The Dreams of Ada (29 page)

The irises of May were barely clinging to life; the scent of lilacs perfumed Ada’s mansions and shanties alike; June’s roses peeped newborn from tight buds; the pecan trees were hung again with green husks. At the Unity Missionary Baptist Church, Buddy Wolf, soon to become eight years old, was baptized amid pride and joyful noise. And in the county courthouse, a date was set for the start of the trial of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot.

After all this time it sneaked up on the town, even on the principals, unawares. The spectator section in the courtroom was vacant; even Tricia was unaware that the boys would be in court this day, June 11.

They sat at the defense table, in their jailhouse coveralls, with their attorneys; Bill Peterson at the opposing table; Judge Donald Powers, with his court robes and his courtly manner, presiding.

The attorneys argued their motions; they had filed written briefs; the judge made his rulings, swift and sure. They had argued to sever the trials of the two defendants. Denied, Judge Powers said; the suspects would be tried together. A victory for the prosecution. They argued for a change of venue, because of the publicity about the case, because of the emotions it had aroused in the town. Denied for now, Judge Powers said; he would attempt to hold the trial in Ada; if it was determined at that time that an impartial jury could not be empaneled here, then he would move it elsewhere. They argued about the manner of jury selection, wanting the prospective jurors to be questioned individually, out of earshot of each other, particularly as to their views on capital punishment. Rulings on jury selection would be postponed until jury selection was about to begin, the judge said. The defense requested a copy of the October 12 interview tape, in which Tommy Ward repeatedly maintained his innocence; granted, the judge said.

More technicalities. Then, suddenly, it was done. The judge said he was ready to go to trial; there had been enough delays; the trial could start in eight days, on June 19, if that was the will of the defendants.

There was a moment of anguish, of mental throat clearing, at both tables. Eight days? Neither side was ready.

That was impossible, Bill Peterson told the judge; it would take a week merely to prepare the subpoenas for all the witnesses. (Thinking: some of these guys you don’t just call up and say come on over; you have to track them down, hit them with the legal papers to make sure they will show.)

There was also the question of vacations; most people took their vacations in late June or in July or in August; key witnesses might be unavailable. Both sides joining in. The attorneys had conflicts in the next few weeks. Don Wyatt would be taking his vacation in July; Bill Peterson in August.

The judge listened patiently, or perhaps impatiently. The suspects had been in jail for nearly eight months; they had a constitutional right to a speedy trial. If there was going to be another long delay, he wanted to hear from the mouths of the suspects themselves, have it in the court record, which the court reporter was busily punching into his tapes, that this was agreeable. He told the two defendants that they should be aware of the advice of their attorneys, but if in spite of this they wanted an early trial date, now was the time to speak up. He particularly wanted Fontenot to speak, because his attorney had been appointed by the court.

“I am in no hurry,” Tommy Ward said.

“It [a later court date] is fine with me,” Karl Fontenot said.

That being the situation, the judge ordered that jury selection in the case would begin in this courtroom on the morning of Monday, September 9.

Bill Peterson was pleased; there would be plenty of time to prepare.

Don Wyatt and George Butner were pleased; there would be a lot more time for Richard Kerner to proceed with his own investigation.

The defendants seemed incapable of opinions. Three more months in jail before they would be freed, or three more months in jail before they would be convicted—you could look at it either way. Confinement, there being no choice in the matter, was becoming a way of life to Karl Fontenot; confinement, there being no choice in the matter, was becoming the Will of God to Tommy Ward.

September 9, then.

In the corridor outside the courtroom, Dorothy Hogue, who had been in the front row taking notes, was approached by Judge Ronald Jones, who had withdrawn from the case; Jones’s office opened off the corridor. Ms. Hogue was excited; it was a big story.

“I wish you didn’t have to print the trial date in the paper,” Judge Jones said to the reporter.

“Why is that?” Ms. Hogue asked.

“Because half the town will schedule their elective surgery that day,” the judge said.

At home that evening, Tricia and Bud heard the news for the first time on television: a trial date had been set. September 9. Tricia calculated in her mind. She was due the first week in November; she would be seven months pregnant during the trial.

The next day it was the front-page headline in the Ada
News
:

FONTENOT, WARD
TRIAL DATE SLATED

The town was buzzing once again.

10

THE SECOND SUMMER

S
ummer in Ada was hot, humid; afternoon temperatures climbed to 100 degrees, hovered there week after week; combined with the high humidity it made a simple outdoor stroll an act of discomfort. The air felt wet to the touch, but such clouds as rolled in seemed rarely to crack and let loose rain. The sun blazed on all alike, rich and poor, involved or unconcerned, except for the two suspects, Ward and Fontenot, tucked away in their cells, far from the light; and except perhaps on the victim, whose whereabouts, dead or alive, remained unknown. But the glare of the Haraway case did not blaze on all alike; to each of those involved it was refracted by the prisms of their individual backgrounds, their differing status in Ada society, their professional training or lack of it, their unavoidable prejudices, the depths of religion in their lives and in their souls.

To the family of Denice Haraway, to the police, to the district attorney, to most of the town’s establishment, the prism refracted a simple spectrum of guilt. Denice was gone, and because they knew no power on earth could have induced her to leave her family, her husband, her career, willingly, or to put them through this torment without a phone call or a letter or some other possible sign, then she most certainly, however terrible the thought, was dead; and, if dead, then someone had killed her. Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were part of the despised running crowd, whose members were probably capable of any imaginable affront to society, to the sanctity of life; most important of all, they had confessed; they had put on videotape their despicable tale of rape, torture, murder. Viewed through this respectable prism, there was no reason why anyone, even under police questioning, intense or not, would say they had done such things if they had not; the fact that they had immediately repudiated the confessions was simply the normal attempt of criminals—of butchers—to avoid paying the price for their crimes. They had rung in Odell Titsworth to place the blame for the actual killing on someone else; all the other statements on the tapes that had been proven false they had simply made up to baffle the police, to confuse the issue, to conceal what they had done with the body. And if, in spite of unofficial talk of a life sentence in exchange for the body, they still held out, it was because they had burned the body and thus had nothing to offer; or because they had thrown it more than a year ago into the Canadian River, or the North Canadian, and had no idea now where it might be, where the denuded bones now rested. The spectrum of this crime might contain shadows absent from most murder cases: the lack of a body, the lack of a weapon, the lack of the vehicle; but these were, by summer, merely disconcerting nuances in the black and white picture of guilt. Tommy Ward, between May and October of 1984, had changed his story to the police of what he had been doing the night of the disappearance. Everything else had flowed from that, inexorably, and would culminate, they fervently hoped and mostly believed, in the conviction of Ward and Fontenot in the county courthouse in September, and in a sentence of death. Only this would satisfy the demands of justice; only this would put the case to rest.

To the family of Tommy Ward, to his mother and Tricia and Bud, to all seven brothers and sisters, to many people at the lower, less-educated, less-sophisticated end of Ada life, the light refracted differently. By now most of them were admitting to themselves that Denice Haraway was probably dead; from everything they’d heard, she wasn’t the kind of person to run off. But how could the police be sure, without a body, so sure that they could bring murder charges? She was a college girl, she was pretty, she’d only been married for eight months…she might have seen something better come along; perhaps not, but how can they be so sure? And then the tapes: they were fantasy, in this view. Titsworth had not been there, though that was on the tapes; the house had not been burned down that night, though that was on the tapes; where had the pickup gone? Where had the body gone? Hardly anything on the tapes checked out. “Disregard everything they confessed to,” they seemed to hear the police, the district attorney, saying, “but believe they are guilty nonetheless.” From this vantage point they wanted to know why they, or anyone, should. Some felt they themselves had been harassed by the police from time to time; they knew firsthand the fear that could lurk at the end of a nightstick, or in a cell. They knew of the unsolved Patty Hamilton disappearance in Seminole, of the unsolved Debbie Carter murder in Ada; they viewed Dr. Jack Haraway of the Rotary Club and the First Christian Church as “high society”; they sensed on the police and the OSBI a great pressure to solve this one; they believed that the police—most of them once poor and unnoticed like themselves, but now in positions of power—were capable of doing anything to get a conviction when they felt they needed one. And so, through this prism, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were victims as much as Denice Haraway might be. Tommy had demonstrated his innocence by not leaving town, they felt, by repeatedly answering all police questions voluntarily, without being arrested, without even getting a lawyer; he had taken a polygraph voluntarily, to prove his innocence, and no evidence had been produced, beyond the unsupported word of the OSBI, that he had failed it. Uneducated, not very bright, Tommy could have been confused and manipulated by the police; weary after five hours of questioning, he had said on tape whatever they wanted him to say, merely to get them out of his face, believing that his lies would free him when they were exposed as lies. Karl Fontenot, in this view, totally incapable of violence, had been fed Tommy’s “confession” by the police, had regurgitated most of it back for the same reasons. If Tommy had been smart enough to ask for a lawyer right away, neither boy would have spent a single day in jail, and the police might be doing what they ought to be doing: might be out there looking for the truth, for the real killer of Denice Haraway. If she was dead.

Those were the two opposing views of the case as summer began. There were no shades of gray. Dennis Smith, Bill Peterson, the Haraways, the Lyons saw on the hands of Ward and Fontenot the bright red of bloody violence. Tricia and Bud, Miz Ward, and the others saw just as clearly, around their necks, the dark purple of injustice.

The only middle position was held by those in the town who admitted that they didn’t know. Among these were the two defense attorneys. George Butner did not know, in early summer, if his client, Karl Fontenot, was guilty or innocent. He suspected he was innocent; but the tapes certainly bothered him, especially the matching descriptions of the blouse. He did not want to bring himself to believe that the police, or the OSBI, had knowingly and willfully framed his client by feeding him Tommy’s description of the blouse. And yet, the rest of the tapes, almost everything proven false…He didn’t know what to believe. He certainly didn’t know how he was going to prove that Karl was innocent. And in this case, it seemed likely, that’s what his task would come down to: a task that obliterated a thousand years of the evolution of criminal law. In this case, in the face of the confession tapes, his client and Don Wyatt’s would likely be considered guilty until proven innocent.

Wyatt, too, did not know what to make of the case. He believed that Karl Fontenot had had nothing to do with Denice Haraway’s disappearance. About his own client, Tommy Ward, he was uncertain. He felt that if Tommy had been involved, one or more others had been as well: others who had been the masterminds, who had had the truck, who had disposed of the truck and the body. He sometimes felt that Tommy himself did not know if he had been involved. On a scale of one to ten, one being that Tommy was totally innocent, ten being that he was guilty, Don Wyatt’s feeling in late spring was about a five. He simply didn’t know.

Then he received the first of Richard Kerner’s reports about Rogers, Sparcino…callers not questioned by the police. Ever so slightly, the needle on the guilt meter in his mind began to shift; ever so slightly it nudged toward innocent.

He called the private investigator to his office once again, and put him back to work on the case.

The house at 730 West Twelfth Street was an old frame building that had not been painted in many years; on a dirt plot beside it stood an abandoned car. This was the home address that Willie Barnett had given to Richard Kerner. The investigator at first suspected it would not be a real address; the first time he went there it seemed vacant. But he came across a note from the family in the lawyer’s office stating that Willie did live on Twelfth Street. On June 17 he went there again, parked in the street, walked up to the front door. The door, behind a screen door, was open. The screen door was latched.

Kerner knocked. A woman came to the door. When Kerner asked if he could talk to Willie, the woman yelled to the rear of the house. A man’s voice asked who it was. But the man did not come to the door. Kerner said again he wanted to talk to Willie. The woman yelled that someone wanted to talk to him. The man yelled back. He did not want to be interviewed. For several minutes this continued: the investigator asking questions of the woman; the woman relaying the questions inside; Willie answering through the woman, without ever making himself visible. Kerner grew increasingly frustrated. He knew how crucial Willie Barnett might be to Tommy Ward’s defense: he might be the only alibi witness who was not a member of the family. If the screen door had not been latched, Kerner felt, he could have got his foot in the door, as any good investigator would, talked his way inside, and confronted Willie, perhaps got him to talk. But the door remained latched. Kerner remained on the outside. Willie refused to come out.

Stymied, Kerner moved on to other areas he had been instructed by Wyatt to investigate. He traced the yellow truck that Joel Ward had seen in Broken Arrow, a suburb of Tulsa. Joel had thought it might be linked to Jay Dicus, and might recently have been painted yellow, over gray. Kerner inspected traffic records, conducted numerous interviews, made a visit to Broken Arrow. The investigation took many hours of many days; like many other trails Kerner would follow, it turned out to be irrelevant. He traced the truck to a man who spoke to him willingly, who said the truck had been yellow for four years. Other people he interviewed confirmed this. The truck and its owner were not involved in the case.

In late June and early July the investigator spent thirty-seven and a half hours checking that lead and others, mostly tracking down people in the running crowd who were mentioned in Tommy Ward’s long essay to his lawyer, young men who Tommy said owned old pickup trucks. Sometimes it took five or six interviews to establish the whereabouts of the person he was looking for.

One young man he interviewed, Larry Jett (name changed), was at his job in a yard ornaments shop. Rows of plaster-of-Paris elephants, birds, Bambi-like fawns, roosters surrounded them as they talked. Jett conceded that he knew Tommy Ward, but claimed he had never owned a 1970s Chevy pickup, as Ward had told his lawyer. Jett volunteered that at the time of Denice Haraway’s disappearance, he (Jett) had been living in Kansas with a roommate, Melvin Harden. The investigator noticed a quickness with which Jett mentioned where he’d been living at the time; Kerner hadn’t asked. Jett mentioned the names of other people Ward ran with, who did own old pickups. Kerner noted the names as possible areas for further probing.

Wyatt had asked him to interview Marty Ashley, of Tommy’s “kiss-and-run” story. The investigator talked to half a dozen people merely to find out where Ashley was now residing: in Paul’s Valley, thirty miles west. He marked that down for a future visit.

Tricia, nearly five months pregnant, was at the kitchen stove, frying up a mess of catfish steaks; catfish was their favorite treat, and Bud had found them on sale at the Dicus Supermarket on Fourth Street. He stood beside her now, cooking vegetables. When the food was ready they sat with the three kids at the table in the dining room.

David and Lisa, the foster kids, were gone; Tricia, often weary, with her belly getting bigger and the days getting hotter, with all the kids out of school, had decided it was getting too hard to handle all five of them, that in July she might tell the social worker to find them another home. But before she had a chance to do that, David came down with measles; the doctor thought they might be German measles, which could endanger Tricia’s unborn child; he told her to keep away from David. Bud spent a frantic time on the telephone with the social worker as she tried to locate someone to take in the kids immediately; she finally found a foster parent who lived only a block away. The woman took David and Lisa, and agreed to keep them even after David recovered; she would bring them by sometimes to visit Bud and Tricia and the kids.

The family ate the catfish and talked. The day before, at the jail, Tommy had told them Don Wyatt had visited, had said things were looking good; Bud and Tricia were not sure what he meant; the lawyer had not yet informed them of the investigator’s findings.