Editorial: Final question remains in KFC murders – technology won’t answer it
Published 5:31 am Saturday, December 27, 2025
On the front page of the Nov. 26 edition of this newspaper, a headline proclaimed, “Last piece of KFC murders puzzle in place.” If each perpetrator of the crime is a piece, the assertion is true. But deeper consideration reveals there’s more to this puzzle.
More than 40 years ago, the heinous deaths of five people abducted from that Kilgore restaurant left an open, violent wound on a city – and our region. Years sped by; answers arrived in a trickle; justice was delayed, but found.
We’re grateful that DNA technology has, at last, identified the final man responsible for the crime.
But we wonder if that wound can truly heal until those still left to mourn the victims understand why their loved ones were killed Sept. 23, 1983.
As much as crime-solving technology has advanced – from fingerprint analysis to DNA testing and now genealogical DNA testing – it can never provide that piece of the puzzle.
Unfortunately, the one person who can – Romeo Pinkerton – has been unwilling to detail why he, Darnell Hartsfield and Devon Riggs turned a robbery into a quintuple homicide.
Hartsfield and Riggs – recently unveiled as the last perpetrator – are dead. And if Pinkerton reads this publication from his permanent home in The James V. Allred Unit in Wichita Falls, we implore him to do the right thing. Give the people who need it real closure. Stop keeping the details of your crime a secret. Explain what happened and why. Provide the true final piece of this puzzle.
It’s also important to point out the lesson for law enforcement in the investigation remains vital and relevant decades later.
A wrong turn – a pathologist’s incorrect conclusion about a piece of fingernail found during an autopsy – kept authorities off track for years. Intense focus turned to a suspect who later would be cleared. (We have declined to print the name of the falsely accused suspect in previous stories over the years, and that won’t change here.) Assumptions can have serious consequences, especially during criminal investigations – a little yeast does indeed leaven the whole batch.
That this newspaper has likely written its last words about Pinkerton, Hartsfield and Riggs doesn’t leave us disappointed. No East Texas cold case is as heartbreaking – or as confounding – as the Kentucky Fried Chicken murders. Its resolution was a welcome and satisfying revelation.
And if 2026 is as kind as 2025, we’ll find out what happened to 17-year-old Kelly Wilson on Jan. 5, 1992, after she left that Gilmer video store and was never seen or heard from again.