The Dreams of Ada (32 page)

Kerner asked Paschall again about his identification of Tommy Ward. The professor said he was 100 percent sure, but that this of course was subject to “human frailties.”

The investigator went back to the yard ornaments shop, with its row after row of silent chickens, elephants, fawns; to Larry Jett, whose sister-in-law held title to the truck in Elmore City, where some of Ada’s running crowd partied. He was struck during this second visit, as he had been during his first, by Larry Jett’s slim stature, sandy-blond hair, facial features; he bore a strong resemblance, the investigator felt, to Tommy Ward.

Kerner asked again about Jett’s owning an old Chevy pickup. Jett, who had previously denied this, now merely shrugged, and did not answer the question. He told Kerner that since the investigator’s last visit, he had been cornered twice by Ada police, who wanted to know what Kerner had asked him. One of these times, he said, an officer had grabbed Kerner’s business card from his hand and kept it. Jett said he did not know how the Ada police knew Kerner had been to see him.

Kerner asked where Jett had been on April 28, 1984; Jett repeated that he had been living in Kansas with Melvin Harden; Harden was also back in Ada now, he said, address unknown. He gave Kerner the names and addresses of several women who might know where Harden was.

Kerner went to Seminole, met again with assistant police chief Dexter Davis, showed him everything he had; Davis said none of these names or trucks had turned up in the investigation into the disappearance of Patty Hamilton.

The investigator met with Wyatt and gave him a written report of his findings thus far; Wyatt told him which areas to follow up. He needed the investigation completed by August 30, the lawyer said.

July’s warmth had become August’s heat. The cooler days topped out at 96 or 98 degrees. The warmer ones reached 102. The humidity was stifling. Merely to be outdoors was a chore.

A fierce lightning and thunderstorm struck Ada at three o’clock in the morning, on Wednesday, August 7. The crashing thunder awakened many people; it was as if the accumulated heat and humidity of weeks had suddenly cracked in an outburst of wild rage. Balls of thunder rolled, crackled, boomed upon the town. Lightning lit the sky over the farms, plummeted like avenging white swords into the town.

On the outskirts, the lightning struck nineteen different oil pumps; the rain flooded the fields. In town, the lightning struck the wood-frame home of Bud and Tricia Wolf and their children.

The thunder had awakened them first; the children left their beds, huddled together in fear. Bud and Tricia lay awake in their bed; Miz Ward, staying with them, was awakened in the back bedroom. In front of their eyes, flashing white current leaped in bits and pieces through the inside of the house, making a crackling noise, as if some fierce electronic ghost had entered.

The children screamed. The momentary ghost left. There was a smell of burning. The adults, shaken, tried to comfort Rhonda, Buddy, Laura Sue. The thunder moved farther away in the night sky. Bud tried the lights—some of them worked; some of them didn’t. He checked every room, to make sure there wasn’t a fire.

The storm passed. The night dragged on. Sleep was only fitful. In the morning, as always, the kids turned on the twelve-inch color television set; it didn’t work. Bud looked behind it; the entry wires leading from the antenna on the roof had been scorched, seared. He checked the lights again; all those on the same circuit as the TV set didn’t work. He went outside and looked up at the roof. The bolt of lightning clearly had hit the TV antenna and forked three ways. One part had come down through the antenna, had burned out the TV set; a second fork had left a long vertical burn scar on the catalpa tree that stands in front of the house, shading the front porch; the third fork had sheared shingles off the roof of the house next door.

No one had been hurt.

At Luton Motors, truck after truck arrived, bringing in the motors of oil pumps that had been burned out by the storm. C. L. Wolf had just ordered a thousand pounds of copper wire; he figured now it would be gone in three months. “That’s what keeps our business athrivin’,” he said. “These lightning storms.”

Tricia, sitting in her living room, the large painting of Jesus that C.L. had painted hanging behind her, called their insurance company, to see if they could replace the TV and the Coleco electronic game attached to it, which had also been destroyed by the lightning. She was told their policy had a $250 deductible figure; they could get no insurance money, because the TV set was ten years old.

What with her maternity bills, and recent dental bills, money was very tight. They would not be able to replace the TV.

“The kids will have to go without for a while,” Tricia said. Then, instantly finding a bright side, as with her abiding faith she always tried to do, she added, “Maybe they’ll do better in school this year.”

A friend said to Tricia, “What more do you need? I can’t believe it! The house getting struck by lightning now!”

Tricia just shook her head.

“Do you think the Lord is testing you?” the friend asked.

Tricia said she didn’t know.

On the third floor of the Pontotoc County Courthouse, behind a glass door marked “Court Clerk,” midway between the large courtroom and the small courtroom, the names were filled in, in the blank spaces on the forms. They had been taken at random from the county voter rolls. There were 225 of them. When the forms were complete, they were stuffed into envelopes, sealed, and taken to the post office a few blocks away. From there, the next day, they went out across Ada, across Pontotoc County; were dropped by mailmen into the slots of vertical mailboxes affixed to the front of frame houses and brick houses, were shoved into the larger horizontal mailboxes that stood along dirt roads in rural areas. They were opened in the afternoon or evening by people who worked at the feed mill and at the cement plant, by teachers and by farmers, by executives and by construction workers, men and women, young and middle-aged and elderly, housewives, retired folks, handicapped people, city employees. The message was the same to all of them: they were to report to the county courthouse in Ada on the morning of September 9, 1985, for jury duty.

They received the notices with varying degrees of irritation and interest. Many would look on it as an inconvenience, to be avoided if possible; others would accept it as a civic duty, a part of what made America work.

To some the date meant nothing: September 9, a Monday like any other. Others immediately knew, or would be told by friends soon after: that was the day they would start choosing the jury for the Haraway case.

11

SCENARIOS

T
he district attorney’s office was behind the first door to the left, inside the main entrance of the courthouse. The door was of reflecting glass that made it difficult to see if anyone was inside. Behind this door, beyond a reception area, in his private inner office, Bill Peterson spent much of the summer interviewing the witnesses he planned to call in the Haraway case.

Many had appeared at the preliminary hearing; with these he went over the testimony they had given, and asked if there were any questions he should ask them on the stand that he had not asked before, his reasoning being: “They were there, I wasn’t; they have to tell me what they know.” Other witnesses were new. He went over with them, too, what they knew, what he would ask them. Before he left for his vacation in early August, he compiled a list of seventy witnesses to be subpoenaed; more would be added later. The subpoenas were sent out by certified mail, or hand-delivered by members of the sheriff’s department across the hall.

Under the law, the state was required to notify the defense of all witnesses it planned to call; the defense was not required to tell the state of its witnesses, except for any alibi witnesses: those who would testify that the defendants had been somewhere else at the time of the crime. When Don Wyatt looked at the state’s list of witnesses, he immediately came up with a stratagem; he decided to have defense subpoenas served on all of the state’s witnesses. This would enable him to keep them out of the spectator section of the courtroom, even after they had finished their testimony for the state. He had counted on the state’s roster about twenty relatives of Denice Haraway; he did not want them sitting in the courtroom, crying, in front of the jury.

Combining the state and defense witnesses, Wyatt’s legal assistant, Winifred Harrell, prepared more than 120 subpoenas. Some were sent out by certified mail; others were served by a private process server; the most difficult people to find were tracked down and served by Richard Kerner.

With a month to go before the trial, the atmosphere developing on both sides was as before a heavyweight championship fight: in one corner would be wealthy Bill Peterson, district attorney, upholder of the law; in the other corner would be rich Don Wyatt, defense attorney, defender of the poor. The trophy to be won would be, for Peterson, an end to the Haraway case, a conviction for his office and the police in a murder trial without a body, perhaps even the death penalty for the suspects: a triumph for justice. The trophy for Wyatt would be another victory for Ada’s most publicized attorney, an accusation of overzealousness hurled in the face of the police and the OSBI, freedom for Ward and Fontenot: a triumph for justice. Whether a fair trial could be held in Ada, whether justice would be served, what indeed justice demanded in this case, were questions that still split the town.

Neither side was suffering from overconfidence. As Peterson took the case records with him to Florida, to go over them yet again, one of Don Wyatt’s aides bought a large green-slate blackboard and carried it into the law office. A secretary asked what it was for. The aide said it was for the Ward case. Before long, an unseen hand had chalked a single word on the board. It said, “HELP!”

If help was to come for the defendants, its most likely source would be Richard Kerner. The dogged investigator was once more in Ada, interviewing dozens of people, tracking trails that led nowhere—much as the police had done, day after day, in the months after Donna Denice Haraway disappeared. By a circuitous route he finally obtained an address in Ada for Melvin Harden, the friend with whom Larry Jett had said he’d roomed in Kansas at the time of the disappearance. Kerner interviewed Harden at his home. The result of that interview he summarized in a written report for Don Wyatt:

“Harden explained that he had left Ada in the summer of 1983 with Randy Rogers and went to the state of Texas. He said that he got into trouble in Texas because of Randy Rogers and went to prison September 22, 1983, and was released in March of 1984, and returned to Ada. Harden was questioned concerning being Larry Jett’s roommate in the state of Kansas and stated that he had never been in the state of Kansas in his life.”

When Harden said that, Kerner’s mind had flashed back to the elephants, the chickens, the plaster-of-Paris fawns: to the yard ornaments among which Larry Jett had so quickly volunteered the information, unasked, that he had been living in Kansas at the time of the disappearance, with Melvin Harden.

“Harden had no idea why Jett would claim that they were roommates up in the state of Kansas,” Kerner’s report continued. “Harden related that Larry Jett was acting strange and nervous after Donna Haraway disappeared and is still very nervous over the Haraway disappearance. Harden strongly believes that Jett knows something about the Haraway disappearance or is in some way involved in it.”

Together, Kerner and Wyatt assessed the evolving situation. They reviewed the young men they felt were possible suspects, besides Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot:

1.
Randy Rogers and Bob Sparcino
. At least four disinterested Ada citizens had said the composite drawings were of these two men. They apparently had left Ada about a year before the disappearance; Kerner had made extensive driver record checks, hoping to find that one of them had been ticketed in the Ada area after that, preferably in an old pickup. He had found no such evidence. That did not mean that they had not come back to Ada; but there was no proof that they had.

2.
Larry Jett
. He apparently had lied to Kerner about being in Kansas at the time of the disappearance. Melvin Harden had said Jett always acted nervous about the disappearance. A red-and-gray-primer pickup with no tailgate, parked in Elmore City, belonged to his sister-in-law, in an area where Elmore City police said young Adans liked to do drugs, to party. And he looked a lot like Tommy Ward.

3.
Marty Ashley and Jay Dicus
. Kerner’s gut feeling was that they were not involved; but Ashley did have possession of a truck that Jack Paschall had said was similar to the one he had seen that night. Don Wyatt had obtained a snapshot of Ashley, in which he had a moustache; he drew a moustache on one of the composite drawings; Wyatt and Winifred felt the drawing now looked exactly like Ashley. And Jay Dicus had moved away to Denver.

The lawyer felt that any of these young men might have been involved. But he could not prove it about any of them. All Wyatt and Butner had to do to win acquittals for their clients was to raise reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors. But in the face of the taped confessions, they knew, their best defense would be to prove that someone else had done it. And to name names.

Don Wyatt sent Richard Kerner back into the field.

It was Rodeo Week in Ada. A bandstand was erected on the grassy civic square beside the courthouse. Every day at noon hundreds of Ada citizens sat on metal folding chairs in the strong August sun or stood in the shade of the pecan trees to watch and listen to entertainment by those who would perform at Ken Lance’s Sports Arena in the evening. The highlight was Red River, a country music group composed of eight young men about the ages of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot. They were Ada’s most popular group. They seemed to have been influenced heavily by the group Alabama. They were very good. As their music thumped with a strong country beat across the square, cheerleaders from Ada High sold hot dogs and soft drinks from wooden booths along the sidewalk; high school boys tried to flirt with them. Off to the side, in the humid shade, stood Tony Pippen, the tall, slim, middle-aged gentleman who was the managing editor of the Ada
News
. Pippen had come to Ada to run the paper about a month before the disappearance of Denice Haraway. He had immersed himself in the civic life of the town, boosting in daily editorials its cultural life, its economic growth, the activities of the chamber of commerce, the local charities. An amiable gentleman in every respect, he avoided by nature the controversial or the divisive. At no time since the disappearance more than fifteen months earlier had anyone from the
News
attempted to interview any of Denice Haraway’s family, not wanting to intrude on their privacy, their grief. Nor had anyone interviewed the family or friends of the suspects, perhaps not wanting to intrude on their grief, either; or perhaps not wanting to be controversial, not wanting to offend the police; or perhaps simply because no one had thought of it.

Ada’s motels were jammed with rodeo cowboys from all over the west, come in pickups or beat-up jalopies to participate. Empty horse vans dotted the parking lots. While Red River played in courthouse square, the cowboys were ten miles away, in Fittstown, in a small arena surrounded by a low fence, undergoing time trials in calf-roping and other events; only the fastest would compete in the rodeo itself. Not far away, a few oil pumps grazed desultorily. Fittstown was the site of Fitts Field, the largest, most productive oil field in the region after it was discovered in the early 1930s. It had made a number of Adans rich, had built several Kings Road mansions, had pulled the economy of Ada out of the Depression by 1934, while much of the nation struggled in poverty for years after. But the field was mostly played out now. There had been new minibooms during the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, when the price of oil soared; then it had tapered off again. Most of the activity now involved flooding the wells with water to float the remaining oil closer to the surface, so it could be pumped out more cheaply. Oil was still important in Ada, but it no longer supported the town. The dreams of Ada no longer centered on bringing in wildcat wells.

Steve Haraway had given up the apartment that he and Denice had shared. He’d moved to Norman, where he had a lot of friends. He still came to Ada often to visit his folks.

Tommy Ward stopped writing letters and poems about Lisa Lawson. His family still had not told him she was married; they assumed he had heard it through the grapevine, with so many young men he knew going in and out of jail on minor charges. In August, Tricia got two letters from a stranger, Charlene (name changed). Charlene wrote that she had been in the jail several times on forgery charges since Tommy was arrested; they had gotten to know each other, she wrote Tricia; they planned to be married as soon as Tommy got out of this mess. Tricia kept the letters, but did not ask Tommy about them. He would be going on trial for his life in a few weeks; she did not think this was the time to be discussing marriage.

Tricia was becoming concerned once more about Rhonda. School would be starting soon, and the trial was set for soon after. Rhonda’s teacher and her principal at Latta Elementary School had been very supportive, talking to Tricia on the phone at night, telling Rhonda all through the previous semester that she was not to blame just because her uncle was in trouble. But, as Miz Ward said, “Kids could be cruel.”

Karl Fontenot had taken to drawing pictures in his cell: pictures of Indians, cars, birds. He was passing the time.

On Monday, August 19, a twenty-nine-year-old woman in Oklahoma City, Linda Thompson, attended an aerobics class. Then, with her two young children, one of them four and the other two, she went to a shopping mall. At or near the mall, all three were kidnapped.

Ms. Thompson and her children were taken to a house in the city. The next day a woman dropped the children off, safely, at a babysitter’s. Ms. Thompson was not seen again. From the people at the house where they had stayed overnight, police got the names of her alleged kidnappers. A hunt for the woman and her kidnappers was begun, first in the city, then in the state, then, as days passed, nationwide.

The alleged kidnappers, both of whom had criminal records, were identified in front-page stories in the
Daily Oklahoman
as Dale Austin Shelton, twenty-eight, and Don Wilson “Bubba” Hawkins, twenty-six. Both were from Seminole.

The name of the town leaped out at Richard Kerner as he read the news account: Seminole. That was where Patty Hamilton had been kidnapped from a convenience store in 1983, and vanished. Kerner, as well as the Ada police and the OSBI, had long believed the Hamilton and Haraway cases could be related, because the circumstances had been so similar, and the towns only thirty miles apart. Now two tough dudes apparently had kidnapped a young woman in Oklahoma City; and they hailed from Seminole! Kerner began to file the clippings on the case. One of the clippings said Shelton had begun a prison term in April 1983 and was not released until June 1984. That would put him in jail at the time Denice Haraway disappeared—if the report was correct. But Kerner knew there were such things in jails as weekend passes. He would continue to follow the case.

On August 27, the investigator received a phone call from Ted Campbell, a police officer in Elmore City who had helped him during his visits there. Campbell told Kerner the Elmore City police had gotten involved in the search for Linda Thompson, because one of the suspects, Dale Shelton, during an earlier arrest, had given an Elmore City address. Campbell said he and other officers had gone to the address, a home in a rural area. In it, they found iron bars installed in one of the bedroom windows, and an assortment of “kinky” sex objects, such as dildos. The Elmore City police believed the two fleeing suspects might have used that home in the past few days.