True Crime Chronicles: A chilling murder spree in Muldrow took years to wind its way through the court system

Muldrow was the kind of small town where people still left their doors unlocked and waved at every passing pickup. Kids played on the chipped-sealed streets until well fter the porch lights came on and the lightning bugs came out.

On the evening of July 2, 1974, that trust vanished in a few bloody hours.

Luther Jerome Anderson was 34, a quiet loner who had lived in Muldrow his whole life. He had no wife, no kids anyone knew of, no close family mentioned in any newspaper story or court file.

What people did know was that he battled severe schizophrenia. He had spent time at Eastern State Hospital in Vinita and walked out on his own a few months earlier. He had never been arrested, never caused trouble, never raised a hand against anyone.

That all changed in one night.Anderson started drinking hard at a local beer joint. Something snapped. Maybe it was the whiskey, maybe the pills, maybe the voices no one else could hear.

Whatever it was, he grabbed a double-bitted axe, a cement block, and a pistol and began walking from house to house

.First was the Duty place. Clarence Duty, 48, and his 78-year-old mother, Dovie, were home. Anderson tried to rape Dovie. When Clarence stepped in to protect her, Anderson buried the axe in his head. Dovie lived, but barely.

Next door, Robert Hewitt, 76, and his wife Jesse, 70, never had a chance. He beat them and shot them. Then George Armstrong, 42, and Frank Mitchell, 34, died the same way. By the time deputies found Anderson, he was soaked in blood and begging them to kill him.

He kept saying, "I don't know why I did it."

Five dead in less than twelve hours. No robbery. No old grudges. Just a man who lost his mind and took a town with him.

Deputies charged him with five counts of first-degree murder. In early 1975 he went on trial only for Clarence Duty's death. The jury called it second-degree murder and gave him ten years to life.

The other four charges were set aside.

Anderson served about fourteen years. In 1982 he asked for early release, claiming self-defense. The parole board said no. Then, in 1989, a state appeals court tossed the whole conviction over a paperwork mistake in the sentence. Anderson walked out a free man

.People in Muldrow could not believe it. Families who buried their dead watched the killer move away. Prosecutors swore they would bring him back.A new investigation by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation turned up enough old evidence to file four more murder warrants in 1990.

Anderson hid for a few weeks, then gave himself up in Miam in Ottawa County. Charges for Armstrong and Mitchell fell apart again. But the case against him for killing Robert and Jesse Hewitt held.

In October 1991 a Sequoyah County jury needed only four days to find him guilty of two counts of first-degree murder. On October 25 the judge handed down two consecutive life sentences. This time there would be no technicality, no early release.

Anderson died in prison on March 23, 2017, at age 77.Seventeen years after that awful night, the people of Muldrow finally closed the book. Five neighbors were gone forever, but the man who took them paid with every day he had left.