(Stillwater, Okla.) – A Cushing man who admitted endeavoring to manufacture methamphetamine at his residence in the 1100 block of E. Greenlee Street with his co-defendant has been placed on 10 years’ probation with extensive conditions including random drug testing and complying with the methamphetamine registry, court records showed today.
Charles Lee Herring, 54, was sentenced Friday by Associate District Judge Stephen Kistler, who ordered him to pay a $5,000 fine along with $650 in fees, as well as the cost of his incarceration. Herring was also ordered to have a substance abuse evaluation, to follow all the treatment recommendations in a background report, and to perform 100 hours of community service.
His co-defendant, Mary Margaret Vaughan, now 47, then an ex-convict living with him, was sentenced last September to a 10-year prison term followed by 10 years of probation.
As part of her plea bargain, the judge ordered that she have drug treatment in prison and on her release have a substance abuse evaluation, follow any recommendations, undergo random drug tests and pay $5,650 in fines and assessments.
Payne County Sheriff’s Deputy Dan Nack, who arrested the couple on Dec. 4, 2013, said Herring told him “he does not know how to cook meth; however, he buys pseudoephedrine for Mary to do so and gets meth for it. He advised this has been going on for several years.
“Mary advised that she does cook meth. She advised that she also purchases pseudoephedrine for that,” the affidavit said.
Their home in the 1100 block of E. Greenlee in Cushing was searched on Dec. 4, 2013, by a team of deputies from the Payne County Sheriff’s Office, the affidavit said.
In the bedroom by the bed were “two individual shake method methamphetamine labs,” Nack wrote in an affidavit.
Ten additional “older one-pot or shake method methamphetamine labs were also found here,” the affidavit said.
Thirteen additional bottles were found in a bathroom cabinet — four containing a liquid one of which tested as methamphetamine, the affidavit said.
“Several of these were also hand-labeled Thursday, Friday, Saturday, etc.,” the affidavit said.
“Mary states that the purpose to label the bottles with days is to identify later when she made it after the bottle is stored,” the affidavit said.
According to state Department of Corrections records, Vaughan was 22 when she was first sent to prison in 1990 for distributing methamphetamine in Comanche County, for which she was given a two-year sentence followed by three years of probation. Five years later she was given a seven-year sentence for amphetamine possession in Comanche County, DOC records show.
The following year, she was given a 10-year sentence for escape in Comanche County, from which she was paroled in 2005, DOC records show.
She had been out of prison for eight and one-half years when she was sentenced from Payne County last September to 10 years’ confinement, DOC records show.
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