On the evening of November 11, 1990, 14-year-old white male Mark Anthony McLaughlin left his home in Van Buren, Arkansas, to walk to a nearby convenience store and never returned. His mother reported him missing shortly after midnight. At first light the next day, a fisherman discovered the body of the 14-year-old male in a pond on private land near Pocola, Oklahoma, just across the Arkansas–Oklahoma line in LeFlore County.
Authorities determined the 14-year-old male had been shot in the back, a detail later confirmed in court when the killer described firing a small-caliber pistol as he marched the boy toward the water.
Detectives soon recognized the pond—known locally as Leard Pond—for its grim history. In February 1987, the body of 15-year-old William Von Eric Domer had been pulled from the same water. In both crimes, the teens had been beaten and shot before being dumped in the pond, a signature that pointed to a single predator who hunted on the Arkansas side, then crossed the border to finish his violence in rural Oklahoma. The parallel facts in the Domer case, together with the location where the 14-year-old male Mark Anthony McLaughlin was found on November 12, 1990, tightened the investigative focus.
The break came less than a month after the 14-year-old white male vanished. On December 9, 1990, a recent high-school graduate named Ross Allen Ferguson survived an abduction after his attacker handcuffed and shackled him, beat him with a rod, and began marching him toward another body of water. Ferguson escaped and led police to a former Fort Smith truck driver, 50-year-old George Kent Wallace, who had been trolling the border communities by impersonating a police officer. Under arrest, Wallace confessed in chilling detail: he had stopped the 14-year-old male Mark Anthony McLaughlin in Van Buren by pretending to arrest him, bound him with handcuffs and leg irons, drove him to Leard Pond, beat him with a wooden plunger handle, then shot him in the back before pushing the body into the water. The same method, he admitted, had claimed the life of Domer years earlier.
In LeFlore County court, Wallace waived protections and pled guilty on March 12, 1991, to murdering the 14-year-old male Mark Anthony McLaughlin and 15-year-old Domer. A judge found aggravating circumstances and sentenced him to death the following month. Wallace declined to present mitigation and said he preferred execution to life in prison. On August 10, 2000, the state of Oklahoma executed Wallace by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. In the years between his arrest and execution, investigators also questioned him about the unsolved killing of 12-year-old Alonzo Don Cade of Fort Smith, but no charges were filed in that case. For the murder of the 14-year-old white male Mark Anthony McLaughlin of Van Buren, Arkansas, the suspect was not only arrested and convicted—he was executed, and the record of his own words fixes the sequence of abduction, beating, and shooting that ended a boy's walk to the corner store.
