How Oklahoma prison gangs use rurality to conceal crimes, hide bodies

Hannah Allam writes for the Washington Post under the headline, "Missing people, buried bones at center of Oklahoma mystery." The story is out of Logan County, Oklahoma, population 41,848, where "a dozen or more people...have disappeared in recent years from the wooded, unincorporated terrain outside the Oklahoma City metro area, a rural haven for drug traffickers."  Violent "white-supremacist prison gangs are suspected."

Acting on a tip this spring, authorities "found charred piles of wood and bone on a five-acre patch of Logan County."

[Logan County Sheriff Damon] Devereaux considers himself a stickler for policing that prioritizes constitutional rights. So, he said, when he first noticed the compound “getting fortified with metal 10-foot fencing and iron gates,” he was suspicious but had no probable cause to investigate.

Allam then includes this vivid quote from Devereaux:   

We’re a county that likes to burn our trash, shoot our guns and drink our beer. And that’s kind of what we embrace in Oklahoma, the freedom to do all that.  There’s a lot of people who move out there to be left alone.

I think that could be said of lots of rural places.  A few other posts about the use of rural spatiality to conceal are here, here. and here.