Do you know who murdered Eddie? Eddie Percy Chatman was a man living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, whose life was abruptly taken on January 23, 1981. That day, he was in a parked vehicle with his brother outside 643 East 54th Street North, a residential stretch in Tulsa where nothing in the official record suggests trouble was expected. He sat behind the wheel in the driver's seat, his brother beside him, when a brief, ordinary pause in front of the address turned into the final moments of his life.
According to the case summaries that now exist, another vehicle pulled up alongside the car where Eddie and his brother were sitting. From that passing or paused vehicle, at least one occupant opened fire. A single shot is described in the public record: it struck Eddie as he sat in the driver's seat, still in front of 643 East 54th Street North. The attack was sudden and one-sided; there is no mention in the available accounts of any exchange of words, any argument, or any warning. Emergency help could not save him. Every official description notes the same stark outcome: Eddie died at the scene.
In the aftermath, the shooter's vehicle left behind a scene defined by silence and shock. Eddie's brother remained in the victim's car, the only person publicly known to have been with him at the time of the shooting. The basic outline of what happened has been repeated in municipal and nonprofit records for years: a man sitting in his car with his brother, a vehicle pulling up alongside, a shot fired from that vehicle, and a death declared on the spot. The language hardly changes from source to source, underscoring how little else about that moment has been shared with the public.
What followed has been decades of unanswered questions. Eddie Chatman's case appears on the Tulsa Police Department's roster of cold cases from the 1980s and in the city's online unsolved-crimes database, each entry brief but clear that the homicide remains unresolved. Nonprofit efforts such as Oklahoma Cold Cases and community-driven sites like Housecreep and CrimeSolversCentral repeat the same skeletal narrative and then pivot to appeals for information, inviting anyone who knows more about the night of January 23, 1981, to contact the Tulsa Police Department's Cold Case Unit.
Across these records, there is a striking absence of detail about the people responsible. No suspect names, descriptions, or even a characterization of the suspect vehicle are included in the public summaries. There is likewise no indication in these sources that anyone has ever been arrested, charged, or publicly identified in connection with the shooting that killed Eddie Chatman; instead, all of the entries frame the case as an open, unsolved homicide still in need of answers. Today, more than forty years later, his story in the public record is reduced to a handful of lines about a parked car, a passing vehicle, a single shot, and a family left without justice, waiting for someone to come forward with the piece of information that has been missing since that day in 1981.
