http://m.newsok.com/article/2373239
Two Tie Police Car To Site of Murders Lovers’ Lane Scene Described
Chip Minty| October 25, 1991
NORMAN – In puzzling testimony Thursday, two witnesses explained their moonlight encounter with a police car they found on a west Norman lovers’ lane the night two college students were killed in 1970.
The former Norman residents, who were 19 years old in 1970, told the jury they saw a police car parked behind the victims’ vehicle the night the students were shot to death.
Carolyn Wrobleski, now of Broken Arrow, said she saw the police car while driving home to Norman from a drive-in movie about midnight May 9, 1970.
She said she was at the movie in Oklahoma City with her friend, Linda Leveridge, now of Skiatook, whose testimony matched in almost precise detail.
The two witnesses combined for nearly five hours of testimony Thursday in the trial of former Norman police officer Frank Edward Gilley, 55, of De Soto, Texas.
Gilley is accused of killing Sheryl Lynn Benham, 19, of Oklahoma City, and David William Sloan, 21, of Amarillo, Texas.
They were shot to death in the early hours of May 10, 1970, while parking on a dirt road bordering a west Norman hay field, police have said.
There bodies were found on the same road May 11.
They had died in the trunk of Sloan’s 1966 Pontiac GTO.
Wrobleski, who was driving, described the night as windy with lightning flashing in the distance.
She first saw the cars parked near trees as they rounded a curve at Western Avenue and Robinson Street in west Norman.
She turned her car onto the road and approached the vehicles looking for friends, but backed out once she realized one of the cars was a patrol car.
Wrobleski said the moon was full and she could clearly see police markings and overhead lights on the first car, but could only see the shadows of the second car, which was partially hidden.
But Leveridge testified that the trunk lid to the second car was opened.
Neither witness saw anyone standing near the vehicles.
Wrobleski and Leveridge said they told police what they had seen in May 1970, but were not interviewed by police again until shortly after the case had been reopened in June 1990.
Cleveland County prosecutor Rick Sitzman said neither woman had been asked to testify in grand jury hearings on the case in 1971 and 1991.
Though Wrobleski testified that she told investigators several times that a police car was parked on the road, there was no mention of it on investigation reports taken when she was interviewed in May 1970, Gilley’s defense attorney, Robert Perrine, said.
Wrobleski said the signed statement she gave to Norman police in 1970 was lost.
Police have said much of the evidence, including physical items found at the scene were lost between 1973 and 1990. BIOG: NAME:
Archive ID: 482847
– this case has always interested me. Gilley was said to of had a fascination with lover’s lane murders and had many .22 cal weapons stashed away. Have often wondered if he was inspired by the zodiac.
1970 Murderer Left Few Clues In Pair’s Death
Zane Clifton| August 31, 1987
"At the time of the deaths there were several things going on in Norman," he said. "There was a demonstration on campus with people coming in for that, a carnival was in town and there were several end-of-school parties."
Investigators checked out all the carnival personnel and any others police were aware of who had been in town and left, Cary said.
But according to the slain girl’s father, "Everybody concerned agreed who did it, but they didn’t have any proof – no fingerprints or nothing – and the guy flew the coop. … He’s gone forever, I guess."
Frank E. Gilley
Amarillo
Posted: Tuesday, March 12, 2002
Frank E. Gilley, 66, of Amarillo, died Sunday, March 10, 2002.
Services will be at 10 a.m. Wednesday in Schooler Funeral Home Brentwood Chapel, 4100 S. Georgia St., with Charles Davenport of First Baptist Church in Tulia officiating. Burial will be in Memorial Park Cemetery.
Mr. Gilley graduated from Amarillo High School in 1954. He was honorably discharged from the Army in 1961. He worked as a deputy sheriff in Potter and Randall Counties for 16 years. He was a member of San Jacinto Baptist Church.
He was preceded in death by his father, Leonard L. Gilley in 1993.
Survivors include two daughters, Cindy Marquardt of Amarillo and Tonya Rogers of Harrison, Ark.; his mother, Myrtle Gilley of Amarillo; a sister, Ann Hall of Nacogdoches; a niece, Jennifer Gunn of Colorado Springs, Colo.; three grandchildren, Brittany Gilley and Dustin Rogers, both of Harrison, and C.J. Matthews of Green Forest, Ark.
The family suggests memorials be to a favorite charity.
Amarillo Globe-News, March 12, 2002
He wasn’t convicted.
"Lovers’ Lane" Witness Tells of Being Accosted, Names Gilley
Chip Minty| July 27, 1991
NORMAN – A former Norman policeman accused in the 1970 "Lovers’ Lane" killings was named Friday by a witness who was accosted while parking with her date more than 20 years ago.
In tearful testimony, Beverly Ann Humphries of Oklahoma City told Cleveland County Special District Judge Gary Purcell how the man threatened to arrest her if she did not take her clothes off for him.
She named Frank Edward Gilley, 55, of De Soto, Texas, as the man who pulled up behind her and her date, Mike Upshaw, on a Wednesday night in October 1970.
"I only remember being scared because he asked me to take my clothes off," Humphries said Friday.
"He said if I didn’t do what he said, he would take me in. " "I said I couldn’t do it," Humphries testified.
Humphries said Gilley made her get out of her boyfriend’s car and sit in his white station wagon during the conversation.
She said she and Upshaw were later allowed to leave, despite refusal to undress.
Gilley, who sat through the second day of preliminary hearing testimony, has been charged in Cleveland County District Court with two first-degree murder counts and one count of perjury.
He is accused of killing Sheryl Lynn Benham, 19, of Oklahoma City, and David William Sloan, 21, of Amarillo, Texas, on May 10, 1970.
Gilley was a Norman police officer at the time of the slayings.
John Sloan, David Sloan’s younger brother, attended the first two days of testimony this week.
John Sloan, 39, of Grand Rapids, Mich., said the unsolved case has caused 20 years of heartache for his family.
"The whole nature of the crime. The way it was done does not comfort you," he said.
"How could any person masquerade as a police officer and accost young couples and threaten young girls and boys? " he said.
Richard DeSirey, of Tulsa, told the judge that he also was harassed by a man driving a white station wagon and impersonating a Cleveland County sheriff.
From a photograph shown to him 20 years ago, DeSirey had identified Gilley as the man who accosted him and his date June 8, 1970.
But when he saw Gilley in the courtroom Friday, he stopped short of making a positive identification.
DeSirey, who was 18 in 1970, said he and Yvonne Bowden were watching the sunset when the man approached their car from behind and showed them a lawman’s badge.
He said the man took him away from the car and asked him if he and Bowden were virgins and if he would try to have sex with her.
The man asked if he would defend Bowden if a man with a gun tried to sexually assault her.
When DeSirey responded that he would, the man said, "Then you would be dead, too," DeSirey testified.
DeSirey said the man also asked if they had heard about the lovers’ lane killings, which had happened less than a month before.
The couple was allowed to leave 45 minutes after the man first approached them, he said. BIOG: NAME:
It really makes me wonder where Gilley was during the Colonial pkwy murders in VA. I think the lesbian couple had the worst trauma if I remember correctly and I’ve read before that Gilley was extremely angry toward lesbians and did not understand why they were gay and didn’t want a man (an affront to his masculinity).
