The Oilman's Daughter (5 page)

Joplin, like Carthage, is nestled in the
southwest corner of Missouri, where it meets Kansas and Oklahoma.
Once famous for being the site of some of Bonnie and Clyde’s first
bank robberies, it acquired a grimmer place in the national
consciousness after the 2011 tornado that killed 158 people.
Driving toward downtown, I could still see the lingering
devastation: Whole tracts of suburban-style homes had been
obliterated down to their foundations and never rebuilt. The local
high school looked liked it had been hit with a bomb.

The section of Joplin’s Main Street where Rick’s Appliances was
located had seen better days, but it at least appeared to have been
spared the storm’s wrath. It was 4:30 p.m. on a Thursday when I
pulled up there. The store was locked, despite the sign out front
that said it was open until five. When I peered through the glass,
no one appeared to be inside. At first it wasn’t clear that the
store was in business at all. The showroom was virtually empty,
with a few battered-looking washers and a refrigerator haphazardly
arranged across a stained carpet.

I cupped my hands to the glass to get a better look and noticed
a bearded, heavyset man visible through an open doorway to a back
room. I knocked loudly on the glass and waved. The man turned his
head slowly toward me, then turned back and wandered away. A moment
later another man walked out from the back and approached the front
door.

He was small—five foot eight, according to the arrest records I
later obtained—with brown hair and brown eyes, wearing a pair of
large metal-rimmed glasses. His hair was slicked over to one side.
He unlocked the front door and cracked it open, glaring at me
suspiciously. I introduced myself as a journalist and said I was
writing about a lawsuit related to M. A. Wright. Did he know
anything about it?

“Yeah, and it’s bullshit!” he shouted.

“OK, I just wanted to find out what you thought about it,” I
said. “That’s all.”

“Get in here,” he said, opening the door wider and waving me
inside.

“Alright,” I heard myself saying.

He slammed the door fully open against the wall and held onto it
while the sound reverberated through the mostly empty shop. He
clenched his teeth and closed his eyes, as if he was trying to hold
back a tide of fury and anguish that was about to pour forth. “That
fucking lawsuit is by Judy”—here he let out a kind of angry
grunt—“fucking Patterson over in Carthage. That sonofabitch needs
to be arrested!”

He leaned in toward me, and for a moment it looked like he was
going to hit me. “OK,” I said again, leaning back. “I just want to
talk about it.”

“She had that same goddamn lawsuit here in Joplin, back in ’08,
and had three court hearings here! The case was dismissed because
there was no damn truth to it whatsoever,” he said. “She’s a
worthless motherfucker, man.” He slammed the door against the wall
again. “Fucking sonofabitch pisses me off, man!”

“I can tell,” I said.

“Nobody owes her nothing!” he shouted. “My family don’t owe her
a goddamn fucking dime. And the sonofabitch is just trying to get
money out of everybody so she doesn’t have to fucking work for a
living in this goddamn fucking world.”

Harris started backing me out of the store, stepping in close
enough that I was forced into the threshold and then onto the
sidewalk. I asked if there was a phone number where I could reach
him. He stared at me blankly. “I’m not going to be here,” he said.
“I’m locking this sonofabitch up.” He closed the door and
disappeared into the back.

Judith wasn’t surprised that Rick had
come undone in front of me, nor that the store itself seemed to be
barely functioning. “That place should have been folded up beaucoup
long time ago,” she said. “There’s not enough money there to keep
the place going, but he was laundering money through that
business.”

If that was the case, however, none of Judith’s investigators or
lawyers had ever managed to produce any hard evidence of it. And
the visit to Rick’s Appliances had brought to mind a lingering
question I’d had since Judith first told me about the money that
her family allegedly had stolen: Where had it all gone? Rick, for
all his volcanic rage, struck me as an unlikely financial
mastermind. His house was small and simple, on the edge of a
trash-filled culvert. From what I could discern, none of the other
relatives seemed to be living much better.

Louise, meanwhile, had gone missing. Judith hadn’t seen her in
over a year. Judith was, in some sense, back where she’d started.
And it wasn’t clear if by pressing on she had any hope of winning
back more than she’d already lost.

Back home after the trip to Carthage, I tried to navigate the
thicket of facts I had dutifully set down in notebooks and tape
recorders. The longer I talked to Judith, the more difficult it
became to write anything about her saga. The evidence was so
simultaneously scattershot and voluminous that it seemed impossible
to corral. Something extraordinary had happened to her, that much
was certain. And something dark clearly had taken place in her
family—indeed, it seemed to still be happening. But a great many of
the answers lay in a time that was now out of any reasonable reach
of memory. Judith was fighting a war against a basic erosion of
historical facts, and I had unwittingly ended up fighting it
alongside her.

At times her motivations seemed to slip into something like
revenge. “I probably will never be able to ever, ever get back all
this money that these people have taken,” Judith admitted to me at
one point. “I hate the fact that Rick has any of this. But the
public humiliation that he is going to have to deal with down the
line, I wouldn’t want to be walking in his shoes.” The further I
waded into the story, the more I wondered how I could possibly
untangle what was important from the petty grievances of a
messed-up family.

Several months later, I was reading through the court filings
for Judith’s lawsuit in Texas, as it wended its way toward trial,
when one document caught my eye. It was a note postmarked November
29, 2010, from Louise Williams to the court:

Dear Judge Weiman,

I have no money to travel and my Doctor won’t let me go that Far
because of my Health. And Just about everything Judy Patterson has
Said is a Lie.… This is about the Fourth time She has Done this she
Wants to make a Movie of me and my family & Smear our names all
over the world. If I had any money I would sue her.

Something Bad is going to happen to Because [God] Don’t like
ugly.

Sincerely,

Ethel Louise Williams

Smear our names all over the world.
Was she referring
to me? I remembered back to my visit, when I’d been sitting in
Judith’s living room and she’d answered a call on her cell phone.
“Can I call you back?” she’d said. “Evan is here.” Not “that
reporter” or writer or any of the ways I’d described myself to try
and make clear the boundaries of our relationship. As many times as
I explained to her that we weren’t really on the same side, that my
journalistic motives were not necessarily aligned with her legal
and personal ones, it never seemed to sink in. “I’m beginning to
think that some sort of media attention would help us,” she
confided to me at one point.

Reading Louise’s letter, though, I realized it was more than
that. I’d set out to make Judith a character in my story, and
instead I’d become a character in hers. 

On January 30, 2012, Judith Wright
Patterson finally got her day in court. She and her lawyer Seth
Nichamoff appeared before Judge Larry Weiman of the 80th District
Court in Harris County, encompassing Houston. By this point, the
defendants in the case had been whittled down to Ethel Louise
Williams and Rick Harris. Although she still suspected many of her
other relatives were involved, she’d dropped her accusations
against them after her half-sister Diana had fought the case with
attorneys of her own.

Neither Rick nor Louise had ever hired a lawyer to defend
themselves, nor did they show up that day for the court appearance.
Even so, the judge proceeded to rule against Judith. Whatever her
relatives might have done to M. A. Wright, she hadn’t proven that
they’d stolen from her, and they didn’t owe her anything as a
result. And that was it.

I was relieved to find that Judith considered the verdict final
and, oddly, something of a victory. Even if the judge hadn’t
ultimately ruled in her favor, she told me when I talked to her
just after her court date, his comments in open court had persuaded
her that he believed M. A. Wright was defrauded. He just didn’t
believe there was enough evidence that she had been. Her decades of
legal battles were over, and she’d lost nearly all of them. She
would never see a dollar from Wright’s family or her mother’s. 

Later, Nichamoff admitted to me that while he had hoped for a
different outcome, he knew they’d never truly tied together the
story’s loose ends in a way that would satisfy the judge. “Did they
take property that specifically belonged to Judith?” he told me.
“We just don’t have any evidence of that. We never did.

“My guess,” he went on, “at the end of the day, did these people
extort money from Myron Wright? Yeah, it did happen. Absolutely,
there is no doubt. But then what? These are people living in
trailer parks. There is no honor and no victory, morally, legally,
or financially, in making people’s lives more miserable than they
already are.” 

My conversations with Judith tapered off
after the verdict, but a year later, in early 2013, I decided to go
back to see her. I flew first to Tulsa and spent a few days driving
around town, looking for the landmarks that had figured into
Louise’s account of her affair with M. A. Wright. The Dutchman’s
steak house where she’d worked is now a small strip mall anchored
by an out-of-season Halloween store. The Adams Hotel, where she’d
first left Wright and later lived for several months as a kept
woman, still has its ornate art deco exterior, but it has long
since been transformed into an office building, with a Mexican
restaurant on the ground floor.

The Mayo, next door, fell into disrepair in the 1980s, but it
recently came under new ownership and has been restored to
something approaching its original glory. It now houses a small
museum dedicated to its history, and I wandered through it, past
the photos of the celebrities and politicians who’d stayed there in
its heyday: John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Marilyn Monroe, and
Elvis Presley. I stood atop the steps where Louise remembered
standing when M. A. Wright told her that she’d never see him
again.

On the other side of town I stopped in on Terry Funk, the lawyer
who had represented Judith in her first lawsuit back in 1994.
Judith had filed an ethics complaint against him, but they’d
halfway reconciled, and she still called him occasionally to fill
him in on the case’s progress. It was like that with Judith.

Funk, wearing a white button-down monogrammed with his initials,
genially welcomed me into his glassed-in high-rise office. I sat
across from him at his desk and pressed him to remember what he
could of the case in which he had once been embroiled. “She had a
good story,” he told me. “You get a lot of b.s. cases, but for some
reason I tended to believe her.”

He remembered filing for her in Texas and warning her that he
wasn’t licensed—“that ended up getting me in trouble,” he said—and
confirmed that Wright’s lawyers had “made some kind of offer, I
don’t even know what.” Nor could he remember the blood tests or the
audiotapes that Judith told me she’d given him of conversations
with Wright. It had been two decades almost, and many of the
specifics of the case eluded him. But Judith’s other lawyers had
long suspected that Funk remembered much more than he let on.
Hoping to force his memory, I reminded him of something he had said
in Louise’s deposition. He paused. “I kept a diary in Vietnam,” he
said after a moment, “and I was reading through it the other day. I
saw that ‘he did this, we did that,’ and I said to myself, I don’t
remember that. But there it is on paper.”

The next day I drove up to Carthage and checked into the Best
Western Precious Moments Hotel, just off the highway. I wanted to
try one more time to talk to Rick Harris and Ethel Louise Williams,
the two people who could still, if I managed to get them to talk,
fill in the story’s gaps. With the legal battle over, I figured,
maybe they would finally tell their stories.

Judith had told me that she’d heard that Rick had grown more
erratic, attacking customers at the store. Indeed, on the website
for the Joplin police I found the record of an arrest the previous
year for assault, disturbing the peace, and resisting arrest. He’d
failed to show up in court several times since. Now, she said, he’d
disappeared, having moved out of his house to nobody knew where.
When I drove by his shop, I saw it had been transformed into an
antiques store. The proprietors had never met him but had heard
stories of his outbursts.

The next day, on an oppressive ash-sky afternoon, I drove across
the Kansas border to Baxter Springs, to the last address I could
find for Ethel Louise Williams. The house was just off the old
Route 66, but without the historical markers the street looked like
any other in a small town. Williams’s home was a gray two-story
house with a green roof. The yard was overrun with junk: an empty
blue barrel, a small sculpture of a lighthouse, a green plastic
cactus. The most prominent item was a wood-paneled hot tub with one
side caved in.

There was a car in the driveway; I parked behind it and walked
up to the front door. A sign on it read, “This is a no smoking
house. Oxygen tanks in use.” Through the little window in the door
I could see tanks strewn around and a stack of moldy-looking mail
on a nearby table, but not much else. I knocked, then rang the
doorbell. Nothing stirred.

I drove over twice more in the next two days, but nobody ever
came to the door. In truth, I felt relieved. Ethel Louise Williams
would be 79 years old, and apparently was in poor health. Her
doctor had written a note to the court saying she had dementia.

Most of our stories pass into oblivion
along with the dead. M. A. Wright died in 1992. Jean Phillips
passed away in 2010. Wright’s second wife, Josephine, died in 2004,
followed by Wright’s daughter by his first marriage, Judith Wright
Reid, in 2008. They all died before I found time to call and ask
them what in Judith’s story was true to their own experience. Even
Dominick Dunne died in 2009, suggesting the counterfactual
possibility that if Judith had really gotten to him, the account of
her story might’ve died with him. I doubt it, though. Judith would
have found someone like me eventually.

There are dozens of possible versions of the truth in Judith’s
life story, alternate explanations for all the pages in the boxes
stacked in her bedroom closet. I have hours of tape of Judith
telling me the story in different configurations, starting at
different points. After years of wading through it all, my own best
guess at the truth is this: That M. A. Wright likely did have that
affair with Ethel Louise Williams, and Judith was the result. That
Louise, by her own admission, tried to obtain money from Wright
after putting Judith up for adoption—money that, it should be said,
she and Judith both would have deserved from him. That her family
tried to get that money, too, an effort that may very well have
metastasized into decades of blackmail and grifting. That Wright
made a mistake of passion fifty years ago and largely avoided the
consequences.

But that’s all it really is, in the end: a guess. I’d be lying
if I didn’t say that sometimes I still wonder if this all could be
some great hoax. That I sometimes wonder how Ethel Louise
Williams’s memory of those days in 1955 could be so cloudy at times
and yet so perfect when it came to the details that mattered. That
after examining the chains of evidence I have concluded that they
are almost all circumstantial, and sometimes even contradictory.
That I, with a vested interest in my guess being correct, am
perhaps no more reliable a narrator of Judith’s story than she
is.

One day not long ago, I finally managed
to track down Diana Stiebens, Judith’s half-sister, and reach her
by phone. She had long since stopped talking to everyone in her
family, she said. She’d felt betrayed when Judith named her in the
lawsuits, and she’d spent thousands of dollars defending herself
from accusations she claimed to not even fully understand.

But she was willing to tell me what she remembered about M. A.
Wright. “He came to a boarding house where I was staying with my
mother,” she said. “He was very, very pleasant, kind, spoke to me
very nicely.” She remembered the nice preschool she’d been put
into, but had only been told years later by her mother that he was
responsible for it. I asked her if he seemed like a wealthy man, a
man from another class. “This was from a child’s point of view,”
she said. “It was a man dressed in plain khaki clothes, and he took
his hat off in the presence of ladies. I remember those kind of
things.”

As a girl, she’d heard her family talking about a child that
Louise had given up for adoption, and she pieced together herself
that it was the young girl named Judith in her town. She used to
follow Judith around at a distance sometimes, she told me, curious
about her mysterious sister. Diana had run away from home not long
after, and she ended up in foster care as a teenager.

As for M. A .Wright’s money, she said, she’d never seen any of
it. “Now, if I had all that money came to me, I wouldn’t have ended
up in a foster home, for example,” she told me. “The only thing
that was ever given to me, that I know, was that he bought me a
pretty dress and put me in a preschool.” In any case, she said,
“what difference does it make? My mother is probably about 79 now.
My brother is about three years younger than me. I’m 62. My point
of opinion is, why do we have to continue this on? There’s really
nothing that can be done about it.”

I asked her whether, deep down, she thought there was some
larger conspiracy in her family around Wright’s money. “One person
says one thing, and another person says another, and all I can give
you is what I believe and what people have told me,” she said.
“What is the truth in all that? I know that a man visited my
mother. I know that they called him M.A.”