In the major-league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with tile Oakland Ns, he said good-bye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big-league glory.
Six years later he was back, his dreams broken by a bad arm and bad habits drinking, drugs, and women. He began to show signs of mental illness. Unable to keep a job,he moved in with his mother and slept twenty hours a day on her sofa.
In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old cocktail waitress in Ada named Debra Sue Carter was raped and murdered, and for five years tile police could not solve tile crime. For reasons that were never clear, they suspected Ron Williamson and his friend Dennis Fritz.The two were finally arrested in 1987 and charged with capital murder: