It was a warm day in Washita County, Oklahoma, and, in a field just east of the Canute cemetery, a 13-year-old boy called Clifford Kirk was picking cotton on the Xavier Meiers farm, along with his father and brother, Martin. Between the stalks Clifford made the odd discovery of a shoe and a Continental Oil Company hat and told his brother to take a look around. Minutes later, Clifford made a discovery that would haunt him for years; it was the decomposing body of a badly beaten man. By the time that the police arrived, the teenager was so hysterical that he had to be taken to hospital in Elk City.

The man had clearly been dead for a little while; he had a broken leg and had suffered cuts and blows to his head. Thanks to a chauffeur’s badge on him he was quickly identified as George Thomas Goodwin, the son of WH Goodwin who lived in Cement, around a hundred miles south-east of Canute. But what also swiftly came to light was horrifying for there had been several missed chances to save George’s life.

The first had been around midnight on Thursday, October 7, 1939. It was then that a Canute farmer called Henry Spieker had spotted a truck, laden with peaches, parked on the side of the road. When it was still there the next day he reported it to the police who towed it away on Sunday. It appears they didn’t investigate further or they might have found the badly injured George some 30 cotton rows into the field beside the truck. According to evidence at the scene and a later post-mortem, it seems that George lived for as long as three or four days in the cotton field, unable to get to the road or to summon help. Later, someone happened to mention that they’d seen a man sitting in the cotton field on Sunday afternoon but had done nothing…

That George had been the victim of foul play was beyond doubt. Afte having supper with his father and family he had left Cement at 8pm on Thursday night with $46 in his pocket; all but a couple of dollars was now missing. His brother-in-law, Claude Underwood, who travelled from Cement to identify the body surmised that George might have picked up a hitchhiker – being a kind-hearted man, he said, that was just the sort of thing he did. George was driving back to San Jon, New Mexico, where he had lived for five years with his second wife Lilly and their three children, William Thomas (13), Pauline Fay (11) and Kathryn (8), and would have appreciated the company.

 Under questioning, Jack Ray admitted to the murder too. Having stolen a car in Dallas and then robbed a pawn shop of a gun, the three found themselves in El Reno. Unfortunately for George, the truck driver was at a filling station at the same time. Seeing George pay from a wad of bills, Jack Ray persuaded George to give him a lift when the Daniels brothers followed in the stolen car. A few miles later, Daniel’s car forced George off the highway and the trio demanded that he give them his money. When George refused, Daniel shot him and Ray hit him over the head before taking the gun and also shooting him. They then carried the wounded George into the cotton field where they left him, driving on to Elk City.

Although badly hurt from being shot in the leg and beaten over the head with the gun (part of the handle was found near him) and a wrench, it’s likely that George Goodwin might well have survived had he been found in time. Instead, he spent his final days alone in a cotton field, just yards from rescue.

Jack Ray pled guilty to the charge of murder and was sentenced to life in prison in McAlester Penitentiary to where he was transferred after completing his term for auto theft. In 1958 he was granted parole but while on parole he committed a bank robbery for which he served a term of imprisonment in the United States Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. Because of violation of his parole he was ultimately returned to the custody of the State of Oklahoma where he remained until 1977. He died on January 9, 1988, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Eunice Daniel changed his plea to guilty before his trial began and, despite his lawyer claiming all the usual excuses of a terrible childhood (the Daniel family were no strangers to the law; by now his older brother Parnell was serving a ten-year sentence), he too received a life term. Curiously, although he was certainly inside McAlester in 1950, Daniel doesn’t feature in the historical Oklahoma prison records. It’s likely he was released around the same time as Jack Ray and he died in 1978. He too lies in an unmarked grave in the Union Cemetery in Bakersfield, California. As this is where unclaimed prisoners and inmates from local jails and state prisons are buried, it seems that he may have continued on a path of crime.

The little Goodwin family was destroyed by the tragedy. Unable to cope, Lilly Goodwin surrendered her three children to the Masonic Children’s Home, an orphanage in Guthrie, Oklahoma. It was a senseless crime with so many ramifications.