Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  We shuffle through some small talk, Glen hesitant to speak on the record or move past this grassy spot, where I continue to speak from the dirt road’s ditch over barbed fencing. After about fifteen minutes, I convince him to let us up to the property, where I hope to see the spot at the top of the hill where the Freemans once lived. He gives us permission to drive up onto his land, revving his quad back uphill as I hop in the back of Jeremy’s pickup truck. The temperature begins to drop as we make our way up the driveway. It is my first visit to the Freeman farm. For reasons I cannot explain, there in the back of the pickup, the sight sticks with me; seconds of memory stretch across sunbeams from the hills and shimmering fields. It’s easy for me to see why Danny Freeman chose here as a place to plant roots with his family all those years ago. This was the sight they saw when settling in after long days of work, the view of coming home. It is peaceful. But knowing what I know, I find it is also chilling.

  It will be my first of countless visits here.

  “The problem is,” Glen begins before I can even hop out from the back of Jeremy’s truck, “nobody wants to hear that this had to do with the sheriff’s office.”

  Glen is as stern as they get, an obsolete type of the John Wayne era, always full of tales of glory days delivered in a low, hoarse voice. “I once punched a man so hard in the gut that it reached his spine, had his head in the toilet for hours” is one of many. At eighty years old, he is slower than he likes to see himself, white hair thin over a patchwork of liver spots and burns and topped with a Stetson. He explains that the scars are surgical on account of skin cancer as Jeremy and I follow him into his trailer.

  Because of his partially missing nose, he sniffs often, a near-constant nasal drip he has to stop and wipe. He admits that his appearance makes him self-conscious. “People would rather think I’m a crazy old man up here.” Through the back door, we go outside, where the Freeman trailer used to be.

  It is the first time I hear the prairie sing.

  The old sheds built by Danny still stand outside, pens full of goats and rams—a wild turkey nearly feels symbolic. Glen’s trailer is only a few yards south from where his son’s trailer sat; all that’s left of the latter today is a rectangular mark at the top of a slight sun-dried hill. Here, the grass is slightly discolored, with a utility pole and the same weeping willow on the burn’s west end. Just downhill at the back were the sounds of the stream spilling over the concrete dam where Danny used to feed the turkeys and leave to go gigging for frogs. It is where the most circulated photo of the girls was taken sixteen years ago. Standing at the site of the former trailer, I feel a chill run through me that reminds me of being on hallowed ground, that sacrosanctity that shakes me: on this small patch of ground, there was life, there was a family, there was death. For the first time on this trip, I bless myself.

  “You’re standing right around where they found Danny’s body,” Glen says at one point with no visible emotion. The weeping willow that once grazed Ashley’s window is green and lush, rustling at my side where strips of sunlight whip across the former crime scene. As Glen walks me through the layout of the house, he talks about the case as if he’s talking to himself. “I think Kathy was across the bed that way because she was going for a shotgun I bought them, which they kept at the head of the bed,” says Glen. “God help them if she got her hands on it.”

  “Them,” I comment. “You think it was more than one person?”

  Glen nods, clarifying that it would have been damn near impossible for one person to kill two grown adults and hold the two girls hostage, while making the several trips it would have taken to get the many frames of arrowheads from the walls and out of there. Whether the arrowheads were a trophy or a motive, most of the people with direct knowledge I talked to over the years believe that Danny’s arrowheads seemed to have had something to do with the murders, and Glen was firmly in that camp, as were the Bibles, who viewed them more as a killer’s opportunity than a motive. The worth of the arrowheads varies, depending on whom I talk to, ranging anywhere from a few hundred dollars to forty thousand dollars.

  Arrowheads come up around many corners of my research, and I think back to my conversation with former OSBI agent Steve Nutter when I met him in Tulsa. “The family was concerned about the arrowheads. I, a little bit less so,” Nutter said. “Not to say that I wasn’t concerned, but less concerned than they were. I went to college in Emporia, Kansas, which is what they call the Flint Hills of Kansas. I was in a fraternity, and as all fraternity boys, we sometimes went to the country with kegs of beer and we’d build bonfires. And I know that flint explodes when it’s hot.”

  Lacking fire marshal reports and/or any reference to the arson investigation, I’ll later have a discussion with my friend Aaron Roper, whom I met in Oklahoma in the early days. As Oklahoma as they got, he was a knowledgeable man, and a former fire-operations specialist for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. “You would have found evidence of something. Rock and glass don’t disintegrate,” Aaron explained in regard to the dozens of frames of arrowheads in the Freeman trailer. “A house fire will burn at eleven hundred degrees. Not even gold will melt at that temperature. You would have found scorched arrowheads or melted glass.” I enjoyed playing devil’s advocate, trying to prove each opposing argument. But Aaron seemed to base his facts on science, and not fraternity keg parties, and while he acknowledged the same thing that Agent Nutter did, that flint might crack in extreme heat, he claimed it wouldn’t have disappeared. “Flint will burn at twenty-two hundred degrees. It takes eight hundred to cremate a body. The kind of heat you’re talking about to make the arrowheads and the glass cases disappear is the type of heat to come from nuclear heat.”

  “The family remained fixed on those arrowheads,” Nutter said in our conversation. “I’d follow every lead related to the arrowheads. They’d call and say, ‘Hey, so-and-so has got some arrowheads. It might be Danny’s,’ and I’d go out and see. But just never went anywhere with it. I don’t see it as a significant thing.”

  During that same interview, now lead OSBI agent Tammy Ferrari chimed in. “We’re still getting leads on arrowheads,” she said. “We still have tons of people call in on arrowheads.”

  Back inside Glen Freeman’s trailer in Welch, Danny’s father houses several dogs and even more rifles, many lying around on his tables and couch (I’ve learned this is not uncommon in Oklahoma). Like his son, Glen has built up an impressive arrowhead collection, which he shows me over several occasions. “I’m eighty years old now,” he tells me. “I don’t know if we’ll find the truth before it’s my time to go.” We speak for hours; Jeremy Hurst stays mostly quiet on the couch—when Glen speaks, you’re best off listening. By the time I finally come up for air, the sun is gone beyond the Flint Hills to the west.

  Today, what came of the missing arrowheads remains unknown.

  “Do you ever get scared?” I ask him. “Being up here all by yourself, knowing that the killer or killers are still out there somewhere?”

  Glen moves swiftly for an eighty-year-old man, and a gun appears from under the arm of the recliner in which he sits, and I’m staring down the barrel of his pistol. “You see this, Jack?” (He’ll never be able to pronounce “Jax.”) A rush of wind shoots up my sternum to my brain, that familiar jolt that warns of panic, but I am not scared. Anxiety can floor me sometimes, but I’m not a fearful person as a rule, and I know to keep still, to keep calm. “Someone comes up here, this is what they’re gonna get,” he continues with the gun pointed at me from across the room. I can tell Glen doesn’t mean this gesture to be menacing—or at least not to me specifically—but Glen propped in the chair, pistol in hand, will always feel like the most accurate portrait of the man I can imagine. It’s not the intent of his mind that scares me, but the unpredictability of an old cowboy’s mitts. “But you oughta be scared, Jack.” Glen slowly eases the pistol back to its resting place. “You would be if you knew what you were dealing with.”

  It’s more tha
n a year after I met Glen Freeman for the first time. Autumn in Oklahoma, when the days smell like fire and the nights smell like rain and the sun smelts like gold casting into the ingots that are the American prairies. I spend hours getting lost on the back roads west of Welch; Indian Country, the old-timers call it, but I always trace back to the two stone columns. The Freeman property becomes my home base, and every place in Welch from then on exists only in relation to the homestead. So-and-so lives ten miles north of the Freemans’. That one lives six miles west of the Freemans’. With so few landmarks on the blank canvases of northeastern Oklahoma, it has to be.

  One particular autumn day, I find Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, and father, Glen Freeman, under the awning of Glen’s trailer. I’m peculiar to them, with my bottle red hair, ripped jeans, and Echo and the Bunnymen shirt. Would you believe the kids are buying their jeans like that nowadays? Standing next to them was Chris, Danny’s stepsister, whom I’d met a couple of times before. She is attractive, with long silver-streaked hair and dark skin. Like her father, she is stern, strong, never one to let her eyes stray from mine. Like everyone here, she wants justice. But unlike her father, she is willing to let her grief show with tears when recounting the days of her family’s murders. Today, she is up from Louisiana, where I’ll visit her not long after to ride airboats over the alligator-infested bayous.

  “Come inside,” she says, nodding toward her father’s trailer. Leaving Dwayne and Glen outside, she takes me to a box she dug up from her father’s belongings and wordlessly hands me several letters. None of them is addressed to anyone in particular; rather they are statements, seemingly declarations of facts. One of them is a handwritten letter by Kathy’s mother, Celesta Chandler, dated the fall of 1999, a couple months prior to Danny’s and Kathy’s murders: nine pages detailing what went wrong with Shane’s death, the investigation, and the year following. These pages survived because Kathy, fearing for her safety, left copies in the care of her close friend DeAnna Dorsey and with Danny’s stepmother and Glen’s late wife (the mother of Dwayne and Chris).

  On the second letter, the words “ONE SHOT” are scrawled at the top of the page. This letter, which has not surfaced in this case before now, was penned by Kathy Freeman in the days before her burned body was discovered.

  I take photos of the words before I can read them.

  The letter reads like a testament to the betrayals and tragedies her family suffered, and holding those pages in my hands, I can’t help but wonder if, in those final days, Kathy knew she was going to die.

  14

  * * *

  THE LAST LETTER OF KATHY FREEMAN

  * * *

  I take the letters of Kathy Freeman and her mother, Celesta Chandler, back to my motel room, where I knock back a cup of cold coffee that’s been sitting there since before I left this morning. My stomach hates me for it. A storm outside, the sky detonates; my heart palpitates with the anticipation of dissecting the letters. In recent months, my body hasn’t been able to differentiate between enthusiasm and fear, so my excitement becomes a dreadful, sickly episode. I go over the same sentence over and over and over again. I hide the phone and take a deep breath. I do the opposite of instinct, since it hasn’t helped. Instead, I dare this thing to do its best. Suddenly, the breath reaches my belly. I start reading once more.

  According to the first letter written by Mrs. Chandler, in 1999, “A few weeks after Shane’s death, his father, Danny Freeman, met with a criminal lawyer in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His name was Tim Baker. He seemed interested in the case until he spoke to (ADA) Clint Ward.”

  I make the ninety-mile drive south and track Mr. Baker down in Tahlequah, the capital of Cherokee Nation. Now retired, Baker claims he can’t recall ever meeting the Freemans back in 1999.

  Likewise, upon reading this to Clint Ward, he comments, “I know Tim Baker and he is a good attorney. I don’t recall having any conversation with him [about this case], though.” I also track down a third lawyer, suggested by the family, in Tulsa who is also unable to recollect meeting with the Freemans.

  In her letter, Celesta Chandler alleges that attorney Tim Baker sent a letter to the Freemans that read, “The case would be too hard to win … the deputy [David Hayes] will never change his story.”

  “The thing was,” says Lorene when I ask her opinion on the death of Shane, “Danny sought out several lawyers, and every one of them told him that he didn’t have a case. And he just didn’t want to accept that.” Lorene seems a little more sympathetic to Kathy’s plight. “As a mother, she was just trying to understand what happened to her son.”

  I take my work to a large window that flashes in lavender and silver, my world fractured by lightning. But now I read what Kathy wrote in the days before her murder, the very declaration that hung from a cow magnet on her refrigerator. And as I read her words, I see a frustrated woman, a devastated woman, a woman hell-bent on justice for her son.

  I see a mother.

  My name is Kathy Freeman. I live west of Welch, OK—a Craig County resident all my life. My complaint is with the Craig County Sheriff’s Department. My son, Shane Freeman, who had just turned 17 on November 6, 1981, [sic] was shot and killed by Deputy David Hayes on January 8, 1999, with a shotgun within seconds of Deputy Hayes arriving on the scene. The location of the shooting was a dirt road out on the prairie approx. 14 miles west and 8 miles north of Welch. The shot entered in the back of Shane’s left elbow and enters the body 2 inches to the left of his nipple. I want the angle of the shot explained. Shane was shot at 4:30 pm but we were not notified until 10:15 pm by Sheriff Vaughn.

  If the law did everything right it was still wrong. The whole community of Welch and surrounding area knows this was wrong and they also want something done. Everyone that knows Shane believes that he wouldn’t have pulled a gun. David Hayes took drastic measures and he along with the whole Sheriff’s Dept. needs to be held accountable.

  The Craig County deputies have a bad attitude and they think they can get away with everything. They have been defensive from the start, harassed us, and tried to intimidate us. The following list is actions taken by the county that I feel is suspicious or odd.

  I am taken by her words, and suddenly, there is no more storm, either in my head or outside. It’s just Kathy and I, as if I’m sitting with her at her kitchen table back at the Freeman trailer, woodstove on, her world icy and black. Her pen to the paper, her words are anger-filled lacerations.

  Kathy goes on to list eight things that she believes are proof of wrongdoing by the Craig County Sheriff’s Office. The very first thing she lists is, “Flowers and wooden cross at road site were removed by county.” It seems that over time, crosses and the bouquets made by Shane’s family, namely by his younger sister, Ashley, were plucked from the side of that country road where Shane had taken his last breath. When I speak to the Freemans years later, they all feel certain that it was cruelty on the part of the sheriff’s office, which usually saw the tributes removed within a day of their being placed.

  “The county didn’t want any sign of sentiment,” says Danny’s stepsister, Chris. On top of the floral arrangements and memorials, all throughout Oklahoma, there were hand-painted signs created and erected by classmates reading JUSTICE FOR SHANE. They too were removed without a trace. Nearly twenty years later, I will see an original one in the front yard of Celesta and Bill Chandler.

  I imagine Kathy writing the letter through the smoke of a cigarette and light one for myself as Kathy continues.

  The second item on Kathy’s list reads: “Road graded immediately.”

  I try to get the records from the Craig County Commissioner’s Office to no avail, but I wasn’t really expecting that they’d have records of a road grading from nearly twenty years ago. According to family, the resurfacing of the road took place the day after Shane was killed. “A friend of mine called me and said they were grading the road,” Dwayne Vancil will tell me years later. “I called bullshit. So I go out there, and
sure enough.” Less than twenty-four hours after Shane’s death, the road where Shane was shot was graded from one end to the other, the top layers and stones shaved by the construction blade. The Freemans feel certain it was to get rid of evidence. Bearing in mind that it was the middle of winter, the middle of nowhere, the middle of where an investigation should have been conducted, the family says they cannot understand why there’d have been an urgent need for such a project.

  “Six hours before we were notified by sheriff” is third on Kathy’s list. The delay in informing the family would have been immediately apparent when the autopsies and statements of the officers on the scene were in their possession. According to media reports, Shane was shot at 4:20 p.m., and the family wasn’t notified until 10:15.

  I knew this information could be corroborated by Freeman family friend DeAnna Dorsey. A Welchan and one of Kathy’s closest confidantes, DeAnna worked as a nurse at Craig County General Hospital in Vinita. According to reports made by the Freemans, DeAnna learned of Shane’s death while working a shift in the ER, when Shane’s body was brought in for inspection by Medical Examiner Donna Warren. Shocked by the news and hoping to offer her support to the family, DeAnna headed straight to the Freeman trailer. But once there, she was surprised to realize that despite it now being several hours since the shooting, the Freemans had yet to receive the news. DeAnna couldn’t find the words to tell them. Since most reports say that DeAnna was there when Sheriff Vaughn delivered the news of Shane’s death to his parents, I knew she would have been able to confirm or deny Kathy’s charges, as well as the Freemans’ continued assertions that upon Sheriff Vaughn’s delivering the news, he’d told Kathy, Danny, Ashley, and DeAnna that there was “no gun visible,” that Shane hadn’t been armed at all.