TULSA, Okla. — On a cold day in January of 2010, two men were combing the south side of the Keystone Dam hiking and looking for scrap metal.
“They were looking for junk metal that people had dumped, and they could gather and sell, and instead they found a partially decomposed body,” said TCSO Investigator, Ed Jackson.
The man’s body didn’t have any identification on it, so it wasn’t clear to investigators who he was or how he got there.
The next day, they got a lead when another detective working a missing person’s case came up and said the two might be connected.
"He had the dental records of his missing person, and it was given to the medical examiner to compare. They compared the dental records and got a hit. Sure enough, the John Doe was really John or Johnny Baker who was 68 years old,” said Jackson.
That’s when investigators contacted the daughter of Baker who had initially filed the missing person’s report.
- Previous Cold Case: Oklahoma Cold Case Files: Kim McVey
On November 19th, investigators say his daughter came to the Hard Rock Casino looking for her father. He liked to play high-stakes poker and often carried large sums of money.
Then on her drive back home, she told deputies she had spotted Baker’s truck along I-244 near Memorial. It was locked, secure and abandoned and Baker was nowhere to be found.
Roughly 2 months later, his body was discovered out at Keystone Lake.
Investigators say they have exhausted all leads in this case which is now 12 years old, and they need the public’s help to move forward.
If you have any information about the death of Johnny Baker, you can contact the TSCO tip hotline. That number is 918-596-8836.
Go even deeper into cold cases in Green Country with our podcast. New episodes drop in Fridays.