True Crime Chronicles: Sequoyah County jury let killer go free and he went on to kill at least oncemore

In the rugged hills north of Sallisaw in the fall of 1985, a deer hunter named Roy Teague came upon a human skull on a remote ridge in the Cookson Hills. Over the next two weeks Sequoyah County authorities recovered the skeletal remains of five people.

They belonged to Linda Wheeler, thirty-five, and four children: her daughter Angela Mosley, thirteen; her sons Edward Mosley, eleven, and Michael Mosley, nine; and fourteen-year-old Terry Lamb, her son with her former husband. The bodies had lain in the woods for months.

Beverly "Bex" Wheeler

Medical examiners determined that the three boys had suffered shattering skull fractures consistent with blows from a hammer or similar object. Angela had been stabbed once in the chest. Linda Wheeler’s cause of death could not be established because of advanced decomposition. A piece of pipe found at the scene was noted as a possible weapon.

Linda Wheeler had last been seen alive in late June 1985 in Oklahoma City in the company of Herman Edward Lamb Jr., known as Eddie. Five days later, Lamb collected the other children from relatives in the Blanchard area and told them he was taking the group to Sallisaw.

Witnesses later placed him near the remote ridge where the bodies would be found.

Terry Lamb

One neighbor reported seeing him drive past her home repeatedly that July and spotted him on foot in the area as late as July 17. Lamb, a Sequoyah County native with a criminal record stretching back to a 1961 federal auto theft conviction at age fifteen, had served time in prisons in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Illinois.

He was arrested in January 1986 in Americus, Georgia, and returned to face five counts of first-degree murder.

Prosecutors presented a case built on circumstantial evidence. Lamb had cashed checks drawn on accounts connected to Wheeler after the family disappeared. He turned her pickup truck over to an Oklahoma City dealer under an alias.

His father testified that the son had remained devoted to Wheeler and to Terry. The defense, led by attorney John Q. Adams, argued that Lamb had been helping hide Wheeler and the children from a former boyfriend and business partner named Alfred King, also known as Bear, whom Wheeler feared.

Adams suggested King was a more likely perpetrator and that Lamb had returned to the hideout only to find the family gone. District Judge Bill Ed Rogers bound Lamb over for trial after a multi-day preliminary hearing in March 1986, noting the evidence was sufficient even if not conclusive.

The case drew heavy local attention. Jury selection in February 1987 for a death-qualified panel proved lengthy, with discussions of handwriting samples, astrological signs, and other peripheral matters filling the small Sallisaw courtroom. The trial itself examined the timeline, the forged checks, the truck, and the lack of any physical evidence such as fingerprints or blood tying Lamb directly to the killings.

On March 10, 1987, after roughly six and a half hours of deliberation, the jury returned verdicts of not guilty on all five counts. Lamb was free of the murder charges but still faced related weapons and forgery prosecutions stemming from the same period. He was later convicted on a felony weapons charge for possessing a pistol after prior convictions and faced forgery counts related to cashing Wheeler’s Social Security checks.

Lamb’s legal troubles did not end in Oklahoma. Florida authorities charged him in the December 1987 beating, strangling, and stabbing death of thirty-four-year-old Bonnie Sue Loker, a Gainesville dancer whose body was found in a ditch. He entered a no-contest plea to a reduced charge of second-degree murder and received a twenty-two-year sentence.

Years later, DNA evidence linked him to the 1977 rape and murder of twenty-one-year-old Denise Stahlhut, a newly married Southern Illinois University art student and tavern waitress last seen leaving her workplace in Edwardsville. Witnesses had reported a man matching Lamb’s description following her that night. In 2003 an Illinois jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to more than one hundred years. Stahlhut’s family had pursued the case for decades after learning of Lamb’s Oklahoma acquittal and subsequent Florida conviction.

Lamb had also been examined as a person of interest in the unsolved 1978 homicide of Sandra Carter Davis, a thirty-five-year-old Sallisaw mother whose skeletal remains were found in a shallow grave near Wildhorse Mountain months after she was last seen leaving a local bar.

Investigators looked at him in connection with that case and at least one other older Tulsa area killing, but no charges resulted from either inquiry due to insufficient evidence.

The 1985 Wheeler family murders remain officially unsolved. No one else has ever been charged. Local authorities have indicated the investigation stays open even after Lamb’s death.

Herman Edward Lamb Jr. died on November 30, 2020, at age seventy-four while in Illinois custody. He had been transferred from prison to a hospital shortly before his death.

The man once tried for the deaths of his former wife and four children, including his own son, spent his final years serving the long Illinois sentence for the Stahlhut killing.

The remote ridge north of Sallisaw still holds the memory of five lives ended in the summer of 1985, and the questions that a Sequoyah County jury could not answer continue to linger.