The Innocent Man (11 page)

In the brown purse an officer found a driver’s license belonging to Denice Haraway. The customer looked at the photo on the license and made a positive identification. That was the young lady he’d passed on the way into the store less than half an hour earlier. Yes, he was sure it was Denice Haraway because he stopped at McAnally’s often and knew her face.

Detective Dennis Smith was already in bed when the call came. “Treat it like a crime scene,” he said, then went back to sleep. His orders, though, were not followed. The manager of the store lived nearby and he soon arrived. He checked the safe; it had not been opened. He found $400 in cash under the counter, awaiting transfer to the safe, and he found $150 in another cash drawer. As they waited for a detective, the manager tidied up the place. He emptied the ashtray with a single cigarette butt in it and threw away the beer can. The police didn’t stop him. If there were fingerprints, they were gone.

Steve Haraway was studying and waiting for his wife to come home after McAnally’s closed at 11:00 p.m. A phone call from the police stunned him, and he was soon at the store, identifying his wife’s car, textbooks, and purse. He gave the police a description and tried to remember what she was wearing—blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a blouse he couldn’t recall.

Early Sunday morning, every policeman on Ada’s thirty-three man force was called in for duty. State troopers arrived from nearby districts. Dozens of local groups, including Steve’s fraternity brothers, volunteered to help in the search. OSBI agent Gary Rogers was assigned to lead the investigation from the state level, and once again Dennis Smith was to direct the Ada police. They divided the county into sections and assigned teams to search every street, highway, road, river, ditch, and field.

A clerk at JP’s, another convenience store a half a mile from McAnally’s, came forward and told the police about two strange young men who’d stopped by and spooked her not long before Denice disappeared. Both were in their early twenties with long hair and weird
behavior. They shot a game of pool before leaving in an old pickup truck.

The customer at McAnally’s had seen only one man leaving with Denice, and she did not appear to be frightened by him. His general description sort of matched the general description of the two weird boys at JP’s, so the police had the first hint of a trail. They were looking for two white males, between twenty-two and twenty-four years of age, one between five feet eight and five feet ten with blond hair below his ears and a light complexion, the other with shoulder-length light brown hair and a slim build.

The intense manhunt on Sunday produced nothing, not a single clue. Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers called it off after dark and made plans to reassemble early the next morning.

On Monday, they obtained a college photograph of Denice and printed flyers with her pretty face and general description—five feet five inches tall, 110 pounds, brown eyes, dark blond hair, light complexion. The flyer also listed a description of the two young men seen at JP’s, along with one of the old pickup truck. These were placed in every store window in and around Ada by cops and volunteers.

A police artist worked with the clerk from JP’s and put together two sketches. When the drawings were shown to the customer at McAnally’s, he said that one of them was at least “in the ballpark.” The two composites were given to the local television station, and when the town got its first look at the possible suspects, calls poured in to the police station.

Ada had four detectives at the time—Dennis Smith, Mike Baskin, D. W. Barrett, and James Fox—and they were soon overwhelmed with the number of calls.
More than a hundred, with about twenty-five names given for potential suspects.

Two names stood out. Billy Charley was suggested by about thirty of the callers, so he was invited in for questioning. He arrived at the police station with his parents, who said that he had been at home with them throughout Saturday night.

The other name given by about thirty concerned citizens was that of Tommy Ward, a local boy the police knew well. Tommy had been arrested several times for misdemeanors—public drunkenness, petty theft—but nothing violent. He had family all over Ada, and the Wards were known as generally decent folks who worked hard and tended to their own business. Tommy was twenty-four years old, the second youngest of eight children, a high school dropout.

He voluntarily came in for questioning. Detectives Smith and Baskin asked him about last Saturday night. He’d been fishing with a friend, Karl Fontenot, then they’d gone to a party, stayed out until 4:00 a.m., then walked home. Tommy didn’t own a vehicle. The detectives noticed that Ward’s blond hair had been cut very short, a hack job that was uneven and obviously unprofessional. They took a Polaroid of the back of his head and dated it May 1.

The suspects in the composites both had long, light-colored hair.

Detective Baskin found Karl Fontenot, a man he did not know, and asked him to stop by the station for some questions. Fontenot agreed, but never arrived. Baskin didn’t pursue it. Fontenot had long, dark hair.

As the search continued with great urgency in and around Pontotoc County, Denice Haraway’s name and
description were broadcast to law enforcement officials nationwide. Calls came from everywhere, but not one was of any benefit. Denice had simply vanished without leaving a single clue.

When Steve Haraway wasn’t handing out flyers or driving the back roads, he was secluded in his apartment with a few friends. The phone rang constantly, and with each call there was a moment of hope.

There was no reason for Denice to run away. They had been married less than a year and were still very much in love. Both were seniors at East Central, looking forward to graduation and leaving Ada for a life somewhere else. She had been taken against her will, he was certain of that.

Each passing day brought a greater likelihood that Denice would not be found alive. If she had been grabbed by a rapist, she would have been released after the assault. If she had been kidnapped, someone would have demanded a ransom. There were rumors of an old lover down in Texas, but they came and went. And there were rumors of drug traffickers and such, but then most bizarre crimes had a few of those.

Ada, again, was shocked by the crime. Debbie Carter had been murdered seventeen months earlier, and the town had just settled down from that nightmare. Now doors were locked and double-locked, curfews were tightened on teenagers, and there was a brisk run of gun sales at the local pawnshops. What was happening to the nice little college town with two churches on every corner?

Weeks passed, and life slowly returned to normal for most of Ada’s population. It was soon summertime and the kids were out of school. The rumors died down but didn’t stop altogether. A suspect in Texas boasted of
killing ten women, and the Ada police raced off to interview him. A woman’s body was found in Missouri, with tattoos on her legs. Denice had no tattoos.

And so it went through the summer and into the fall. Not a single break or piece of evidence of any kind that would lead the police to the body of Denice Haraway.

And no progress in the Carter investigation. With two sensational murders remaining unsolved, the atmosphere around the police department was heavy and strained. Long hours were worked, with nothing to show for the time. Old leads were reviewed and chased again, with the same results. The lives of Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers were consumed with the two murders.

For Rogers, the pressure was even worse. One year before the disappearance of Denice Haraway, a similar crime had been committed in Seminole, thirty miles north of Ada. An eighteen-year-old girl named Patty Hamilton was working at an all-night convenience store when she vanished. A customer walked in and found the store empty, the cash register cleaned out, two open soft drink cans on the counter, no sign of a struggle. Her locked car was found outside the store. She was gone without a clue, and for a year the police had assumed she’d been abducted and murdered.

The OSBI agent in charge of the Patty Hamilton case was Gary Rogers. Debbie Carter, Denice Haraway, Patty Hamilton—Agent Rogers had the unsolved murders of three young women on his desk.

When Oklahoma was still a territory, Ada had a colorful and richly deserved reputation as an open haven for
gunslingers and outlaws. Disputes were settled with six-shooters, and the quickest on the draw walked away with no fear of punishment from civil authorities. Bank robbers and cattle thieves drifted to Ada because it was still Indian territory and not a part of the States. Sheriffs, when they could be found, were no match for the professional criminals who settled in and around Ada.

The town’s reputation for lawlessness changed dramatically in 1909, when the locals finally got fed up with living in fear. A respected rancher named Gus Bobbitt was gunned down by a professional killer hired by a rival landowner. The killer and three conspirators were arrested, and an epidemic of hanging fever swept through the town. Led by the Masons, the upstanding members of Ada, a lynch mob formed early on the morning of April 19, 1909. Forty members marched solemnly out of the Masonic Hall on Twelfth at Broadway in downtown Ada and arrived at the jail a few minutes later. They subdued the sheriff, yanked the four thugs out of their cells, and dragged them across the street to a livery stable that had been chosen for the occasion. Each of the four had his wrists and ankles bound with baling wire, then each was ceremoniously hanged.

Early the next morning a photographer set up his camera in the barn and took some pictures. One survived over the years, a faded black and white that clearly shows all four men suspended by their ropes, motionless, almost peaceful, and quite dead. Years later, the photo was reproduced on a postcard and handed out at the Chamber of Commerce office.

For decades, the lynchings were Ada’s proudest moment.

C H A P T E R  5

W
ith the Carter case, Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers not only had an autopsy, hair samples, and “suspicious” polygraph exams but also were confident they had their killer. Ron Williamson was away for a spell doing time, but he would be back. They’d nail him sooner or later.

With Haraway, though, they had nothing—no body, no witnesses, not a single solid clue. The sketches by the police artist could realistically fit half the young men in Ada. The cops were due for a break.

It came out of nowhere early in October 1984, when a man named Jeff Miller walked into the Ada Police Department and asked to speak to Detective Dennis Smith. He said he had information about the Haraway case.

Miller was a local boy with no criminal record, but the police knew him vaguely as one of the many restless young people in the town who kept late hours and
moved from job to job, usually in factories. Miller pulled up a chair and proceeded to tell his story.

The night Denice Haraway disappeared, there had been a party near the Blue River, at a spot some twenty-five miles south of Ada. Jeff Miller had not actually been at the party, but he knew two women who were there. These two women—and he gave Smith their names—later told him that Tommy Ward was there, and that at some point early in the party there was a shortage of alcohol. Ward, who did not own a vehicle, volunteered to go get some beer, and he borrowed a pickup truck from one Janette Roberts. Ward left by himself in the truck, was gone for a few hours, and when he returned without the beer, he was distraught and crying. When asked why he was crying, he said he’d done something terrible. What? everyone at the party wanted to know. Well, for some reason he had driven all the way back to Ada, passing many beer stores along the way, and had found himself at McAnally’s out east of town, where he snatched the young female clerk, raped her, killed her, disposed of her body, and now he felt awful about it.

Confessing all this to a random group of hard drinkers and dope smokers seemed like the logical thing to do.

Miller offered no clue as to why the two women would tell him and not the police, nor did he suggest any reason why they had waited five months.

As absurd as the story was, Dennis Smith quickly pursued it. He tried to find the two women, but they had already moved away from Ada. (When he finally tracked them down a month later, they denied being at the party, denied seeing Tommy Ward there or at any other party, denied ever hearing a story about a young female store
clerk getting kidnapped and killed, or any other young female for that matter, and denied everything Jeff Miller had included in his tale.)

Dennis Smith located Janette Roberts. She was living in Norman, seventy miles away, with her husband, Mike Roberts. On October 12, Smith and Detective Mike Baskin drove to Norman and dropped in unannounced on Janette. They asked her to follow them down to the police station for a few questions, which she reluctantly did.

During the interview, Janette admitted that she, Mike, Tommy Ward, and Karl Fontenot, among many others, had often partied down by the Blue River, but she was almost positive they had not done so on the Saturday night the Haraway girl disappeared. She often loaned Tommy Ward her pickup, but he had never left with it from a party at the river (or any other place), nor had she ever seen him crying and upset, nor had she ever heard him blubbering about raping and murdering a young woman. No, sir, that had never happened. She was quite certain.

The detectives were pleasantly surprised to learn that Tommy Ward was living with the Robertses and working with Mike. The two men were employed by a siding contractor and putting in long hours, usually from sunrise to dark. Smith and Baskin decided to stay in Norman until Ward came home from work, then ask him some questions.

Tommy and Mike stopped for a six-pack on the way home, and the beer drinking was one reason not to go chat with the cops. More important, Tommy just didn’t like them. He was reluctant to go to the police station in Norman. The Ada cops had quizzed him about
the murder months earlier, and he thought the matter was closed. One reason he’d left Ada was because so many people commented on how much he looked like one of the suspects in the police composites, and he was tired of it. He’d looked at the drawing many times and could see no resemblance. It was just another sketch, drawn by a police artist who’d never seen the suspect and never would, then broadcast to a community quite anxious to link the face to someone living in Ada. Everybody wanted to help the police solve the crime. It was a small town. The disappearance was big news. At one time or another, everybody Tommy knew had ventured a guess as to the likely identities of the suspects.