets a sense of his victims, then adapts his narrative to reel them in,” said Jack Thorp, district attorney for District 27, which includes Wagoner County.

Cops picked up on Clark’s sleazy trawling when a 15-year-old girl’s mother reported that her daughter had been contacted online by an older man calling himself Easton Sloan. That’s when the undercover detectives stepped and began pretending they were the girl. They soon set up a date to meet with Clark at a fast food restaurant and then go to a motel for sex.

“We told Sloan we’d be wearing a blue flowered dress,” Elliott said. “And he was kind enough to send selfies from inside his vehicle while he was in route.”

Clark ultimately stood deputies up, but armed with the selfies, they were able to identify his mother’s car, which he was driving, and found him the next day at his mother’s home.

“When these big old guys told Clark they didn’t appreciate being stood up at the restaurant he realized, they were the ‘sweet young thing’ he’d been grooming,” Elliott said. “From that moment on, he confirmed everything we already knew, and, unfortunately, much more.”

He faces charges in three Oklahoma counties but cops say they believe there are other victims and that further charges would be filed. Clark was held on $250,000 bond.

Bad Dad Kills Daughter’s Dogs After She Failed to Do Dishes

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Jeffrey Don Edwards took his frustration out on his daughter’s two helpless dogs

HARRAH, Oklahoma — An ogre of an  Oklahoma dad has been charged with teaching his teenage daughter a particularly cruel lesson when he ruthlessly shot her two dogs after she failed to clean up the house, cops said.

Jeffrey Don Edwards, 35, allegedly “got mad” at his 17-year-old daughter for not having done the dished or straightened up the house, triggering the bloodshed.

“Her father was mad … and began throwing dishes,” an investigator with the Oklahoma County sheriff’s office reported in a court affidavit, according to the Oklahoman.

The girl then called her mother to come pick her up. When she returned the next morning, she found “blood all over the place” and her two dogs missing, cops said.

According to investigators, the girl’s uncle told her Edwards “shot her dogs to punish her.” She then found dried blood in the bed of her pickup and investigators found tire tracks that led to a wooded area near the house, where the two dogs were found shot to death.

Cops say that after the shootings, Edwards visited a nearby convenience store and told two employees there about killing the animals. One employee said Edwards told them “his house was dirty and he lost his temper then shot the dogs without remorse,” according to investigators.

Investigators recovered at least two rifles, a handgun and a huge cache of bullets on the property.

In 2011, he was sentenced to five years’ probation after pleading guilty to firing a shotgun out the window of a pickup.

 

Charges in Cold Case Slaying of 4, Including Teens Who Were Never Found

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Teens Ashley Freeman (L) and Lauria Bible disappeared in 1999 and have never been found

VINITA, Oklahoma — Charges have finally been filed in an 18-year-old cold case disappearance of two teenage girls from a burning mobile home where the parents of one of them were shot to death.

The girls, Ashley Freeman and her friend Lauria Bible, both 16, have never been found and are believed dead.

Ronnie Dean Busick, 66, has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder in the December 1999 slayings of Danny and Kathy Freeman and the two girls. Bible had been staying with the family that night to celebrate Ashley’s 16th birthday.

Two other suspects in the killings, Warren Phillip Welch II and David Pennington, have since died, investigators said.

Authorities say the three men came to the Freeman house in Vinita that night either to sell drugs or collect on a drug debt, the Oklahoman newspaper reported. The girls are believed to have unexpectedly walked into the house after the men had killed the Freemans.

Prosecutor say the men then kidnapped the girls and set the mobile home on fire. According to court documents, prosecutors believe the men held the girls in Welch’s mobile home and raped them. Welch and Pennington are through to have strangled the girls after “a matter of days.”

According to prosecutors, Welch kept photos of the teens “lying on a bed, facing each other, with their hands tied and their mouths gagged,” with some photos featuring him lying next to the teens.

Authorities believe the girls’ bodies were dumped in a pit or mine shaft in the area known as the Tar Creek Superfund site or “dumped in a cellar that was later covered in concrete,” according to the affidavit.

“We believe there are people with knowledge of this crime who can assist in recovering the girls’ bodies and bring some closure to their families,” Craig County District Attorney Matt Ballard said.

83-Year-Old Child Molester Charged With Groping Sex Shop Employee

By HardBoiledNews Staff

Bobby Otto Powers allegedly tried to cop a feel from a worker at a sex shop where he liked to buy his porn

OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma — What a creepy old man.

An 83-year-old former school teacher who’d been sentenced to 60 years in prison for molesting a child only to be released early, has been busted again for groping an employee or a sex shop where he went to buy porn.

Police in Oklahoma City say Bobby Otto Powers groped the employee of the Hustler Hollywood shop in Oklahoma City in late November after pushing $10 into her hand, and then pointed to some red lingerie and said he wanted to see her in it, police said.

The whole episode was caught by surveillance cameras, but when cops caught up to Powers, he said he didn’t remember laying hands on the woman, and that if he did so, it was accidental, the Oklahoman newspaper reported.

He did admit he went to the shop several times a week to buy porno videos.

When Powers was 70-years-old, in 2005, he was sentenced to 60 years behind bars for molesting a 9-year-old girl over many years. But in 2010, he was released when the state parole board granted him a medical commutation because it was believed he was sick and dying, with less than six months to live.

Even then-state governor, Brad Henry, signed off on Powers’ release.

He is now facing three felony counts of sexual battery and prosecutors say they will try to send him back to prison.

His victim told the Oklahoman that she was stunned that Powers was out walking the streets as she had thought he had died in prison.

“That’s crazy,” she said. “He, like, freaking messed my life up, a good part of it. I had a lot of mental issues for a long time. And still kind of do.”

Mother-Daughter Shoot Would-Be Robber in Furious Liquor Store Gun Battle

By HardBoiledNews Staff

TULSA, Oklahoma — A shotgun-wielding robber messed with the wrong liquor store, when the owner and her daughter whipped out their guns and shot him numerous times as he fought with them.

“We’re not going to be victims,” the owner’s son, Justin Christen, told KTUL-TV.

Dramatic surveillance video footage showed a masked gunman, who police identified as Tyrone Lee, walk into the Forest Acres Liquor Store in Tulsa on Thursday with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands and demanding cash.

The footage shows the store’s owner and her daughter get out of the way as Lee rifles through the cash register, but when he walks out of the camera’s view, they both dart down below the counter and grab handguns.

When Lee comes back into the frame, the owner opens fire. Lee then steps off camera again, but then comes back prompting more shots to be fired. As he begins to wrestle with the owner for her gun and start to pistol whip her, the daughter shoots him at close range.

He then tries to chase them around the counter, but falls to the ground, presumably as a result of his wounds. The women then fled the shop and called for help.

Lee — who police say they suspect was responsible for a string of gunpoint robberies in Tulsa in recent weeks — managed to get away from the store but later turned up at a hospital where he was rushed into surgery. He remains in critical condition in an induced coma.

The owner required several staples to close a gash in her head.

13-Year-Old Faces Murder Charges in Crossbow Killing of 10-Year-Old Boy

By HardBoiledNews Staff

A 13-year-old kid — like this one — took a pot shot at his pal and could now go to jail for it.

CHANDLER, Oklahoma — A 13-year-old boy was taken into police custody after fatally shooting a 10-year-old boy with a crossbow and injuring his kid brother, police said.

Cops say the three boys were playing in a tree house behind a home in Chandler when they began arguing and the oldest of them shot a single, broad head arrow.

“There was a disagreement amongst the three prior to the shooting,” Lincoln County Sheriff Charlie Dougherty said, according to KOKH-TV.

The arrow passed through Austin Almanza and struck his 8-year-old brother, Ayden, on the arm. Austin was declared dead at the scene and Ayden was taken to a local hospital and later released.

The suspect, whose name was not released because he is a juvenile, was held in a juvenile detention center and the sheriff expects formal charges to be filed soon.

“On an incident like this, I think you have to take the word accident plumb out,” he said. “Austin is not dead because of an accident. He’s dead because of an action that took place. So until something steers us in the other direction, we’re going to work it as a homicide.”

Relatives said the 13-year-old had just been given the crossbow as a gift by his parents.