Panta Lou Liles was twenty, worked for the Douglas Aircraft Company, and was murdered in her apartment near downtown Tulsa on May 15, 1945. Police counted her as the fourth in a string of killings of women on the city's Northside that they believed were one man's work. The man they charged with hers was LeRoy Benton, a thirty-year-old Black man, and a jury convicted him.
An appeals court threw the conviction out and freed him, in an opinion that accused the investigation of star chamber methods and found that his confession had been false. The man eventually arrested for the series had been working in a junkyard a block from her building at the time she died.
His name was Charles F. Floyd. He did casual and trucking work, and he was known to the police as a voyeur before anyone died. He was reported as fifty-two when he was arrested in 1949, which would put his birth around 1897. The women he was accused of killing were mostly alone at home, and several accounts say he picked out redheads.
On July 10, 1942 he went into a house belonging to a man named William Brown and strangled his wife. She was twenty, and she was nine months pregnant. The police recorded it as a double killing.
About six months later Georgina Green and her married daughter were alone in their house when he got in; one account names the second woman killed that night as Stewart.
Liles came next. After his arrest he described her bedroom and her belongings in a detail that detectives believed only the killer could have known, and said he had first noticed her through her open window, undressing after she came home from a movie.
Then, in 1948, he broke into a house where a mother was at home with her two daughters; one account says a mother and one daughter, both wounded. He was forcing them into sexual acts when a neighbor heard and came to help, and he ran.
He went two blocks to 111 East Cameron Street, broke into the home of Ruth Norton, and beat her to death in her bed at about three in the morning on July 2, 1948. She ran an elevator in a downtown building. The Tulsa Tribune gave her age as forty-five; other accounts say forty or forty-two. Police found her at a quarter past nine, undressed from the waist down.
That neighbor is the reason the case ended. Until then there had been no surviving witness. Detectives Bud Caffey and Bob Cleveland learned that a man matching the survivors' description worked at a nearby truck yard and had not come back to work since that night. It took them more than a year to find him. They arrested him in Dallas on November 22, 1949.
He confessed, but the accounts differ on to what. One says he admitted all five killings. Another says that, with a Tulsa World reporter present, he confessed to two of the five.
And then there was no trial. He was examined, his intelligence was tested, and he was ruled mentally incompetent. The account that follows him furthest says he was committed to Eastern State Hospital at Vinita and died there in 1968. Others say only that he died of natural causes in an institution, and one says he was sentenced to life in Texas; none of them records a trial in Oklahoma.
The five deaths attributed to him therefore rest on police attribution and on what he told them. The only conviction anyone obtained in the series was of LeRoy Benton, and it did not stand.