Ep. 4 - The Mysterious Death of Mildred Ann Reynolds
The murder of Mildred Ann Reynolds is a cold case that stretches back
more then 60 years. The crime scene was horrific with blood and a burned
out car. This young woman had come to a brutal end. Violent murders,
especially those that remain unsolved, seem to spawn spirits. The supernatural occurrences that accompany this puzzling story serve to deepen the intrigue.
Mildred Ann Newlin, or Annie as her family called her, was born on
December 25, 1933 in Lambert, Oklahoma. Lambert started as a settlement that was named for Ambrose Lambert who obtained the land in the Cherokee Outlet Opening land run in 1893. This piece of Oklahoma was between two railroads and was part of wheat-growing country, so it prospered. But this was never a big town and today has less than 10 residents. Ernest and Marie Newlin had moved to Lambert and had a little farm. A photo of a young Annie pictures her in a dress and cowboy boots, bottle feeding a young lamb as she smiles for the camera. People all described Ann as a sweet girl.
In 1952, Ann decided to attend Northwest Oklahoma State University in Alva and she majored in chemistry. Richard Reynolds, or Dee as his friends called him, was a schoolteacher and basketball coach at the high school in the nearby town of Avard. He and Ann started dating and became engaged. Dee was four years older and had been married before, but Annie didn't seem to mind. The two tied the knot in May of 1955. The couple bought a farmhouse on a rural road near Avard. Shortly thereafter, Ann's nephew, Jerry Huckabee, moved into the house because he was attending the same university as Ann. There was only a two year age difference between Jerry and Ann. They would ride to and from school together since they had a similar schedule. Except for Tuesdays. Jerry had a botany lab on that day, so he would ride home with friends.
Ann owned a light gray 1949 Chevy sedan. On Tuesday March 13, 1956, she had finished up her morning class at the university and was running a few errands before heading home. She had stayed at the university long enough to have lunch with Jerry and left there around 12:30pm. Ann picked up some dry cleaning and bought brake fluid at the store and then headed home. A destination where she would not arrive.
The road home was a country red-dirt road through farmland and it would be a farmer named Leroy Lancaster who first noticed smoke a little after 1pm. Farmers regularly burned their natural waste and he assumed someone was burning thistles, so he didn't report anything. Thirty minutes later, the Goucher family was driving the same road as Ann and spotted her car on the side of the road, burning. Loren Goucher surveyed the car from a distance and saw that there was a burning body inside. The victim was clearly dead. The Gouchers rushed to Hopeton, which was 2.5 miles west of the scene, and called the police. Highway Patrolman G.R. Brown was the first officer on the scene. Other members of the Woods County Sheriff's office would follow including Sheriff Ed Doctor, Deputy Vernon Hackney and Deputy Sheriff Doss Gourley. Later, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation would investigate the accident. This was not only the most bizarre scene any of these men had ever seen, it is one of the most mysterious accidents in history. Lots of evidence was gathered, but the questions only increased, with few answers.
Annie's body was burned beyond recognition. Her body was lying in the front seat with her feet by the steering wheel and her head in the passenger seat. Ann's belongings were scattered in the area, including a pair of shoes. Her right shoe was covered in blood and found 250 yards in front of the car and her coat was found 100 feet behind the car. According to the report written by Highway Patrolman G.R. Brown and his observations of tire tracks, it seemed that Annie had been driving the car west when it appears to have pulled to the left, veering into the wrong lane, and impressions in the sand indicated that it was about two inches off the road when the brakes appeared to have been applied at the top of a hill, before reversing and zigzagging backward. That was strange, but it got weirder. The car then shifted into drive and sped across the road, hitting a tree on the other side in a ditch. The rear tires left impressions revealing that they had spun, meaning someone had pressed the gas pedal hard. The car backed up onto the road again and performed the same maneuver, hitting the fence a few feet from the tree. This caused the bumper guard to be pulled off the sedan. Putting the car in reverse yet again, the car backed along the bank of the road in a straight line for 250 feet. Then somehow the sedan ended up on the center of the road, facing west and burst into flames. Ann must have taken her foot off the pedals and the car drifted 14 feet before coming to a complete stop. The investigators found that all the car tracks were made by the sedan and no footprints were found leading to the fields or side of the road.
The police snapped photos before sending the body for autopsy and identification to Oklahoma City. The pictures revealed some strange clues. While Annie's body was laying across the front seat with her head in the passenger seat and feet towards the steering wheel, her shoes were outside of the car. One shoe was partially burned and found near the left rear fender of the sedan. The other shoe was near the fence the car hit and had human blood on it. There was also blood found on a thisle and the grass near the shoe. The grass also seemed to be matted down as if a body had fallen there. None of Ann's blood survived the fire inside the car. Ann's coat was outside of the car, on the left, and almost completely burned and four burned buttons were found 56 feet from where the fire started. These buttons were believed to be from a blouse. Bullets casings were found from a 9mm, but a man, H.E. Brockman, came forward saying the bullets were from his gun and that he had fired them out there and tests proved that the casings were from his gun. He was not looked at for the death. There were two metal bases from 12-gauge shotgun shells found inside the car.
The driver of the wrecker who came to take the car found other clues. The drain plug from the gas tank was about 16 feet from where the car fire started and it was melted out. The report stated that only two rivets, instead of four, were on the drain plug and that this was “rare.” There was a large hole in the muffler towards the front and small holes on top. The exhaust pipe was bent. The car was so burned, that it had to have been started and supplied with an accelerant. The body also seemed to indicate that the fire was helped along. It was burned beyond recognition. Ann's left tibia was still attached to her body and was the only longer bone in the body to be found that way. One of her legs had burned off at the knee. The autopsy revealed that the skull was fractured, but the coroner could not determine if the fracture happened before or after the fire started. Intense temperatures can crack the skull.
A paper written in the Journal of Forensic Science in May 2004 shares the research done by Doctors Elayne J. Pope and O'Brian C. Smith. This is titled "Identification of Traumatic Injury in Burned Cranial Bone: An Experimental Approach." This is from the abstract, "Interpreting patterns of injury in victims of fire-related deaths poses challenges for forensic investigators. Determining manner of death (accident, suicide or homicide) using charred remains is compounded by the thermal distortion and fragmentation of soft and skeletal tissues. Heat degrades thin cranial structures and obscures the characteristic signatures of perimortem ballistic, blunt, and sharp force trauma in bone, making differentiation from thermal trauma difficult. This study documents the survivability and features of traumatic injury through all stages of burning for soft tissue reduction and organic degradation of cranial bone. Forty cadaver heads were burned in environments simulating forensic fires. Progression of thermal degradation was photographically documented throughout the destructive stages for soft tissues and bone to establish expected burn sequence patterns for the head. In addition to testing intact vaults, a percentage were selectively traumatized to introduce the variables of soft tissue disruption, fractures, impact marks, and incisions throughout the cremation process. Skeletal materials were recovered, reconstructed, and correlated with photographs to discern burn patterns and survivability of traumatic features. This study produced two important results: (1) Identification of preexistent trauma is possible in reconstructed burned cranial bone. Signatures of ballistic (internal and external bevel, secondary fractures), blunt force (impact site, radiating fractures), and sharp force (incisions, stabs, sectioning) survive the cremation process. (2) In non-traumatized specimens, the skull does not explode from steam pressure but does fragment as a result of external forces (collapsed debris, extinguishment methods) and handling. The features of both results are sequentially described throughout the progression of thermal destruction.
Basically, this study revealed that if someone is murdered or dies from some kind of head trauma before being burned, that trauma can be detected. And a skull will not explode from heat, but rather fragment. So a skull will not be heavily damaged by just fire. But this is our modern science. Would they have known this in the 1950s? The autopsy officially found that the fire killed Annie and the death certificate stated that Ann burned to death in an auto fire, for which the cause was unknown. The newspapers all went crazy with the story. A clipping from the Woods County Enterprise and Waynoka News noted that a coroner’s jury report deemed Reynolds death was from a fire, but that it was not an accident and the death certificate reported two causes of death: homicide and accident.
The Woods County Sheriff’s office officially classified the case as unsolved. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation declared it an accident. Kenny Cole was the Alva Chief of Police at the time of Ann's death and when he looked at the evidence, he disagreed with some of the findings. He believed that another car had crossed the tracks of Ann's car. He also believed that Ann fought for her life. A serious problem for crime scenes in decades and centuries past is that they were not secured. We hear stories often of neighbors trampling through crime scenes or gawkers coming to steal a souvenir or two. How many people wandered around the scene? Many citizens came out to help find evidence. Were the officers on scene careful of where they stepped? And how many cars may have left tracks on the dirt road? We know that the Goucher family drove on the road as they were the ones to report the fire.
Woods County Sheriff Rudy Briggs Jr. said that they were still treating the case as a cold case homicide. They still have three pieces of evidence from the crime scene on file: a gas tank from the car, a limb from where the vehicle supposedly hit a tree, and Anne Reynolds’ rosary beads. Interestingly, Ann was not a Catholic. Her sister-in-law confirmed that the rosary was Ann's and that she kept it as a good luck charm. This had been burned and found embedded in the ground near the left door of the car.
A special agent from the National Auto Theft Bureau, James Sullivan, believed the fire began at the back of the car, near the left rear wheel. The reason the fire began was never fully established. The windshield had melted from the heat, so Sullivan and Kyle Morehead, deputy state fire marshal, agreed the fire had reached at least 1700 degrees Fahrenheit, the melting point of glass. For a fire to reach this temperature, it would need an accelerant. Investigators conducted experiments on a car similar to Ann’s to try to replicate a fire of the same magnitude. They first used gasoline, but the temperature never rose above 1400 degrees. They then tried brake fluid since Ann had some in her car. After two minutes, there was an explosion and the heat hit 1725 degrees. So the investigators knew it was possible that the car was burned out by the brake fluid, but what ignited it? A crash into the tree? Did someone light it with a flame?
These questions remain today and the case went cold. What is known is that Annie was alive when the fire started as she had carbon monoxide in her lungs. She was inside the car, while some of her stuff was outside the car. If she had gotten out of the burning car, why would she get back in? Was everyone in Ann's life questioned? Were there problems in the marriage? How about with the nephew? What we do know is that Annie was
laid to rest at the Cherokee Municipal Cemetery in Cherokee between her
parents, Ernest and Marie Newlin, and her brother, Eddie Newlin, and his
wife. And her unsolved death seems to have left her spirit at unrest.
There have
been stories of her ghost haunting several locations. For years, there
had been unexplained noises and wisps of an image
passing by the view of students when the building was the high school
gymnasium where Dee Reynolds coached. Her ghost has been spotted in a
nearby restaurant called Vina Rae's that opened in 1996, but has been
closed for several years now. This was the former location of the old
gym at Avard Public School where her husband had worked. Nan Wheatley
was the owner and she claimed to experience strange phenomenon. One
story she has shared is that one day a young woman in green was sitting
at the counter. Wheatley went to get a pad to take her order and when
she returned the young woman was gone. Wheatley also had a scary
experience on memorial Day 2002. She saw the headless figure of a woman
come through the wall and then it vanished. Wheatley said, “I would hear
sounds like someone was walking like a pirate with a peg
leg in another part of the building, and I would go and investigate, and
no one would be there. I didn’t know until I did some
research that Anne Reynolds had her leg burned off.” Ann also was wearing a green dress when she died.
Patrons complain about the smell of burnt hair in the air. Paranormal
groups from Enid and Tulsa had investigated the restaurant on Halloween
night 2003. They managed to capture a faint image in a photo down a
hallway and some glowing orbs. Wheatley said, “They told us there is
more than one ghost here. They (ghosts) like this place. It is a place
they wait until they pass on.” Among the other ghosts, Wheatley said, is
a male ghost the paranormal investigators dubbed Issac, who tried
pushing Wheatley down the gym stairs before he was chased by the
investigators out to a nearby vacant building.
Cold cases are always tough because there is no closure for family or
the victim. Could this be why Annie still seems to be hanging around in
spirit? The death of Mildred Ann Reynolds is indeed a mystery, one I fear that will never be solved.
Show Notes:
Newspaper article on Coroner's Jury: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/3129714/22march1956-mildred-ann-reynolds-death/
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