Cold Case Files: Despite a confession from a known killer, the death of a Haskell County Commissioner remains unsolved
- Dennis McCaslin
- 7 minutes ago
- 3 min read
On a warm Thursday afternoon in June 1987, Leo Boyd Reasnor, a 49-year-old Haskell County Commissioner, left to check cattle on property he owned four miles southwest of Lequire in rural Oklahoma.
He never made it home. Later that day his son and son-in-law discovered his body slumped inside his 1986 Ford pickup truck on a remote oil lease road. He had been shot once in the head with a small-caliber weapon. The murder of the well-liked public servant sent ripples of shock through the tight-knit farming communities of Haskell County.
Reasnor had served as commissioner for District 3, representing the Kinta area, for multiple terms. Just the previous August he had won reelection with more than 85 percent of the vote.
Known as a hardworking rancher who understood the land and its people, he left behind his wife Phyllis and children, including 21-year-old daughter Kim Stout. Nearly one thousand mourners filled the church in Stigler for his funeral, a measure of the respect he commanded in eastern Oklahoma.
The Haskell County Sheriff’s Office, assisted by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, launched an immediate inquiry. Evidence at the scene pointed to homicide, yet no arrests followed in the weeks and months after the killing. The case gradually faded into the background as one of the region’s unsolved rural mysteries, its file gathering dust for a quarter century.
Then in April 2012, came a startling development. Clifford W. Eagle, a 53-year-old homeless man with an Oklahoma criminal record, walked into the Billings, Montana, police department and confessed to participating in Reasnor’s murder.
Eagle claimed he and another man, Vince Allen Johnson, had encountered the commissioner on the isolated road. According to the confession, Reasnor confronted Johnson over alleged theft. Words turned heated. When Reasnor appeared to reach for a gun, both men fired.
Eagle said he did not know whose bullet struck the fatal shot. Johnson had already been executed by the state of Oklahoma in 2001 for a separate murder.
Prosecutors found the details credible enough to file first-degree murder charges against Eagle. He was extradited back to Oklahoma that August. For Reasnor’s family the news brought a flicker of hope after 25 years of silence.
That hope soon crumbled. Eagle quickly recanted, insisting the confession was false. In letters to the court and reporters he explained he had been drunk and high on painkillers during the Montana interview, only days after his release from federal prison.
He accused investigators of pressuring him and suggested the entire statement was unreliable. Mental evaluations followed. A judge ruled him competent to stand trial in 2013, but the case stalled amid the controversy and legal challenges.
As of 2026 the murder of Leo Boyd Reasnor remains unsolved. No trial has produced a conviction, and no additional suspects have been publicly identified.
The physical evidence from 1987 still exists, yet without a solid confession or fresh forensic breakthrough the investigation sits dormant in the files of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and the Haskell County Sheriff’s Office.
The twists in this case highlight the difficulties of rural justice. Limited resources in the late 1980s, the passage of decades, and the unreliability of a late confession have all combined to keep answers out of reach
. For Reasnor’s family the pain endures. Grandchildren grew up never knowing their grandfather, and the community still carries the memory of a respected leader cut down on his own land.
Reasoner was buried in the San Bois Cemetery after his memorial service in StiglerThis is the same cemetery where several of his siblings and relatives are interred (e.g., his sister Virginia Ramona Reasnor Gormley and nephew Willis Leon Reasnor J
In the quiet hills of Haskell County the Reasnor murder stands as a reminder that some shadows along Oklahoma’s back roads refuse to lift. A man drove out one ordinary afternoon to tend his cattle and never returned, leaving behind questions that more than three decades of time have yet to answer.
