Do you know who murdered Tommie? On a cold winter week in 1980, 35-year-old Tommie Lee Jones, a female resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma, vanished from her usual routines and slipped into a silence that worried those around her. Born in July 1944 in Oakland, California, she had built a life hundreds of miles away in a modest home at 717 North Yukon Avenue on Tulsa’s west side, where she was living when everything changed.
Official records list her date of death as February 7, 1980, and the following day, February 8, she was found lifeless at her home, the discovery marking the beginning of a mystery that has endured for decades.
In the days leading up to the discovery, Tommie was last seen on the night of February 6, at around 11:30 p.m. Friends or associates saw her alive then, and there is no public indication that anything seemed amiss at that moment. Sometime after that late-night sighting, someone came to her house. When authorities later arrived at 717 North Yukon, they found clear signs that whoever entered had not been invited. A door or entry point had been forced, indicating a break-in rather than a casual visit, but the home itself did not look like a typical burglary scene. Drawers were not ransacked for valuables in the usual way, and investigators noted that the place did not appear to have been looted, suggesting that theft had not been the primary motive.
The most chilling detail was where Tommie’s body was ultimately found. Instead of being left in a room or near the entryway, she had been placed in the trunk of a vehicle parked inside the garage of her home. It appears that the attack began inside the house itself: investigators found bloodstains within the residence, and the condition of the scene suggested there had been a struggle before she died. At some point, after she was shot, her killer or killers took the time and the risk to move her, placing her body into the car trunk and leaving it there, hidden but still on the property. She had been killed by a gunshot, but the exact sequence of blows, movement, and decisions remains known only to the person responsible.
The fact that there were clear indicators of forced entry but no obvious theft complicated the investigation from the start. It raised the possibility that Tommie may have been specifically targeted by someone who was focused on her rather than on her belongings. Yet there is no publicly available indication that police were able to identify a clear suspect or reconstruct a definitive motive. The scene inside the house — blood, signs of struggle, but no obvious ransacking — offers a disturbing glimpse of violence contained within familiar walls, ending with the calculated concealment of her body in the garage.
Despite the brutality of the crime, Tommie’s case quickly joined a growing list of unsolved homicides in Tulsa. Her name appears on official cold case listings and dedicated unsolved-crime databases, described in brief, stark summaries that mention only her address, the date of discovery, the forced entry, and the fatal gunshot wound. These summaries are often accompanied by appeals for information: anyone who knows what happened that night is urged to contact the Tulsa Police Department’s Cold Case Unit. There is no record of any arrest in connection with her murder, and no suspect has been publicly identified. More than four decades later, the file remains open, her case standing as one of many in which the story stops abruptly at the moment of violence, with the final chapter — the identification and capture of her killer — still unwritten.
