TULSA COUNTY, Okla. — It’s one of the oldest cold cases in the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office files.
On July 26th, 1973, someone found Veda Woodson, known as Susie, brutally raped and murdered near Sperry.
“My dad nicknamed her Susie when she was just a baby and all of the family and all of the friends and everybody she knew, knew her as Susie,” said her brother Jack Barnes.
Barnes said he'll never forget the phone call telling him no one could find his beloved sister Susie.
“I received a call in the morning and it was from my brother and he said 'Jack, Orville just called me and said they can’t find Susie, she is missing.' They were forming a search party and one of the detectives there was organizing the search, and we got together with him and everybody spread out and started searching,” said Barnes.
Barnes said his family started scanning the field to try and find any clues about what may have happened to her.
"My brother, James, says I see something up ahead. I said let’s get closer. It was Susie. That’s how we found her and so the three of us brothers actually found the body,” said Barnes.
They found Susie’s driver’s side door open and the window shattered. They found her body in a field not far away from her car. She had been raped and strangled.
Years later, investigators with the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office took a closer look at the evidence in this case.
“There was a suspect that surfaced early on in the investigation and a couple of years ago we got a DNA match linking it to him but it wasn’t enough to get charges filed,” said Roebuck.
DNA linked Woodson’s murder to a man named Stanley Clabough.
“Mr. Clabough actually passed away a few years ago, but we can’t close it by death of offender because charges were never filed in this case so our hope is that at some point, he spoke of this to someone else or anyone else that was involved,” said Roebuck.
Investigators said they potentially lose more witnesses who might come forward with every day that passes. For Barnes, finding his sister’s body that fateful day is a hard image to forget.
“The only satisfaction that I can get out of that he is having the flames of hell lick him right now and he’s burning in hell,” he said.
Despite the case being more than 50 years old, the sheriff’s office is asking anyone with information about Woodson’s murder to come forward or Stanley Clabough’s possible involvement in the crime.
“We would love to finally give this family a definitive answer on what happened to their mom,” said Roebuck.
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