The Dreams of Ada (5 page)

One of the volunteers was Gary May, Steve’s friend and fraternity brother. Gary took a stack of flyers and headed north, toward Seminole County and the city of Seminole.

The first place he stopped was the Circle K, on Strothers Street. The people there were very cooperative. They put a flyer in the window. The place had recently changed hands, they told Gary; it used to be called U-Totem. It was the same store from which Patty Hamilton had disappeared.

Gary, an Ada native, good-looking, well-mannered, thanked them and drove up the road. He came to another convenience store, took a flyer in. A young woman was behind the counter. She, too, was very cooperative. She had heard about the disappearance on the news.

“The same thing happened to my sister,” she said.

Gary could hardly believe it. She was the sister of Patty Hamilton. He was afraid the woman would go to pieces, being reminded like this. But she didn’t. Instead she became supportive of him.

“Don’t worry, they’ll find her,” she said. “My sister’s been gone for a year now, but I know she’s okay. I know she’ll turn up okay one day.”

Shaken by the coincidence, Gary returned to the car, sat for a moment Then he drove on up the road, stopped at the next convenience store. A young woman clerk was tending that store, too. Gary made his request about the flyer, handed her one. The woman looked at it.

“Oh, my God!” she said. “Denice? Denice is missing? She’s my cousin!”

The cousin had not yet heard about the disappearance.

They talked for a bit. Then Gary returned to the car. In Oklahoma, he realized, news often travels slowly on Sundays. He felt shaky. Encountering them one after the other like that—first the store where Patty Hamilton had worked, then Patty Hamilton’s sister, then Denice Haraway’s cousin, both working in convenience stores—was the most startling experience of his life.

Harvey Pratt was a cop—part Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian, part Sioux, a little French. By night he was an artist, painting detailed watercolors of winter scenes on the plains, of sacred scenes from his ancestors’ tribal past. His paintings were on display in galleries in Oklahoma City, Chicago, and Santa Fe. By day he was an agent for the OSBI, supervisor of the organized crime and criminal intelligence division. One of his jobs, when necessary, was to make composite drawings of suspects.

On Monday morning, April 30, Pratt drove to Ada. He met at the police station with Karen Wise. From her descriptions, he drew sketches of the two men she had seen “acting weird” at J.P.’s. The sketches would later be shown to Lenny Timmons, who would agree that the one on the right was a reasonable likeness of the man he had passed in the doorway, that it was at least “in the ballpark.” New flyers were Xeroxed, bearing the sketches of these suspects as well as Denice Haraway’s photograph. The sketches were distributed to the news media.

They arrived at the Ada
Evening News
too late for inclusion in Monday’s edition. The paper’s deadline is about 11
A.M
. When it hit the newsstands about 1
P.M
., the disappearance of Denice Haraway was the lead story.

MISSING, LOCAL CLERK ABDUCTED

the headline said. Beside it was the college photograph of Denice, smiling, a delicate chain necklace over her sweater.

Under the byline of a reporter named Dorothy Hogue, the story recounted all the information the police had obtained at that point about the disappearance. It said that Mr. and Mrs. McAnally had offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the whereabouts of Mrs. Haraway. For further information, the story said, Detective Dennis Smith should be contacted.

By late Monday, the composite sketches were being shown on KTEN, the local TV station. On Tuesday they were printed on the front page of the
News
. And the phones at police headquarters were ringing; people were calling in the names of young men they felt might be the ones in the drawings:
Billy Charley. Tommy Ward. Randy Rogers. Tommy Ward. Billy Charley. Marty Ashley
.

The department’s four detectives—Smith, Baskin, Danny Barrett, and James Fox—took calls; when they got too busy, uniformed officers helped out.

Bob Sparcino. Billy Charley. Tommy Ward. Billy Charley. Tommy Ward.

Smith soon realized that the detectives were so busy answering the phone calls that they weren’t out doing detective work. He got some of the department’s seven civilian clerks and secretaries to answer the phone. The names of the people calling in were not taken, just the names of the possible suspects.

More than a hundred calls were taken in those first few days. More than twenty-five different names were given. The police were familiar with some of the names—young men they had arrested in the past. Others were new to them. Some of the names had been given by only one or two callers. But two stood out glaringly. The name Billy Charley had been given by more than thirty callers. They said he resembled the sketch on the right-hand side as they appeared on the flyers and in the
News
. The name Tommy Ward had also been given by more than thirty callers as resembling the same sketch.

The police were familiar with Billy Charley. They called him in for questioning. He showed up at headquarters with his parents, who said he had been at home with them Saturday evening. The police believed the parents. Charley was pretty much eliminated as a suspect.

They called in Tommy Ward, whom they also knew. He’d been arrested several times in the past—for misdemeanors such as being drunk and disorderly, though never for anything violent. Like Charley, he came in voluntarily. Dennis Smith and Mike Baskin questioned him about where he had been Saturday night. He said he’d been fishing with a friend, Karl Fontenot; then they had gone to a party at the home of another friend. He’d stayed at the party till about 4
A.M
., he said, and then had walked home.

The detectives noticed that Ward’s blond hair was cut real short, above his ears, unlike the suspect in the sketch, who had longish hair. They noted, too, that it was sort of choppy in the back—an unprofessional haircut. They took a Polaroid picture of Ward, and wrote the date on it: May 1.

Mike Baskin went to talk to Karl Fontenot, who had no prior record. When he arrived at the address, he encountered a dark-haired young man coming down the stairs. Baskin asked the youth if he knew where Karl Fontenot lived. The youth said that he was Karl Fontenot. Baskin identified himself, asked if Fontenot would come down to headquarters and answer a few questions. The youth said he was on his way to his job at Wendy’s but would come in after work. Baskin said that would be okay.

Fontenot never showed up for questioning. The police did not pursue the matter. They had no reason to arrest him. Besides, Fontenot had dark hair; the two described suspects had light hair.

There were other names to check out, and one by one in the ensuing days the detectives went down the list, questioning all of those they could locate; a few no longer lived in Ada, and could not be found. They got calls about pickup trucks that might have been used in the crime, and checked those out. They found no evidence that linked any of the men whose names had been called in, or any of the trucks, to the disappearance of Denice Haraway.

A man was arrested in Shamrock, Texas, near the western Oklahoma border, for abducting a woman in Amarillo. His description fit one of the suspects in the Haraway case, and there was evidence in his car that he may have been in Oklahoma on Saturday. But further investigation cleared him of any involvement.

The name and description of Donna Denice Haraway was put into a nationwide, computerized missing persons network, as well as into missing persons bulletins that go to law enforcement agencies in all fifty states. No information of use turned up. When the detectives were not busy interviewing people, they and uniformed officers and sheriff’s deputies continued to search the county in places they thought a body might have been dumped: under bridges, in ravines, at dump sites. They found no body, no murder weapon, no bloodstains, no clothing that could be linked to Denice—nothing to indicate if she was dead or alive.

In the apartment above the dental office, Steve Haraway was kept company by his closest friends when they were not out distributing flyers or searching. The phone kept ringing there, too, and with each ring there was the momentary flicker of hope that it might be Denice, that she might be alive. But most of the calls were from the ministers of Ada’s scores of churches, wanting to offer comfort, wanting to come over and say a prayer for Denice. Other ministers came and knocked on the door. Steve did not want to talk to any of them. His friends began taking the calls, answering the door, shooing the ministers away. It got so bad that an answering machine was put on the telephone, to screen the calls.

The disappearance was the talk of Ada: at the feed mill and the factories, on the farms and in the oil fields, in the stores and in the homes. As each new day passed with no body turning up, no evidence, no suspects, new rumors blew through the town: that Denice had faked her own disappearance, to run away with a lover or because she was involved in drug trafficking. People didn’t just vanish into the air.

Where the rumors didn’t take, where people believed that Denice had probably been kidnapped and killed, there was fear. This kind of thing might go on in Tulsa, in Oklahoma City, in Chicago, in New York. But in Ada?

At the Ada Trading Post on Main Street, a large pawnshop with a gun display on one side, pistols in glass cases, rifles and shotguns on the walls, business was brisker than usual. People kept coming in—mostly young couples—to buy handguns. In Oklahoma it is legal for almost anyone to buy a gun, though it is illegal to carry one loaded; all anyone needs is a driver’s license. The most popular model was an Italian-made X-cam .25-caliber pistol, very small. They retailed new for $50 but were available used for $39. “It’ll jam half the time,” the proprietor, Gene Matthews, would tell them. He would say that the most effective weapon at close range was a shotgun. But the women were afraid to handle shotguns; they bought the inexpensive pistols.

The only other time there had been fear like this, in most people’s memories, had been sixteen months before, in December 1982: the time of the last murder in Ada. The name of the victim still came easily to the lips of the people: Debbie Carter.

To Dennis Smith, sitting at his desk at police headquarters, placing a bit of smokeless tobacco along his gums, spitting out tobacco-colored saliva, the name, the crime, burned like an ulcer in his gut.

Debbie had been twenty-one years old, beautiful, with the kind of figure that turns men’s heads. She was working as a waitress at the Coachlight Club, which later became Buzzy’s nightclub. On the night of December 8, 1982, when she got home from work, she was brutally raped and strangled in her apartment. Police found the apartment a gory mess. Debbie’s body was naked. An electric cord was around her neck. Bottles were strewn about—including a ketchup bottle with which she had been raped. On her stomach, the word
DIE
had been written with nail polish. Other words had been written with lipstick, on her back and on the walls.

Dennis Smith seethed with rage when he saw the body, the apartment. He had known Debbie Carter; she used to live down the block from him. He had known her parents. He was determined to find the killer.

There were no witnesses. A case would have to be made with physical evidence: with hairs found at the scene, with fibers. These were sent off to the OSBI laboratory in Oklahoma City.

Through his investigation, Smith quickly became convinced who the killer was. But he couldn’t prove it. There was not enough evidence. Most of the town soon knew there was a single suspect in the case. But he had never been brought to trial.

Debbie had lived not far from the college. The dormitories had been locked up for a time after her death, with a mad killer on the loose. There was pressure on the police to make an arrest. But they never had.

The town for a time had lived in fear. Then it had subsided, as it always does.

Now it was back again.

The Debbie Carter case remained unsolved. In a town that small, it was a lingering cloud, perhaps in the shape of a murderer’s hand, over the police department.

One day Detective Smith pulled a manila envelope from a cabinet in his small basement office. In it were the photographs from the Carter case: black and white, eight-by-tens. He arranged them in a certain sequence. First, distant shots of the street, the house, the garage, her car. Then, the interior of the apartment: the mess; the writing on the walls; the nude body—first the back, the way she had been found, face down; then the front, the cord around the neck, the wasted beauty. He had done this many times before. Every time, the images burned his gut, renewed his rage.

Unlike the disappearance from Seminole of Patty Hamilton, which bore a strong resemblance to the Denice Haraway case, the Debbie Carter murder did not. They were not connected—except in two ways: in the fear they brought to the streets of Ada; and in the extra pressure the ghost of Debbie Carter put on Ada police to solve the Haraway case.

Sitting at his desk, a copy of the Haraway flyer always prominent on it, Detective Smith would suddenly think of a place out in the country that was a likely spot for a body to be hidden, a place that might have been overlooked by the searchers. He would get into a car and drive out there and look around. Ninety percent of his working time was being spent on the case, and much of his personal time as well. Often he would not get home till after dark; then, to relieve his frustration, he would mow the two acres of grass that surrounded his house; and in the morning, going out early to deliver the newspapers, he would see tufts of grass that he had missed in the dark sticking up from the lawn here and there, like a bad haircut.

By mid-May, most of the more than twenty-five possible suspects—the names produced by the composite sketches—had been interviewed; several dozen pickups had been checked out. Nothing had been discovered to connect any person or any truck to the disappearance, though the McAnallys had increased their reward offer to $5,000, and the OSBI had offered another $5,000, and a private donor had put up $100.