Nice win for cold case unit
Since June 2013 when Charles Nieman was shot to death outside a convenience store in Boise City, family and friends had been left to wonder who killed him, and why. Today they're closer than ever to getting those answers.
Work by a new cold case unit within the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation led to the arrests recently of three men who now stand accused in Nieman's death. The unit, formed Nov. 1, is looking at a minimum of 1,276 murder or missing persons cases that have gone cold since 1950, a date chosen because of the likelihood the suspects might still be alive.
“These individuals have escaped justice and are, in some cases, posing as normal citizens who carry a horrible secret,” OSBI Director Ricky Adams wrote in The Oklahoman in October. “Somewhere out there are answers to what happened to those missing or murdered Oklahomans.”
Nieman, 77, of Alva, was shot after he and his wife stopped for gas on June
12, 2013. The OSBI says a gunman demanded Nieman's wallet. Nieman, who had hearing troubles, was shot when he asked his wife what the man had said (his wife, Yvonne, was not hurt).
OSBI agents began reviewing Nieman's case in December, initiating a meandering trail to the suspects.
A break came when an agent reran shell casings from the scene through a ballistics database. A match turned up from a stolen gun seized in Denver. The gun had been taken from a Louisiana police chief's vehicle at his home days before Nieman's killing.
A few houses down from that home, a charcoal gray pickup truck was stolen. That pickup — recovered in Colorado two weeks after the Nieman shooting — could be seen in surveillance video from the attack in Boise City.
Agents determined that Zachery Lee Wilson had traded the pickup to a Colorado man for methamphetamine. Agents also tracked down the stolen gun, which was found to have fired the shell casings at the homicide scene.
Earlier this month, Wilson was arrested and told investigators he was there when Nieman was killed. He said another man, Timothy Erish Dees, had gotten out of the pickup. Wilson heard two gunshots, according to an affidavit.
Wilson, 28, and Dees, 24, were arrested in Mobile, Alabama. A third man, Jeremy Hugh Scott, 33, was arrested two days later in Colorado. All three are charged with first-degree murder in Cimarron County.
This case involved law enforcement, and evidence, from Oklahoma, Colorado, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. “We've been all over the place. This has been a massive effort,” Adams said.
It's the first of what he hopes will be several “wins” for the unit. We join our good wishes to his as the OSBI pursues justice for victims, however belated.