Have you heard about the Lea County Triple Murder? This is a really old case – from 1957, to be exact. It involves the unsolved shooting deaths of J.D. Cantrell, Barbara Lemmons, and Dorothy Gibson between Hobbs and Carlsbad on a torrid summer night. That night was supposed to be a fun one for Lemmons and Gibson; meanwhile, Cantrell was just headed to work like any other morning. None of them expected to die in the darkness of Hwy 62. All these years later, we are no closer to a motive or a suspect than we were back then.
The Scene of the Lea County Triple Murder
Snyder Ranch foreman named Tom Greene was driving westbound on Hwy 62 between Carlsbad and Hobbs around 4 am July 23. He noticed a man lying near the road, and an unoccupied diesel semi truck pulled over, idling with the lights on. A few yards behind the truck was a pale green 1952 Plymouth, unoccupied. The Plymouth was jacked up for a tire change and the trunk was open. Its spare tire had been taken out. He pulled over to assist and found a man lying on the shoulder with a weak pulse and spent shell casings around his body. He took off to a nearby potash mine for help.
Floyd Smith was also driving along Hwy 62 at about 4:00 am when he saw the same scene. Greene had just left to get help. Smith pulled over and checked on the man lying on the road. He was shocked to find the man had been shot. Smith also raced to the nearby potash mine for help.
Greene returned to the scene with an ambulance from the mine, only to find that the truck driver on the side of the road had succumbed to his injuries. Soon after, the Carlsbad police and Lea County sheriff deputies arrived.
Sheriff deputies looked in the Plymouth and found purses belonging to Barbara Lemmons, 23 of Hobbs, and Dorothy Gibson, also 23 of Hobbs. The green Plymouth belonged to Dorothy Gibson. But there was no sign of the women.
They quickly identified the truck driver as J.D. Cantrell of Artesia. He had only left for a delivery at 3:10 am that morning, so he had been attacked shortly before Floyd Smith and Tom Greene came along. Greene and Smith were lucky – they may have become victims too, had they come upon the scene any earlier.
With the women still missing, law enforcement worked to reconstruct the night’s events. They learned that the two women had gone out to Club Morrice on the state line near Hobbs to dance and listen to country music. They had a male friend whom they gave a ride back to Carlsbad. After dropping him off, the two women enjoyed coffee and candy at the bus station’s cafe. On the return drive to Hobbs, their car got a flat tire, so they pulled over to the shoulder of Highway 180.
J.D. Cantrell had just picked up a load of fuel in El Paso the night before and left at 3 am to deliver the fuel to Seagraves, TX. He was from Artesia. He probably pulled over to help the women when he saw they had a flat. It was thought he stopped to help them around 3:30 am and then was killed around 3:45 am.
There was evidence of a struggle on the side of the road, though whether it was between the killer and the women or the killer and Cantrell is unclear. J.D. Cantrell was shot four times with a .22 rifle. The women appeared to have been taken elsewhere.
The picture became more complete when an oil field worker found the two women in the desert off Buckeye Road, about six miles from their car. They were lying face down, fully clothed, and dead from .22 bullets. It could not be established if the women had been sexually assaulted, though the fact they were fully clothed suggests they were not. They were not robbed and all their cash remained in their purses in their car. So why would someone do this awful thing? It seems personal to me.
Other oil field workers who pulled on the scene were stopped and asked to comb the area for clues. I’m not sure why law enforcement thought it would be appropriate to enlist untrained civilians for evidence collection. Small wonder this triple murder is still unsolved.
Suspects
The triple murder was attributed to a “madman” in the papers. But no suspect was ever formally charged. I can’t even find speculation about who it might have been.
An interesting fact is that both women were divorced. Their former husbands took them to the club in Hobbs the night they were killed. Did one of the ex-husbands get jealous and ambush the women on the side of the road? Either ex-husband would have known exactly where the women would be driving. One of them could have even sabotaged the tire somehow so that they got a flat.
I’m also curious about the male friend for whom they gave a ride to Carlsbad. Why did they give him a ride – did he not own a car? Did he have a car at home in Carlsbad, which he got into after the women dropped him off in order to follow them? What was the nature of the friendship and did he have romantic interest in one or both of the women?
The police cleared all three men as suspects with lie detector tests, which are notoriously unreliable and inadmissible in court. Since most murder victims are killed by people they know, I think these three men could be the strongest leads in the case.
The fact the killer removed the women from the scene and took them to a field makes me think that they were his intended victims and Cantrell was just in the way. I’m also curious about the motive. Why would you go through the trouble of killing three people and abducting two of them to a location six miles away if you didn’t want to rob them or rape them? Either the medical examiner missed evidence of rape, or the killer wanted these women dead for a personal reason. The way he abducted them makes me think he wanted to scare them and make them suffer.
At the time, most people thought that the three victims met with a serial killer. People all over New Mexico became fearful. When different crimes occurred around the state, the first thought was always, “Could this be the man who shot the three people in Lea County?”
Police tracked leads in Texas and Colorado, questioned men who had .22 rifles, and even interrogated a man who attempted to kidnap a postmistress in Tinnie. They attempted to link this case to the Mattie and Patty case in Carlsbad in 1961. They also attempted to link it to Charles Cox and the headless torso. But these connections never panned out.
The location of the bodies makes me think this was a person familiar with the area. He knew he wouldn’t be interrupted for a while off Buckeye Road. He may have also wanted the women to suffer in terror, which is why he abducted them and drove them six miles away, instead of just quickly shooting them on the side of Hwy 62 like J.D. Cantrell and then speeding off.
Hwy 62 is a desolate 62-mile stretch between Hobbs and Carlsbad. It was even more desolate back in 1957, when it was a narrow two-lane road primarily used by miners and truckers. There weren’t very many people traveling it at 3-4 am. Whoever attacked the women may have come upon them randomly, but I think it is more likely that the killer knew they would be on this highway and targeted them. The arrival of J.D. Cantrell was probably quite unexpected for the killer. The eerie thing is that Greene and Smith may have passed the killer driving eastbound as he transported the women to their deaths on Buckeye Road.
I think it is possible that more than one person was involved. It is certainly not unheard of for one person to control multiple victims at a crime scene. The “flight or fight” instinct in many people causes them to freeze when faced with the threat of death. Criminals take advantage of that fact. The 1968 slaying of the Arrellano family in Texas is an example of one person controlling multiple victims. But an accomplice certainly would have made it easier to control multiple victims. So we can’t rule out the possibility that more than one person was involved.
The Victims
Barbara Lemmons is buried in the Memorial Gardens of Hobbs. She was a lovely woman and left behind two children, Sharron Dean and Charles Eddard, as well as her parents and two sisters. She had been living with her parents at the time of her death.
Dorothy Gibson was survived by two sisters who both lived in Hobbs as well as her mother and father. She had no children. She had been a clerk at the Hobbs News Sun. Now she lies eternally in the Prairie Heaven Cemetery in Hobbs.
J.D. Cantrell was a 27-year-old Army veteran who drove a truck for a living. He left behind a wife Barbara, a daughter Pamela, a son Jeffrey, his mother and father, two sisters, and four brothers. He was known as a hard worker and a nice guy who always went out of his way to help people.
Sources:
https://genealogytrails.com/newmex/lea/obitsL.html
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/49606395/barbara_ann-lemmons
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=MT19570723.2.14&e=——-en–20–1–txt-txIN——–
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[…] thought that the Mattie and Patty murders might be related to the Lea County Triple Murder of 1957. The two intended victims of the Lea County triple murder, Barbara Lemmons and Dorothy Gibson, were […]