In the early morning hours of March 15, 2015, a violent altercation shattered the quiet of a rural home in Hinton, Oklahoma, leaving 45-year-old Alfred Loyall Jr., a White male, dead from a gunshot wound. The fatal incident occurred at the residence he shared with his 74-year-old roommate, Claude Wilkinson. Authorities were dispatched to the home located at 5108 County Road 2630 around 2 a.m., where they discovered Loyall's body inside.
A third individual also living at the home
witnessed an argument between Loyall and Wilkinson escalate to the point of deadly violence. This witness told investigators that Wilkinson shot Loyall during the dispute. Caddo County sheriff's deputies subsequently arrested Wilkinson on a complaint of first-degree murder. This was not Wilkinson's first serious encounter with the law; at the time of the shooting, he had a pending charge from 2013 for shooting with intent to kill.
Following his arrest, Claude Wilkinson was tried and convicted of the first-degree murder of Alfred Loyall Jr. In an attempt to overturn the verdict, Wilkinson appealed his conviction, arguing that there was insufficient evidence for a first-degree murder charge and that the shooting was not intentional. However, in January 2017, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals found that the evidence presented was sufficient to support the charge and upheld both his conviction and his life sentence.
