The Dreams of Ada (4 page)

The news of the disappearance, and of the search, was reported to the town by the local radio and television stations.

After a long day of fruitless searching, spirits were low at police headquarters. Then came a report from McAlester, sixty miles to the east, site of the state penitentiary. A trooper there had stopped a pickup that matched the description. There were two men inside who also roughly matched the descriptions, but they were wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots; there was no young woman with them. The men were detained in McAlester while their pictures were taken and they were fingerprinted. For a time, Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers had hopes for a quick solution to the case. But within a few hours, the men were cleared of any involvement.

As hour after hour passed with no trace of Denice Haraway turning up, the specter of another young woman loomed large in the minds of the police. Her name was Patty Hamilton.

Patty Hamilton was an eighteen-year-old girl who had lived in Seminole, in the adjoining county, thirty miles north of Ada. She used to work as a clerk in the U-Totem convenience store, at 401 West Strother. Shortly after 4:30 in the morning of April 9, 1983—one year and nineteen days earlier—Patty Hamilton had disappeared while working. Her disappearance was reported by a customer who entered the store and found no clerk. About $110 was reported missing from the cash register. Patty’s locked car was found parked outside the store, with her purse in it. Her keys were in the store. On the counter were two cans of soda pop. There was no sign of a struggle. Less than an hour earlier, Patty had been talking on the phone with her mother, who worked all night as a dispatcher for a Seminole cab company. She told her mother she was going outside to sweep the driveway. She had not been heard from since; had not been seen, dead or alive. Police believed that Patty Hamilton probably had been abducted and killed. But there was no evidence, no suspects. Leads checked out in the early days had proved fruitless. With more than a year gone by, there weren’t any leads anymore. The disappearance remained a mystery.

The OSBI case agent in the disappearance of Patty Hamilton was Gary Rogers. The last thing he needed in Ada was another Patty Hamilton case.

Dennis Smith was exhausted. Nearly a thousand man-hours had gone into the search that day. They had turned up not a single clue. But his eighteen years of experience told him there was only one logical explanation for the disappearance of Denice Haraway: she had been taken from the store to be raped. And rape victims, when their attackers are through with them, usually find their way to a road, or a phone, within a few hours.

Donna Denice Haraway had not.

They had found no body, no clothing, no weapon, no blood. But as he sagged into his bed, the detective captain was already convinced: Donna Denice Haraway was dead.

2

OF DEER AND CALVES

D
ennis Smith’s grandfather had been a farmer in Arkansas. He moved to the Ada area around the turn of the century, when it was still called Ada, I.T.—Indian Territory. The first white settlers, two brothers named Daggs, had ridden their horses up from Red River County, Texas, early in 1890, and had built log homes near what would later become a cement plant. A fellow named Jeff Reed came up with them to help drive their cattle. It is Reed who is considered the founder of Ada. Impressed by the site, he returned to Red River County, sold his interests there, and came back to Ada to live.

At first the place was called Daggs Prairie, after the first two families to settle. Jeff Reed dealt in cattle for about a year, then opened up a small store. The store became a trading center for the Indians and the few white settlers in the area; it gave the settlement its first commercial importance. Indians raised small crops for subsistence; the Daggs brothers began farming to sell the produce. The only transportation in the area was on horseback. Virgin, untilled lands stretched for miles in every direction.

The settlement soon became known as Reed’s Store. As the place grew in population, one of the Daggs brothers opened a second store. Local residents began to want a post office, and J. B. Reed set out to get them one. He prepared a petition, spent months traveling through the countryside to get the required number of signatures; sometimes he rode fifteen miles to get one more. The first name he proposed to the Post Office Department was “Sulphur Springs,” after two such springs nearby. It was rejected, because there was already a town by that name in the Territory. The second name he suggested was “Reed’s Store.” It, too, was rejected. The third name he submitted, “Ada,” was accepted in 1903. It was the name of his eldest daughter.

Slowly the new town grew. More settlers arrived to farm the land. More stores opened. All over the west railroad lines were being built, and several local men formed a company to start a railroad. They routed it through Ada. A bridge was built over Sandy Creek, the first bridge in the county. A man from Shawnee bought a corner lot at Main Street and Broadway and opened the First National Bank. A man named George N. McKnight was elected mayor, a fellow called “Uncle Dick” Couch became the town marshall. By 1903 there were several dozen stores in Ada, selling all manner of merchandise—hardware, meat, feed, lumber. Seven doctors had opened offices, two dentists, a dozen lawyers. The Ada
Weekly News
had begun publication. The Oklahoma-Indian Territory Anti-Horse Thief Association held its convention in Ada that year. More banks opened. A baseball field was built. More than 20,000 bales of cotton were marketed in Ada that fall.

Into this new town bustling with horse-drawn wagons. Dennis Smith’s grandfather arrived from Arkansas to try his luck at farming. He watched as Ada, Indian Territory, became, in 1907, part of the new state of Oklahoma. He saw stone masons arrive, churches rise on many street corners, small factories open. He watched the early livery shops give way to the first automobile dealers, saw prospectors arrive, hunting for oil and natural gas, and finding both. In the 1920s and 1930s the town prospered from an oil boom; the Kings Road mansions began to go up.

Dennis Smith’s father did not participate in the boom, did not get rich; as always, the rich were the minority, even in boom times. Smith’s father went to work as a janitor at the First National Bank on Main Street. He would remain there until he retired in 1972 and moved to Odessa, Texas.

Ada is a place where people tend to stay, generation after generation. While some of the children who grow up there move off to big cities in search of larger opportunities, most do not. It is a place of roots, not rootlessness; of extended families, not nuclear ones. Most people own modest frame houses in which they raise their children, who in turn raise their own children in the same or similar houses. There are plenty of jobs to go around—at the feed mill, the glass factory, the cement plant, for the men; at Solo Cup, Blue Bell jeans, the convenience stores, for the women. It is a place of simple living: work, children, television, hunting, fishing, church. When the photo portrait-maker died, his son took over the business, to continue immortalizing the next generation of Adans, in life, in full color; the son of the monument maker went into
his
father’s business, to continue immortalizing Adans in death, in gray granite.

If there was fear in Ada, it usually was the fear inspired by tornadoes, or the fear people find deep in their own souls or in their personal relationships, never simple, even in simple towns. Or the fear of God. But there had rarely been fear in the streets.

Dennis Smith was born in 1943, romped as a toddler on Ada’s quiet lawns while the nation was at war. When he was in the third grade, he was sent to a charity camp called Sheep Creek, about fifteen miles out in the country. The camp was owned by the wealthy Norris family. He spent a month there, splashing about in a lake, learning to swim. The boys had no life preservers but would strap large gallon cans to their chests to keep them afloat. He also learned to wrestle there.

In junior high school, Dennis met a boy named Bill Peterson. They became friends, often hung out in the same crowd. They would swim together at a place called Blue Hole. Sometimes, along with other kids, Dennis was invited to the Peterson home, a palace compared with his own family’s working-class house. The fact that Bill Peterson’s grandfather, P. A. Norris, owned the bank where Dennis Smith’s father swept the floors did not seem to impede their friendship; it lasted well into high school. Then they began to drift into separate crowds. No one could know then that Dennis Smith one day would become Ada’s detective captain, and Bill Peterson its district attorney.

When Smith graduated from Ada High, he enlisted in the Marines. He was stationed in California and in Okinawa. This was after Korea, before Vietnam. He thought for a time of making a career of the Marines, because of the Corps’ excellent retirement plan after twenty years; but he didn’t. Instead he returned to Ada, went to East Central, and joined the police force. He does not pretend he became a cop to make the streets of the town safer, or to help combat evil; he became a cop when he learned that the Ada police department also had an excellent retirement plan after twenty years: half the pay of your highest annual salary.

For nine years he was a uniformed officer, patrolling the town in a squad car; then he became a detective, attended OSBI seminars in detective work. He would reach his twenty-year plateau for possible retirement in January 1986. In the interim he was married, divorced, remarried. He had two boys, now teenagers, James and Shawn. His bull chest, round face, bald pate, “hard eyes” became familiar in the town as he probed the burglaries, the drug traffic that were increasingly common in Ada.

About every two years there was a murder. Most of them were family-related, and were solved fairly quickly.

Main Street terminates abruptly at the campus of East Central University. It is a pleasant campus, the administration building off to one side, the library dead ahead, the education building behind it to the right. Walkways connect the buildings between grassy, tree-shaded lawns. Behind the library the land slopes sharply downward. Set into the slope is the science building. Across a roadway at the bottom of the hill is the football stadium: Norris Field.

Founded in 1909 as East Central Normal School, the institution had expanded through the years to become East Central State Teachers College, then East Central Oklahoma State College, and finally East Central University. By 1984 it was serving about 4,000 students. Most of them had grown up within a fifty-mile radius of the campus. Others came from all over the state.

The education department had long been the mainstay of the school. The director of elementary education was Norman Frame, who had been at the college for twenty years. As an elementary education major, Denice Haraway had taken several of Frame’s classes; he also had been, for the past three years, her faculty adviser. During the first two years her name was Denice Lyon. She struck Norman Frame as a very beautiful girl, the kind whose presence brightened your day—although not all that serious about her work, about average. Then, having married in August, she turned up for her senior year as Denice Haraway. Frame noticed a change. Her marriage seemed to have matured her; she worked harder, was more serious about wanting to become a teacher.

In his early days in Ada, Norman Frame had been active in the First Christian Church. So, too, had Dr. and Mrs. Haraway. He and the Haraways had become friends, had visited each other’s homes; he’d known Steve Haraway then as a nice little boy, a bit shy but coming out of it. He remembered this when he heard the news of Denice’s disappearance on Sunday, on television, and he recalled his last conference with Denice. It had been in late winter, when she had completed her classes, just before she’d started her student teaching. He’d given her a grade of 90 in his class. No one was more surprised than he at how well she had done; it was a tough course. When he told her that, in his narrow office in the education building, she smiled slightly. He could tell that she was pleased, very proud of what he was saying; but she was trying to maintain her ladylike decorum, trying, in that way she had, to retain control of her emotions.

The moment he heard the news, Norman Frame felt something terrible had happened to Denice. Other students that he knew might suddenly take off on a lark, an impulse, and not say where they were going. But not Denice.

Donna Howard, the teacher under whom Denice had been practice teaching, was out of town that weekend. When she got home late Sunday, she got a call from a friend who told her about the disappearance. She watched the ten o’clock news on television, saw the report there. She, too, felt from the start that something terrible had happened. Denice was not the kind of person to run away.

Denice had been assigned to Mrs. Howard’s classroom in early February. For eight weeks, every Friday, instead of going to the college, she came to Hayes Elementary, sat at the rear of the class, and watched Mrs. Howard teach. She was quiet; she rarely had any questions. In late March she began the required eight weeks of full-time practice teaching. At first, still shy, she had trouble making her voice heard by the entire class. Mrs. Howard worked with her on voice projection. As second-graders will, some of them began to test the student teacher, acting wise, disrupting the class. Denice was surprisingly firm with them; she quickly got them into line; not once did Mrs. Howard have to step in and help her out. When the pupils were at music or physical education, Denice and Mrs. Howard would sometimes chat, have coffee. Mostly Denice talked about teaching. After graduation, she told Mrs. Howard, Steve hoped to get a job with a pharmaceutical firm, as a salesman. They wanted to live in a metropolitan area—Oklahoma City or Tulsa. She would wait till Steve got a job, see where they would live, then apply for a teaching job there. She was hoping it would be Oklahoma City, which was a lot closer to Purcell, where her mother lived.

Classes at Hayes ran until 3:30. Denice would drive to the school each morning, park on the street outside—the school lot was reserved for the regular staff—and teach the class. She would wear dresses, or skirts and blouses, to teach. About 2:30 she would change into blue jeans, and leave, to go to her job at McAnally’s. Sometimes, if she was going to be late, she would call the store to let them know.

On Monday morning, Denice’s car was not outside the school. The early arrivals among the twenty-two second-graders in the class whispered among themselves. Some of them had heard on television that Mrs. Haraway had disappeared. The others were quickly being filled in. When Mrs. Howard entered, they pressed around her, asking questions. Mrs. Howard told them to return to their seats, that she would talk about it when all the children had arrived.

When the bell rang and the class started, the teacher told them all that she knew: that Mrs. Haraway had disappeared from the store where she was working Saturday night; that police thought she may have been taken away by two men driving a gray pickup truck; that that was all anyone knew. Most of the students chattered for a bit, then settled down. One little girl started crying and couldn’t stop. She cried most of the day. She had not seemed especially close to Denice Haraway—just more sensitive, perhaps. Mrs. Howard taught the class herself that day.

As the second-graders buzzed, Steve Haraway and six or seven of his college friends gathered at police headquarters. The police had obtained from the college a photograph of Denice. They were mimeographing it onto flyers with her description—twenty-four years old, five-feet-five, 110 pounds, brown eyes, dark blond hair, a light complexion. The description indicated that her hair had been cut to shoulder length since the picture had been taken. The flyer also contained descriptions of the gray pickup and of the two possible suspects. The Ada police would distribute the flyers in town, get them into store windows. The sheriff’s department and the highway patrol would do the same out in the county. Steve and his friends volunteered to take them into neighboring counties, where no searches had been conducted the day before.