A History Of Violence: What We Know About Suspected Serial Killer Stacy Lee Drake

TUSCALOOSA, AL — Investigators have released additional information about a suspected serial murderer with a long criminal record who is believed to have shot and killed a Tuscaloosa man at the local Alcoholics Anonymous clubhouse off of Jack Warner Parkway last month.

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Captain Jack Kennedy, commander of the Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit, said during a press conference Thursday that Rusty Andrews, 62, was found shot to death inside the clubhouse by several members in the early morning hours of May 14.

Russell Andrews, the son of the man Drake is accused of killing in Tuscaloosa last month, told Patch after receiving the news Thursday that his father's suspected killer was in custody that his family is "elated, to say the least."

ALSO READ: Man Slain At Tuscaloosa AA Remembered As Compassionate Force In Local Recovery Community

“I’m sick for the other families involved," Russell Andrews said. "I’m just glad that they got him. I’m glad he’s going to be held accountable."

Investigators initially released a vivid physical description of the suspect but declined to mention his name or show his face at first to make the suspect think that he had gotten away with the killing and had not been identified.

As Patch reported earlier on Thursday, a large search effort in Arkansas resulted in the arrest of 50-year-old transient Stacy Lee Drake in a wooded area south of the intersection of University Boulevard and Poor Farm Road in Morrilton — a town of nearly 7,000 in Conway County, Arkansas.

The Arkansas Department of Public Safety said that Drake was taken into custody without incident, before saying that Drake was also wanted in connection with at least three homicides in Oklahoma stemming from two separate carjackings, along with felony warrants from other jurisdictions.

Drake is currently being held at the Conway County Detention Center and Kennedy said investigators from Tuscaloosa were already en route to Arkansas to begin working on the next steps of the investigation.

Unable to see the video link above? Click here to watch the full press conference on YouTube.

During a press conference lasting over 20 minutes on Thursday, Kennedy provided more details regarding the suspect, while declining to comment on the charges Drake is facing from other jurisdictions.

The portrait of Drake provided by Kennedy, along with details gathered from extensive additional reporting by Tuscaloosa Patch, shows a pattern of violent escalation in Drake's life and Kennedy explained that the accused murderer was known to regularly change his appearance to elude capture.

A History of Violence

According to an article published by the Kingman (Arizona) Daily Miner on July 8, 1994, Stacy Lee Drake was 19 years old when Mohave County Superior Court Judge James Chavez sentenced him to 10 years in prison after he had entered a guilty plea to charges of armed robbery and burglary.

Indeed, investigators with the Mohave County Sheriff's Office identified Drake as the man who bound a 68-year-old Golden Valley woman to a chair with duct tape in her home while holding her at gunpoint on Valentine's Day 1994.

Drake then burglarized her home and stole her car — a modus operandi that would come to be Drake's calling card for the next three decades, including his suspected killing in Tuscaloosa.

Records show that Drake was arrested in Arkansas after a 22-mile chase that began when a routine check on the license plate of the Ford Tempo Drake was driving showed the car was stolen.

Fortunately, newspapers reported at the time that the 68-year-old woman he had victimized was able to able to alert the police after she freed herself from the duct tape and flagged down a passerby, who then drove her to a phone.

Mohave County Public Defender Ken Everett represented Drake at trial and worked out a plea agreement that allowed his teenage client to plead guilty to armed robbery and burglary in exchange for kidnapping, theft and additional burglary charges being dropped.

What's more, the plea agreement stipulated that Judge Chavez could not use a joyriding conviction as an aggravating circumstance while sentencing Drake.

Despite being sentenced to 10 years in prison and accumulating additional disciplinary actions while behind bars, he was released from custody early in 2002.

It wasn't long — April 2003, in fact — that Drake found himself on the wrong side of the law again when he was convicted in Arizona for burglary and aggravated assault of a police officer.

Drake was 29 years old the previous March and living in Golden Valley, a town of around 8,900 in northwest Arizona, when he was detected by a Mohave County sheriff's deputy during an attempted break-in at a residence in the 7500 block of Arizona Highway 68.

The deputy also reported that he saw Drake carrying an unknown item and decided to investigate further before Drake used pepper spray on the man and was subsequently jailed, where he also received another charge for assault with a deadly weapon while behind bars.

Drake received another prison sentence in Arizona on those charges and was released sometime in 2009, before leaving Arizona and embarking on a brief but violent multi-state crime spree spanning nearly 2,000 miles.

As Patch previously reported, Drake was first accused of robbing a liquor store in Guymon, Oklahoma sometime after that, before then moving on to Alabama, where he was also suspected of robbing a gas station in Ozark and later a liquor store in Dothan in February 2010.

That same year, Drake was arrested and later indicted for a string of crimes in Pickens County.

Court records show Drake was indicted in April 2010 for felon in possession of a firearm, carjacking and brandishing a gun during a violent crime during the incident in Pickens County.

He later entered a guilty plea on all three counts.

The charges resulted from an incident during Drake's crime spree in February 2010 when a man exited Gilliam’s Store just on the other side of the Mississippi line in Reform and was approached by Drake, who pointed a black semi-automatic pistol at the man's chest and ordered him to give him the keys to his 1993 GMC Sonoma truck.

The man reportedly begged for his life as Drake held him at gunpoint and ordered him to start his truck, before forcing the man out and threatening to shoot him if he touched him.

Drake then drove away with the man's wallet and was pursued by a Gordo Police Department officer shortly thereafter.

The officer engaged Drake on Pickens County Road 63 but Drake ignored the lights and sirens before leading police on a chase that reached speeds of 90 mph. He eventually lost control of the truck and flipped the vehicle, which news reports said was so badly damaged that an emergency crew had to rescue him from the mangled vehicle.

After his conviction and sentencing, federal public defender Kevin Butler in 2016 requested that Drake be resentenced, arguing that there had been insufficient evidence to sentence his client on three felony charges under the Armed Career Criminal Act — a 1984 statute that requires an offender to be given a mandatory prison sentence if they have three or more prior violent felony or serious drug convictions at the time of sentencing.

U.S. District Judge R. David Proctor granted the request and vacated Drake's sentence, before giving him a new sentence.

Court records show that on Nov. 10, 2021, the court entered a corrected second judgment and commitment order on the revocation of Drake's supervised release following his sentence for the offenses in Pickens County.

A judge ordered on Oct. 18, 2022, that Drake was to remain in the custody of the United States Marshal, pending the availability of a residential drug treatment facility.

Records show that arrangements for a bed-to-bed transfer were finalized and Drake was placed in the Jimmie Hale Mission in Birmingham in late 2022 as part of his supervised release.

Founded as a Christian shelter in 1944, the Jimmie Hale Mission says it feeds, clothes, houses, counsels, and provides back-to-life vocational and social services to around 150 men, women, and children.

During Thursday's press conference, Kennedy explained that this is where Drake's connection to Birmingham can be found, before stressing that other than his crimes in a neighboring county, he was not from the area.

"He is not from Alabama," Kennedy told reporters. "At one time, he was arrested in Alabama in Pickens County and he had an ID with a Birmingham address that may have been involved with him being in a homeless shelter there."

At some point, Drake left the shelter and began on yet another multi-state spree that saw him escalate from armed robbery and carjacking to murder.

"He was utilizing a false name and possibly dressing himself differently, including hats and glasses at the time when he was in Tuscaloosa, which starts to make sense now that we know more about his past and what he's done since then," Kennedy told reporters Thursday.

Kennedy said Drake had only been in Tuscaloosa for a week or two in early May and witnesses told police that he had been seen at the AA clubhouse on Jack Warner Parkway, where he had reportedly been offered food, water and the typical range of resources provided by the group.

After Rusty Andrews — a beloved longtime member and respected mentor in the recovery community — was found dead inside the club on the morning of May 14, investigators quickly found that his vehicle had been stolen.

To paraphrase Kennedy and many others, Rusty Andrews was known as the kind of man who would have given Drake or anyone else his keys and wallet had they just asked.

Nevertheless, just a few hours after his body was discovered, the vehicle's location showed that it was well outside of Tuscaloosa County, and its destination was unknown, which prompted the Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes unit to contact the US Marshals Task Force to begin the search for the murder suspect.

"We did have video surveillance from a distance and the victim's vehicle was seen at the approximately the vehicle left AA," Kennedy said. "We were able to locate the vehicle several hours later around the border of Oklahoma and Arkansas."

Drake is then believed to have made his way into Oklahoma, where he committed the first murders he has been suspected of, at least publicly by law enforcement.

Indeed, Patch previously reported that the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said that at approximately 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sequoyah County deputies responded to a report of two people found dead inside a business near Oklahoma Highway 64 and South 4760 Road in Gans — a town with a population of roughly 300 in the Fort Smith, Arkansas-Oklahoma Metropolitan Area.

State investigators in Oklahoma also mentioned that Drake was suspected of being responsible for another carjacking that resulted in an unrelated death.

From there, police say that Drake crossed back over into Arkansas, where he was spotted on foot in Conway County and seen buying camping supplies, according to the Arkansas State Police, which said the Arkansas National Guard and the Arkansas Division of Community Correction assisted in the search.

The vehicle owned by Rusty Andrews has yet to be recovered, Kennedy said.

"I wish I was the one going to Arkansas so I could thank the guys who went into the woods and got him," Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit commander Captain Jack Kennedy said Thursday.

After Drake was taken into custody, Kennedy was asked if he believed the suspect could be considered a serial killer — a possibility that Kennedy said was likely, at the very least.

"If you look at his criminal history, he was continuously escalating his violent behavior, so he is now at least responsible for three or possibly four homicides we know about in the last two months," Kennedy said. "I would not be surprised if there were other homicides out there that are unsolved in other jurisdictions because of his lifestyle, using false names, having no official address, no employment records, changing and altering his appearance and immediately fleeing multiple states away from the scenes, it would not surprise me at all."

Kennedy was also quick to thank members of the local AA chapter for their assistance and cooperation in the earliest stages of the investigation, explaining that the little things Drake said during his time in Tuscaloosa were crucial in connecting him to the murder of Rusty Andrews.

"This case could very easily be unsolved right now [without their help]," he said.

Kennedy went on to say that details are being worked out right now regarding the next steps for bringing Drake to justice and referenced "the long arm of the law" when saying that Drake will eventually be in the Tuscaloosa County Jail to answer for his crimes.

With that in mind, though, Kennedy then said it is likely the jurisdiction where he's being held in Arkansas will have primary custody over Drake for the time being and there will likely be an extradition to Oklahoma for the three murders he is suspected of in that state.

"He was also a federal inmate at different points in his career and there were outstanding pending federal charges on him for violating his parole at this time," Kennedy said. "It appears that he was traveling the country in this lifestyle utilizing false names in an attempt to keep from being incarcerated. What led him to become a person who violently assaults and murders people, I do not know."

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