John Elmer Rausin Jr., a 63-year-old male, had spent his life in Oklahoma, born on December 28, 1916, and eventually settling in the small community of Depew. He was the son of John E. Rausin and Ruby E. Arnold, and records show that he married Mildred Lorena Bias, building a life rooted in the rural towns of Lincoln and Creek counties. On paper, his story looked like that of many working men of his generation: a long life in one state, a family, and, finally, burial in Oak Park Cemetery in Chandler after his death in 1980.
The morning of June 12, 1980, began as a routine workday but ended in extraordinary violence. Before dawn, while he was in the garage at his home in Depew, preparing to leave for work, someone attacked him with chilling ferocity. Accounts from investigators later summarized the scene with stark precision: he was shot twice, stabbed around ten times, and his throat was slit. A neighbor discovered his body near his car in the garage at around 8:30 a.m., the ordinary clutter of a working man's space suddenly transformed into the center of a homicide investigation. Contemporary reporting placed the attack at about 4 a.m., suggesting that his killer or killers struck under cover of darkness and were long gone by the time help arrived.
The brutality of the crime immediately signaled that this was no accident, no robbery gone casually wrong. The combination of gunshots and multiple stab wounds, along with the slashing of his throat, pointed to rage and deliberation rather than a single impulsive act. Later memorials would list him among those “lost to gun violence” in Oklahoma on that date, but the firearm was only one part of the assault that ended his life. The overkill nature of the wounds suggested to investigators a deeply personal motive, something rooted not in chance but in relationships and history.
For a time, the case seemed to stall, resting as a dark memory in Depew and a file on a shelf. Then, nearly three years after the murder, the investigation took a dramatic turn. Authorities arrested two women from Cleveland, Oklahoma: Ida Prewitt, then in her mid-fifties, and her daughter, Deborah Rausin, in her early thirties. Deborah was John's wife, and their arrests pushed the case into the realm of family tragedy, where grief and suspicion overlapped. Investigators believed the motive behind the killing was intensely personal, and the image that emerged was not of a faceless attacker but of a potential plot formed within his own extended family circle.
Court records summarized in later accounts indicate that in 1983 both Ida and Deborah were formally charged with his murder. Another retelling, tied to a separate high-profile disappearance case in Oklahoma, notes that he was found shot and stabbed to death in his car on June 12, 1980, and that the two women were accused in connection with that killing. Yet, despite the seriousness of the charges, the prosecution did not end in a conviction. The charges against Ida and Deborah were eventually dropped, leaving the case without a legally established perpetrator.
In the years that followed, John Elmer Rausin Jr.'s death remained a grim waypoint in several later narratives about violence and family conflict in Oklahoma, cited briefly in discussions of other crimes but never fully resolved in its own right. His grave marker in Chandler bears only the bare facts of his life and death—his name and the dates—offering no hint of the horror that took place in his garage that June morning. With the primary suspects no longer facing charges and no one else brought to trial, his killing stands, in the surviving public record, as an unsolved homicide: a man attacked where he lived, in the simple act of getting ready for work, and a community left with a story that trails off without a definitive ending.
