The Dreams of Ada (6 page)

One night about ten o’clock, when Smith was at home with Sandi and the boys, he got a phone call from Mike Baskin. A member of the Haraway family had contacted a psychic in northern Oklahoma in an attempt to discover where Denice was. The psychic had visualized a scene; the information had just been relayed by the family to Baskin. According to the psychic, Denice’s body could be found about eight miles east of Ada, near a government installation; there would be a water tower, a creek, a bridge; old stoves and refrigerators would dot the creek; the number 7 would somehow be hanging symbolically over the scene.

Baskin wanted to go out and look right away, in the dark.

Dennis Smith did not believe in psychics. He preferred hard-nosed logic, tough police work. But he had read of cases where bodies had been found by psychics; he felt he could not disregard the information; if he saw it work for himself, he felt, he would even become a believer. He told Sandi what Baskin had said. “Let’s all go look,” Sandi suggested.

Smith felt it was bizarre, taking the whole family out to look for a body. But they went, he and Sandi and the boys, carrying flashlights. They picked up Baskin and drove out Highway One, heading east, past McAnally’s, past Deer Creek Estates, past the village of Homer, past the turnoff to a cemetery and to a village called Happyland. Just when they had gone about eight miles, they saw a water tower; Smith realized it was for Rural Water District Number 7. It was on the Kalli-homa Indian Reservation—a government installation. They came to a bridge over a creek, pulled off the road, got out, looked around; down in the creek they could see, in the yellow circles of their flashlights, a bunch of junk—old stoves, refrigerators.

As they moved down, flashlights illuminating the grass and sand at their feet, they smelled something foul, the smell of death. Holding their breaths against the smell, and perhaps in anticipation, they poked around in the debris—and found the rotting carcass of a calf.

In the days and weeks after the disappearance, McAnally’s became something of an Ada shrine. People would stop by and look around, and ask the clerks about the Haraway case. The constant questions took their toll on some. James Watts, who worked the morning shift, who had been relieved by Denice at 2:30 on April 28, quit in early May. On May 19 the manager, Monroe Atkeson, quit. It was one year to the day since Denice Haraway, then Denice Lyon, had started work there.

A new manager was hired, and a new clerk. The McAnallys looked around their now notorious store. Their eyes fell with displeasure on the magazine rack, with its large selection of naked girls on the covers. The store did between $80 and $90 a day business in these adult magazines; the McAnallys decided the pictures might be inciting young men to crimes of sex. They decided to ask their distributor to stop bringing in such trash.

With only a few weeks remaining to the end of the semester, Steve Haraway did not return to classes at East Central. He arranged to get I’s—Incompletes—in all his courses; to take the final exams, to qualify for graduation, later on. When he was not out searching the countryside with friends, he sat in the lonely apartment, morose, waiting. Formerly gregarious, he was now quiet; he did not talk about what had happened, he simply waited.

For two weeks, he, Monty Moyer, Gary May, Brad Goss, and a few other friends distributed flyers. They drove in every direction within a 150-mile radius of Ada, stopping at gas stations, grocery stores, small-town police departments. Several of his friends owned four-wheel-drive vehicles; they went searching for Denice’s body in otherwise inaccessible places. The police would get calls that someone thought they had heard or seen something the night of the disappearance. They relayed some of these to Steve and his friends, who checked them out.

In the first few days, it had seemed better not to find anything; with the passing weeks it seemed, at least to Steve’s friends, that it was time to find something, to learn what had happened to Denice.

On Memorial Day weekend his friends convinced Steve to get away from this for a while. He agreed to join Monty, Gary, Brad, others on a boat trip down the Illinois River. It was their first time away from the case in the month since Denice had disappeared. The water swirled beneath them. The wind whipped through their hair. Steve remained quiet most of the time, alone with his thoughts.

One day he went to the financial office at the college. A hush fell over the clerks. Everyone seemed to know what he was there for: to pay off his wife’s student loan.

Spring became summer in Ada. The fields in the outlying areas were green. Lilacs and hollyhocks and roses took turns blooming on the small lawns that front most of Ada’s houses. They bloomed on the large ranches surrounding the town, and near the small working-class houses, and in colored town, which is what the small black section is still called. Colored town used to be right downtown; but a few decades back, as Ada grew and downtown real estate became more valuable, the city fathers razed colored town and built a new one out on the highway, across from the small airport at the northern edge of the city.

Stories about the case in the Ada
News
stopped in mid-May; but members of the Haraway family called the police frequently—every day in the early weeks—to see if there was any news.

Every few weeks, a bright new lead seemed to flare briefly, tantalizingly, before the eyes of the police, and then die. In mid-summer, a man named Gary Allen Walker was arrested in Tulsa. He allegedly had killed nine or ten women, leaving a string of bodies through several states. His method of operation did not seem quite the same as in the Haraway case, but Gary Rogers and Danny Barrett went hopefully to Okmulgee to see his parents. They found that Walker had been with them the night Denice Haraway disappeared. He later confessed to other killings, but not to killing Denice Haraway.

A man was arrested in Texas and accused of killing several women there. OSBI agents went to interview him, to determine his whereabouts on April 28; he had not been in Oklahoma. Another man was arrested in Texas, accused of kidnapping and raping a woman. OSBI agents went down to check out his clothing, his car, to see if they could find any evidence that would tie him to Denice Haraway. They couldn’t.

The police and the OSBI got frequent calls from other states where unidentified female bodies had been found. None of them matched Denice’s description. One that stuck in Dennis Smith’s mind was from Missouri, where the lower half of a woman’s body had been found in a parking lot. There were tattoos on the thighs. The police checked with the family, to make sure Denice had none. The dead woman was later identified as coming from the northern Midwest.

With each new lead Dennis Smith felt a small flicker of hope. When the leads did not check out, he felt a new sense of frustration. He was back to square one: what to do now?

The days grew hotter, more humid. Summer reached its peak. String beans and broccoli and tomatoes and yams and okra—lots of okra—sprouted in the gardens that many Ada residents tend behind their homes. The rodeo made its annual visit to Ken Lance’s sports arena, and for a few days Ada’s motels were crowded. The county fair was held at the old rodeo grounds. The husks of the pecans on the leafy trees all over town began to shade from green to brown.

On Labor Day, Ada broke into the nation’s sports news; the million-dollar All-American Futurity at Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico, the richest quarter-horse race in the world, was won by Eastex, whose owner was an Ada dentist named H. D. Hall; he had an office right there on Arlington. Eastex was the second Ada horse in three years to win the Futurity. Local horsemen strutted with pride.

Dennis Smith did not have to work on Labor Day. Neither did his wife. Dennis asked her how she would like to spend the holiday.

“Let’s go look for Denice Haraway’s body,” Sandi said.

The detective agreed. They got into the family car to search, as they had done together once before, the night of the psychic’s vision. They drove this time, for no particular reason, to an area near the Reeves Packing Plant, on the western edge of town. They climbed out and looked in fields and woodlands, creeks and ravines. In time, at the edge of Sandy Creek, amid a site common in Ada—old stoves and refrigerators and mattresses dumped where they should not have been—Smith saw a cardboard box with bloodstains on the lid. The blood, to his practiced eye, looked too fresh; Denice Haraway, he felt fairly certain, had been dead for four months.

“Well, take the cover off!” Sandi urged.

The detective removed the lid. Inside the box, peering up at them with mournful eyes, was the severed head of a deer.

Smith had run out of ideas, had run out of places to search. In his office during the next few weeks, he could only put shreds of tobacco in his mouth and spit the brown juice and try to accept the fact that the mystery of Denice Haraway’s disappearance was going to remain unsolved. There were no more leads to check out. The file would remain open, but in the public mind it would be another case that the local police and the OSBI couldn’t handle—like the disappearance of Patty Hamilton up in Seminole, like the murder of Debbie Carter.

Then, one day in early October, a young man named Jeff Miller walked into police headquarters. He wanted to talk to Dennis Smith, he told the officer at the desk; he had some information about the Haraway case.

3

SUSPECTS

I
n Ada, despite its Bible Belt moorings and its pastoral locale, there is a substantial underclass of young people whose roots are in the town but whose daily existence drifts with the passing breeze. Mostly high school dropouts, they tend to find employment in the local factories, work for several weeks, then stop showing up at work, often after an all-night party. Between sporadic employment their primary activity is “running” together: cruising the area in whatever pickup is available, getting hold of a keg of beer or a few six-packs and partying—out by a creek or river in the warm months, in someone’s pad in the cold—smoking or snorting whatever dope is available. The pushers among their number, coming into a good supply, will rent a room in one of Ada’s nine motels. Word will spread through the grapevine like a brushfire: there’s dope at room 52 of the such and such motel: the Village Inn or the Holiday Inn, the Rainbow Motel, the Indian Hills Motel—whatever. A steady stream of beat-up cars and pickups will arrive at the motel in search of the room in question. Or long-haired youths will stop at the front desk and ask what room so-and-so is in. The clerks understand what is going on. They do not call the police, because they don’t want a scene at the motel; they don’t want the place to get a bad reputation. On the contrary, they hope the pusher does well, that he exhausts his supply quickly; then he will be gone in a few hours. Usually he is. The dope fuels a few more nights or weeks of partying, until, flat broke, with no money for the two indispensable needs of running together—beer and gas—the runners will surrender to the society around them, get a job for a while, confine their partying to nights and weekends—till the job pales in the torpor of a late binge, a new person to shack up with, and they don’t show up at work again. The town points with pride to the solid achievements of its sons and daughters at Ada High and nearby Byng High, to the future professionals at East Central; the running underclass is acknowledged mostly by the police. Some never come in contact with the law; those who do are viewed by the authorities as the town’s inevitable quota of “trash.”

From this milieu came Jeff Miller’s information, which was not surprising to Dennis Smith; you don’t get tips on street crimes from the parsonage. Jeff Miller sat in police headquarters and told the detective that two young women in the town—he gave their names—had been at a party down by Blue River, about twenty-five miles south of Ada, on the night Denice Haraway disappeared; that the women had told him Tommy Ward had been at the party with a group that included a woman named Jannette Roberts; that midway through the party, with the beer supply running low, Tommy Ward had offered to go get some more; that he had borrowed Jannette Roberts’s pickup and left; that he had been gone for some time; and that when he returned he was crying. When asked why he was crying, he told friends he had gone back to Ada, had taken a girl from a store and had raped her and killed her; and now he felt terrible about what he had done.

All this Jeff Miller told the police. He had not been at the party himself, he said; his information had come from these two women, who said they had been there when it happened. Why the women would tell this to Jeff Miller, instead of to the police, remained unclear. So, too, was the question of why they would remain silent for five months, then speak of it.

The detectives asked Miller if he knew where Tommy Ward was. Miller said he had heard that Ward and his friend Karl Fontenot had been living in Norman with Jannette Roberts and her husband, but that Jannette had thrown them out because they weren’t contributing to the rent. He didn’t know where Ward was now, Miller said.

The detectives thanked Miller for coming in. This was only hearsay; proof might be a long way away. Still, for the first time in months, they had something to go on; they might solve the Haraway mystery after all.

The first step was to find the two women Jeff Miller had quoted, to get the story from them firsthand; they might also know where Tommy Ward was. But the women had moved from their last known address. They were part of the running underclass. Smith couldn’t locate them.

The next step was to contact Jannette Roberts. She had been at the party at Blue River, according to the Ada women as quoted by Jeff Miller; she had loaned Tommy Ward her pickup; she had kicked him out of her house; she might know where he had gone. Smith obtained an address for her in Norman. He tried to call her, to set up a meeting. She didn’t have a telephone.

On October 12, a Friday, Dennis Smith and Mike Baskin decided to drive to Norman, eighty miles away, to drop in on Jannette Roberts, to question her about the party at Blue River, about Tommy Ward. Though she was married to a fellow named Mike Roberts, in the minds of the detectives she was Jannette Blood. That was her name from a previous marriage. It was the name under which she had been convicted years before for forging a drug prescription, the name under which she had spent six years in prison.

As the detectives drove through the countryside, out Route 3W, the trees and woodlands were rich in their autumn colors: reds, yellows, oranges. The mood of the officers was equally bright with the excitement of the chase, of a possible solution after all these months. On the pecan trees beside the road, the husks were a deep brown; they soon would be ready for cracking.

Jannette Roberts was thirty-eight, a pretty woman with reddish-brown hair, but you could almost read the contours of her life in her face: three marriages, six children, two convictions for forging drug prescriptions, a six-year term for the second one. When she got out of prison in 1982, she came to Ada to start a new life. She got a job at Taco Tico, a fast-food Mexican place, worked her way up to assistant manager. One day the eldest of the children living with her, Niki Lindsey, a teenager, said she had met a fellow in town who lived on the streets, who didn’t have any home, any family. He was real nice, real gentle, Niki told her mother. Would it be all right to bring him home?

Jannette had always been softhearted about taking in strays, animal or human. She told Niki to bring him home. Niki did—he was a dark-haired youth, seventeen years old. His name was Karl Fontenot. They gave him a place to sleep; he became like part of the family. Karl had a friend named Tommy Ward, four years older, who came to visit sometimes. They all got along well together, Jannette and her husband Mike, Karl and Tommy and the kids. Often, after a late party, Tommy would stay over as well instead of walking back to his mother’s house on the edge of town. Sometimes Tommy and Karl would babysit while Mike and Jannette were out.

The Roberts family lived in a small apartment at 509½ South Townsend, in downtown Ada. But the building was condemned. One by one the other tenants moved out, until the Roberts clan were the only ones left. When the water was turned off, they, too, were forced to move. Mike Roberts took a job in Norman, installing aluminum siding. The whole household followed. Mike taught Tommy Ward how to install siding, got him a job with the same company. Karl, who had worked for a time at Wendy’s in Ada, got work with another fast-food place. Tommy helped with the rent, Karl with the groceries. The siding business was good that summer and fall. Mike and Tommy worked till dark most days, coming home at times with bad sunburns and blistered fingers.

When Detectives Smith and Baskin arrived in Norman on October 12, they found Jannette at home. They asked if she would come to Norman police headquarters; they wanted to ask her some questions. Jannette said she couldn’t do it, that her daughter Jessica, who had just turned seven, would be coming home from school soon. The detectives said she should come anyway; that if they weren’t back in time, a police car would pick up Jessica. Reluctantly, Jannette went.

At the police station, the detectives asked her about the information they had received from Jeff Miller. Jannette said that she and her husband and Tommy and Karl and various friends and neighbors used to party together a lot. Yes, they had partied at Blue River a number of times, she said, but she didn’t think the night the Haraway girl disappeared was one of them. Yes, she said, she sometimes let Tommy borrow her pickup. But this she was sure about, she said: Tommy had never borrowed her pickup and left a party at Blue River and then come back crying and said he had kidnapped a girl and raped her and killed her. That had never happened, she said.

Jannette was getting anxious about the time. Jessica would be coming home soon. The detectives sent a squad car to Jessica’s school; it picked her up and brought her to the police station. In their minds this was a kindness they had provided; in the mind of Jannette, it stank—bringing her little girl into the police-station atmosphere.

The detectives resumed their questioning. About Tommy and Karl: did she know where they had gone?

Karl had moved to Hominy, near Tulsa, Jannette said; he was staying with Tommy’s sister and brother-in-law, Joice and Robert Cavins. He’d gotten a job up there, installing fencing.

And Tommy? Did she know where Tommy had gone?

Tommy hadn’t gone anywhere, Jannette told the detectives. He was still living with her and Mike; still working with her husband at All-Siding. They were at work right now, but they would be home after dark—maybe around eight, she figured.

Smith and Baskin were surprised and delighted. They decided to stay in Norman, to talk to Tommy Ward. They told Jannette to give Tommy a message when he came home from work: that they would like him to come down to the police station, to answer a few questions.

As the detectives killed time in Norman, waiting for Tommy Ward, they were convinced they had gotten good information from Jeff Miller. Jannette had confirmed that she and Tommy and the others used to party together, sometimes at Blue River, and that at times she had let Tommy borrow her pickup. She had denied the key incident about the crying, the confession; but perhaps she had not been within earshot of that, or perhaps she was protecting her friend. The fact that Tommy was still living in Norman, they felt, was a stroke of luck.

When Tommy and Mike got home from work, Jannette gave Tommy the message: two detectives were waiting for him at the police station, wanting to talk to him.

“What about?” Tommy asked.

“They think you had something to do with that girl who disappeared from McAnally’s,” Jannette said.

Tommy told Jannette and Mike that when the girl disappeared, and they put the drawings of the two suspects in the newspaper, people used to hassle him that he looked like one of the pictures. That was one reason he was glad they had moved to Norman, he said. So people would stop hassling him. The cops had already questioned him once. Why didn’t they leave him alone? He wasn’t sure he wanted to go.

“They’re waiting for you at the police station,” Jannette said. “If you didn’t have anything to do with it, go down there and tell them that.”

Tommy agreed that that was the best course. Mike drove him to the station. Inside, he told a clerk who he was. Detectives Smith and Baskin came out of an inner office. They led him downstairs, to a room with videotaping equipment set up. They told him they were going to make a tape of the questioning, asked if that was all right with him. He said it was. The machine was turned on by Eddie Davenport of the Norman police department. The detectives read Ward his rights under the Miranda Act: that he had the right to remain silent; that he had the right for a lawyer to be present; that he was free to go at any time; that if he did answer questions, he could stop answering them at any time; that if he did answer their questions, anything he said could be used against him in a court of law.

Tommy sat in a wooden chair, listening. He had not changed clothes after work. He was dressed as he usually was, in blue jeans, an athletic shirt, tennis sneakers. He told the detectives that he understood all of that, that he would answer their questions.

As the tape rolled, Dennis Smith recalled to Tommy the previous time he had been questioned, shortly after the disappearance: how Tommy had told them he would help them in any way he could to find out what had happened. Tommy said he remembered saying that.

Mike Baskin asked him what he had done the day Denice Haraway “was kidnapped.” Tommy said he had installed plumbing at his mother’s home with his brother-in-law, Robert Cavins. Then he had showered and walked to Jannette’s, about 9
P.M
. Karl Fontenot was there, he said, and some other people, and they had a party.

The detectives told him that when they had questioned him the last time, he had told a different story. Tommy replied that the first story he had told them had happened the day before the disappearance. He had realized this later, he said.

“What was the statement you gave us?” Smith asked.

“I don’t remember,” Tommy said.

“When did you realize you hadn’t told the truth?” Baskin asked.

“I got mixed up the days,” Ward said.

The red light of the taping machine remained on. Smith asked Tommy if he was nervous. The detective then refreshed his memory about his previous story—about going fishing and then to a party.