By admin 
The prison guard found Winston Walters in January.
“I need to talk to you,” he said. “One-on-one, though.”
Walters, a citizen of the Comanche Nation, had never spoken to this correctional officer, and he thought a private conversation with him or any other guard was a recipe for trouble. Besides, his 7:30 a.m. work detail was about to start.
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“Whatever you need to say to me,” Walters replied, “you can say it to me right here.”
The officer asked if Walters knew a couple named Mark and Rita Roebuck.
Of course he knew them.
Thirteen years earlier, masked men had terrorized the Roebucks inside their home near the tiny town of Comanche, Oklahoma. Mark was shot twice and nearly died. News of the home invasion spread rapidly across the rolling plains of southwestern Oklahoma.
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At the time, Walters was 19 years old. He lived in his small hometown about 20 miles west of Comanche and was gaining something like fame as the youngest contestant on Mudcats, a reality TV series about Oklahoma catfish noodlers. Also known as grabblers or hand-fishermen, noodlers use their own bare limbs as bait to catch enormous flathead catfish lurking in Southern and Midwestern rivers, creeks, and lakes. The creator of Mudcats described Walters as the show’s breakout star. He seemed to have a bright future ahead: He was cast in the lead role of a short film and was finding production work on other TV shows, including American Idol.
Then, the month after his 20th birthday, police arrested him. He was charged in the attack on the Roebucks.
From the start, Walters insisted that he’d never met the couple and had nothing to do with the brutal crime against them. A jury disagreed. Following a two-year investigation that saw charges levied then dropped against the victims’ own nephew and a break in the case that hinged on a cartoonish quest for a bag of marijuana, Walters was convicted on four felony counts, including robbery, burglary, assault, and kidnapping.
“I’ve been in murder cases and everything else, and I believe this is the coldest,” District Judge Ken T. Graham told the courtroom of the crime during the trial’s sentencing phase.
No one had died in the attack, but following a jury’s recommendation, Graham sentenced Walters to 92 years in prison. He will be eligible for parole if he can reach the age of 99.
“His life as he has known it for the past 21 years, or whatever, is over,” Graham said. “I feel sorry for him, but I feel sorry for the Roebucks too. Two innocent people minding their own business.”
Mudcats ended. Years crawled. Then came TikTok. Walters was incarcerated for a decade when he was suddenly discovered by online creators and reality TV denizens. Tall and elaborately tattooed, with a pair of long, dark braids draping either shoulder, he had informally adopted his grandmother’s last name, Red Elk, and was perfect for the role of a wrongfully convicted online sensation.
“Now, I know he’s very beautiful. Boy, do I know,” Shanoa Mitchell, a Native American OnlyFans model and influencer, said in a video, chuckling under her breath. “But we are not looking for people to be pen pals, which seems to be what everybody wants to do. We need real help.”
Rallying around the slogan “Free Red Elk,” Mitchell and others posted videos picking apart Walters’ case. They argued that he had been railroaded by Oklahoma’s severe criminal justice system, that there was no physical evidence conclusively tying him to the crime scene, and that the state lacked jurisdiction to prosecute the case on Comanche Nation territory. They also raised thousands of dollars for his legal appeals.
“We’re on it, so don’t worry,” Dog the Bounty Hunter encouraged Walters in an online video.
A “freewinstonwalters” TikTok account, which had more than 31,000 followers, regularly shared photos and videos of Walters, sometimes shirtless, often set to plaintive music. “Today Winston is having to spend his 13th Thanksgiving in prison without family or friends. Can you imagine?” went a typical post. Another used A.I. to animate a photo of Walters, the digital replica lamenting his sentence of “death by incarceration.”
But the online attention had yet to alter Walters’ fate. He exhausted his direct appeals, and the state’s pardon and parole board denied his request for a commutation in December. Barring some miracle, he would likely die in prison.
On that winter morning at the Red Rock Correctional Center in Lawton, Oklahoma, Walters was exiting his cell pod when guard Ronnie Sloan approached to deliver the unexpected message. It came from none other than Mark Roebuck, the man Walters had been convicted of shooting. Sloan explained that he attended church with the Roebucks, and they had decided to extend a tantalizing offer: Mark and Rita would support an effort to reduce Walters’ sentence if he would first write a letter accepting his guilt in the attack.
The offer posed a searing predicament for Walters, who had withstood intense pressure to confess to the crime and says he turned down an informal plea offer that would have resulted in half as much prison time.
Maybe this overture from the Roebucks was his miracle. He mulled his response for weeks. Then he found a pencil and a sheet of paper and started writing.
In February, Walters called Bradley Beesley, the creator of Mudcats, to inform him of the Roebucks’ offer. Beesley, a documentary filmmaker and avid catfish noodler, had taken a shine to Walters during Mudcats’ run in 2012 and 2013. He’d been stunned by his star’s nearly centurylong sentence and came away from a review of the case suspecting that Walters may have been wrongfully convicted. He’d already begun to work on a podcast and possible documentary about the case when he asked me, an old acquaintance, to partner with him. We were pleasantly surprised when Mark Roebuck eagerly agreed to share his side of the story.
“We need to get the truth out about this,” he said.
When I pulled up the long driveway to his country home on a bright morning in June, Roebuck greeted me warmly. Then he eyed the canvas tote bag where I’d stashed a notepad and some audio gear.
“Want me to carry your purse for you?” he ribbed. This burly 65-year-old biker was a ham.
The mischief didn’t end there. After talking for more than two hours about the worst night of his life, we were leaning against a pipe fence next to one of his cow pastures when Roebuck noticed Beesley filming us from a distance. Roebuck hollered, dropped his blue jeans, and mooned the camera.
Rita didn’t join us for the interview. She and Mark met at a local bank where she worked for years as a teller. She was 10 years his senior. Roebuck, then a Halliburton contractor, thought she was gorgeous. They married in 2005.
On Jan. 29, 2013, the couple were fast asleep around 1:50 a.m. Their boxer, Gus, was nestled in his usual spot at the foot of their bed when a glass door shattered in their sunroom. Gus rarely barked at night. Now, Roebuck says, he was “booger barking” like a riled-up coyote.
“I thought, What the heck?” Roebuck recalled.
He stumbled out of bed in his underwear and down the hall to his darkened living room. Gus was still bawling, but he was nowhere to be seen. “Come on, Gus,” Roebuck said, trying to let the dog out the back door to investigate.
“I flipped the light switch on and took about two more steps, and there’s a man standing there,” Roebuck recalls, “a little short guy, holding a rifle in his hand.”
Roebuck yelped. “It scared the crap out of me,” he said.
The man was crouched behind a 5-foot-tall gun safe Roebuck had purchased a few weeks earlier. He wore a dark hoodie cinched around his face and a rubber mask that obscured everything but his eyes. Roebuck immediately recognized the long gun in the man’s gloved hands. It was the Ruger .22-caliber rifle with a camouflage scope that Roebuck kept in the workshop behind his house.
“I took one step back,” he told me, “then instinct kicked in.”
He rushed forward to grab the gun. From the other side of the living room, he heard a blast. “The next thing I know, I’m lying on my stomach, and my guts are just on fire.”
A second intruder, whom Roebuck hadn’t seen, had shot him in the abdomen with a 9 mm pistol with a red laser sight. Now the two intruders stood over him, yelling at each other and Roebuck: “We want your fucking money!”
The shorter man pointed Roebuck’s own rifle between his eyes, 6 inches from his forehead. The other intruder, who was noticeably taller, disappeared into the hallway. He found Rita frozen in bed, pointed his pistol, and ordered her to get up.
“My little wife, as sweet as she can be, he brought her in here, grabbed her by the scruff of her neck, jerking her around, and had that laser light right on the back of her head,” Roebuck says.
The taller man pushed Rita toward the safe and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t open it. She was crying. Her hands shook as she punched the buttons into the safe’s keypad, entering the wrong combination.
“You leave her alone,” Roebuck said. “I’ll open that safe.”
Roebuck scooted onto his hip and entered the code. The shorter man jerked the knob, but the safe didn’t open. “That short guy backed up,” Roebuck says, “and, just like a field goal kick, kicked me right where he just shot me.”
Rita said Roebuck could open the safe if they left him alone. He climbed back to his knees and tried the code again. The door swung open. The men dug through his files, seeming to know there was cash somewhere in the safe. “Where is your fucking money?” they asked repeatedly, as Roebuck’s business papers went flying everywhere.
He told them to look for a bank bag in the door. When he heard a Velcro zipper, he knew they’d found it: $28,000 in $100 bills from the recent sale of two vehicles.
“You want me to go ahead and kill him?” the shorter man asked the taller one. No, the taller man replied.
Rita was still crying. The shorter man offered his accomplice a chance to rape her. Again, the taller man declined.
When Roebuck tried to get up, the short man kicked him again. The tall man took Rita back to the bedroom and asked where their phones were. She handed him Roebuck’s cellphone. “There are two,” he said. “Give me the other one. Where’s the other one?”
Then he made another demand: “The cordless phone. Give me the cordless phone!”
She handed him the landline phone, which was resting on a dresser by her side of the bed. Then he led her back to the living room and duct-taped her to a dining chair.
Roebuck was still lying on the tile floor, his stomach burning. The shorter man shot Roebuck in the knee, an inch from the skin. The bullet went through his left knee and entered his right calf. Blood squirted from the wounds with each heartbeat as Roebuck went into shock. “I didn’t feel nothing,” he recalls.
The men fled through a back door. He heard their footsteps as they ran down a walkway behind the house, past the tall windmill in their backyard.
“Mark, are you OK?” Rita asked.
He said no. She asked if she should try to free herself from the duct tape. He told her to wait. He could still hear the men’s footsteps. Then all went silent.
The tall man had bound Rita tightly in layers of tape. Now she got her thumbs underneath the tape. “She just pushed that duct tape up and shimmied right out of that chair,” Roebuck recalls.
The couple had a hidden landline phone on their kitchen wall. Rita thought it was ugly and outdated, so she’d covered it with greenery. She dialed the Comanche Police Department, and within minutes, a sheriff’s deputy arrived, followed by emergency responders. When Roebuck stood to climb onto the gurney, the floor was so slick he felt as if he were skating on his own blood. He was taken by ambulance to a series of hospitals.
Meanwhile, Rita told the sheriff’s deputies that she thought she could identify one of the assailants. The taller man, she said, had been “hopping around” like Roebuck’s nephew Jeramy Roebuck.
Jeramy seemed to have a motive: A couple of weeks before the break-in, Roebuck had repossessed a Dodge Dakota pickup truck he’d sold to Jeramy after his nephew fell behind on payments. On top of that, Roebuck’s son had recently evicted Jeramy from a house he owned. Rita said Jeramy was “very upset” by the losses.
When officers searched the property for evidence, they found Roebuck’s Ruger in the backyard. They also gathered a plastic water bottle and a couple of cigarette butts near a log splitter about 200 yards north of Roebuck’s workshop. Because it was locked, they were unable to check inside the 2,000-square-foot shop. However, they gathered several items that had seemingly been tossed onto the grass outside the shop door that night: a Grand Master–brand car lockout kit, a headlamp, and a bottle of an anti-inflammatory drug called Etodolac. The prescription was made out to Jeramy Roebuck.
Around 8 the next morning, Jeramy’s wife drove him to a local police department so he could talk to the officers about the home invasion. Somehow, he’d already heard that he was the chief suspect, but he adamantly denied involvement in the crime against his aunt and uncle.
Roebuck was on life support and unconscious for two days. When he finally woke up, in an intensive care unit in Oklahoma City, about 90 miles northeast of Comanche, he learned that surgeons had removed 13 inches of his small intestine during emergency surgery.
Rita called one of the chief investigators, Bobby Bowen, a sheriff’s lieutenant, and urged him to speak with Roebuck, who was able to talk now that a tube had been removed from his mouth. From his ICU bed, Roebuck told Bowen that Jeramy and a friend of Jeramy’s were the men who had broken into his home and shot him. Roebuck said he recognized their voices.
Bowen asked how sure he was.
“Ninety-nine percent,” he replied, as Bowen would later report.
Roebuck also said that Jeramy knew that his uncle carried a lot of cash from the sale of used vehicles he advertised near the highway in front of his house.
On Feb. 1, Jeramy appeared in district court and was charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon. His bond was set at $1 million. At the same time, charges against his friend, Jeffrey Herbert, were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
On Feb. 4, Bowen again interviewed Roebuck at the hospital. This time, Roebuck said he was no longer sure about the voices he heard and did not think Jeramy was a suspect after all. He also said that although he remembered being interviewed by the investigator, he had been on hospital-grade painkillers and couldn’t remember what he had told him.
Less than a week later, Jeramy called Roebuck’s son Mark Jr. from jail. The night before the attack, he said, he drank a few beers and smoked a couple of “hooters,” or oversized joints, at the house where he was staying, before going to bed before 11. He also said that none of his DNA was found inside his aunt and uncle’s house.
“You tell Mark I love him and I would never do that,” Jeramy said, his voice cracking with emotion. “I know he believes that.”
Roebuck went through several surgeries during his first week in the hospital and, all told, spent more than a month in medical care. When he was finally discharged, he went to the sheriff’s office and reiterated that he did not think Jeramy had shot him. Nor did he believe that Jeramy left behind the prescription pills. Roebuck explained that he found the pill bottle when he repossessed his nephew’s pickup truck and had left the pills in his workshop.
Afraid to enter their own home, Mark and Rita stayed with a friend for another month or so. When they finally returned, Roebuck realized he was missing four pistols from his safe. Rita remembered that the shorter man had stuffed them inside his coat while he was yelling for the money. Roebuck further discovered that his workshop had been ransacked. Cabinet doors were open wide. Arrowheads from his collection were missing. There was no sign of forced entry, though. Someone had apparently used the secret key Roebuck hid near the workshop door.
On March 15, the charges against Jeramy were dropped. “We didn’t have a reason to believe he had done it for sure,” Bowen would later testify, “or we didn’t feel he was the right person.”
Two weeks later, the Season 2 finale of Mudcats aired on National Geographic TV. The show followed contestants in the Okie Hand Fishing Invitational, a 10-week tournament founded by Beesley when he was filming his cult-classic documentary Okie Noodling in 2000. A grand prize of $10,000 and a mounted catfish trophy were at stake.
Mark Roebuck, himself a catfish noodler, had watched several episodes of Mudcats with no idea that his life would become inextricably linked to one of the competitors.
Noodling is often portrayed as an extreme redneck pastime, but it traditionally had more to do with survival than sport. In 1775 an Irish-born trader and historian named James Adair wrote about the Chickasaw people’s “surprising method of fishing,” in which they dive into rivers and stick an arm into a catfish hole, where the “fierce animals see that tempting bait” and “immediately seize it with the greatest violence, in order to swallow it.” After a sharp struggle, divers bring their catch safely ashore.
Walters learned to noodle when he was a young child.
“I started on my grandpa’s back, just floating down the creek with a life jacket on,” he told me during a recent phone interview from the Red Rock prison. His Papa Charles grappled the fish, and Walters held their catch. “He’d tie that stringer around my hand and let the fish pull me around the creek.”
Before long, Walters was noodling on his own. His biggest catch was a 78-pound mudcat. “You either love it or you hate it,” he said. “I’ve had times where I’ve almost drowned. I had mud up to my brain, man.”
In 2008, when Walters was 14, his mother died in a car crash, and he moved in with his grandparents. The following summer, he traveled across Oklahoma and Kansas, cutting fields of wheat. He also broke horses and rode bucking broncos in ranch rodeos. When he was 17, Beesley cast him on Mudcats. In the first season, he and his cousin performed poorly. Their preferred rivers and creeks had gone dry from a record drought. During Season 2, they were far more competitive, hauling in behemoths weighing 45 and 58 pounds.
“I can’t believe these people are going to pay me a couple thousand dollars per episode to go fishing,” Walters remembered thinking. “I just thought that was the funniest thing in the world.”
Although one newspaper reviewer described Mudcats as “brainless cable bottom-feeding,” the show opened up a new world for the rural teenager. An independent producer who saw the show flew Walters to Virginia to star in a three-minute video trailer for a novel called Torn From Normal. The storyline is inscrutable, but Walters displays real range, gazing forlornly in the rain, hurling dishes at a wall, grinning and giving high-fives when a family takes him bowling. “I just winged it,” Walters said.
He was fascinated by the camera operators who followed his Mudcats exploits and asked them to teach him how they worked. Soon, he was landing gigs as a production assistant and camera operator on an American Idol tour and as an assistant camera operator on another National Geographic reality show, Okies vs. Aliens.
A new friend, John Oxford, who was six years older than Walters, hooked him up with the Okies vs. Aliens gig. The two soon became inseparable, working in construction together and training as mixed martial arts fighters. In August 2013, Walters delivered and received a barrage of punches and knee kicks before a raucous crowd of spectators at a regional cage match called Fists of Fury. “Hands up, Winston!” someone shouts in a YouTube video of the fight. “Get him!” fans scream. In the front row, Oxford, in a black Tapout T-shirt, shadowboxes and cheers him on.
In September, Walters moved out of his childhood home and rented a small house with Oxford that belonged to Oxford’s sister. Two months later, police were knocking on their door.
After the case against Jeramy Roebuck collapsed, the authorities seemingly had no other leads in their hunt for the men who had victimized Mark and Rita.
That changed on the afternoon of Nov. 2, 2013, about nine months after the home invasion, when the police department received a call that two guys were waving a gun at a residence less than a mile from the house Walters and Oxford shared.
Upon arresting the men, whose names were Michael McKay and Marcus Yakeschi, the police ran the serial numbers on the pistol they had used. It was a semiautomatic .45 Springfield—and it had been stolen from the Roebucks.
McKay told police he and Yakeschi had taken the gun during a quest for marijuana.
He said they’d been buying pot from Oxford for a couple of years. One night, when Oxford and Walters were out of town, McKay and Yakeschi popped a couple of Xanaxes and hydrocodone pills and decided to nab a quarter pound of weed they’d seen at their dealer’s house. They knocked on the front door and window. A pit bull barked, but no one seemed to be home. McKay climbed the back fence and tried to squeeze through an 8-by-12-inch doggie door that led to a back washroom. He didn’t fit, so Yakeschi tried next. To distract the dog from biting them, they said, they fed it cereal they’d taken from a neighboring house where Yakeschi’s aunt lived. “He just sat there and ate it,” McKay would later testify.
Yakeschi’s hips became wedged in the doggie door. McKay pulled his friend’s pants and shoes off, to no avail. Finally, after a 10-minute struggle, they broke the trim off the small opening, pushed aside a washing machine that had been positioned against the door to keep the dog in the house, and easily crawled through.
While looking for the pot, McKay said, he found the Springfield pistol in Walters’ room. It was wrapped in a towel in a laundry basket. He said he took it.
Police and sheriff’s deputies raided Oxford and Walters’ house on Nov. 3, just one day after the men were arrested with the stolen pistol. On top of a dresser in Walters’ bedroom, the officers found a little pot, a digital scale, and Walters’ wallet with his driver’s license inside. They didn’t locate any weapons, but they did find a pair of detached pistol magazines.
Oxford was already in jail; he’d been serving time on the weekends for fleeing when police had tried to stop his motorcycle. Under questioning, he readily admitted that he’d visited the Roebucks’ house the previous year—although not during the home invasion. At the time, Oxford had been moonlighting for a sales company that offered welding machines, generators, and other equipment door to door.
Following a sales call, he said, he was driving home when he noticed two men talking in front of a house on State Highway 53. He decided to pull in and try to make a sale, introducing himself to Roebuck, who agreed to buy the entire load of equipment. He went into the house, returned, and paid Oxford about $5,000 in cash. Roebuck unlocked his workshop, and Oxford helped him unload the equipment. Oxford maintained that he was innocent but agreed to give police a cheek swab for a DNA test.
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When it was Walters’ turn for questioning, he admitted that he smoked pot, which was illegal at the time, but denied owning a pistol. He also agreed to a cheek swab.
As investigators awaited the results of the DNA test, they gathered circumstantial evidence. A man in Wichita Falls, Texas, just across the state line, said that he’d sold a Kawasaki Ninja sport bike to Oxford and Walters after the robbery; they’d paid $3,200 in $100 bills. Police interviewed a man in the Comanche County Jail who said that Oxford sold him a 9 mm pistol that he assumed had been stolen. Walters was there during the gun sale.
The case was mounting.
A Secret Service agent gave Oxford a polygraph test. When he failed, he confessed to the crime.
Oxford told police that he and Walters had broken into Roebuck’s workshop to steal back the diesel-powered welding machine he’d recently sold him. He blamed everything else—breaking into the house, shooting Roebuck, stealing the guns, and destroying evidence —on Walters. “Winston was the main guy putting everything together and deciding what was going to go down,” he said.
Following his confession, Oxford led police beyond a set of railroad tracks, past a church, to a tree stump near the bank of a creek. Under a piece of wood by the stump was a yellow sack containing a white Spencer’s shopping bag. Inside the bag was an orange Dave Matthews Band T-shirt wrapped around two handguns. One was a loaded stainless steel Beretta 9 mm pistol, the same caliber as the slug removed from Roebuck’s abdomen. The other was a Taurus .44 Magnum revolver stolen from his safe.
Oxford said he and Walters had burned their clothes, masks, and boots in a trash barrel at his grandmother’s house outside town. Corroborating Oxford’s account, his brother Robert Oxford told police that he had seen Oxford burn his boots while Walters and another man, Andrew Travis, watched. Oxford told his brother the group had gone to somebody’s house, “it got wild, and bad stuff happened.”
Travis, Oxford told police, had been their getaway driver that night.
Not long after Oxford’s confession, authorities tracked down Travis, who was in jail for an unrelated warrant in Boulder, Colorado, and had him extradited to Oklahoma. At first, he denied any knowledge of the crime. Then, he would later claim, police “attacked him like four wolves,” told him that he was looking at a century in prison, and put him in solitary confinement, where, he later reported, he contemplated killing himself.
When his bond was set at $2.5 million, Travis cracked. At first, he was too emotional to write a statement, “bawling his eyes out,” Walters’ defense attorney would later claim. Eventually, Travis calmed himself enough to explain that he gave Walters and Oxford a ride in exchange for gas money, but he claimed to have no idea they planned to rob anyone. First, he said, according to case files and court transcripts, he drove past the Roebucks’ house and turned onto a smaller county road, where he dropped them off. Then he drove around for about an hour, until, he said, Walters called him to be picked up. They told him to drive home fast. He asked why. “You don’t want to know,” he says Walters replied.
The same day that Oxford confessed and implicated his roommate, the authorities brought Walters in for questioning and informed him that they had identified his DNA on the water bottle found at the scene of the crime.
In a video of the interview, Walters expressed shock. He said he didn’t know the Roebucks and had never been to their house. He also insisted that the DNA results were wrong.
“You have to believe me, sir,” he said. “You have to believe me.”
Walters’ younger half brother, Noah Collins, was in second grade at the time and lived around the block from Walters and their grandparents. He was watching the local news with his dad before school one morning when a familiar face appeared on the screen.
“What? My brother’s on TV? That’s so cool!” Collins remembered thinking. “I didn’t recognize the weight that held,” he now says.
Despite their 12-year age gap, the brothers were close, he told me. They made pizza and played video games and rode Walters’ motorcycle, sparking a lifelong interest. Once, they even went noodling. “I absolutely hated it,” Collins said. “We’re diving under the water and grabbing these big old catfish. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.”
Collins shopped with his grandmother Kathy Red Elk for a suit Walters could wear to court. His sole memory from the trial is of his brother waving at him during the only day he attended the proceedings.
Naturally, for Walters, the memories are more vivid. Heading into trial, he thought his innocence would be apparent.
The prosecutors built much of their case on circumstantial evidence. Not long after the home invasion, Walters took a girlfriend on a date to the zoo and an NBA game in Oklahoma City. He and Oxford also attended an off-road motorsports event called “Rednecks With Paychecks.” The high times, prosecutors seemed to imply, had been bankrolled by the Roebucks’ cash.
Oxford had already pleaded guilty. Sentenced to 72 years in prison, he didn’t testify at Walters’ trial. Travis, the getaway driver, did, however; his eyewitness account was arguably the most damaging.
Jurors were also informed that Walters’ partial fingerprint was found on the white Spencer’s bag holding the cache of stolen firearms that Oxford turned over to police. (Walters freely admits the bag was his; he claims that Oxford grabbed it from their house.)
Authorities had also recovered a mixture of DNA from more than one person on the stolen guns themselves. While not a conclusive match, Walters could not be excluded from the mixture.
FBI agent Andrew Kerstetter also presented evidence that Walters’ cellphone had pinged off a U.S. Cellular tower near Comanche at 12:01 a.m. on Jan. 29, 2013, which indicated that Walters was somewhere within approximately 12 miles of the Roebucks’ house just two hours before the break-in. This was unusual for Walters. Kerstetter further testified that Walters’ phone had pinged in Comanche only one other time during the preceding 11 months, about two weeks before the break-in.
Even as his trial dragged on for two weeks, Walters says, he remained convinced that he would soon be set free. On the advice of his attorney, he didn’t take the stand. The prosecution rested, and the jury deliberated for five hours.
Two weeks into his brother’s trial, Collins was in class when their sister Chloe picked him up at the elementary school and took him to their grandmother’s house. She told Collins that Walters had been sentenced to nearly a century in prison. He’d been convicted of conjoint robbery, first-degree burglary, assault and battery with a deadly weapon, and kidnapping.
“That’s when it hit me, and I started crying and screaming. I’m never going to see my brother again,” Collins recalled.
As for Walters, he was stunned. He says he felt like an ant walking into the huge facility on his first day in prison; the guard towers reminded him of skyscrapers. He had told his family there was no way he could do any time whatsoever.
“Well,” he now reflects, “you’d be surprised what you can do when you have to do it.”
Describing incarceration as a “slow death,” he says he has been stabbed and has done things he’s not proud of to stay alive. He has also learned leatherwork and other crafts and has taken dozens of e-courses ranging from Wine 101 to Suicide Prevention and Protecting Yourself While Responding to Earthquakes. The one good thing to come from his loss of freedom, he says, is his deepening faith in God.
Walters had been in prison for several years when a social media influencer named Shanoa Mitchell heard about his case from some of her relatives in southwestern Oklahoma. A mother of four from Northern California, Mitchell describes herself as a “Native Strong” freedom fighter and a “genetically blessed” OnlyFans model. She’s also a true-crime fanatic who uses her social media platforms to raise awareness about wrongful convictions, missing people, and other victims.
First, Mitchell read Walters’ trial transcripts and appeals. She was struck by the Roebucks’ initial identification of their nephew Jeramy, the pill bottle of Jeramy’s left at the crime scene, and the absence of concrete evidence tying Walters to the crime.
Then she saw the video of him pleading with the police when they first accused him of the break-in. His shock was how she, too, would have reacted to false allegations. It gave her chills.
Mitchell shared Walters’ story with her 90,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok. She also orchestrated fundraisers allowing Walters to retain the services of Brenda Golden, a lawyer and Indigenous rights activist, as well as private investigator and bail bondswoman Rainy Robinson, a friend and former castmate of Dog the Bounty Hunter. Robinson took up Walters’ cause on Instagram, where she has 143,000 followers.
To Robinson, the evidence against Walters seemed extremely thin. “God, this kid has really been railroaded,” she remembers thinking. She also believed that Oklahoma’s justice system had thrown the book at Walters as a convenient way to clear a vexing case. “Part of justice is that you get the right people,” she said during a recent interview. “Not just ‘Oh, look, we got somebody off the street.’ ”
In particular, she and others argue that police and prosecutors mischaracterized the DNA found on the water bottle as conclusive when it was anything but. Testing by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation showed that two people had drunk from the bottle, leaving a mixture of their DNA. Contrary to police claims, the DNA was not a conclusive match for Oxford and Walters; it indicated only that they could not be excluded as possible contributors. According to OSBI agents who testified at trial, about 1 in 236 people shares the DNA profiles recovered from the water bottle. In Oklahoma, that works out to roughly 16,000 people.
Cellphone records also don’t appear to match the timeline for the home invasion. Andrew Travis testified that Walters called him as he and Oxford were leaving the Roebucks’ house to ask him to pick them up. However, there is no record of Walters making any calls after midnight or so—nothing around 2 a.m., when he and Oxford were allegedly fleeing the Roebucks’ house. (The prosecutors, who declined to comment for this story, did not introduce Oxford’s phone records into the evidence.)
Walters’ supporters further argue that Oxford’s statements implicating Walters—as well as Travis’ testimony against him—were tainted, the result of the men being coerced by police and angling for lighter sentences.
Why implicate Walters, though? Golden alleges that “small-minded” small-town police “railroaded” her client due to his rise in local fame.
“Winston was getting too big for his britches,” she said. “He had starred in Mudcats.” He’d also been seen around town on a nice new motorcycle. “He’s a bad boy from a bad family, an Indian boy at that.”
That seemed far-fetched to me. Police had falsely accused Walters of the crime simply to knock him down a peg? In response, Golden further alleged that Walters had been “fooling around” with the daughter of a member of local law enforcement.
“You know, stranger things have happened,” she said. “I’m sorry to say, it happens, especially in Oklahoma.”
Golden also asserts that Oxford and Travis were covering for the original suspect, Jeramy Roebuck. I was unable to reach Jeramy or find a solid connection between him and the other two men.
I also couldn’t persuade Oxford to speak with me on the phone. We have exchanged several notes via a prison messaging system, though. He said he hopes to be a dog trainer and groomer if he is released from prison—he’ll be 98 when his sentence ends—and he asked me to apologize to the Roebucks. At first, he would not directly say whether Walters was guilty.
“If he is innocent or not, the courts decided he was guilty a long time ago,” he wrote.
I pressed him. “The man was there,” he finally messaged. “One day he’ll grow up, or maybe not.”
While wrestling with his response to the Roebucks, Walters confided in Collins, his half brother.
“Bubba, what if I just give in to what they’re demanding of me and say I did it?” Walters asked.
People in prison confess to crimes, regardless of innocence, for any manner of reasons: because they are coerced, because their memories are unclear, to curry favor, for attention. In recent years, a stream of DNA exonerations has shown how widespread false confessions really are.
To Collins, who is deeply religious, the thought of his brother lying, even for a chance at a reduced sentence, is unacceptable.
“That wouldn’t be truthful, and that would make you in the wrong,” Collins recalls telling Walters. “And giving false testimony about yourself wouldn’t help anything.”
Walters finished his letter to the Roebucks on Feb. 14. Less than a month later, Collins visited him in prison. Walters gave him a box filled with handmade items, including piles of mittens, hats, and other items he’d crocheted for children; Collins dropped the box off with a church deacon. At the bottom of the box was a pencil-drawn, surprisingly close likeness of Mark and Rita Roebuck. It was based on the profile picture of the couple’s shared Facebook account, but Walters had swapped out palm trees for three Christian crosses and the American flag rippling in the breeze. On the back was a handwritten letter to Mark and Rita.
Collins, then 21, showed up at the Roebucks’ house on a Saturday afternoon in March with no advance notice.
“I was terrified,” he said. “I thought I was going to be greeted by a shotgun.”
He worked up the courage to knock on the door. Rita came around from the garage entrance. “Can I help you, young man?” she said.
Collins has rosy cheeks and tousled hair. He studies music education and plays guitar in his church’s praise band. There’s a gentle quality about him. He introduced himself to Rita.
“Her face just goes like a deer in the headlights,” he recalled. She stepped inside to get Roebuck. Collins stood outside for several agonizing minutes, hearing their muffled voices. “I was like, OK, here we go. Lord Jesus be with us,” he recalled.
Finally, Roebuck came outside, but the air was tense. Collins offered the drawing and letter in response to Roebuck’s offer of support. The portrait was unsettling, a little too familiar.
“I don’t want anything to do with that,” Roebuck replied.
Instead, he offered to sit and talk. Their conversation stretched for hours.
Roebuck brought up details that Collins, who’d never wanted to look at his brother’s case files, hadn’t heard before: Most notably, the taller man had used a pistol with a laser sight that reminded Collins of a Beretta his brother had.
“They presented evidence that was pretty strong. But, you know, there’s also other evidence that goes for Winston,” he said.
“We formed a bond of trust,” Collins continued. “But the damage that was done to the Roebucks is very real, and it broke my heart to hear what happened to Mark and Rita. I saw the scars, the physical scars that it gave them.”
Before he left, they exchanged contact information. Collins asked again if they would read the letter. In it, Walters expressed regret, but he had decided not to confess to the crime. “I fully, wholly, and from the bottom of my heart apologize purely in a good way to you,” he wrote. He also apologized for befriending Oxford, and he signed off with a request to correspond and perhaps visit someday.
Despite the prison guard’s promise, Roebuck again declined to read the letter. He repeated that he and Rita didn’t want anything to do with it.
Collins understood. “They’ve spent 13 years believing That’s the guy that shot me,” he said. “That’s the guy that tied me up and held a gun to the back of my head.”
Collins was telling me this story while he and I drove around the town where he and his brother grew up. Oddly enough, Walters’ hometown is also named Walters. With a population of about 2,400, it could pass for any number of prairie towns: modest houses and churches, mostly boarded-up storefronts, and a grain elevator towering above everything.
I asked Collins whether he still believes that Walters is innocent.
“My brother didn’t do that,” he said. “That’s what I believe. As a man of God, he still proclaims his innocence. It’s not him.”
Walters is also standing by his innocence claim.
“I want justice. I want the truth,” he told me in a phone call.
Given that clemency boards often look more favorably on applicants who acknowledge their wrongdoing and express remorse, I asked if he’d been tempted to confess.
“Hell, yeah, I was tempted,” Walters replied. “I’m still tempted to this day.
“A lie put me here,” he added. “Will a lie get me out? Surely not. That’s not my fate.”
Walters spent all but one month of his 20s in jail or prison. Now he’s well into his 30s. He dreams of freedom, marriage, children. And then there’s noodling.
Despite their mudcat nickname, enormous catfish keep a surprisingly clean den. “It’ll be slick as a car hood from the slime on their bellies,” Walters says.
Their dens can also be unexpectedly deep. When he was a teenager, Walters remembers, he dove into some catfish holes so vast he couldn’t find the back. “You’re holding your breath this whole time,” he says. “You just dive down, and you’ve got to be one with the water. You’ve got to be natural in it. The fish will let you touch them if you’re real gentle, almost like you belong there.”
One time, a riverbank caved on top of Walters. A friend grabbed his arm and pulled him out.
In a way, he says, noodling is an act of faith. “You’re doing all this blind,” he told me. “That fish is going to come up, and it’s going to bite the heck out of you.” You’ve reached into the dark. When the mudcat bites, you’re committed. All you can do is wrestle back to the light.
Mark Roebuck sat in the sunroom where two men broke into his house 13 years earlier, his back to the heavy black safe where his money and guns were stolen. He explained why he had passed along the message to Walters: “If he’d just own up to what he’d done, I might talk to somebody about lightening his sentence a little bit.”
Roebuck expressed certainty that Walters was the tall man who shot him from behind, in his own home.
After the attack, he accompanied Rita to the sheriff’s office so she could apply for a concealed-carry license. There, he says, he chatted with strangers who told him they were taking the same precaution following a recent home invasion in Comanche. They didn’t realize they were speaking with the couple whose home had been violated.
“It changed a lot of people, because we live out in a rural community that’s pretty friendly,” he said. “We never dreamed anything like this would ever happen to us, turning people from trusting to everybody wanting to get alarm systems and security lights.”
During our interview, Roebuck went back and forth between his feelings about Walters’ sentence. He was certainly less charitable since Walters refused his offer.
On one hand, he described Walters as a back-shooting coward who needs to pay for his crime. “If the jury came up with this [92-year sentence], that’s what they see fit,” he said.
What if Walters confessed to the crime? Would Roebuck support his bid for a reduced sentence then?
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said. “Like I said, I still have feelings about a young man trashing his whole life like that. But no.” Roebuck almost appeared to reconsider midsentence. “At the time, yes, I probably would have. But no, after really thinking about it and going through all this time, it’s hard to say.”
Then Roebuck changed his mind again.
“Yeah, probably, because …” He trailed off, thinking for several seconds. “That’s a long time.”
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