The Dreams of Ada (38 page)

By the time they agreed on strategy the dark wood conference table was a messy litter of empty cans of New Coke, Cherry Coke, Diet Slice. It was late in the evening. In another part of the building, Odell Titsworth was waiting to be interviewed about the testimony he would give for the defense; so, too, was his mother. As Marie Titsworth waited, she vacuumed all the offices.

With the trial on, the case was back on the front page of the newspaper, was the lead item on the KTEN newscasts each night, was once more the talk of the town. Over a breakfast of sausage and eggs, biscuits and gravy, coffee, two middle-aged men were discussing it at the Village Restaurant Thursday morning.

“They’re making a big deal they don’t got that body. If they was to get rid of the body, they wouldn’t bury it. They knew that area out by Reeves Packing Plant. They just cut her up in little pieces and put her in plastic bags and threw her in that acid pit. You know, they make dog food out of that. Somebody’s bought her and fed her to their dogs already.”

“It’s terrible sometimes. You know people did it, but the legal system, sometimes you can’t get into evidence what you know, and they get off.”

“But if they get off, somebody’ll probably take care of them anyway.”

“It really bothers me, what’s happenin’ to the world the last ten years. The Antichrist is here, and people don’t even know it. Ya know, anybody who doesn’t believe that Jesus Christ is the living Son of the living God
is
the Antichrist. Even the Jews.”

DAY FOUR

Steve Haraway’s testimony had been completed. But because the defense had subpoenaed him as well, he could not sit in the courtroom. His mother and father and sister would watch the proceedings each day, would tell him at night what each witness had said, just as Melvin was doing for the Wards. But sitting, waiting at his father’s house, was frustrating. On Thursday he went hunting coyotes.

In the courtroom, Pat Virgin of Purcell took the stand. She was Denice Haraway’s mother. She was shown Denice’s driver’s license, which had a picture on it. “That’s my daughter,” she said. She was fighting back tears as she sat on the witness chair, in a turquoise suit. “She was a very beautiful girl. Slim…She was in very good health as far as I knew…She seemed very happy.”

On the defense table, as she testified, was a large brown paper sack, with bulges inside. The sack bore the marking “Dicus Discount Supermarkets.”

Mrs. Virgin stepped down. Soon after, a man named Richard Holkum took the stand. Now with the Alcohol Commission, he had been, at the time of the disappearance, an Ada city policeman. Holkum testified that at 7:45
P.M
. on the night of April 28, 1984, he had stopped by McAnally’s, which was on his way home. He was off duty, in civilian clothes. Denice Haraway was the clerk at the time, he said, alive and well. She was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, a gray sweatshirt with a hood, and a light pastel blouse, lavender or blue, with a print or design on it.

“Okay,” Bill Peterson said. “And did you relay this information to the police?”

“Yes, sir,” Holkum said.

“Okay. Did you—was it anything that they already didn’t know?”

“At that time,” Holkum said, “I don’t know if they had the information already or not.”

There was little cross-examination. The defense attorneys were thrilled with Holkum’s testimony; they had not known of his existence. They had tried hard to get Janet Weldon to say she had told the police about the blue-flowered blouse soon after the disappearance; she had insisted she had not. Now an Ada police officer had admitted he’d seen the blouse. This would buttress their planned arguments that the police had fed the suspects the information on the tapes—including the critical, detailed description of the blouse.

It appeared to some that the district attorney had made the first blunder of the trial in calling Richard Holkum to the stand. Bill Peterson didn’t think so. He did not know if the defense attorneys knew of Holkum’s stop at McAnally’s; he could not risk their suddenly calling him to the stand later. That would look as if the prosecution had been trying to withhold evidence.

Karen Sue Wise, the clerk at J.P.’s, who had supplied most of the details for the composite drawings, was called next. She told of the two young men shooting pool in her store that night, acting weird. She identified Tommy Ward positively as one of them. She said she could not remember what the other one looked like. The truck outside she described as “mixed red primer and gray primer.” Asked why she remembered Ward, she said, “His eyes. He was staring at me, watching me. It scared me real bad.”

Ms. Wise was questioned and cross-examined at length. Don Wyatt showed her a composite drawing—the one he had drawn a moustache on. Then he showed her a photograph of Marty Ashley. He asked if this man had been in her store that night. She agreed that the pictures were similar. But she said, “I know him, and that is not the man.”

“She knows Ashley!” Wyatt whispered excitedly to George Butner. But later Ms. Wise amplified. She said she had gone to school with him, knew his appearance, but did not know his name.

She admitted seeing a man in the back of the courtroom during the preliminary hearing who looked familiar. “I recognized a familiar face,” she said. “I guess I was just scared.”

Cross-examined by Butner, she said the cowboy she had seen loitering one night outside her apartment “resembled” the man in her store on April 28. Butner placed his hands on Karl Fontenot’s shoulders as he sat at the defense table. “Was Karl in your establishment on April 28, 1984?” he asked.

Ms. Wise replied, “I don’t know.”

Bill Peterson, on redirect examination, referred to the man outside her apartment who had frightened her. “Was that the person in J.P.’s that night?” he asked.

Ms. Wise said, “I don’t know.”

As they broke for lunch, Tommy Ward felt things were going well. “I guess the Lord is starting to answer my prayers,” he said.

Bill Peterson was also feeling good. He asked a journalist, “Any stuff sticking today?”

Peterson called Jack Paschall, the ECU professor and part-time employee at J.P.’s, who had joined Karen Wise at the store that night. A dark, intense man with sideburns and a moustache, Paschall again identified Tommy Ward as one of the men in the store that night. He recalled attending a lineup on November 8, picking out number 6—which was Ward—and saying to Gary Rogers, “If it’s not him, it’s his twin brother”; then adding, “No, it’s just him.”

He had never identified the other man, he said, and still could not do so. But of Tommy Ward, “I’m sure within the limits of human frailty.”

Cross-examined, he told of two conversations with Richard Kerner, in which he had been shown photographs of two different trucks. He said he could not rule out either, that some of the details he recalled about the truck could be wrong.

Wyatt showed him a Polaroid picture the police had taken of Ward when they first questioned him on Tuesday, May 1, three days after the disappearance; his hair was very short. Wyatt noted that the disappearance had occurred on a Saturday night, and that Ada’s barbershops were closed on Sundays and Mondays. He asked if Paschall would stick to his identification of Tommy Ward even if it was proved that his hair had been short on April 28. Paschall said he would stick to his identification, even then.

On redirect, Assistant D.A. Chris Ross observed that Ada’s barbershops are open on Tuesdays.

The next witness was Jim Moyer, the gas station attendant who said he had stopped by McAnally’s for cigarettes about 7:30
P.M
. and had seen two men acting suspicious there. He said he was sure one of them had been Ward; he was not sure about Fontenot. He recalled on cross-examination the man in the back of the courtroom at the preliminary hearing, who looked like the man in the store with Ward.

Wyatt asked if Moyer recalled telling Richard Kerner, “I may be wrong. I may be helping the wrong side here.” And he introduced the tape recording, which had been made without Moyer’s knowledge; this was the first he knew of its existence. Judge Powers allowed the tape to be played for the jury. They heard Kerner ask, “You are reasonably sure the guy at the preliminary with ‘Lurch’ on his belt is the second man and he knows Tommy and spoke to him at the preliminary?” And they heard Moyer answer, “Right.”

“I wasn’t sure about Fontenot,” Moyer said after the tape had concluded. He told of trying to reach the D.A. all summer to tell him this, without success. He said that during the preliminary hearing in the winter he had told a detective about “Lurch,” but that no one ever came to ask him more about it.

Of the truck he had seen outside, he said he’d seen no one else in it, and that there was nothing unusual about it—it had a tailgate.

The next witnesses, Lenny Timmons and David Timmons, told in detail about driving up to McAnally’s and finding the clerk missing. They repeated that they had seen nothing unusual about the couple leaving. Lenny Timmons repeated about Ward that on a scale of one to ten, his certainty was a six. “It may or may not be the man,” he said. About the woman, he said, “Nothing was apparent to me that she was being forced.”

“Everything looked normal?” Wyatt asked.

“Yes.”

David Timmons said the man had his arm around the woman’s waist. He said when the pickup left, it went east, away from town. He, too, saw “nothing unusual” about the couple leaving.

All through the testimony the jurors watched the witnesses, and listened—except for one elderly man, juror number nine, who sometimes looked at the ceiling; and one young man, juror number one, who stared intently, with narrowed eyes, at Ward and Fontenot.

It was 6:15 when the judge recessed the proceedings until morning.

DAY FIVE

Gene Whelchel led off. He echoed the testimony of his nephews, the Timmons brothers, about how they had found the clerk missing from McAnally’s. He said he did not at first realize that the woman leaving was the clerk; but that later, when he looked at the driver’s license, he realized it was she.

Sergeant Harvey Phillips, the first officer on the scene, testified to what he found there. When he was through, Don Wyatt approached the lectern with a magazine in his hand. There was a hint of scorn in his voice as he asked, “Are you the same Harvey Wayne Phillips that was quoted in
Startling Detective
magazine?”

The officer said he had never talked to anyone from that magazine.

Wyatt for a moment looked puzzled, almost stunned. He had not known the author of the article had made up all those quotes. He hesitated, turned, walked back to the defense table. “
Startling Detective!
” he muttered under his breath, with disgust. He tossed the magazine onto the table and took his seat.

Two new witnesses, Arthur and Mary Scroggins, an elderly couple, testified. Arthur Scroggins said he was driving west on Richardson Loop, in the area of the Holiday Inn, on the night in question when, about nine o’clock, a gray-primer pickup passed them, going west, at a high rate of speed. Mary Scroggins said that as the truck sped by she noticed three people in the pickup, and that one had blond hair. She did not know if they were male or female, she said.

The manager and the owner of McAnally’s testified about Denice Haraway’s fine work habits, her reliability.

Then the courtroom was cleared. Bill Peterson was preparing to introduce the tape of Tommy Ward being questioned on October 12. But there was a place on the tape where Dennis Smith asked Ward if he would take a polygraph examination; and any reference in court to a lie-detector test could lead to a mistrial. Judge Powers wanted to view the tape alone before deciding what to do.

A video screen was set up in the courtroom. With the jurors already gone, the judge cleared out the spectators and the press.

In the corridor, a lady reporter from a radio station looked over her notes, to phone in a report. She had developed her own shorthand; she did not like the defense attorneys, did not use their names in her notes. Instead she referred to them as “HD 1” and “HD 2.” “HD” stood for “Hot Dog.”

Detective Captain Dennis Smith was not permitted in the courtroom, because he would be a witness. He spent much of the time standing in the corridor, finding out during recesses what was happening inside. Now, with the judge busy viewing the tape, Smith went to the Feed Store for some iced tea. He knew the tape was more than ninety minutes long; he’d been there.

As he sipped his tea, a lawyer not involved in the case came in. He razzed the detective about the lady on the jury whose ex-husband was in jail. “The most important thing in any case is who you got in that box,” the lawyer said.

Smith was thinking not of the jury box, but of the bag on the defense table. He was wondering what was in it, for Don Wyatt to bring it in and let it sit there every day. He was pretty sure he could guess—the bones and the skull they had brought to Tommy Ward’s cell. He was not overly concerned. He was hoping the incident might even prove useful with the jury—by showing that the police had done everything they could to recover the body for the family.

The lawyer, sitting at another table, came over again. He told the detective of a T-shirt he had seen, that he hoped to get. The T-shirt said, “Innocent Until Proven Broke.”

The October 12 tape was the one in which, for almost two hours, Tommy Ward declared his innocence to Detectives Smith and Baskin, while Smith was holding in front of him a large picture of Denice Haraway. After viewing the tape, Judge Powers decided to admit it as evidence, with the reference to the lie-detector test excised. The defense attorneys were joking happily as they emerged from the courtroom and crowded into the elevator.

“We’re on a roll!” George Butner said.

“We sure are,” Wyatt agreed. “That’s the best evidence we’ve got!”

So why was Peterson entering it?

“That’s what the judge said,” Don Wyatt noted. “The judge said, ‘Why do you want to enter this?’ Peterson said, ‘I want to enter it.’ Heck, we’re not objecting!”