By Robert A.
Waters
“How sad that to Billy Don Alverson, a life is only worth a new pair of Nikes.” Chester Cadieux III, president and CEO of QuikTrip Corporation.
On January 7, 2011, CBS News reported that the "Oklahoma Department of Corrections says 39-year-old Billy Don Alverson was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. Thursday after receiving a lethal dose of drugs while strapped to a hospital gurney. Alverson was among four men convicted in the February 1995 killing of 30-year-old Richard Yost, who was the night manager of a convenience store in Tulsa. His body was found bound and beaten on the blood-soaked floor of the store's cooler."
The brutality of the crime and indifference shown by the killers certainly made death the only just punishment.
Yost, married with two children, managed the night shift of the QuikTrip convenience store on 251 North Garnett Road. Yost clocked in at 11:00 p.m. on February 25, 1995. He replaced clerk Michael Wilson, who left the store.
At around 4:00 a.m., Wilson returned to the store with three other men: Billy Don Alverson, Darwin D. Brown, and Richard Harjo, 17. They chatted for a few minutes until Yost left the counter area and began cleaning the windows of the coolers. (It's likely Yost felt uncomfortable around the men and attempted to move away from them.)
Within seconds, all four men surrounded the manager. According to court documents, the "defendants attacked [Yost] and dragged him to the back room. One of the defendants, Billy Alverson, came back out and picked up some items that were knocked from the shelves and kept watch for customers. A few moments later, Alverson and Harjo walked out the front of the store. While they were going out, Yost was yelling and screaming for help, possibly thinking that a customer had entered the store."
The men duct-taped Yost's legs and placed handcuffs on his wrists.
The court wrote that "Alverson and Harjo re-entered the store with Harjo carrying a black aluminum baseball bat. He carried the bat to where Yost had been taken. The surveillance camera picked up the sounds of the bat striking Yost. Circumstantial evidence showed that the baseball bat struck the handcuffs on Yost's wrists which Yost was holding above his head to ward off the blows. As the blows were being struck, Wilson walked from the back room, checked his hands, put on a QuikTrip jacket, got behind the counter and tried to move the safe. While Wilson was behind the counter, several customers came in. Wilson greeted them with a friendly greeting, sold them merchandise, then said, 'Thank you, come again,' or 'have a nice day.'"
In between serving customers, Wilson continued working to remove the safe. He also took all the cash from the register and pulled money out of the currency change machine. He and his cohorts eventually located the store's dolly and used it to roll the safe to Wilson's car where they placed it in the back seat. Before leaving the store, Wilson extracted the surveillance video and took it with him. The safe contained $30,000 in cash. When the killers got home, they pried it open and retrieved the money.
The court wrote that "Yost's body was discovered by Larry Wiseman, a customer, at about 6:00 a.m. Yost was laying on the floor in a pool of blood, milk and beer."
Yost had been struck more than 50 times with the bat. His arms and hands were bruised and broken, showing he'd attempted to resist the attack. The medical examiner found a pin from the handcuffs embedded in Yost's head.
While speaking with customers who had been at the store that night, detectives learned that Wilson was working the counter between 4:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Investigators placed his home under surveillance. When he and the other suspects got into Wilson's car, cops pounced, arresting them. Detectives discovered large sums of cash on all the suspects except Wilson. When arrested, each suspect wore a brand-new pair of expensive Nike sneakers.
Wilson quickly confessed to being the mastermind behind the robbery and murder. He told interrogators the four had planned the crime for two weeks before carrying it out. While searching Alverson's home, cops found the drop safe, the dolly, QuikTrip glass cleaner, money tubes and the store surveillance tape. In Wilson's home, investigators discovered the blood-stained baseball bat, a bloody QuikTrip jacket with Yost's name on it, Wilson's Nike jacket matching the one seen in the surveillance video, and part of the cuff that had broken off the handcuffs. This trove of incriminating evidence proved beyond doubt that the four men had committed the murder.
Wilson, Alverson, and Brown were convicted and sentenced to death. Since Harjo was only 17 at the time of the murder, he beat the system, receiving only a sentence of life in prison without parole.
Sixteen years after the cold-blooded murder, Alverson went to that eternal sleep with a needle in his arm. Darwin Brown was executed in 2009, and Michael Wilson's appeals ran out in 2014.
Years later, during some of Alverson's numerous appeals, Angela Houser-Yost wrote that her husband's murder devastated her and her family. She stated that her sons were eight-years-old and two-years-old at the time he was killed. "Anxiety plays a major role in my life now," she said. "I can also sense when the anniversary of Richard's death is without looking at a calendar. I start shutting down inside and avoid talking with family and friends."
No comments:
Post a Comment