Marie Montgomery, a 73-year-old female, died on December 12, 1977, in St. Louis, Missouri, when violence came to her door in what authorities later treated as a robbery turned deadly. In the days leading up to her death, the man who would be blamed for it—Winford LaVern Stokes Jr.—was already moving through the city with a prowler’s nerve, looking for someone vulnerable and a place with something worth taking.
According to later accounts of the case, the intruder forced his way into Montgomery’s apartment while searching for an easy target. Inside, the encounter ended with gunfire: she was shot in the neck and in the right arm. After she was killed, the rooms were disturbed and the place was ransacked, as if the killer kept searching even after the life had drained from the scene. A wristwatch was taken, a small object with an outsized role—because it was the kind of thing that could travel, be traded, and leave a trail. Montgomery was not discovered immediately; she was found later by her niece, who came to check on her after Montgomery missed her Sunday church services, a quiet absence that became an alarm.
Investigators and prosecutors eventually focused on Stokes as the suspect, tying the killing to a broader string of crimes around that period. In the weeks after Montgomery’s death, he was arrested on January 15, 1978, on charges of armed robbery and armed criminal action, and was sent for a pre-trial mental evaluation at the Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center—yet even confinement didn’t hold him for long. The same day, he escaped from the facility with authorities close behind, foreshadowing the pattern of flight that would keep following his name through court records and news reports. Months later, in June 1978, he was indicted for the murders of Montgomery and another victim, and he was held in a secure medical setting while awaiting trial on the homicide charges.
The case did not move in a straight line. While awaiting prosecution, Stokes later escaped again—this time with other inmates—after overpowering guards, stealing weapons and clothing, and running for the open city. The chase ended with federal agents: he and the others were arrested in Chicago on December 11, 1978, bringing him back into custody as the courts closed in.
Ultimately, Montgomery’s death produced a clear legal outcome. On September 10, 1979, in St. Louis Circuit Court, Stokes pleaded guilty to second-degree murder among multiple felony pleas connected to his broader crime spree, and he received sentences totaling fifty years, ordered to run concurrently. Contemporary reporting and later court summaries describe that plea and sentence as the resolution of the Montgomery killing—an admission in court that the fatal shooting was his crime, followed by decades of prison time imposed for it.
