True Crime Chronicles: A Craig County brother and sisters committed a heinous murder near Welch in the summer of 1987
On an otherwise quiet Sunday morning in late August 1987, the Wingfield family of rural Welch in Craig County went about what looked like an ordinary day. Kenneth Clinton Wingfield, a rancher in his early forties known as Clint, and his wife Louise, in her late twenties or early thirties depending on the account, loaded their eighteen-month-old adopted daughter Crete into the car and drove to church.
They left behind their eighteen-year-old son Ty and sixteen-year-old daughter Holly at the house a few miles from the Kansas line.
The two teenagers had already been running hard on drugs. The night before, Ty had swallowed fifty Valium tablets, injected methamphetamine, and smoked large amounts of marijuana. That morning, while their parents were gone, he and Holly drove to Miami, where they scored more Valium and beer. Ty took twenty-three of the pills and most of a six-pack. Holly took two pills and three beers.
When they returned, Ty noticed the telephone had been locked in his parents' bedroom. He kicked the door in, so Holly could call about plans to go to the lake.
When Clint and Louise came home with the toddler, an argument started over the broken door. Clint told Holly she was not going anywhere. Ty had been ordered into drug rehabilitation a couple of days earlier, and he refused. He walked to the hall closet, took out a rifle, and shot his father.
Holly grabbed Crete and carried the child into the living room. She went back to the bedroom and watched Ty shoot Louise. She also saw him strike Clint twice on the head with a steel bar or bat because the first shot had not finished him. Roughly half an hour later, Holly was in the kitchen getting Crete a drink when Ty called for the child.
Holly told Crete to go to Ty. Ty shot the toddler in the head with the rifle. Holly then put the small body into a plastic bag. Together the brother and sister loaded all three bodies into the family pickup. Ty drove them to a trash pile behind the house and dumped them under tin and sheets.
Holly cleaned blood from the house, gathered valuables including jewelry from Louise, and forged two checks on Clint’s account. The pair fled toward Texas in separate vehicles, planning to meet at the home of Ty’s former girlfriend Joy Mauldin near Marshall.
Bodies of the three victims were found the next day. Each had been shot once in the head. Clint had also been stabbed several times in the chest, and both adults had been beaten about the head.
Ty reached Mauldin’s house around three thirty in the morning and told her what he had done. She called authorities. Holly arrived later, asked police in Paris, Texas, for directions after getting lost, and was taken in for questioning. Both were arrested.
Ty confessed in Texas that he had shot his father because Clint had been beating Holly, that Louise came at him with a baseball bat, and that he killed the toddler because she looked shocked after seeing the others die. He also said the killings grew out of an argument over dirty dishes and his refusal to go into treatment.
In court later, he testified that Holly had suggested killing the family more than once, including that morning, and that she had urged him on when he picked up the rifle by asking whether he was really going to do it this time.
He claimed she had struck Louise with the metal bar during a struggle.
Holly’s own affidavit given the day after the murders said she had not wanted Ty to kill Crete but knew he would once the child left the kitchen because he had told her so. She admitted bagging the body and helping clean up.
A second cousin, Sally Randall, later testified that in a jail conversation Holly showed no remorse while describing the events and acknowledged knowing Ty intended to kill Crete right before she sent the child to him. Joy Mauldin said Holly arrived at her house showing no emotion about the toddler’s death and that Ty had told her he would take the blame for everything so Holly would say nothing.
Ty pleaded guilty as the principal actor in all three first-degree murders. Holly, charged as an adult under Oklahoma’s reverse certification rules for juveniles accused of murder, went to trial on an aiding and abetting theory for each of the three killings.
The jury convicted her only of aiding and abetting the murder of Crete and acquitted her on the charges involving the adults. She was sentenced to life in prison. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction and sentence in a summary opinion in 1994. In 1996, Holly filed a federal habeas petition arguing the evidence of her personal intent was constitutionally insufficient.
A district judge in Tulsa agreed in early 1997 and ordered her release, reasoning that she had been under no legal duty to protect her sister from her brother’s drug-fueled rage and that the proof of her own intent to kill the child fell short. The state appealed. In August 1997, the Tenth Circuit reversed.
Applying the standard that asks whether any rational jury viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution could find the essential elements beyond a reasonable doubt, the appeals court held that a reasonable jury could infer both that Holly knew Ty meant to kill Crete and that she herself intended the child’s death.
The court pointed to testimony that she had earlier spoken of killing the family, to her direction of Crete toward Ty when she knew what was coming, to her help disposing of the body, to the forged checks, and to the absence of remorse. Conflicting statements in which she claimed she had tried to stop him or had not wanted the toddler dead were for the jury to weigh. The conviction stood.
Holly served roughly twenty-one years. In the summer of 2008, when she wathirty-sevenen, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended her for parole. Residents of Welch and Vinita who remembered the case expressed mixed feelings. Some called the original killings unreal and horrible in a quiet rural community and worried that two decades in prison might have hardened her.
Others noted that the town’s strongest opposition would have been reserved for Ty if he had been the one seeking release. Department of Corrections records from 2013 list her parole as having begun in August 2009, with supervision through a district office in McAlester. Public records do not show any subsequent return to prison on the original conviction.
Ty Delbert Wingfield pleaded guilty as the principal and, on January 28, 1988, in Craig County case CRF-87-81, was convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison on each count. Those life terms, which began that same day, reflected his role as the person who fired the shots that killed his father, his stepmother, and the eighteen-month-old toddler.
The three victims remain the central fact of the case. Clint Wingfield was a working rancher trying to impose some order on a household already strained by drug use. Louise was his wife and Crete’s mother figure. The toddler was eighteen months old, adopted into the family, and had no part in the arguments over rehabilitation, locked telephones, or lake trips.
Their bodies were found on a trash pile a short distance from the house they had left that morning for church. The legal process that followed sorted the brother as the principal killer and the sister as an aider only in the death of the child, then spent years testing whether the evidence of her intent met constitutional standards. It did.
Decades later the daughter, who was sixteen when she helped bag her little sister’s body was released under supervision while the town that still spoke their names continued to live with the memory of what happened on that August Sunday.
