Do you know who murdered Richard? Richard Dalton Rumley, a 55-year-old man living in Tulsa, spent a warm July evening in 1968 at a dinner party high above the city in the Liberty Tower apartments at 1502 South Boulder Avenue. The gathering in apartment 24-E was the kind of casual social event residents of the modern high-rise had come to enjoy—friends sharing food, drinks, and conversation while the lights of downtown flickered beyond the windows and the Arkansas River flowed quietly in the distance.
For Richard, it should have been an ordinary night among acquaintances, the sort of small occasion that fades into memory without consequence. Instead, it became the last night of his life.
At some point during the evening, as the party wound down and Richard prepared to leave, he went to the door of the apartment. When he opened it, he was met not by a hallway of quiet carpet and elevator chimes, but by armed men waiting on the other side. A shot rang out almost immediately, striking him just inside the doorway and dropping him to the floor before the other guests had time to understand what was happening. The entrance to the apartment—once a mundane threshold between private comfort and common corridor—became the point where a robbery and a murder collided in a single, violent moment.
With Richard lying mortally wounded, the intruders surged into the apartment. Accounts preserved in cold case summaries describe multiple suspects—four armed men—forcing their way inside, taking control of the room and its terrified occupants. They were not there by accident; they moved with purpose, binding or otherwise restraining the guests and turning the party into a crime scene. As Richard lay on the floor, the men robbed the apartment and the people inside, stripping away wallets, valuables, and any sense of safety the residents of the building might once have felt. The violence was direct and personal: Richard had been shot in the head, and the others were left to watch as the men ransacked the space that, minutes earlier, had been full of ordinary conversation and clinking glasses.
When the assailants finally fled, the apartment was a wreck of overturned normalcy: a man dying at the threshold, partygoers shaken and bound, the night split into a clear before and after. Responding officers and medics could do nothing to reverse what had happened. Richard succumbed to his gunshot wound, and what had begun as a simple dinner among neighbors became an open homicide file. Later records would place his age at fifty-five and note his burial at Memorial Park Cemetery in Tulsa, where his grave quietly marks the life interrupted in that high-rise apartment.
In the days and months that followed, Tulsa police treated the killing as a robbery-homicide, a home invasion in a prominent downtown building that should have offered security. Investigators knew they were looking for multiple suspects, and cold case summaries consistently refer to several or four armed men who entered the apartment after the door was opened, shot Richard, and then robbed the other occupants. Yet if witnesses were able to provide descriptions, those details have not led to publicly identified suspects, and no one has been named in official materials as the person who pulled the trigger or helped carry out the attack. Despite the brazenness of the crime—armed men storming an occupied apartment in a large residential tower—there are no public records of arrests or charges stemming from the case. The men who rushed that doorway appear to have vanished back into the city, leaving behind only a thin investigative trail and the memories of the people who survived them.
Decades later, the murder of Richard Rumley remains an unsolved cold case. His name still appears on official cold case lists and specialized homicide registries, a reminder that the questions raised in that apartment have never been fully answered. The Tulsa Police Department continues to keep the file open, inviting anyone with information to come forward, while independent cold case projects and online communities retell the story of the dinner party that ended in gunfire and fear. In the shadow of Liberty Tower, traffic moves along the streets below and new residents cycle through its halls, but the memory of that night in 1968 endures in police records and memorial pages, an unresolved act of violence that left a man dead at his own doorway and a city with unfinished business.
