True Crime Chronicles: Illegally obtained evidence in 1975 trial led to an overturned verdict four years later

A brutal crime shattered the peace in Sequotah County on the night of April 4, 1975 when Henry Ellis, a weathered retiree in his 70s who had spent decades as a deputy sheriff enforcing the law, was brutally murdered

And his killer walked free on a legal technicality.

Ellis lived alone in a modest home near the town of Vian. That evening, fate--or something far darker--brought an intruder across his threshold.

The intruder was Richard Riley Morris, an 18-year-old local with no major criminal shadow in his past.

What drove him that night remains a matter of record and speculation: a desperate bid for robbery. He forced his way in, armed with whatever came to hand. The attack was savage and frenzied.

Morris clubbed the elderly man repeatedly, then drove an ice pick into Ellis's head multiple times, targeting the skull in a merciless assault. By the time the sun rose on April 5, Henry Ellis lay lifeless, the victim of a home invasion turned deadly.

Authorities moved swiftly. Morris was arrested by 10:30 a.m. that same morning. During questioning, he signed a Miranda rights waiver around 12:40 p.m. and gave a statement denying any involvement in the killing.

But the evidence told a different story.

In Sequoyah County District Court, he faced charges of first-degree murder. The trial unfolded with stark testimony and physical proof, leading to a conviction and the harshest penalty the law allowed in 1975: death.

Morris was sent to death row, one of several young men in Oklahoma facing execution under the state's reinstated capital statutes. Yet the sentence--and the conviction--would not stand. In 1979, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals stepped in, overturning the verdict.

The court's ruling hinged on a critical flaw: illegally obtained evidence had tainted the trial. A new trial was ordered, but the district attorney chose not to pursue it further. The capital charge faded into limbo.

Morris walked free on appeal bond in 1980, his death sentence erased. The case against him for the murder of Henry Ellis was never revived, leaving the killing without a final judicial reckoning. In the years that followed,

Morris remained in the area, but his life unraveled in smaller ways--multiple arrests for public drunkenness and petty thefts, including stealing beer from a store in 1990. He became one of those rare figures who escaped the ultimate punishment, only to drift through a quieter, more troubled existence

The murder of Henry Ellis stands as a stark chapter in Oklahoma's true crime history: a violent end for a man who once wore the badge, a youthful perpetrator spared execution by appellate mercy, and a case that slipped through the cracks of justice.

In the end, the ice pick scars on Ellis's skull told a story the courts could not fully resolve—one of rage, robbery, and a life cut short in the dead of night.