True Crime Chronicles: A commutation of sentence released a Leflore County murderer on February 18, 2026
Cathy Sue Lamb was about five feet tall and roughly 100 pounds in 1991, a LeFlore County sales representative with no criminal record, an associate’s degree in art earned after she left school in the eighth grade, and a small pistol she carried because the job put her on the road.
She had grown up poor with an alcoholic father, married at 14 to a man in his twenties, had a son at 15, and later lived through a second marriage marked by beatings.
After that husband died, she dated Chris Neilson. Darrell Lovell was 23, about 5-foot-10 and nearly 200 pounds, an expectant father who had spent the day fishing near McCurtain and stopped with friends near a convenience store across from a newly opened place in Bokoshe called the Why Not Bar.
The bar had been open only a day or two when the early April incident took place. . Neilson talked Lamb into going, saying there would be free barbecue.
The food had been served the day before.
Neilson drank. There was a fight inside. The pair were put out. Lamb later said she fired a warning shot or shots into the air because she feared men from the bar would follow them.
Across the street, Lovell and his friends were laughing. Neilson took it as mockery and shouted. Lovell crossed toward them. Lamb’s version is that she asked him to let them leave, that he shoved her in the face against her truck, and that the .25-caliber pistol discharged.
Five witnesses described something else: that she pointed the gun at Lovell within about four feet of his face and fired. He fell with a gunshot across the face and died shortly after.
Lamb fled. She said Neilson stopped her from going straight to the police.
She later flagged a patrol car, confessed to a deputy she knew from school, and was taken to jail.
Officers had been looking for a different woman. Neilson was never charged and dropped out of the public record of the case.
District Attorney Mike Sullivan offered a plea that would have meant about 25 years. Lamb’s public defender rejected it. Sullivan later said the defender “nonchalantly threw it off.”
The case went to a 12-member jury. In closing argument, Lovell’s infant son cried in the courtroom. Sullivan later called it a prosecutor’s dream he did not arrange. The jury convicted Lamb of first-degree murder and she was sentenced to life without parole, one of the earlier uses of that statute in Oklahoma.
Sullivan never lost a murder case to a jury in those years.
After a heart attack around 1996, he began saying this one sat wrong. In a November 1998 letter, he wrote that of more than 40 homicide cases his office filed, this was the only one in which he believed the sentence was too harsh.
Then-District Attorney Rob Wallace told later in hearings that witnesses said Lamb fully extended her arm, put the gun to Lovell’s face, and pulled the trigger. Carroll Lovell of Bokoshe, the victim’s mother, treated the verdict as final.
In 2000, Lamb became the first Oklahoma inmate serving life without parole to get a commutation hearing. About 20 of Lovell’s relatives and friends gasped and wept when the Pardon and Parole Board voted 3-2 to recommend reducing the sentence to life with parole eligibility in 2006.
Carroll Lovell sued the board over procedure. Governor Frank Keating had a staff member read the trial transcript, spoke with both sides and the medical examiner, and asked reconstruction expert Tom Bevel to rebuild the shooting.
On the deadline in October 2000 he rejected the board. “This was a premeditated, first-degree killing,” he said. “This was not an accident. The jury has spoken.”
Lamb stayed at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud. She painted. A spinal tumor went untreated long enough that she ended up in a wheelchair. Another clemency bid failed in 2020.
In early 2025 the board again recommended reducing the sentence to life. Governor Kevin Stitt commuted it that year after renewed reporting. Lamb, now in her seventies, was released in February this year.
Housing was hard. She tried Arkansas near a son, then moved to her brother’s apartment in Stigler under rules that required her home before dark.
Sullivan, by then an old man, had spent years saying the state kept her too long. The Lovell family had spent the same years saying a jury already decided what the night outside the Why Not Bar was.
