The Dreams of Ada (30 page)

After dinner, in the small living room, Laura Sue was idly turning the pages of a 1980 Ada school yearbook; it had pictures of all the grades in it, including a picture of Rhonda. Bud began to turn the pages with her; then he stopped. He was struck by a picture of one of the high school boys: it looked exactly like the composite drawing in the Haraway case that was supposed to be Tommy.

Ever since the drawings had appeared, Bud had had the feeling that he knew someone who looked like that, and it wasn’t Tommy. Here was the boy. He read the name under the picture. They knew the family slightly; he was a good kid, a good student.

“I’m not saying he did it,” Bud said. “But I think we should show this to Wyatt.”

“What for?” Tricia asked.

“To show he’s a lookalike. To show that an identification through a composite drawing is useless.”

“He knows that,” Tricia said. “Wyatt isn’t the one who needs convincing.”

On Thursday morning, June 20, Tommy Ward had an experience he had never had before. He was lying on the bunk in his cell. He was not sure if he was awake or dreaming; he seemed to be somewhere in between. Suddenly he had the strong sensation that his spirit was about to leave his body, that his spirit was about to go out and hover over the land, and find out who had committed the crime: who had done what to Denice Haraway. At first it was a good feeling, very powerful. Then he had another, frightening thought: “If my spirit leaves my body, I will be dead.” With a willful effort he shook himself back to consciousness, so that his spirit would not depart.

Bill Peterson, in his office in the courthouse, was preparing for the trial, though it was still more than two months away; he’d been doing so on and off ever since the preliminary hearing. Now he was going through the transcript of the hearing, preparing his list of witnesses, noting the important testimony he would need from each one. He was planning to take a vacation with his wife in August; they would visit relatives in Florida. He would take his work along.

He was estimating that the jury selection, plus the prosecution case, would take two weeks; he did not know how long the defense would take. “I’ve heard they’re saying they’ll have as many witnesses as we will. I don’t see how they can do that, but maybe they will.”

He was not looking forward to such a long, pressurized ordeal; he had never tried a case that lasted more than a week.

Across town, in his offices on Arlington, Don Wyatt, too, was preparing for the case. He was elated by Richard Kerner’s initial findings, and planned to keep him in the field most of the summer to see what he could turn up. He knew the police and the district attorney were aware of Kerner’s activities; some of the people Kerner talked to had been visited soon after by the police, who wanted to know what he had asked them. That did not bother Wyatt. He wanted “to keep the pot boiling” all summer, if possible. Perhaps, he thought, if the police kept on the case, instead of sitting back waiting for the trial,
they
might turn up something that would clear Tommy Ward.

In his mind the defense was taking shape. He might call as many as fifty witnesses: all those who had called in to the police names other than Tommy’s that fit the composite drawings, the people who had seen two possible suspects out at the trailer park, the alibi witnesses in the family, and Willie Barnett if possible. One idea he’d had pleased him immensely. He was going to subpoena from the college the skull and bones the detectives had taken to the jail to frighten Tommy. Every day of the trial he was going to enter the courtroom and set on the defense table a large paper bag. At the end of each day he would carry it out again; it would get the attention of the jury. At a dramatic moment during the defense, he would open the bag and whip out the skull and bones. If it startled the people sitting on the jury, he reasoned, they might understand how much more frightening it had been when shown to a young man locked in a cell; and yet it still had not obtained any additional information for the police.

In his mind, too, a powerful opening statement was forming, which he hoped Richard Kerner’s investigations through the summer would justify. “Not only are we going to prove to you that Tommy Ward did not commit this crime!” he envisioned himself telling the jury. “We are also going to tell you who did do it!”

Wyatt was thinking that he probably would have to put Ward on the stand. This was unusual in a criminal case, he knew, but he felt he might have to do it so Tommy could explain away the tapes. He had obtained permission from the judge to have a psychiatrist or psychologist examine Tommy at the jail, to explain “how anyone could be so stupid as to make up all those lies and think that was going to get them out of trouble.” If that turned out to be strong testimony, he might not have to put Tommy on; he would thus avoid the likelihood that the D.A. could hang Tommy’s lies around his neck. Wyatt knew that the tapes were deadly; but he saw some points in their favor: Odell Titsworth and all the other things on the tapes that had proved false.

For the first time, Wyatt was beginning to feel he could win the case. He was planning a vacation in July, to go hunting and fishing in the Northwest; then he would return to prepare the case. In a courtroom, preparation was everything, he believed. And he believed he could outprepare Bill Peterson.

In his cell in the county jail, Tommy Ward was becoming concerned about Karl Fontenot over in the city jail, about the “crazy things” Karl was saying. They’d had a chance to talk during the ride to the hospital at Vinita; they had talked again while in the courtroom together on June 11, the day the trial date had been set. Tommy voiced his concerns one Sunday during the visiting hour: “In court the other day,” Tommy said, “he sits there, he says, ‘Man,’ he goes, ‘I have a good mind to just go in there and plead guilty.’ He goes, ‘They’re gonna convict us of it anyway.’ I said, ‘Bull!’ I said, ‘When you get your witnesses up…’He goes, ‘Well, my lawyer ain’t gonna do nothing about it!’ I said, ‘Bull! Your lawyer is fightin’ for you just like he was a hired lawyer.’”

Tommy said he told Karl they would have Jannette Roberts as a witness. “He goes, ‘I didn’t think anybody would want to witness for me.’ I says, ‘Well,’ I says, ‘it’s just you not caring about anybody. You don’t care about nobody, so nobody’s caring about you, you know.’” Tommy laughed. “He’s gone plumb crazy. He was telling me about this girl that was one of the disc jockeys over there at the police department. He told her that if she didn’t come up there and let him screw her through the bars, that he was gonna kill her just like he killed that girl. That’s what he told her. I said, ‘You saying things like that, they’re gonna get up there and testify against you.’ I said, I told him, ‘First, I know you didn’t have nothing to do with it.’ I said, ‘I still know you didn’t have nothing to do with it.’ His hair was short and he was working up there at Wendy’s. But I told him, I said, ‘Now I’m starting to doubt. The way you been acting, I’m starting to think you mighta had something to do with it.’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t have nothing to do with it.’ I said, ‘Well, then keep your mouth shut then.’” Tommy laughed. “He’s crazy.”

Tommy spoke, too, of his own situation: “I don’t know why they didn’t drop it in the first place. They ain’t got no evidence…I’m just wanting to laugh it off and laugh it off as much as I can, you know. I can’t believe it that my own hometown is doing this to me. I’ve lived here; I was born and raised here all my life. There wouldn’t be no reason I would want to go and do something like that, especially in my own hometown, you know…They say moneywise, is the reason why, ’cause I was short of money. Any time I needed any money, my mom would give it to me. And if mom didn’t have it, my brothers and sisters would. And if they didn’t have it, you’d see me on the side of the road picking up beer cans. I told the truth. I said, don’t you think my mom, my brother, and them would rather give me this money than give it to them lawyers and everything, instead of having to go through this. That’s when they started coming up with the drug deal, you know, saying I was all doped up on drugs and just don’t remember doing it. I said, Bull! I said, Man, I don’t think there’s any kind of dope in the world to get somebody to go out and do something like that and everything and not remember it.”

There was a knock on the door of the visiting room; Tommy’s time was up.

Five days later, on June 28, Karl Fontenot was led from his cell in the city jail across the street to a cell in the county jail. Initially the suspects had been placed in separate jails so that they could not communicate, could not coordinate their stories. As the months passed, that simply became the way it was; no one thought of changing the arrangement. The reason the move was made now was vague, even to Dennis Smith; there was some hope that by putting them together, letting them talk about the case, some new clue would be overheard by a jailer or another inmate that might lead the police to the body; partly it was because Karl was not being prosecuted by the city; the county jail was where he belonged, and there was nothing more to be gained by keeping the suspects apart. As he was led across Townsend Street, Fontenot left behind in the city jail what was undoubtedly an Ada record: eight months and ten days in a cell without a visitor other than his lawyer, without a word of support from anyone he knew.

As he entered the county jail, Karl would not have quarreled with Tommy’s assessment of him. He knew it was true that he did not trust anyone, did not let anyone get close to him. He was introspective enough to understand some of the reasons why: because all those whom a child learns to trust had deserted him: his mother frequently disappearing when he was little, because she was being abused by his father, then coming back because she had no place else to go; his father disappearing for good when Karl was twelve; his mother getting herself killed by a car when he was sixteen; his sisters and brothers turning him out into the street, saying he was old enough to take care of himself. If his life so far had taught him anything, it was to mistrust the very concept of trust. And his time in jail was only reinforcing that: not a call, a letter, a visit from his family in all those months.

At times, the outward shield he adopted against further wounds was the persona of a wiseguy, a smart aleck, an operator. Don Wyatt, for one, felt Karl had more “street smarts” than Tommy. Others, looking at Karl, saw a wounded puppy.

In a different jail now, with new inmates totalk to, Karl went around saying that he might plead guilty, might say he had been there and that Tommy had done it; that way, he figured, he’d get twenty years in jail, maybe, but they wouldn’t kill him. Tommy heard this talk and got even more nervous than usual. Tommy trusted, perhaps to a fault; he trusted his family, he trusted that at the trial he and Karl would be found not guilty. Watching Karl “talking crazy,” he thought, “When we are freed, they may have to put Karl in an institution.”

After several days, Karl stopped talking about pleading guilty. He calmed down, in Tommy’s view. They became friends again, began to chat, to play dominoes in the open area among the cells, which they were now allowed to frequent; the months of solitary confinement had, for no stated reason, ended.

Tommy told Karl that reading the Bible and trusting in the Lord was helping him to endure the time in jail. He began to read Biblical verses aloud to Karl. Not since his early childhood a churchgoer, Karl sat quietly and listened.

In the ensuing weeks Karl would begin to claim that he had been saved; that he had found God; that he, too, had put his faith in the Lord, and the Lord would see him through. Whether this was a genuine religious feeling, or a pose that Karl felt might be useful in winning sympathy, or some combination of the two, only Karl could know.

DONNA WAS
KIDNAPPED,
RAPED, AND
CREMATED!

So screamed a headline in July from the magazine racks of Ada, from magazine racks across Oklahoma, across America. Printed in blue capital letters on a bright yellow background, it was the lead headline on the cover of a bimonthly magazine called
Startling Detective
.

Inside, beginning on page thirty-four, was a six-page spread on the Haraway case. The same headline ran across the bottom of the first two pages:
DONNA WAS KIDNAPPED
,
RAPED
,
AND CREMATED
! Above it, filling one of the pages, was a black-and-white photograph of Tommy Ward, in his prison coveralls, being led from the jail by two deputies. Facing it was the yearbook photograph of Denice Haraway. On the succeeding pages were the composite drawings, a picture of Karl Fontenot, a picture of Patty Hamilton, the girl who disappeared from Seminole. Above the story was a byline: “by Jack Heise.”

A friend of Tommy’s sister Kay saw the magazine and told Kay, who told Bud. Police officers heard about it and bought copies. So did the D.A.’s office, and the Haraways. By the time Don Wyatt heard of it, the newsstands of Ada were sold out; he got hold of a Xeroxed copy. Dozens of other Xeroxed copies were passed from hand to hand through the town.

The article was a highly sensationalized account of the case. It treated most of the statements on the Ward and Fontenot tapes as if they were proven facts, while, out of respect for the laws of libel, always attributing the statements to the suspects. Narrating the events of April 28, 1984, the article was dotted with inaccurate statements, was padded with quotations and invented dialogue from Ada police officers, all of whom said they had never heard of the author, Jack Heise, had never talked to anyone from
Startling Detective
.

Describing the witnesses arriving at McAnally’s, the article said, “They saw two men and a woman leaving.” This was wrong; they had said they’d seen one man and a woman leaving.

One witness, the article said, thought “the young woman might have had too much to drink, particularly when she was pushed roughly into the cab of a pickup truck.” The witnesses had said no such thing; the woman had appeared to be walking normally; she was not pushed into the truck.