The Dreams of Ada (13 page)

The patrolman in the squad car asked if it was her truck. She said it belonged to her daughter. Since it wasn’t hers, the officer said, he could not tell her what this was about, except that the truck was being impounded in an investigation. The investigation, she would later recall him saying, had to do with narcotics trafficking.

Marie moved toward the front of the truck, to get a sweater that she had left on the seat. The officer stopped her. He told her she could not take anything from the truck.

Mrs. Titsworth returned to the house, embarrassed that the patrol car was parked there, in front of Mr. Wyatt’s, for all the neighbors to see. She phoned Melba, who got a ride over. For more than two hours the patrol car was parked behind the pickup, till a tow-truck arrived and towed it away. Before they left, the police allowed her to get her sweater.

Marie asked her friend and employer, Don Wyatt, for help. Mrs. Titsworth told Wyatt that her boy could not have hurt the Haraway girl; that the police had broken his arm two nights before, in her own home.

Wyatt informed the district attorney’s office of this. The authorities already knew it. Odell Titsworth, they said, was being held on an outstanding warrant for his assault on a policeman the night his arm was broken, not for the Haraway case.

It was nearly a week before Marie Titsworth got her daughter’s truck back. The OSBI had treated every inch of it for hairs, fibers, fingerprints, anything that might connect it to Donna Denice Haraway. They found nothing. When the truck was returned, it was covered with a film of black soot used in the analysis. Marie Titsworth felt that the least they could have done before returning the truck was to clean up the mess they had made. Don Wyatt agreed with her.

Wyatt was a maverick among the attorneys of Ada. A loner by nature, he did not belong to the Rotary Club or any other civic organizations at whose functions other attorneys hobnobbed with clients or prospective clients. His own clients were mostly poor criminals, or poor factory workers engaged in claims against management. For him to mingle socially with the opposition would have made both sides uncomfortable.

Born and raised in Oklahoma City, Wyatt moved to Ada after O.U. law school, because of its quiet beauty. There was an aura about him of a city slicker in the country, an aura fraught with contradictions. His city upbringing was reflected in the pale gray suits and ties and white shirts he favored in court, in the gold watch he wore with its face turned toward the inside of his wrist, as if he were guarding the privacy even of his time. He was mildly stocky, had a full moustache, was not tall but somehow gave the forceful impression of being taller than he was. He spoke in a soft, well-modulated voice, but his words were usually direct, sometimes even brusque. His rural side was reflected in the dark plaid wool or cotton shirts, open at the neck, that he wore when he did not have to go to court; in the green and cream–colored Ram Charger he drove; in the spent buckshot shells that littered the rear of the Charger, hunting pheasant and shooting skeet being his favorite ways to relax.

He came to Ada in the 1970s as an assistant district attorney. After several years he quit to practice criminal law. In the view of some of Ada’s law enforcement people, that switch was almost like a policeman quitting to become a burglar. At first he handled only criminal cases; some of his first clients were people he had helped to convict, who, in trouble again, wanted him to represent them now. Gradually he branched out into civil suits. His firm, Wyatt & Addicott, was one of several law firms in the state that advertised on television at times for accident or personal injury cases; in the eyes of the town’s upper classes, this made him an “ambulance chaser.” Yet it was of these same injury cases that he was most proud. On a wall in the stunning law building he had designed for himself was a state map dotted with clusters of light blue and dark green pins; there were large clusters of pins around Ada, around Oklahoma City, around Tulsa, and individual pins scattered through the state; the pins represented more than 400 workmen’s compensation cases and 300 civil suits—personal injury cases, automobile accidents—that were pending in his computerized files at any given time, in addition to 40 or 50 criminal cases.

The success of his practice was evident in the size of his staff—the firm had nine employees—as well as in the office building itself, which some passersby thought, while it was being built in the summer of 1984, would be Ada’s fifty-first church. Made of red brick, it had a peaked roof, vaulted windows, beautiful wood parquet floors, handcrafted wooden chair railings, thick carpets, soaring ceilings and skylights, a library, a conference room with stained glass in the doors, a computer room, a kitchen, a large parking lot out back, manicured lawns that sloped to Arlington Boulevard in front. The building was a monument to Wyatt’s taste, to the 20 to 33 percent fees he got for winning civil cases, and to the number of cases he won. His business card listed phone numbers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, where the industrial courts were located, as well as in Ada; all of the toll-free numbers rang in Ada, but the clientele was statewide.

Because of all this, Don Wyatt did not have the fears other Ada attorneys had about representing the defendants in the Haraway case. By the time he was asked to represent Tommy Ward, his hackles had already been raised by what he viewed as police mistreatment of his cleaning lady, Marie Titsworth. There would be no conflict of interest, he was confident, because Odell Titsworth was not likely to be charged in the case.

Wyatt had heard of Tommy Ward’s confession. He did not want to take the case merely to enter a plea of guilty. He knew the Ward family was poor; a court-appointed attorney could do that. So he went to talk to Tommy Ward. He went back several times, questioning Tommy in the jail about why he had made the taped confession. Tommy told him his account of the dream, of the questioning by Gary Rogers and Dennis Smith. He insisted that he hadn’t done it. After three or four visits, Wyatt was not totally convinced that Ward was innocent. But he felt there was a strong possibility that he was. He decided to take the case.

Tricia, Miz Ward, and Joel went back with the $3,000 retainer. Wyatt repeated that his services would cost $25,000. He agreed that if they could not pay him in full within a year, he would take the old Ward house on Ashland Avenue, and the three acres on which it stood, in lieu of cash. The date the house would change hands, if the fee was not paid in full, would be one year to the day, on October 29, 1985.

Soon after, Don Wyatt filed a writ of habeas corpus. The suspects had been in jail for eleven days, with no charges brought against them. The district attorney would have to file formal charges, body or no body, or set them free.

The first response of the D.A.’s office was to claim that the men were being held as material witnesses in the case. But that didn’t hold up in court. On November 7, twenty days after their arrests, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were formally charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon; with kidnapping; with rape; and with the murder, in the first degree, of Donna Denice Haraway.

There was still no body.

TWO MEN CHARGED
IN HARAWAY CASE

announced the Ada
News
the next day.

Odell Titsworth was still in jail, but he had not been charged. District Attorney Bill Peterson went to great lengths to explain to the public why.

“After an extensive investigation by the officers of the Ada Police Department, the Pontotoc County Sheriff’s Department, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the District Attorney’s Office, Odell Titsworth has been eliminated as a suspect in the Donna Haraway case,” Peterson stated. He said Titsworth was still being held in jail on charges in an unrelated assault-and-battery case.

A broken arm suffered by Titsworth in the unrelated incident two days before the disappearance of Denice Haraway was one of the main factors used to rule him out as a suspect, the
News
reported to the people of Ada. According to Peterson, although both Ward and Fontenot implicated Titsworth as having a major part in the crime, Titsworth had been ruled out for three main reasons.

“First, Ward and Fontenot said Titsworth had on a short-sleeve shirt the night of the crime and had no scars or tattoos or anything wrong with his arm, when in fact he is heavily tattooed on both arms from his knuckles to his elbows. Titsworth had a cast on his left arm from wrist to shoulder at that time. Medical records and police reports show his arm was broken two days prior to Haraway’s abduction,” Peterson said.

“Secondly, statements by Ward and Fontenot implicating Titsworth include actions allegedly done by him which would not have been physically possible with an arm in a cast or with a broken arm had the cast been removed. Third, Karl Fontenot was unable to pick Titsworth out of a photo lineup.

“Titsworth’s medical record, along with witnesses’ statements, establish his whereabouts, his actions, and his physical condition on April 28, 1984. All these facts and other factors which cannot be released at this time indicate Titsworth is not a suspect in the commission of this crime,” Peterson said.

The news of the murder charges swept Ada like a verbal tornado, swirling, doubling back upon itself. Some people wondered why it had taken so long to bring the charges. “Because they can’t find the body,” other people answered, and wondered how you could even bring murder charges without a body. Still others, aware of Odell Titsworth’s reputation, felt the police had cleared the wrong man. But most of the town could only assume the police knew what they were doing: that Ward and Fontenot were the guilty ones, because they had confessed.

The formal charges filed against the pair read as follows:

In the name and by the authority of the State of Oklahoma, William N. Peterson, District Attorney for the 22nd District, comes into court and states upon this affidavit that the above-named defendants, Thomas Jesse Ward and Karl Allen Fontenot, on or about the 28th day of April, 1984, in Pontotoc County, State of Oklahoma, did commit the offense of:

COUNT I

ROBBERY WITH A DANGEROUS WEAPON: That is to say, the said defendants, Thomas Jesse Ward and Karl Allen Fontenot, acting together and in concert each with the other, on or about the 28th day of April, 1984, in Pontotoc County, State of Oklahoma, did unlawfully, wrongfully and feloniously rob one Donna Denice Haraway, by wrongfully taking and carrying away certain money belonging to McAnally’s and in the possession of said Donna Denice Haraway, and in her immediate presence, without her consent and against her will, said robbery being accomplished by said defendants with the use of a certain dangerous weapon, to-wit: a knife with a long, sharp pointed blade, and which they used to menace and threaten the said Donna Denice Haraway, with harm if she resisted, and by said assault, threats and menace did put the said Donna Denice Haraway in fear of immediate and unlawful injury to her person and overcame all her resistance, and while so intimidating her did wrongfully take and obtain from her the money aforesaid, and

COUNT II

KIDNAPPING: That is to say, the said defendants, Thomas Jesse Ward and Karl Allen Fontenot, acting together and in concert each with the other on or about the 28th day of April, 1984, in Pontotoc County, State of Oklahoma, did unlawfully, willfully and feloniously, without lawful authority, forcibly seize, kidnap and confine one Donna Denice Haraway from a place in Pontotoc County, Oklahoma, to-wit: 2727 East Arlington, in the City of Ada, with the unlawful and felonious intent on the part of the said defendants to cause the said Donna Denice Haraway to be secretly confined and imprisoned in this State against her will, and

COUNT III

RAPE, FIRST DEGREE: That is to say, the said defendants, Thomas Jesse Ward and Karl Allen Fontenot, acting together and in concert each with the other on or about the 28th day of April, 1984, in Pontotoc County, State of Oklahoma, did unlawfully, willfully and feloniously with the use of force and violence and by means of threats of immediate and great bodily harm to one Donna Denice Haraway, a female person not the wife of the said defendant, overcome all resistance on the part of said Donna Denice Haraway, and did rape, ravish, and carnally know and have sexual intercourse with the said female, against her will and consent, said defendants being over the age of 18, and

COUNT IV

MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE: That is to say, the said defendants, Thomas Jesse Ward and Karl Allen Fontenot, acting together and in concert each with the other on or about the 28th day of April, 1984, in Pontotoc County, State of Oklahoma, did unlawfully, willfully and feloniously, with malice aforethought, without authority of law, effect the death of Donna Denice Haraway by stabbing, slashing, cutting her with a certain knife, to-wit: a 5 to 6'' lock blade knife, thereby inflicting certain mortal wounds in the body of said Donna Denice Haraway, from which mortal wounds the same Donna Denice Haraway did languish and die on the 28th day of April, 1984, contrary to the form of the statutes made and provided and against the peace and dignity of the State of Oklahoma.

The charges were signed by the district attorney, and by Gary Rogers of the OSBI.

The next day a short bill of particulars was added to the charges. It stated that

1. The murder was especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel;

2. The murder was committed for the purpose of avoiding or preventing a lawful arrest or prosecution;

3. There existed a probability that the defendants would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.

The purpose of this list of aggravating circumstances, under Oklahoma law, was to permit the district attorney to seek the death penalty.

For three weeks the family of Tommy Ward had been hearing that this day might come; Tommy had told Tricia in his first phone call from the jail: they said he would get the death penalty. Still, Tricia and Bud, Joel and Miz Ward, Bud’s parents Maxine and C.L., all the others, could not believe it. Over and over the question rattled through their minds, like the freights going in and out of the feed mill: there was no body, no weapon, no bones, no bloodstains; nothing. How did they know for sure that Denice Haraway was dead?