Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  At around this time, Dwayne Vancil, who had failed to glean any clues as to Danny’s whereabouts from the hunting family up at the cabin, returned to the property. He was waved over by the Bibles and found himself looking down at his stepbrother’s body in the wreckage. “I felt like I knew right away what’d happened here,” said Dwayne. “Danny told me where to look if something happened to him. Well, it did, didn’t it?”

  The CCSO returned between seven and seven thirty a.m.—I imagine a little red-faced—and began to cordon off the area once again with crime scene tape. From there, they called the OSBI back and waited. Aware of the scrutiny this monumental oversight would undoubtedly bring to the bureau, OSBI agent Steve Nutter returned with ten to twelve more agents in tow to oversee the rest of the investigation.

  Deputies asserted that what they were doing was going to be a repeat of the day before.

  “Oh, no, it won’t be!” Lorene exclaimed. Despite several attempts to clear the Bibles from the scene, Lorene was having none of it. “I ain’t leaving here today, boys. You can tie your tape to the mirror of my vehicle, but we’re not moving. I’m not going to be in your back pocket today. I’m going to be in your front pocket. We’re not leaving here until we know that this place has been searched thoroughly this time.”

  The OSBI objected, trying to explain to her that she needed to let them do their job.

  If maybe for the first time, Lorene raised her voice. “I stood down that road yesterday and let you do your job. There were nine of you who told me that y’all were one hundred percent sure that there wasn’t another body in here. So we’re not leaving till we take this sucker to the ground.”

  When the OSBI continued to try to affirm their authority, she stubbornly reminded them that they’d already released the crime scene over to Dwayne the evening before. “You had your day. Now it’s mine.”

  From here, it seemed that every man, woman, and child in town came to aid the Bibles in their crusade to find the girls. By nine o’clock, they were already lining the driveway leading up to the trailer, waiting on the Bibles’ command to storm the trailer, like lightning waits for God’s permission to strike.

  Medical Examiner Donna Warren arrived late, having been held up at yet another fatal car accident. Wide-eyed, she came onto the Freeman property for the second time in twenty-four hours. “What the hell happened here?” she asked one of the deputies. “Who found the body?”

  The deputy hung his head and pointed at Lorene, who only stared back at Warren in the fixed-gaze demeanor that makes Lorene the imposing figure that she is.

  “This is bad,” said Warren. “This is real bad.”

  No gun was found within reaching distance of Danny, ruling out any suspicion of a murder-suicide. Soon after, his body was removed. At this, the Bibles sprang into action.

  God Himself couldn’t have stopped Lorene from going into the crime scene. She figured that any evidence left behind would have surely been destroyed by the fire. And since authorities failed to find an entire body in the small trailer, she couldn’t trust them to find anything relevant, anything that might point them in the direction of the girls. It was now up to the families. Agents from the OSBI and deputies of the CCSO, about twenty-five in total, stood back as Lorene took over the crime scene, along with approximately a hundred fifty volunteers under her command storming the trailer: distant relatives and high school friends of the girls, neighbors and strangers alike. Even staff from the local funeral parlor came, erecting a canopy tent about fifty feet from the trailer to hand out sandwiches and drinks.

  “It was a sideshow,” Lauria’s cousin Lisa admits. “There were so many people there who helped us, but not everyone. Some were just nosy, even letting their kids run around. I even remember people calling out mothers not to let their three- or four-year-old kids let loose to find another body, God forbid.” Some even came and parked on the property just to watch it all unfold, refusing to help at all.

  For the first time in recent memory, Welch came to life. The resistance to authority brought on by Lorene, Jay, and Dwayne spread through the residents like a fever. They came by horseback and tractor, insulated in their flannels and with cups of breakfast blend to pepper the dirty blond prairie. Locals withstood the cold and the chaos, restless in spirit and in mind. They came with thermoses of coffee to keep alert those who’d stayed long, and others came with bottles of water to wash the taste of char from their mouths.

  The many agents of the OSBI watched, contained, like boys kicked out of their classrooms, their buttonlike eyes lined at the sidelines of the crime scene. The family directed neighbors to rip out the floorboards until hitting the air between the trailer and the ground. A line of nearly one hundred people formed down the long driveway, equipped with makeshift sieves, an assembly line to receive handfuls of clumpy ash, sifting for something, anything, that could be a clue. Many bones from the animals whose heads were mounted on the Freemans’ walls were found in the debris. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for; they were hoping only to recognize it when they found something.

  With her face blackened by wet ash like war paint, Lorene overheard one of the agents say that she was letting everyone destroy the crime scene.

  “It can’t be messed up any worse than you did yesterday,” she called over her shoulder. “So if you’re going to be a part of this, you’re just going to have to do it our way.” Lorene went through the larger pieces of rubble first: what remained of the couch, the chairs, the icebox. If the girls had been lost in the fire, they were going to find them, come hell or high water. While Lorene stood as the head of the crime scene, Jay and Dwayne were a two-man command center working from the Freemans’ yard, where they organized a grid search on the forty-acre property, including volunteers who came via horseback, some even taking their canoes to the creek in the back. It took all that they had not to rip off their own skin out of sheer determination, urgency, and frustration.

  “Look no further than right there,” said Kathy’s mother and stepfather, who’d sat in their parked Astro van at the end of the driveway, looking up at the action. They locked their eyes on the men in uniform, and burst out in abrupt accusation. “They’re the ones who did this, and they’re all going to burn in hell for it too.” But few seemed to mind the couple, who’d always been known for barking like crows, made of wild tales and batty superstitions.

  Dwayne kept an eye on Sissy the Rottweiler, who went to the end of the driveway several times and howled in only one direction, where the road met the driveway to create a T intersection. It was assumed, and accepted today, that the lump with the dried blood on top of Sissy’s head was the result of the butt of a shotgun. Even as he organized the searches, Dwayne became convinced that the girls must have traveled in the direction of Sissy’s whimpers. As a regular visitor to the Freeman home, he also recognized that something was missing from the house—the hundreds of arrowheads and their cases, absent from the walls, along with several buckets full of other arrowheads and tomahawks.

  I ask Dwayne if he thinks the arrowheads could have been the motive. “I think they were more of a trophy,” he answers.

  Lorene and her volunteers cut the axles on the trailer, and together, they pulled the entire home apart. It would take several more days, but there wasn’t a piece of ash any bigger than a small stone that went unturned. Later in the afternoon of that second day, Lorene found her daughter’s purse at the north wall, where Ashley’s bedroom (formerly Shane’s) used to stand. Inside the purse, Lauria’s ID and Christmas cash, totaling about two hundred dollars. She also found Lauria’s partly burned pajama top in the remnants of Ashley’s bedroom, which suggested to her that the fire had started prior to Lauria and Ashley’s getting ready for bed, or that someone made them change out of their pj’s into something else.

  Family and volunteers also found thirteen guns belonging to the Freemans, placing them out in the front yard, one by one. It occurred to everyone that any one of the guns could have
been the murder weapon, but on the front lawn they’d stay for at least a week, none of them collected as evidence by the agents or officers nearby.

  The possibility of one of the guns being the one used to kill Kathy and Danny remains unexamined today.

  Evening was closing in; damned be the short nights of winter. But the Bibles refused to let darkness threaten their efforts to find the girls. Thanks to the Rural Electric Cooperative, a nonprofit electricity producer owned and operated by the people of northeastern Oklahoma, lights were hung around the property to make this little corner of the pitch-black countryside sparkle and glow through the night next to the veils of the plains. Another local brought light plants, illuminating the property like the football fields of local Friday night lights.

  Once again, at the close of day, the authorities left.

  While the world celebrated the new millennium, and Y2K turned out to be a lemon, the search for the girls at the Freeman property continued into the third day, and into the year 2000. Far from the confetti and noisemakers and hangovers, Welch became a well-oiled machine, functioning without sleep, too distracted to acknowledge the world’s ringing in of New Year’s Day.

  Jay Bible said the good Lord put it in his heart to call the radio station and appeal for help, and because of it, there were nearly five hundred volunteers on the scene that third morning. This time, the grid search expanded to a five-mile radius, with Jay and Dwayne delegating small groups to different sections of the property. Each small thing they stumbled on was marked by volunteers, who’d shout out for word to get back to Jay and Dwayne so that they could collect the evidence themselves. It was the family, and not law enforcement, who laid down the evidence markers.

  That morning, there was no sign of law enforcement returning at all.

  In the afternoon, Lorene enlisted the help of a family friend to make missing-persons posters for both Lauria and Ashley at their office supply house. After picking the flyers up, Lorene drove to an acquaintance down at the Vinita Police Department to confirm that the girls had been properly entered into the databases of the NCIC, as OSBI agent Nutter said he would on the evening of December 30.

  “The girls aren’t in here,” the acquaintance replied after pulling up the database on her computer.

  “That’s impossible,” answered Lorene. “Steve Nutter said that he was submitting all the info. You mean to tell me there’s no alert out there for them? No one is out there looking for the girls?” For Lorene, it was another dispiriting sign that she was on her own, that law enforcement was not acting in the best interests of her missing daughter. “Well, what the hell do I have to do to get the girls in there and their faces out there?”

  The acquaintance advised Lorene that she had to go to the sheriff’s office herself, that she’d have to sign for Lauria, and that there would have to be a next of kin there to sign for Ashley. At that, Lorene stepped outside the station and called Celesta, pleading with Kathy’s mother to go to the sheriff’s office and sign for her granddaughter.

  Kathy’s mother, Celesta, and stepfather, Bill Chandler, were an unusual couple. They kept to themselves, isolated in the nameless outskirts of Vinita with dozens of cats and dogs in a small trailer, which you could smell from the road. The couple was paranoid, perhaps rightfully so, given their family’s history, but it went further than that. Years later, they tell me about the helicopters that nearly crash into their house each week and the devices in their walls. They would stay half-dressed throughout the day and scan the skies for spying planes. When I sat outside with them for several hours one particularly hot afternoon, Bill spent the entire interview spraying hundreds of flies with some household chemical spray. It was because of this paranoia that Celesta initially refused to cooperate with Lorene and sign for Ashley to be entered into the NCIC database. “She was screaming and hollering, like she always does,” said Lorene. “But I told her I didn’t care what she thought, that she just needed to get here.” With Lorene not taking no for an answer, Celesta submitted, meeting Lauria’s mother at the sheriff’s office to sign for Ashley. The girls then were officially entered into the database and listed as missing.

  Lorene raced back to the Freemans’, and handed out the flyers to various individuals and groups who ventured on out of Welch to circulate the girls’ faces as far and wide as they could. At this point, local media started gathering. The girls’ school photos started to adorn telephone poles and storefront windows. Large magnets with their faces were affixed to the sides of interstate trucks. Phone booths displayed the flyers.

  A couple unaffiliated with the police came with a pair of scent dogs and offered to help. Led by their owners, the dogs started at Lauria’s pajama top and Ashley’s pillow up by the trailer and hightailed it down the driveway. Everyone on the scene stopped what they were doing for that heart-stopping moment, spinal fluid like ice water at the sight of the bloodhounds chasing the smell of the girls. The hounds went fast, skimming their snouts across the cold ground and past hundreds of volunteers. At the end of the driveway, they turned in one direction and sped along the edge of the property. It was the same direction in which the Rottweiler Sissy had howled. At a ford in the stream, floodwater from the creek forced the dogs to stop. At the water’s edge, the dogs continued to look on, barking and howling, noses pointed in one direction.

  On that third day, at about four p.m., Agent Steve Nutter arrived on the scene to check in. He was described as strutting from his car with his white ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots, looking more like an oil tycoon than an agent for the OSBI, and he asked Lorene, “So, what’d you all get done today?”

  She didn’t take to his smugness. “We’ve done a grid search five to ten miles out. We’ve got people driving out there and getting the word out. Now we’re getting their faces out there with these flyers. And they’re on the NCIC.”

  “That’s because I put them in there.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I went to town, and I had them look for me. And guess who wasn’t in the system. I had to force Celesta Chandler down there to the sheriff’s office and sign for Ashley while I signed for Lauria. That’s how the girls got there.”

  Nutter’s blood pooled in his face. “Well, no. I was about to,” he stuttered.

  Lorene gestured to one of the young cameramen to film Nutter as she began to give him a tongue-lashing. “This guy’s getting you on tape. You did nothing, nothing, to find my child. Another day … they could be in Canada, in Mexico. Hell, they could be overseas at this point! You said you were going to enter the girls into the NCIC, but guess who did. I did.”

  Years later, I’d get one of my law enforcement sources to pull up the missing girls on the NCIC databases, which aren’t open to the public. The date of submission supported Lorene’s timeline; they were entered into the system on January 1, 2000, three days after the fire. It did not align with Nutter’s belief that the girls were entered into the system the night Kathy’s body was found.

  Among the hundreds of volunteers who came to aid in the search were two private investigators, named Tom Pryor and Joe Dugan, who’d heard of the murders on a local news program. Abandoning his trust in law enforcement, Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne, hired them on the spot, paying them one dollar to take on the case. The private investigators accepted.

  Tom Pryor had been an investigator in law enforcement for twenty-eight years before running his own private company for fourteen, while his partner, Joe Dugan, was a bounty hunter and a friend of Pryor’s for thirty years. They referred to themselves as a dynamic duo, also sporting ten-gallon hats. As soon as they went on the clock, they joined the search party and began combing the property. At the end of the driveway, about fifty feet from the road, Tom Pryor came across a car-insurance-verification card, one belonging to a woman who sounded familiar to no one. Studying the card, Pryor glanced around him; it didn’t seem to have come from the ashes, and it was far enough from the trailer th
at it struck him as peculiar. PI Pryor had been at this game a long time, and the insurance card of an unknown female this close to a rural road might be nothing—or it might be something.

  Pryor walked back up the incline of the driveway, past the dogwoods and bois d’arcs where Ashley and Lauria had collected food for the goats only days before, and asked around for who was in charge, at least on an official level. After a moment, he found Agent Steve Nutter. Introducing himself, Pryor held out the card. “This might be of some interest to you. Might be nothing, but every little thing counts in these things, don’t they?”

  Nutter looked down at Pryor, curling his lip. “Why don’t you leave this investigation to the big boys, eh?”

  “Well, I just thought—”

  “We don’t need any PIs coming around here, screwing things up for us. Keep it up, and I’ll have your license revoked so fast, you won’t even know what hit you.”

  At a loss, Pryor pulled out his wallet as Nutter turned and walked away.

  His partner, Joe Dugan, moved over toward him. “Whatcha got there?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Pryor. “But I think we’ll find out.”

  The days went on without any answers, and those days became weeks, became years, became decades. Today, there is no doubt in Jay’s, Lorene’s, or Dwayne’s minds that Lauria and Ashley did not die in the fire.

  Welch defrosted into springtime, there to distract its residents with its warmth and the seasonal obligations of its farmers. Life simply went on for everyone. Still, light didn’t dim for the families who bound themselves to the pasturage of Welch. Their eyes stayed wide and their focus was kept narrow but far-reaching.

  Almost two decades later, that’s never changed, nor has the sealed-lipped land that offers no closure. But time continues on against their will. Time is something that people don’t feel until it turns against them. Where it’s thought to heal all, for the parents of any missing child it only tears the cut wider; sands of time become grains of salt to an open, bleeding wound.