Editor’s note: This story contains descriptions of murder and sexual assault some readers may find disturbing.
On a sunny spring morning last year, Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Matt Snyder stopped to conduct a routine welfare check on a man in distress sitting along Interstate 40.
The man, in his 20s, wore shorts and a Super Mario T-shirt, and he had a dark secret he was ready to share.
Joseph Tyler Beck began confessing to a crime that had long gone cold, revealing he had strangled to death a young woman he knew in Edmond seven years earlier.
Another trooper, Preston Cox, took him in handcuffs to Edmond to be questioned by police detectives.
“I am a murderer,” he said on camera in the patrol car, crying as he spoke, as the trooper began the 30-minute drive from Oklahoma City.
“Hey, buddy, just try to breathe a little bit right now and don’t get yourself too worked up, OK?” Trooper Cox said.
“I just killed one person,” Beck said a few minutes later. “But it’s still just like it should be enough that you just have to go to jail forever. … I don’t want someone along the way here to try to get into my head that I’m … worth saving. Because I’m not.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, man,” he continued.
“Why did I ever choose to do anything bad?” he then said, speaking through sobs.
“I’m sorry, sir?” the trooper replied.
“Why did I ever choose to do anything bad?” Beck repeated. “I was a good person. I went to school. I believed in God. I chose to be good. Why did I ever choose to do bad? Why did I ever choose the evil path? Why did I ever kill anyone?”
He confessed further at the police station, talking to detectives for more than three hours. He also wrote out what he did.
“The night of, I went over with pure hatred and sin in my heart,” he wrote. “It was gonna happen, my first murder.”
The routine welfare check on May 2, 2024, led to a first-degree murder charge in Oklahoma County District Court.
Jennifer Kyli Molloy, pictured here in a provided photo, was killed in Edmond in 2016. Joseph Tyler Beck was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole on Sept. 17, 2025, for killing Molloy.
Beck was charged with murdering Jennifer Kyli Molloy on Oct 5, 2016, at her Edmond apartment. She was 19. He had been 20.
Police confirmed his confession with DNA evidence.
Beck, now 29, pleaded guilty in June, choosing to let a judge decide his punishment.
On Wednesday, Sept. 17, District Judge Cindy Truong decided that he should never be free again.
She ordered him to prison for life without the possibility of parole. She said she feared he wiould kill again if ever released. The death penalty was not sought in the case.
Beck had sought a prison sentence of 40 to 45 years. His defense attorney asked the judge to consider the role Beck’s mental health issues had in in his actions.
Beck has been diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophenia, the assistant public defender, Ryan Sullivan, said.
The judge told Beck to get whatever mental health treatment he could in prison. She promised to review the sentence in a year.
More: Oklahoma City cold case closed with prison time, an apology and words of forgiveness
For police, the case had been particularly frustrating because they had DNA evidence from underneath the victim’s fingernails, from her bra and from a cup in the apartment
“She was a young, beautiful woman,” Detective Mason Long testified at the sentencing. “There were a lot of men in her life that wanted to hang out with her.”
Those known possible suspects were eliminated, according to his tesimony. The case went cold, until Beck confessed.
In those confessions, Beck said he invited himself over to Molloy’s apartment. He had first met her in middle school and they had worked together at a Subway. He said he was attracted to her.
“He said he was going to have sex with her one way or another,” the detective told the judge.
Beck claimed the two had a good time at her apartment at first, drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. They had listened to Fleetwood Mac together. Then he made a move.
She rejected his sexual advance and said another man was coming over, according to his confession. She told him to leave or she would use a Taser on him.
He said he began choking her. He kept going until she was unconscious because he didn’t want her to scream. He said he then put his knee to her throat to kill her to keep her from reporting him.
He said he considered having sex with her corpse but thought he would get “into it” and become a serial killer.
In his statement in the trooper’s vehicle on the way to the police, he said he considered confessing immediately. “I said, ‘Dear God, what have I done?'” he recalled.
He left the state instead.
He said he also considered killing himself. His attorney said Beck went to I-40 on May 2, 2024, to jump off a bridge.
At the sentencing, Beck stayed silent, even after the victim’s father and three others told the judge how much their lives had been devastated.
“She was truly something special, and she is missed every second of every day” the father, Johnny Molloy, told the judge. “He does not deserve a chance to ever hurt anyone again.”
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: An Oklahoma murder case had gone cold. Then the killer confessed on the side of an interstate
