News

Oklahoma Executes John Michael Hooker for the 1988 Stabbing Murders of Sylvia Stokes and Her Mother

Stokes had a protective order against Hooker and was leaving him when he killed her and Drusilla Morgan. He had killed once before, as a teenager.

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Illustration of a razor-wire fence running across dry prairie grass toward a white prison and watchtower under a stormy sky. Not an actual scene from the case.

Sylvia Stokes had told a court she feared John Michael Hooker would harm her. On March 25, 2003, Oklahoma executed Hooker for stabbing her and her mother to death.

Hooker, 49, was put to death by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester and pronounced dead at 6:07 p.m. Strapped to the gurney, he nodded and smiled to his witnesses and told them he was at peace. "Y'all stay up," he said. "I'm out." Nine of the victims' relatives watched. The U.S. Supreme Court had turned down his last appeal shortly after 3 p.m., and the state Pardon and Parole Board had denied clemency. He was the fourth inmate Oklahoma executed that year.

Hooker and Stokes lived together for eight years and had three children, in a relationship marked by violence. Five months before her death she obtained a protective order against him. In late March 1988 she moved out of their Oklahoma City apartment with the children to live with her mother, Drusilla Morgan, in the same complex. On March 27, after Stokes refused his repeated pleas to come back, the two women went to his apartment to collect the children's clothes. Both were stabbed to death there. Stokes was 28 and Morgan 53.

An Oklahoma County jury convicted Hooker of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death. He had been to prison before: as a teenager he was convicted of manslaughter for shooting his best friend. At his clemency hearing his lawyers argued that he had been too drunk and high to plan the killings; prosecutors pointed to his earlier threats to kill both women. A federal appeals court upheld the convictions and death sentences in 2002.

Hooker's lawyers dated the prison records of his teenage killing to 1970, while prosecutors placed the killing in 1971. The victim's mother's first name appears as Drusilla in news reports and as Drucilla in the federal court's opinion.

Sources