True Crime Chronicles: Bomb plot in 1971 by career Oklahoma criminal killed the wife of witness that was set to testify

The winter morning in Bristo (Creek County) , dawned crisp and unremarkable, the kind of day where frost clung to pickup trucks like forgotten promises. Dorotha "Fern" Bolding, 28, a kindergarten teacher with a laugh that could disarm the rowdiest five-year-old, stepped out of her modest home on Elm Street.

Her husband, Don, a steady man in his mid-30s working odd jobs around Creek County, had left early for a shift. Their five-year-old daughter, Kimberly, still rubbed sleep from her eyes inside, the house quiet save for the hum of the radio.

Fern. a graduate of Roland High School slid into the cab of Don's battered Ford pickup, her breath fogging the windshield. She was just warming it up for the short drive to school, where her class awaited with finger paints and alphabet songs. Her hand turned the key. In an instant, the world erupted.

The explosion was cataclysmic, a thunderclap of fire and shrapnel that shattered windows two blocks away.

The truck disintegrated, hurling Fern's body across the lawn into the neighbor's yard, her remains scattered like confetti from hell. Debris rained down: twisted metal, shards of glass, chunks of high-grade explosive.

Neighbors rushed out, faces ashen, only to recoil at the carnage.

"It was overkill," one investigator later muttered, staring at the crater where the driveway used to be. "Whoever did this wanted to send a message louder than a scream."

Kimberly, peering from the doorway, froze. The blast's roar drowned her cries, but the image etched into her young mind: Mommy gone, in a puff of smoke and fire. Don, racing home after a frantic call, collapsed beside the wreckage, his world reduced to a single, gut-wrenching question/

Why?

The answer slithered north, some 60 miles to Tahlequah in Cherokee County, where Garland Rexford "Rex" Brinlee Jr. held court like a backwoods kingpin.

At 37, Brinlee was no stranger to the law's glare. Born in 1933 in rural Oklahoma, he'd clawed his way from cattle rustling in the 1960s. stealing livestock via his private planeand once dismantling a stolen unloader in a Mayes County barn, to running a sprawling auto theft ring across northeastern Oklahoma.

His tools? A plumber's steady hands, a pilot's eye for spotting unmarked herds, and the charm of a man who owned "The Library Club," a dimly lit Tahlequah nightclub pulsing with bootleg booze and whispers of deals gone sour.

But Brinlee was no mere crook; he was a "rattlesnake," as he'd later boast to reporters. a predator who struck without warning.

Cherokee County Assistant DA Bill Bliss

By 1969, he'd graduated to bombs. That August, Cherokee County Assistant DA Bill Bliss, who'd been raiding Brinlee's illegal clubs, turned the key in his own truck.

Boom.

Bliss survived, intestines spilling as he slumped against a tree, his young daughter Angie picking glass from her skin for weeks. Brinlee was questioned, even pinned against that same tree in a tense standoff, but charges never stuck. A federal grand jury sniffed around, calling Brinlee and a Stilwell produce manager, but the trail went cold.

.Brinlee's web tightened in October 1970. At Swinson Chevrolet in Tulsa, he eyed a gleaming Chevy pickup--not to buy, but to steal.

Enter Don Bolding, brother of Tahlequah Police Chief Gene Bolding, Brinlee's sworn nemesis.

Don Bolding

Don spotted the truck's mismatched VIN during a routine Oklahoma Highway Patrol stop on February 9, 1971, just days after the bombing. Brinlee was arrested for theft, slapped with a four-to-12-year sentence in April.

But Don's testimony was the linchpin, "highly significant," Tulsa DA S.M. "Buddy" Fallis declared. Three days before trial, Brinlee struck.

It started in January 1971 at the Tahlequah apartment of Ralph Lee Hinkle, a 20-something college kid moonlighting for Brinlee's plumbing gigs. Hinkle lived in one of Brinlee's properties on a landlord-tenant bond laced with coercion.

Brinlee arrived with a duffel: four blocks of military-grade C-4 plastic explosive, blasting caps, lead wires. "Borrow a truck," he ordered. Hinkle did, fetching a '69 Chevy.

Enter Archie Dale Miller, a Vietnam vet with a knack for ordnance, part of Brinlee's theft crew.

At an abandoned farmhouse, Miller demo'd the basics: wire the ignition to the caps, snake lines through rubber grommets under the chassis.

Hinkle's apartment became a bomb shop. Brinlee, alligator clips in hand (purchased days earlier), taped wires to the caps with Hinkle's help. That night, under cover of darkness, they motored to Bristow. Hinkle clutched a sawed-off shotgun as lookout while Brinlee crawled beneath Don's Ford, affixing two C-4 blocks under the seat.

"A 70% job," Brinlee later bragged to OSBI Agent Dick Wilkerson during a March 23 truck-stop chat in Tahlequah. "Just to remind Bolding not to mess with Rex Brinlee."

Brinlee even phoned "up north" for the explosives, Wilkerson testified solidifying interstate ties that drew the FBI's attention.

The blast site told the tale. Expert Howard Casey sifted the rubble: lead wires, clips matching Brinlee's purchases, high-velocity residue. Hinkle flipped under immunity, his testimony a damning blueprint of the build.

Miller copped to conspiracy, drawing time

. Brinlee? Arrested June 5, 1971, on a routine traffic stop while out on $7,500 bail for the theft.

He lashed out, punching a KTUL photographer in the Okmulgee courthouse, swinging at a Tulsa World lensman en route to jail.

The trial in Creek County District Court was a spectacle: 39 witnesses over four days, a jury deliberating just three hours. Brinlee, stoic in cuffs, denied it all.

Convicted November 29, 1971, of first-degree murder. Life at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Federal add-ons: 12 consecutive years for explosives conspiracy, tried in Bismarck, ND, to dodge Oklahoma headlines

Prison couldn't cage Brinlee's venom. July 1973: A riot erupts, 15 inmates slashing with shivs. Brinlee slips free, evading capture for six weeks until Biloxi, Mississippi's FBI Most Wanted reward money saw him recaptured just shy of being named the top 10.

In 1976, Brinlee and six others burrowed a utility tunnel to freedom. Days later, chiggers and ticks riddling his skin, he surrendered in a Canadian (Pittsburg County) grocery to an off-duty guard.

Threats poured out: letters to his Tulsa lawyer, a Tahlequah banker, even a vow to kill an Oklahoman reporter who'd printed his jailhouse confession.

Parole boards rebuffed him--once, in 1991, member Carl Hamm dangled federal time if he'd only admit the sin.

Brinlee never did, dying December 18, 2009, at 76 in a Tulsa hospital, natural causes claiming the man who'd cheated death twice.

Fern Bolding's grave in Bristow reads like an epitaph for innocence lost: a teacher, a mother, collateral in a thief's war

. Brinlee's message landed, but so did justice, swift and unyielding. In Oklahoma's heartland, where small towns dream of safety, the Rattlesnake's hiss reminds: Danger wears a plumber's wrench.