OKLAHOMA CITY — Gilbert Ray Postelle was pronounced dead at 10:14 a. m. Thursday, ending a 14-year journey from a meth-fueled massacre to the execution chamber
He was 35.
The condemned man offered no final words. He refused visitors. He stared at the ceiling as the lethal injection began its work, and by 10:02 a.
m. his eyelids were already drooping.
A single tear rolled down his face just before he was declared dead.
Those final moments, silent and clinical, stood in stark contrast to the violence that put Postelle on death row. On Memorial Day 2005, he was a 19-year-old armed with a MAC-90 military-style rifle, and he helped slaughter four people in southeast Oklahoma City in broad daylight.
The crime unfolded with chilling speed outside a trailer home on the property of James Donnie Swindle. The morning sun had barely cleared the rooftops when a maroon van rolled up. Swindle and his friend Terry Smith stepped outside to see who had arrived.
They never made it past the doorway.
The van’s sliding door flew open, and Gilbert Postelle raised the rifle and shot Smith in the face at point blank range. Smith died instantly. Swindle turned to run but was cut down by gunfire from Gilbert’s father, 41-year-old Earl Bradford “Brad” Postelle.
Bleeding and stunned, Swindle asked what was happening. He received no answer. Instead, Gilbert’s older brother, David Postelle, walked up, took the rifle from their father, and finished Swindle with a single shot to the head.
The killing didn’t stop there.
Gilbert stormed into the trailer, kicking doors open and firing as he moved from room to room. James Alderson tried to crawl beneath a nearby boat for cover. Gilbert spotted him, ran him down, and shot him where he lay.
Then came Amy Wright. She ran hard, perhaps believing she could reach the fence. Gilbert raised the rifle and pulled the trigger once, twice, a third time.
She dropped face down on the dirt, just feet from the trailer where the others already lay lifeless.
Four lives were gone. Nearly 100 shots had been fired. And the Postelles climbed back into the van and drove off as if nothing had happened.
A security camera across the street captured the van pulling in and tearing away moments later. The faces weren’t clear, and the license plate stayed just out of view. But a woman from a nearby flower shop told police she saw four men in the minivan — and remembered them laughing, as if the four lives they’d just stolen meant nothing.
The motive, authorities would later determine, was built on a lie.
Brad Postelle had been left brain-damaged and in a wheelchair after a motorcycle crash. He became convinced that Donnie Swindle was responsible. His sons clung to that belief like scripture
But investigators found no proof. The crash was a single-vehicle accident. Brad lost control in a skid and was thrown from the bike.
Swindle wasn’t even involved. Authorities believe Brad’s meth-fueled paranoia twisted his mind until fantasy blurred into motive.
Hours before the attack, inside a smoke room at Brad’s house, the family was getting high. Meth was passed around, and so was paranoia. Gilbert and David were fixated on Swindle all day.
Arthur Wilder, one of the men present, remembered Gilbert saying flatly: “Donnie’s going to pay.”Wilder had brought his MAC-90 rifle that day, expecting to go target shooting. He never got it back. When Wilder and his girlfriend asked to be let out of the van minutes into the drive, they were dropped off — and Wilder’s rifle was used in the massacre
Later, when Wilder saw Gilbert again, Gilbert bragged about the killings. He reenacted the shooting, raising his arms as if holding a rifle and saying he “shut that [expletive] up in the corner.”
The bragging stopped when the news coverage began looping the same grainy surveillance footage. Suddenly, Brad, David, and Gilbert were whispering about what to do with the van. Burn it?
Sink it? Hide it?
In the end, they sent a friend to drive the van to Indiana. The license plate was ditched. Gun parts were buried in a backyard.
But police traced the van within days, and the arrests came quickly.
Gilbert was arrested on August 17, 2005. David and Brad were taken in the day before. Arthur Wilder, Randall Bias, Jay Sanders, and Daniel Ashcraft were all picked up for helping with the murders.
The case cracked when Randall Bias, facing heavy charges, told detectives what really happened. He claimed he thought the plan was innocent — a quick drop-off and a trip to target shooting. But things shifted when David suddenly veered off course.
According to Bias, Gilbert turned to Brad with a chilling question: “What do we do if Donnie’s dad is there?”
Brad didn’t hesitate: “Everybody.”
And that’s exactly what they did. Bias told authorities that when it was over, Gilbert climbed into the van last and muttered, “That [expletive] almost got away.” Brad leaned forward, hugged his sons, and smiled.
“That’s my boys.”
In 2008, a jury convicted Gilbert of four counts of first-degree murder. For Amy Wright and James Alderson, he was sentenced to death. For Donnie Swindle and Terry Smith, he received life without parole.
Brad Postelle never faced trial. The motorcycle crash had left him with severe brain damage, and he was ruled incompetent. He died in 2011 at age 46, never answering for his role in the murders.
David Postelle received life in prison — but even prison walls couldn’t contain his criminal enterprise. From a maximum-security facility, he coordinated drug operations as a key figure in the Irish mob gang. Using contraband phones, he connected gang members with outside contacts and helped move massive quantities of illegal substances.
A federal judge later held David responsible for moving more than 500 pounds of drugs, tied to hundreds of firearms and nearly $600,000 in dirty money. He received an additional life sentence, this time in federal prison.
For Gilbert, the years on death row brought a long series of appeals. His legal team pointed to his upbringing in a house full of meth, chaos, and violence. His mother walked out when he was a young boy, and his father ran a meth lab.
By age 12, Gilbert was using meth every day. By the time of the murders, he’d been arrested at least eight times, mostly for drugs and weapons.
His attorney also noted his IQ, which sat in the low 70s. But none of that erased what he did.
In December 2021, Gilbert sat before the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board asking for clemency. He claimed he didn’t remember much about the shooting, that he’d been high for days. His attorney argued that Gilbert was just following the path his father had laid down — that Brad had been the leader and had influenced everything.
That’s when the state revealed the ironic twist: Brad had caused the wreck himself. The crash that left him disabled, the crash that fueled his murderous obsession with Donnie Swindle, was his own fault. Donnie wasn’t involved.
The entire motive was built on delusion.
Gilbert stopped hiding from the truth in his statement to the board. “I do understand that I am guilty and I accept that,” he said. “My life at that time was filled with chaos and drugs.
There’s nothing more that I know to say to you all than I am truly sorry for what I’ve done to all these families.”
But not everyone was ready to hear it. Donnie Swindle’s mother stood before the board, shaking, and said she couldn’t even view her son’s body because the bullets had torn him apart. The board listened — and denied clemency.
The execution would move forward.
In the final weeks before his death, Gilbert joined a lawsuit challenging Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol, arguing it caused unnecessary pain. He even asked the court to let him face a firing squad instead. The method was technically legal in Oklahoma but hadn’t been used since 1976.
The court denied the request.
On the morning of February 17, 2022, Gilbert was taken to the death chamber. He refused visitors on his final day, and no spiritual adviser stood by his side.
His last meal: McDonald’s. Twenty chicken nuggets, two chicken sandwiches, three large fries, a cola, and a caramel frappe.
The curtain rose inside the Oklahoma execution chamber at 10:00 a. m. Gilbert lay strapped to the gurney.
He stayed silent and stared straight up. When asked if he had any final words, he shook his head.
No family was present. Only the five media witnesses watched.
At 10:02, his eyelids began to droop. By 10:03, they were nearly shut. At 10:06, a doctor entered, rubbed his sternum, shook him slightly, and called his name.
There was no response. He was declared unconscious.
His chest rose and fell slightly for another minute or so. Then, just after 10:09 a. m.
, a finger twitched. A single tear rolled down his face.
At 10:14 a. m. , Gilbert Ray Postelle was pronounced dead.
In the years leading up to his execution, Postelle had found moments of humanity behind bars. In 2017, he married Veronica Gail Ward in a simple ceremony in a cold concrete chapel on death row — no guests, no flowers, just a pastor from the Light of God Church. The marriage didn’t last, ending in divorce in 2020.
But by the time his execution date approached, he had found someone else. Jackie Thompson, his fiancée, pleaded for his life before the parole board. “Gil is kind, loving, funny, loyal, and has a heart of gold,” she said.
“He is amazing in more ways than one.”
His daughter also spoke out, her voice cracking as she addressed the board. “My dad is my inspiration. He keeps me going.
He calls me his beautiful daughter and says he’s proud of me. I don’t want to lose my dad.”
The pleas didn’t change the outcome.
The question now, as it always is in cases like this, is whether justice was ultimately served. Gilbert Postelle is dead, executed by the state of Oklahoma for the four lives he helped take. His father died without ever facing judgment for his role.
His brother remains in federal prison, running criminal enterprises even from a cell.
But the families of Donnie Swindle, Terry Smith, James Alderson, and Amy Wright carry their losses still. Nearly 100 shots were fired that Memorial Day morning in 2005. Four people never came home.
And on a Thursday morning in February 2022, the state of Oklahoma answered with a single lethal injection.
For some, that’s justice. For others, it’s a reminder that nothing can truly undo what happened in those terrible minutes outside that trailer home in southeast Oklahoma City.
Gilbert Ray Postelle was 35 years old. He spent 14 of those years on death row, and in the end, he went to his death the same way he lived his final years — largely alone, with no final words, and a single tear as the only goodbye.
