OK - Rev. Richard, 43, & Sue Douglass, 36, slain, kids injured, Okarche, 15 Oct 1979

Afterward, Leslie was hog-tied like her parents and brother, and the two men stood in the kitchen and ate the family's supper from the stove. For two hours, the intruders terrorized the bound family members with threats while they debated what to do with them. A sobbing Sue Douglass begged for mercy. But at last, "Ake told Hatch to go start the car and 'listen for the sound,'" Brooks Douglass, now 32, recalls. "Ake said, 'I don't want to have to shoot you, but...' The first shot hit me in the back. On the second shot, I heard Mother scream." When it was all over, Richard and Sue Douglass lay dying. Their son and daughter, both shot in the back, were grievously injured, but alive.

Five weeks and two more killings later, Ake and Hatch were captured at a ranch in Colorado, and, in separate trials in 1980, they were sentenced to death. But, in fact, their business with the shattered family had only begun. For the next 16 years, their lives and the lives of the two Douglass children would be inextricably tangled, not only by the memory of the carnage that October evening, but by a tortuous odyssey of trials and hearings that finally reached a conclusion of sorts last week at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. While Glen Ake, the triggerman, continues to serve a life sentence, his accomplice, Steven Keith Hatch, died by lethal injection a little after midnight on Aug. 9.

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Infamous convicted murderer Glen Burton Ake died at a prison hospital April 23, a state Corrections Department spokesman confirmed Thursday.

Ake, 55, died of natural causes. His attorney, Irven Box, said he was told Ake had a heart attack.

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