by Robert Mayer
Now the town was in a lynch mood again.
Tommy Ward had confessed, according to the news reports. Karl Fontenot had also confessed. Odell Titsworth had not confessed, but both Ward and Fontenot had implicated him. Two confessions and Odell Titsworth—who was known in the town as a bad guy, with four convictions for things like assault and battery. Few in Ada had reason to doubt that all the suspects were guilty. The murder of Denice Haraway was the angry talk of the factories and the stores, the homes and the 3.2-beer bars, much as her disappearance had been the curious talk five months earlier.
At the feed mill, Bud Wolf operated a computer that mixed different grains into the proper proportions for different feeds. He had been working at the mill for six years; his coworkers were well aware that Tommy Ward was his brother-in-law, that Tricia was his wife. “Those Wards,” one worker said, making sure that Bud could hear him. “They’re all no good. They ought to kill them all.”
At Latta Elementary School, Rhonda was taunted by her fifth-grade classmates every day about how her uncle had killed that girl. Every day she came home in tears; she loved her uncle Tommy. The taunting was led by the daughter of a policeman.
Odell Titsworth’s sister Judy worked at Blue Bell jeans. Every weekday morning after the arrests, she came in and sat at her machine with her head down. The other women perched at their sewing machines under the fluorescent lights, and gazed at Judy, and said nothing—aware, perhaps out of personal experience, that women were not responsible for the violence of the men in their lives.
Call after call came into police headquarters and the district attorney’s office warning that the suspects in the Haraway case would be killed. It is only forty-three steps across a neat green lawn beneath a pecan tree from the county jail to the county courthouse, but because of the death threats District Judge Jesse Green moved a scheduled hearing on Monday from the courthouse to the jail. At the hearing the men were told they were being held in connection with the Haraway case—but no formal charges were brought.
The next day, District Attorney Bill Peterson asked that formal arraignments be postponed until Thursday. “They have admitted it, but we don’t have the rest of the evidence yet,” he told the Ada News. “What we’re trying to prove is if they are the ones. It’s not as easy as it appears.”
On Thursday, the state medical examiner’s office announced that the charred bones found in the burned-out house during the initial search were not human bones. A jawbone found was the jawbone of a possum. “This puts us back to square one in the search for the body,” Paul Renfrow, a spokesman for the OSBI, told the press. The scheduled arraignments were delayed again; the men had been in jail for a week without any charges being brought.
The town still seethed with dark threats, with a desire for revenge. One night the phone rang in the county jail. The jailer was told that he had better leave, because the jail would be blown up that night, to kill Tommy Ward. The call was anonymous, but the jailer believed he recognized the voice as that of a local thug; even the running underclass was outraged. The jailer stayed where he was. There was no bombing.
Day after day the police continued to search for Denice Haraway’s body in the area west of town. Tommy Ward had mentioned in his taped statement Sandy Creek; the police prowled its edges, poked its muddy depths in search of the body. They didn’t find it. Tommy had also mentioned the concrete bunker. There was fifteen feet of garbage in the bunker. Police went down into it, hauled out the garbage. They found no body. OSBI technicians went through the remains of the burned-out house described by Fontenot, using window screens to sift the debris, looking for bone fragments or teeth. They found none. They used metal detectors to try to unearth dental fillings; they came up with many rusty nails, but no fillings, no evidence.
The 200 acres of land just west of Ada, in the area of the power plant, were owned by a gentleman named Forrest Simpson, the manager of the Southern Oklahoma Livestock Auction. On his land stood the house in which he lived, plus five barns and an older, unoccupied house. There used to be two old houses. But one day in June of 1983, Forrest Simpson decided to get rid of one of the old houses, which was an eyesore on the land. He tore out what scrap lumber in the house he thought he might be able to use; he tore out the floor. The house had been four rooms, each exterior wall about twenty-five feet long. What lumber he didn’t want he tossed inside the foundation. Then he lit a match and set it to the old, dry wood, and he burned the entire house to the ground.
After the arrests in the Haraway case, Forrest Simpson was told on the telephone that a bunch of police were out on his land, poking around in the remains of the house. He went over and saw the police at work, sifting through the sticks of charred wood that remained, and the broken tiles. He asked what they were doing. They told him they were looking for the body of Denice Haraway, the clerk who had been kidnapped from McAnally’s. One of the fellows who’d confessed, Simpson was told, had said they had brought the woman’s body to this abandoned house, and poured gasoline over it, and burned it, and then burned down the entire house.
That was last April, wasn’t it? Forrest Simpson said.
He was told that that was correct.
Well, that couldn’t be, Simpson told the police, because he himself had burned down the house in June of ’83, ten months before the woman disappeared.
Are you sure about that? Simpson was asked.
Yes, he was quite sure. The night in question there’d been nothing here but the foot-high foundation in front of them now.
This development would be a problem, Dennis Smith understood, unless they found the body somewhere.
The news provided by Forrest Simpson was not made public. The police continued to search the burned-out house, while cattle watched dumbly from behind a barbed-wire fence.
Detective Mike Baskin, too, had a problem; it wouldn’t go away. He was glad that Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers had obtained a confession from Tommy Ward; he was glad that Rogers and Smith had obtained a similar confession from Karl Fontenot. Odell Titsworth had not yet confessed, despite intensive questioning, but Titsworth, he knew, would be harder to crack; he’d been through rough questioning before. But Titsworth had to be guilty. There it was on Ward’s tape: the robbery, the kidnapping had been Titsworth’s idea; they had left a keg party in Titsworth’s pickup; Titsworth had taken the girl from the store; Titsworth had the knife; Titsworth raped her first; Titsworth did most of the stabbing; Titsworth kept the money from the cash register.
It was pretty much the same on Fontenot’s tape: Titsworth’s idea, Titsworth’s truck, Titsworth’s knife. Titsworth the murderer.
The case was pretty much solved, would be finished once they found the body, it seemed. Just a matter of all the courtroom stuff from now on.
Still, something was bothering Detective Baskin, niggling at his brain. He went back in his mind to the night of the disappearance—April 28. He remembered how he had gotten the call in the squad car, how he had gone to McAnally’s. He remembered what he had been doing just before the call came in, why he was working that Saturday night. He had gone to Valley View Hospital that night to get a statement from the staff at the emergency room, because…because two nights before, in an altercation, the police had broken Odell Titsworth’s arm!
Baskin checked the records. There it was. The altercation at Marie Titsworth’s house: April 26, 1984.
Baskin told Dennis Smith of his recollection, and Gary Rogers. The same thought was in all of their minds: how much could you do with a broken arm?
The next morning, Detective Smith called Dr. Jack Howard, the physician who had set Titsworth’s arm. It had been a spiral fracture, between the elbow and the shoulder, the doctor told the detective after checking his records; such things are very painful; Titsworth would have had to sleep sitting up, his cast in a sling; there was no way he could have removed the cast and then put it back on again, the doctor said. No way he could have carried a body, as was described in the confessions. No
way he could have committed a violent rape. No way.
Dennis Smith thanked the doctor, the tapes running wild in his head. This, too, was going to be a problem, unless they found the body.
Smith gathered eight mug shots together. He showed them to Karl Fontenot, asked him to pick out the picture that was Odell Titsworth; Fontenot couldn’t. Smith reduced the number of pictures to four, asked him to pick out Titsworth; Fontenot couldn’t. He reduced the photos to two. Which one was Titsworth? Fontenot didn’t know; he didn’t know what Odell Titsworth looked like.
What about markings? Smith asked Fontenot. Did Titsworth have anything on his arms?
No, Fontenot said.
Whereas Odell Titsworth’s arms, like most of his body, were covered in dark tattoos; and according to the taped confessions, he was wearing only a T-shirt that night; and, according to the doctor, he was wearing a cast that night.
Reluctantly, Smith, Baskin, Rogers, Bill Peterson had to agree: Odell Titsworth was telling the truth: he had not been involved, despite the stories on the tapes.
Titsworth, in his cell, also remembered that his arm had been broken at the time. He told this to the police. He’d been at his girlfriend’s home that night, nursing his painful arm; there were witnesses, who backed him up.
This information was not made public just then. Ward, Fontenot, and Titsworth were kept in jail; no charges had yet been filed against them.
If only he had been in on the questioning of Ward, Mike Baskin could not help thinking, he would have remembered right away that Titsworth had had a broken arm that night; the final taped statement might have turned out differently.
Not long after the tapes were made the detectives finally located the two women who allegedly had seen Tommy Ward return to a party at Blue River the night of the disappearance, crying, and allegedly had heard him confess to killing a woman, and allegedly had told of this to Jeff Miller. Both women denied to the detectives having been present at any such scene, or having told Jeff Miller about any such scene. The origins of the story, and how and why Jeff Miller came to tell it, remained uncertain. All that appeared certain was that the story was not true—and that it had led the police to Tommy Ward.
Miz Ward, Tommy’s mother, owned a bird. It was a cockatiel, a crested parrot, native to Australia. It had a yellow head, a multicolored, bluish body. She called it Pretty Boy. A few months before Denice Haraway disappeared, Tommy was playing with the bird at the house on Ashland Avenue, as he often did. He had opened the bird cage and was allowing Pretty Boy to fly around in the house, perching wherever it wanted, in the living room, the bedrooms. Flying into the kitchen, it landed on the electric range—on a burner that had accidentally been left on. The bird screeched; its claws were seared to the burner.
When Tommy saw what had happened to Pretty Boy, he cried. He placed Vaseline on its burned claws, wrapped them in gauze. He placed cloth at the bottom of its cage, so the bird would have someplace soft to rest. Every day for months he changed the dressings—new Vaseline, new gauze—until the bird recovered.
At the time of Tommy’s arrest, Miz Ward still had the bird. It would talk somewhat, saying “Kiss me, Pretty Boy, kiss me, Pretty Boy,” and would make small kissing sounds. It seemed as healthy as ever—except that instead of four claws on each foot, it now had two claws on one foot, one claw on the other. Also, it no longer flew freely around the house; it remained in its cage, even when the door was opened.
This was the Tommy that was in Miz Ward’s mind when she heard of his arrest. She had seen his temper in action, the times he had put his fist through the walls of the house. But it was only himself he would hurt. If there had ever been anyone he wanted to kill, Miz Ward thought, it was Lisa Lawson, that time she broke up with him. Instead he had gone out and wrecked his motorcycle. He would kill himself before he’d hurt anyone else.
She knew Tommy had some trouble inside him, ever since his father died. He had started having his dreams around then—bad dreams. He would have one every few weeks, every few months. Miz Ward would hear him screaming in the middle of the night. She would rush into his room to see what was wrong, and he would be sitting up in bed, crying. He’d had a terrible dream, he would tell her, a real bad dream. But when she would ask what the dream was about, he wouldn’t tell her. He would say it was too horrible to talk about. Instead, he would get some paper and a pencil, and he would draw pictures—pictures of animals, strange, weird animals that she had never seen. Then he wouldn’t be afraid anymore—not till his next dream. But dreams were different from killing.
She remembered the time the Haraway girl disappeared. She and her daughter Kay had gone to Lawton that weekend to visit Melva, who had invited them to a Tupperware party on Saturday night. They had gone not so much for Tupperware as for the visit; Melva’s Army husband had been reassigned to California, and then would be shipping off to Germany. He and Melva and their three kids would be leaving Oklahoma soon; Miz Ward did not know when she would see them again. So they had driven down there, she and Kay, and had come back Sunday night and found everyone talking about the clerk who had disappeared from McAnally’s. Miz Ward had a job back then, the first job of her life outside the house, working nights at Love’s Country Store on Main near Oak. She remembered that on Tuesday night, the day the drawings of the two suspects appeared in the Ada News, someone had come into the store and showed her the paper and told her that the picture looked like Tommy; she’d told whoever it was who brought the paper that she didn’t think it looked like Tommy.
Now Tommy was in jail. She still didn’t think the picture looked like him. Also, the caption said the man had been wearing a white T-shirt. Tommy didn’t wear white T-shirts, only black ones or Navy blue; the only white T-shirt he owned had a picture of Lisa on the front, and his own name, Tommy, on the back. He didn’t wear the shirt with the picture of Lisa anymore, she knew.
The other picture didn’t look like Karl, either, Miz Ward thought. The caption with the picture said sandy hair, and Karl’s hair was black.
She knew Karl Fontenot. When Tommy was working nights over at Davis’s garage a couple of years back, fixing motors, Karl started hanging around there to pass the evenings. He was the kind of person who often would hang around people, looking for friends, until they shooed him away. But Tommy didn’t shoo him away, he let him hang about, became his friend. On nights when Tommy wasn’t around, Karl would walk over to Love’s where Miz Ward was the clerk, and would sit in one of the plastic booths, fold his arms on the table, and lay his head on his arms and go to sleep. He would sleep that way all night. Miz Ward would leave him be. Sometimes, if there was an extra sandwich that had been made up and not bought, she would give it to Karl; he never had money to buy one.
Still seeking the body, the police announced that a citizen search would be held in the area west of town on Sunday, November 4. About eighty-five people turned out: members of the National Guard, the Amateur Radio Club, the Rifle and Pistol Club, other private citizens. Under the direction of the detectives and the OSBI, they lined up shoulder to shoulder along a fence line. They walked slowly through the tall, dry grass, up hills and down ravines, looking. When they reached the fence line opposite, they moved over a few yards, stood shoulder to shoulder again, and walked back, peering at the earth.
The district attorney, Bill Peterson, stood watching. He knew the gory content of the confessions; but to bring murder charges without a body would be highly unusual. Trying a murder case without a body was not something he would relish. As he watched the searchers, one thought ran through his mind, over and over, like a prayer: “Find me a bone! I want a bone!” He didn’t need an entire body; one of Denice Haraway’s bones would be enough. Any human bone would help.
The search went on from nine in the morning till five in the afternoon. Police climbed down into wells in the area. Volunteers searched dump sites. Several more bones were found, were sent off to the medical examiner’s office to be studied. None of them were human bone
s.
In the Pontotoc County Jail there were cells made of bars, which fronted on a small common area in which inmates released from their cells could sit at tables and play checkers or read magazines. Tommy Ward was not in one of these. He was kept in a solitary cell, with cement walls on all sides. The only opening was a small, barred window in the steel door. There was no television in the jail, and he was allowed no magazines, no books except a Bible. There was nothing he could do but sit or lie on his bunk, and think, or cry, or pray.
Alone on his bunk, his mind went back to the day he took the polygraph, to the questioning that had followed. A Thursday, he thought it had been, but he was no longer sure; time stood still in the jail. The days blended together, with absolutely nothing to do; the mind played tricks. He was not good with names, words, spelling. He’d been in slow-learner classes all through school. This was evident a few days later, when he put down on paper, at the request of a lawyer, his version of what had transpired during the questioning. He wrote his account with a ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, on both sides of the page. The most notable misspelling was that of the first name of his friend, Karl Fontenot. He spelled it repeatedly as “Carol.”
This is part of what he wrote:
Mr. Smith shuck my hand when I came in the door and had me to wate. I waited for about 2 hours wile they was back in the back room talking. Then they came and got me and a OBI agent ask me if I had anything to drink or taken any drugs in the last 24 hours. I told him I drank a cuple of beers last night. Then he said, did you take any dope. I said, I don’t do dope. Then he gave me the number test. Then he told what number it was then showed me the test. So then he ask me the questions about the girl missing and I answered him no on all of them. Then he ask me some more questions about the girl missing and I answered no on them. Then he told me to go back in and have a seat that he would be in, in a minnit. So I went back in the room and then about 5 minits later he came back in. Then he checked the test. Then he said, what do you think. I said, I know I passed. And now they can see I didnt do it. Then I started to get up to leve. Then he said fraid not you flunked the test. I about fell out of my seet. Then he said do you want to talk about it. I said, thers nothing to talk about cause I didn’t do it. Then he said the looks of these test you know something. I said I know I didnt do it. Then he went to the door and got Mr. Smith and the OBI agent. Then the OBI agent said, what do you know about it. I said I dont know nothing I didnt do it. Then he said, you do to know something about it or you wouldnt have flunked the test. Then he said, you did it, or you played a part in it. I said no I dont know nothing about it. Then he said, you do know something. Then I said, after people comming up to me I had a dream. And Mr. Smith questioning me. Then he said when did I have this dream. I told him after Mr Smith questioning me that was the night I had a dream. Then OBI he ask me what did I dream about. I told him.
