Do you know who murdered Drew? On November 25, 1985, 33-year-old male Drew Douglas Hale was discovered in his Tulsa home at 7219 S. 66th East Avenue, turning an ordinary Monday afternoon into the start of a mystery that has stretched on for decades. Shortly after 1:20 p.m., Hale was found inside his residence with a gunshot wound, the quiet suburban setting suddenly transformed into an active crime scene as officers and medical responders converged on the address.
When emergency personnel reached him, Hale was still alive, but his injuries were catastrophic. He was rushed from the house to a nearby hospital, clinging to life as detectives began securing the scene he had just been taken from. Despite the effort to save him, he was pronounced dead upon arrival, and what began as a desperate attempt at rescue became a homicide investigation classified as a death by force. The small, otherwise unremarkable home on South 66th East Avenue was left behind under police tape, its rooms now holding the few physical clues that might explain who had come to Hale's door and why.
Detectives quickly focused on the possibility that robbery had been the motive. Official summaries of the case note that robbery “may have been the motive,” suggesting that something about the state of the house, or items missing from it, pointed toward a crime of profit rather than a targeted personal vendetta. Yet, even with that early theory, the investigation did not produce the breakthrough detectives needed. No suspect was ever publicly named, and no arrest has ever been recorded in connection with Hale's killing; contemporary and later case summaries emphasize that there were no conclusive leads or arrests at the time.
As months turned into years, Hale's murder slipped from active investigation into the long list of unsolved homicides in Tulsa. His case is now formally listed as a cold case by the Tulsa Police Department and appears on regional cold case and crime-solving websites, each repeating the same stark core facts: a man found shot in his own home on a Monday afternoon, transported to the hospital, dead on arrival, with robbery suspected but nothing proven and no one held accountable. Appeals for information remain attached to his name, inviting anyone who knows what happened inside 7219 S. 66th East Avenue that day to come forward. The passage of time has not supplied the missing answers, and Drew Douglas Hale's death remains an open wound in the historical record of Tulsa homicides, an unsolved killing still waiting for the single detail or long-buried truth that might finally reveal who pulled the trigger and why.
