AVARD—It’s been 70 years since Mildred Ann “Annie” Newlin Reynolds mysteriously died on a red dirt road outside of Avard.
That Tuesday, March 13, 1956, started like any other day for the 22-year-old Lambert native. She was running errands in Alva where she had attended class that morning at Northwestern State College (renamed Northwestern Oklahoma State University in 1974) before heading home to Avard.
Family later said she normally would travel to and from the 15 miles with her nephew, except on Tuesdays, when he would catch a ride with someone else after his afternoon class and she would go home alone.
Reynolds lived in a farmhouse with her husband of 10 months, R.D. “Dee” Reynolds, in the Avard area, where the Army veteran (who grew up in Freedom) was a teacher and basketball coach at the high school which was in the middle of town. It was her first marriage, but his second.
Annie and Dee Reynolds (Photo provided)
The burning question
On a county road near Hopeton, another rural community east of Avard and south of Alva, law enforcement officials discovered a jarring scene early that Tuesday afternoon after a local farmer alerted authorities of smoke.
A charred body in a green dress later identified as Reynolds lay across the front seat with the head on the passenger side and the feet with only one shoe on by the steering wheel in the burning 1949 Chevy sedan that was still in first gear. The blaze had been so intense, the right leg from the knee down had been burned off.
She had been less than two miles from home.
According to the Oklahoma crime bureau investigator’s report, Reynolds had been driving westbound up a hill on that county road when her car suddenly pulled to the left, making impressions in the sand about two inches from the road.
The car’s brakes had been applied slightly, causing the vehicle to roll backwards and zigzag by the bar ditch. The rear wheels began to spin, so the driver placed it in drive and hit a tree. After backing up, the car hit a small fence, tearing off the car’s bumper guard. The car was pulled forward and backed up again before coming to a stop in the middle of the red dirt road.
There were no other vehicle tracks aside from the ones that matched Reynolds’ car (although later statements were made that there was, in fact, an extra set of car tracks nearby indicating the possibility of a second car) and no footprints found leading to or from the car alongside the road or in the field.
However, one of her blood-spattered shoes was found 250 feet from her car, and her coat was outside of the vehicle, too, along with buttons from her blouse.
The case report stated the car’s tires and solenoid starter switch had melted, which could explain why the car had pulled, and the drain plug had two rivets instead of the normal four inside the gas tank had also melted and been located 16 feet from the burnt car by the wrecker service.
Had the brake drum overheated, igniting the fuel tank and setting off an explosion? That’s what investigators theorized.
Additionally, the case report noted the muffler had a large hole in the front and small holes on top. The exhaust pipe was bent, allowing 30-40% of the exhaust out.
Although the pathologist in Oklahoma City noted Reynolds’ skull had an unexplained fracture, other skull fractures were believed to have happened as a result of the automobile fire.
Ultimately the autopsy determined Reynolds burned to death; however, the coroner’s jury report deemed her death could be either an accident or foul play, as both were plausible.
How or why the fire started still remains a mystery.
To this day, the Woods County Sheriff’s office has never closed the investigation, making it a cold case that was recently brought back into the spotlight on the 70th anniversary of Reynolds’ death on OklahomaColdCases.org.
In an interview with The Oklahoman in 2014, the sheriff told reporter Mike Coppock he was still treating it as a homicide and had maintained three pieces of evidence on file: the car’s gas tank, a tree limb supposedly knocked off during the collision, and the victim’s rosary beads.
In Oklahoma alone, there are over 2,500 homicide cases that remain unsolved, so the mission of Oklahoma Cold Cases is to share the stories of victims such as Reynolds.
The burnt out car (Photo provided)
A haunting history
On the 60th anniversary of Reynolds’ death, a distant relative spoke to the Enid News & Eagle’s Emily Summars, a correspondent for the newspaper at that time. Lacey Newlin grew up in Burlington hearing the stories about Reynolds—who was a cousin of Newlin’s grandfather—but she never knew the details.
Herself a journalist for the High Plains Journal in Dodge City, Kan., Newlin came across Reynolds’ name while researching ghost stories.
Newlin, now married and living in Loyal, contacted relatives for their rendition of Reynolds’ death in 2016, including Reynolds’ sister Barbara who encouraged Newlin to talk to old acquaintances in an attempt to find out what actually happened that day in 1956.
“It was surprising how the family would have different versions of it, and no one was really on the same page with it,” Newlin told Summars.
Unfortunately, after hundreds of phone calls and visits with numerous classmates still living in the Cherokee area, no one else really knew anything, she said, perhaps because the details were so gruesome, and the case went nowhere.
Reynolds’ husband, plagued by whispers and side looks questioning his possible involvement in her death, had already moved away and remarried for the third time. He purportedly sent flowers to her grave in Cherokee until his death.
Since she perished, Avard residents long believed that Annie Reynolds haunted the old Avard high school gym, which is now privately owned, looking for her husband.
After the Avard post office closed in 1963 and Avard Public Schools closed for good five years later, the gym eventually became Vina Rae’s Grill & Graze, a local café owned by then-Avard mayor Nan Wheatley. In a tiny town of less than 30 residents, the café mostly served local farmers and railroaders back then.
A lifelong resident of the Woods County community, Wheatley often recounted the tale of the woman in the green dress who would appear at the lunch counter and disappear just as quickly.
Both customers and staff repeatedly testified to strange sightings of a ghostly headless visage that went through walls, floating mists, and glowing orbs in the building as well as cold spots and such a strong sense of a presence that Wheatley even placed a sign saying “Ann’s Room” over one particular room.
Throughout the 2000s, ghost hunters with their paranormal equipment frequently appeared on the scene in an attempt to summon or connect with the spirit but to no avail.
Lacey Newlin holds a photo of her distant cousin Annie Reynolds on the dirt road near Hopeton where Reynolds died (Photo by Emily Summars)
Lingering in the shadows
Founded in 1895, the town was named for its first postmistress Isabell Avard Todd, whose son Frank Todd owned the land Avard was located on. It became incorporated in 1904, swelling to 250 residents.
In its heyday, Avard was a bustling crossroads for the Frisco railway that interlocked with the Santa Fe transcontinental line, shipping cattle, freight, and passengers.
The town was thriving until the Depression, drought, and dust storms devastated it in the 1930s, followed by tornados ripping through town twice in 1943 and 1944. Even the opening of the Avard Regional Rail Park more than seven decades later didn’t help.
When the Avard grain co-op closed (all that remains is a substation of Alva Farmers’ Co-op Association), the town went unincorporated in 2010 and the café soon closed. Wheatley died in 2017.
Today Avard’s population is less than 10. This Northwest Oklahoma town is literally a ghost town.
And the old high school gym now sits abandoned in the middle of town amidst an overgrown junkyard listening to the occasional train barrel through as the unsolved case of Annie Reynolds continues to linger in the shadows.
Present-day Avard (Photo by Ruth Ann Replogle)