On a summer day in June 1978, twelve-year-old Richard Jay Lorenz was traveling with his parents, Melvin and Linda Lorenz, on Interstate 35 near Purcell, Oklahoma, en route to North Dakota for a funeral. The family stopped to offer help to a woman who appeared to have car trouble. That woman and her companions were Roger Dale Stafford and his wife, Verna.

According to accounts of the case, the encounter became a robbery that escalated into murder. All three members of the Lorenz family were shot and left in a field beside the road; the family’s pickup truck was stolen. The Lorenz murders were later linked to a separate mass killing at a Sirloin Stockade restaurant three weeks afterward. Verna Stafford’s testimony implicated Roger Dale Stafford in the I-35 killings and in multiple other crimes. Roger Dale Stafford was convicted of the murders of Richard, Melvin, and Linda Lorenz and later sentenced to death.

Did anyone in the Purcell area at that time remember seeing the Lorenz family’s pickup or the vehicle involved in these events?