In the winter of 1975, a palpable sense of fear gripped the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, following the disappearance and brutal murder of a vibrant young woman. Geraldine Cornwell Martin, a 28-year-old white female, was an art student at Tulsa Junior College with a passion for music and a magnetic personality that drew people to her. On the cold evening of February 5th, she left her art class with plans to meet a friend for dinner, a rendezvous she would never make.
The initial discovery of
her Volkswagen near the college sparked concern, which escalated when her purse, containing her keys and glasses, was found discarded by the Broken Arrow Expressway. A chilling development emerged when a man attempted to use her blood-stained credit card, confirming the police's fears of foul play. The search for Geraldine came to a heartbreaking end nineteen days after she vanished. Construction workers renovating a vacant apartment building on North Osage Drive discovered her nude body hidden in a second-floor closet. The clothes she had been wearing on the night of her disappearance were found nearby.
An autopsy revealed the horrific details of her final moments. Geraldine had been raped and strangled with a cord, the force of which had compressed her neck to nearly half its normal size. She had also suffered blunt force trauma to her face, and her body had been mutilated postmortem, leading investigators to suspect they were dealing with a serial killer. For nearly three decades, Geraldine's case remained cold, a haunting mystery for Tulsa law enforcement and a source of unending grief for her family.
A breakthrough finally came in 2002 with the arrest of a long-haul truck driver named Clyde Carl Wilkerson in Little Rock, Arkansas. Advances in DNA technology, unavailable at the time of the murder, linked Wilkerson to the crime. In 2004, faced with the irrefutable scientific evidence, Wilkerson pleaded guilty to the abduction and murder of Geraldine Martin. Now an old man, he was sentenced to life in prison, finally bringing a measure of justice for the vivacious young woman whose life was so violently cut short. Police believe Wilkerson may have been responsible for numerous other unsolved murders across the country. He died in prison in 2016.
