A two-day manhunt for a man suspected in three murders in Oklahoma and another in Alabama ended on Thursday with Stacy Lee Drake’s arrest in Arkansas.
The hunt for Drake began early Tuesday evening in Oklahoma when Sequoyah County deputies responded to a report that two people were dead at a business in Gans, KOCO reported. The deputies found a woman and a man — identified as Tara Underwood and Taylor Sharp — dead on the scene, with injuries consistent with homicide.
With the assistance of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, the sheriff’s office identified Drake, 50, as the suspect.
Sheriff Larry Kane said that Drake had abandoned a truck he was driving on Saturday in Sallisaw before walking into LaFerry’s Propane on Tuesday. Surveillance footage shows him arriving at the business Tuesday afternoon and then leaving in one of the victim’s cars. No one else entered or exited while he was there.
The car he took was later found at a Motel 5 in Morrilton, Arkansas, and surveillance footage there showed him in the same clothing he had been wearing in Gans.
Arkansas State Police picked up the trail on Wednesday, saying Drake had been seen buying camping gear and was believed to still be in the Morrilton area. On Thursday, they said he’d been captured at about 10 a.m. in a wooded area near the intersection of University Boulevard and Poor Farm Road.
After his arrest in Arkansas, police in El Reno, Oklahoma, said he was a suspect in a June 14 murder there. That suspect was identified as 56-year-old Phillip Emerson, whose brother told KWTV that Emerson had met Drake at an AA meeting in El Reno. Emerson’s truck was missing, and the discovery of that truck in Sallisaw was the “piece that helped tie the victim to what turned out to be Mr. Drake,” El Reno’s Police Chief Ken Brown said.
But that wasn’t all. Drake was already wanted in Alabama for the murder of Russell Thomas Andrews, who was found dead in an Alcoholics Anonymous building in Tuscaloosa on May 14.
Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit Capt. Jack Kennedy told AL.com that investigators are now looking around to see if Drake could be responsible for more deaths.
“It would not be surprising to me at all,” Kennedy said. “If you look at his criminal history, he was continuously escalating his violent behavior.”
Drake was previously charged with Andrews’s murder and has now been charged with the murders of Underwood and Sharp in Sequoyah County. He has not yet been charged with Emerson’s murder.
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[Featured image: Stacy Lee Drake/Arkansas State Police]
