The Dreams of Ada (18 page)

The hearing was adjourned until 9:15 the next morning. Bill Peterson was satisfied. These witnesses had held up; they had stuck to their identifications of Tommy Ward.

The suspects were handcuffed and taken from the courtroom by sheriff’s deputies, down two floors on the elevator, out across the lawn, Ward back to the county jail, Fontenot across the street to the city jail. It had been their first lengthy stay outside their solitary cells since their arrests in October. On his bunk that night, Tommy Ward was shaking. He’d been shaking in the jail ever since his arrest—his hands, mostly, thin-fingered mechanic’s hands. Even in his days of freedom, he used to shake some; it was one reason he had taken to drinking lots of beer and wine: to stop the shaking. But this night it was worse. Jim Allen’s words were in his head, and they were making him tremble.

Jim Allen was a trustee in the jail, allowed to roam the corridors, sweep the floors. He could stop outside cells, talk to the other inmates. For many days now he had been talking through the bars to Tommy Ward, telling him what he ought to do.

“Tell them,” Jim Allen kept saying. “Say it. All you’ll get is seven to fifteen years. If you don’t, they’re gonna kill you. They’re gonna put that needle in your arm.”

Tommy Ward lay on his bunk and felt his hands shaking and thought about Jim Allen’s words.

He didn’t want to follow his advice.

He also didn’t want to die.

The scene on Tuesday, the second day of the hearing, was much like on the first. The courtroom was crowded with spectators, among them Tricia and Kay and Miz Ward, local attorneys curious about how the case was going, and in the back row the tall man with dark hair and high cowboy boots and his name carved into his belt. Bill Peterson called a young man named Jim Moyer, a gas station attendant, to the stand. Moyer said he had been a customer in McAnally’s about 7:30
P.M
. on April 28 when two men drove up in a gray, late 1960s or early 1970s Chevrolet pickup. He said he had picked both Ward and Fontenot out of police lineups as the men he had seen. He said the men had been acting suspicious in the store, so that when he left he looked at the license plate of the truck. He went to his own car to write it down, but didn’t have a pencil. Then another car drove into the parking lot, so he left.

Continuing to proceed in chronological fashion, Peterson called the three witnesses who had arrived at McAnally’s shortly after 8:30 that night: Lenny Timmons, David Timmons, and their uncle, Gene Whelchel. All three described how a young man and a young woman had left the store together just as Lenny Timmons was entering. Whelchel said that when they discovered the clerk was missing, he realized the young woman they had seen leaving was Donna Denice Haraway. All three said the man leaving was of a similar type to Tommy Ward; none could positively identify Ward as the man they saw. Lenny Timmons, who had passed in the doorway within two feet of the couple leaving, was asked on cross-examination by Don Wyatt how certain he was that the man he saw was Ward, on a scale of one to ten.

“About a six,” Timmons replied.

All three witnesses testified that they had seen no other person at the store or in the pickup. They said they had seen no weapon; that the girl seemed to be leaving voluntarily, and did not cry out for help. Whelchel said he’d thought they were young lovers.

They told about how, finding no clerk in the store, and seeing the cash drawer open and empty, they had called the police. They described the pickup they’d seen as “light-colored.”

Monroe Atkeson, the store manager, and O. E. McAnally, the owner, both testified that Denice Haraway was a good employee, and had given no indication that she planned to leave. Sergeant Harvey Phillips, the first police officer on the scene, told of what he had found when he arrived: no clerk present, a purse with Denice Haraway’s driver’s license in it, car keys, her car parked beside the store. When Phillips completed his testimony, the judge adjourned the hearing until the following morning.

Several times during the proceedings there had been recesses: for lunch, and to allow the participants to stretch and use the restrooms. During one recess, the tall cowboy in the back row, the one with his name on his belt, approached Miz Ward. She knew him, knew that Tommy knew him.

“I know that Tommy didn’t do it,” the man said.

Miz Ward nodded, agreed, thanked him; she took his comment as a gesture of support.

During another recess, Jim Moyer approached Karen Wise in the corridor. Moyer was troubled; he had just finished testifying that Ward and Fontenot were the two men he had seen in McAnally’s at 7:30 that night. But then, in the courtroom, he had noticed someone else: someone he felt looked a lot more like one of the men he had seen than Karl Fontenot did. He wanted to check his observation with Ms. Wise.

As he approached her, she seemed fearful, her eyes looking down the corridor. When he struck up a brief conversation, she stepped around a corner, so she could not be seen by someone. Moyer told her his feeling: that there was someone in the courtroom who looked a lot more like the second man than Karl Fontenot did. He didn’t tell her which person he meant. He asked if she had noticed anyone like that.

Karen Wise told Moyer that she had. It was the tall guy in the back row, she said, with the long hair and the cowboy boots.

Jim Moyer nodded his agreement. He peered around the corner of the corridor. The cowboy was looking toward them. Moyer had the distinct feeling that Karen Wise was afraid of him.

When the hearing resumed Wednesday morning, Bill Peterson was prepared to spend the rest of the week, if necessary, putting twenty of Denice Haraway’s relatives on the stand to testify that they had not seen her or heard from her since April 28. This would buttress the fact of her disappearance, and, by implication, he felt, the certainty of her death. To speed things up, the defense attorneys agreed to accept the testimony of the relatives contained in depositions already taken by the district attorney. Peterson spoke into the record what Steve Haraway would have said: that he and Denice had been planning for the future, that she had no reason to leave, that none of her personal belongings were missing from the apartment. One section of Peterson’s summation of Steve Haraway’s testimony mentioned the shirt that Denice’s younger sister, Janet Weldon, had described in her testimony.

“Steve has looked through her personal belongings for a lavender-colored, almost white, shirt with ruffles around the collar and tight sleeves and light-blue flowers on the shirt. That is not in her personal belongings.”

When the deposition testimony was completed, Judge Miller granted a continuance of the hearing until the following Monday. Then Tommy Ward told his attorney he wanted to make a statement. They huddled; Don Wyatt tried to talk him out of it; Tommy insisted. Spectators were sent from the courtroom. A tape recorder was turned on. Wyatt—not the district attorney—read Tommy his rights, warning him that anything he was about to say could be used against him in court.

Tommy said he understood. And there in front of Bill Peterson and Dennis Smith and Karl Fontenot and the attorneys, but without the press or the public present, he changed his story. He said that his mind had been clouded about the night of the disappearance, but that now it was clearing; now he remembered what had happened that night. He said he
had
gone into McAnally’s that night, but not with Karl Fontenot. He said he had gone in with another fellow he knew, named Marty Ashley. He said Ashley knew Denice Haraway, and had begun talking with her. He said Ashley told Denice, “If you were
my
wife, you wouldn’t have to work at all.” And then Ashley kissed Denice Haraway on the cheek, Ward said, and asked her to run away with him. If she did, she would never have to work again.

Ashley returned to his pickup parked outside, Ward said. Denice asked Tommy if Ashley meant what he had said: that she would never have to work again. When Tommy said he guessed he meant it, Denice went with him out to the truck and they drove off.

So Tommy Ward stated, while the tape recorder turned. He said they dropped him off downtown, and were planning to drive to Tulsa, to stay with a friend of Ashley’s named Jay Dicus. (Jay Dicus was the nephew of one of the town’s most prominent merchants, who owned Dicus Supermarkets, three large markets in Ada.) Tommy said that was the last he ever saw of them.

When he was through, the recorder was turned off. The participants returned to their respective offices. Tommy Ward had dropped a bombshell.

Back in his cell, Tommy was shaking again, worse than ever. And his stomach was upset, real bad. His heart was pounding, louder and louder inside him, faster and faster. He thought he was having a heart attack.

He couldn’t believe what he’d just done. It was so stupid, he realized once he got back to his cell. Because they would surely find out. He had thought when he made the statement that they would believe him; he would get seven to fifteen, like Jim Allen had been telling him.

“Just tell them you were there,” Allen kept saying. “Tell them you were there, but you left before it happened. And you won’t get the death penalty.”

So he told them. He told them it was him there and Marty Ashley. It was Jim Allen who had suggested Ashley, Tommy would say later, because Ashley looked a lot like one of the drawings. So he had told them and thought they would believe it was the truth; only now back in his cell his stomach was messed up and his heart was beating so loud he thought he would die. Because he saw now that they would find out it was a lie. The police would check on it and find out it wasn’t true.

His stomach got worse and worse. Tommy asked to see a doctor. The jailer, Ron Scott, had him fill out a medical request form. Scott then called for an emergency medical team to come to the jail. They checked Ward and decided to take him to the hospital for further examination.

He was taken to Valley View. His condition was diagnosed as a nervous stomach. He was given medication to calm his nerves, and he was returned to the jail.

Sheriff Bob Kaiser, reporting the hospital trip to the press, made it clear that Ward had not tried to commit suicide.

Dennis Smith went to see Marty Ashley, who denied being involved.

The police established, to their own satisfaction, that Ward’s Ashley story wasn’t true. Don Wyatt was furious at Tommy for lying again.

The story, as Tommy had told it, was absurd on the face of it, Wyatt felt. But he couldn’t help wondering how thoroughly the police had checked to see if Ashley and Dicus might have been involved in some other way. The Dicus family had a lot of influence in Ada.

At his home in Tulsa that Saturday night, Tommy’s brother Joel was awakened out of a deep sleep by the ringing of the telephone. As he picked up the receiver, he looked at his clock. It was two in the morning.

The voice on the phone was a man’s. He did not say who he was. He warned Joel to stop helping defend Tommy Ward—or else! Then he clicked off.

Joel, a bachelor, hung up the phone, shaken. He wondered who it had been. Tulsa is 180 miles from Ada; few people there were following the case; hardly anyone there knew that Tommy Ward was his brother.

He decided the call had probably come from Ada.

He didn’t get much sleep that night.

On Monday morning the courtroom was more crowded than ever. Word had filtered through the courthouse, through the town’s legal community, out into the streets: Monday might be Tape Day. If the judge allowed the tapes to be shown, people would be able to see for themselves the full horror of the confessions.

The key legal question of the hearing would be whether the state had proved the corpus delicti. If the judge decided that it had not, then the confessions could not be used; then there could be no trial, unless additional evidence surfaced.

To bolster the state’s contention that Denice Haraway was dead, Peterson put on the stand an OSBI criminal analyst, Lydia Kimball. Ms. Kimball testified that continuing, computerized checks with all fifty states had indicated that Denice Haraway had not applied for a driver’s license anywhere under that name or her maiden name; nor had she been arrested or hospitalized; and that no unidentified body found anywhere in America was hers.

To link Ward and Fontenot to the alleged crime, Peterson called Mike Baskin. The detective testified about the police actions in the case, from the time of his arrival at McAnally’s the night of the disappearance, through the arrest of the suspects and beyond.

Then Peterson tried to introduce the tapes. The defense attorneys objected, on the grounds that the corpus delicti had not been proved. Peterson cited legal precedents, among them the Nettie Brown and Rawlings cases, prompting the defense attorneys to protest angrily:

GEORGE BUTNER:
I just want to reiterate on each of the cases that Mr. Peterson has submitted to you in regards to substantial evidence of the corpus delicti, in each of those cases there has been some evidence of a death, some evidence that there might have been blood. There’s even been a medical examiner’s report, there’s been some evidence of a death, and you will find this in every case that’s presented to you. And so, when Mr. Peterson argues substantial evidence as to the corpus delicti, judge, real corpus delicti is death in this case, and there has been no substantial evidence in regard thereto. There has been no blood, there’s been no hair samples, no medical examiner’s report, nothing. I believe if the court—if you will peruse all cases that the state presents to you, you will find that this is the connecting aspect in all and every one of them. And in this case, we do not have that. In fact, the closest we have is the fact that she walked out, of her own volition, without being dragged and that’s the closest we have as to any actions or activities of her person. And I believe that the court will see that throughout these cases that’s true: there is some evidence, and we have none.

BILL PETERSON:
Your Honor, in Wilkins vs. State, 609 Pacific 2nd, 309—