Floyd Medlock was the 33rd person executed by Oklahoma since 1976, for the brutal slaying of a 7 year old girl in the town of Yukon in 1990. He was born on October 9, 1970 and his own life started on all the wrong notes. According to relatives, Medlock was shut up in a closet by his mother and often shut up in the basement by a babysitter. His stepfather beat him with a garden hose and he tried suicide twice, once when he was 10 and tried to blow his own head off with a shotgun but the weapon misfired. When he was 15 he tried to cut his wrists and was put in psychiatric care. He claimed to have a split personality and that his alter ego he called "Charlie" told him to do bad things.
Medlock had a rap sheet including two arrests for indecent exposure, one arrest for marijuana possession, and an arson and burglary conviction. In late 1987, shortly after his 17th birthday and while living in Nevada, Medlock dressed in a ninja Halloween costume and stalked a neighbor's 10 year old daughter. He broke into her house with the intent of raping her but nobody was home, so instead he poured gasoline on the floor and set the place on fire. In 1989, Medlock was living with his sister and nieces in Fresno, California and claimed Charlie was ordering him to harm his nieces. He finally moved out for fear that he would act on those thoughts and went back to Oklahoma, where, tragically, he couldn't restrain Charlie.
And so on Monday February 19, 1990, Medlock, by his own version of events, in his Yukon apartment when he heard a knock on the door and found Katherine Busch, the 7 year old daughter of some of his neighbors, standing outside. Katherine's mother Gina claimed she was quite shy and would not have so willingly approached a stranger, so she believed Medlock forced her into the apartment. Kathy was born in Oklahoma City on July 15, 1982 and her own family life had been a less than joyous one--her parents were divorced and her father Ken Busch was serving a prison sentence for forgery. Kathy had lived with her grandmother for a time while Gina was in Texas looking for work. The two eventually came to live in Yukon.
Although Gina Busch claimed her daughter was shy and introverted, the evidence seems to prove otherwise; the girl was known to wander off and disappear for hours, leaving her mother concerned. Sometimes she would turn up on a playground or feeding ducks at a nearby pond. On February 19, Kathy went out for her usual wanderings on her pink and white bicycle but when she was late even for her usual standards, Gina got worried and called police. The small town Yukon PD had limited resources and were slow to respond to Busch's report of a missing child. It was about eight hours before any action was taken. Police searched Kathy's usual hangout spots around town, didn't see her in any of them, and eventually one officer found her bicycle laying behind a drugstore three blocks from her home.
Detective Major Jim McDaniel opened the lid of the drugstore's Dumpster. Inside lay Kathy's lifeless body. She was nude and wrapped in a blanket, dead of a stab wound to the back of the neck and there were injuries, bruises, and contusions to other parts of the body including the anogenital region. The news of the heinous and completely senseless crime made Yukon residents angry. Medlock was not a suspect in the murder, but when he went to his job at a restaurant the next day a co-worker angrily remarked that whoever did this to Kathy should be "nailed to a stump."
Overcome by feelings of guilt, Medlock left work, walked across the street to a phone booth, dialed 911, and announced that he had killed Kathy and where they could find him. Police soon arrived to arrest him. Taken into custody, he readily confessed everything as he casually smoked cigarettes and sounded as relaxed and matter-of-factual as if he was discussing a baseball game. Jim McDaniel said that he didn't see a whole lot of remorse.
According to Medlock's confession, he had been living in the apartment complex for two weeks after having moved out of his sister's home in California and come to Yukon. He was watching TV when he heard someone jiggling the front doorknob, so he got up, opened it, and saw Kathy standing there next to her bicycle. To his surprise, she simply walked right in and remarked that she used to live here with her mother. Medlock scolded her for walking into a stranger's apartment without asking first. Kathy then replied that she was hungry, so Medlock offered to get her some food. He started preparing a dish of macaroni and cheese and offered her a bag of potato chips to munch on while she waited.
At this point, Medlock claimed he was getting a strange feeling overcoming him. He offered Kathy the macaroni and cheese but she didn't want to eat it and instead walked into his bedroom. She then remarked that this used to be her mom's room. "Oh yeah?" Medlock told her. "Yeah," she replied. Medlock grabbed Kathy by the arm and she jerked it back. He wrestled her to the ground, covered her mouth as she began yelling for help, and choked her unconscious. He dragged her to the toilet and stuck her face in the bowl as she continued to gasp for air; apparently she was still conscious at this point, so instead he stabbed her neck with a pocket knife but it broke so he got a more substantial hunting knife and stabbed her again. He pushed Kathy's head in the toilet to keep her blood from getting on the floor.
Detective McDaniel believed the murder was ultimately little more than a case of terrible luck. "She just knocked on the wrong apartment door," he remarked.
Once she had stopped bleeding, he laid the body in the bathtub, undressed, and washed it. Medlock then tried to rape her but was unable to get an erection so he wrapped the body in a blanket, put her in a large box that a TV set had come in, and dumped her body and the bicycle where they were found. He said the entire incident was a blur and he wondered if he'd dreamed the whole thing. He said he'd heard voices in his head since he was 12 years old. At times during the interview he referred to Kathy as "Norm", the name of an abusive stepfather, and suggested that he'd been hallucinating into thinking he was killing his stepfather instead of Kathy. Interviews with psychiatrists suggested that Medlock believed Kathy was an abandoned, unwanted child like he himself had been and so he was doing her a favor by putting her out of her misery. He pled guilty and waived his right to a jury trial. Judge Ed Cunningham sentenced him to death and he entered Oklahoma State Penitentiary's death row on March 28, 1991.
Medlock was executed by lethal injection on January 16, 2001 after the usual round of appeals, including his defense arguing that the autopsy of Kathy had not substantiated whether or not she was still living when he tried to rape her.
The build-up to his execution had a small bit of drama concerning Kathy's two grandmothers Judy Busch and Johnnie Cabrera as Busch favored the speedy execution of her granddaughter's killer while the latter was an anti-death penalty activist and was known to participate in anti-death penalty demonstrations. The two women did not get along well and were at best acquaintances and Busch argued that Cabrera didn't especially care about Kathy when she was living and was mostly using her as a vehicle for her activism. Busch was also unhappy with the Yukon PD's handling of the case, saying that it was hours before they tried to look for Kathy and that after they did find her, they told her family little other than they discovered her body; they had to turn on the news the next morning to find out what actually happened and she did not know the full details until Medlock was sentenced.
Cabrera also protested the execution in December 1999 of Cornel Cooks, a black man sentenced to death for the rape and murder of an elderly woman during a burglary in 1982. Despite the gruesome nature of that crime, Cabrera said Cooks should be shown mercy because he grew up abused and impoverished and was estimated as having a 75 IQ. Further, he had a white accomplice in his crime who was spared the death penalty.
Kathy Busch was buried in Resthaven Gardens Cemetery in Oklahoma City.
>>17866819>>17866834alright lady, if you're going to let your little shit run around the neighborhood unsupervised, barge into my place unannounced, and after I'm still nice enough to make her some food not eat it anyway I can't be held responsible for what happens. I ain't your fucking babysitter.
>>17866819I was sure not allowed to wander around town anywhere I fucking felt like at 7 years old. Kill all single moms.
he did her a favor. she no longer had to live in Oklahoma.
>>17866819Too bad she was cute but all the same she shouldn't have been allowed to go around town by herself like that something was going to happen eventually.
>>17866819>he small town Yukon PD had limited resources and were slow to respond to Busch's report of a missing child.>We'll get on it after we get back from a donut run, I promiseChief Wiggum was supposed to be a funny cartoon character not real life.
>>17866817 (OP)>>17866819He's white, OP, we don't care. If he was black we'd have something to discuss here.
Oklahoma sucks, please never visit it.
>>17866829>Taken into custody, he readily confessed everything as he casually smoked cigarettes and sounded as relaxed and matter-of-factual as if he was discussing a baseball game.damn the good ol' days when they still let you smoke indoors
American rednecks did all the crimes.
New yorkers and Californians would never do this shit.
>>17866817 (OP)6'' and white.
Still had it easy
>>17867064ha ha there are so many serial killers in California history that you could go on and on forever listing all of them
>>17867098The bad thing about a warm weather state that has an "anything goes" mentality.
>>17866850>>17866847wow her grandma was a massive cunt
>>17866819Entitled little shit, wasn't she?
>just barges into some dude's apartment uninvited and demands to be fed>won't even eat the stuff when you go through the trouble of cooking it for her
>>17867282she was raised by a single mom, why wouldn't she be?
>>17866889apparently Yukon had a low crime rate and was considered a quite safe town back then
>>17867282seriously the entire neighborhood ain't your fucking babysitter
>>17867282>>17868785She was 10, and it's not like she came there specifically for food. She knocked on his door because her and her mother used to live there. I really don't think it's that odd, in a small town people look out for each other more often.
