In the summer of 1977, a terrifying crime spree unfolded across the American South and West, leaving a trail of stolen cars, shattered families, and senseless death. One of the men caught in this wave of violence was Melvin Short, a 40-year-old male taxi driver from Purcell, Oklahoma. His life was violently cut short on July 1, 1977, by two desperate fugitives whose paths tragically crossed with his.
The men responsible were Earl Van Denton and Paul Ruiz, who had escaped from the
Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester on June 23, 1977. Van Denton was serving a life sentence for a prior murder, while Ruiz was serving life for armed robbery. After breaking out of a work detail, the pair embarked on a two-week rampage of robbery and murder that spanned four states. Investigators believe their spree began with the disappearance and presumed murder of Gerald Tiffee in Boswell, Oklahoma, whose truck they stole. From there, they traveled to Louisiana, where they are believed to have murdered three more men: Jimmy Cockrell, Alton Wilson, and Ray Jones Sr.
Fleeing north, the duo’s stolen car broke down near Magazine, Arkansas. When Town Marshal Marvin Ritchie stopped to help, they kidnapped him. They then used his patrol car to abduct two U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rangers, Opal James and David Small. Ritchie and Small were shot and left for dead in the trunk of the patrol car; Small miraculously survived, but Marshal Ritchie died. The fugitives kept James alive for a time to use him as a guide through the back roads before killing him as well. His body was found on July 1.
It was on that same day, July 1, that the killers, having driven back into Oklahoma, arrived in the town of Purcell. There, they encountered Melvin Short, a local taxi driver going about his work. In need of a new getaway vehicle, Van Denton and Ruiz murdered Short and stole his cab. They drove his taxi all the way to the Pacific Northwest, leaving his body behind. Five days later, on July 6, 1977, Melvin Short's body was discovered in Chickasha, in Grady County.
The nationwide manhunt for the escaped convicts came to an end on July 8, 1977, when FBI agents captured Ruiz and Van Denton in Portland, Oregon. They were found in possession of knives but were apprehended without resistance a short distance from Melvin Short's stolen taxi. Following their capture, the complex legal process of holding them accountable for their multi-state crime spree began.
Ultimately, Ruiz and Van Denton were extradited to Arkansas to stand trial for the murders of Marshal Marvin Ritchie and Ranger Opal James. In April 1978, a jury found them both guilty of two counts of capital murder and sentenced them to death. Despite numerous appeals and a retrial that resulted in the same verdict, the sentences were eventually carried out. Though authorities in Oklahoma sought to extradite the pair to face charges for the murder of Melvin Short, they were never prosecuted for that crime.
On January 8, 1997, nearly two decades after their bloody rampage, Earl Van Denton and Paul Ruiz were executed by lethal injection at the Cummins Unit in Arkansas. Van Denton, 47, and Ruiz, 49, both declined to make a final statement. Their executions brought a final, somber close to a case that had inflicted immeasurable pain on numerous families across the country, including the family of a taxi driver from Purcell who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
