Convicted child killer to face murder charge in ‘96 Las Vegas homicide

On Sept. 28, 1996, Timothy Owen walked out of the Cheetahs Las Vegas strip club and saw a group of people attempting to steal rims off a car in a nearby parking lot.

Owen decided he was going to intervene. That decision cost him his life.

“He came out and saw that they were capering … they were in physical contact with the car, and he was like, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing?’ ” said veteran Las Vegas homicide Detective Dean O’Kelley.

A fight broke out. Owen was bludgeoned with a wooden table leg and would later die of his injuries. It was a vicious, brutal crime that, for two decades, looked like it would never be solved.

But persistence by law enforcement would eventually pay off. Thanks to the Metropolitan Police Department Homicide Cold Case squad, evidence from the crime scene was linked in 2016 to a convicted child killer in Ohio named Toby Wilcox.

This week, some 23 years after Timothy Owen was left in a pool of blood in the 2100 block of Western Avenue, Wilcox, 41, was brought to Southern Nevada to face justice.

After the attack, Owen was taken to University Medical Center with severe injuries. He died from those injuries in an extended care facility on July 27, 1997, according to an arrest report for Wilcox.

Cold case investigation

Longtime Metro homicide Detectives Dean O’Kelley and Ken Hefner picked up on the cold case nearly 20 years after the fact. The detectives are retired, but they work part-time on old cases that have gone unsolved for years. When they looked at the case file, they learned Owen was a divorced musician and kind of a loner. A photo of Owen showed him playing the trumpet in a small band. It looked like the musicians were playing outside a church.

The detectives learned something else from the case file. There was fingerprint evidence recovered from the crime scene. In fact, fingerprint evidence was found on the bloody table leg that was left behind. Also in the case file was information indicating that, after the fact, a confidential informant gave police the names of possible suspects.

The detectives noticed the fingerprint evidence was never cross- referenced against the suspects’ names provided by the informant.

“We had another detective kind of review the case a little bit and saw we had some fingerprints on the murder weapon,” O’Kelley said. “One was a definitely identifiable fingerprint and one partial fingerprint on what was believed to be the murder weapon. It hadn’t been compared to the individuals provided by the confidential informant.”

The detectives began the laborious task of getting the prints compared. It took time, but the investigators got a hit. The prints matched those of Wilcox.

“He had been convicted for a double murder in Ohio,” O’Kelley said.

A child’s slaying

The detectives learned Wilcox was serving two life sentences without parole for a double slaying in the Columbus area.

According to online news reports, Wilcox was convicted of killing Habu Westbrook and Alamar Wright in May 2003. The Akron Legal News reported that authorities in Ohio said Westbrook sold marijuana and was living with his fiancée and her infant son, Wright. The woman said they were at home when two men showed up and held them at gunpoint. Westbrook was shot to death.

The Columbus Dispatch reported that the gunmen then went to shoot the fiancée as she held her baby. A bullet struck the baby.

Wilcox and a second defendant avoided the death penalty and were sentenced to life in prison.

“It was a dope rip inside an apartment,” O’Kelley said. “Two people were killed. One was a child. A baby. He killed a drug dealer … during a narcotics transaction, and he went to shoot a female who was holding a baby and the bullet went through her hand, hit the baby and killed the baby.”

Las Vegas detectives went to an Ohio prison in 2016 to interview Wilcox.

“During our interview he admitted to striking our victim with a table leg, which is where his print was found,” O’Kelley said. “He admitted to striking him once … but we know he had to have hit him more than once, because there was cast-off blood at the crime scene.”

A warrant charging Wilcox with murder was obtained. It took several years to bring him back to Southern Nevada. On Thursday morning, Wilcox stood in the courtroom of Las Vegas Justice of the Peace Diana Sullivan as his prosecution in Nevada commenced.

For those who never gave up on the Owen case, it was worth the wait.

“There is no statute of limitation on a murder,” O’Kelley said. “If you take the life of another person, we are going to take it as far as we can possibly go to seek justice for that person and for their family.”

Contact Glenn Puit at gpuit@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0390. Follow @GlennatRJ on Twitter.