Massacre recalled: Anniversary sparks memories of brutal steakhouse killings
Massacre recalled: Anniversary sparks memories of brutal steakhouse killings

Ellen Knickmeyer

Published: July 15, 2008

This article was originally published by The Oklahoman Saturday, July 16, 1988.

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"Really? This is the anniversary?" restaurant manager David Drisko asked.

Raising an eyebrow, he shot forth his pointed index finger. "Pow, pow, huh?"

Drisko was running an errand Friday at the South Oklahoma City shopping center hamburger place he used to manage. He didn't have to be told what the anniversary was.

Ten years ago tonight, when the same building housed a Sirloin Stockade, three people in an old car pulled off Interstate 240 and executed six workers in the steakhouse meat locker.

Not one customer came in on the night of last year's anniversary of the slayings, Drisko said. Patrons always were conscious of the building's history, he said. They would ask the manager about the killings as he went about refilling water glasses.

"I'm always tell them, they're sitting right on the spot," Drisko said.

Three other restaurants came and went there after the Sirloin Stockade, and the meat locker was long ago converted to a no-smoking section, Drisko said.

But most Oklahomans remember, attorney Andy Coats said.

Coats was the prosecutor who won the death penalty for Roger Dale Stafford in the steakhouse murders.

The then-Oklahoma County district attorney was awakened from his Sunday night sleep and called out to the shopping center 10 years ago.

The only female victim, Terri Horst, 15, had been pulled from the meat locker still alive when Coats got there. She died at a hospital within hours.

Horst and the three boy workers went in the meat locker first, according to testimony Coats introduced in Stafford's trial. Obedient, the children waited together as the robbers assured them they would not be hurt.

The janitor and the assistant manager took positions nearest the door.

The assistant manager angered Stafford, Stafford's wife testified.

When the robbers walked out the door with about $1,500, the faces of the steakhouse workers wore bullet holes and blank expressions.

Coats said the killings are Oklahoma's most notorious. They were the state's worst, until the 1986 Edmond post office massacre of 15.

Oklahomans still come up to Coats and talk to him about Stafford being alive, he said.

Once, those who commiserated turned out to be relatives of a victim, Coats said.

The victims were Horst, David Salsman, 15, Anthony Tew, 17, David Lindsey, 17, assistant manager Louis Zacarias, 43, and janitor Isaac Freeman, 56.

Parents of three of the victims tried and lost lawsuits against Sirloin Stockade. None of the survivors' relatives dealt freely with reporters after the killings.

One family's father said his family still receives Christmas cards from another of the victim's families. The family receives strange phone calls when he's quoted about the crime, the father said, so he doesn't talk much publicly.

Neither does Carlos Joy, Horst's former boyfriend. Joy has married someone else since he was the second to find his high school girlfriend among a pile of bodies.

"That's something in my life I'm trying to get beyond," Joy said this week.

Zacarias's widow also has remarried. Other relatives have moved away.

Only the name of the man convicted of killing the six is remembered widely, Coats said.

"They're always the forgotten people," Coats said. "People know a lot about Stafford but they don't know about the families, and the victims."

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