JoAnna Laverne Gish King, a 27-year-old female, was killed on August 15, 1987, inside the couple's home in the 6600 block of Dinner Creek Drive in northwest Harris County, Texas. The shooting also claimed the life of her husband, Homer “Butch” King. In the immediate aftermath, investigators documented a close-range execution-style attack that left both victims shot in the back of the head, a detail that undercut any notion of a chaotic exchange and instead suggested a deliberate, controlled
killing carried out at intimate distance.
For years the case drifted as an unsolved double homicide. It returned to life when Harris County Sheriff's Department cold case detectives Roger Wedgeworth and Harry Fikaris re-opened the file and began re-interviewing people connected to the original investigation. Their renewed canvass surfaced a new witness—an 18-year-old who, as a 6-year-old child in 1987, said she accompanied her mother and a man named Gerald McKnight to the Kings' house and waited outside while the drug-related shooting took place. According to prosecutors, the mother had been interviewed in 1987 but had withheld the full story out of fear of McKnight.
Detectives traced McKnight to a federal prison in West Virginia, where he was serving a 22-year sentence on drug charges. Confronted with the revived evidence, McKnight told authorities he had gone to the Kings' home for drugs and shot the couple in self-defense. That claim did not align with the physical evidence indicating both victims were shot in the back of the head at close range.
Indicted in March 2000 and originally facing capital charges, McKnight pleaded guilty to two counts of murder. On May 2, 2000, a state district court judge imposed two consecutive life sentences—“stacked” terms that spared him the death penalty but ensured a lengthy confinement. With approximately 13 years remaining on his federal sentence at the time, McKnight would first finish that term before being transferred to Texas to begin serving his state time, and he would not be eligible for parole until completing 30 years on the murder convictions.
JoAnna was laid to rest at Magnolia Cemetery in Onalaska, Polk County, a quiet resting place that stands in stark contrast to the violence that ended her life. The resolution of the case—rooted in a child's long-silent memory, a mother's fear finally put into words, and the cold case squad's persistence—transformed a file that once seemed fated to gather dust into a conviction that answers, at least in part, the who and the how that shadowed her name for more than a decade.
