True Crime chronicles: One of two men convicted in a 1981 Van Buren killing remains in a Georgia prison after45 years
Richard Phillip Anderson has spent forty-five years behind bars for a jewelry-store robbery that ended with two people shot in the head in a back room in Van Buren.
Arkansas still carries him as ADC 077515, a life sentence with no projected release. The public listing does not put him in Cummins, Varner, Tucker, or any other Arkansas unit. It lists Interstate Compacts and gives no mailing address, which is how the department marks a man whose body is housed somewhere else while Arkansas keeps the paper.
The somewhere else is Georgia. That is where he is serving the sentences for the August 25, 1980, killings of Barbara Price and her twelve-year-old son, Allen, in a trailer near Tyrone. A Georgia jury convicted him on April 8, 1982, of two counts of malice murder and armed robbery and stacked two consecutive life terms plus twenty years.\
Those Georgia judgments are why he is in a Georgia prison. Arkansas did not let go of him.
The life term from Sebastian County case 1981-295 remains an active hold. If Georgia ever paroled him or otherwise cut him loose, Arkansas would still have a life sentence waiting. He would not walk free. He would come back under the Arkansas commitment.
He is sixty-nine. Custody class C5. Good time class I-C. PE/TE date: life.
The tattoos are still on the file. Panhead. Wings. Harley-Davidson on the upper right arm.
He was received by Arkansas on October 14, 1981, the same day the Van Buren jury’s first-degree murder verdict became a life sentence. The paper never expired.
The Van Buren killings were sixteen days after Tyrone. On the evening of September 10, 1980, Kenneth Staton and his daughter Suzanne Staton Ware were found bound and gagged on the floor of Staton’s Jewelry in Cloverleaf Plaza. Each had been shot twice in the head at close range.
About $ 100,000 in jewelry and watches was gone.
Kenneth was fifty. He had rheumatoid arthritis and still worked the cases. Suzanne was twenty-four, a student at Westark, a young mother. Ruth Staton had gone home. The store was at closing time. Witnesses later put a man in a wig and a second man in the lot. The second man was Anderson.
He and Eugene Wallace Perry had met at a campground on Beaver Lake. They were in the fight business, as they told it, meaning robbery. They cased the plaza. Perry went in as Damon Peterson. Anderson waited with the motorcycle and the bags.
Perry was convicted of capital felony murder and sentenced to death. He spent sixteen years denying he was the man in the wig and later pointing to a confession by another condemned inmate, Marion Pruett.
Courts rejected it. He was executed at Cummins on August 6, 1997. Ruth Staton and the other women of the family watched. That night, Ruth said, was not as bad as what Suzanne had been made to watch.
Suzanne was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Fort Smith. Memorials went to the church and the Arthritis Foundation. Ruth raised the surviving daughters. Years later she sat with Anita Paddock for the book that reconstructed the case.
She lived into her nineties and outlived her husband, the daughter killed with him, and the man who fired the silenced gun.
Anderson’s Arkansas trial was in Sebastian County after a change of venue from Crawford. He said he was only the lookout. He said he never meant to kill. He said local publicity made a fair jury impossible. On January 17, 1983, the Arkansas Supreme Court called the proof overwhelming and affirmed.
Brown pleaded in Arkansas to conspiracy in the Staton robbery. Ginn testified. She had no prior record. She said that in Florida, when Perry suggested killing her, Anderson gave her two hundred dollars and sent her home to Kansas.
Canadian authorities later tied Anderson to the killing of a Vancouver businessman. He was never tried for it.
That is the board as it sits now. Georgia houses him for Tyrone. Arkansas keeps the Van Buren life term as a hold that does not expire.
One state has the cell. The other still has the claim on the rest of his life.
