My Ex Admitted Killing Juli Busken—So Why Is His Son Still on Death Row?

Anthony Sanchez waits on death row, his execution just months away. He is going to pay the ultimate price for a rape and murder he did not commit, according to his father's former girlfriend, who says Sanchez Sr. confessed to the crime to her.

Speaking to the media for the first time, Charlotte Beattie told Newsweek that Thomas Glen Sanchez repeatedly admitted to killing Jewell "Juli" Busken before his death.

"He told me about it a few times, saying that he had to hogtie her 'cause she squealed," she said. "He said after he finished the job with her, he just shot her in the head."

She feared the same fate would befall her if she ever told anyone. "I was afraid, because he'd say that he could end up doing to me as he did to Juli Busken," she said.

Busken, a 21-year-old ballerina from Benton, Arkansas, had just finished her final semester at the University of Oklahoma when she was abducted from her apartment in Norman on December 20, 1996. Her body was found near Lake Stanley Draper that evening. Authorities said she had been bound, raped and shot in the back of the head.

After eight years of few leads, police charged the then 25-year-old Sanchez Jr. in 2004. Investigators said a DNA sample taken from him when he was imprisoned for burglary had matched DNA recovered from the pink leotard found on Busken's body.

Two years on, he was convicted and sentenced to die. Now 44, he is set to receive a lethal injection on September 21. He has always maintained he did not kill Busken, telling Newsweek from prison that he was convicted "on pure circumstantial evidence."

Beattie and others who believe in his innocence are now scrambling to save his life.

How the Doubts Were Dismissed

An attorney for Sanchez Jr. asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals for an evidentiary hearing earlier this year, alleging that his father was the actual killer.

In the court filing, Mark Barrett wrote that Beattie first heard Sanchez Sr. confess in July of 2020 but was too afraid of him to come forward while he was alive.

The filing noted that neither of the two eyewitnesses identified Sanchez Jr. as the perpetrator during their testimonies and that evidence taken from Busken's vehicle—including 49 fingerprints and hair—were not matched to him.

Importantly, the filing said, a police sketch crafted with the help of a witness who saw Busken and the perpetrator appears to match a photo of Sanchez Sr. taken in 1996.

The court last month rejected the claim, with Judge David Lewis writing in a ruling: "Indeed, considering the remaining evidence, even if Glen Sanchez had confessed his guilt on the witness stand under oath at Anthony Sanchez's murder trial, no reasonable fact finder would have acquitted Anthony Sanchez of killing Juli Busken."

In a statement to Newsweek, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond said the evidence is "overwhelming that Anthony Sanchez brutally raped and murdered Juli Busken. Instead of expressing remorse, he made the cowardly decision to try blaming the crime on his deceased father—a ludicrous allegation thoroughly discredited by DNA analysis.

"What makes this claim all the more despicable is that it makes a mockery of how advances in DNA evidence have exonerated wrongly convicted individuals in recent years. Just as DNA evidence has helped clear the innocent, it can also conclusively show guilt. Anthony Sanchez is guilty beyond any conceivable doubt, and I will ensure justice is served."

Advocates for Sanchez have questioned the DNA evidence used to secure the conviction, saying it was mishandled and manipulated, and argue other evidence, including ballistic evidence, was not credibly connected to Sanchez Jr.

Speaking to Newsweek from the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Sanchez maintained his innocence. "I was convicted of murdering Juli Busken on pure circumstantial evidence," he said. "There was no physical evidence at all."

He said he had been let down by his trial lawyers, who he said didn't check his alibis or even his address. He didn't live a mile from Busken at the time of her murder like prosecutors alleged, he said, but in the next town over.

Prosecutors at trial said Busken's missing cell phone was used to call a number belonging to an ex-girlfriend of Sanchez Jr.'s. He insists it wasn't the right number.

An Abusive Alcoholic

Sanchez Jr. was a boy "who had to raise himself," Beattie recalled.

She remembers his father as an alcoholic and opioid abuser with a short temper who physically and sexually abused her for years. He took his own life on her front porch on the evening of April 24 last year, she said. He was 68.

Beattie met Sanchez Sr. in meat-cutting school in the early 1990s but they lost touch when she moved. In 1994, she said he contacted her and told her he had divorced.

"I started going around with him and we just went places and we had a nice time," she said. The following year, she gave birth to their son, now 27.

Just months earlier, he had met another woman who would go on to become his third wife.

But he "kept on coming back and forth," Beattie said, adding that he often "mooched" off her to pay for his drinking. And over the years, he "started getting more hateful," she said.

He took his anger out on her, she said, describing in graphic terms the sexual assaults he subjected her to. "If I screamed, he'd go further," she said. He was also impotent, she remembered, which often made him more vicious in his abuse.

Beattie said Sanchez Sr. first mentioned Busken's killing to her several years ago, but then kept on bringing it up.

"He'd say, 'I'll hunt you down and I'll kill you if you say something,'" she said. "That's how he was whenever he was telling me about Juli Busken... there were a few times he talked about it sober. He just kept on talking about it."

Sanchez Sr. was diagnosed with cancer in February last year, Beattie said. A lump on his neck grew to the size of a baseball by the end, meaning he couldn't talk much.

He never expressed remorse, she said. "He just kept on saying that at least Anthony's a man...I'd say, 'Why would you want him to suffer for it?' He said, 'Well because he's young, and he can handle it.'"

David Ballard, an investigator hired by Sanchez Jr.'s attorney and death penalty opponents to examine the case, said he found that many who knew Sanchez Sr. described him as paranoid, and that most who knew him were affected by his abuse.

That includes Cathy Hodge, who married Sanchez Sr. in 1980 when Anthony was a little over a year old. "I raised him," she told Newsweek.

She spoke of the physical abuse she regularly suffered over the course of the 14-year marriage. "It started off just a slap here, slap there, and it got worse and worse," she said. "During the week, everything was normal. It was usually on the weekends when he started drinking, and he would get to a certain point and then he got real abusive."

Her former husband pulled a gun on her a number of times, she said, but she was not sexually abused.

She recalled how on one occasion after a night out, he beat her in the car. "I had two black eyes swelled shut," she said.

While Hodge is convinced the man she considers her son is innocent, she hesitates to definitively point the finger at his father. "I know he was abusive, but I wouldn't have never seen him as a murderer," she said. "But I don't know if he changed after I left."

The Sketch 'Does Look Like My Father'

But what many who knew the father and son agree on is that the police sketch looks a lot like Sanchez Sr. and nothing like his son.

That sketch shows an apparently older man with hollowed cheekbones and shoulder-length hair. Sanchez Jr. was a teenager with hair down his back at the time of Busken's killing.

"It did resemble Glen. It didn't look anything like Anthony," Hodge said. "I believe in his innocence, 100 percent. There's too many things that prove he didn't do it."

Sanchez Jr. does not want to believe his father committed the crime he may soon pay the ultimate price for, but he concedes that the sketch does resemble his dad.

"I have very mixed emotions about it," he said. "It does look like my father. It does."

The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation in February compared Sanchez's DNA to that recovered from Busken's leotard, The Oklahoman reported, and concluded the DNA did not match that from Busken's leotard.

The state's attorneys said the new tests were conducted "in an effort to fully and unequivocally debunk" the new claim.

Ballard, the investigator hired by Sanchez Jr.'s lawyer, questioned the DNA handling and profiling—a technology in its infancy at the time—that was done in the case. The testing and results were "questionable at best," he said. "It needs to be redone."

A spokesperson for the attorney general's office said there was no evidence to suggest the DNA was not properly collected or stored.

The spokesperson said the profile obtained from Busken's leotard by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation in 2000 matched exactly to a DNA profile separately obtained by Oklahoma City police. Sanchez Sr. was excluded, but the testing found that it was highly likely to belong to the biological father of the attacker.

Ballard, president of Valour Investigations LLC, of Norman, said he feels confident that Sanchez Jr. did not kill Busken, noting that the heinous crime pointed to someone with a propensity to violence.

"He didn't match the profile, the physical evidence isn't there and there's just a lot of conjecture on his case," Ballard said.

"There are things right now that can be done on the Anthony Sanchez case that could very much clear his name that we're not in possession of."

Fingerprints, skin cells and hair found in Busken's vehicle should be tested against Sanchez Sr.'s, he said.

Sanchez Jr.'s attorneys and advocates also dispute the state's assertion that a shoe print at the crime scene was connected to him. They never found the shoe, Ballard noted, but an ex-girlfriend told authorities that he owned a similar pair.

The print was of a size 9, Ballard says. "If they checked my foot, they would have known I was size 11 and a half," Sanchez Jr. said.

"And it's a mass produced shoe," Ballard added. "There's so many unanswered questions, and a lot of the evidence was inconclusive, but labelled as, this matches."

Ballard said a detective had looked at Sanchez Sr. as a more plausible suspect early on in the investigation but was "shut down."

'We Want the Glossip Treatment'

The Rev. Jeff Hood, who met Sanchez Jr. last summer, told Newsweek he was initially skeptical of Sanchez's innocence claim. It was the sketch that made him delve deeper and team up with Death Penalty Action, a nonprofit organization that works to stop executions and abolish the death penalty, to raise funds to pay for the investigator.

Hood said he feels the state jumped to test Sanchez Sr.'s DNA earlier this year without being ordered to do so in a bid to "cut us off before we were able to present evidence of what we feel like was DNA manipulation at the very beginning."

He argued that Sanchez Jr., who is Native American, has as strong an innocence claim as another inmate on death row in Oklahoma: Richard Glossip, who is white. Glossip was accused of ordering the 1997 killing of motel owner Barry Van Treese but has maintained his innocence, and there have been persistent doubts about the evidence against him.

"We want the Glossip treatment," he said. "We want a person of color who has an innocence claim in Oklahoma to be taken as seriously as a white person who has an innocence claim in Oklahoma."

Abraham Bonowitz, Death Penalty Action's executive director, praised legislators and Oklahoma's attorney general for exploring Glossip's case.

"The real test," Bonowitz said, is if Oklahoma's political leaders will similarly step up for Sanchez. "His life is valuable too. There are real and urgent questions about his guilt also," Bonowitz said. "He deserves every bit as much of a re-investigation as Glossip got."

Hood has already accompanied two men to the death chamber this year—Scott Eizember in Oklahoma and Arthur Brown Jr. in Texas— and watched as the lethal injection coursed through their veins. He doesn't want to do it again with Sanchez Jr.

On Thursday morning, he and others will gather at the Oklahoma State Capitol to launch a campaign aimed at saving Sanchez's life.

Sanchez is a test, Hood said, of "whether there is even a modicum of morality left in the governance of the State of Oklahoma. If they can't stop themselves from killing a demonstrably innocent man, I pray that God damns them all."

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text "988" to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.