On August 13, 1996, Leta Simmons Kagen, a 37-year-old white female from Golden Valley in rural Mohave County, Arizona, was killed in her trailer home along with her 15-year-old son, Robert Delahunt, and her partner, 50-year-old Roland Wear. She lived in a modest mobile home in a remote desert area outside Kingman, where she was known for taking in boarders and people who needed a place to stay. Public records list her birth as June 27, 1959, and note that the three victims were murdered on August 13, with their bodies discovered on August 15, 1996, at the Golden Valley residence where they all lived.
Earlier that year, in April 1996, Leta met 19-year-old drifter Robert Allen “Bobby” Poyson, who was homeless at the time. She invited him to stay with her family at the trailer, and he became part of the small household that included Robert and Wear. In August 1996, 48-year-old Frank Winfield Anderson and his 14-year-old girlfriend, Kimberly Lane, arrived in the area while hitchhiking. An acquaintance who knew the Kagens took Anderson and Lane to the Golden Valley trailer because the family was known to take in boarders, and Leta again extended her hospitality and allowed them to stay. According to later court findings, Anderson boasted of supposed organized-crime connections in Chicago and, together with Poyson and Lane, helped form a plan to kill their hosts, steal Wear’s pickup truck, and drive it to Chicago to start a new life.
On the night of August 13, 1996, the conspiracy was carried out. Lane lured Robert Delahunt to a small travel trailer on the property under the pretense of a sexual encounter, where Anderson and Poyson ambushed him and killed him as part of the planned takeover of the home. After several hours, Anderson and Poyson moved to the main trailer, where Leta and Wear were asleep. Before the attack they had taken preparatory steps such as disabling the household’s phone line and checking their weapons, underscoring the premeditated nature of the crime. Inside the cramped bedroom, Poyson used a rifle to shoot Leta in the head at close range while she lay in bed, killing her during the robbery-motivated assault; Wear was also shot and then beaten when he tried to resist. The killings were later characterized in court as a planned, deliberate sequence of murders committed to obtain Wear’s truck and other property.
After the murders, Anderson, Poyson, and Lane gathered belongings, took Wear’s pickup truck, and fled the remote Golden Valley area, driving east along Interstate 40. The bodies of Leta, her son, and Wear were discovered on August 15, 1996, at the residence, prompting a multi-state manhunt. Investigators traced the stolen truck and movements of the suspects as they traveled across the country. According to later summaries of the case, Anderson was arrested about five days after the killings in southern Illinois, while Poyson and Lane were located and arrested later at a homeless shelter in Evanston, Illinois. All three were returned to Arizona to face charges in Mohave County for the triple homicide and related offenses.
In Arizona, Robert Allen Poyson was charged with three counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, and armed robbery arising from the deaths of Leta, her son, and Wear. He was convicted in 1998, with the trial court finding multiple aggravating factors, including that the murders were committed for pecuniary gain, involved multiple victims, and were carried out in a particularly cruel manner. He was sentenced to death on November 20, 1998. Over the years, Poyson’s death sentence became the subject of extensive appellate litigation. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his death sentence, ruling that Arizona courts had not properly considered mitigating evidence related to his abusive childhood and mental health, although his convictions for the murders themselves were left intact. On remand, however, the Arizona Supreme Court conducted a new independent review of the aggravating and mitigating factors and in 2020 again concluded that the mitigation was not substantial enough to warrant leniency, ultimately re-affirming Poyson’s death sentences.
Frank Winfield Anderson was tried separately for his role in the Golden Valley killings. His case went through an unusual procedural history: an initial conviction and sentence were overturned due to issues with jury selection, leading to a retrial. In the subsequent proceedings, Anderson was again convicted of three counts of first-degree murder, conspiracy, and armed robbery and was sentenced to death for each of the three murders, as well as to additional terms for the non-capital offenses; he remains on Arizona’s death row. Kimberly Lane, who was a juvenile at the time of the crimes, was treated differently by the courts. She ultimately pleaded guilty under a separate agreement, received a fixed prison term reportedly totaling about eight years, and has since been released from custody.
Taken together, the available public record shows that the killings of Leta Simmons Kagen and her family members were not a random or unsolved event, but a carefully planned triple homicide carried out by people she had allowed into her home out of kindness. All identified perpetrators—Poyson, Anderson, and Lane—were arrested, prosecuted, and convicted, with the two adult male perpetrators receiving death sentences that have been the subject of continued appellate review, and the juvenile accomplice serving a substantial but finite prison term before release.
