In the spring of 1974, three-year-old Craig Neal was a little boy playing in his Tulsa, Oklahoma, neighborhood. On May 29, his life was cut tragically short when he was abducted by a predator who should have been securely institutionalized. The toddler’s disappearance sparked a frantic search that ended in heartbreak and revealed a devastating failure of the justice and mental health systems.
Craig, a Male child, was taken by Wayne Henry Garrison, then a teenager.
Garrison was supposed to be receiving psychiatric treatment at the Griffin Memorial Hospital in Norman. He had been sent there after killing his four-year-old cousin, Dana Dyane Dean, on Halloween in 1972. In that case, the 13-year-old Garrison had dragged the little girl into a crawlspace and asphyxiated her. A juvenile murder petition was reduced, and he was committed for treatment instead of being incarcerated.
In a decision that would have fatal consequences, Garrison was granted a 10-day leave from the psychiatric hospital in May 1974. During this leave, he returned to Tulsa and crossed paths with Craig Neal. Garrison abducted the toddler and suffocated him, ending his life with the same method he had used on his young cousin. He then hid the little boy's body under an abandoned house.
For five days, family and community members searched anxiously for the missing child. The search came to a devastating end on June 3, 1974, when Craig’s remains were discovered. Suspicion quickly fell on Garrison, who lived across the street from Craig's family. An anonymous tip to the police pointed them toward the teenager with a known history of violence against children.
Garrison was arrested and charged with murder. In a turn of events that defied justice for Craig and his family, he was allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree manslaughter. For the murder of a three-year-old boy, Wayne Garrison was sentenced to just four years in prison. He was released on March 9, 1977, at the age of 17, having served less than two years in the Oklahoma State Reformatory. He went back to high school and graduated.
The leniency shown to Garrison allowed him to kill again. In 1989, he abducted, murdered, and dismembered 13-year-old Justin Wiles in Tulsa. After a lengthy investigation, Garrison was finally arrested for this crime in 1999. In 2001, a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder for Justin's death and sentenced him to death. This sentence was later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole in 2007, a deal Garrison accepted to avoid a resentencing trial.
Wayne Henry Garrison, a serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least three children, remains imprisoned for life. His other convictions include insurance fraud and giving prescription painkillers to a minor. For the family of Craig Neal, the initial outcome of his case was a profound injustice, a brief sentence for a man who had already killed and would do so again. The system that was meant to protect the public by institutionalizing a dangerous individual had instead released him, leaving a path of devastation that stole the life of a bright little boy.
