After McCurtain County officials dispatched with the agenda and ushered citizens out of a public meeting last month in southeastern Oklahoma, they spoke among themselves without realizing they were being secretly recorded, a local newspaper reported.
Over the weekend, the newspaper published an article recounting a portion of that alleged conversation, promising to follow up with more reporting in coming weeks. The paper also posted snippets of the audio online. Gazette-News reporter Bruce Willingham told KWTV he left his recorder hoping to get evidence that officials were holding secret meetings.
“I was completely appalled and frightened, quite frankly,” Willingham told the station.
On Sunday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) called for the resignation of four officials who, according to the Gazette-News, were part of that conversation, including county commissioner Mark Jennings, Sheriff Kevin Clardy, sheriff’s investigator Alicia Manning and county jail administrator Larry Hendrix.
“I am both appalled and disheartened to hear of the horrid comments made by officials in McCurtain County,” the governor said in a statement provided to The Washington Post. “There is simply no place for such hateful rhetoric in the state of Oklahoma, especially by those that serve to represent the community through their respective office. I will not stand idly by while this takes place.”
The Post reviewed the recordings but could not independently verify the identities of the speakers.
None of the McCurtain officials or their lawyer responded Monday to requests for comment. In a Facebook post published Monday night, the sheriff’s office said the recordings were “illegally obtained,” have not been authenticated, and that “preliminary information” indicates they were “altered.”
The sheriff’s office described recording the officials as “criminal activity” that it’s investigating with other agencies. After finishing that probe, investigators will submit their findings “to the appropriate authorities for felony charges to be filed on those involved,” the sheriff’s office post states.
The recorded comments were made at the March 6 public meeting of the McCurtain Board of Commissioners, the Gazette-News reported. After the public left, Sheriff Clardy gave the board an update on a deadly fire that had happened four days earlier when a 43-year-old woman died after rushing back into the flames to try to save her two dogs, according to the paper.
Then someone asked a question about burn victims’ body parts.
“You never had barbecue?” Hendrix allegedly asked, rhetorically.
Later, the conversation turned to Gazette-News reporter Christopher Willingham’s coverage of the sheriff’s office. Manning, the sheriff’s investigator, allegedly said she had some packages to take to the shipping center, which is located near the newspaper’s office, and feared running into Willingham, Bruce’s son, because of what she might do to him.
“Oh, you’re talking about you can’t control yourself?” commissioner Jennings asked her, according to the newspaper’s reporting.
“Yeah, I ain’t worried about what he’s going to do to me. I’m worried about what I might do to him,” she allegedly said. “My papaw would have … wiped him and used him for toilet paper.”
Later, Jennings allegedly told Clardy and Manning that he knew of “two big, deep holes” if they needed them. Jennings later allegedly said he’d come across “two or three hit men” in his life who “would cut no … mercy” to Chris Willingham.
On March 6, the same day as the secretly recorded meeting, Willingham had sued county commissioners, the sheriff’s office, Clardy and Manning in the U.S. District Court of Eastern Oklahoma, accusing them of slandering him.
His suit followed years of reporting on the sheriff’s department for the Gazette-News. In November 2021, the newspaper ran the first article in what would be an eight-part series about misconduct in the sheriff’s office, according to the lawsuit. Over the next five months, the newspaper exposed several instances of alleged misconduct in the sheriff’s office based on interviews with current and former employees, including homicide evidence that had been tainted, questionable hirings of employees with no previous law enforcement experience and an investigation into who in the sheriff’s office was leaking information, the suit says.
In an effort to plug the leak, Clardy threatened to fire any of his employees who spoke with Willingham, and Manning told deputies she would get search warrants for their cellphones, it alleges.
In June 2022, Manning allegedly retaliated against Willingham for his reporting by telling someone that the reporter had traded marijuana for child pornography. That same day, Manning said in a teleconference that Willingham was “one of them,” mentioning the name of a man who had been convicted of having child pornography and sexually abusing a child, Willingham’s suit alleges.
Those were lies to smear Willingham and destroy his credibility as a journalist, it adds.
Four days after the March 6 meeting, Willingham and the Gazette-News also sued the sheriff’s office and Clardy, this time in state court, alleging the office spent months illegally denying public records requests related to 45-year-old Bobby Barrick, who died in March 2022 after a deputy Tasered him, the suit alleges. The FBI and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation later investigated Barrick’s death, it adds.
The Willinghams’ lawyer, Christin Jones, said in a statement that their family has owned the paper for more than 40 years. For nearly a year, they have suffered intimidation, ridicule and harassment for trying to report the news to their fellow McCurtain County residents, the lawyer said. And while they are extremely grateful for the support they’ve received in the past few days, “they look forward to the day when they can continue to report the news and not be the news.”
The newspaper plans to run two more stories based on those and has promised to release the full recording once the series has been published.
