Cold Case Files: Did the theft of a modest amount of marijuana in 1987 lead to the death of a 17-year-old teen?
- Dennis McCaslin
- Jun 15
- 3 min read
Guy Edwin Krisher died on the last day of 1987 in a grassy field south of Miami, in rural Ottawa County.
Seventeen years old, he had moved from Lawton to the Ottawa County area earlier in life and carried the kind of restless energy common among teenagers navigating limited options in small-town northeastern Oklahoma.
A single shotgun blast to the head ended whatever path he might have taken next. His body lay undiscovered until New Year's Eve, when someone found him in that open stretch of ground near Narcissa.
The killing grew out of a petty theft. Authorities determined that Krisher had taken roughly eight ounces of marijuana from a man named Jerry Jones. In the version pieced together by investigators, Jones responded with lethal force.
The field where it happened reportedly held several people that afternoon or evening, yet accounts of exactly what unfolded stayed fragmented from the start. Witnesses came and went in the years that followed, some reluctant, others unreliable in the eyes of the court.
By 1993 the case gained fresh momentum. Jerry Jones faced first-degree murder charges, supported in part by testimony from his own daughter, Sequoyah Jones, who was sixteen at the time of the preliminary hearings.
She described being present when her father shot Krisher and claimed others, including then-sheriff Therl Whittle, had watched without intervening.
Lou Ann Jones, who left her husband in 1991 and later served a term for conviction of illegal weapons possession in Utah, said Jones came home about 9:45 a.m. with "red spots" on his clothes and the toddler's coveralls.
When her son changed his story about his whereabouts that morning, she testified that she took her son's coveralls to Whittle.
Whittle "later told me that it tested to be animal blood," she said. Whittle returned the coveralls to her husband.
She also said a deputy told her husband that Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agents were coming to talk to him and Jones told her "he had to clean up."
Whittle died in June of 1981 at the age of 81. He was honored by the Whittle by the Tulsa Police Department Honor Guard at his funeral.
A second man, James Renfrow (sometimes spelled Rentfrow in reports), was also charged. Prosecutors pushed forward on the theory of retaliation over the stolen marijuana. Jones remained in custody on a separate drug charge after a pound of marijuana turned up in a search of his property.
The legal effort unraveled quickly. At one preliminary hearing, the judge found insufficient evidence to bind Renfrow over for trial. When it came time for Jones's case to advance, Krisher's mother, Karen Collins, stepped in and told the court she believed the evidence would not support a conviction. Prosecutors dropped the murder charge against Jones without prejudice on October 28, 1993, meaning it could be refiled if stronger proof emerged.
They continued investigating, including leads on a possible third suspect, but no further charges stuck. The sheriff at the time denied any involvement in the events that night. What began as a potential breakthrough dissolved into the same uncertainties that had surrounded the case since 1987.
Krisher's short life left few public traces beyond the circumstances of his death. He had lived for a time with Ben Loring, who later became district attorney and was subpoenaed in the proceedings. Family connections reached back to Comanche County, but in Ottawa County he existed as one more young man caught in the edges of local disputes and the drug economy that touched many corners of the region in those years.
The Miami Police Department still lists the murder as open and encourages anyone with even minor details to come forward.
Guy Edwin Krisher rests in the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery in Miami.
Decades later, the field where he fell and the cemetery where he lies both remain part of a landscape that has changed little in its essential character, while the question of full accountability for his death lingers unresolved in Ottawa County records.
