The Dreams of Ada (31 page)

The piece told how Sergeant Harvey Phillips was the first officer at the scene. It continued: “‘One of the guys had his arm around her and I thought maybe she was a bit tipsy,’ the witness said. ‘But she didn’t call out or say anything. Possibly I could have stopped it.’

“‘And most likely would have gotten yourself shot,’ Phillips said. ‘She must have been a gutsy girl to go with them without calling out for help because she knew they had a gun.’”

All of this had been invented by the writer. No one had ever said anyone was tipsy; no one, in the entire case, had ever mentioned a gun.

On and on the story went, filled with inaccuracies; it described Detectives Smith, Baskin, and Danny Barrett arriving at the scene, along with Police Chief Richard Gray; of these, only Baskin had been there. It had lab technicians dusting for fingerprints; that never happened. It went at great length into the stories on the tapes, making the implicit assumption that the stories were true; it never mentioned that both suspects had repudiated the tapes. Changing the name of Odell Titsworth to “Mike Callender,” for legal reasons, it did say he had been cleared by the police. Other statements on the tapes that had proved false—such as the body being burned in the house—were presented as true.

For obvious reasons—since no trial had yet been held—the final paragraph stated: “By law, until such time as they may be judged at a fair trial, Ward and Fontenot must be considered innocent of the charges that have been placed against them.”

The magazine billed itself as the “World’s Top Crime Magazine.” It was published by Globe Communications Corp., which listed an address in New York State. It had been in business for seventy-five years.

When Bud and Tricia read the article, they felt sick. It clearly portrayed the boys as guilty, they felt; particularly the large picture of Tommy above the unattributed, unmodified headline. They wanted to know if they could sue. Don Wyatt felt the magazine had probably covered itself legally with its final disclaimer; in any case, they would have to await the outcome of the trial; if Tommy was found guilty, there would hardly be grounds for a lawsuit.

The Haraway family was embittered by the article as well; the garish treatment seemed a further violation, now of Denice’s name. The references to the woman having been drunk or tipsy were especially libelous, they felt. Four different members of the family called the district attorney’s office to ask if they could sue the magazine. Chris Ross told them that was not the province of the D.A.’s office, that they should consult a private attorney.

Both Peterson and Ross found the article highly offensive. Though it seemed to leave no doubt as to the guilt of the suspects—a feeling he shared—Dennis Smith nonetheless found it disgusting. Sergeant Phillips, in whose mouth many fictitious words had been put, went around for days wanting to punch the author, but no one knew the author; his name was not familiar in Ada.

Bud Wolf’s first thought when he saw the article was of the letter received by the Ada
News
back in November, enclosing a twenty-dollar bill, asking for the clippings on the case; that crossed the mind of Dennis Smith as well. Dorothy Hogue, who had received the request, went through the drawers of her desk in the city room of the
News
; she found the envelope. It was from a Jack G. Heise, with an address in the state of Washington.

The article in
Startling Detective
thus cleared up at least that one small mystery in the case: the mystery of who had cared enough about it to send for clippings from half a continent away.

This was no consolation to the offended parties; Harvey Phillips still wanted to punch the author. The others would have been glad to join in.

The Haraway case had caught the attention of Jack Heise in the town of Bothell, Washington. In space 66 of the trailer park in which he lived, Heise pored through newspapers from across America, looking for good crime stories. When he found ones that interested him, he would clip the stories.

When the suspects were arrested and made their brutal taped confessions, Heise had clipped the write-ups in the
Daily Oklahoman
and the Tulsa
World
. Because the case was taking place in Ada, he pulled out a handy directory of every newspaper in the country, listed state by state, town by town, and he got the address of the Ada
News
, and sent for their clippings. Later he typed his article, using what facts he could from the news clippings, inventing what he needed. “Paraphrasing” was the way he thought of it, not “inventing.” For this and countless similar articles he had done over the years, for various police and detective magazines, he received about $250 each.

Jack Heise found no shame in the practice. He’d been doing it for fifty years. When he was a reporter in Seattle, he had done it for extra income. Now he was retired. He was seventy-five years old. He banged out one such article a week; the money was enough to live on.

“You paraphrase the best you can,” he said. “It’s an okay living. Especially when your hair is gray and you have no teeth, and nobody cares anymore.”

The grass on the campus of East Central University was still a bright green, not yet burned out by the summer heat. Students taking summer classes sprawled in the shade of the trees that dotted the lawns, studying, eating sandwiches. Richard Kerner strode up the central walkway, then bore half-right down another path, toward the education building. He had an appointment there with Jack Paschall, who’d been at J.P.’s with Karen Wise the night of the disappearance, who’d testified he was sure that Tommy Ward had been in the store that night.

Paschall told Kerner the same story he had told to the police, the same story he had told under oath at the preliminary hearing: how he had come to J.P.’s that night, how Karen Wise had told him she was nervous, that it was two guys shooting pool who were upsetting her; how the men had left soon after, in an old pickup truck, with either gray primer or red primer on it, with something unusual about the tailgate. Paschall said he did not know Tommy Ward, but he was sure he’d been one of the two in the store that night. He said again, as he had said before, that he did not recognize Karl Fontenot.

The same afternoon, July 11, Kerner drove thirty miles to Paul’s Valley. There he placed a home at 307 East Bradley under surveillance; it was the home of Marty Ashley’s mother. Kerner had been watching the house for less than an hour when a short, slight, blondish young man came out of the front door and walked toward several cars in the yard that seemed to be under repair. Kerner approached the young man and addressed him as Marty Ashley; Ashley said that’s who he was.

Ashley agreed to answer the investigator’s questions. They sat in Kerner’s car and talked. Ashley said he had been questioned long ago by Ada detectives Dennis Smith and James Fox about Ward’s story that he, Ashley, had run off with Denice Haraway; he said he had given the detectives a recorded statement saying that Ward’s story was totally false. He said he had never in his life been in any kind of vehicle with Tommy Ward; he mentioned he had seen Ward riding in old pickups from time to time, and gave Kerner the names of several young men they might have belonged to. He denied knowing Randy Rogers or Bob Sparcino. Ashley told the investigator he was pretty much of a loner, that he had not run around very much with Jay Dicus or Tommy Ward or anyone else in Ada.

About Denice Haraway, Ashley said he had seen her working at McAnally’s, but had not known her name till she disappeared. He said, smiling, that he wished she
had
run away with him, because she was a very attractive lady.

Kerner’s gut feeling was that Ashley was telling the truth.

In mid-July, Tommy’s sister Melva passed through Ada for a few days with her husband, William, and their four children. Melva was allowed to visit Tommy at the jail on a Thursday, because she had driven so far and would be gone by Sunday. She thus became the last of Tommy’s seven brothers and sisters to see him in jail, to lend her moral support.

Her husband was in the Army, and was being transferred from California to a base in Europe; they had driven east from California, would be flown the rest of the way. Seeing them gave Tricia an idea. She had always known that, even if Tommy were acquitted, he could not return to Ada; he might be killed. He would need to leave the state, she felt; and now she thought: perhaps he should leave the country as well; once he was freed, he perhaps should go to Europe till things calmed down. He could stay close to Melva and William there.

Richard Kerner continued to investigate; the list of names he had checked grew longer: names Tommy had mentioned, now names Marty Ashley had mentioned. On August 1, looking into the contacts of Larry Jett, he went to Elmore City, a village of six hundred people fifty miles southwest of Ada, to a mobile home in which Jett’s common-law sister-in-law lived. No one was at home in the trailer. But parked on the two-acre lot, about seventy yards away, Kerner saw an old pickup. It was painted with gray and red primer; the front was facing him. Slowly the investigator walked toward the truck. With each step his feeling grew stronger: that when he circled to the back of the truck, it would be missing its tailgate. Kerner walked to the back; the tailgate was gone.

Circling the pickup repeatedly, he photographed it from many angles. It fit perfectly Karen Wise and Jack Paschall’s description of the truck at J.P.’s, he felt, except that it did not have larger tires on the rear.

The investigator wanted to climb into the cab; take scrapings from the seat, the dash; perhaps find hairs or something that could be linked to Denice Haraway. But he had no legal authority to do that. Instead he drove to Ada and showed the pictures to Don Wyatt.

The lawyer was instantly excited. This might be the truck, he felt. He told Kerner to find out everything he could about the history of this truck, and about everyone connected with it. If it seemed to tie in, Wyatt thought, he might try to buy the truck; have some lab go over it microscopically for fingerprints, for anything that might link it to the missing girl. It would be a longshot after a year and a half, but it might be worth a try.

Kerner wondered. The OSBI, “the badge-carriers,” as he thought of the police, had laboratories at their disposal to conduct such tests. He did not know if, or where, they would find a private lab to do it.

Wyatt told Miz Ward he needed more money to pay the investigator. He said the bills were up around $2,000 now, but that they were well worth it: the investigator might have found the truck in which Denice Haraway was taken from McAnally’s.

That same day, August 1, Wyatt and Kerner went to the jail to talk to Tommy. A new theory was brewing in the attorney’s mind. The most damaging evidence against Ward, aside from the taped “confession,” was the adamancy with which both Karen Wise and Jack Paschall insisted that Tommy had been in J.P.’s that night. Suppose they were right, Wyatt reasoned, suppose Tommy had been shooting pool in J.P.’s—but then had left, and had gone to a party, or home, or wherever. Suppose the incidents at J.P.’s and McAnally’s were not related; suppose there had been different people, different trucks. It certainly was possible. The witnesses at McAnally’s could not say for sure it was Tommy. Wyatt wanted to see what story Tommy was going to stick to.

At the jail they told Ward they had found the truck that might have been involved. They asked him if perhaps he
had
been at J.P.’s that night.

Tommy said no. He insisted that he had been at home all that evening. He told again how Willie Barnett had visited, how he had bothered the bird.

“Where did you go after you left J.P.’s?” Wyatt asked.

“I wasn’t at J.P.’s,” Tommy repeated. Frustrated, he said, “If you have the truck, why don’t you find out who done it?”

“Let’s hope we don’t find
your
fingerprints in the truck,” the attorney said.

“Don’t worry, you won’t,” Tommy said.

In Richard Kerner’s view, the session had not been productive. Don Wyatt felt Tommy had been more lucid than in the past, perhaps because there were no more drugs in his system. It seemed, at last, that this would be the story Tommy would stick to: that he had been at home all evening.

On the positive side, in Wyatt’s view, that fit in with what the family said. On the negative side, it left the Wise and Paschall identifications unexplained.

Ward himself was extremely upset by the visit; he felt Wyatt had turned on him, was trying to convict him instead of trying to clear him. He felt they had been trying to mess with his head, to get him confused again. For three days he brooded incessantly about the meeting—so much so that when his mother and his sister Kay came to see him on Sunday, and he told them about it, he thought it had taken place the day before, instead of three days before. More than ever, the days in the jail were running together into endless night.

Kerner returned to Elmore City. He talked to the police there. He was told there were frequent drinking and drug parties at the trailer where the truck was parked, with some of the participants coming from the Ada area. The Elmore police agreed to keep an eye on the red and gray pickup, which had not been moved since Kerner’s last visit; they said if someone was seen driving it they would arrest him for having an expired license tag, and would impound the truck.

The investigator continued with his interviews, his checks of driver records. He discovered that Marty Ashley once had four moving violations in a 1977 Chevrolet pickup. On August 13 he returned to Paul’s Valley. At Don Wyatt’s request, he took detailed photographs from all angles of an old Ford pickup he’d noticed among the cars being repaired in the yard. Kerner then went to Ada and showed both sets of pictures to Jack Paschall: those of the red-and-gray pickup in Elmore City, and those of the truck Ashley had. Paschall said he could not rule out the Elmore City pickup, but that the Ashley truck looked more like the one he had seen.