Cold Case Files: Strangers in a Buick silenced a potential state witnesses with gunshots to protect their cash crop
In the timbered bottoms of McCurtain County where the Red River cuts a slow muddy path through the pine and the fog settles thick enough to swallow the road at night, December 3, 1977 began like any other cold morning near Idabel.
By the time the sun climbed high enough to burn off the mist, two men lay dead inside a modest house that belonged to James Earl Cook.
He was thirty-nine years old, a dairy farmer who had tried to stretch a living out of the hard red soil of southeastern Oklahoma. Beside him was Ralph Aaron Patty, fifty-nine, another local man whose name would forever be tied to Cook’s in the county’s darker oral history.
Both had been shot. Robbery was ruled out almost at once. Cash and valuables remained untouched, a detail that settled into the local storytelling like a stone in a riverbed and never moved.
Cook and his wife Wanda Sue Rockett Cook ran a dairy operation west of Idabel. In the mid-1970s, the farm faced the same pressures that pressed every small agricultural outfit in the region: rising costs, thin margins, the constant need for capital.
Sue later said they needed a hundred- thousand-dollars to put up chicken houses.
Legitimate credit was scarce. What they found instead was marijuana. On roughly ten acres of their land, they planted, cultivated, harvested, baled, and delivered the crop. Sue described the work herself years later in a television interview, speaking in the plain language of someone who had done the labor with her own hands.
She was not alone. Her husband, members of her family, and a wider network of neighbors and associates worked the same enterprise. Court records from the federal prosecutions that followed name James Earl Cook and Ralph Patty as central figures alongside Clifton Carter. Marijuana grew on the Cook place and on land belonging to Patty.
Proceeds were to be split among Cook, Patty, Carter, and at least one other man. Additional product moved north from Edinburg, Texas, mixed with the local harvest and sent out into distribution channels that reached beyond Oklahoma’s borders.
The operation was large enough to draw the attention of state and federal investigators. Fields were located. Arrests followed. Cook and his wife elected to cooperate. They turned state’s evidence.
In the closed world of the southeastern Oklahoma marijuana trade, that decision carried a price.
On the morning the bodies were found a 1976 or 1977 white and blue Buick carrying Texas plates had been seen near the Cook residence. No one ever identified the occupants with certainty. The vehicle simply appeared in the official reports and then vanished into the same silence that settled over the rest of the case.
Local memory filled the gaps the investigation could not. Money left behind argued against a simple robbery. The timing of the killings, coming after the couple’s decision to talk, suggested a deliberate silencing. Rumors circulated of a contract, of men sent up from Texas, of a message meant to keep other tongues still.
A federal grand jury examining related drug conspiracies in the early 1980s heard the same talk. Witnesses recalled the common understanding that Cook and Patty had been marked because they were prepared to testify.
Former sheriff Paul Stuart, later convicted in a separate marijuana conspiracy that overlapped the same period and the same county, was never charged in the murders, yet the atmosphere of protection and profit that surrounded the trade made every local name a subject of suspicion. No one was ever arrested. The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation still lists the case among its open files.
Ralph Patty had been born in November 1918, the son of Ernest Ervin Patty and Ella Mae Ogden, part of a large McCurtain County family that knew the land and the seasons. By the time of his death, he was a man of nearly sixty whose farm had become one of the production sites for the ring.
Cook, two decades younger, had built a life around dairy cattle and then gambled that life on the green cash crop that promised faster returns. Their partnership, whatever its exact terms, ended in the same house on the same morning.
Sue Cook survived. She pleaded guilty to drug charges, testified, and lived another thirty years, dying in 2007 in Ponca City. She and James are buried together in Forest Hill Cemetery west of Idabel.
In the years that followed, she spoke of the work and the danger with a matter-of-fact tone that suggested the choices had seemed ordinary until they were not.
The bottoms around Idabel have always kept their own counsel. Fog still rises off the river. The timber still closes in on the secondary roads after dark. Somewhere in those woods or in a town across the Texas line the men who drove the white and blue Buick that morning carried the knowledge of what happened inside the Cook house.
Nearly five decades later, the official record remains thin: two men shot, no robbery, a Texas vehicle seen nearby, and a community that learned early that certain questions were better left unasked.
The OSBI continues to seek information. The silence that followed the gunfire has proven harder to break than the fog that still rolls up from the Red River on winter mornings.
