Black Muslim killings gain new attention
Authorities believe radicals are linked to other unsolved slayings of white victims.
Black Muslim killings gain new attention

By Ken Raymond

Published: September 7, 2008

For more than three decades, Alfred Brooks has marked time in prison.

He's waiting to get out. Police are waiting for him to talk.

Classic impasse.

In the late 1960s or early '70s, Brooks joined a group of radical Black Muslims headquartered in Oklahoma City. The group has long been suspected in a series of black-on-white crimes, including at least six unsolved slayings, three shootings, two abductions and a dozen arson fires.

Police think Brooks, a convicted murderer who declined interview requests for this story, is the key to cracking the cases. They think he committed some of the crimes, or at least knows who did.

They just can't prove it. Not after 34 years.

The thing is, Brooks, 55, may not have anything of value to say. And even if he does, people may not believe him. They didn't in the past.

The trail is growing colder and the "top suspect” older.

Will these cases ever be closed?

About half past midnight Aug. 3, 1974, Judy Webb, 18, and her roommate, Karen Trantham, 23, left the Apartment Key Club at 2525 NW 10.

The women, both white, were sitting inside their car when two black men approached. One had a gun.

The men forced the roommates to strip naked and get in the trunk of the car. Near NE 65 and Coltrane, the women were released and told to walk down a dirt road.

Then the shooting started.

"Webb was killed in the barrage of small-caliber bullets fired by their assailants,” The Oklahoman reported. "Though wounded ... Trantham was able to run to a house about a block away and get help.”

What happened that night continued a chain of violence that began on June 17, 1973, police said. The Webb-Trantham shootings weren't the first, nor were they the last, but they were, perhaps, the most pivotal.

Trantham lived. Later, she identified Brooks as one of her attackers.

For the first time, there was a solid tie to the Nation of Islam.

There had been suspicions about the Black Muslims before. Brooks was involved in those, too.

On June 17, 1973, Brooks and another man were arrested near Douglass High School. A group of Black Muslims in military-style uniforms stormed a Juneteenth celebration there, shoving through the crowd and forcing a KJFL-FM remote broadcast to shut down.

Responding to the disturbance, police pulled over a mini-bus near 2200 N Harding and arrested Brooks, then 20, after a brief altercation.

Soon after, local Nation of Islam leader Theodore G. X. and about 20 of his men occupied Oklahoma City police headquarters. They blocked elevators and stairways, and Theodore demanded the release of Brooks and the other man. Police didn't comply, and Theodore left, warning "no policeman would be safe east of Walnut Street.”

That night, a series of black-on-white crimes occurred, most on the east side. A man was fatally shot. Three people were shot and wounded. A dozen fires, several ignited by fire bombs, damaged businesses and a school.

Authorities suspected the Black Muslims were responsible, but Theodore insisted they were innocent. Another group had taken advantage of the situation to make the Nation of Islam look bad, he said.

Police and the FBI could prove nothing.

On June 27, though, Brooks and Theodore were charged with armed robbery. About a month earlier, two black men, one armed with a sawed-off shotgun and the other with a pistol, robbed a jewelry store. Theodore, calling himself a political prisoner, said police "concocted” the case against him and predicted he would be freed.

He was right. Charges against both men were dropped.

Things were quiet for the rest of 1973.

The same couldn't be said for 1974.

In March, two black males abducted a woman from an Oklahoma City nightclub, forced her to disrobe and choked or knocked her unconscious. She awoke to a dog barking and saw her attackers running away.

"The thinking is that they were planning to kill her but got scared off by the dog,” said police cold case Inspector Kyle Eastridge. "She was a lucky woman.”

In June, a woman was kidnapped under similar circumstances. Fearing for her life, she fought back, then threw herself out of a moving car as a gun went off. She survived.

The next month brought another attack. Nancy Lynn Nuckels, 21, was shot to death in a grassy area in the 700 block of Northwest Expressway. She was nude, her left arm draped over her neck, and she'd last been seen at an Oklahoma City nightclub.

August brought the Webb-Trantham attack, the execution of a male service station attendant in Del City and the slayings of two young workers at a Norman pizza shop. In September, another service station worker was executed, this one in Lawton.

Some of the crimes were so similar it seemed likely they were connected. In each of the abductions, the female victims were kidnapped outside of nightclubs, stripped and taken to isolated areas. Both gas station workers were shot in the back of the head with a large caliber weapon.

But there was more. In 1974, ballistics examiners linked bullets from the Webb-Trantham shootings to those used in the Norman pizza shop and Del City slayings. The same gun had been used in each case.

On Sept. 8, 1974, Brooks was arrested in San Diego in connection with two armed robberies.

The police investigation ultimately led Oklahoma authorities back to Brooks, and on Christmas Eve 1974, Trantham identified him as one of the men who shot her and killed Webb.

At trial, Brooks claimed that Theodore G. X. shot the women.

"He (Brooks) told me matter of factly that he was there,” said Joe Long, 56, who has known Brooks for more than 20 years. "He was there with Theodore X. And he was wild and crazy and arrogant, but he had no idea whatsoever that Theodore was going to kill the girls. ...

"I've seen his face, and I am absolutely convinced that he did not know that murder was going to happen.”

The jury didn't buy Brooks' story. Neither did police. Trantham's description of the shooter didn't match Theodore, and he was never charged.

Brooks was convicted in 1976 and received the death penalty, but his sentence was commuted in 1977. He is serving two consecutive life sentences in a Lawton prison.

The other cases remain unsolved.

Police think Brooks has information about the crimes, and at his parole hearings through the years, Norman officers have implied that Brooks is involved in the other shootings.

If he shot Webb and Trantham, the reasoning goes, then he also shot the pizza shop workers and the Del City service station attendant. Those crimes are very similar to the other abductions and slayings, so he probably did those, too — or at least knows who did, they say.

But there's a problem with that.

When Brooks was arrested in California, he was carrying a .357 Smith & Wesson that he'd purchased in Del City less than a week before the Webb-Trantham shootings.

He said the women were shot with that gun.

Only they weren't.

Test bullets fired from Brooks' gun did not match bullets from the other shootings. The only gun police can place in Brooks' hand wasn't used in those crimes.

Did he use a different weapon? Did someone else pull the trigger? Was he telling the truth about Theodore G. X.?

Brooks is the only one who knows for sure.

He isn't talking.