Oklahoma law lets families demand reviews of cold-case murders

Nearly 39 years after Cheryl Genzer and Lisa Pennington vanished from the Oklahoma State Fair, Oklahoma gave their families a new lever to pull. Gov. Kevin Stitt signed Senate Bill 1636 on May 13, 2026, creating a formal path for designated relatives to demand a review of an unsolved violent case.

Genzer was 25 and Pennington was 17 when they disappeared on Sept. 23, 1987. Their bodies were later found in a shallow grave in Oklahoma City, and their case became one of the names driving the push for a law that does more than promise sympathy. It puts deadlines on the state.

The measure passed with no dissent in either chamber, 47-0 in the Senate and 81-0 in the House, and is set to take effect on Nov. 1, 2026. Once it is in force, law enforcement must acknowledge a family’s request within 30 days and finish the review within six months unless that timeline is extended with transparency. The work has to be done by investigators who were not involved in the original case, a safeguard meant to bring fresh eyes to old evidence and reduce the kind of institutional bias that can bury a file for decades.

The review is supposed to be active, not symbolic. Investigators are expected to look at new forensic testing, re-interview witnesses and revisit earlier steps that may have helped the case go cold. Families are supposed to get updates during the process and a final meeting explaining the findings. If officials decide no further investigation is warranted, the same case cannot be reviewed again for five years unless new evidence turns up.

Sen. Carri Hicks filed the bill after an interim study titled Justice Delayed: Strengthening Oklahoma’s Response to Cold Cases and Unsolved Violent Crimes. That study looked at how other states handle cold cases and included testimony from the Office of the Oklahoma Attorney General and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation. Hicks has said about 1,000 Oklahoma families are still waiting for justice in murder cases, and Oklahoma still has hundreds of unsolved missing-person cases on the books.

Rep. Ross Ford, a former police officer, said one of the hardest parts of the job was telling families he had no answer about what happened to their loved one. That is the promise, and the test, of SB 1636: whether a locked file gets one real second look, or whether another family is left waiting at the edge of a case that never stopped haunting them.