Accident, Suicide, or Murder? The Aeileen Conway Riddle

When someone is suddenly, inexplicably murdered, such cases can be very difficult to solve.  When law enforcement is unable to decide if a person’s violent death is a result of murder, accident, or even suicide, you generally have a mystery where finding a solution is virtually impossible.  Such was the tragic case of a seemingly normal housewife.

Fifty-year-old Aeileen Conway lived with her husband of 33 years, Pat, in Lawton, Oklahoma.  Although there is little public information about her personal life, she appeared to have led a quiet, ordinary, peaceable existence, which ended in an extremely shocking way on April 29, 1986.

On that day, a farmer working in his fields just outside of Lawton saw smoke coming from a nearby road.  He notified police, and about twenty minutes later, Oklahoma Highway Patrol officers arrived at the scene.  It was a remote, lonely road that for years had seen little activity.  The officers found that the source of the smoke was a car crashed inside a deserted bridge.  The vehicle was burning so fiercely that it had fused with the metal guardrail.  The officers saw that a body was inside the car, although it proved to be burned beyond recognition.  Skid marks on the road indicated that the car had been going 50 to 60 miles an hour when it smashed into the bridge.  The officers assumed that what they were dealing with was a gruesome, but unremarkable accident.

It was soon learned that the car was registered to Pat Conway, and by the next day, the body was identified as his wife Aeileen.  Case closed?  Not as far as Pat was concerned.  He insisted that some sort of foul play had led to his wife’s brutal death.  He pointed out that when he returned home from work on the day Aeileen died, he found their house in a state of rather sinister disorder.  Aeileen’s purse containing her driver’s license and eyeglasses, which she always carried whenever she left the house, was still there.  A garden hose was on, running water into their swimming pool.  The ironing board was set up, with the iron still on.  A bathtub was full of water, and their phone was off the hook, as though Aeileen had been interrupted while trying to make a call.  Some jewelry was missing from the house.  To Pat and his children, this all screamed that Aeileen’s death was no simple accident.

Pat and Ray Anderson, an investigator from the District Attorney’s office, went to the crash site to conduct their own inquiry.  They found a church bulletin on the ground some distance from the scene.  Pat identified it as one that Aeileen kept on her car’s dashboard.  However, his wife always drove with the windows rolled up, so the bulletin could not have flown out of the car.  To Pat and Ray Anderson, this indicated that the car had been stopped.  They theorized that some unknown person had abducted Aeileen from her house and killed her.  The assailant then drove to the crash site, set the accelerator, put it into drive, and fled, hoping that Aeileen’s death would be dismissed as an accident.  

Anderson’s findings were able to persuade authorities to reclassify Aeileen’s death from “accident” to “unexplained,” particularly since the Oklahoma State Fire Marshall could not rule out arson as the cause of the car catching on fire.  He noted that the car was so destroyed by the blaze, it seemed likely that some accelerant was used.  Additionally, the gas cap was missing.  In most cases where a car burns as a result of arson, the cap was removed.

Unfortunately, the investigation into Aeileen’s death virtually ended there.  Law enforcement agreed that it was very possible that Mrs. Conway had been murdered, but who the killer could have been, and why he/she would want Aeileen dead, were questions nobody was able to answer.

Until his death in 2013, Pat Conway devoted his life to trying to solve the mystery of his wife’s horrifying death.  However, although many theories have been proposed, ranging from burglary-gone-wrong to suicide to “it was an accident after all,” we will probably never know for certain just how Aeileen Conway’s seemingly normal day around the house came to such an abruptly violent end.  This is one of those rare cases where it’s been impossible for anyone to stitch all the known facts together into a completely coherent scenario.