On August 13, 1996, 37-year-old Leta Simmons Kagen was murdered inside her modest mobile home in a remote Golden Valley area of Mohave County, Arizona, along with her 15-year-old son, Robert Delahunt, and her 50-year-old partner, Roland Wear. Leta had a history of taking in boarders and people in need; earlier that year she had invited 19-year-old drifter Robert Allen Bobby Poyson to stay with the household. In August, 48-year-old Frank Winfield Anderson and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Kimberly Lane, arrived and were also taken in.

Court findings describe a premeditated plan by Anderson, Poyson, and Lane to kill the household members, steal Wear’s pickup truck, and flee. Lane lured Robert Delahunt to a travel trailer where he was ambushed and killed; later Anderson and Poyson disabled the phone line, checked their weapons, and entered the main trailer.

All three suspects were later captured, returned to Arizona, and prosecuted. The adults were convicted of first-degree murder and related offenses and received death sentences; the juvenile accomplice pleaded guilty under a separate agreement, received a fixed prison term of about eight years, and has been released. Did anyone in the Golden Valley area know Leta, her family, or the household’s boarders and can add details about life at the trailer before August 13, 1996?