Do you know who murdered John? John Stewart Behre, a male victim known by the nickname “Scarecrow,” was found dead on July 11, 1995, along a bicycle trail in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That summer day, he was last seen around 2:00 p.m., walking toward the same stretch of trail where his body would later be discovered. The path ran north of the 300 block of North Noglas/Nogales Avenue, an ordinary recreational strip that, by evening, had become the center of a homicide investigation.
Sometime after he was seen heading in that direction, Behre was attacked and stabbed. When he was found on the bicycle trail, his injuries were severe enough that responding authorities could only confirm that he had died from the stab wounds he had received. The scene offered few immediate answers. There were no publicly documented signs of a struggle that could clarify how the confrontation began, no widely reported witness accounts describing a fight or argument on the trail, and no clear indication of why someone had targeted him there. The violence that ended his life appeared sudden and deliberate, but its origins remained obscured.
Known in some circles as “John Scarecrow,” Behre's killing unsettled those who learned of it. The idea that a man could be stabbed to death on a public trail in broad daylight or early evening raised fears in the community and left family, friends, and strangers alike with the same question: why him, and why there. Investigators opened a homicide case and began searching for leads, looking for anyone who might have seen him on the trail, interacted with him that day, or noticed suspicious activity near North Noglas Avenue around the time he was last seen alive.
Despite those efforts, the case did not move toward resolution. Publicly available summaries note that no motive has been determined for Behre's killing, and the investigation eventually cooled as leads dried up. The Tulsa Police Department now lists his death as a cold case, and the city's unsolved-crime and homicide databases continue to carry his name, emphasizing that investigators are still seeking information. Case descriptions and cold-case listings make no mention of any arrests or publicly identified suspects, underscoring that, as far as the public record shows, the person or people responsible for stabbing John Stewart Behre to death on that bicycle trail have never been brought to justice.
