Madeline’s Niece, Sherrylea Webb

Researching our forthcoming true crime book Madeline Gets Life, co-author M. J. Van Deventer and I needed to get our hands on Madeline Webb’s college transcript.

We wanted to verify the stories in the New York press during her 1942 trial that made much of Madeline’s status as an honor student back in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

She herself wrote, in an article for Headline Detective Magazine, “I was a good average student in college in spite of all my extra-curricular activities.”

She graduated in 1933 from Oklahoma A&M, now Oklahoma State University.

Surely, M. J. and I could just ask the registrar’s office for a copy of her transcript, right?

Wrong.

OSU’s registrar follows strict privacy rules, even if a student is no longer living.

The university would only turn over the transcript if a living relative of Madeline’s signed a release form.

We had already chatted with a great-niece named Cathy, who lived in Texas. She didn’t respond when we asked if she would sign the release form.

We knew of one other living relative, Sherrylea Webb, but we weren’t very optimistic. Sherrylea was the elder daughter of Madeline’s brother, Billie. Cathy, the daughter of Sherrylea’s deceased sister, had told us Sherrylea suffered a massive stroke and “is not lucid enough to talk.”

Sherrylea Webb: 1948-2023

But Sherrylea was our last hope of getting a relative’s signature. We tracked her down through an extraordinarily helpful stepdaughter, Brandy.

And Sherrylea was as lucid as they come.

The family didn’t get along with Madeline when she returned home after 25 years in prison for murder. According to Sherrylea, Billie thought Madeline was guilty. And she didn’t help out around the house.

Within months of returning, Madeline moved out of the family home and moved in with Jonita Milligan, a telephone operator who had taken a shine to her. Their relationship deepened the schism between Madeline and her family, Sherrylea said.

The family hardly mentioned the murder, so Sherrylea had to piece together a version of the crime from bits she heard around the house and fragments she got from friends.

In this telling, Madeline was living with a rich elderly New York couple who came home early from a vacation and surprised Madeline and her Jewish boyfriend as they were cleaning out the apartment of valuables – and they shot the couple dead.

Sherrylea was surprised when I told her the crime occurred in Madeline’s hotel suite and that the lone victim died of suffocation, not a gunshot.

Sherrylea agreed to sign the transcript release form, so M. J. and I visited her in Shawnee, Oklahoma. She rented a small, ground-floor apartment in Shawnee Tower, a public housing building.

Sherrylea Webb in her apartment in Shawnee, Oklahoma

Sherrylea said she regretted that she didn’t get to know Madeline better.

She also told us the story of her stroke, which had paralyzed the left side of her body and robbed her of much of her eyesight.

In the early 1990s, after raising two sets of twins, Sherrylea learned how to drive a big rig and formed a truck-driving team with her second husband, Richard Wills. She loved the open road and the towering view from the driver’s seat. They hauled cargo to all 48 contiguous states and three Canadian provinces.

But in 1996, after dropping off a load near Phoenix, Arizona, Sherrylea got a bad headache, then went lame and had to be airlifted to Tucson.

It was a stroke. She blamed the 110-degree heat at first but learned the real cause was her use of the diet drug Fen-Phen, which was banned the following year.

She taught herself to cook one-handed. She hated having to give up driving. The marriage to Richard ended in divorce.

M. J. and I got Sherrylea’s signature on the transcript release form and hustled to the OSU registrar’s office in Stillwater, 60 miles to the north.

And lo and behold, the transcript doesn’t describe an honor student. Rather, it shows a student in nearly constant danger of academic suspension. Madeline failed five courses and received a D in thirteen others. She had to enroll in summer sessions twice to boost her grade point average to a solid, graduation-worthy C.

We stayed in touch with Sherrylea, even as her health became more and more fragile. She moved into a nursing home in Meeker, about 15 miles north of Shawnee, but kept hoping she could recover sufficiently to move in with her boyfriend.

Sherrylea didn’t get her wish. She died on December 13, 2023. She was 75.