The Dreams of Ada (60 page)

“It’s been over five years since I’ve been out,” he said one evening, a year after his second conviction. “To me the outside is like a dream, a remembrance. At night, when I have dreams now, I’m always locked up. Sometimes people I know are in the dreams, people from the town—but the town always has a fence around it.”

T
he summer of 2006 dawned hot and dry in Ada. A severe drought was suffocating the entire region. Straw-colored patches were beginning to appear in the broad green lawns. Pecans on the trees were turning brown before they got ripe. Creeks were evaporating, exposing the sandy beds. People complained about the heat and the drought, and waited for promised rain.

Few were thinking about two local boys, now grown men, once in the headlines, now long gone from view. Tommy Ward in Lexington and Karl Fontenot in Hominy were each serving the twenty-first year of their life sentences for a murder they still insisted they did not commit.

It had been a long time since their names had been on the lips of Ada’s citizens. But that was soon to change.

Bill Peterson, the man who had prosecuted Ward and Fontenot, was still ensconced as district attorney. Gary Rogers, formerly of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, was now the investigator for Peterson’s office. Both were secure in their jobs—but they had reason to be apprehensive about their images. For more than a year, one of the bestselling novelists in the world and an experienced trial lawyer, John Grisham, had been visiting Ada intermittently, researching his first nonfiction book. What he was writing was no secret: a book about two Ada men who had been convicted of the brutal murder of an attractive young woman and who had been sentenced respectively to life in prison and to death—two men who were later proven innocent. Grisham’s book—certain to be a bestseller, like his novels—was likely to give the police and the prosecutors of Ada, and perhaps the whole town, a black eye all across America.

Grisham was not writing about Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot; his book was about two other men whose trials and convictions closely paralleled theirs. Grisham’s research convinced him, however, that Ward and Fontenot had nothing to do with the murder of Denice Haraway, that they were innocent men spending their lives in prison cells. He would state this conclusion in his book
The Innocent Man
, and the town most likely would be talking again about Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot—and pondering again who really killed Denice Haraway.

The case that had caught Grisham’s attention (described early in this book) was the rape and murder of a young woman named Debbie Carter on December 8, 1982—sixteen months before Denice Haraway disappeared. The police soon believed they knew who had killed her—a man named Ron Williamson. Their belief was based primarily on two facts: that he was known to suffer from mental problems and that he lived not far from Debbie Carter. There was no real evidence. And Williamson’s mother, who was well respected in the town, gave him an alibi. She said he had been at home that night. The police made no official move against Williamson until after his mother died three years later, until after Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot had been tried and convicted of killing Denice Haraway. The police then arrested Williamson and an acquaintance, Dennis Fritz, charged them with the killing, and obtained murder convictions on both. Fritz was sentenced to life in prison. Williamson was sentenced to die.

Their convictions were Kafkaesque—ludicrous but tragic—and shed further light on the cases of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot.

“Make your confession at the first chance you get. Until you do that, there’s no possibility of getting out of their clutches, none at all.”

—Franz Kafka,
The Trial

The only real evidence against Ward and Fontenot was their taped confessions—which turned out to be filled with false information, as the police themselves proved. Ward insisted his was based on a dream. At their trials, the tapes were bolstered by other “confessions” they allegedly made in the presence of jailhouse snitches. In the Debbie Carter murder, the police had no more evidence against Williamson and Fritz than they had in the Haraway case against Ward and Fontenot. Yet they also obtained convictions—and a death sentence—in the Carter case. So how did they do it? They restaged virtually the same trial to convict two more men.

The Ward and Fontenot convictions had proven how powerful a confession, even a dubious one, could be to a jury. The prosecutors introduced a confession allegedly made by Ron Williamson—supposedly emanating from a dream he’d had! It was not on videotape. It was not on audiotape. It was not in Williamson’s handwriting. OSBI agent Gary Rogers merely wrote out a confession that, he testified, had been made to him by Williamson. He did not read it to the suspect. Williamson did not sign it. But at the trial, in one of the less salutary moments in the history of jurisprudence, this “confession” was allowed as evidence.

Since additional damaging testimony in the Ward-Fontenot case was given by prison snitches, the prosecutors apparently decided that tactic was worth trying again. A woman testified that she had heard Williamson confess while in the county jail. But this was not just any prison snitch. This was Terry Holland—the same woman who had testified in the Ward-Fontenot trial. Now she swore that while she had been in the county jail, in addition to hearing Fontenot confess, she had also heard Ron Williamson confess. She had not reported this at the time it allegedly happened, two years earlier, but no matter.

The case against Williamson and Fritz was clinched by the testimony of a so-called hair expert at the OSBI lab. He said his analysis had shown that hair found at the scene of Debbie Carter’s murder
could
have come from the defendants. Not that it
did
—hair is not like fingerprints or DNA; there is no such thing as a definitive match. But the jury bought it, and convicted both men.

The suspects were tried in 1988. Dennis Fritz spent eleven years of a life sentence in prison. Ron Williamson spent most of that time on Death Row while Oklahoma appellate courts upheld the convictions. Williamson was five days from being put to death when federal judge Frank Seay delayed the execution so he and his staff could study the case. In September 1995, he issued a lengthy opinion critical of the district attorney, the judge, and a court-appointed defense counsel. He overturned the conviction of Williamson and ordered a new trial.

Responding to the judge’s actions, Bill Peterson told the Ada
Evening News
: “I’m flabbergasted, bumfuzzled, angry, confused and a lot of other things…. It simply doesn’t make any sense.”

In a footnote to his opinion, Judge Seay cited an earlier edition of this book and questioned the multiple dream confessions leading to convictions in Ada. Peterson told the press, “It is simply not true that any of these three men—Williamson, Fontenot, or Ward—were convicted based on dream confessions.”

During the intervening years, DNA had come into use as a foolproof tool in the search for justice. With a new trial in the offing, semen and pubic hair found on Debbie Carter’s body was sent to several different labs for testing. The results proved that neither the semen nor the hairs came from either Williamson or Fritz. Both men were innocent. In April 1999 they were freed.

Williamson and Fritz sued the authorities, asking $100 million for false imprisonment. The suit never went to trial. It was settled for an undisclosed amount, reported by one source as $5 million. Local property taxes were increased twice to help pay for the settlement.

In a curious sidelight, the DNA in the case matched that of a fellow named Glen Gore, who had been the last person seen with Debbie Carter the night she was murdered—and who had never been investigated by the police. Years later, Gore, already in prison on other charges, was convicted of the killing on the basis of the DNA evidence. But his conviction was also overturned, on the ground that the fact that two other men had previously been convicted of the murder should have been allowed into evidence for Gore’s jury to hear.

Gore’s second trial took place in June 2006. He was convicted again. Because one juror held out against the death penalty, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole—a lesser sentence than the innocent Ron Williamson had received.

The lead detective in both the Carter and Haraway cases, Dennis Smith, though long gone from the Ada police force, was a witness at the Gore trial. He testified about the bloody scene he had found in Debbie Carter’s apartment. Less than three weeks after his testimony, on June 30, Smith died of a heart attack, at age 63. He was the first lawman to take to the grave the intimate truth about the Ward and Fontenot confessions.

The exoneration of Williamson and Fritz cast further doubt on the guilt of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot; it called into question the judgment, techniques, and veracity of certain Ada law-enforcement officials. Some citizens who had recognized the absurdity of the confessions of Ward and Fontenot still had trouble believing that those confessions had been choreographed by the police, and that the district attorney had put innocent men in prison. But the Carter case showed that they had marshaled a false case against two innocent men. Who could say that they had not done the same thing to Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot?

Another case in Ada, with Dennis Smith investigating and Bill Peterson’s office prosecuting, raises similar questions. In 1983, a man named Calvin Lee Scott was tried for rape, convicted, and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He proclaimed his innocence. He served twenty years before being released. After he was out of prison, DNA testing showed that he could not have been the perpetrator.

In the Denice Haraway case, only skeletal remains of her body were found, so there was no DNA material that might clear Ward and Fontenot. In the summer of 2006 they remained in prison, serving their life terms. Fontenot had no possibility of parole. Ward could come up for parole in the next few years, but Bill Peterson, still the D.A., liked to attend parole board hearings and demand that those he convicted remain in prison. For whatever reason, Bill Peterson usually got what he wanted.

One long shot existed. The attorney who had represented Ron Williamson in his successful appeal, Mark Barrett of Norman, had come to believe strongly in the innocence of Ward and Fontenot. He decided to represent them, and was seeking evidence that would clear them; with evidence of actual innocence, he could appeal to the courts or go to the governor and the parole board on their behalf. To aid in this search, he was preparing a Web site to bring further attention to the frustrating case. The site registered was www.wardandfontenot.com.

Karl Fontenot was now forty-one years old. Tommy Ward was forty-five. All they could do for themselves, from behind prison walls, was to claim again to unheeding ears that they are innocent.

“In the first years he curses his evil fate aloud; later, as he grows old, he only mutters to himself.”

—Franz Kafka,
The Trial

Robert Mayer was born and raised in New York City. As a journalist and columnist for
Newsday
, he twice won the Mike Berger Award for the year’s best writing about New York City, as well as a National Headliner Award as best feature columnist in the country. Mayer has written seven novels and two works of nonfiction. He currently lives in New Mexico.

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