In the quiet of their Osage County home near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a respected Osage couple met a tragic and violent end. Gloria Maude Cheshewalla, a 60-year-old tribal historian and craftswoman, and her husband, Joseph “Buck” Cheshewalla, were the victims of a robbery that escalated to a brutal double murder. The couple was discovered in their residence, each having been shot twice in the head.
The scene told a grim story of their final moments; she had been blindfolded, and he was found bound with a belt and duct tape.
The investigation into the heinous crime led authorities to two men, Billy Gene Harris and Eugene Mervin Sides. The motive for the crime was determined to be robbery. Information provided by one of the accomplices was pivotal in breaking the case open, leading law enforcement to secure a search warrant for Harris's home. Confronted by an Osage County Deputy Sheriff, Harris was informed that his co-defendant, Sides, had implicated him in the robbery and homicides.
Both Billy Gene Harris and Eugene Mervin Sides were subsequently tried and convicted for the murders of the Cheshewallas. They each received two concurrent life-without-parole sentences for their roles in the crime. Despite numerous appeals over the years, including challenges to the jurisdiction of the federal courts in the case, their convictions have been consistently upheld. Harris, a non-Indian, was ordered to pay over $11,000 in restitution in addition to his life sentences. The legal battles continued long after the initial convictions, but the outcomes remained unchanged, leaving both men to serve their life sentences for the deaths of Maude and Joseph Cheshewalla.
