Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  The Freemans disagree. “He was impressionable,” they claim. “DeAnna stood up to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office just days before.” The Freemans have long believed that DeAnna’s murder could be the connecting link to the murders of Danny and Kathy and the abductions of Ashley and Lauria. They stand firm in the belief that law enforcement hired Ricky Martin to shut DeAnna up. They also believe that this was the case for the murders of Danny and Kathy, as they were in the process of filing a wrongful-death suit against the county.

  The deaths of DeAnna Dorsey and Ricky Martin were handed off to the OSBI, as Martin’s was a police-related shooting. It unexpectedly shone a light on a mental health crisis that was sweeping over the state as swiftly as the methamphetamine epidemic, and calls emerged for the governor and the state commissioner for mental health to conduct a full-scale review of the incident. They, along with State Representative Joe Eddins, acknowledged that with the “downsizing of Eastern State and more emphasis on community-based treatment, the mentally ill are ending up in prisons.” The results of the inquiry were turned over to Governor Frank Keating and not released to the public. However, Commissioner Terry Cline of the ODMHSAS sent a letter to the governor, acknowledging that the ODMHSAS’s Consumer Advocacy Division’s investigation found that neither their own department nor local mental health providers were at fault.

  In December of 2001, widower Dale Dorsey expressed his anger, accusing Governor Keating of not taking his wife’s murder seriously and “turning a deaf ear” to the reality that his decisions for downsizing would inevitably cause something like this to happen in their community.

  “I would like to have the opportunity to pass pictures of my wife in the body bag out to state legislators and the governor,” Dale told the Tulsa World.

  “The downsizing has already occurred, it’s over,” said the mental health commissioner in the same article.

  The case of DeAnna Dorsey dwindled to only a few sentences in print at the back of local papers, a case that was never really fleshed out into something as locally momentous and tangible as the Bible-Freeman case. Her family kindly rejects my requests to speak with them. All I have on DeAnna today is a grainy still shot of the woman in her matching teal trousers and blouse, sitting in the audience of a talk show that never aired.

  Today, the people of Craig County are split as to DeAnna’s murder being a senseless act of violence versus the conjecture that her murder was fundamentally connected to the Freeman murders and the prior death of Shane, with her brave decision to speak out against the CCSO positioning her in the firing line.

  Authorities never discovered a connection between the Dorsey and Freeman murders. Likewise, the Bibles, while acknowledging that it was a shocking coincidence worth looking into, do not agree that DeAnna’s death was connected to the Freeman murders or the disappearance of their daughter. Yet again, the two families found themselves on opposite sides of a growing rift, where the Freemans stood firm in their belief that Shane’s death and police corruption were at the core of the murders while the Bibles still alluded to drugs, a theory I’d soon examine.

  While I look into the Freeman family’s side of this significant story, it is just as important that I inspect the drug rumors they dismissed in favor of police corruption and cover-up. This drug angle, supported by the Bible family, carries me to the neighboring county of Ottawa, the northeasternmost corner of the state, punctuated with ghost towns and meth communities and the no-name terrains even some locals won’t drive through colloquially known as the Outlaw Lands.

  But despite their differences of opinion, the Freemans and the Bibles agreed on one thing: that no matter the reason, their loved ones’ case was not being investigated, leaving them to hire their own private investigators and to do the work themselves.

  SECTION 3

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  DRUGS

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  16

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  THE MOST TOXIC PLACE IN AMERICA

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  Oklahoma is breathtaking in more than one way; I can become spellbound by its beauty or smothered by its desolation. It’s important that I listen to the prairie, but just as important that I connect with its cancer. I have a difficult time thinking up a place like Picher, just a half-hour drive northeast from Welch, an environmental disaster that few outside the area have heard of, myself included before this investigation. It is a place that sounds like the nightmares of an apocalyptic wasteland, and back in the first weeks of 2000, private investigators Tom Pryor and Joe Dugan landed there after following up on the insurance card found at the Freeman property. After failing to grab OSBI agent Steve Nutter’s attention, they took it upon themselves to follow up on it.

  The Picher I come to acquaint myself with and the Picher of old are different worlds; to familiarize myself with the case, I must familiarize myself with this place, understand it in context. More than once, I ignore the government warning signs that decorate the white mountains of this ghost town just 1.75 miles south of the Kansas border. I wrap my arms tightly around the waist of a former local who describes himself as half white and half Quapaw, fearing the four-wheeler will tip over on the bone-colored gravel that makes up what are called “chat piles.” Hills of dolomite and limestone deposits long separated by way of ore processing during the country’s lead and zinc mining boom now dominate a once-thriving town, a town formerly referred to as the buckle in America’s Lead Belt. They glare from the majestic crow poison and dayflower fields like a string of pearls hanging from the Kansas border, now contaminated and toxic. Once silver and gold, the carcass of Picher is a cavity-riddled mouth that swallowed its homes and roads in its sinkholes and undermining hazards created when too much mining and hollowing out of the ground below weakened the land above.

  It is here that the prairie stops singing.

  The muscles in my eyes are tired, working hard against the white mountains that I stand on, causing gray shapes to move in and out of the abandoned homes below. This investigation turns the shadows of my fatigued psyche into killers always ready to meet me, swimming in paranoia and swift hallucinations.

  “Oklahoma’s Death Valley,” says seventy-five-year-old private investigator Tom Pryor. Today, he is retired and struggling with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), because of which our conversations are punctuated with coughing fits. “There’s no telling how many bodies are down there.” The breeze picks up, and I’m afraid to breathe in the air of this ghost town, but no one around me seems to mind. “All those mines and pits.”

  I assumed that the bright memories of Picher’s recent history wouldn’t be so faded in people’s minds. Some who’ve been scattered in the surrounding towns, like Miami (the pronunciation of which—“My-yam-uh”—I’ll forever be corrected on), Cardin, and Commerce, still proudly refer to themselves as Chat Rats, after all. (A couple thousand former Picher residents still gather at Christmastime to form a parade through the abandoned streets and past the rubble of old buildings.) But others want to keep this place as far from their thoughts as possible. Bitterness, as acrid as the chicory that weeds over at the town’s edges, lingers both in the air and in their souls. Today, the town is the Tar Creek Superfund site—a beneficiary of a government-implemented program designed to safely remove hazardous waste in accordance with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA chief once referred to Picher as “the most toxic place in America.” The name sticks.

  A decrepit sign at the town limits today welcomes me to Native America.

  But it wasn’t always this way. In its heyday, Picher was the heart of the Tri-State Mining District, an area of about twenty-five hundred square miles across northeastern Oklahoma, southeastern Kansas, and southwestern Missouri that produced nearly 75 percent of the bullets and bombshells used in World Wars One and Two. At its thirty-year peak, between the 1920s and the 1950s, Picher produced the equivalent of $290 billion worth of ore, making it the largest exporter of lead and zinc in the world. Patriotism was
alight and the booming industry brought with it a strong sense of community. The miners came and went underground, blanketed in a healthy dose of black and silver dust with their daily bread, and ever grateful was the Oklahoman who didn’t have to travel far for honest work. Picher: a steady population of fifteen thousand and a total of fourteen thousand mines.

  Today, the thousands of square miles of tunnels and mines, many once acting as underground interstates, have largely collapsed and filled with poisonous water. Despite this, the old-timers, the stubborn men who refused to ever admit that the land they so loved had betrayed them, still laugh when reminiscing about their childhoods and shake their heads at the later generations who never set foot in the mines or knew the town when it flaunted six movie theaters and two dozen saloons.

  This postcard picture of Picher is impossible to imagine today.

  Over time the ventures of thousands of Midwestern men enticed by the luster of two hundred fifty mining mills began to dwindle. The toxic chat piles were growing too big, and the demand was lessening. The lead and zinc started to turn into common dolomite and limestone the farther they dug, no matter which direction the miners mined. You could say that it was too much of a good thing for people long used to suffering before the mines changed their fortunes. Abundance, in those days, was something otherwise foreign to Oklahomans, whose overzealous mining would hollow out the ground below, forming sinkholes and collapses in smaller surrounding ghost towns like Zincville (St. Louis) and Hockerville, in the shadows of adjacent and foreboding Picher.

  For years, citizens took all the stone they wanted from the chat piles, using it to fill their playgrounds or for school track meets.

  What’s left today is the disembowelment of a promised land: fourteen thousand abandoned mines. Seventy million tons of chat that still today sit piled up to two hundred feet tall and two hundred yards wide, the width of four football fields. And thirty-six million tons of toxic waste that would go on to contaminate the waters. For every ounce of lead extracted from the earth, there were ten pounds of unusable mineral, thus the chat piles.

  Before the exodus, children played in the man-made ponds brought to them by rainfall and the natural water below, along with the tailing ponds created to dispose of the fine powders of lead-zinc ore processing. They cried of sunburn after playing in the red swimming holes that smelled like vinegar, but they always seemed willing to overlook such annoyances, so long as the waters were cool enough to offer relief in the brutal summers. The pools were red like rust, and they gradually realized it couldn’t be sunburn permanently dyeing their hair orange. It later transpired that the sunburns were chemical burns from cadmium- and arsenic-laden waters that had been flushed out from the mines, but the residents wouldn’t understand the extent of the damage until scientists came to test the waters in the 1990s. Over the years, the same groundwater broke free of the swimming holes and began to fill the abandoned mines.

  Up until then, no one knew of the dangers that Picher’s most precious resource posed to its people, and this obliviousness made its way down through the generations. They spent their lives reveling in the dust, damn well proud of it, and drinking and swimming in the contaminated water. After high school test scores began to plummet and sickness made its way into nearly every home, a study in 1996 showed that 46 percent of the children in Picher between the ages of one and five had high concentrations of lead in their blood (more than eleven times higher than in the rest of the country). The miscarriage rate of its mothers was more than double the national average, and chronic lung disease was 2,000 percent higher. And it wasn’t just lead and zinc in the air and in their water; iron, manganese, and cadmium also played a part in slowing neurodevelopment in children. Because the absorption of lead causes irreversible damage in the brain, organs, blood, and nerves, most of those affected would suffer the symptoms of poisoning for the remainder of their lives.

  At first, many of the complaints were dismissed as your garden-variety homemaker’s “nerves”: insomnia, hallucinations, memory loss, aggressive tendencies. Women were moodier and harder of hearing, and the men couldn’t perform in bed. But then blue-and-black lines started forming on their gums (known as the Burton line), and their speech became slurred. Headaches, loss of coordination, gastrointestinal disorders, depression, numbness in the extremities, decreased urine, brain damage. Neurologically, the children of Picher were affected far more, with spiking rates in severe intellectual disabilities. They lost their sense of smell; their bones lacked density to such an extent that their own body weight would cause fractures. At suppertime, after grace, their noses and mouths would bleed at the table. Liver, lung, and kidney diseases would claim many lives but remain undocumented among a stubbornly proud population that refused to admit the land they were raised on could have turned on them this way. The trains stopped coming, and the welcome signs began to disintegrate.

  Today, the overwhelming pride still carried by those who grew up here feels like stubbornness and denial, especially by people who evaded illness.

  While several government-funded health studies were carried out on children after the area was declared a superfund site, there appear to be no public reports that show how many teens, adults, and elderly became sick and how many died from metal toxicity. With so many people sick and in pain, the blinding platinum memories of Picher’s former glory were rusting over, and all that was left was despair.

  In 1999, there were just over sixteen hundred people remaining in Picher. Many of those who stayed were men who refused to submit to the man. But others, blood long poisoned, took a more pragmatic approach: the town’s poverty level at the time was twice the national average, and into that desperate climate came a wave of methamphetamine production and addiction. The mines, once a symbol of Picher’s prosperity, presented the perfect opportunity to easily ensure that evidence of meth cooks and laboratory equipment disappeared forever. The local houses, formerly adorned with cherry pies on windowsills and the singing of Johnny Cash on record players, became hubs for meth makers to cook and go, never staying in one abandoned home for too long.

  One such man was a Kansan named Warren “Phil” Welch II, who lived within a twenty-minute ride of Picher for a good portion of his life. While it’s not clear exactly how long he lived in the town itself, it is known that he was an inhabitant at least from October 1999 to April 2000, according to receipts obtained by private investigator Tom Pryor.

  Depression spread as fast as the metal toxicity, and Picher never would see enough money to pay for cleanup. It was a religious town in the Bible Belt, but the God the locals loved was nowhere close for some, and to bridge the gap many searched for new crutches. In the late nineties, meth was their master, opening its arms to the weary and burdened and then unemployed and removed. Within a fifty-mile radius, it was the epicenter for the disease. Like many others, Phil Welch took his trailer where no one would care to bother him, and he settled at 412 South College Street, folded neatly against the backdrop of poison.

  While rumors related to Picher were some of the earliest in the case of the missing girls and the murdered couple, they never gained traction in the way some of the other theories did.

  “The private investigators’ updates comprised of vague facts,” said Lorene Bible, something the Freemans agreed with. “They said they’d heard stuff, but then they wouldn’t be clear about what they heard. Or they’d tell us about a piece of evidence, but then wouldn’t tell us where to find it.”

  “Everyone was talking about Phil Welch,” PI Pryor tells me. After discovering the insurance card on the Freeman property, Pryor and Dugan traced it back to a woman in a town called Chetopa, Kansas (just north of Welch and about seventeen miles from Picher). The woman, known as E.B., pointed investigators in the direction of her boyfriend, Phil Welch.

  In January of 2000, about two weeks after the bodies of Kathy and Danny were discovered, fifty-four-year-old Phil Welch wandered around the crumbling remains of Picher, the chat piles at h
is back. He wore a Western shirt with pearl snap buttons, and he walked up and down the prairie that surrounded the town. In the early afternoon, he scanned the silver horizon, taken by the beauty of the frost and the weight of the clouds. With tears running down his face, he sang “Nothing but the Blood” without having to look at the hymnal in his hands. And when the fields failed to sing back, he was struck by a pang of emptiness. It was a void that could only be filled with poison.

  Despite his religious convictions, most people I speak to about Phil Welch refer to him as the devil himself. He was a well-known meth addict and manufacturer who moved frequently, though never far. When I ask around, the most common word associated with him is “terrifying.” And when I reach out to one of his stepchildren for the first time, the initial response is a short one: “Phil Welch is a horrible man.”

  Phil Welch had two homes, one in Picher, where he cooked meth, and one in Chetopa, where his wife and her children lived. “She was only married to him because she was scared he was going to kill her,” his stepchild tells me. “He was a horrible man who would beat her and her children. He did a lot of bad things.”

  On the icy outskirts of Picher in January 2000, a couple weeks after the murders of Danny and Kathy, Phil continued to survey the land, perhaps consecrating it with one of the religious ramblings he was so known for (they went on for days, I’d hear). The machinery of the mines behind him was cold, and the sickness that had taken grip in those shafts never had worked its way out of Picher’s system—or out of his. He looked down at his hands, which were becoming less and less coordinated by the day. He cursed those hands, unaware that their clumsiness was the beginning of a sickness he swore was his punishment from God.