On the night of September 2, 1986, someone cut the screen on the back door of Anna Laura Fowler's house in northwest Oklahoma City and broke in. Mrs. Fowler was eighty-three and lived alone. The next morning her grandson found her body. Four months later, in the early hours of January 11, 1987, the same thing happened in the house directly across the street, where Zelma Cutler, a woman in her nineties, lived alone and kept her own careful routine.
Police in Oklahoma City arrested a twenty-seven-year-old man named Robert Lee Miller Jr. He was convicted of both murders in 1988 and sentenced to death twice. He did not commit them. While Miller sat in jail, two more elderly women in the same part of the city were attacked and raped in their homes in the same way, and the man who pleaded guilty to those rapes was Ronald Clinton Lott. It took most of a decade, a change in forensic science and the collapse of a police chemist's reputation before the state accepted what DNA showed: that Lott, not Miller, had raped Anna Laura Fowler and Zelma Cutler. Lott was convicted of their murders in 2001 and executed in 2013.
Most of what is on record about Lott's early life comes from his own appeals, in which his lawyers argued that a jury should have heard it. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals summarized their account in 2013. Lott was the youngest of ten children, born into poverty in rural Texas, where the family shared a five-room house with no heat or running water. He spent his first three weeks in the hospital, and his mother was paralyzed during his first year. The family rarely had enough to eat. His father, according to the same filings, was abusive and beat the children with switches, and the older siblings tended to leave home at about fifteen to get away from him.
When Lott was ten, his mother left his father and took him and the next-oldest child to Lawton, Oklahoma, and a year later to Oklahoma City. She worked two jobs. By his lawyers' account he began drinking and using drugs at eleven and was put out of his mother's home at twelve. A friend later remembered him as filthy and hungry, sneaking into his mother's house to take food. At fourteen he was arrested for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. At sixteen his mother told juvenile authorities she could not control him, and he was placed in the Oklahoma Children's Center at Taft, where he was held past the end of his term because the state had nowhere to release him. He left in 1978, about six months before his eighteenth birthday. The appeal filings note that a 1979 investigation found widespread abuse at the state's juvenile institutions during that period.
Back in Oklahoma City, Lott did landscaping work. In 1985 he suffered a head injury in a car accident. Testing done for his appeals put his overall IQ at 74. A psychologist who prepared a social history for his trial team, Dr. Russell, wrote that he had a positive relationship with his mother, but that her move from the country to the city had been "the single most devastating event in his life." She also described a relationship with a woman named Donna Burton that ended in 1984 or 1985, about the time the first of the attacks occurred, and suggested it may have been a catalyst. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, quoting the same report, noted that Lott told a different story about his upbringing, describing his father as "close" and, in the psychologist's word, "glamoriz[ing]" his early years, an account other relatives and state records did not support. The report listed seven prior convictions in two states, ranging from conspiracy to sell marijuana to first-degree rape and robbery with firearms. By the time of his murder trial he had spent fourteen of his forty-one years locked up.
In 1986 and early 1987, Lott was living with his mother or his sister in the neighborhood where Anna Laura Fowler and Zelma Cutler lived.
Anna Laura Fowler was eighty-three in September 1986. At Lott's trial her family described a woman who was loved and visited every day; someone in the family stopped by daily, and her kitchen was where they gathered. Her granddaughter Cynthia Houston told the jury about her sewing and her gardening. The appeals court noted that her house and yard, like Mrs. Cutler's, were noticeably better kept than others in the neighborhood. She had at least three children who were still living at the time of the trial: Jim Fowler, her oldest son; Harold Fowler; and a daughter, Mary Elizabeth Templin.
According to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, she was attacked some time after 10:30 p.m. on September 2, 1986. The intruder came in through the back of the house after cutting the rear screen door. She was raped and beaten in her bed and died of asphyxiation. The medical evidence showed contusions on her face, arms and legs and several broken ribs, which the medical examiner said were consistent with someone sitting on her chest. Nothing of value was taken and the house was not ransacked. Her grandson found her the next morning, which is why some later accounts, including the Innocence Project's and the National Registry of Exonerations', date her death to September 3.
Zelma Cutler lived across the street. The courts and the Associated Press give her age as ninety-three; Reuters, the Oklahoman and the exoneration records give it as ninety. By the time of Lott's trial she had no living immediate family, so the state called a longtime friend, Carol Sue Disney, to describe her. Mrs. Cutler had cared for Mrs. Disney's mother when that woman was a baby, and Mrs. Disney had spent much of her own childhood in Mrs. Cutler's house. In later years she still visited and ran errands for her. Mrs. Cutler, she said, did not drive and seldom left home. She moved slowly and by evening needed a cane. She went to bed soon after dark and left the bathroom light on. She was generous with friends, taught Mrs. Disney's children to fold paper birds from scraps, and had, in Mrs. Disney's words, "the sweetest smile."
Her mail carrier, Mary Akins, checked on her daily as part of a postal "carrier alert program" for elderly and disabled residents, visiting for a few minutes and sometimes staying for lunch. Both women testified that after Anna Laura Fowler was killed, Mrs. Cutler told them she had been Mrs. Fowler's friend and was afraid she would be next. She was careful with strangers and would not open her door at night at all.
In the early morning hours of January 11, 1987, someone shut off the electricity at her breaker box and cut her telephone line, according to the Associated Press account of the court record, then broke in through the back. Mrs. Cutler was raped in her bed, beaten, and suffocated. Like Mrs. Fowler, she had multiple rib fractures and died of asphyxiation. Again nothing of value was taken. A knotted rag was found near each body.
After the second murder, the prosecutor at Lott's trial later told the jury, "police flooded the neighborhood." The crime laboratory's early serology work shaped the search. According to the National Registry of Exonerations and the Innocence Project, police believed the killer was a type A secretor, and a laboratory report wrongly suggested, from the frequency of one blood marker, that he was likely Black. Police focused on Black men in the area. The Death Penalty Information Center, citing its 2022 report on race and Oklahoma's death penalty, says 173 Black men were questioned about the case and 23 were asked for blood samples.
One of them was Robert Lee Miller Jr., twenty-seven, who was known to police and, according to the Registry, hung around a nearby drug house as a lookout. His blood tested as type A. He was brought in and questioned for about twelve hours, roughly half of it on tape. Miller talked about dreams, visions, spells and hair, and tried to describe the crimes as though he were clairvoyant. His public defender later said he was probably under the influence of marijuana dipped in PCP. On the tape he denied involvement many times. But scattered through hours of talk, as the prosecutor put it at Lott's trial years later, were statements police connected to things at the scenes that were "you had to be there kinds of things." The Registry and the Innocence Project say most of those details came from speculation, public reports or guesses, and some were wrong.
Miller was charged with both murders and rapes, and also with an attempted break-in on November 27, 1986, at the home of Izabella Lendway, seventy-six, which the Registry lists as part of the same case.
Miller was tried in Oklahoma County District Court in May 1988. The district attorney, Bob Macy, relied on the interrogation and on forensic testimony from Joyce Gilchrist, a chemist in the Oklahoma City Police Department laboratory. "He knew detail after detail," Macy told the jury. "Details only the killer would know."
Gilchrist testified that semen at the scenes came from a type A secretor, a group that included Miller, and that she could not exclude him. Other blood and saliva results from the scenes did not fit his type; she attributed the difference to the samples being mixed with the victims' blood. She told the jury that hairs found at the scenes had "Negroid characteristics" and were consistent with Miller's, and that animal hairs matched a dog Miller looked after. A second police chemist, Janis Davis Lhyane, testified that while working on evidence from the Fowler scene she had found a white person's hair, which turned out to be her own, and that three other hairs from white people at the scene belonged to neither her nor Mrs. Fowler. DNA testing was not used; according to the Registry, Oklahoma courts had not yet accepted it.
The jury convicted Miller on all counts on May 27, 1988. He was sentenced to death for each murder, to 287 and 392 years for the rapes, to twenty years for each burglary and ten years for the attempted burglary.
Gilchrist's serology had a second effect. According to the Death Penalty Information Center and the Registry, her work also excluded Ronald Lott, who had been considered as a suspect.
Miller's arrest did not end the attacks. On March 22, 1987, Grace Marshall was attacked and raped in her home. On May 7, 1987, Eleanor Hoster was attacked and raped in hers. Both were elderly and lived alone, and both survived. Lott, who was then living with his brother near their homes, was arrested and pleaded guilty to both rapes. According to the Registry, he received a twenty-five-year sentence for rape and burglary. His victims lived less than twenty blocks from the murder scenes.
When the cases were later compared side by side, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals listed what the four attacks had in common. All four women were white, over seventy-one, and lived alone, on the south side of the street, on corner lots, within three miles of one another. All four homes were entered through a rear door. The back porch screen had been cut at three of them, the electricity shut off at three, and a back door window broken at three. All four women were raped in their bedrooms late at night or early in the morning, and all were beaten about the head, face and arms. A pillow had been placed over the faces of three of them. Nothing of significant value was taken from any of the homes. The four attacks fell within eight months. The difference was that Mrs. Marshall and Mrs. Hoster were left alive.
Miller's case went into the appeal process, and the science changed while it was there. According to the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals, in about 1992 DNA testing excluded Miller as the source of the semen in the Fowler and Cutler cases. In 1994 a private laboratory reexamined the hair evidence and, in the words the Registry and the Death Penalty Information Center quote, called Gilchrist's hair comparison "essentially meaningless" and "completely unjustified." Her testimony about the dog hair was also found to be invalid. Further DNA testing then implicated Lott, who was still in prison for the Marshall and Hoster rapes. The Oklahoman's 2013 coverage and the Death Penalty Information Center date the match to Lott to 1995.
On March 10, 1995, the Oklahoma County district attorney's office filed an amended information charging Lott and Miller jointly with the two murders. Miller's convictions were set aside and a new trial ordered; the Innocence Project attributes this to the Court of Criminal Appeals in 1995, while the Registry says Macy agreed to vacate the convictions. The joint charges were dismissed at the state's request on January 30, 1996, and refiled on March 19, 1997. According to the Registry, in February 1997 District Judge Larry Jones reviewed the interrogation tape and ruled the evidence against Miller insufficient. The Registry also reports that prosecutors offered Lott a life sentence if he would testify against Miller, and that he refused.
On January 22, 1998, the charges against Miller were dismissed and he walked out of jail. The Associated Press and Reuters reported that he had served eleven years, seven of them on death row; the Registry puts his wrongful imprisonment at almost ten years.
Lott's case moved slowly. His preliminary hearing began eight months after the 1997 refiling, was continued six times and finished on March 20, 1998. That day the state filed notice that it would seek the death penalty, alleging three aggravating circumstances: that the murders were especially atrocious or cruel (the statutory aggravator, which uses three adjectives), that they were committed to avoid arrest or prosecution, and that Lott would be a continuing threat to society. The judge assigned to the case retired in January 1999. A trial date of May 2000 was struck at the defense's request so it could argue a speedy trial motion, which was denied on June 2, 2000.
On November 13, 2000, the state filed a fourth amended information that changed its theory. Lott was now the only named defendant on the malice murder counts. On the alternative felony murder counts, the state alleged that he had been "aided and abetted" by Miller. The Registry notes that this kept charges against Miller on file, though investigators found no further evidence against him.
In March 2001, as a jury was about to be chosen, the trial court held a closed hearing after it emerged that the Oklahoma City Police Department was conducting an internal review of Joyce Gilchrist's work. The state argued that she had played a minimal part in Lott's case and had not been the only analyst to test the evidence. The defense said it could not be ready without knowing more. The judge told Lott he could have a continuance only if he gave up his speedy trial claim; he took the continuance. Gilchrist was fired by the department in September 2001. Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna, testifying to Congress in 2019, said an FBI review that year questioned her work and recommended the state reexamine her cases, and that state and federal officials went on to review more than 1,200 felony cases she had been involved in, 165 of which were found to need further review. An Associated Press report in 2005 put the number of cases reviewed at 1,700.
Lott's first trial began on October 29, 2001. His defense was that Gilchrist had contaminated the forensic evidence and that her results could not be trusted. In the middle of the state's case, the medical examiner disclosed that his office still held evidence that had never left its custody and had never been handled by Gilchrist or tested for DNA. The state asked for time to have it tested by LabCorp. About a week later it reported that the results implicated Lott. Defense counsel told the court that their whole defense had rested on Gilchrist's contamination, and the two sides agreed to a mistrial, with the defense stipulating to the chain of custody for a retrial set for December 3, 2001.
The retrial opened on December 3, 2001. Brian Wraxall, the state's original DNA analyst, testified that Lott's DNA was consistent with all nine markers in the best samples from the scenes. Megan Clement of LabCorp testified that a sperm sample from Mrs. Fowler produced a thirteen-area DNA profile that matched Lott, with a random match probability of about one in 15.7 quadrillion. Sperm from Mrs. Cutler also matched Lott, and Miller was excluded. Witnesses described the Marshall and Hoster rapes. Robert Thompson, a former Oklahoma City police officer who had worked on Miller's post-conviction defense team, testified to the similarities he had found between the four crimes. Gerald McKenna, an inspector in the police sex crimes unit, testified that sex crimes of this kind are committed by one person, and that in his opinion the murders were done to eliminate witnesses.
Lott's lawyers did not deny the DNA directly so much as try to put it in doubt. They called Joyce Gilchrist to the stand. "We called Joyce Gilchrist to the stand, not for a spectacle, not to put her on trial," one of them said in closing, "but to show you that the science in 1987 excluded this man and included Robert Miller." Science fourteen years earlier had been wrong, they argued, and the jury could not be sure it was right now. They also pointed to Miller's statements to police and argued that he, not Lott, might have been the killer, noting that the women raped after Miller's arrest had not died. "At worst," counsel said, "they have proven that Ronald Lott was the rapist." The state, for its part, told the jury that Miller's statements showed he had been present, while maintaining that Lott was guilty either way.
The jury convicted Lott of two counts of first-degree murder. In the penalty phase, Mrs. Fowler's son Harold, her daughter Mary Templin and her granddaughter Cynthia Houston each told the jury that death was the right sentence. Her oldest son, Jim Fowler, testified for the defense that the right punishment was life without parole. The defense also called a prison industries supervisor, who described Lott as a dependable worker who had risen to help oversee a license tag shop; two county jail officers, who said he had caused them no trouble; and his niece Harriet Tingle, who said he had been like a big brother to her and that his family would go on supporting him.
The jury found both of the first two aggravators proved for each murder: that it was especially atrocious or cruel, and that it was committed to avoid arrest. It rejected the continuing threat allegation. It fixed the punishment at death on both counts, and on January 18, 2002, the trial court formally sentenced Lott to death.
Lott raised seventeen claims on direct appeal. On September 9, 2004, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in Lott v. State, 2004 OK CR 27. It held that the delays had been largely for good cause, given the complexity of the case and the arrival of new DNA methods during the proceedings, and that the delays had not hurt Lott's defense; DNA testing, it noted, could as easily have cleared him. It upheld the joint trial of the two murders and the use of the Marshall and Hoster rapes. It found error in letting the granddaughter testify as a family representative when Mrs. Fowler's children had already testified, but held the error harmless. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on March 28, 2005. The state court had already rejected his application for post-conviction relief on November 22, 2004.
In federal court, Lott filed a habeas petition in 2005 raising twenty-two grounds. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma denied it on March 31, 2011. On January 14, 2013, a Tenth Circuit panel of Chief Judge Mary Beck Briscoe and Judges Neil Gorsuch and Jerome Holmes affirmed. It rejected his claims about the speedy trial delay, the aiding and abetting theory, his lawyer's "at worst" remark, the prosecutor's use of Miller's statements, and the failure to present his life history to the jury. On the last point the courts found that his trial lawyers had a mitigation investigation in hand and had made a reasonable choice: evidence of a life without internal controls and with heavy drinking could look as aggravating as mitigating to a jury.
On November 8, 2013, the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board voted 4-1 against recommending clemency. Only board member Currie Ballard voted in Lott's favor. Lott's lawyers asked the board to weigh his inadequate trial representation and his troubled youth. Lott himself apologized to the victims' families. "I'm so sorry for what I've done, and I'd ask them to forgive me," he told the board, according to the Christian Post. "I caused them so much hurt and pain."
Jim Fowler spoke against the execution. He told the Oklahoman he had supported the death penalty before his mother's murder and for years after it, until the Miller case changed his mind. "We put the wrong man on death row with my mother," he said. When the DNA results came out, he recalled, he told his wife they could have killed an innocent man. He did not ask the board for mercy out of forgiveness, the Oklahoman reported. He believed life in prison was the harsher punishment and that the state should not kill anyone. Lott, he said, should be left to "rot in that damn cell."
Ronald Clinton Lott was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester on Tuesday, December 10, 2013. He was fifty-three. Department of Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie said he was pronounced dead at 6:06 p.m. and made no final statement; asked whether he had one, he said no. His brother, the only family member present, sat in the front row and raised a fist and nodded when the curtain opened. His lawyer, Lanita Henricksen, also attended. No members of the Fowler or Cutler families came. Lott was the fifth person executed in Oklahoma that year and, according to Reuters, the thirty-seventh in the United States. Attorney General Scott Pruitt said in a statement that Lott had been sentenced to death by "a jury of his peers" for what he had done "against Anna and Zelma in their homes."
Lott's execution did not close Miller's case. The aiding and abetting charges filed against him in November 2000 stayed on file. Miller filed a federal civil rights suit on January 18, 2000, and dropped it that March after the city argued that the 1998 dismissal had not been with prejudice. In September 2016 he asked the court to dismiss the remaining charges. A district judge ruled in January 2017 that she had no jurisdiction; the Oklahoma Supreme Court reversed in April 2017 and ordered the court to address the issues. On May 19, 2017, the district attorney moved to dismiss the charges, and the motion was granted the same day. In May 2018 Miller asked for a formal declaration of innocence, and on March 5, 2019, District Judge Amy Palumbo issued one. He then sued again, and in 2021 Oklahoma City paid him $2 million to settle. The Oklahoman counts him among eleven people freed from death row in Oklahoma County, a total second only to one other county in the country.
Joyce Gilchrist's work was cited in other wrongful convictions. In 2009 she agreed to a $16.5 million judgment in a civil suit brought by another man whose 1983 conviction rested partly on her hair and blood testimony, according to the Oklahoma Gazette; Macy settled that suit on sealed terms. In a deposition she said, "Hair examination is very subjective."
Proven: Lott was convicted by a jury of the first-degree murders of Anna Laura Fowler and Zelma Cutler, on DNA evidence that matched him to semen from both victims, and the convictions were upheld by every court that reviewed them. He pleaded guilty to the rapes of Grace Marshall and Eleanor Hoster.
Admitted: at his clemency hearing Lott apologized for "what I've done," as reported by the Christian Post. No source opened records a detailed confession to police.
Miller's role: from 2000 until 2017 the state kept alive the theory that Miller had been present and had aided Lott, and prosecutors told Lott's jury that Miller's statements reflected his presence. No evidence beyond those statements was found, the charges were dismissed in 2017, and a court declared Miller innocent in 2019. The theory rests on the interrogation alone and is not supported by any court finding.
The unidentified hairs: Miller's jury heard that hairs from white people not belonging to the victim were found at the Fowler scene. The source of those hairs was never identified in the records opened. The Tenth Circuit noted that Lott's jury was told about them.
Gilchrist's role in Lott's case: the state said she had a minimal part in the evidence against Lott, and the decisive DNA testing was done by other laboratories. Her role in Miller's conviction, and in steering the original investigation away from Lott, is described by the Registry, the Innocence Project and the Death Penalty Information Center.
Other crimes: no source opened links Lott to any killing beyond the two for which he was convicted.
1978: Lott released from the Oklahoma Children's Center at Taft, about six months before his eighteenth birthday.
September 2, 1986 (late evening): Anna Laura Fowler, 83, raped and killed in her home; found by her grandson the next morning.
November 27, 1986: attempted break-in at the home of Izabella Lendway, 76, later charged to Miller.
January 11, 1987 (early morning): Zelma Cutler, raped and killed in her home across the street.
Early 1987: Robert Lee Miller Jr. questioned for about twelve hours and charged.
March 22, 1987: Grace Marshall attacked and raped in her home; she survived.
May 7, 1987: Eleanor Hoster attacked and raped in her home; she survived.
1987: Lott arrested; later pleads guilty to both rapes.
May 27, 1988: Miller convicted; sentenced to death twice.
About 1992: DNA testing excludes Miller as the source of the semen.
1994: private laboratory rejects Gilchrist's hair findings.
March 10, 1995: Lott and Miller charged jointly with the murders.
January 30, 1996: charges dismissed at the state's request.
March 19, 1997: charges refiled.
January 22, 1998: charges against Miller dismissed; he is released.
March 20, 1998: Lott's preliminary hearing ends; state seeks death.
November 13, 2000: state names Lott as sole defendant on malice murder, with Miller as alleged aider and abettor.
March 2001: trial delayed after the police review of Gilchrist's work comes to light.
September 2001: Gilchrist fired.
October 29, 2001: first trial begins; mistrial after untested evidence is found.
December 2001: Lott convicted of two counts of first-degree murder.
January 18, 2002: Lott sentenced to death on both counts.
September 9, 2004: Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals affirms.
March 28, 2005: U.S. Supreme Court denies review.
March 31, 2011: federal district court denies habeas relief.
January 14, 2013: Tenth Circuit affirms.
November 8, 2013: Pardon and Parole Board denies clemency, 4-1.
December 10, 2013: Lott executed at McAlester.
May 19, 2017: remaining charges against Miller dismissed.
March 5, 2019: court declares Miller innocent.
2021: Oklahoma City pays Miller $2 million.