The Dreams of Ada (47 page)

Court resumed. Nancy Howell took the stand. She was the girlfriend of Jimmy Ward, Tommy’s eldest brother. She said she and Jimmy had gone to the Ward house on Ashland Avenue about sunset of the night in question, and that Tommy had been there. Tommy and Jimmy had stood in the driveway and quarreled, she said, about money; Jimmy claimed Tommy owed him $150 as part of a car swap they had made; Tommy claimed the swap was even-up.

Ms. Howell produced a large wall calendar to indicate why she remembered the date: Jimmy had a weekend pass from a V.A. hospital. On cross-examination, Chris Ross noted that April 28 had many more notations than any other day; he implied that this calendar had been prepared just for the trial.

Jimmy Ward was called. A veteran of Vietnam, he had been in and out of the Veterans Administration hospital in Oklahoma City. He said he had prescriptions for tranquilizers and antidepressants; his hands fidgeted as he talked.

He told the same story as Nancy Howell, about finding Tommy at home that evening and quarreling about money.

Dorothy Hogue leaned toward a colleague. “Wyatt is hanging his client!” she said. “He’s showing that Ward was angry that night, and that he needed money!”

The impact of the testimony was supposed to be that Ward was at home, and therefore not shooting pool at J.P.’s. And not out kidnapping anyone.

Court adjourned for lunch. O. E. McAnally, the owner of McAnally’s, slim, white-haired, sat on a bench in a corridor. He reminisced about what a fine young lady, a fine employee, Denice Haraway had been. He had no doubt that the suspects were guilty.

He spoke of his recent decision to rid his stores of girlie magazines. “Maybe these young guys look at those pictures,” he said, “and it gets them stirred up to do something like that.”

Of Tommy Ward’s four sisters, Melva was the most sophisticated and worldly; Tricia the most open and warm; Kay the most gentle and pretty. Joice was the family cutup, raucous and emotional.

Once, as a teenager, Joice wrote on the wall of an Ada underpass: “For a good time, call Melva Ward.” And she added the correct phone number. Melva got obscene phone calls for weeks; she was angry at Joice for months.

Of all the sisters, Joice was the one most prone to shout, to cry, to lash out, to lose control. Now Don Wyatt had to play with fire, as Bill Willett had said; he had to put her on the stand. She was the alibi.

Taking the witness chair after lunch, Joice testified that she had been at home all day on April 28, 1984. She said Tommy had been hungover in the morning, from a party the night before. About 3 in the afternoon Tommy left the house, she said, to walk into town; he returned about 6:30
P.M
., she said, and did not leave again that night. She said Jimmy, and Nancy Howell, had come over, and Tommy and Jimmy had quarreled. Then Willie Barnett came over, and Tommy asked him to leave because he was bothering the bird. She told of the plumbing breaking down late that night, and Tommy and her husband, Robert, fixing it.

Is it possible, Wyatt asked, that Tommy was at McAnally’s about 8
P.M
. or thereabouts?

“No,” Joice said, “he was at home with me.”

On cross-examination, Chris Ross asked if it was not true that Joice was attending classes on Saturdays at that time, to qualify for an Emergency Medical Technician certificate. Joice said she had not attended the class that day.

When she was excused from the stand, the relief of the defense attorneys was almost audible. Joice appeared to have done well. She had not come unglued, as she herself had feared she might.

Then it was Richard Kerner’s turn.

Under Wyatt’s guidance, the private investigator recited his credentials: thirteen years in the Air Force Military Police; seven years attached to the Office of Special Investigations; ten years in private industry; then three years as a private investigator; a graduate of the FBI Academy; current president of the Oklahoma Private Investigators’ Association. He had not wanted to mention that for three of his years in the Air Force, he had been an investigator assigned to the CIA. He could not talk about that, he’d told the lawyer. Wyatt got him to mention it, for the record, to impress the jury.

Kerner told of his investigations in this case: of the people he’d found who believed the composite drawings were exact images of Randy Rogers and Bob Sparcino; of the truck he had photographed at Elmore City. He was not permitted to mention the house with the bars on the bedroom window there; it was deemed irrelevant to this trial.

He told of conversations with law officers about whether the suspects in the Linda Thompson kidnapping in Oklahoma City in August, Don Hawkins and Dale Shelton, might have been involved in the Haraway case.

And he told of his suspicions of Jason Lurch, the “mystery man” in the back of the courtroom, who had looked familiar to Jim Moyer and Karen Wise. He had taken a picture of Lurch this very morning, he said, and he produced it from his pocket. He told of the truck he had found that had belonged to Lurch’s nephew, Ricky Brewer. More than twenty pictures he’d taken of that truck, from every possible angle, were introduced by Wyatt.

Kerner said he had interviewed Brewer; he described him. Wyatt showed him one of the composite sketches, asked if it looked like Ricky Brewer.

“It’s a very good likeness,” Kerner said.

Chris Ross began the cross-examination; he had displayed during the trial an instinct for the jugular; Bill Peterson was allowing his assistant to do much of the hard-nosed questioning.

Reviewing Kerner’s credentials, Ross brought out that his ten years in private industry had not been as an investigator, that he had held several different jobs; that one of them had been—there was derision in Ross’s voice—with Shaklee Products.

He asked what Kerner had done in the CIA.

I can’t talk about that, Kerner said.

You mean, Ross asked, you are going to drop the name CIA and then not tell us what you did?

That was correct, Kerner said; he was forbidden by law to discuss it, even if the judge ordered him to.

Ross did not ask the judge to order him to.

The assistant D.A. read a list of about twenty-five names—most of the names that had been called in after the composite sketches were first published. He asked if Kerner had investigated these people, as the Ada police had done.

“I did not have access to that knowledge,” Kerner said.

He conceded that he did not know where Jason Lurch was living in 1984, that he had gotten no confessions in this case, that he had found no physical evidence linking any truck to this case.

“Can you say,” Ross asked, pacing in front of the witness stand, “that Jason Lurch was in McAnally’s on April 28?”

“No.”

“Can you tell us who did it?”

“No, I cannot.”

Then Kerner added, “I believe Mr. Lurch and Mr. Brewer are the most likely suspects of all I investigated.”

Kerner said Jim Moyer had told him he believed it was Lurch he had seen in McAnally’s that night.

“He also said it was Mr. Ward,” Ross said. “You are going to substitute Mr. Brewer for Mr. Ward?”

“Yes,” Kerner said.

“And they were also the ones at J.P.’s?”

“That would be my opinion.”

The jury watched intently as the fencing continued. Kerner crossed his legs, appeared relaxed—as if to indicate he had been through this sort of thing before.

Ross asked if he had obtained any confessions from these men.

“No,” Kerner said.

Ross sat down. Wyatt stood for redirect questioning.

“I have found no evidence,” Kerner said, “linking Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot to the missing girl.”

Lurch, he said, had told him inconsistent stories: first that he’d been living in Ada at the time, then in Oklahoma City.

“You are not telling us, are you,” Wyatt asked, “that Lurch and Brewer did it?”

“No, I’m not,” Kerner said.

The attorney brought up, indirectly, the matter of Officer Holkum and the blouse, to suggest again that the police knew of the blouse before the arrests, and spoon-fed the information to the defendants.

“Would you assume,” Wyatt asked, hypothetically, “as agent in charge, that others working for you would bring all relevant information to your attention?”

“Yes,” Kerner said.

Chris Ross asked whether, if Karen Wise knew Lurch and Brewer, that would clear them. Kerner didn’t think it necessarily would.

Wyatt countered by asking why, if Karen Wise knew Lurch, she would be afraid of him in court and would hide around the corner.

Kerner was excused. It was late Friday afternoon. Judge Powers told the jurors he would permit them to return to their homes for the weekend. But because the testimony might soon be concluded, he might sequester them on Monday night, so they should come prepared. Because their deliberations might take several days, the judge said, they might want to bring several pairs of underthings.

There was laughter in the court at the mention of underwear.

Richard Kerner was supposed to drive Jason Lurch home. Considering his testimony in court, he did not think that was a good idea. Bill Willett, a large man himself, did so instead. The ladies in the office were happy to see Lurch go.

There was no problem during the ride home. Lurch was as yet unaware of what had been said in court: that suspicion had been pointed, by the defense, at him.

Some in Wyatt’s office were concerned about an unasked question: Wyatt had neglected to have Kerner testify about how, when Jannette Roberts found the haircut Polaroids in her trunk, they were already dated. Wyatt noted that Jannette had already testified to that. Some aides felt the jury would be more inclined to believe her if they’d heard Kerner say the same thing.

The investigator went home for the weekend, to catch up on other work. He said he would try to find out, over the telephone, if Lurch might have been living somewhere else in Ada, other than the trailer park, in April of ’84. He told the lawyers he would be back in Ada Monday morning.

Judge Powers went home to Chandler for the weekend. Butner went to Wewoka, to be a spotter for the high school football team; the other attorneys on both sides retired to their homes, to relax, to try for a time to forget the case.

The next day, Saturday, September 21, Tommy Ward celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday, in the Pontotoc County jail.

Miz Ward had asked the jailers earlier in the week if she could bring a birthday cake: only if it was large enough to serve all the inmates and all the jailers—twenty-five people, she was told. On Saturday, Tricia and Bud went to the Cake Box bakery on Main Street and bought a large chocolate cake. It had white icing—and four small blue roses in the corner.

The little blue roses on the cake, and in the description of the blouse on Tommy’s tape, was coincidental.

The cake said, “Happy Birthday Tommy.”

They also bought three two-liter bottles of Sprite, and napkins and paper cups, and took them to the jail. Bud carried the heavy soft drinks. Tricia, between the large cake and her big belly, could barely fit through the door.

They were not permitted to see Tommy, because it was not a Sunday. A deputy took the food inside. The inmates and the staff wolfed down the cake and drank the soda pop. No one sang “Happy Birthday.”

Saturday was cloudy, with intermittent drizzle; the heat wave had broken at last. About 3 in the afternoon, Bud and Tricia wanted to get out of the house. They packed the kids into the car, the trunk filled with fishing rods, and they drove to Wintersmith Park. There, for the next hour, they stood or sat on a small jetty that jutted into the lake, and they fished. The park was deserted; they had it almost all to themselves, except for the silent ducks and geese that glided through the dark water.

They did not catch any fish.

At exactly the same time, restless on this rainy Saturday, Mike Baskin and two other detectives drove to Sandy Creek. They were not going fishing. They were looking for Denice Haraway’s body, one more time.

They parked near Reeves Road, got out, walked along the creek, poking in the brush, searching.

At the edge of the creek they came upon a pair of blue tennis shoes. There was a stain on one toe that looked like blood. Excited, Baskin picked it up. He studied it closely. He decided, disappointed, that the stain was mulberry juice, from a tree hanging over the creek. He tossed the sneakers down, and moved on.

Early Sunday afternoon, Tricia, Bud, the kids, and Joice went to the jail, to wish Tommy a happy birthday. He was wearing, for the visit, a new black T-shirt—a birthday gift from Charlene, the woman who was hoping to marry him. On the way home, hopeful of an acquittal, Tricia said, “Maybe this is the last time we’ll have to go there.”

Karl Fontenot also had a visitor that weekend—a winsome young lady, married, in her twenties. She did not know Karl, but her mother had known Karl’s mother. Hearing that Karl had not had a single personal visitor in eleven months, the woman came to see him. She brought him a Bible and a checkers set.

Karl was exhilarated by the visit. He spent the night reading his new Bible.

He felt the trial was going well. He was especially happy about the Polaroid pictures showing both of them with short haircuts. Karl had taken the one that had Tommy and Jannette in it. He felt proud of that.

His new friend also brought him some magazines to read. The stories he liked best were those about people in jail.

Detective Captain Smith did not speak with Detective Baskin that weekend. But at three o’clock Sunday, Smith had the same urge Baskin had had the day before. He wanted one more crack at finding Denice Haraway’s body, before the case went to the jury.

Smith, his wife, and another couple they were with climbed into the family Datsun. The captain chose a place he had not personally searched before: the portion of Sandy Creek near Reeves Road.

As they prowled along the creek, they came upon the same pair of tennis shoes Baskin had found the day before. There was darkness on one toe. Smith’s friend thought it was blood. Dennis’s heart leaped. He took the shoe, examined it.