Teresa Ann Smith was a 46-year-old white/Caucasian female from Okemah, Oklahoma, a lifelong resident of the small town where she had been born on March 26, 1972, to Wes Albert Smith and Delois Ann Smith. Family and friends remembered her as deeply loved and rooted in the community, the kind of person whose life was closely intertwined with the rhythms of Okemah’s churches, neighborhoods, and extended family gatherings.
In early January 2019, there were plans for a memorial service at Victory Christian Center in town, arrangements that no one could have imagined would be needed so suddenly when the new year began.
On the evening of January 5, 2019, Teresa went out to a rural home along West Highway 56, just west of Okemah, where her daughter Sabrina lived with her husband, Anthony Roy Spain. Sometime around 7:30 p.m., a 911 call came in from that address, reporting a domestic incident and a shooting. Deputies from the Okfuskee County Sheriff’s Office arrived to find a grim scene inside the residence: Teresa lying in the living room, already dead from shotgun wounds, while Anthony and Sabrina were present at the home. The investigation was quickly turned over to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which treated the case as a homicide, and Spain was detained and taken in for questioning as the night’s events were pieced together.
According to an affidavit later filed in court and described in local news reports, the evening had devolved into a heated domestic argument that escalated into physical confrontation inside the house. Investigators documented that Teresa had been shot twice with a 12-gauge shotgun, once in the torso and once in the head. Spain told authorities that his mother-in-law had come at him with a knife and that he fired in response, a claim recorded in court documents but treated as his version of events rather than an accepted justification. Sabrina, questioned separately, recounted that she tried to step between her husband and her mother during the altercation, then gathered the couple’s four children and fled the house after the shots were fired. Neighbors later described hearing two gunshots that night and initially assuming it was something mundane, such as dealing with animals on the property, only realizing the gravity of what had happened when law enforcement converged on the home and word spread that Teresa had been killed. In a town of only a few thousand people, where everyone knows each other at least by name, the knowledge that the violence had unfolded within a family was particularly haunting.
By the early hours of the following morning, OSBI agents had arrested Spain on an initial complaint of malicious homicide, with officials indicating that a first-degree murder charge was likely. Within days, the Okfuskee County District Attorney’s Office formally filed a charge of first-degree murder, alleging that Spain had shot his wife’s mother with a shotgun during an argument that turned physical inside the home. He was booked into the Okfuskee County Jail and ordered held while the case moved into the courts. At his early appearances, including an arraignment hearing in January 2019, a not-guilty plea was entered on his behalf. The case, listed as State of Oklahoma v. Anthony Spain, passed through multiple preliminary hearing settings, continued more than once as prosecutors and defense counsel completed discovery and prepared for a contested trial. Records describing the incident, including national gun-violence databases, classified the shooting as a domestic-violence situation in which a 34-year-old male family member was arrested at the scene.
As 2019 progressed, the long march toward trial sharpened the focus on what had happened to Teresa that night. In November 2019, shortly before jury selection was to begin, Spain waived his right to a jury trial, electing instead to have the case decided by a judge in a bench proceeding. When he appeared before District Judge Lawrence Parish for that bench trial in January 2020, the direction of the case changed dramatically. Spain abandoned his earlier not-guilty stance and asked to enter a “blind” guilty plea to first-degree murder—an admission of guilt without any negotiated sentence, leaving punishment entirely to the judge within the range allowed by law. In open court, he answered the judge’s questions about whether he understood the charge and the possible penalties, then admitted that he had shot Teresa, breaking down in tears as he accepted legal responsibility for her death. The judge ordered a pre-sentence investigation, and on June 23, 2020, Spain was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. He did not file a direct appeal but later sought post-conviction relief, arguing that the state lacked jurisdiction in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s McGirt v. Oklahoma decision. At the same time, federal authorities obtained an indictment in 2021 charging him with murder in Indian Country and a related firearms offense tied to Teresa’s killing, underscoring that no other suspects had ever been identified in the case. Subsequent legal challenges, including a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, did not overturn his state conviction; in 2024 the high court declined to review his case, leaving intact the life sentence imposed for the murder of his mother-in-law.
Today, the story of Teresa’s death is told through court records, news reports, and memorial pages that remember her as more than the victim of a domestic shooting. They describe a woman whose life began and ended in the same Oklahoma town, surrounded by family, whose final moments unfolded in a place that should have been safe. The legal trail—from the frantic 911 call to the arrest, the first-degree murder conviction, and the life sentence imposed on the man who admitted to pulling the trigger—forms a stark narrative of accountability. Yet for those who knew her, the defining memory is not the courtroom, but the decades before: the daughter, mother, and friend whose absence is still felt in Okemah long after the case file was closed.
