Before I was elected District Attorney, one of my predecessors was an able lawyer named Gene Ritter, now deceased. Prosecutors in those days served only one county, not five as they do now. So, Gene was County Attorney for Carter County. Gene had prosecuted a man I’ll call Bob Jones and sent him to prison…

I was hired once by a young couple who sought a divorce. They had 2 little girls, ages 5 and 3. The couple were quite amicable for parties splitting up. That was a rarity in family law. Wife got custody, father custodian visitation with an obligation to pay child support, which he honored to the…

LOSING A HOMICIDE CASE AND FEELING OKAY WITH THAT. A true story. Ardmore Police got a call about a death by gunfire at a tavern east of town. Police officers arrived and found a man lying dead behind the bar of the tavern. They determined that a man who had leased the bar, a gentleman…

When my brother David Clark was in Korea, on one patrol he found a small, 10-year old Korean boy. The child was an orphan who had lost both parents in the war. He was starving. Dave threw him over his shoulder and after finishing the patrol, carried him back to his pup tent. Carrying the…

When I was CEO of IMTEC Corporation in Ardmore, one of the products we sold to periodontists was demineralized bone. Periodontists used that product to pack openings in their patient’s gums after they scraped bacteria away. But where does the bone come from? One source was Russian corpses. I met a doctor in San Francisco…

One day when my law office was on the 3rd floor of an Ardmore building on W. Main, I had a client named Harvey walk in without an appointment. In my office he displayed to me an IRS income refund check in amount of $1,800 payable to John Doe and Susie Doe, husband and wife.…

A TRUE STORY ABOUT OUR IDIOTIC ALCOHOL LAWS WHEN I WAS DISTRICT ATTORNEY:The state legislature had enacted a goofy law before I became District Attorney that I inherited and that my predecessor had refused to enforce. That idiotic law prohibited nightclubs from stocking liquor. To have a drink of alcohol legally, one had to take…

AN UNUSUAL EXPERIENCE WHEN I WAS DISTRICT ATTORNEY:When I was District Attorney of a 5-county district in Southern Oklahoma, including Carter County, I wanted to learn as much as I could about homicide investigations and in particular, how a pathologist determined the cause of death and the circumstances surrounding same. If we had a murder…

A HORRIFIC CRIME OF MURDER THAT STILL HAUNTS ME BECAUSE I NEVER SOLVED IT: The call came from the Davis, Oklahoma Police Department: “DA, we need you here ASAP. We got a situation we can’t handle. Please hurry, you’ll see two police cars just south of town. ”I drove 90 miles an hour to get…

WWII AND THOSE TRAINS HEADED SOUTH:I was born and raised in an old Frisco Railroad house, which was in reality, a shack. The front door and porch was about 50’ from the railroad tracks. When I was 5-years old, WW11 was in full force, and I spent countless hours near the tracks watching the trains,…