The person who sent the newspaper this photo after Thanksgiving 2023 was angered. “He has been lying to us all about him and his captain. This Thanksgiving family pic says it…The truth speaks out exactly how the captain got started so far up the ladder.” Sheriff Kevin Clardy and Captain Alicia Manning, right, are shown with Clardy’s son Kyler and his family. (Contributed photo)
First of a series
For some, it’s the end of an era.
For others, it’s a crucial step toward ending a nightmare and a national embarrassment for the county.
For county officials, it is a huge relief that the county will now avoid the possible takeover of its sheriff’s office by the federal government.
Such a move by the Department of Justice could have cost county taxpayers millions of dollars, and after a recent short documentary by CBS, the DOJ was likely paying attention to Tuesday’s election here.
But it isn’t quite over yet. There’s still more than six months to go before sheriff Kevin Clardy, now humiliated by Republicans in his re-election bid, leaves office early next year.
Clardy was elected in 2016, and Alicia Manning came on board to investigate domestic cases and was funded initially by a federal grant.
Rumors of an affair between the two soon began, along with Manning’s rapid ascension in position within the department. Finally she would become “captain of all officers” and her brother Mike, who wasn’t even CLEET-certified at the time, would become undersheriff.
What’s known now but wasn’t known then by the public is that in May of 2018, the board of county commissioners quietly asked District Attorney Mark Matloff for an investigation into the sheriff’s office.
Commissioners claimed Clardy was “having an affair with his employee Alicia Manning. As a result, Manning, who has just a couple years’ experience in law enforcement, now is in an authority position in the sheriff’s office and many employees would testify to her actions and lack of consequences to her actions,” commissioners said at the time.
Even the name she used was misleading. Alicia Manning has a married name she uses on legal documents: Alicia Harrison. But perhaps she avoided that last name because then people might learn her current husband has been convicted of manslaughter, plus eight other felonies – not a good look for a law enforcement officer.
But more than that, she had been married four times. All of the men had been in trouble with the law and two of them had multiple felonies.
Also not a good look for a law enforcement officer, but for some reason, Clardy didn’t care.
Commissioners in 2018 said the sheriff needed to be investigated for gross partiality because of his treatment of Manning, but also for habitual or willful neglect of duty, oppression in office, corruption in office, extortion or willful overcharges of fees in office, willful maladministration and habitual drunkenness.
That might have been the end of it for Clardy, but the allegations were never investigated. As commissioners’ legal adviser, the D.A. recused from an investigation and passed the commissioners’ request along to the Oklahoma Attorney General, who did nothing.
That was the start of several requests to Oklahoma attorneys general over the next five years, and as each attorney general balked at taking action, Clardy and Manning grew bolder.
But they still had one hurdle left – this newspaper and reporter Chris Willingham.
Beginning in November 2021, several stories became an embarrassment to the department, beginning with photos of an evidence room that looked worse than any teenager’s bedroom, with evidence piled on top of evidence, even murder case evidence.
Manning was enraged, and according to officers there, she both threatened to seize and search their phones to see who was speaking to the reporter, and also said she was going to seek a court order to seize the reporter’s phone.
But she couldn’t get a court order because Willingham was not accused of any crime… so he needed to become a suspected criminal, a need that Manning would soon address.
Manning and Clardy suspected that two of their top officers, Devin Black and John Jones, were talking to the reporter, so they fired Black and to make him an example to the others, stripped him of years of accumulated retirement, which they are allowed to do in the case of firings.
Jones didn’t wait for that. He resigned. So did some others, and for the first time, law enforcement officers said privately that the leadership was clearly corrupt and needed to go.
Clardy halted the reporter from reading the office’s daily reports, which the newspaper had been doing for decades. This was a violation of the Oklahoma Open Records Act. The sheriff said he didn’t care.
Headline on Jan.20, 2022: “Sheriff regularly breaking law now.”
Eight days later: “County has largest jailbreak in its history.”
