The Oklahoma 1976 Cold Case That Took 48 Years to CRACK
We begin with a family getting long-awaited answers decades after their loved one was brutally murdered. This is incredible. The case went cold and the killer was never found. But for the first time ever, Oklahoma City police used DNA from a genealogy site helping them track down the man behind Lila Johnston’s death.
On May 14th, 1976, a neighbor in Oklahoma City walked next door to check on the woman who lived in the duplex on North Robinson Avenue. The front door had been forced open, the wooden frame splintered. A 68-year-old woman lay dead inside, beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled. Detectives bagged the biological evidence from the scene and sent it to the state crime lab.
In 1976, no laboratory in the world could pull a genetic profile from a sample like that. Six months later, the man who had broken through that door was booked into the Oklahoma City jail on a drug charge. Detectives processed him, took his fingerprints, and let him go. They had no idea what they were holding.
By the time the science caught up to him, he had avoided justice for 48 years. This is how they finally identified him. Her name was Lila Johnston. She was 68 years old, living alone in a duplex on the north side of Oklahoma City. Her granddaughter, Leslie Sollinger, said Lila sewed all her school clothes growing up.
She was a few months into retirement when someone broke down her front door. The attack happened sometime on the evening of May 13th or the early morning hours of May 14th. The intruder entered through the door, came inside, and killed Lila in the home where she had lived for years. A neighbor found her body the next day and called the police.
Oklahoma City homicide detectives responded to the address on North Robinson Avenue and began processing the scene. The block was residential, older homes and side-by-side duplexes with small front yards. The people on the street had been there long enough to know each other by name. Lila had been one of them for years.
Detectives collected biological material from the assault and documented the damage to the door, which had been forced inward with enough violence to splinter the wooden frame. They searched the interior of the home, the yard, and the surrounding area for anything the intruder might have left behind. Every room was photographed.
Fingerprints were dusted from the door, the handle, and the surfaces inside. Trace material was collected from the floors and the furniture and sent to the state crime lab. The medical examiner confirmed that the cause of death was strangulation. The injuries to Lila’s body indicated she had been beaten before she was killed.
The material collected from the sexual assault provided the strongest piece of physical evidence from the scene. At the time, there was no way to extract a genetic profile from a forensic sample. No laboratory anywhere in the world had done it. Detectives collected what they could, labeled it, and placed it into storage. The samples sat there alongside the rest of the physical evidence from the scene.
The block produced nothing useful for the investigation. Nobody had seen the attacker enter or leave. The streets had been quiet that night. Neighbors on both sides of the building and across the street were interviewed in the days after the body was found. None of them had heard anything unusual. There was no description of a suspect, no vehicle, no direction of travel.
Whoever broke in had arrived and left without a single witness. Oklahoma City detectives worked the case through the summer and fall of 1976. They canvassed the neighborhood, knocked on every door within range, and interviewed Lila’s former co-workers at the welfare department, her acquaintances, friends, and anyone with a connection to her or to the address.
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Detectives checked whether Lila had reported any disturbances in the weeks before the attack, whether anyone had been seen around the property, whether there had been other break-ins on the block or in the surrounding area. The names of people she knew were run through criminal records. Every call that came into the office was followed up on.
Her family members were contacted and asked whether she had mentioned anything unusual in the days or weeks before her death. Any concern about a person she had encountered, any reason to feel unsafe. None of it produced a viable suspect. [music] The attack appeared to be random, an act of violence with no discernible motive. A stranger had chosen Lila’s address for reasons nobody could determine, and he had left nothing behind except the material from the assault.
Without a witness description, the investigation depended entirely on finding a connection between Lila and whoever had done this. No connection emerged. The man who killed her appeared to have had no relationship to her whatsoever. Six months after the murder, in November of 1976, a 28-year-old man and his wife were booked in Oklahoma City on drug charges.
The arrest appeared in the Daily Oklahoman. It had nothing to do with the Johnston murder. No detective drew a connection. The man was processed and moved through the system without incident. He had been living in Oklahoma the entire time. He was sitting in a booking room at the Oklahoma City jail, fingerprinted and photographed, six months after the murder.
The detectives working the Johnston homicide had no idea he existed. In 1981, the same man was arrested again on an unrelated charge. Again, his name triggered nothing. He passed through the criminal justice system for years without anyone connecting him to the unsolved attack on the north side of town. The case went cold.
It joined a growing list of unsolved murders at the department, cases where the early work had been thorough, but nothing had connected. The physical evidence stayed sealed. The samples from the crime scene sat in containers at Oklahoma City police, preserved but untouchable with the forensic tools available in the late 1970s. New detectives inherited the Johnston investigation periodically over the years.
Each one who picked it up read through the original reports, reviewed what had been collected, and looked for anything the previous investigators might have missed. Each one reached the same wall. The leads had been run, and the neighbors had been interviewed. The physical material was there, but no laboratory in the country could turn it into a name.
Some of the detectives who worked the case early on retired before it was solved. Others transferred to different divisions, or left law enforcement entirely. The investigation outlasted all of them. It outlasted the careers of the officers who first walked into that duplex and photographed the splintered frame. The years turned into decades.
The neighborhood around the north side changed as residents moved in and out. Lila’s generation on the block aged and thinned. The people who had known her retired themselves, moved away, or died. The building changed tenants. The street that had been full of people who recognized each other turned over as families came and went.
Oklahoma City expanded outward, new construction pushing into land that had been empty when Lila was alive. The population grew. The downtown skyline changed. The city in 2004 looked nothing like the city Lila had known. But the evidence from that night was still in storage, sealed and untested, the same way it had been since the week of the murder.
In 2004, 28 years after the attack, a state laboratory analyst processed the physical material from the crime scene and extracted a genetic profile of Lila’s attacker. For the first time, investigators had a complete genetic fingerprint of the man who had killed her. The analyst entered it into CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offender profiles.
If the attacker had been convicted of a qualifying offense and required to give a sample, the system would flag a match. It came back empty. CODIS only contains profiles from people who have been required to submit them, typically as part of a felony conviction after states began mandating collection in the mid to late 1990s.
A drug charge in Oklahoma in 1976 would not have required a DNA sample. [music] The man’s arrests predated those laws by two decades. He could have a criminal record stretching back years and still be completely invisible to every law enforcement database in the country. The system had no way to find someone it had never been told about.
The result ran automatically against new entries for nearly two decades after that. Every time the national database expanded with new offender submissions, the system checked it against them. Every check returned the same empty result. The genetic fingerprint of the man who killed Lila existed in a federal system with no name attached to it.
Lila had worked for the state for most of her adult life processing welfare paperwork year after year. She retired with a pension and a routine she had built one decade at a time. She sewed clothes for her grandchildren, kept her home in order, and tended the small garden in front of her half of the building on North Robinson Avenue.
[music] In 1976, someone took all of that in a single night. By 2004, the evidence from that night had a DNA result attached to it. By 2023, the result still had no name. Leslie Sullinger had been young when her grandmother was killed. She grew up knowing that no one had been caught, that no name had ever been attached to what happened.
And as the years accumulated, the possibility of an answer felt smaller and smaller. I thought it would never be finished, she said. It had been so long. She watched cold cases being solved in other cities on the news. Cases from the 1970s and 1980s cracked open by laboratories that hadn’t existed when the crimes were committed.
Families standing at podiums thanking the detectives who never gave up on their cases. She watched the technology reach other families in other states and wondered whether it would ever reach hers. The phone never rang with anything new. I just couldn’t believe it, she said later. After all these years, to finally have an answer.
But that answer was still years away when Leslie said those words. By the time anyone identified the man who killed Lila, nearly half a century had passed. Gerald Ford had been president when she died. The country had been celebrating its bicentennial that summer. Most of the people who had known Lila when she was alive were gone themselves by then.
Leslie had gone from a young child to a grandmother herself in the time it took to put a name to the profile from that night. In May of 2023, the Oklahoma City Police Department’s Cold Case Unit partnered with DNA Labs International, a private forensic laboratory based in Florida that specializes in investigative genetic genealogy.
The department had been looking for new approaches to its oldest unsolved cases. And DNA Labs International had a track record of identifying suspects in cold murders where traditional methods had failed. The process works differently than a criminal database search. Instead of checking the crime scene profile against records of convicted offenders, a genealogist uploads it to public ancestry databases where millions of ordinary Americans have voluntarily submitted their genetic data through consumer testing services. If a distant
relative of the offender has taken one of those consumer tests, a genealogist can identify the shared segments and begin building a family tree backward from the match. The relative doesn’t need to be close. A second cousin or a third cousin is enough. Allison Martin Krensky, a forensic genealogist at DNA Labs International, took on the Johnston file.
She uploaded the crime scene DNA and began searching for relatives of the unknown man who had attacked Lila 47 years earlier. Distant relatives appeared in the results, people who shared enough genetic material with the crime scene sample to indicate a family connection several generations back. The matches were distant, second and third cousins and further back, but they were enough to start building a tree.
Martin Krensky began tracing the connections outward from those matches. Birth records, marriage certificates, death records, census data. She cross-referenced names and dates and locations across states and generations, looking for where the branches converged. She worked alongside Oklahoma City cold case detectives for more than a year, narrowing the tree one branch at a time.
Some of the relatives identified through the databases cooperated directly with investigators. They confirmed family connections, provided additional information about their family history, and helped fill gaps that public records alone could not cover. The opt-in nature of the ancestry databases meant these relatives had already agreed to make their data available for law enforcement searches when they submitted their samples.
Without that cooperation from people who had no connection to the crime and had never heard of Lila Johnston, the identification would not have been possible. After more than 12 months of work, the family tree narrowed to a single branch. One man, born in 1948, a resident of Oklahoma, 28 years old in May of 1976, the month and year someone came through the front door of a duplex on North Robinson Avenue. His name was Charles O.
Droke. Droke had a criminal record in Oklahoma, but none of it had ever been connected to the Johnston murder. He was the 28-year-old man who had been booked on drug charges that November, 6 months after the murder, and arrested again in 1981 on a separate offense. He had moved through the criminal justice system on minor charges across the late 1970s and 1980s, arrested and processed and released each time without consequence.
His name did not appear anywhere in the investigative records. No investigator had ever looked at him as a person of interest. By the time investigators identified him in 2024, he had been dead for 35 years. In January of 1989, nearly 13 years after Lila’s death, Charles Droke was shot in the head by his younger brother Edwin.
Edwin L. Droke was born in 1951. He was 3 years younger than Charles and had recently been released from a prison sentence of his own. The Droke family had a long history with the law, and the relationship between the brothers had been violent for years. Edwin told authorities he had acted in self-defense that Charles posed a direct and immediate danger to him and his family, and the shooting was necessary to protect them.
An Oklahoma jury rejected the self-defense claim after a trial that lasted several days. Edwin was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. Edwin maintained throughout the trial that Charles had threatened him and his family repeatedly, and that the shooting was the only way to stop him. The jury heard the testimony and returned a guilty verdict.
The judge imposed the death sentence. Edwin was taken back to his cell at the county jail to await transfer to the state penitentiary in McAlester, where Oklahoma houses its death row. He never made the trip. Two days after the jury handed down the sentence, Edwin killed himself in the jail. He was 38 years old.
He left behind no explanation. Both brothers were dead by mid-1989. The older brother had killed a 68-year-old woman in her home more than a decade earlier and walked away from it. The younger had killed him and then himself. Neither would ever face a courtroom for what happened to Lela Johnston. When Charles died in 1989, his death generated its own set of forensic samples.
They were collected during the investigation and cataloged under a separate number. His genetic material existed in the system filed under an investigation in which he was the victim. Nobody had a reason to cross-reference it with anything else. For 35 years, the samples from his death and the samples from Lela Johnston’s death sat in the same police department filed under separate numbers connected to separate investigations that had nothing to do with each other.
There was nothing linking a 1976 attack on a retired state employee to a 1989 shooting between brothers. The two investigations existed in the same building and never touched until Martin Krensky’s family tree pointed to his name. Detectives pulled the forensic material from Lela Johnston’s crime scene and compared it to samples from Charles Droke’s 1989 murder.
The evidence from his death proved he was responsible for hers. On December 6th, 2024, the Oklahoma City Police Department held a press conference at its headquarters and announced that the Johnston homicide had been solved. Charles O. Droke was identified as the attacker. He was 28 at the time. Lela was 68.
He had no known connection to her, no relationship, no shared history. He came through her front door, killed her, and left. Detectives could find no evidence that he had ever met her or had any reason to be at her address. It was the first homicide Oklahoma City police had ever solved using forensic investigative genealogy.
The department had been working with DNA Labs International since the spring of 2023 to identify suspects in cold cases through ancestry databases and the Johnston case was the first to produce a confirmed result. 48 years had passed since the night on North Robinson Avenue. The tools to identify the attacker had gone from non-existent to inadequate to finally sufficient over the course of those decades and by the time they worked, the man responsible had been in the ground for more than three decades.
His own brother had put him there in a separate act of violence that had nothing to do with what he did to Lila. Edwin Droke never knew what his brother had done. He shot Charles in January of 1989, claimed self-defense, and was sentenced to die for it. He took his own life two days after the verdict.
Nobody in that courtroom had any reason to look at Charles as anything other than a man who was shot by his brother. The connection between the two killings, between a strangling on the north side of Oklahoma City and a shooting between brothers, took another 35 years to establish. Leslie Sullinger was alive to hear the announcement.
She had carried the open question since 1976. “It is very important that this is solved,” she said. “I feel an inner peace now.” She had been a child when her grandmother was killed. By the time police gave her a name, she was a grandmother herself. The wait had lasted 48 years. A forced door on North Robinson Avenue, biological evidence collected in 1976, the man who came through that door was dead before anyone knew his name.
It took 48 years to find him. If this case stayed with you, go check out the other solved cases in the playlist.
