Cold Case Files" Two deaths, one disappearance in one year in Ottawa County are still considered "unsolved"

Once a booming hub in the Tri-State Mining District, Picher had grown rich on zinc and lead ore. But by the late 1970s, the mines had closed, the chat piles towered like poisonous monuments, and the ground beneath the streets had begun to shift and sink. Families still clung to their homes in this isolated pocket of Ottawa County, yet everyone sensed the town was dying.

Children played near abandoned shafts, and adults whispered about the red water seeping from the earth.It was into this decaying landscape that three young lives vanished in quick succession, leaving a shadow that has never lifted.

Thirteen-year-old Julia Miller left her Picher home on the evening of June 1, 1977. She told her family she was walking to a nearby drive-in restaurant for ice cream. She never came back. For nearly a year, searchers combed the area with no trace. Then, in April 1978, her skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded spot just across the state line in Treece, Kansas. The bones were bound to a tree with barbed wire.

Published reports from the time suggested she may have been tied there while still alive.

 Ellen Deann Rowden

Two months after Julia disappeared, twenty-three-year-old Ellen Deann Rowden was last seen alive on August 1, 1977. Witnesses placed her at a local bar in Picher with several people, including a man named Karl Lee Myers. Rowden knew Myers well—they had dated. She, too, was never seen alive again.

In April 1978, her skeletal remains were found in the same general area near Treece, Kansas, only yards from where Julia Miller had been discovered. Like Julia, she had been bound to a tree. Forensic examination showed she had been beaten to death with blunt force trauma to the head. A hammer later recovered from a nearby mine pit was believed by some to be the weapon.

.Myers, who lived in the area and had connections to both victims, quickly became the focus of the investigation. He was charged with Rowden’s murder, stood trial, and was acquitted. The jury could not be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, yet many in law enforcement and the community remained convinced he was responsible.

Sheryl Denise Taylor l

The third case struck even closer to the heart of Picher. On July 20, 1978, twelve-year-old Sheryl Denise Taylor left her family home barefoot around 7:15 in the evening. She planned to walk four short blocks to Martin’s Supermarket for a few items her mother needed. Family and friends had ridden bikes part of the way, but Sheryl continued on foot. She was last seen standing on the sidewalk near the store.

She never returned home.

Her family, who had recently moved to Picher from Nowata County, insisted she was not the type to run away. Foul play was immediately suspected. Unlike the other two victims, Sheryl was never found. The hazardous terrain of Picher offered one grim possibility: the town was riddled with open mine shafts, collapsing chat piles, and unstable ground. Some theorized she could have fallen into an unmarked shaft, never to be recovered.

Yet the timing of her disappearance---so soon after the other two cases--made many believe she met the same fate.All three cases share deep roots in Picher. The victims lived there. They vanished from its streets. Two of the bodies were transported across the border and bound in the same remote Kansas woodland.

The town’s toxic environment, its abandoned mines, and its reputation as a place where secrets could easily be buried created the perfect conditions for such crimes. In the 1970s, Picher was still home to a few thousand people, but the economic decline had left it rough and basically uninhabitable.

Everyone knew everyone else, which meant a local predator could move among them unnoticed. The chat piles and sinkholes that later forced the town’s evacuation already made the landscape treacherous and isolating, turning routine walks to the store into journeys through danger.At the center of every theory stands Karl Lee Myers.

Born in 1948, Myers was a Picher-area native with a troubled past, including a prior conviction as a sex offender. He had lived for a time with Julia Miller’s mother. He had dated Ellen Rowden and was with her the night she vanished. He knew the back roads, the mine pits, and the hidden spots around Picher better than most.

Later, in the 1990s, Myers was convicted of the brutal murders of two other Oklahoma women, Shawn Marie Williams and Cindy Marzano. DNA evidence sealed those cases, and he was sent to death row, where he died in 2012 without ever facing execution for the Picher crimes.Investigators long considered him the prime suspect in the deaths of Miller and Rowden and the disappearance of Taylor.

He fit the pattern of targeting women and girls he knew, luring them to isolated areas and using violence to silence them. Yet without physical evidence tying him directly to all three cases—and with his acquittal in the Rowden trial—he was never charged in the others. Some who knew him described a man capable of extreme cruelty who moved easily through the shadows of the mining towns.

Other theories have circulated for decades. In the late 1970s, rumors of satanic cult activity swept through Picher and the surrounding region. The way the two victims were bound to trees in a remote wooded area struck many as ritualistic. Whispers of occult gatherings in the abandoned mines and chat piles fueled speculation that a group, rather than a lone killer, was responsible.

The eerie, decaying landscape of Picher--with its poisoned earth and ghostly ruins--only amplified those fears. Some locals pointed fingers at other men in the community, including acquaintances of the victims’ families or individuals with criminal records. For Sheryl Taylor’s case, a few even suggested her own father, who reportedly had a volatile temper when drinking, though no evidence ever supported that claim. T

he mine-shaft theory for Taylor persists because the physical dangers of Picher were very real. Children and adults alike had fallen victim to the unstable ground before.More than four decades later, these cases remain unsolved. Julia Miller and Ellen Rowden were laid to rest, but their killer or killers were never brought to justice.

Sheryl Denise Taylor is still listed as missing, with foul play presumed. Karl Lee Myers took many secrets to his grave. The town of Picher itself has largely emptied out. Most residents accepted buyouts and relocated after sinkholes and contamination made the area uninhabitable. What remains is a ghost town of crumbling buildings and silent chat piles—a haunting monument to lives interrupted

.Families continue to seek answers. Retired investigators still revisit the files, hoping new technology or a long-silent witness will finally break the silence.In Picher, Oklahoma, the ground may have swallowed its secrets, but the questions endure.

Who walked among them in the summer nights of 1977–1978, and why did three young souls from this dying mining town never come home?