Both were thin and a couple inches shy of six feet tall. One was light-skinned, the other dark. They weren’t making trouble, but they weren’t shopping, either. By 7:50 p.m., when a yellow 1981 Dodge Colt parked in the lot outside Shepherd Mall, the world beyond the lamp posts was dim.

It was April 23, 1986, and things were about to turn deadly.

Kathy Sue Engle, 41, got out of the Colt. The brunette, a married mother of two, was thin and almost as tall as the men now watching her.

She’d stayed late at work, and she knew her family already had eaten dinner without her. The night was warm and breezy, with just a few high clouds drifting across the face of the nearly full moon.

If she hurried, she could return an unwanted birthday gift, enjoy the weather and still get home in time to see her children before their 9 p.m. bedtime.

But the men stalked toward her. Predators, young and aggressive.

Roy Hinther doesn’t know what attracted his attention. It may have been a flicker of motion or the sound of a struggle. Whatever the case, he glanced up to see Engle with the two men. One stood at the front of the car. The other was with Engle near the trunk.

“She received a blow to the back of the neck from the guy who was with her, and then they opened up the back door and pushed her in,” said Hinther, now 56, of California. “They were out of there, just like that. ... I was just standing there stunned.”

The car backed out and bolted from the lot. Moments later, a man fixing his truck at NW 1 and Villa saw a yellow Colt slam into a curb, then stop.

Two men were struggling with a woman inside the car, and one got out briefly before moving back in to control her.

The car sped off again.

The next confirmed sighting came a day or two later. The Colt, its gas tank empty, sat abandoned at a Shell truck stop about 390 miles away in Tucumcari, N.M. Engle’s body wasn’t found until April 30.

Her killers have never been captured.

Laughter dies

Dawson Allen Engle, now 65, thought his wife was playing a joke on him. It wouldn’t have been the first time.

That night, he’d fallen asleep on the couch after putting the kids to bed and awakened about 10:45 p.m. to the sound of someone pounding on the door. He opened it to find “all kinds of law enforcement personnel” waiting for him.

“I recall thinking that my wife was pulling some kind of practical joke on me,” he said. “My initial reaction was to start laughing.”

The laughter died in his throat when officers started asking questions: “When did you last see your wife? When did you talk to her last?”

A witness to the abduction had gotten the tag number from the Colt. The witness, like most in 1986, did not have a mobile phone, and there was a delay in relaying the information to police, who ultimately traced the tag to the Engles.

All indications were that Kathy Engle had been kidnapped, and police advised her husband to buy a phone recording device in case someone called with a ransom demand. That call never came.

In the morning, the Engles’ son, Dawson Rolland, 13, awoke first. His father sent him to wake up his sister, Kristine, 8.

Once they were all together, their father broke the news.

“I don’t remember anything he said,” said Kristine Ervin, now 30, married and living in Houston. “I only remember him crying, and that scared me because I didn’t think daddies were supposed to cry.”

A grisly find

The Colt turned up at the New Mexico truck stop along Interstate 40 on April 24 or 25. The trip odometer read 387.

Inside the car, police found Kathy Engle’s clothing. Her knit blouse had two cuts in it, and her bra had apparently been sliced from her body. Blood smeared the blouse and the back seat.

A dozen fingerprints were recovered. Ten matched people who had legitimate access to the vehicle, leaving two that may have come from the killers.

Cigarette butts littered the car’s ashtray. Some were Salem cigarettes, the victim’s brand, but the filters had been torn off before they were smoked. The rest were Camel cigarettes. Her husband smoked Marlboros; the Camels weren’t his.

Initial testing indicated the cigarettes had been smoked by two men with different blood types — almost certainly the killers. DNA testing wouldn’t be done until 1999.

On April 30, 1986, oil-field workers made a grim discovery in a Sayre oil patch.

A woman’s nude body lay face down in tall grass. Although she’d been dead a week at most, insects had accelerated decomposition, and much of the head, neck and genitals already were obliterated. Her hands stretched out behind her, bound with blue-and-white nylon rope.

Police notified Dawson A. Engle that day. They would need dental records to make certain, but it appeared his wife was dead.

Suspects identified

Kathy Engle was the third woman in two years killed after being abducted from an Oklahoma City shopping mall.

None of the cases were connected. The suspect in one slaying was already dead, killed with his own gun during a struggle with police. The suspects in the other, which also occurred at Shepherd Mall, were in custody at the time of Engle’s death. So who did it?

By June 1987, police thought they knew. The prime suspects were Ricky Martin, 19, of Oklahoma City, and his half-brother, Travis Lee McGuire, 27.

A few months before the Engle slaying, Jena Marie Repp, 58, had vanished from an Albuquerque, N.M., shopping center. Her body was later found along I-40 in New Mexico.

In 1987, McGuire was arrested in Kentucky while driving Repp’s car. He was charged with kidnapping and murder, and Martin was later captured.

“When they were actually caught, Ricky Martin actually confessed to their involvement in her (Repp’s) murder,” said Oklahoma City police cold case Inspector Kyle Eastridge. “Information was provided that they had taken that victim’s car to Oklahoma City and had hidden car papers from that car in the elevator shaft of an old apartment building downtown.”

Detectives recovered the paperwork. A direct link had just been established between the men, Oklahoma City and New Mexico.

Had the killers been found?

Surprising results

For more than a decade, Martin and McGuire remained the strongest suspects.

“Oklahoma City (police) told us it’s these two guys,” said Dawson R. Engle, 35. “They said, ‘We feel very strongly it’s these two guys, but we just can’t put it together.’”

There was little need to rush. In 1988, McGuire was convicted of first-degree murder in Repp’s death and sentenced to life in prison. Martin pleaded no contest to kidnapping and got an 18-year sentence.

They weren’t getting out any time soon.

But the family wanted to know for sure. They pushed for DNA testing of the cigarettes and other items from the Colt. In 1999, those tests were finally performed. The results surprised everyone.

Martin and McGuire did not kill Kathy Engle. Their DNA was not in the car. Almost 22 years after her death, the identity of Kathy Engle’s killers remains as much of a mystery as it was in 1986 — only now, the trail is even colder.

“It’s almost worse now that we pushed to have that DNA testing,” Dawson R. Engle said. “It’s almost like you’re at the finish line, but you’re just not there. You never get there.”

Kristine Ervin, too, thinks the search will never end.

“I don’t think it can ever be fully resolved,” she said. “It’s difficult not knowing who they are. ... It’s difficult sometimes being on the street and passing a man and thinking, ‘Wow, he could be the one who killed my mother.’”

To help: Anyone with information about the Engle case is asked to call the Oklahoma City police cold case unit at 297-1127 or Crime Stoppers at 235-7300 or e-mail coldcase@oklahoman.com.

Remembering a mother

“Everything is fragments from that time,” she said recently. “Nothing is very cohesive. ... She did arts and crafts and loved to do needlepoint. She always lost her sunglasses. She would read the newspaper on the kitchen floor by the vent. “She often wore a brown leather blazer; that’s one of the things I remember the most, the smell of it. When I was in first grade, she dressed up as the Easter bunny. ... If she made chocolate pudding, she would always make me make a smiley face in the pudding before I ate it. She used her mascara to put a mole on my face so I could look like Madonna.”

Ervin, 30, is working toward a Ph.D. in writing at the University of Houston. Her dissertation will be a personal memoir about her mother, focusing not only on the slaying, but also on its consequences.

“It will have details of the case, plus my coming of age story after the murder,” she said. “Memory, struggle for identity, especially gender identity. ... How we got through it and all that.”

Ervin’s brother, Dawson Rolland Engle, 35, remembers more. Almost too much. Even now, thoughts of his mother can reduce him to tears.

In 1985, all he wanted for Christmas was to go to space camp. On Christmas Eve, his mother told him that she didn’t want him to be disappointed, but they simply couldn’t afford it.

Christmas morning, he awoke to find a space camp poster on the wall. His mom had been building up the surprise. He was going, after all.

“She died before I went,” he said recently, crying. “I didn’t go until June. ... It just kills me that she wasn’t around to see me go.”

As a boy, he didn’t just want to be an astronaut. He was also interested in law. His mother’s slaying crystallized that interest into a driving purpose. He would become a prosecutor. He would help find justice for families who’d experienced similar losses. He interned with the Cleveland County district attorney, then became an assistant district attorney in Purcell. For more than two years, he has served as a special judge in Lincoln and Pottawatomie counties.

Dawson Allen Engle, 65, the victim’s husband, has never remarried. He lives in the same house the family shared in 1986 and still smiles when he recalls meeting his future wife for the first time.

“Bells and whistles went off,” he said. “That’s really all I can say.” The couple met when both worked in the computer department of a Ponca City oil company. They wed a few years later in a small ceremony at his parents’ home in Lindsay and moved to Oklahoma City, where they started a family.

“We were just typical middle-class parents,” he said. “We were probably like most anybody else. Probably had some good points and some bad points.”

His children would disagree.

“With Kristine and I, he’s always just been steady as a rock,” his son said. “We never got the sense that this (the killing) would beat him. You never ever thought that we wouldn’t make it as a family, that we wouldn’t prevail.

“I don’t know how he was privately, with family or friends, but I never ever doubted that we would be safe, that he wouldn’t take care of us.”

Ervin was more succinct.

“Mostly because of my father,” she said, “my brother and I are a success story.”

For his part, Dawson A. Engle credits supportive friends, neighbors, family and even strangers with helping him survive what happened to his wife.

“We can’t begin to thank everyone,” he said. “But I wish we could.”

This is an excerpt from Kristine Ervin's memoir about her mother

1981 yellow Dodge Colt. After the police gutted her car, my father asked me and my brother if we wanted it back, because he didn’t want us to lose anything of my mother’s if it was important to us to keep. I didn’t yet know what had happened inside. If we said yes, my father knew what could happen — if he sat in the driver’s seat, he would be in the murderer’s position, hands on the wheel, review mirror tilted down; if he turned to the backseat, he might see her body, bruised and shaking, curled in sweat and rapid breaths; every time he walked to or from the car, his muscles might tense, fists close, ready to punch whatever was behind him, more out of anger than fear, more because he could when she couldn’t. And when I looked up at him and answered no, I didn’t realize the burden my father had offered to take, I didn’t know that his love meant the willingness to suffer.

My decision was a practical one: He had said that the police wouldn’t put the car back together, and how can you drive without seats. I’m thankful for my answer, though now I would say no for different reasons. Her car is a sacred place, a shrine fixed in time. Reason tells me it went to a scrap yard, had other people’s hands on its engine and frame, and if it still exists at all, only a skeleton remains.

But memory and the imagination keep it whole, intact, the steering wheel and blood, the radio on soft rock, the sun heating the vinyl to make it too painful to touch, the semen and seats. Her sweater is on the floorboard, the beer bottle and paper bag on one of the seats, the can of Pepsi nearby, and the cigarette butts of her Salems, the filters ripped off, settled in the ashtray. The frame still holds the vibrations of her cries. And what happened inside is encased, entombed, the secrets sealed, unknowable and outside of time. To open the car door is to violate its mystery.

Excerpt from “The Distance to You,” by Kristine Ervin