Authors: Robert Mayer
On October 7, in California, police arrested Don “Bubba” Hawkins and Dale Austin Shelton, both of Seminole, Oklahoma. They were the men wanted in the August 19 kidnapping of Linda Thompson from Oklahoma City. Because they came from nearby Seminole, had long criminal records, and were being sought for kidnapping, Richard Kerner had mentioned them at the trial as possible suspects in the Haraway case. The state had introduced testimony that Hawkins had been in jail the night Denice Haraway disappeared; it had not introduced such testimony about Shelton.
After a night in jail on the west coast, Don Hawkins confessed that he and Shelton had kidnapped Mrs. Thompson. He said they had raped her, had taken her to Seminole, and that he had drowned her in a lake there. And he told police where they could find her body—in a wooded area near the lake.
On October 11, following Hawkins’s directions, police in Seminole found the remains of a woman. This was reported in the Ada
News
. Reading of it, Tommy Ward’s family experienced a day of hope. If the body somehow turned out to be that of Denice Haraway, then Hawkins and Shelton had killed her.
The next day the remains in Seminole were positively identified as those of Linda Thompson. Hawkins and Shelton were charged with kidnapping and murder. They were brought back to Oklahoma to stand trial. They would later be convicted.
In the county jail, awaiting formal sentencing, Ward and Fontenot continued to insist on their innocence. Most of the other inmates believed them and had been surprised when they were convicted.
Karl read romance magazines, brought by the woman who had befriended him. Tommy and Karl read the Bible aloud to each other.
Fontenot had been afraid, after the conviction, that someone might come into the jail who was out to get them. But he and Ward were now locked in a cell together. That made Karl feel safe.
October 25 was exceptionally warm for autumn; the air conditioning in the courthouse was straining as Judge Powers arrived from Chandler and put on his black robe, as Jack and Betty Haraway took seats in the courtroom, as Tricia, Miz Ward, and others of the Wards arrived.
The defendants were led across from the jail, beneath the shade of the pecan tree, into the courthouse, and up in the elevator. They were wearing the same suits they had shared at the trial. In the courtroom, the defense attorneys and Bill Peterson were waiting.
The attorneys began by presenting motions for a new trial. One reason they cited was that testimony about rape in the confessions should not have been seen by the jury, because the men were not being tried for rape. Judge Powers overruled the motion; he said the rape references were so integrated into the confessions that they could not have been removed.
Another motion sought a new trial because a woman had been excluded from the jury solely because she was opposed to the death penalty. A federal district court had ruled recently that such disqualifications unfairly tainted juries in favor of the prosecution; the issue would soon go before the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Powers overruled the motion.
The time had come for sentencing. It was one year and one week after the suspects were arrested. Judge Powers called Tommy Ward before the bench. He asked if Ward had anything he would like to say before being sentenced.
Tommy spoke four words, the only words he had spoken for the record during the long court proceedings: “I didn’t do it.”
The judge then followed all of the jury’s recommendations. He sentenced Tommy Ward to death.
He set the date of execution as January 21, 1986.
Tommy returned to his seat. He didn’t break down this time. Tricia, Miz Ward were crying. The Haraways showed no emotion.
Karl Fontenot was called before the bench. The judge asked if he would like to say anything before being sentenced.
“I would like the court to let me know when they find the people who committed these crimes,” Fontenot said.
Judge Powers was momentarily startled by the request. Then he replied, “It is the court’s opinion that they have found those who committed these crimes.”
He gave Fontenot the same sentences as Ward, the same date of execution: January 21, 1986.
The judge pointed out that there was an automatic appeals process in regard to the death penalty; that the sentence would not be carried out until the appeals were exhausted.
The men were entitled to spend ten more days in the Pontotoc County jail, the judge told them, if they so desired. Then they would be taken to the State Evaluation and Assessment Center at Lexington; and from there to Death Row at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester. Fontenot waived the ten days, said he would rather go straight to Lexington. Tommy Ward chose to remain in Ada as long as possible.
The judge asked Fontenot if he had any money to hire a lawyer. “No, I never will,” Karl said.
Because Fontenot already had a court-appointed attorney, the judge said the appeals in his case would be handled by the Appellate Public Defender’s Office in Norman.
Tommy Ward was put on the witness stand by Don Wyatt. Asked if he had any money, Ward said no; he said that his family had hired Wyatt; that he himself had paid no part of the fee; he had no assets and no income, he said. Wyatt told the judge his own contract had been only through the trial. The judge assigned Ward’s appeals to the Appellate Public Defender’s Office as well. Upon filing the notices of appeal, the judge said, the attorneys would be relieved of their responsibility in the case, and the executions would be officially stayed.
Soon after, the defendants, handcuffed, were led across the lawn to the jail.
The Ada
News
did not publish on Saturdays. An account of the sentencing appeared on the front page of Sunday’s paper. On page two of the same edition was a paid advertisement, two columns wide and five inches high. It read:
THANK YOU
GOD BLESS YOU
We would like to thank the law enforcement officers, the fraternities, the Boy Scouts, all the friends and citizens of Ada who helped search for my daughter Donna Denice Haraway.
We appreciate so much the giving of your time and effort to find her.
A special thanks goes to District Attorney Peterson and Assistant District Attorney Ross, Detective Baskins [sic], Detective Smith, O.S.B.I. Agent Gary Rogers and all the police officers that worked on the case. Our family feels they did a splendid job together and we cannot praise them enough. We are so proud to know all the men that worked on the case. The caring and concern for my family will always be remembered.
I know I can never repay you men or thank you enough for all the help and the long hours you spent, but again I thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything.
I know that God will bless each and every one of you for everything you did.
Thank You All,
Pat Virgin, Mother
and the Family of
Donna Denice Haraway
Now, pending the outcome of the long appeals process, the town of Ada would try to put the Haraway case behind it.
Don Wyatt, for one, would not be sorry to see it go.
Of his fee of $25,000 for taking the case, Wyatt had received $6,000 in cash from the Ward family, most of it from Joel. The old Ward house on Ashland Avenue, deeded to him, turned out to be unfinished and a partial wreck inside; he sold the house and the land for $7,000. Of this $13,000 in income, he had spent about $8,500 for the preliminary hearing transcript, for Richard Kerner’s fees, and for the psychiatrist who examined Ward but did not testify. His net fee was thus about $4,500 for a year’s work by himself and his staff. It was more than George Butner would be paid as a court-appointed attorney—but not a lot more.
Wyatt also didn’t like to lose, even if he was well paid.
“I’ve figured out over the years,” he said a few days after the sentencing, “that you have to close the door and move on to the next one. If you spend your time second-guessing ’em, you just drive yourself crazy. This one’s been tried, and it’s been lost. I hope somebody on appeal can overturn it. I think it’s a good possibility. But it will be a long, drawn-out process.”
Wyatt could not know, then, that he wasn’t really free of the case yet.
On Thursday, November 7, at 6
A.M
., Tricia entered Valley View Hospital. She was several days past her expected delivery date; her doctor had decided to induce labor.
At forty-nine minutes past noon, the baby was born. It was delivered by a nurse; the doctor arrived too late.
The nurse put the child on Tricia’s chest. Tricia counted the fingers and the toes. They were all there. It was a healthy baby girl.
Tricia had been afraid the stress about Tommy during her pregnancy might have affected the child’s formation.
They named her Yuvonda Maxine. The unusual first name Bud and Tricia had invented; the middle name was for Bud’s mother.
Little Buddy noted the date of birth and said Yuvonda would be a lucky little girl. “She was born on seven-eleven,” he said.
On Sunday, Tricia and the child went home from the hospital. Tommy, though more than ten days had passed since his sentencing, was still in the county jail. Bud sent cigars over with Miz Ward. Later he went himself, and pressed against the glass a Polaroid picture of the four kids.
“Awright!” Tommy said.
In the aftermath of the formal sentencing, Judge Powers signed the legal documents to be filed within the judicial system, to be part of the record of the case. Among the papers he signed was the formal notice of appeal on behalf of Karl Fontenot, filed by Fontenot’s attorney, George Butner. The paper would lead to an automatic stay of execution for Fontenot, and would transfer his representation from Butner to the appellate public defender’s office.
No notice of appeal and transfer was filed for Tommy Ward.
Don Wyatt apparently believed the state would take care of that, either through the D.A.’s office or the public defender’s office. The D.A. routinely assumed the defense attorney would do so, as was the common practice; it was not the D.A.’s task to look out for Tommy Ward.
Judge Powers did not notice that an appeal document for Ward, and a transfer of the case to the public defender’s office, were not among the papers he signed.
On Cherry Street, near Main, it was the hour of the pecan cracker. The nuts on the trees of Ada were a rich, ripe brown. They were falling by gravity’s pull, or in the November breeze, or being knocked down with poles. The old box springs, the veneer furniture, the glass objects that were sold there in the off-season were gone from in front of the small white building. The space was needed for parking, for stacking up the bags of pecans being ground inside. The iron gears meshed, day after day, week after week.
Tricia, feeding her newborn child, remembered sometimes the pecans they used to gather under the tree planted by her father, the day he married her mother, on the lawn of the house on Ashland Avenue. And a sadness, never far away, would enter the moment. This year, for the first time in her life, the house belonged to a stranger, and the tree and the pecans.
The town of McAlester is sixty miles northeast of Ada. Oklahoma’s maximum-security state prison was opened there in 1911. More cell blocks were added later. In the fall of 1985 it held just over 600 prisoners.
In mid-November, among the new files opened at the prison were ones marked 148909—Karl Fontenot, and 148915—Tommy Ward.
Death Row at the prison had been housed for years in E-block, an isolated section of the sprawling facility. Warden Gary Maynard was in the process of constructing a new Death Row in a more accessible area of F-block, which had been built in 1935 and renovated in 1981. The cell block was being converted from manual to electronic control. There would be forty-eight cells in the Death Row “run.” The admission of Ward and Fontenot brought the number of Death Row inmates to fifty-four. Some would have to room together.
Until the new section was completed, Ward and Fontenot were placed with the other inmates in the old Death Row in E-block. They were in separate cells, a few cells apart. Each cell was walled with concrete, about eight feet across and ten feet long. They had metal doors with narrow Plexiglas windows in them. At the rear of the cell, barred windows looked into the prison yard. Bunks and toilets were the only amenities.
Prisoners could receive mail, and one package a year, which could contain only sweat suits. Everything they needed had to be purchased at the prison canteen. This included soap and toothpaste. Money could be sent to them in the form of bank checks. These they could deposit at the canteen and draw against. Radios and TV sets were permitted in the cells. They had to be purchased at the canteen. The going rate for a small black-and-white television set was $92; the same set sold in stores outside the prison for about $69. Inmates who had no money, even for soap and toothpaste, had to do without.
The high cost of items at the canteen was one of many grievances among the inmates that were leading to an explosive atmosphere in the prison at the time that Ward and Fontenot were brought in.
The inmates could mail letters if they had the money for stamps. A plug-in telephone was available for them to make collect calls to the outside, when it was not in use by someone else. They could receive books, magazines, newspapers—but only if these were sent directly by the publishers. Such reading matter could not be sent by relatives or friends, for fear the pages might be pre-dipped in drugs, and the paper then chewed by the inmate.
Visiting was permitted Thursday through Sunday. The visitor and the inmate sat separated by a glass partition and spoke to each other through telephones. Each inmate was allowed a visitor list with ten names on it; the lists were completed only after slow paperwork, and the visitors were issued clearances. Each visitor could come twice a month.
The only exceptions were spouses and parents; in the cases of Tommy and Karl, that applied only to Miz Ward; she could visit twice a week, and the lengthy paperwork was waived.