Edward Jefferson Large was a 40-year-old white male from rural Choctaw County, Oklahoma, whose life ended violently on December 14, 1987. He had been born on December 9, 1947, and by the time of his death he was rooted in the small communities of southeastern Oklahoma, a region of scattered towns, back roads, and farms where people generally knew each other and where sudden, unexplained violence cut deeply into the fabric of daily life. His body was found in Choctaw County and his death was treated from the outset as a homicide, a “death by force” that marked a brutal and deliberate taking of his life. After the authorities completed their initial work, he was laid to rest in Yarnaby Cemetery across the county line in Bryan County, underscoring how tightly interwoven the neighboring communities were.
In the years that followed, investigators and prosecutors came to view Large’s killing not as an isolated act, but as one episode in the wider trail of violence left behind by Michael Dale St. Clair, an itinerant criminal whose crimes eventually spanned several states. St. Clair, born in 1957, had already drawn the attention of Oklahoma law enforcement for killings within his own extended circle. In July 1991 he was convicted in Murray County, Oklahoma, of murdering his uncle, Ronnie St. Clair, and a man named William Henry Kelsey Jr., receiving life sentences without the possibility of parole. Later that year, while awaiting further proceedings, he escaped from a jail in Bryan County with fellow inmate Dennis Reese, and the pair embarked on a multi-state crime spree that included kidnappings, carjackings, and additional murders, among them the killing of Denver paramedic Timothy Keeling in New Mexico and Kentucky resident Frank Brady, whose truck they had commandeered.
St. Clair’s eventual capture and prosecution in multiple jurisdictions forced courts to unravel the full scope of his conduct. In Kentucky he was convicted of Brady’s murder; appellate records from that case later described St. Clair as a man who already had a record of capital offenses and would go on to accumulate even more. Those same records note that by 1994 he had also been convicted in Oklahoma for the murders of Mary Louise Smith and Edward Jefferson Large in Choctaw County, confirming that prosecutors had formally tied Large’s death to the emerging picture of St. Clair as a serial killer.
For Choctaw County, the most significant step in securing justice for Large came in January 1994, when St. Clair stood trial there on two counts of first-degree murder arising from the deaths of Large and Smith. A local jury found him guilty on both counts, and the court imposed two life sentences without the possibility of parole, to be added to the already heavy slate of murder convictions he had accumulated elsewhere. With that verdict, the state identified him not just as a drifter who had passed through on a broader rampage, but as the man legally responsible for Edward Jefferson Large’s killing in 1987.
Today, what can be said with certainty is that Large’s death is no longer officially unsolved, and no other suspects have been publicly named. His case has become one thread in the larger narrative of Michael Dale St. Clair’s crimes, cited in legal records and crime histories as one of several murders that defined St. Clair’s violent path through Oklahoma and beyond. Even so, the bare facts of dates, counties, and sentences only hint at the human cost behind them: a man killed in midlife, a grave in a small Oklahoma cemetery, and a family and community left to live with the knowledge that his life was taken by someone whose cruelty reached far beyond their corner of the state.
