Daughters Plea With Thief To Return Dead Father's Ring

A Pauls Valley family is heartbroken.

A day before they lay their 90-year-old father to rest, someone steals his wedding ring right off his finger.

The ring holds great sentimental value to his daughters.

The three daughters had just left the cemetery where they laid their father to rest when News 9 caught up with them. They're pleading that whoever took that ring off their father's finger inside Stufflebean Funeral Home simply return it.

"We hope that that person has a tingling in his feelings, and a heart that's going to be burning that he does the right thing. He or she," Sandy Strickland said.

It is a heavy gold ring with three, one karat diamonds in it. A wedding band of more than 68 years.

"When something happened to our dad, each one of us got a piece of him by having a stone," Barbara Tolleson said.

Now, 90-year-old Robert Nichols daughters Cindy Alexander, Barabara Tolleson and Sandy Strickland don't have that.

The three are torn.

"Because somebody was evil enough to go in there and do that," said Tolleson. "That's part of our dad that we'll remember, and we won't have it now."

"And we had just laid our mother to rest 14 months ago, and so, you know it makes it double tough to have to deal with something so heinous almost as this," Strickland added.

Robert Nichols, a coast guard veteran and a retired postal worker from Pauls Valley, had quite the resume and quite the reputation in town.

"Everyone knew him, and he was always there for whoever, or whatever," Cindy Alexander said.

He was also a hunter, a fisherman, a Chickasaw citizen and a loving father.

"It's like a grave robber, when you get right down to it," said Strickland. "This is something that you don't do."

Sandy, desperate to find the ring, put a post on Facebook early Tuesday morning. She wrote, "If anyone sees or hears of someone sporting a new three-diamond gold man's ring, please contact the Pauls Valley Police Department."

"If they would just put it in a cloth and lay it at the funeral home door, you know, that would be fine," said Tolleson. "If they would just give it back to us, we'd just be thankful."

We're told Stufflebean Funeral home directors have been working to get names of florists and people who came in to purchase flowers for another funeral in the next room.