True Crime Chronicles: Cherokee County murder and rapes of Tulsa residents in 1968 led to life in prison for pair

  Harold James Pope

On Father’s Day weekend in June 1968, the Carey G. Pope family of 7405 East 60th Street in Tulsa drove out to Barren Fork Creek about seven miles east of Tahlequah for a holiday outing. Their twenty-year-old son,, a junior majoring in business administration at Northeastern State College joined them along with his twin sisters Marilyn Kay and Carolyn Gay, both seventeen and students at Memorial High School.

What began as an ordinary family gathering turned into hours of terror when the three young people, traveling back toward the family campsite near Welling, stopped on a county road to assist two men who appeared to be changing a flat tire.

The men were Delbert Eugene Hopper, then twenty-four and living on Route 1 near Barnsdall, and Chester Dale McDonald, twenty-two, of Baxter Springs, Kansas. They threatened Harold James Pope at gunpoint, forced him behind the car, and shot him once in the left side of the head just above the ear.

The sisters later recounted that the attackers claimed they had only wounded their brother in the leg to keep him from running. After several terror-filled hours, the girls managed to escape, reached a nearby farmhouse, and summoned help from the sheriff’s office. Officers located Harold James Pope’s body in the trunk of his own automobile, which stood parked in a weeded area near the creek only a few miles from the family camp.

The sisters received medical attention from a doctor at a Tahlequah hospital before their parents brought them home.

Earlier that Sunday night, the same two men had broken into the John Carlile residence about three miles north of Tahlequah on Steeley Hollow Road and stolen several firearms and a quantity of ammunition. Recovered from the Pope car were two shotguns, a thirty-caliber rifle, a twenty-two-caliber automatic rifle, and a twenty-two-caliber pistol. A single-shot twenty-two-caliber rifle remained missing.

All the recovered weapons were loaded. Sheriff August Martin’s deputies, assisted by Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers, city police, and friends of the victim from the college, searched the area after the father reported his children missing. Around two o’clock Monday morning the posse discovered Hopper and McDonald asleep inside the Pope automobile near the Eldon community.

Both men were wearing only trousers when officers awakened them and took them to the Cherokee County jail.

Hopper and McDonald were arraigned early Monday before County Judge Ira Miller on separate counts of murder and second-degree burglary. They entered pleas of not guilty and requested counsel. The judge appointed Jack Durrett the Second and Elton Johnson of the firm Durrett and Johnson to represent them.

Preliminary hearings were scheduled for June 25, with the murder charges set for ten in the morning and the burglary charge for two in the afternoon. McDonald also carried an outstanding robbery charge from Ottawa County stemming from a February holdup of a grocery store in Quapaw; he had been released on bond the previous April.

The cases proceeded through the Cherokee County District Court under District Judge C. F. Bliss Junior. By late October, separate trial dates had been set for December, with the first-degree rape charges against both men calendared shortly afterward.

In the end, neither case went to a full jury

verdict. Both defendants entered guilty pleas. Each received three consecutive life sentences covering the murder of Harold James Pope and the rapes of Marilyn Kay and Carolyn Gay Pope.

Hopper remained incarcerated under those sentences for decades. In 2016, at the age of seventy-two, he appeared before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board for consideration of release. He died on September 3, 2020, still carrying the weight of the life terms imposed nearly half a century earlier.

The violence that struck the Pope family on that Father’s Day outing along Barren Fork Creek left two young lives forever altered by sexual assault and one young life ended by a single gunshot.

The two men from ordinary northeastern Oklahoma and Kansas backgrounds stood accused, pleaded guilty, and received the maximum penalties available under the laws of the state.

The complete investigative files, the full accounts given by the surviving sisters, and the detailed court records remain preserved in the archives of Cherokee County and in the contemporary newspaper reports that first brought the tragedy to public attention.