A former reality TV star is at the center of a growing innocence campaign more than a decade after he was sentenced to 92 years in prison. And now, the filmmaker who helped make him a small-screen personality is working to tell his story.
Bradley Beesley, creator of the National Geographic reality series Mudcats and the documentary filmmaker behind The Fearless Freaks, Summercamp!, and Okie Noodling, may be taking true crime for a spin with his next project. According to a new investigative report from Slate, the director has already begun work on a podcast and is eyeing a potential documentary focused entirely on Winston Walters.
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View this post on InstagramBeesley met Walters through Mudcats. The show featured the then-17-year-old catfish noodler from Oklahoma and his cousin as hand-fishing athletes competing in the Okie Invitational Tournament for cash and honor.
The 2012 series captured Walters and the other participants braving riptides, snakes, insects, severe droughts, and sweltering temperatures as they attempted to snatch massive Flathead catfish weighing up to 60 pounds from the water with their bare hands.
According to the outlet, Walters and his cousin performed poorly in season one but were far more competitive in the follow-up season.
“I can’t believe these people are going to pay me a couple thousand dollars per episode to go fishing,” Walters said, via Slate. “I just thought that was the funniest thing in the world.”
In January 2013, however, Walters’ story took a dark turn. The rising star was implicated, along with an accomplice, John Oxford, in a brutal home invasion and armed robbery targeting Mark and Rita Roebuck in Comanche, Oklahoma.
According to court testimony, two masked men broke into the Roebuck residence through the rear entrance. When Mark went to investigate, he was confronted by an intruder pointing a rifle at him. A struggle ensued, and Mark was shot twice. The intruders then duct-taped Rita to a chair and forced the couple to open their safe. The intruders then fled the scene with $28,000 in hundred-dollar bills and several firearms.
“John Oxford stood there with a gun pointing right between my eyes,” Mark told ABC News.
Mark’s account of who shot him came after he and several other pieces of evidence initially implicated the Roebucks’ nephew, Jeramy Roebuck. In the end, authorities cleared Jeramy and focused on Oxford and Walters.
Oxford pleaded guilty as the second gunman and is now serving a 72-year sentence. Walters, however, has maintained his innocence to this day, denying any involvement in the crime. Still, he was convicted and sentenced to 92 years in prison, a sentence he is now more than a decade into.
“My brother didn’t do that,” Walters’ younger half-brother, Noah Collins, told Slate. “That’s what I believe. As a man of God, he still proclaims his innocence. It’s not him.”
Since his conviction, a social media campaign has rallied around the possibility that Walters was wrongly convicted. Per Slate, Beesley “took a shine” to Walters while he was on the show and was “stunned” by how his story turned out. After reviewing the case, the outlet said the filmmaker came away suspecting the noodler may have been wrongfully convicted, reporting also that he’s already begun work on a podcast and a possible film.
Because the two share personal history, the potential documentary becomes much more compelling than a generic true-crime adaptation. As does this next twist: Mark reached out to Walters in prison recently with a “strange” offer.
Delivered by message through a correctional officer named Ronnie Sloan, Mark said that if Walters agreed to a written confession accepting guilt in the attack, he’d consider supporting an effort to reduce Walters’ sentence. Walters wrote the letter, but he stopped short of fully confessing to the crime.
“I fully, wholly, and from the bottom of my heart apologize purely in a good way to you,” Walters wrote. He also apologized for befriending Oxford, and he signed off with a request to correspond and perhaps visit someday, Slate shared.
Despite the offer relayed by Sloan, Mark declined to read the letter, saying he didn’t want anything to do with it.
However, during his meeting with Slate, he went back and forth on whether he’d support an effort to reduce Walters’ sentence, saying, “If the jury came up with this [92-year sentence], that’s what they see fit,” only to contradict that with, “After really thinking about it and going through all this time, it’s hard to say. Yeah, probably, because … that’s a long time.”
The whole saga makes for an entirely fascinating story and begs the ultimate question: Could this be the next Making a Murderer? Though no finished documentary or announced release is on record yet, readers are captivated as the story unfolds in real time.
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