A judge found Larry Doil Sanders Sr. guilty of murdering his friend during a fishing trip in July 2022. Sanders and Jimmy Glenn Knighten were noodling in Oklahoma—you know, fishing for catfish with their bare hands—when things started to get a little weird. Unfortunately, it ended with a cold-blooded murder.
According to a detailed report of the two-day, non-jury trial by local newspaper The Ada News, Sanders, 55, struggles with substance abuse. He had taken methamphetamine in the days preceding the noodling trip and was likely in a state of psychosis at the time.
Sanders is also a Bigfoot believer, and, according to testimonies, “his Bigfoot rhetoric is more pronounced when he is under the influence of the drug.”
Here’s why that’s relevant.
Sanders took the stand in his own defense in the trial, which wrapped up yesterday, and he explained that he murdered Knighten, 52, in self-defense after Knighten summoned Bigfoot to hurt him. Three Bigfoots, in fact.
From Sanders’ perspective, Knighten was acting strange during the fishing trip. He took a cryptic phone call early in the day, and at one point, Sanders says Knighten even got up on a rock and howled for apparently no reason.
It gets worse.
Sanders says he then saw three Bigfoots by the river—a tall black one about 50 yards away, plus two more, a dark red one and a brown one, farther away. Some reports say Sanders believed Knighten wanted to kill him as a sacrifice to Bigfoot. The two men got into a fight, and Sanders strangled Knighten to death.
Knighten was a father, a grandfather, a son, and a brother. He’d offered Sanders employment starting the following week and then invited him on a noodling trip that ended horribly.
Sanders is now officially guilty of first-degree murder, and he’ll be sentenced in June.