The Dreams of Ada (53 page)

The Death Row inmates were allowed to exercise twice a day, five inmates at a time, in narrow pens in the yard that reminded Tommy Ward of dog runs at a kennel. At the beginning, Tommy and Karl were in the same exercise group, along with three others. Of the others, one boasted he had killed thirteen people; one boasted he had killed five people; one said he had killed a cop. Tommy and Karl told their fellow inmates that they were innocent.

They told how their case had evolved, how no body had been found. They had given confessions to get “the laws” out of their faces, they said; but they hadn’t done it.

The other prisoners believed them, said they could take one look at Ward and Fontenot and know they hadn’t killed anyone; the other prisoners called them idiots for confessing to something they hadn’t done.

In the prison argot, because they had been convicted together, for the same crime, they were known as “fall partners.”

On his way to the prison from a brief stay at the Lexington evaluation center, Tommy Ward, reading his Bible, had thought he might like to become a preacher in the prison. Now he took one look at his fellow inmates—at how tough they were—and decided he’d better think about that for a while.

There was something about their eyes, he thought. You could look at their eyes and know that they had killed.

A few days after they arrived at McAlester, Tommy heard strange noises outside the window of his cell. His impulse was to look out the window into the prison yard. He took a few steps in that direction. Then he stopped. A voice inside him told him not to look out the window. He didn’t. He lay down on his bunk instead.

That night, for a short time, the guards thought there had been an escape. A prisoner was missing from his cell. The next morning, they found the missing inmate. He was dead, his body stuffed into a garbage can.

The noises Tommy heard had been the killing.

Tommy told of the incident to another inmate. He was assured he had done the right thing. If he had looked out the window, and been a witness to the killing, he was told, he would have been the next victim.

Every few days or weeks a tour of visiting dignitaries was escorted through the prison. As they moved through the corridor between the cells holding the Death Row inmates, a guard would tell what each man was in for. The first week, outside Tommy Ward’s cell, the guard said he’d been convicted of robbery, kidnapping, and murder. “Of course, they never found a body,” the guard said.

“No body?” a man in the tour said. “How did they ever prove murder? What was the corpus delicti?”

“They got all her relatives up there to say they hadn’t heard from her,” Tommy said.

“That doesn’t prove she’s dead,” the man said.

In Ada, the Haraway case faded slowly from conversation, except among those involved in the trial. The participants would be asked at social gatherings—more often now than before the trial—if they thought the defendants were guilty or innocent.

The harvesting of the pecans went on, and the cracking. Thanksgiving arrived. For the second year in a row, Bud and Tricia Wolf “won” the free-turkey lottery from their loan company.

Tommy called them frequently from McAlester. The calls had to be collect. They could not afford such calls, with maternity bills to pay off—but neither could they say no to a call from Death Row.

On December 2, they got a phone bill for about $150. They did not have the money, were about to lose their phone; a sympathetic friend helped them out. This allowed the calls to continue.

They could not yet visit Tommy; the paperwork had not been completed.

In California, collect calls from Karl Fontenot came to the homes of his brother, his sisters. They were not accepted.

Letters came to these same homes, from Karl Fontenot, No. 148909, P. O. Box 97, McAlester, Oklahoma 74502. They were not answered.

An inmate called Hank (name changed), who had killed several people, owned two decks of cards. One sunny day, in the exercise yard, he asked the others if they wanted to play poker. Karl declined, said he would watch. Tommy accepted, thinking it would help to pass the time.

Tommy and three others stood around a table in the yard. They played poker with a deck of blue cards. A deck of red cards was used for chips. After an hour or more, Tommy had a large pile of the “chip” cards in front of him. He was ahead about $1,800, but he was getting bored; he said he did not want to play anymore.

“You can’t quit when you’re ahead like that,” Hank said.

“Why not?” Tommy asked. “It ain’t real money.”

“Whattaya mean? Of course it’s real money. We owe you eighteen hundred bucks.”

“No, you don’t,” Tommy said. “It’s just a game. It ain’t for real.”

The others looked at one another, as if Tommy were insane. They insisted the stakes were real.

“I don’t want your money,” Tommy said. “Let’s just forget about it.”

According to the Bible, he felt, gambling was sinful.

The others told him they couldn’t forget about it; it would mess up their game; he had to keep playing.

“Okay,” Tommy said. “But I don’t want your money. I’m gonna start losing on purpose. You just tell me when we’re even, and then I’m gonna quit.”

The card game resumed. Tommy began to lose on purpose. He would raise on every card—and then fold his hand just before the last card was dealt. He did that hand after hand; the “money” in front of him dwindled.

The exercise period ended. They totaled up the cards. Hank told Tommy he owed $1,200.

“What are you talking about?” Tommy said. “You were supposed to tell me when I got down to even.”

“You owe me twelve hundred,” Hank said. “We’ll play more later.”

When the game resumed, Tommy began to win again. He cut his losses to $700. Then the game was over.

“I don’t got seven hundred dollars,” Tommy told Hank. “I don’t got nothin’.”

“Well, you better get it,” Hank said.

There was menace in his voice.

The next time Miz Ward came to visit, Tommy told her about the poker game, about the money he owed. She didn’t know where she could get that kind of money; no one in the family had that kind of money.

Tommy told Hank what his mother had said.

“Well, you better get it somewhere,” Hank warned.

Every day, Karl cleaned his cell thoroughly, to pass time. He still wrote letters to his family, even though they didn’t answer. He wrote letters to the young woman in Ada who had come to visit him during the trial, and to her mother. Both were sympathetic. They answered his letters, accepted phone calls. They sent small checks to both Tommy and Karl, to help with their canteen money for soap, for cigarettes.

In one letter he sent from his cell, Karl wrote: “We go out in the yard during the morning and evening. I don’t talk to the other guys. They are guilty of what they done. Me and Tommy are the only two who look like we came from a church somewhere and look innocent. All the other guys brag about killing people. I never speak over 10 words a day out there on the yard. The only way I figure I will make it here is be myself and stay with the Lord and His word. My feelings toward all this is I pray every night for these people who lied on me to get me in here on death row and the death penalty, to save themselves from sin. I wouldn’t ever want anyone to go to the burning pits of hell. I want to see them all in heaven some day.”

Solitary by nature, Karl began to brood a lot. The more he brooded, the more he focused on one thought. It had to do with Tommy. If Tommy hadn’t mentioned Karl’s name to the police, he thought, he, Karl, wouldn’t be in this jam. Sure, he had given the police a statement himself. But only after they picked him up. And they picked him up because Tommy had mentioned his name.

More and more the same thought entered Karl’s mind. If it weren’t for Tommy, he wouldn’t be in this jam; he wouldn’t be on Death Row; he wouldn’t even be in prison.

The more the thought came, the less he wanted to talk to Tommy. Sometimes he would chat with him in the yard. But more and more, he wanted nothing to do with him.

Early one evening, a week before Christmas, Tommy called Tricia. As always, she accepted the call. They talked for a time, and then Tricia looked at the clock. It was 6:25. Bud, who normally got off work at the feed mill at four, was working overtime, to help pay all the bills. She had to hang up, she told Tommy; she had to pick up Bud at 6:30.

They said goodbye. Tommy began to place another call with the operator, to his mother, in Tulsa. Before the call went through, the phone went dead.

Tommy went to the door of his cell, peered out the narrow window. A guard was double-locking the cell block.

That was the first he knew that anything was wrong.

There were noises outside. He went to the window, looked out. Helicopters were hovering overhead. Guards were crawling through the prison yard, carrying shotguns. Soon after, National Guardsmen were in the yard. There was a riot going on at McAlester.

For eighteen hours the prison was locked down. Inmates in two cell blocks had rioted, had stabbed three guards, had taken seven as hostages. The cell block housing the Death Row inmates was not involved: except for the extra locks, the canceling of exercise, of the telephone, of all privileges.

After a day and a half, the warden met with a committee of the inmates. The hostages were released unharmed. The warden told the press that many of the grievances of the inmates were justified.

The major grievance had been jobs; there were 612 inmates in the prison and 151 prison jobs.

One of the inmate negotiators, Jerry Kinney, told the press the uprising had not been planned, but that there had been idle talk of it for some time. “It’s been kind of a joke for a while,” he said. “People were walking around saying, ‘When’s it going to go? When’s it going to go?’”

On the morning of Friday, December 20, a guard came to Tommy Ward’s cell, and unlocked the door. He told Tommy he had to go to the warden’s office. Tommy asked, “What for?”

The guard said there was something wrong with Tommy’s papers; he didn’t have a lawyer. His stay of execution had not come through.

They walked through the corridors of the cell block. Tommy had been waiting day after day for some new lawyer to come see him; he’d been wondering why one hadn’t.

There were seven or eight people in the warden’s office, one of them a preacher. Warden Gary Maynard sat at one end of a long table. The others, some kind of prison officials, Tommy figured, sat along both sides. Tommy was told to sit at the other end, facing the warden. The guard remained in the room, standing near Tommy.

The warden had a sheaf of papers in front of him. He began to read aloud from them. He said that Tommy had been sentenced to be executed at 12:30
A.M
. on Tuesday, January 21, 1986. No stay of execution had been received, he said. Therefore, the prison was required to proceed with plans for the execution.

Tommy began to shake.

A form had been mailed out to Tommy’s mother, the warden said, asking her what they wanted done with Tommy’s body following the execution. If they received no reply, then the body would be sent to her.

The shaking was hard to stop. Tommy didn’t understand how this could be happening.

Thirty days before execution, the warden continued, prisoners are transferred from Death Row to a thirty-day holding area near the execution chamber. The last five days prior to execution, the warden said, the prisoner could be visited only by immediate family, with a limit of five people. Tommy would have to give them, tomorrow, a list of the five people he wanted.

There was supposed to be a stay of execution in such cases, the warden said. But no such stay had been received. Until one was, plans for the execution would have to proceed.

“What about Fontenot?” the guard asked.

Fontenot has a lawyer, the warden replied. His notice of appeal had been filed. A stay of execution had been granted Fontenot by the Court of Criminal Appeals. But none of that had been done for Ward.

Tommy felt weak, sick. He asked if he could have the phone in his cell, to make some calls. The warden suggested that he call his mother, to warn her of the papers that would be arriving in the mail.

Tommy gathered his strength to stand. The warden gave him copies of the papers he’d been reading from. The guard led Tommy back through the corridors to his cell.

He sat on his bunk, shaking. He did not understand what had happened, what had gone wrong. All he knew was that they were planning to kill him in thirty days.

It was late afternoon before he could reach anyone on the phone. Finally he talked to his mother. Miz Ward began to cry. She did not understand, did not know what to do.

He called the woman in Ada who had become sympathetic to both boys, who accepted phone calls. The woman called Don Wyatt’s office. She told Winifred Harrell what Tommy had said. Winifred looked at the clock. It was a quarter to five, on the Friday before Christmas. Winifred said she would straighten it out.

Tommy called Tricia. By the time he reached her, it was early evening. Tricia called Don Wyatt at home; he was out to dinner; he would be back later. Tricia called a friend. There was disbelief in her voice, and fear. She had never thought the case would go to trial, without a body; but it had. She had never thought the boys would be convicted, without a body; but they had been. She’d been sure they would not get a death sentence; but they had. Now, she felt, she could be assured a hundred times that they wouldn’t execute Tommy before his appeals were heard, and she wouldn’t believe a word of it. Now she believed that anything was possible.

At the law office, Winifred explained the situation to Don Wyatt; the lawyer said it had been his impression that the judge had instructed the district attorney to file the papers turning the case over to the public defender’s office. Winifred called George Butner in Wewoka. According to Winifred, that had been Butner’s impression as well; but since he happened to have one of the forms in his office, Butner had given it to the judge himself. Winifred called Bill Peterson; he was already gone for the day. She called the Appellate Public Defender’s Office in Norman. They had never received notification that they were to represent Tommy Ward in the appeals process. And now they could not do so. They were already representing Karl Fontenot, because that appointment had come through. And in death penalty cases, they said, they could not represent co-defendants, because at some point there might be a conflict of interest.