Do you know who murdered Allen? In the pre-dawn dark of January 18, 1985, Allen Wayne Bennett, a 29-year-old man from Tulsa, was discovered lying in the parking lot of Guy’s Foods at 6960 East 38th Street. It was about 5:51 a.m., the quiet hour when night-shift workers and early commuters briefly share the streets, when a call brought officers to the lot behind the store. Bennett had been shot and left out on the cold pavement, the scene already bearing signs that whatever had happened there had been both sudden and brutal.
Investigators soon realized that the gunfire was only part of what he had endured. Bennett had been shot twice in the stomach with a 9 mm weapon, and then a vehicle had passed over his body, dragging him and leaving telltale injuries that suggested he had been run down as his killer or killers fled. The car that struck him never remained at the scene, and by the time officers cordoned off the area, the only things left were shell casings, tire tracks, and the lifeless body of a young man whose last minutes appeared to have been chaotic and violent.
Clues around Bennett’s body hinted at a possible motive but offered no certainty. His wallet and identification were missing when he was found, raising the specter of robbery intertwined with the shooting and hit-and-run. The empty space where those items should have been suggested someone had taken the time, amid the violence, to go through his belongings before disappearing into the early morning. Detectives were left to reconstruct those final moments from physical evidence alone, as there were no immediate witnesses stepping forward to say they had seen the confrontation that ended in gunfire and screeching tires.
For a brief period, it seemed as though the case might be on the verge of resolution. On February 14, less than a month after the killing, police impounded a 1971 Lincoln Continental that had been traded in the same day Bennett died by a man named Daniel Joseph Marino, who had purchased a new truck. Inside and on the vehicle, investigators found trace evidence; fibers recovered from the Lincoln were reported to match the clothing Bennett had been wearing when he was murdered. The car, quietly exchanged at a dealership while the investigation was still in its earliest days, became a central piece of the puzzle.
As detectives tried to close in, Marino went off the radar for months, remaining at large while officers and prosecutors worked to build a case around the vehicle and the forensic findings. Eventually he was located and charged in connection with Bennett’s murder, and for a time his name stood in the case file where “unknown suspect” once had. In court, however, the story began to unravel. A judge later ruled that the prosecution’s case was built entirely on circumstantial evidence and that what they had was not strong enough to move forward. The charges against Marino were dismissed, leaving the investigation once again without an accused killer.
During preliminary testimony, another possible thread emerged: the suggestion that Bennett’s death might have grown out of a drug deal gone wrong. That hint of a hidden world—transactions, grudges, or debts never recorded in official ledgers—offered a context but no clarity. If such a deal had taken place, those involved did not step into the open to explain how it had ended in gunfire in a grocery store lot. The idea remained part of the narrative surrounding the case, a potential backdrop that failed to yield the kind of concrete, admissible proof needed to secure a conviction.
Years turned into decades, and the parking lot where Bennett died became just another address in Tulsa, its ordinary traffic belying the unresolved violence in its history. The case moved from a fresh homicide investigation to a cold file, preserved by the Tulsa Police Department and revisited periodically in the hope that new information, a new witness, or advances in forensic science might change its trajectory. Official summaries still describe the same core facts: a young man shot and then struck by a fleeing vehicle, his killers never identified, his last walk across a dimly lit lot ending in a mystery that has outlived him by generations.
