True Crime Chronicles: He took the shotgun and took two lives - 42 years later, he still languishes in prison
On a late summer day in 1983, deep in the wooded hills of Montgomery County, Arkansas, two men died by shotgun blasts.
Larry Lynn Buckelew and Edmond Callen were shot to death on August 22.
Their bodies were to be buried and covered with lime so that nature would finish what the gun had started. The man who pulled the trigger was Ford E. Strafaci. The man who handed him the weapon and gave the order was Luther Edward “Eddie” Skeels.
Another man, Travis Smith, stood with Strafaci when the shots were fired.
Forty-two years later, Strafaci remains behind bars. He was received on April 18, 1984., and is serving life for first-degree murder and a concurrent ten-year term for manufacturing, delivering, or possessing a controlled substance.
He has no prior ADC record. One sequence of decisions in a single criminal enterprise erased the rest of his free life.
The killings grew out of an illegal drug-manufacturing operation. Strafaci, Skeels, Smith, Clay Holcomb, and others were involved in producing controlled substances.
Buckelew and Callen were part of that same world. According to testimony later given in court, they had been stealing chemicals from the operation. When Skeels learned of the thefts, he obtained a shotgun in Georgia and gave it to Strafaci. The instruction was simple and absolute: use it, or do not come back. Skeels also told them how to dispose of the bodies--bury them and cover the graves with lime to speed decomposition.
Strafaci carried out the order. On August 22, 1983, he and Travis Smith shot Buckelew and Callen. In a sworn affidavit later introduced in post-conviction proceedings, Strafaci stated the essential facts plainly: he shot both men with the shotgun Skeels had supplied, knowing what Skeels intended, and with Skeels’ help in planning the act.
The law caught up quickly enough. By the spring of 1984, Strafaci had entered a guilty plea to first-degree murder and the related drug charge in Montgomery County Circuit Court. Case numbers 1983-48 and 1983-43 appear on his prison record.
He was sentenced to life plus ten years and delivered to the Arkansas Department of Correction on April 18, 1984. He has never left.
Years later, he tried to undo the plea. In a Rule 37 petition he argued that the trial court had failed to establish a proper factual basis when he pleaded guilty, and that his own later testimony suggested the killings were not deliberate or were done in self-defense.
The Arkansas Supreme Court rejected the claim in 1989. The justices held that evidence presented at the post-conviction hearing—including Strafaci’s own affidavit—supplied the missing factual basis. Parallel petitions filed by Skeels (charged as an accomplice) and by Travis Smith were decided the same day. All three men remained where the pleas had placed them.
Public records reveal almost nothing about Strafaci’s life before the drug operation.
He entered prison at twenty-five. He is now sixty-seven. The only incarceration listed is this one.
The victims receive even less personal detail in the surviving court documents. Larry Lynn Buckelew and Edmond Callen appear primarily as participants in the same illicit enterprise who crossed a dangerous line by stealing from it. Their deaths were not random. They were the calculated response of men protecting a criminal business.
Once the order was given and the shotgun changed hands, the outcome was almost inevitable.
That is the quiet horror of the case. Strafaci had no prior prison record with the Arkansas Department of Correction. He was not a career killer with a long string of violent convictions. He was a man inside a drug-manufacturing ring who accepted a weapon and an order on a specific day in August 1983.
The shots were fired. The bodies were to be buried with lime. A guilty plea followed. A life sentence was imposed. More than four decades have passed.
Today the ADC inmate search still shows the same stark facts: ADC #082459, Ford E. Strafaci, life. The PE/TE date is simply “Life.” Custody classification C4. One incarceration. The numbers have not changed because the sentence was never meant to change.
In True Crime Chronicles we return again and again to the same hard truth: some lives turn on a single irreversible choice.
For Ford E. Strafaci that choice was made in the summer of 1983 in Montgomery County when a shotgun was placed in his hands, and two men who had stolen from the operation were marked for death.
He pulled the trigger. The rest of his life has been measured in prison days.
