Do you know who murdered Michael? On August 22, 1980, Michael A. Huntley, a male resident of Tulsa, was found dead in the doorway of his apartment at 215 West Fairview Avenue, a modest address in the city’s north side. What should have been an ordinary day ended at the threshold of his own home, his body discovered in the entrance of the apartment he was supposed to be safe in. Official records describe him simply as the victim, a man whose final moments were spent at that thin line between inside and outside, private space
and the world beyond.
The scene itself was stark and brutal. Huntley had been killed by a gunshot wound, and he was found lying just inside the doorway, his body collapsed at the entrance to the apartment on West Fairview. There is no public mention of a struggle inside the home, a chase through the building, or a chaotic crime scene; instead, everything recorded focuses on that small area at the door. The fact that he was discovered right there suggests a sudden, close encounter – the kind of confrontation that happens in a matter of seconds, perhaps as he opened the door to someone he knew or to a stranger who never intended to let him walk away.
In the years that followed, Huntley’s death was formally marked as a homicide and placed among Tulsa’s unsolved cases. A brief entry in the Tulsa Police Department’s cold case files notes only that he was found dead inside the doorway of his apartment from a gunshot wound, with no further public detail about motive, witnesses, or physical evidence released. The address itself later appeared in databases of stigmatized properties, where it is recorded that the case remains unsolved and that no one has been identified as the person who pulled the trigger.
Decades later, the file is still open. There are no public records of any arrests tied to Michael Huntley’s killing, and no named suspects have been released by authorities. Instead, his case is listed among other unsolved homicides from the 1980s, a short entry with a date, a location, and the bare statement that he was shot to death in his own doorway. The Tulsa Police Department continues to ask anyone with information about that day in August 1980 to contact their Cold Case Unit, hoping that someone, somewhere, still remembers what happened at the door of 215 West Fairview and is willing to finally speak.
