The Dreams of Ada (14 page)

On Thursday, November 8, at 2
P.M
., Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot appeared in court before Special District Judge John Miller, to plead to the charges.

Ward, accompanied by attorney Mike Addicott of Wyatt & Addicott, pleaded not guilty to all counts.

Fontenot, who still did not have a lawyer, did not plead, pending the appointment of an attorney by the court.

Both men were ordered held without bail.

Don Wyatt moved to have Ward released on bail. It was largely a
pro forma
motion, in behalf of a client who had pleaded not guilty; the attorney knew that the Wards had no money with which to post bond; he knew, too, from the talk of the town, that if Tommy Ward were released, he might very well be killed by one or more of the angry people of Ada.

The bail hearing was held on Thursday, November 15—a week before Thanksgiving. Judge Miller denied bail. The story was the lead headline in the Ada
News
on Friday. Beside the headline was a large photograph of Tommy Ward being led from the county jail to the bail hearing. He was wearing white prisoner’s coveralls. His hands were handcuffed behind him. His arms were being held by two armed sheriff’s deputies in uniform.

The second paragraph of the story quoted attorney Wyatt indirectly, as follows:

Wyatt said at this time no body has been found to be in existence and no evidence has been produced indicating a crime has been committed. Ward is being held solely on his recounting of a dream which the prosecution is calling a confession, Wyatt said.

That was the first mention in the
News
of the word “dream” in connection with the Haraway case. The police had never mentioned it to the media. The reporter writing the story pressed no further for an explanation.

Tricia and Bud were at home when they read the story in the paper that evening. They had not expected Tommy to get bail; the denial was no surprise. Suddenly, without warning, Tricia, in a rare outburst of temper, swung around and punched Bud viciously in the shoulder.

Bud grabbed his throbbing shoulder and stepped back. “What was that for?” he wanted to know.

Tricia was in a rage. She showed him a sentence farther down in the story; it was quoting Assistant District Attorney Chris Ross.

“Ward should be denied bail because of evidence against him, the fact he has not been permanently employed in years and no one has come forward to claim his reliability, Ross said.”

Tricia apologized to Bud. She hadn’t been angry at him. She had just exploded in frustration.

“No one has come forward!” she said. “How can he say that? We put up the house! We hired a lawyer for twenty-five thousand dollars!”

The story went on to describe how Don Wyatt had asked the judge to place a gag order on the prosecutor, because, “He is trying the case in the papers and on television.” The judge refused the gag order, but instructed the prosecution to review the code of ethics and to follow it.

The judge then denied bail: because the charge was murder, and because the district attorney had said he would seek a sentence of death.

The new Pontotoc County Jail, built in 1972 to replace the former one on the top floor of the courthouse, was situated across the lawn from the courthouse, across the street from City Hall and the police station. The jail was built one story high, a long, narrow rectangle, with walls of solid cement. There were no windows. There were two doors, made of steel. One door was at one end of the rectangle, facing onto a small side street. It was for the use of sheriff’s deputies, the jailers. The other door faced the lawn and the courthouse. This was the door for visitors.

Visitors sat in a small, dark room the size of a clothes closet; inmates were brought from their cells and led into a similar closet-sized room on the other side of a wall; between the two rooms was a narrow glass window, about four inches across, ten inches high. Through this thick-paned window the prisoner and his visitor could see each other. Beneath the window was a small opening covered on both sides by metal strips with holes in them. Through these holes the inmate and the visitor could talk; they usually had to half shout to hear one another.

Visiting was allowed only on Sunday, from 1
P.M
. to 3
P.M
., and only for ten minutes. There was only the one visiting room. People who came to visit an inmate had to give the inmate’s name, and their name, and their relationship, to a jailer, speaking through a door that led to a jail office. They then had to wait their turn. The waiting room was a cubicle about four feet by five feet. In it was a small metal table and two folding chairs. Most of the people who came to visit were women and children whose husbands or fathers were in the jail; or the mothers and girlfriends of young men who had been picked up for being rowdy on Saturday night. Often, by one o’clock Sunday afternoon there were ten or twelve people waiting to see someone in the jail; often, many of them were pregnant. There were only the two seats in the waiting room; the others could stand against the walls, or outside, or sit on the pavement or the lawn, if it wasn’t too cold or too hot or raining or snowing. Between the small waiting room and the small visiting room was an orange metal door that ended two inches above the floor. Through this two-inch gap the words being shouted to the inmate by the visitor could easily be heard. There was no privacy.

On the day she first heard Tommy had been arrested, Tricia tried to see him at the jail. She was told by Bob Kaiser, a former major league baseball pitcher who was the Pontotoc County sheriff, that Tommy could not yet have visitors. Tricia, Bud, and Miz Ward went to the jail that first Sunday, visiting day. Again they were told that Tommy could not have visitors. Not until the charges were filed against him were they allowed their ten minutes a week.

The first time they saw him, peering out through the narrow glass window, his whole body was trembling uncontrollably; he resembled an animal in a shelter. He could hardly speak. He cried most of the time. They could only look at him, tears in the eyes of Tricia and Miz Ward as well: at his long hair, grown back since his haircut in the spring; at the white prison coveralls. When he could mumble coherent sentences, it was to repeat what he had said from the beginning: that he hadn’t done it; that he had told the police his dream, and they had said it really happened; but that it wasn’t true, all it was was a dream. Then there was a knock on the door behind him, and he was taken away; the ten minutes were up.

The second visit was much the same, Tommy sobbing most of the time. They brought him cigarettes; that was all he wanted from the outside world. The third time, he talked more. He made a statement that made Tricia feel a little better. “They may kill me,” he said. “But they can only kill my body. The Lord will have my soul.”

To Tricia this meant two things: it reaffirmed her belief in his innocence; and it comforted her that, with that outlook, he would not do something foolish in jail; he would not try to kill himself.

While the entire Ward family rallied around Tommy—letters of faith arriving from Melva in California, from Melvin stationed in Virginia, Miz Ward driving down from Tulsa every Sunday to visit him, three hours each way, sometimes with Joel, sometimes with Joice—such was not the case with Karl Fontenot. His family deserted him.

He had been born in Ada twenty years before, the second youngest of five children; he grew up in filthy poverty. His father, an alcoholic, left the family when Karl was twelve, going off in the direction of Texas and Louisiana. Karl had not heard from him in eight years, did not know if he was alive or dead. To feed her family, his mother, Dottie, would go to a fast-food restaurant where she knew the owner—it sold kiddie hamburgers five for a dollar in those days—and would buy five hamburgers, and then ask for credit for the dollar.

One day when he was sixteen, Karl and his mother were in the car, his mother driving. They got into a minor accident. Dottie Fontenot got out to look at the damage. As she did, she was struck and killed by a speeding car, in front of Karl’s eyes.

The death of Dottie Fontenot led to the breakup of the family. Karl dropped out of high school, began to live in the streets, to sleep wherever he could. One of his brothers moved to California. Another of his brothers went to jail; his sister-in-law remained in Ada, but wanted nothing to do with Karl. Neither did his older sister, who was married. Karl liked his younger sister, who was going to high school at nearby Byng, but the older sister kept them apart.

His reputation on the streets was that of being “weird.” Few could explain what they meant by that, except that it didn’t mean violent. No one who knew him thought he could hurt anyone. Some said he was “weird” in that he would suddenly laugh at the wrong things, laugh when nothing was funny. But nothing worse than that. He was like a puppy dog who hung around looking for friends, people said.

And Tommy Ward, always eager to find fishing companions, had become his friend.

When Karl was arrested in the Haraway case, no one came to see him. Instead, his two sisters moved away from Ada, to California, without a visit, or a phone call, or a note.

Alone in his cell in the city jail, Karl hailed any policeman passing down the corridor and struck up a conversation, in an attempt to pass the time. He made up stories about where Denice Haraway’s body was. When the police went to look, he said he was only making it up; he didn’t know where the body was; he didn’t do it. The police felt he was enjoying whatever attention he could get.

An Ada woman who was a social worker when Karl was a child recalled what his early home life had been like. “They came up here from Louisiana,” she said. “His father was a killer at Wyckham packing plant. A lot of those killer guys are pretty demented. At that time the way they would kill the animals, they would just hit them on the head and slit their throats and wade around in the blood. I had occasion to go to their home a number of times, because they were turned in for child abuse, child neglect. The home was utter chaos. Absolutely filthy. About as many dogs in the house as there were people. The whole place was full: a small apartment over in the north side of Ada, down an alley; a typical welfare village. They didn’t have a chance in the world, the kids. They were born into deprivation and nobody gave them anything. The mother was young; she had no skills as a housewife. I remember going over there and her crying about how mean the husband was to the children. He was sadistic. There were incidents involving animals. Sexual relationships with animals in front of the family. Dog feces, kitten feces all over the place. The mother would leave all the time, and then come back. I guess she had no place else to go. It was as bad a situation as I had ever seen. I recommended to the court that the children be removed from the parents. The court didn’t see fit to do so.”

Nearly twenty years later, because he had no money, and no family to put up money, a different court assigned Karl Fontenot a lawyer.

The attorneys of Ada had made it clear that they wanted no part of the case. Judge Miller chose an experienced criminal lawyer from adjacent Seminole County, George Butner, to represent Fontenot. Butner visited Karl in the jail; Karl told him he was innocent; that he knew nothing about the Haraway case, despite the tape he had made.

In court, Fontenot, too, pleaded not guilty. Judge Miller set January 7, 1985, as the date for a preliminary hearing. It would determine if there was enough evidence to bring Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot to trial.

The Ada
Evening News
is housed in a two-story white stone building on Broadway, a block from Main Street. On the street level are the circulation offices and the advertising offices. To find the news department you walk up a flight of stairs, and turn left.

At a desk near the middle of the newsroom sits Dorothy Hogue. She is a young woman, a reporter. She has written all the stories in the Ada
News
concerning the Haraway case, from the night of the abduction, to the arrest of the suspects, to the denial of bail for Tommy Ward.

If you ask her, she will tell you that she believes the suspects are guilty.

“They confessed,” she says, “so they must be guilty.”

A few days before, a request had come in the mail for a set of Xeroxed clippings of all the stories the paper had printed about the Haraway case. Enclosed with the request was a twenty-dollar bill. Ms. Hogue had shown the letter to her managing editor, Tony Pippen, who instructed her to send the clippings. The return address was to a man in the state of Washington.

“We assumed it was a friend of the family, who wants to know what’s going on,” Ms. Hogue said. “But who knows? It could be the girl herself.”

She said this not sixty seconds after she said she believed the suspects were guilty of murder.

The reporter thought a moment about what she had said. Then she added, “Even if Tommy Ward gets off, he can’t live in this town anymore. People believe he did it. If he shows himself in the streets, he’ll probably be killed.”

As a precaution, Ms. Hogue told the police about the request for clippings from the man in Washington. Dennis Smith queried the Washington state police about him. No response came back, meaning that the computers in Washington state had no criminal information, under that name, about the man. How he had heard about the case, why he was so interested remained unknown.

Two years earlier, a new business had begun to boom in Ada—the small-loan business. In Oklahoma, loans of $1,000 or more, known as Grade A loans, are handled by banks. Grade B loans, of $500 or less, are made by finance companies. Until the early 1980s there were no finance companies in Ada; now, suddenly, there were eight: walk-in storefronts where a person could borrow $50 or $100 or $300, sometimes with a cursory credit check, sometimes on a signature. The interest on these small, short-term loans was high. But they were a useful source of quick money when the rent was due and the month’s wages had been spent; when a tuition payment was needed at the college; when an elderly person had unexpected medical bills. All at once a number of companies had found Ada to be a fertile field for the quick-loan business.