The oilfield business in East Texas, once upon a time, was wrought with shady characters who’d gladly revert to egregious crimes to stay on top of the game. Perhaps that is the reason Oilfield Sandblasting & Coating Incorporated’s owner, 27-year-old Clarence Ray Hudgins, was gunned down on the porch of his home in October of 1981. But that theory is almost too easy, and besides that, shady figures in the business usually only sabotaged or stole equipment. Murder was much more of a rarity. Either way, the Kilgore, Texas Police and the Gregg County Sheriff’s Office were stumped. Motives were easily theorized, but much more difficult to prove.

If you have any information about the assassination of Clarence Ray Hudgins, please contact Gregg County Crime Stoppers at 903-236-7867.

You can donate to law enforcement investigations that need funding or upload your DNA into a database used only for law enforcement investigations at DNAsolves.com

If you don’t have DNA data from a consumer testing site, you can get a kit at connect.DNAsolves.com

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Sources for this episode, largely, were the documents supplied to us by Ray Hudgins’s Mother Kathryn. Additional sources include The Kilgore News-Herald, The Tyler Morning-Telegraph, and the Longview News-Journal.

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