The Dreams of Ada (10 page)

Then had come the turning point: the death of their father. Of all the kids, Tommy had been the closest to Jesse; he took it the hardest when their dad developed cancer. The doctors operated, found it had spread all through him. They sewed him up and sent him home to wait for death. For three months Jesse Ward lay in the house on Ashland Avenue that he had inherited from his father, the pecan tree he had planted still bearing fruit out front. The last few days they took turns sitting at his bedside, Miz Ward and all eight of the kids, and Bud. Two of them, Melvin and Tommy, couldn’t bear it; they would disappear for days at a time, unable to watch their father waste away.

To ease the pain of his father’s death, someone gave Tommy a joint to smoke. Some say it was Jimmy; some say it was Robert Cavins; some say it was a friend. Whoever it was, within a week the family could see that Tommy was doing a lot of dope. Perhaps Jesse Ward could have stopped him if he were alive, perhaps not. Susie Ward couldn’t. Tommy quit high school, grew fond of beer, of cheap wine. He began to run with a bad crowd in the streets. He got arrested occasionally for misdemeanors, had to be bailed out, might sass the police in the process; he was another one of “those Wards,” in the eyes of the town.

But would he kill somebody? It was impossible, Tricia thought, pacing the living room, unable to sit still. Jut-jawed, Tommy had a temper; he would get angry sometimes; but when he did he would punch a wall, or the refrigerator, and hurt himself, not the person he was angry at. The house on Ashland had plenty of holes in the walls to prove it. The time his former girlfriend, Lisa Lawson, broke up with him, Tommy had gone out and banged himself up on his motorcycle; he’d never laid a finger on Lisa. Then he had come home and put his head in Tricia’s lap and cried.

Now the police were saying he killed the Haraway girl. Tricia didn’t believe it, not for a minute—not if Tommy said he didn’t. She knew he might do a lot of things, but not kill.

Get a lawyer? Thanksgiving was only a month away; she’d been wondering how they were going to afford a turkey; Bud was planning to go to a loan company to get money to pay the October bills. How could they afford a lawyer?

She thought of Susie. Of Mama. She would have to tell Mama, though it would break her heart.

Miz Ward was staying in Tulsa at the time, to help Joel, who had hurt his leg at work and was having trouble getting around. Tricia had to summon all her self-control to get her fingers to dial the number correctly.

Crying, she told her mother about Tommy’s arrest. Miz Ward listened with a quiet bewilderment. It wasn’t so; Tommy wouldn’t do such a thing.

She remembered the time the police came looking for Tommy, a few days after the girl disappeared. He had gone down and talked to them. There had been no problem. They had let him go. Why would they arrest him now, six months later?

It was all a mistake, Susie Ward thought. Things would get straightened out.

“We have to get him a lawyer,” Tricia said.

“Yes, I guess we do,” Miz Ward agreed, in the soft, laconic way she had of speaking; such emotion as she might be feeling rarely was evident in her voice.

Miz Ward talked to Joel; Joel talked to Tricia. Being the two strongest ones, Tricia and Joel sometimes butted heads, got into arguments. But now they would need each other; Tommy would need them both. Joel and Miz Ward drove to Ada from Tulsa.

Tricia called Bud’s mother, Maxine, who lived ten blocks away on Seventeenth Street. The two sets of in-laws, the Wolfs and the Wards, were not close, did not always get along, but Maxine loved Tricia, her daughter-in-law, mother of three of her four grandchildren. Why, that’s crazy, Maxine told Tricia. Tommy wouldn’t do such a thing. Whenever she had met him, he had always been nice, polite. She was thinking, but not saying:
unless he was on drugs, and it was the drugs
that made him do it; you never knew what someone might do on drugs
. But mostly not believing it.

When Maxine hung up the phone, it was Tricia she was concerned about. She telephoned Reverend Larry Jones, the preacher of their church, the Unity Missionary Baptist; the preacher went to Tricia’s house, to offer her such comfort as he could.

Tricia did not know much about the legal system, had never been in trouble that way. All she knew was that lawyers cost a lot. They would probably have to get one of those public defenders, she thought—not knowing a technicality, that in Oklahoma there are public defenders only in the major cities; in the smaller towns the right-to-counsel for the poor is granted through court-appointed private attorneys.

She called some friends, spoke of Tommy’s plight; told them he said he didn’t do it, despite what the TV was saying about a confession. Don’t settle for a public defender, her friends told her. They’re not experienced, they don’t try very hard; that would be signing Tommy’s death warrant.

Bewildered, not knowing where to turn, Tricia called the office of the state attorney general in Oklahoma City. The advice was similar: in a capital case it would be better to hire a private attorney, if that were at all possible.

Tricia hung up, frightened. She did not see how that would be possible.

In its Wild West days, Ada had been renowned as an open city, a haven for outlaws. Belle Starr used to hang out in a hideaway called Devil’s Den, about thirty miles from Ada, a lichen-covered rock canyon that later would become a tourist attraction, a place for picnicking. According to legend, the Jesse James gang once held up the bank at Francis, a few miles northeast of Ada, and found only eleven dollars in it, and, encountering the sheriff as they were leaving, ridiculed the place for its slim pickings. Outlaws who had fled from the States into Indian Territory walked the streets of Ada with impunity. Until 1909. That year a local man named Gus Bobbitt was shot dead. Four itinerant outlaws were arrested for the murder. As the men were being held in the local jail, the citizens of Ada rose up in wrath. They stormed the jail, took out the men before they could be tried, and hanged them in a nearby barn. The lynching of the four suspects—Jim Miller, Joe Allen, B. B. Burwell, and Jesse West—is the moment in its history of which Ada is most proud. It was, in the words of a history book published by an Ada bank, “one mob action in America entirely justified in the eyes of God and man.” At the Ada Chamber of Commerce, situated in an old railroad depot on Main Street, there is available only one picture postcard of the town. It is a faded black-and-white photograph of the lynching: the four suspects clearly visible, dangling simultaneously from ropes affixed to the barn’s rafters, while in the background morning sun filters in over the heads of onlookers, and to the right, beside the dangling bodies, a white horse grazes peacefully.

Now the town was in a lynch mood again.

Tommy Ward had confessed, according to the news reports. Karl Fontenot had also confessed. Odell Titsworth had not confessed, but both Ward and Fontenot had implicated him. Two confessions and Odell Titsworth—who was known in the town as a bad guy, with four convictions for things like assault and battery. Few in Ada had reason to doubt that all the suspects were guilty. The murder of Denice Haraway was the angry talk of the factories and the stores, the homes and the 3.2-beer bars, much as her disappearance had been the curious talk five months earlier.

At the feed mill, Bud Wolf operated a computer that mixed different grains into the proper proportions for different feeds. He had been working at the mill for six years; his coworkers were well aware that Tommy Ward was his brother-in-law, that Tricia was his wife. “Those Wards,” one worker said, making sure that Bud could hear him. “They’re all no good. They ought to kill them all.”

At Latta Elementary School, Rhonda was taunted by her fifth-grade classmates every day about how her uncle had killed that girl. Every day she came home in tears; she loved her uncle Tommy. The taunting was led by the daughter of a policeman.

Odell Titsworth’s sister Judy worked at Blue Bell jeans. Every weekday morning after the arrests, she came in and sat at her machine with her head down. The other women perched at their sewing machines under the fluorescent lights, and gazed at Judy, and said nothing—aware, perhaps out of personal experience, that women were not responsible for the violence of the men in their lives.

Call after call came into police headquarters and the district attorney’s office warning that the suspects in the Haraway case would be killed. It is only forty-three steps across a neat green lawn beneath a pecan tree from the county jail to the county courthouse, but because of the death threats District Judge Jesse Green moved a scheduled hearing on Monday from the courthouse to the jail. At the hearing the men were told they were being held in connection with the Haraway case—but no formal charges were brought.

The next day, District Attorney Bill Peterson asked that formal arraignments be postponed until Thursday. “They have admitted it, but we don’t have the rest of the evidence yet,” he told the Ada
News
. “What we’re trying to prove is if they are the ones. It’s not as easy as it appears.”

On Thursday, the state medical examiner’s office announced that the charred bones found in the burned-out house during the initial search were not human bones. A jawbone found was the jawbone of a possum. “This puts us back to square one in the search for the body,” Paul Renfrow, a spokesman for the OSBI, told the press. The scheduled arraignments were delayed again; the men had been in jail for a week without any charges being brought.

The town still seethed with dark threats, with a desire for revenge. One night the phone rang in the county jail. The jailer was told that he had better leave, because the jail would be blown up that night, to kill Tommy Ward. The call was anonymous, but the jailer believed he recognized the voice as that of a local thug; even the running underclass was outraged. The jailer stayed where he was. There was no bombing.

Day after day the police continued to search for Denice Haraway’s body in the area west of town. Tommy Ward had mentioned in his taped statement Sandy Creek; the police prowled its edges, poked its muddy depths in search of the body. They didn’t find it. Tommy had also mentioned the concrete bunker. There was fifteen feet of garbage in the bunker. Police went down into it, hauled out the garbage. They found no body. OSBI technicians went through the remains of the burned-out house described by Fontenot, using window screens to sift the debris, looking for bone fragments or teeth. They found none. They used metal detectors to try to unearth dental fillings; they came up with many rusty nails, but no fillings, no evidence.

The 200 acres of land just west of Ada, in the area of the power plant, were owned by a gentleman named Forrest Simpson, the manager of the Southern Oklahoma Livestock Auction. On his land stood the house in which he lived, plus five barns and an older, unoccupied house. There used to be two old houses. But one day in June of 1983, Forrest Simpson decided to get rid of one of the old houses, which was an eyesore on the land. He tore out what scrap lumber in the house he thought he might be able to use; he tore out the floor. The house had been four rooms, each exterior wall about twenty-five feet long. What lumber he didn’t want he tossed inside the foundation. Then he lit a match and set it to the old, dry wood, and he burned the entire house to the ground.

After the arrests in the Haraway case, Forrest Simpson was told on the telephone that a bunch of police were out on his land, poking around in the remains of the house. He went over and saw the police at work, sifting through the sticks of charred wood that remained, and the broken tiles. He asked what they were doing. They told him they were looking for the body of Denice Haraway, the clerk who had been kidnapped from McAnally’s. One of the fellows who’d confessed, Simpson was told, had said they had brought the woman’s body to this abandoned house, and poured gasoline over it, and burned it, and then burned down the entire house.

That was last April, wasn’t it? Forrest Simpson said.

He was told that that was correct.

Well, that couldn’t be, Simpson told the police, because he himself had burned down the house in June of ’83, ten months before the woman disappeared.

Are you sure about that? Simpson was asked.

Yes, he was quite sure. The night in question there’d been nothing here but the foot-high foundation in front of them now.

This development would be a problem, Dennis Smith understood, unless they found the body somewhere.

The news provided by Forrest Simpson was not made public. The police continued to search the burned-out house, while cattle watched dumbly from behind a barbed-wire fence.

Detective Mike Baskin, too, had a problem; it wouldn’t go away. He was glad that Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers had obtained a confession from Tommy Ward; he was glad that Rogers and Smith had obtained a similar confession from Karl Fontenot. Odell Titsworth had not yet confessed, despite intensive questioning, but Titsworth, he knew, would be harder to crack; he’d been through rough questioning before. But Titsworth had to be guilty. There it was on Ward’s tape: the robbery, the kidnapping had been Titsworth’s idea; they had left a keg party in Titsworth’s pickup; Titsworth had taken the girl from the store; Titsworth had the knife; Titsworth raped her first; Titsworth did most of the stabbing; Titsworth kept the money from the cash register.

It was pretty much the same on Fontenot’s tape: Titsworth’s idea, Titsworth’s truck, Titsworth’s knife. Titsworth the murderer.

The case was pretty much solved, would be finished once they found the body, it seemed. Just a matter of all the courtroom stuff from now on.

Still, something was bothering Detective Baskin, niggling at his brain. He went back in his mind to the night of the disappearance—April 28. He remembered how he had gotten the call in the squad car, how he had gone to McAnally’s. He remembered what he had been doing just before the call came in, why he was working that Saturday night. He had gone to Valley View Hospital that night to get a statement from the staff at the emergency room, because…because two nights before, in an altercation, the police had broken Odell Titsworth’s arm!