True Crime Chronicles: Horrific 1939 murder in OKC sent FHA inspector to the electric chair a decade later

 Eudora Stokes Cunningham

From the perspective of 2025, the execution of Roger W. Cunningham on November 15, 1940, looms as a haunting chapter in Oklahoma’s history, a grim tale of domestic betrayal and unrelenting justice.

Roger, a 34-year-old Federal Housing Administration inspector and son of a prominent Oklahoma City physician, seemed an unlikely figure to occupy the electric chair.

Yet, his brutal murder of his wife, Eudora Stokes Cunningham, a beloved teacher and librarian, shattered the facade of their respectable lives and gripped 1930s Oklahoma with shock and outrage.In the spring of 1939,

Roger and Eudora, married since 1935, appeared to embody the stability of Oklahoma City’s middle-class society. Eudora, connected to wealth through her stepfather, Joel P. Stokes, a real estate developer, was a familiar figure at Foster High School, her warmth as a librarian endearing her to many.

But beneath this polished exterior, their marriage simmered with discord. On the evening of March 6, 1939, a heated argument in their car spiraled into violence. In what Roger later called a “fit of rage,” he strangled Eudora with her own scarf, ending her life in a remote corner of the city’s West Side.

With chilling calculation, he buried her body eight feet deep in a sewer ditch he had inspected days earlier, a site between West 11th Street and Park Place.

For weeks, Roger maintained a charade of normalcy. He told Eudora’s employer and friends she had left town, first citing a family illness, then claiming she had moved to California.

He even sent a forged telegram, addressed to “Endora,” to assure her mother, Mrs. Stokes, that her daughter was “getting along fine.” But suspicion mounted. Neighbors noted Eudora’s absence, and police found her belongings--money, clothing, bags--untouched in their attic.

When investigators learned Roger had been seen near the sewer trench just before Eudora vanished, the pressure intensified. On March 24, County Attorney Lewis R. Morris and detectives confronted him in a late-night interrogation. Hours later, Roger’s composure crumbled.

With a steady hand, he sketched a map to the burial site and signed a confession: “I strangled my wife Eudora and buried her in a partially filled sewer ditch. May God have mercy on my soul.”

By dawn, searchers unearthed Eudora’s body, still in her tan coat and blue hat, her scarf knotted around her throat, confirming her death by strangulation.

The trial that followed in October 1939 captivated Oklahoma City. Roger’s defense hinged on a history of syphilis and mental instability, supported by testimony from a psychiatrist and records of a hospital stay. Prosecutors, led by Morris, dismantled this claim, pointing to Roger’s meticulous cover-up as evidence of a calculating mind.

“He wasn’t crazy--he was just a murderer,” Morris declared.

After five days of testimony, the jury deliberated for seven hours before convicting Roger of first-degree murder, sentencing him to die. Appeals failed, and even the governor, unmoved, denied clemency, affirming that justice had been served.

On November 15, 1940, Roger faced his final moments at McAlester’s Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Escorted to the electric chair at midnight, he tossed aside a half-smoked cigar and sat with eerie calm, described by Warden Jess Dunn as “the calmest man I ever saw executed.”

His only words were a quiet request to his attorney: to ask Mrs. Stokes for forgiveness for the grief he caused. Strapped in at 12:08 a.m., Roger endured two 45-second shocks and was pronounced dead five minutes later, his life extinguished as swiftly as Eudora’s had been.

Looking back from 2025, the Cunningham case resonates as a stark reflection of its time.

The death penalty, a cornerstone of 1930s justice, met little resistance in an era that demanded retribution for such a heinous act. Eudora’s prominence amplified public outrage, while Roger’s fall from respectability fueled the call for punishment.

Today, the case invites scrutiny through a modern lens. Advances in psychology might have probed Roger’s mental state more deeply, and debates over capital punishment question the finality of his sentence.