The Dreams of Ada (55 page)

In the afternoon, a guard told Ward he could go out and exercise if he wanted—not with the Death Row inmates who had threatened him, but with the Christians with whom he went to church. Tommy said he would wait a while. He wanted to make sure they were really Christians.

19

GERTY

A
llan Tatum had lived in Gerty, Oklahoma, for twenty-seven years.

When asked the population of the small community, he liked to reply, “About thirty-seven.” A more accurate count would be 125 to 150, depending on how many of the children scampering through the countryside stood still long enough to be counted.

Gerty is in Hughes County, about twenty-seven miles east, and slightly north, of Ada; about eight miles east of the Pontotoc County line. It consists of a single grocery store and a scattering of houses. There is no post office, no school. State maps of Oklahoma show no roads leading to Gerty; in fact, there are two or three, all of them dirt. One leads down from Allen, just inside Pontotoc about nine miles to the northwest; another leads down from Atwood, farther to the north. It is an area of rugged hillsides choked with thick underbrush. The coons and the possums far outnumber the people.

Tatum, sixty-one, and his wife, Linda, lived in a house a quarter mile south of the Gerty store. He was a carpenter by trade. Linda worked at Toot’s Barbecue, out on Highway 75 to the east. Most winters, when the weather turned cold and snow covered the countryside, carpentry work was slow; Tatum would spend his time hunting and trapping in the woods. It was mostly for sport; depending on what he caught, he might barbecue the meat and sell the pelts.

The winter of 1985–86 was unusually warm in Oklahoma, as it was in most of the Southwest. Afternoon temperatures were often in the sixties. The weather stayed so good that Tatum was kept busy with his carpentry, repairing fences, building barns or cabins. By the middle of January he had not gone hunting once.

Then a project on which he was working was delayed; some hardware was late in arriving. Tatum woke up on the morning of Monday, January 20, with no work to do. He decided to go out and lay some traps. He was hoping he would get a bobcat.

His wife fixed him lunch before she went off to her job at Toot’s. Tatum ate, loaded his pickup with his traps and bait. He tossed his .22-caliber single-shot rifle into the truck and climbed in. For January, the seat of the pickup parked in the sun felt extra warm against his Levis.

He drove west three miles over rutted dirt roads to open land that abutted his property. He parked the truck and carried the traps and the liquid bait into the underbrush, away from the road, where hunting would be best, making mental note of the locations; he’d be required by law to run the traps every day, to see if any animals had gotten caught, were injured but alive.

The carpenter spent the whole long afternoon out in the brush. Then, with the winter sun dying early, he headed slowly back toward the pickup. He was pushing his way through the leafless brambles of huckleberry bushes, on a sloping hillside, when a rounded white object caught his notice, lying under a bush. In the fading light he thought it was a Styrofoam head, the kind sold in five-and-dime stores, for women to keep their hats on, or their wigs.

Tatum reached down and rolled the object over with his finger. A skull was staring up at him.

He did not touch it again.

He noted the location, and continued on to his truck.

As he drove home, his thought was to keep his mouth shut about what he had found. He had no idea who it might be, how long it had been there, where things might lead if he mentioned it to anyone. He parked the pickup, went into the house, sat. Linda was still at work, would be gone till after the supper hour. He looked at the telephone, silent. Tatum had a hard time with telephones. He was hard of hearing, could not understand what people were saying on a phone.

He waited. On toward seven o’clock, his brother-in-law, Leonard Muck, came over. Leonard lived just down the road, and came by most every night to pass the time. They often hunted together.

Tatum told Leonard, and asked him to telephone Orville Rose. They both knew Orville Rose. He was the sheriff of Hughes County, had been the sheriff for eleven years.

Leonard Muck told the sheriff what Allan Tatum had found. It was already dark outside. The sheriff asked questions, and Muck repeated them loudly to Tatum. The carpenter told his brother-in-law the answers, and Muck spoke them into the phone. It was agreed that the sheriff would come out to Tatum’s place at eleven o’clock the next morning, and Tatum would take him to the place where the skull was.

None of them speculated on what the skull was doing there, or on who it might be. The sheriff especially didn’t speculate. In his eleven years he’d gotten many calls like this. Most of the time it turned out to be a dog.

Orville Rose’s office was in Holdenville, the Hughes County seat; the birthplace, twenty-five years earlier, of Donna Denice Haraway. He left there Tuesday morning with his undersheriff, Floyd Trivitt, in Trivitt’s squad car. With Floyd behind the wheel, they drove in the morning sun down Highway 48, across the South Canadian River, past Atwood, down the unnumbered dirt road into Gerty. The sheriff had considered calling the OSBI, but first he wanted to make sure the skull was human. They picked up Allan Tatum at his house. Tatum directed them the three and a half miles to where he had seen the skull.

It was still there, on the ground under leafless brush, on a bed of autumn-colored leaves, about 200 yards up a slope from the dirt road. The sheriff knelt beside it. The lower jaw was missing. In the teeth of the human upper jaw he could see a lot of silver fillings.

He could not tell if it was male or female.

They looked about in the immediate area. They saw bits of fabric on the ground, and snagged in the bushes: little more than frayed remnants; they appeared to be from blue jeans. They came upon other bones, scattered. There was no hint of flesh; that would have been devoured by dogs or buzzards, the sheriff figured, in no time. They came upon the soles of a pair of tennis shoes; the upper, cloth part was gone. Tatum saw what he thought was bits of some kind of blouse or top. It was a “streakedy, stripedy blue.” Sheriff Rose would not recall seeing any part of a blouse or top.

The sheriff decided not to disturb the scene. They drove back to Tatum’s house. The sheriff called the OSBI office in McAlester. The agent there said he was too busy to come down, but that he would notify the crime lab in Oklahoma City; they would send someone.

Two OSBI lab technicians arrived at Holdenville in early afternoon. The dispatcher sent them out to Gerty. They met up at the grocery store with Sheriff Rose and Undersheriff Trivitt; Allan Tatum stayed home. The sheriff led the technicians to the site.

They took photographs. They placed the skull in a paper sack, along with what other bones they could find: rib bones, finger bones. They took the soles of the tennis shoes, the frayed pieces of cloth. The largest piece was the waistband of blue jeans. It was marked “Size 9.”

Sheriff Rose produced a rake, began to rake the leaves around where they had found the skull. He came upon something bright and shiny: an earring, white-gold in appearance, with a bit of red in it.

Between the earring and the size 9 waistband, they were fairly sure the remains were of a woman.

Not far from the shoe soles, they found two white socks, about half-knee-length. Inside the socks were toe bones. In another spot they found the zipper of the jeans.

The sun, still warm for January, caught the light color of some of the bones; others were uncovered as the men continued to rake the leaves in an area about forty feet across. They found leg bones, arm bones, a pelvis. Perhaps eight or ten ribs. One of the lab men, wearing gloves, placed each find carefully in a paper sack.

Before they placed the skull in the sack, the men studied it. Near the back were two holes, one on each side. They looked to Sheriff Rose like bullet holes, as if a bullet had been fired into the back of the head on one side, and had come out the other side. The hole was too big for a .22-caliber, he guessed; it must have been at least a .38.

It was nearly four in the afternoon when they left the scene. Rose and Trivitt drove back to Holdenville. The lab men—with the bones, the bits of fabric, the single earring—drove back to Oklahoma City, where the medical examiner found a tiny bullet fragment in the skull they brought.

By chance, District Attorney Bill Peterson was working in Holdenville that day; it was part of his three-county jurisdiction. Sheriff Rose found Peterson in the office of his assistant. He told the D.A. they had found a body out near Gerty.

“Did that Haraway girl have a lot of fillings in her upper teeth?” Rose asked.

Bill Peterson said yes; her father-in-law was a dentist; she had a lot of fillings.

“How was she dressed?” the sheriff asked.

Tennis shoes and blue jeans, Bill Peterson said.

“Then I’m pretty sure this will be her,” the sheriff said. “That’s what we found out there.”

Hearing of the fillings, the blue jeans, the tennis shoes, the size 9 waistband, Bill Peterson was fairly certain, too, that they had found Donna Denice Haraway at last.

The date was January 21, 1986—the day on which, prior to their stays, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot had been scheduled to be executed.

The fact of the discovery of a skeleton near Gerty was kept secret that night. Even Dennis Smith, the detective captain, did not learn of it until Chris Ross mentioned it at police headquarters the following day. Ross said they suspected it might be Denice Haraway; he was on his way to Dr. Haraway’s office, to get her dental charts, her dental X-rays.

The detective captain met the assistant D.A. at the dentist’s office. They stood outside and discussed the possible new evidence, beneath the windows of the apartment in which Steve and Denice had lived. Ross went inside and talked with Dr. Haraway, who had already been told of the find. He came out with Denice’s dental impressions. Smith took them and drove, with Mike Baskin, ninety miles to the state medical examiner’s office in Oklahoma City, to deliver them personally.

It was about 6
P.M
. when they got there. The office was already closed. The detectives left the impressions with a night attendant, and returned to Ada. Positive identification would have to wait till morning.

Smith was excited during the drive up and back. From what Ross had told him, there were strong indications it was Denice: proof positive of what he’d assumed from the very first night, that she was dead. The thoughts that ran through his mind he put into spoken words a few days later: “Someone had already looked at the teeth that had been found, and had unofficially said it looked like her. I was pretty excited at her being found. I knew there was a bullet hole in the head. [But] nothing was going to surprise me in this case. The location wasn’t really going to surprise me because of the different areas that we had searched.”

Hughes County had not been searched during the investigation. “Ward and Fontenot’s statement said it was out west of town. Initially the people at the scene said the vehicle went east, and in the initial search they searched out east and south and that area. There are so many possibilities. They could have gone west first. In Tommy’s statement he said that after he got through raping her, he said they were cuttin’ on her and he decided he didn’t want anything more to do with it and he went home. He said after he got home he was washing up or something and he got to thinking about them leaving her body up there, and the police might find her close to his house. I don’t know, it’s hard to really say what actually did happen. Only they really know. From him saying that, you can kind of—he’s thinking about the police finding that body, so he goes back. That’s what he says. He goes back. It’s conceivable that the body may have been there and he may have loaded the body back up, in whatever kind of vehicle. He could have gone around the loop. There are so many ways of getting to where the body was found. There are so many likelihoods, possibilities. With him being out there so close to his house. He knew all that area. But, on the other hand, it’s always conceivable that he could have gone east from the store, and gone straight out there. We had wondered ourselves [why they would go through the center of town on a Saturday night].”

About the evidence that a gun had been used, and had not been mentioned on the tapes, Smith said, “Well, I don’t know. It really didn’t surprise me. I’m open for game on anything anymore. Anything’s conceivable. I can see ’em just making damn sure she’s dead before they left her. That would be the final act, a gunshot to the head.”

When the detectives arrived back in Ada from the medical examiner’s office that night, Mike Baskin telephoned Pat Virgin, Denice’s mother, in Purcell, to tell her they had found a body, that while it had not yet been definitely confirmed, it probably was Denice.

“It was good news for us that the body was found,” Smith said. “The family acted as if they were relieved to know that her body had been found. Where she was at and everything.”

The next morning, in Oklahoma City, the state medical examiner compared the dental impression of Denice Haraway’s teeth, delivered by the detectives, with the upper jaw in the skull found at Gerty. It was a perfect match. The identification was now positive. The skeleton found at Gerty was that of Donna Denice Haraway.