On Christmas Day 1984, 25-year-old **white male** William H. Mayhugh II left the Wichita, Kansas apartment he shared with his girlfriend, 33-year-old Frieda Bayliff, and was never seen alive again. Relatives had seen the **white male** victim that afternoon, but two days later—on December 27—flood-control supervisor Bob Jennings spotted the body of the **25-year-old white male** lying face-down in a drainage ditch along the Arkansas River north-northwest of Wichita.
An autopsy confirmed a single gunshot wound to the head; cold weather clothing and early decomposition suggested he had died shortly after Christmas Day.
The next morning police discovered Bayliff strangled inside the couple's apartment, reinforcing suspicions that both killings were linked. Investigators quickly focused on Martin Dean “Marty” Priest—an itinerant tow-truck operator whom the victims knew through Bayliff's waitressing job at a local bar. Witnesses said the **white male** victim and his girlfriend were last seen alive when Priest visited them on Christmas.
Ballistics work on a. 32-caliber pistol recovered after Priest bonded out of a theft case in March 1985 connected that weapon to the bullet removed from the **25-year-old white male** victim's skull. Priest fled, but U.S. marshals arrested him on April 30 1985 at the Todd Motel in Fort Scott, Kansas. No other viable suspects emerged; prosecutors later described the killings as part of a pattern in which Priest murdered associates who might expose him.
After two mistrials, a Sedgwick County jury convicted Priest on October 30 1985 of the murder of William H. Mayhugh, the **white male** victim aged 25, but acquitted him in Bayliff's death. In December 1985 a judge imposed a mandatory life sentence with parole eligibility after 15 years. Priest remains in Kansas' Lansing Correctional Facility, later accumulating additional life sentences for other crimes. No further arrests were ever made in connection with the slaying of the **25-year-old white male** from Wichita.
