Past attempts to investigate Campbell in Oklahoma and Missouri failed after police and prosecutors said the statute of limitations had lapsed. But the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office says that clock stopped running when Campbell moved out of the state in the 1980s. To charge him in connection to a decades-old allegation, they’re applying a frontier-era statute that pauses the statute of limitations for suspects who flee or reside elsewhere.
Prosecutors recently used the same legal theory to
charge former megachurch pastor Robert Morris with sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl in Oklahoma in the 1980s. Morris, who founded the nondenominational Gateway Church in Texas,
pleaded guilty in October to five felony counts of lewd or indecent acts with a child and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, with all but six months suspended.