True Crime Chronicles: Discovery of body eight years after initial missing report lrd to an October 25, 2024 murder conviction
Barbara Ann Durant lived in the small community of Dow east of McAlester along U.S. Highway 270 in Pittsburg County. At the time of her disappearance, she was 54, a white woman with red hair and brown eyes who stood 5'2 "and weighed about 140 pounds. Friends and neighbors said they had been unable to reach her after July 9, 2012, the day she was last reported seen in the Jackfork Mountains of southern Pittsburg County.
She had been living with a man in the Dow residence. When contact stopped, the Pittsburg County Sheriff’s Office filed a missing person report.
The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation joined the search. Durant was entered into the FBI National Crime Information Center as an endangered missing person in October 2012. Searches in July 2013 focused on a dumping area near the Dow home after leads suggested remains might be found there, but nothing turned up. The case cooled.
Billy Jack Thomason already carried a long record in Pittsburg County by the time Durant vanished. Court and corrections records show multiple earlier cases that put him in state prison before 2012. In 2000, he was convicted of unauthorized use of a vehicle, using an offensive weapon in a felony, and cruelty to animals. Those five-year incarceration terms began December 22, 2005, and ran until February 4, 2008.
The same period overlapped with a child-abuse case (CF-2005-0446) that carried a five-year split incarceration sentence running from December 22, 2005, to May 16, 2010. A related 15-year suspended sentence on the child-abuse matter remained active into June 2012.
A 2002 deferred sentence in Hughes County for uttering forged instruments had already ended in 2004 without a recorded prison term. Thomason was free by mid-2010 and remained out through the summer of 2012, when Durant disappeared.
Additional 2012 charges for assault and battery with a deadly weapon, second-degree burglary, larceny from a house, and felon in possession of a firearm led to further incarceration terms that began in October 2013, after the murder.
On February 1, 2020, hunters checking traps along a creek roughly three miles east of Hartshorne on State Highway 1, near the Latimer-Pittsburg County line, pulled a blue tarp from shallow water. Inside, they found a human skull and other skeletal remains bound with rope.
The Latimer County Sheriff’s Office called the OSBI. The remains went to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. On February 4, 2020, they were identified as Barbara Ann Durant. The cause of death was a gunshot wound. Years of decomposition had left little else.
Investigators from the OSBI and Pittsburg County Sheriff’s Office reopened the file. Additional interviews followed.
A probable cause affidavit later stated that a witness told agents they had overheard Billy Jack Thomason and Mary Ballard, also known as Mary Brochu, admit to killing Durant. The pair then threatened the witness that they would kill them if the admission ever reached anyone else. In a July statement to investigators,
Ballard said Thomason was the one who killed Durant. She admitted she helped him wrap the body in a large package covered by a blue tarp and rope and throw it into a creek just east of Hartshorne. She claimed she did so because he made her.
Thomason was already in the custody of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections on the earlier child-abuse sentence and other charges when the murder warrants issued. Ballard had relocated to Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, where she had lived for the previous couple of years.
On October 25, 2024, the Pittsburg County District Attorney’s Office charged both with first-degree murder in Pittsburg County District Court. On October 28, U.S. Marshals and the Natchitoches Parish Sheriff’s Office arrested Ballard without incident at a residence on Sisson Road. She was held as an out-of-state fugitive pending extradition. Thomason was transferred from DOC custody to face the new charge.
Public accounts do not spell out a detailed motive. The available record centers on the admissions, the disposal of the body, and the threat to a witness. Ballard placed the fatal shot with Thomason and described her own role as compelled assistance in concealment. No other theories appear in the released court materials or official statements.
On April 12, 2025, Brochu entered a no contest plea and received a 10-year prison sentence. Thomason later entered a plea agreement and was sentenced to 25 years in connection with the Durant case. Both sentences are state convictions imposed in Pittsburg County District Court under Oklahoma law. The Pittsburg County Sheriff’s Office announced in November 2025 that the 12-year investigation had ended in convictions.
Billy Jack Thomason is held at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester (commonly called Big Mac). Mary Brochu (Mary Ballard) is at Mabel Bassett Correctional Center in McLoud.
