Ivan Kilgore

Ivan was born to the proud parents of Reiletta Kilgore and Frank Williams Jr. He was raised for the most part in Seminole County, Oklahoma.

At the heart of this racially intolerant stretch of land set the county seat–Wewoka, his birthright. Yet, he and his family resided here and there throughout the state.

From jump at age three, Ivan’s father had checked-out. Though, his abandonment was not by choice.

Three bullets caught him in the back of the head. His murder would be the first of many life-altering events in Ivan’s childhood.

When times got hard for his mother, Ivan was sent to stay with his grandparents. They were church folks who had settled on a two-hundred acre ranch.

To say they were his “rock” would be an understatement.

There, Ivan would flourish. He was free to roam as he pleased. He camped-out in the woods; skinny-dipped in the pond; rode horses, bulls and even the neighbor’s Great Dane.

Ivan’s grandparents were charitable people who taught him the importance of social and economic institutions through the establishment of their own church and business.

Sadly, by the time he was 13, his grandparents began to experience health complications and as they grew infirm, so too would the positive influence in Ivan’s life.

He was soon back in the chaotic home of his mother and stepfather, which eventually forced him into the streets.

He later found family in a group of fatherless boys who spent their weekends stealing cars. At age 14, his new friends gave him a job dispensing cocaine at a crack house from sundown to sunrise.

In thirteen years of school he attended thirteen different schools. Most of the towns he grew up in were small populations (800 to 25,000), with exception to Oklahoma City and Norman.

Needless to say, they all were trapped in the cultural bubble of racism, drugs, poverty, and violence. By his senior in high school, Ivan was on his own.

After miraculously graduating, he left Wewoka and moved into a three-bedroom apartment with his girlfriend, three of his sisters and a stepson. He had minimum wage jobs, but began selling drugs on the side to buy groceries and shoes for his family.

Despite serious efforts to make a legitimate living, flipping burgers was not enough. This eventually pushed him deeper into drug dealing.

Black on black crime statistics Source: YouGov

By 1995, at age 20, he was trafficking drugs from California. Soon, thereafter, the streets would come calling. In November, he shot and killed an acquaintance in a dispute over stolen guns.

After a drawn out capital murder trial ended with a hung jury, Ivan pleads to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to four years in prison.

After his release in 1998, he moved to Pittsburgh, California and enrolled at Los Medanos Community College. Awarded an academic scholarship, Ivan received praises from instructors, deans and family.

Life was good for a change. He was engaged to get married and set to open the first of what he dreamed would be a chain of small clothing bouquets.

Never in his wildest dreams would he imagine that he would find himself charged with capital murder again.

After returning to Oakland from a summer trip in Oklahoma to visit his daughter, Ivan was assaulted and robbed on several occasions.

His assailants, William Anderson and several friends, brutality pistol-whipped him and made off with $100. Again, they would return the following day and attempted to rob him.

Two days later, on July 16, 2000, Ivan shot and killed Anderson near a pay phone on San Pablo Avenue after one of the assailants (standing next to Anderson) shot at Ivan’s car.

Percentage of homicides by weaponry from 1988 to 2017. Source: DATA HUB

March 2003, the stage was set for Ivan’s trial to begin. Having been afforded the unfortunate yet insightful experience of his prior trial, it was too obvious his attorney was intent on sabotaging his chances at acquittal.

In the months leading up to trial Ivan repeatedly informed his attorney of his defense—that he was shot at, that the Oakland Police Department had sold his car before he could substantiate this fact, and that he shot back in self-defense.

His pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears.

Two weeks later Ivan was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Today Ivan spends much of his time confined to a prison cell 23 hours a day. His motivation to write is driven by a need to survive.

A need to understand and navigate the political, historical, and cultural forces that operate to hold him captive–both physically and mentally.

Prison, unquestionably, has made Ivan more of what he was before he went in. In most cases the outcome is not positive.

Yet, the circumstance has brought about the best of Ivan. History has told of such men who have risen above the circumstance to have a benevolent impact on society.

They become somewhat of Ministers of Truth who redefine reality, which too often misleads and distorts our value systems and perception.

That said, Ivan is one such individual who has spent much of his adult life in prison reviewing and analyzing the reality that landed him there.

Without question, the ink that spills from his pen is a reality check! His writings are confrontational, in that, they expose the fallacy of a common worldview tainted by a lack of compassion and morality.

Having been condemned to spend the rest of his natural life in prison, Ivan stands as a beacon of inspiration for those determined not to allow circumstance to curtail their ability to make a positive contribution to society.

Through much tenacity and opposition from within the ranks of an institutional structure that fosters social regression, Ivan is truly an exception to the norm.

Having founded and established the United Black Family Scholarship Foundation  from within prison walls. The objectives of this organization, he has briefly discussed in his recently published book Domestic Genocide: The Institutionalization of Society.

In the book he explains unlike any scholar  the various cultural and institutional forces which have operated in American society to create  detrimental circumstances.

And the natural right of all human beings to be free of oppressive institutional structures designed to exploit and destroy them.

Mayhem, Murder and Magnificence chronicles the inspirational story of Ivan Kilgore who, after suffering a wrongful conviction for first-degree murder and being sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, set out to build a successful, multi-million-dollar community-based organization from within the walls of a maximum-security California prison.

Born into a world of chaos, murder and mental illness, this is a story about a country boy from Oklahoma who turned tragedy on its head by taking everything he learned from small-town trappin’ to big city hustling to lessons learned while fighting for his freedom after spending over 20 years in some of the nation’s most violent prisons.