by Jax Miller
Hope.
At night, the trailers of northeastern Oklahoma are tiny specks in the distance, single spotlights to mark their existence against an encompassing realm of stars. I look out at them and imagine it’d be nothing for the sky to just suck them up through a straw. By day, the flaxen pastures are endless, impossible to distinguish one acre from another. There are so many places to hide, so many hidden things, so many places to hide a body. I think to myself that Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman could be anywhere and nowhere at once.
“I don’t know why I connect to Shane more than anyone else in this story,” I say to my husband. Of course, I grow to love the missing girls in the way artists love their work, but they are different from me, wholesome, and good, and I’ll always struggle to empathize.
“Maybe that’s because you were just like Shane when you were his age,” he says.
Of course, he is right.
So little is documented about the death of Shane Freeman, so I go to the archivists in Vinita, a group of elderly women who speak in tongues of conspiracy and murmurs in the back of the library (they’ve since moved to the back of a funeral parlor, I’m told). Meet us in the graveyard at night, they request, cautious of people listening in on our conversation. Though I’m sure there are places other than cemeteries to ensure privacy, I think they like the air of spookiness surrounding the idea. We flip through piles of scrapbooks they’ve spent years collecting while they twist their necks to glance over their shoulders. They’re a living, breathing microfiche collected. I could spend years here in black and white, as these ladies have, but I’m only here for so long. I take as many pictures of the articles as I can on my phone to read later.
Over time, I listen to several competing narratives of how Shane died at the hands of CCSO deputy David Hayes: that he was shot once in the chest or four times in the back, that he died on the side of the road or he died while climbing a nearby fence, that Shane wasn’t armed at all, that he witnessed deputies doing something illegal and was killed for it. Without any surviving records and without an autopsy report, it seems unlikely that I’ll ever find out the truth, and David Hayes hasn’t publicly spoken of the incident in twenty years, not even once. But I’m not the first person to come across these roadblocks: I read articles of a public dispute over Shane’s death between law enforcement and the Joplin Globe.
Before I’d get to hear the Freeman family’s side of things, I sit with then CCSO sheriff George Vaughn, the man initially in charge of the investigations into both Shane’s death and the murders of Shane’s parents. I get the opportunity to speak with Vaughn several times before he gets too sick to leave home on his own. Nearing his eightieth birthday, today he is the pastor of a community Baptist church, prefacing that he has Alzheimer’s disease, forewarning of vague recollections … Maybe so. He is heavyset, his movements painfully slow. Despite this, he speaks clearly.
“David Hayes was a seasoned officer,” Vaughn says. When not sipping his mocha, he passes his cane from hand to hand like a tic, as though wavering between choices, maybe variations of the truth. Each time we meet, he defends David Hayes, stating that the shooting of Shane Freeman was justifiable. “My officer did as he was trained to do.”
All I have of the dispute between the Joplin Globe and the sheriff’s office are phone shots of black-and-white articles from the graveyard girls dating back to 2002, when George Vaughn was no longer in office. He was voted out the year following the murders in Welch, and fifty-two-year-old Jimmie L. Sooter took office in January 2001. The debate started when the Joplin Globe filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for an investigative report into the 1999 shooting of Shane. It seemed that the timing of the public-record request aligned with the inauguration of a new sheriff. Only one month after taking office, “Sooter had said his policy was to deny all open-records requests. He also said he believed that the records from the Shane Freeman case were missing,” according to the Joplin Globe. When the paper noted that the new sheriff was “violating the Oklahoma Open Records Act,” Sooter referred to the article as “deceitful,” citing the sheriff’s office’s efforts to locate the records and claiming that he was falsely accused of such a violation.
After some back-and-forth between the newspaper and the CCSO, the Joplin Globe looked to District Attorney Gene Haynes, whose role it was to ultimately decide whether or not to bring charges against David Hayes and/or the sheriff’s office on behalf of the state of Oklahoma for the killing of Shane. According to the Joplin Globe, on April 11, 2002, DA Haynes personally wrote the following response:
Several weeks ago I received a letter from your paper complaining that Craig County Sheriff James Sooter had refused your request for information about the shooting death of Shane Freeman by Deputy David Hayes. As a result, we asked Sheriff Sooter to try and locate the report of the case so we could send you the information that is required under the Oklahoma Open Records Act. Sheriff Sooter informed us that he was unable to find any records of the case. As you know, the shooting of Shane Freeman occurred during the term office of the previous sheriff, George Vaughn. I believe the reports of the shooting may have been lost during the changeover of sheriffs and that Sheriff Sooter honestly cannot find them in his office.
It wouldn’t be the first time that this line of defense—evidence becoming lost during the course of sheriff changeovers—would show up in this case, and it was an excuse I’d curse frequently.
Former sheriff Vaughn asserted that the records had been in his office when he left the job. Even from his near-finished mocha in an ice-cream parlor in Vinita, he maintains this. “Well, it’s protocol, really,” he says. “Whenever there’s a police-involved shooting, we call in the OSBI.” This was another place for the Joplin Globe to reach out to in its continued attempts to obtain the investigative report.
But when the Joplin Globe asked the OSBI for these records, OSBI spokeswoman/public information director Kym Koch publicly cited that because of confidentiality clauses, all OSBI reports were protected by state law. She did, however, acknowledge that the DA’s office was in a position to release such documents if it saw fit, with legal records more subject to the public’s petitions than the state’s investigative documents with the OSBI. This seemed to push the blame back on the DA’s office, and soon, the Oklahoma Press Association intervened, urging all officials to do their best to locate the report. After this, DA Haynes’s secretary “located copies of Vaughn’s records,” much to the skepticism of the community.
Under the pressure of an increasingly dubious public, DA Haynes admitted that they had found approximately fifty pictures of Shane’s crime scene, as photographed by the OSBI. He also publicly blamed the CCSO for their loss, adding that they’d also found “two rolls of exposed film as evidence obtained at the crime scene,” as well as a videotape of the crime scene made by OSBI agent Dennis Franchini. Despite this, there is no public evidence of these items today.
Now-retired OSBI agent Franchini kindly declines to comment when I reach out to him, citing state statutes.
In 2002, the public dispute between the Joplin Globe and the DA’s office ended when the newspaper received a twenty-nine-page investigative report on Shane’s shooting death, which included ten pages of reports from the CCSO, seven pages from the McAlester Police Department (Shane fled on foot from one of their officers after a car chase a couple of days before his death), and twelve pages of autopsy and medical examiner’s reports, along with a personal note from Gene Haynes. However, the Joplin Globe never released its findings, and when I contact them to inquire about the report, they refer me to the investigative reporter, who is also unable to locate his findings.
Having contacted all pertinent agencies, I am left with not much more than some newspaper archives, and my thumb up my ass. I have no official reports saying how Shane died and no statements, and the sequence of events immediately following the shooting remains unknown to me, outside of alternating rumors that range anywhere from troubled
kid to Clyde Barrow incarnate.
Have you checked flight records? The graveyard girls tilt their heads down to look at me over the rims of their glasses.
In an effort to track down the investigative report with the DA’s office, now headed up by Matt Ballard, I encounter more disappointment. “After a search of our records, we are unable to locate any documents responsive to your request. The report you are referencing—if it ever existed as a record in our office—was apparently created 15 years ago and by people who haven’t been employed in this office for many years. Our staff undertook a diligent search to attempt to locate any open records responsive to your request, but did not find any,” writes the chief of the civil division on behalf of the DA. I am astounded that its very existence can be called into question when the authors of the report are former employees of that same office.
Further attempts to personally reach DA Gene Haynes go unanswered.
In the days of this dispute, Haynes adamantly stood by David Hayes’s defense after reviewing all the evidence made available to his office: he announced that they had “determined that the shooting death of Shane Freeman was justified.” He declared that while David’s eyewitness statement is the only eyewitness statement available, the evidence and autopsy records support it. “I could find no evidence on which to base a criminal charge against David Hayes.”
This is the official record as it stands today.
In 1999, Danny Freeman did not agree with the claim of self-defense—and by the time I reached Oklahoma, there wasn’t a person familiar with the case who didn’t believe that in the wake of his son’s death, a “full-on war” developed between Danny and some of the deputies of the CCSO, which included Deputy David Hayes, Undersheriff Mark Hayes, Deputy Troy Messick, Lieutenant Jim Herman, Investigator Charles (Charlie) Cozart, and Sheriff George Vaughn. All of these men were present at Shane’s crime scene, and with the exception of David Hayes, these very men would be present at the Freeman fire in December 1999 as well.
David Hayes was merely off duty when the call of the fire came in.
But it wasn’t just Shane’s death and the controversy surrounding it that later led people to believe that the police had had some involvement in the murders of Kathy and Danny. Not only was the timing deeply suspect, but in the months following Shane’s death, Kathy and Danny were exploring their options with the hopes of filing a wrongful-death suit against the county.
The couple, who had two years to file, was murdered nine days before what many people I spoke to mistakenly believed was the final filing deadline, just one year after Shane’s death.
13
* * *
BOYFRIEND, JEREMY HURST, AND POP POP, GLEN FREEMAN
* * *
I come to Welch at night alone. The “ky-oats” are loud in the hills. I can smell a trace of fire, as though it’s a memory, but it’s a hazy memory, and I try to fill in the gaps. Can anyone really know what happened here? I suppose if they did, I wouldn’t be here, where night comes as a wave from the hills, and I’m suffocating in the smoke.
When my nerves slacken, so does the prairie. I listen.
“It was just like any other night,” Jeremy tells me. Jeremy Hurst, Ashley’s then boyfriend and the last known person to see the Freemans alive, becomes one of my first sources, and he is the first person to bring me to this spot, which I revisit so many times over the years. He is short, a Bluejacket boy with ice-blue eyes under the cream-colored rim of a Stetson. He tells me that on the night of Ashley’s birthday, he gave her a necklace, a heart-shaped pendant on a silver chain with her birthstone, turquoise, now listed in the last seen wearing section of Ashley’s missing-person flyer, as is Jeremy’s class ring. “I loved her,” he tells me.
Today, Jeremy is a truck driver who tends to his family farm, still pressed into the ranches of Bluejacket. We talk in his pickup truck after leaving the convenience store where Ashley used to work in the center of Welch (it was called Roscoe’s back in 1999, though the store’s name changes several times in my years here until finally being demolished). It was one of those regulars’ joints that sell pork rinds and heat-lamp chicken, from where I would leave with the smell of grease stuck in my hair and clothes for the rest of the day. Jeremy and I also pass where his grandmother used to run her store across the street, where he was invited one last time to be with his girlfriend and family on the night of the murders. Jeremy doesn’t even look in that direction, and I don’t ask for the sake of small-talk bullshit.
“Are there regrets?” I ask him.
Not blinking, he looks out to the road ahead as we drive toward West of Welch. “I wonder. Maybe if I was there … maybe there was something I could have done.”
For the ride that takes us from one end of Welch to the other, the very route the Freemans daily took, Jeremy and I talk about the night he last saw them. “We all ate cake and drank soda, and there really wasn’t much more to it,” he tells me, an account that remains unchanged over the years and also corroborates what the medical examiner’s report showed in the stomachs of Danny and Kathy. “When I left at about ten o’clock, Ashley and Lauria were just hanging around, watching TV,” he says. “It was a hunting show.” In our side-view mirrors, nothing but dust—what’s behind us no longer exists. Before us, the blond vertigo of summer-lit prairies.
Jeremy and I also discuss his getting the news of the fire the morning after while putting the cattle away on his family farm. “My grandmother was the one who told me that there’d been a fire. I didn’t know there was a body until later on. But I just blanked out. I can’t say. I jumped into my pickup truck and got to the trailer as fast as I could.” It’s the very path we’re on at this moment. “When I got there, one of the deputies smirked and said to me, ‘Looks like someone’s gonna be spending New Year’s Eve alone.’ I couldn’t believe he’d say something like that to me. My feelings were all over the place. But soon after, they took me behind the trailer, where they questioned me.”
Over the years, Jeremy and I grow close. He’ll invite me to his wedding, and I’ll eat corn-battered catfish with his wife and daughters. Maybe, when we first meet, I should be a little more apprehensive about jumping into the truck of the last person to see four people alive, but I enjoy the view of the countryside and the smell of fresh-cut hay in the air flowing through the truck’s windows. “At one point, the agents came over and asked to see my guns,” says Jeremy. “So I showed them, and they saw they were collecting cobwebs. They told me to clean my guns and left.” We sit the rest of the way in silence, and I feel inspired by the land around us. The quietness is comfortable.
“By God, that tore him up,” Jeremy’s mother once told me as we sat on the bleachers at a Bluejacket football game that Jeremy refereed across the field. Before us, Friday Night Lights and a line of cheerleaders dressed in virginal white radiated from the sidelines, the very squad in which Lauria cheered years before. Around us, bake sales and coolers of lemonade, and a raffle for an honest-to-God .22 caliber rifle. “It was just tragic,” Jeremy’s mother continued. “Jeremy hides it. He’s always joking and smiling. But it was just so hard for him.”
But back during the drive into the heart of West of Welch, I am surrounded by pure gold so that I’ll see the same color imprinted behind my eyelids later that night when trying to sleep in a blanket of aloe vera gel. I dream of being a scarecrow, static and exposed in the middle of the prairie. My head throbs from the raw sunlight as the day wears on, arms tender with sunburn.
As Jeremy and I drive up through the surrounding ranches, we rise suddenly to a view of hills and trees that had been obscured by the blinding sun. It’s as though the land picks up a pulse, and nestled in those hills is the Freeman farm.
Jeremy slows the truck near a pair of stone-and-wire pillars at the end of the Freemans’ long driveway. Also on the other three corners of the forty-acre property, the structures were erected by all four Freemans, evidence of their labor, of their existence. A pair at the drivewa
y and three more across the way, the pillars seem to represent the two friends, and the other three Freemans I already know to be dead. It is here, Lorene Bible will tell me, that she comes when she wants to pay respects to her missing daughter.
While I’m not a bashful woman, and I have no issue with knocking on strangers’ doors, I’m warned about Danny Freeman’s father, said to have settled on the property. “You go up there, you’re askin’ for trouble.”
When the truck stops and the engine dies down, the sounds of the countryside are clear and beautiful; the shade stops the hisses of the sun and the vultures circle overhead. Vultures, at every subsequent visit, always seem to circle over West of Welch. At the top of this hill is a light-colored trailer, newer than the Freemans’ was before it was reduced to nothing.
The day starts to ease toward dusk, and my eyes keep wandering up to the trailer, to the windows sparkling like flames in the softening sun, and I try to catch a glimpse into the past. And then, as I’d half hoped and half feared, a group of small dogs appears at the top of the hill where the trailer home sits, barking.
“Have you met Danny Freeman’s father?” I ask Jeremy.
“I have not.”
The heat has left me smelling like bone broth as I wait for a man who I’ve heard will kill me if he feels the need. Soon, a revving four-wheeler comes crookedly downhill toward us, driven by a cowboy in white. I don’t want it to seem like I’m up to anything shady, so I move farther up the hill to meet him, stopping at the barbed wire fence until he arrives. From where I stand, the trailer is up ahead, a little to the left at my ten o’clock; Glen loops around so that he pulls up to my two o’clock. I quickly realize that this is so his mounted rifle points straight at me, which doesn’t bother me so long as his hands are off of it. He comes in a white cowboy hat and with a collie at his quad’s side, plaid shirt starch stiff. In the shade of his hat, the man’s face bears distinctive burn scarring, dappled like lacework, and a portion of his nose is missing. I reach over the barbed wire fence and shake hands with Danny Freeman’s father, Glen Freeman.
