True Crime Chronicles: Intervention in 1980 domestic dispute left one man dead and just a ten-year-sentence for killer

On the afternoon of September 13, 1980 James Wilkett Sr. walked into Bunk’s Bar in the small community of McCurtain in Haskell Count. He had already argued with two men earlier that day and left the tavern once in anger. When he returned he began slapping and hitting his wife inside the bar.

Ralph Bell, 46 of nearby Bokoshe, stepped in and told Wilkett to stop fighting with the lady.

Wilkett pulled a .25-caliber pistol. According to witnesses, he said “When I shoot them they don’t get up.” The gun fired once striking Bell in the face. Bell died at the scene.

Wilkett handed the pistol to the bar owner.

The shooting was not an isolated barroom fight. Oklahoma City homicide detectives had already opened an investigation into the July 6 , 1980 shooting of three men at the Guest House Motel in Oklahoma City. That probe led them to Haskell County and to Wilkett.

D

uring the murder inquiry, authorities uncovered evidence that Wilkett and several members of his family were deeply involved in a large-scale narcotics distribution ring centered on a drug store in Stigler, the Haskell County seat.

Federal records show the Wilkett family obtained controlled substances through the Stigler pharmacy and distributed them to buyers who resold the drugs for profit in Oklahoma City. The operation involved animal medications misused for human use or horse doping.

Some family members faced federal conspiracy charges. A federal judge dismissed certain counts against an osteopath and pharmacist connected to the Stigler store in February 1982 but convictions against four defendants, including Wilkett relatives, were upheld on appeal later that year.

Wilkett Sr. himself carried a prior federal conviction. The murder charge against him in Haskell County became entangled with these drug investigations. The case went through multiple mistrials because Wilkett was in federal custody and transfers under the Interstate Agreement on Detainers complicated proceedings.

In 1985 a jury convicted him of second-degree murder. He received a ten-year sentence. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the verdict in 1988.

Ralph Bell left behind a quiet life in Boko she with no known ties to Wilkett or the drug ring. He simply intervened in what he saw as a domestic assault. The tavern shooting and the larger narcotics case illustrated how a single rural confrontation could pull together threads from a multi-county drug network and an Oklahoma City motel triple homicide.

Wilkett served his state sentence. No further major crimes tied to him appear in public records after the 1980s. The Stigler drug store conspiracy faded from headlines once the federal appeals concluded.

The Guest House Motel killings in Oklahoma City remain a separate unsolved or partially resolved matter from the same era, but the Wilkett investigation served as one of the bridges that connected the cases.

This single afternoon in a McCurtain tavern exposed layers of local and federal law enforcement activity that rarely surface in a county as small and rural as Haskell. Ralph Bell’s death and the Wilkett family’s drug involvement remain the most documented major crime episode in the county between 1965 and 2015.