The Dreams of Ada (56 page)

The identification was given out to the media. Tommy Ward heard it on a borrowed TV set in his cell.

Ward was frightened by the report. He asked for the telephone, called his mother’s house in Tulsa, spoke to his brother Melvin. He told Melvin he’d been hoping Denice Haraway would turn up alive; that way everyone would know for sure that he didn’t do it. Now there was no chance of that.

Melvin calmed Tommy down. He told him that now perhaps the police would find evidence that proved someone else did it.

Tommy called a friend. “I was hoping and praying she was still alive,” he said. “I’m gritting my teeth and hoping they’ll find evidence that proves I didn’t do it.”

“I never even heard of Gerty,” Tommy said. “I heard of Atwood, because you pass it on the way to McAlester. But I never heard of Gerty.”

Karl Fontenot also saw the report in his cell. It made him feel good, he said, for two reasons. One was that the woman had been shot, and his tape said nothing about shooting. The other was that she’d been found a long way from where it said on the tape she’d been put. “Maybe now they’ll see the tape was all lies,” he said.

In Ada, District Attorney Peterson was answering questions from the press about the finding of the body, about whether it would affect the convictions of Ward and Fontenot.

“Why would it?” Peterson said. “We convicted them without a body, and now we have one.”

He said the finding of the body simply confirmed the justness of the convictions. “They sent us out looking north, south, and west,” he said. “Every direction but the right one. I should have known to look east. They said they put her in a bunker. Everything stands up except what they did with the body.”

Peterson told the press Ms. Haraway had been stabbed in the chest and shot once in the head, “according to the medical examiner.” This statement would be reported in the media in Ada and throughout the state—that Denice had been stabbed and shot. “Nothing found so far proves their innocence,” Peterson said.

Across town, in his office on Arlington, Don Wyatt had a different reaction. “If the body suffered a gunshot wound,” he said, “this cuts against what they were trying to prove. They said the instrument of death was a lock-blade knife. If the body was clothed, this cuts against what they were trying to prove. If there was a blouse on it, I’d like to know a description of the blouse, if it was different. The people their witnesses saw on Richardson Loop must have been someone else. I heard OSBI chemists have had the body. We need to see what they found. Is there any physical evidence out there that ties the body to the defendants? We don’t know. Or to anyone else? I don’t know how hard they’re going to look out there. They feel they have their convictions.”

In late fall, Bud Wolf had bought a small black-and-white TV set to replace the color one that had been burned out by lightning before the trial. Bud and Tricia were watching it Wednesday night when the first unofficial announcement about the finding of a body was made. Tricia was watching it in the living room Thursday morning when the identification of Denice Haraway was made official. Her first reaction was a sick feeling. She felt that Tommy and Karl were now doomed. She had been hoping that Denice Haraway was alive. She had known Denice was dead, but had been hoping she was alive—both for Tommy’s sake and for the sake of the Haraways.

In the afternoon she read the Ada
News
, as most of the town was doing. The headline “Haraway’s remains are found” crossed the top of the front page, beside the old yearbook picture of Denice. The story in the newspaper contained more details than had been mentioned on television. It told of the blue jeans, the tennis shoes, the earring being found. It did not mention a blouse. And it contained Bill Peterson’s comment that the finding of the body would not affect the case.

After her first feeling of doom, Tricia grew hopeful again. Perhaps they could trace the bullet fragment to a gun that would lead to the killer, she thought. Maybe they would find the gun itself, or something else that the killer dropped.

And she grew suspicious. If they had found blue jeans and tennis shoes, she wondered, why hadn’t they found a blouse? She knew the blouse was the key. If they had found a blouse, she figured, and it was different from the one on the tapes, that would prove the police had fed Tommy and Karl the story on the tapes. Because how else would Tommy and Karl know about Denice having a blouse with little blue flowers, if she hadn’t been wearing it?

The hopes and the suspicions and the fears all ran together in her mind. Like Don Wyatt, she wondered how hard the authorities would look for evidence that might clear Tommy and Karl.

Richard Kerner was out of town that day. He did not hear of the discovery of the body until the TV news that night.

His first thought was “She was shot!” That, he felt, cast further doubt on the confession tapes.

His second thought was of Jason Lurch’s grandmother. The investigator had visited the grandmother when he was first trying to locate Lurch. He’d learned that Lurch had lived with her for a time, had once shoved his grandmother so hard she fell down and broke an arm or a hip. The place she lived—where Lurch had once lived—was called Centrahoma. It was in an open area of trees and scrub and hills. If you drove north from Centrahoma on Highway 75, the first community you could turn off to, about twenty miles to the north, was Gerty.

Kerner’s next thought was of Larry Jett, standing among the plaster birds and Bambis in the yard ornaments shop, lying to him about having lived in Kansas at the time Denice Haraway disappeared. Larry Jett, the investigator recalled, looked a lot like Tommy Ward. And he came from Allen, the closest village to Gerty. The place the body had been found was a no-man’s-land about one-third down from Allen and two-thirds up from Centrahoma. Both Lurch and Jett could be familiar with the area, Kerner figured.

The investigator had never relinquished his suspicion of Lurch for having attended every scattered day of the preliminary hearing, and then for not attending the trial; and for Karen Wise and Jim Moyer thinking they might have seen him that night. A combined scenario formed in the investigator’s mind: the real killers might have been Lurch and Jett, in Lurch’s nephew’s truck.

And yet all of his suspicions, Kerner knew, proved nothing.

The officers who had been working on the case from the beginning—Dennis Smith, Gary Rogers, Mike Baskin—wanted to see the spot where Denice Haraway had been found. They also wanted to search for more evidence there. A weapon, perhaps. More bones. More clothing. The story in the Ada
News
had quoted Bill Peterson as saying a complete rib cage had been found. That was not the case. Some rib bones were missing, and it was on the rib bones that evidence of stabbing was most likely to appear. So they wanted to find more rib bones, with stab marks.

None of the published accounts had mentioned anything about a blouse or top being found. Dennis Smith had heard that when the lab technicians removed the skeleton, under it, on the leaves, they had found evidence of a blouse. It was so decayed, so fragile, that if they had tried to touch it, it would have disintegrated. But the lab men had photographed it, Smith had been told. It was pale lavender, with little blue flowers on it.

If this was true, it had not been made public.

The three officers decided to meet at police headquarters Friday morning and go out to Gerty to conduct their own search. They would be joined by Bruce Johnson, a new investigator for the district attorney’s office; by another detective; and by Sheriff Rose of Hughes County, who could show them the place.

Detective Smith arose early, as always, to distribute the
Oklahoman
through the town before going to work. A story about the finding of Denice Haraway’s body appeared on the lower part of the front page, and continued inside. He paused to read it—and his blood pressure rose as he read the last part of the story. It consisted of comments the reporter had obtained from Don Wyatt, who had not been quoted in the Ada
News
.

Wyatt was quoted as saying the finding of the body would help the defendants in their appeals. The story continued:

“The description of that blouse was fed to them by the police” during their interrogation, the lawyer said.

“That’s how the police got those confessions. They kept going over and over on them until they gave them those stories to get them off their backs,” Wyatt said.

“They thought the police would eventually disprove their stories and [they would] be released.

“But that wasn’t the case. The police chose to believe those cock and bull stories,” Wyatt said.

The detective was incensed by Wyatt’s statements. He was furious as he met the others at headquarters, as they climbed into a black unmarked car, Smith at the wheel, and drove east on Arlington toward Gerty. As they passed Don Wyatt’s expensive law building, which happened to be on the route, Smith suddenly swung the car to the right, up the short, steep driveway, and into the parking lot behind the red brick building. It was 8:30 in the morning. The lot was empty, the building not yet open.

Frustrated, the detective captain turned the car around and started back toward the driveway. As he did, a van swung off the road into the driveway. The van was wide; there was not enough space for the car and the van to pass in the drive. Smith backed up his car. The van came up the drive, then paused beside the car. The driver of the van was Winifred Harrell; she was often the first of Don Wyatt’s employees to arrive at work.

Winifred did not recognize the black car. But she saw Dennis Smith behind the wheel. She rolled down her window to talk. She liked Dennis, thought he was a fine person. Way back ten years ago, she and her first husband, and Dennis and Sandi, sometimes took vacations together. Their contact since had always been friendly. He had chatted with her amiably during the trial. Just a few weeks before, doing Christmas shopping in Oklahoma City, she had run into Dennis and Sandi and one of their boys, and they’d had a nice chat.

The detective rolled down the window of the car. Winifred smiled.

“What are you doing?” she asked, wondering why the police would be at Wyatt’s office so early in the morning.

“When you see Don Wyatt,” Smith said, “you tell him I said, ‘Bullshit.’”

“What?” Winifred said. She was taken aback. Smith had not even said good morning.

“When you see Don Wyatt,” the detective repeated, “you tell him I said, ‘Bullshit.’”

“He’s in Muskogee today,” Winifred said. “But what’s going on, Dennis? What’s the problem?”

“Read the
Daily Oklahoman
,” Smith said, “and tell him I said, ‘Bullshit.’”

“Well, you don’t have to take it out on me,” Winifred said. “I just work here.”

Another officer was seated beside Smith. Mike Baskin was in the backseat. He rolled the back window down. “Birds of a feather flock together,” he said.

Angry, Winifred drove off, into the parking lot. She expected that kind of attitude from Baskin, but not from Dennis. She felt they had an honest disagreement about the case. She felt the detective captain truly believed that Ward and Fontenot were guilty. He was not the kind of person to knowingly frame someone. But she had observed Tommy Ward, had spoken to him. If Tommy was guilty, she thought, he was the best dad-gum con artist she had ever run into.

The finding of the body in Gerty had only confirmed her belief in his innocence. She felt it made no sense for the boys to give a true confession, and then not tell where the body was, even after they had been convicted and sentenced to death. Smith had maintained before that if they burned the body, they had nothing to trade for a life sentence; or if they had thrown her in the river, they would have had no idea where she was by the time they were arrested. But now they had found the body, not burned, not thrown in the river: just left under some bushes. If Ward and Fontenot had put it there, Winifred felt, it made no sense for them not to have told the police where it was.

Dennis Smith swung the car east again on Arlington and drove out to Gerty. Sheriff Rose met them there, showed them the place where the body had been. The men walked about, searching. Then they got down on their hands and knees to search. Two autumns of leaves had fallen since the night of the disappearance. They poked about in the mulch, using their hands, using a metal detector in hopes of finding a knife, or a gun, or both.

They spent all of the morning there, and part of the afternoon. The metal detector unearthed the second earring, white-gold with red in it. But no weapon. They found more bones—the lower jaw with all the teeth intact, a few small bones. But no additional ribs. The winter-bare branches of huckleberry bushes tried to scratch at their faces as they crawled underneath. Dennis Smith felt that with the dirt road running only 200 yards away, the place was fairly accessible, a lot less rugged than he had been led to believe.

The next day, Saturday, Don Wyatt and Bill Willett decided to go bird hunting. Not exactly by chance, they decided to hunt in the wooded area near Gerty. As they prowled with their shotguns, up the sloping terrain, Wyatt was reminded of the hill country of Tennessee. A person would have to know his way around, to come in here at night, he thought; it was rugged country.

One juror in the case, hearing of the finding of the body, felt relief for Denice Haraway’s family. Only after you bury a loved one, she felt, can you put the death behind you and get on with your life. The fact that Denice had been shot did not lead her to question the verdict, she said.

Another juror echoed that feeling. “It doesn’t really matter how you do it,” he said. “She’s still dead. Just because you say you killed her one way, and you did it another way, doesn’t make you any less guilty.”

Fontenot’s trial attorney, George Butner, was conducting another murder trial, in Duncan, Oklahoma, in the south-central part of the state, when he heard that Denice Haraway’s body may have been found. The initial report did not include the cause of death, and Butner’s first thought was about the clothing—the blouse. If they found her blouse out there, and it was different from the one described on both tapes, then that would be monumental, he felt; then the boys would be home free. He assumed that the cause of death would be stabbing. “In my wildest dreams,” he said later, “I never thought that they would find the body and they would discover she had been killed with some other kind of weapon, that she had been shot.”