Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  “We weren’t allowed to be sick,” another relative tells me. “He’d think it was God’s punishment coming upon the house.” Family members would often cough into their pillows to avoid him or stifle their sneezing. I wondered what his thoughts were when he started to lose the strength in his hands.

  In the distance, a familiar streamer of dust signaled an approaching car. This time a blue Ford pickup with two men inside, both wearing ten-gallon hats that bobbed in unison and created shadows against the illuminated back window.

  The two men in the truck were private investigators Tom Pryor and Joe Dugan. Today, Pryor still sports that ten-gallon hat.

  “We found him walking down the road,” he remembers. “I asked Joe if that was Phil Welch, and he said, ‘I think so.’”

  Phil Welch watched the car slow as it approached him; then the men pulled over. Like him, they were coming from the direction of Chetopa, Kansas. Tom recalls, “We didn’t tell him who we was or anything.”

  Phil had a habit of thinking that most everything was a sign, and this day was no different. God was leading him somewhere, or putting someone in his path, for a reason. Phil held his head up proud. “Hey, fella, you need a ride?” asked Pryor. Phil shot them a hard sideways glance, reading them for a moment. But he didn’t have anywhere in particular to go, and from nowhere in particular was he coming. He was restless, and the sky overhead wasn’t moving fast enough for him anyway. “Well, I guess.”

  Pryor climbed out from the passenger’s side and let Phil sit in the middle of the bench seat.

  “The first impression you get,” Pryor tells me, “was Charles Manson. He’s that type.”

  Crammed between the pair, Phil hummed the remnants of the hymn that wound through his head. He faced forward, his eyes distant and empty, like he wasn’t there at all. In this way, he had a dreadful intensity to him, one that made those around him stand on edge. “Where you going?” Pryor asked.

  “Picher, I suppose.” The tips of his fingers were burned, nails black and amber and exceedingly brittle as he tapped on the leather-bound songbook. He also had a habit of constantly smacking his tongue against his teeth, an obsessive behavior when he was high, which was at most any given time.

  “Joe, you wanna stop for a hamburger?” Pryor asked before glancing at Phil, who never took his eyes from the road. “You want a hamburger?”

  Pryor describes him as “really weird,” and says, “He could be talking and he’d break into religious mode, start preachin’ about anything. I think he knew every page of the Bible. His daddy was a preacher. I think he punished him by beating him with it.” But I am not able to verify this, and what family does exist out there seems to have put a great deal of distance between themselves and Phil over the years.

  The three men headed to the drive-through of the Gorilla Cage, a now-extinct burger joint that sported a large gorilla out front (it was the mascot for Picher). They parked in front of the small building, which resembled a shoebox with bright red and white stripes painted on its metal fringes. Brightly lit roadside signs and arrows pointed to the building from either side, a compact version of a neon-lit eatery you’d find on the nearby Route 66, begging passersby to try their famous calf fries, a beguiling term for the locally popular fried cow testicles. From the small restaurant’s loudspeakers, Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” played, as if the locals were desperately hanging on to a past Picher still longed for. Pryor knew who Phil was, and several times he tried to get Phil’s eyes to meet his. There were sunken moments of silence, filled with the electricity of an impending storm crawling overhead.

  Phil pointed to the poisonous hills around them. “See this place?” Phil remarked. “God’s damnation. Wicked people. There’s no saving anyone here.” Phil watched the private investigators closely, then returned to his burger, adjusting to the silence from the two men at his side. “Like Sodom.” Pryor and Dugan agreed, nodding. Phil inspected each one of the chat piles looming in front of the truck. “Man, I can’t keep count of the transgressions. The whites took this earth and raped it to death before giving it back. And you wonder why God got angry. One day, God’s gonna just cut this place down, give it the natural disaster it so deserves.”

  I know today that this would be an accurate prophecy, as the coup de grace for Picher was an EF4 tornado in 2008 that killed seven and destroyed a hundred fifty homes.

  Residents with obvious signs of meth addiction came in and out of view. Their lips scabbed over, the emaciated characters wore the loose cowboy gear of their forefathers. Enveloped in the toxic wind, they were a stark contrast to those still hanging on to the dreams of the old town, smiles twisted tight as they pretended the junkies overrunning the place weren’t there.

  “After a while,” Pryor remembers, “I asked him, ‘Say, you hear about those girls in Welch?’” in an effort to divert Phil’s attention from fire and brimstone.

  “Yeah,” answered Phil, angry and jittery in equal measure, “I heard about them two little bitches.”

  Pryor tilted his head back fractionally to gauge his partner’s reaction. “I wanted to grab his throat right then,” says Pryor. “But I kept my cool.”

  “Where you say you from?” Joe Dugan asked Phil.

  “Chetopa, but I do missions around here too.”

  “You know, I used to live in Chetopa,” Pryor told Phil. Not only had he lived there, but Pryor was the chief of police there long before he launched his own private investigation business.

  “These girls I was talking to up there said that a guy by the name of Phil Welch killed those girls. I don’t suppose you know Phil Welch, hmm?” Phil stopped chewing his food, stored what there was in his cheek.

  “Yes, I’m Phil Welch.” Phil began to stutter, answers half-coherent, half-ecclesiastical, the religious rambling he was so known for amplifying with his anxious outward demeanor. The two men sitting on either side of him caught just fragments of sense from Phil Welch. “I hear they’re somewhere in the mine shafts.” Pryor saw the emptiness of his glare and says that he knew right then that he was sitting with a murderer. “Those two little bitches.”

  Phil started to jerk around, scratching at his arms, babbling barely comprehensible lines from sermons and Bible verses. Pryor and Dugan felt confident that this man had heard something about Lauria and Ashley in the weeks after their disappearance.

  Pryor feared that if he didn’t let Phil out of the truck, he might become violent. Phil nearly climbed over Pryor to escape what was too quickly becoming an interrogation. He landed on the chat-filled pavement of the burger joint, then walked away as fast as he could with high shoulders, inflated with a rage that always lurked just beneath the surface. Righteous anger, he’d tell himself over the years. Pryor and Dugan silently watched Phil march off and disappear back in the deteriorating lands of Picher. Even after he was out of sight, they could still hear the scripture emanating from Phil’s lungs.

  Later that evening, Phil retreated to his Picher trailer. It was a ramshackle home used to cook meth, littered and filthy. There was no running water, and electricity was tentative; the place felt damp, cold. Porn rags and cigarette butts covered the floor, and stray cats and rats came in and out as they pleased. Phil’s hands weren’t working right when he tried to turn the knob of the front door, and it took him some time to regain his grip. He cursed those hands once more, confounded by spells of paralysis that would only get worse with time. He became gripped by the idea that God was telling him not to go inside. But when he turned around, the storm clouds were bruised and inflamed, surely a sign that his capricious God intended him to seek shelter in the trailer. After nearly a half hour of trying to get in, when God released him from His discipline, Phil Welch finally stumbled across the threshold.

  Already inside was a small group of people—associates, lovers, wheelers and dealers. They included one of his girlfriends, a sex worker or two, and two men as thick as thieves named David Pennington and Ronnie Busick—men who’d spent mos
t of their adult lives in the throes of meth addiction, and more recently, under the dominance of Phil Welch.

  “Everyone was scared to death of Phil Welch, because they all knew what he was capable of,” says a source of mine. Bruce, a hard-core biker and meth user out of Picher, a man who would have never struck me as a man scared of anything, tells me of a time when Phil Welch nearly strangled him to death. “If you want to know what pure evil was, it was Phil.” Evil, I keep hearing, had a home in Phil’s eyes.

  “Have you ever seen the devil?” one source asks me while he’s getting high. “I mean it, Jax. I’m asking. Have you ever seen the devil? Because I have, and it was Phil Welch.”

  In those days and weeks surrounding the date of the Freeman murders, David Pennington and Ronnie Busick followed Phil Welch closer than ever, higher than ever. The men, both bread-and-buttered in Chetopa, Kansas, were boys of poverty and products of meth. And as they looked up to Phil’s finally returning, the gospel music that Phil demanded be played in his presence revved back up to life—an old, rugged country hymn you might have found in the days of the dust bowl.

  The three men continued to get high, with Phil Welch briefly stopping to look over at the dirty wall where a clean piece of paper hung …

  It was one of the missing flyers that Lorene Bible had drawn up days before, with the faces of Lauria and Ashley smiling back at Phil Welch.

  17

  * * *

  THE OUTLAW LANDS

  * * *

  2001

  Less Than Two Years After the Fire

  I drive for days. Ice has turned each and every square inch and bare twig to crystal, weighing them down so it feels like winter closes in on me. It’s a wonderland like something on the front of a Christmas card. I think I’m going to freeze to death in the Arkansas Ozarks, trapped by ice and desolation, car-rocking gusts, and the darkness of the razorbacks. I pull over, left with a paranoia that welcomes me to the Midwest every time I drive here from the East Coast. I like the mindless hours, the changing terrain as it races by, and the wide-open sky; I like the snow in my sleep. When I wake, it’s to a spectacular, blinding beauty—milk white and opalescent hues. But I need to get warm—I need to wash myself of the scent of truck exhaust and Krispy Kreme glaze and get back to work; I plan to investigate the drug theories that have plagued the Welch murders and the girls’ disappearances since day one.

  To me, it has always seemed that the Freemans focus on the “whys” of the crimes against their family while the Bibles choose to focus on the “wheres.” The former look for answers in the patchwork leading up to the murders while the latter remain grounded in the present. There is no right answer, and here there are no answers at all. “What do I have to do next to find my child?” Lorene always asks me rhetorically. To her, what is in the past is unchangeable; it doesn’t matter. She never shows the desire to dwell, as she puts it, just a rigid determination to track down her daughter.

  It is a late night in early January, and I curl up on the couch of Ottawa County sheriff Jeremy Floyd. The fire keeps us warm, the sheriff in his pajamas with a flannel blanket over his legs. His wife entertains a couple of Yorkies; our stomachs are full from a wild hog the sheriff killed and prepared himself. The Floyds are gracious in letting me sleep there and work from their dining room table. Jeremy is a soft-spoken man, once a boy from Commerce, Oklahoma, just a few miles up Route 66. I try to impress him by pointing out how he was raised in the same town where the infamous Bonnie and Clyde killed Constable Cal Campbell for their thirteenth and final murder in 1934 (marking Ottawa County’s first lawman to die in the line of duty) and abducted Chief of Police Percy Boyd, who was shot, taken hostage, then let go about seventy miles north in Kansas.

  Today, you’ll find a black-and-white photo of Floyd’s great-grandparents on the wall behind his desk in his office. “My great-grandpa Smith was plowing mules on his ranch, just west of Commerce,” Jeremy starts. “Some young, well-dressed man walked up and pulled a gun on him. He made my grandpa take his horses to where the young guy had his car stuck in a ditch on the county road. And back then, having a car was a big deal. As the story goes, there was a woman in the car, and Grandpa Smith was convinced that as soon as he used his horses to pull the car out, this man was going to kill him. But, instead, the man gave him some money, and they were on their way. Soon after, they killed that lawman in town.”

  Sheriff Floyd is also a direct descendant of infamous gangster, once public enemy number one, Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, and he tells a hand-me-down family tale of Jesse James: “Jesse James showed up shot in Commerce, but my great-aunt, being the Christian woman that she was, wouldn’t let outlaws in her house. She let him heal up in the barn outside. After some time, when Jesse James was ready to head on out, he left a jar of money for the woman.” Sheriff Floyd goes on to explain that the rumor was that she’d buried it, much to the entertainment of later generations, who dug holes in the gardens. “Ottawa County has a rich history,” Jeremy continues. “Every outlaw you could imagine had ties here. It’s always been outlaw country.” Like his forefathers, Jeremy Floyd is no stranger to crime, but he carries with him a sense of rightness that seems to have eluded so many of the Ottawa lawmen before him. Floyd is reserved, gentle, with jet-black eyes and a childlike smile that always feels unexpected when quickly flashed, even as we sit near the dying fire. Only weeks after being elected sheriff in 2016, he earned himself a reputation around town as a force to be reckoned with when he shot and killed a forty-two-year-old criminal in an indisputable case of self-defense. Beneath his unassuming demeanor is a power he can wield swiftly, one you’d hate to be on the wrong end of, and a voice so quiet that I can’t press one ear to the couch.

  “The sheriff’s office was so behind the times, I guess you can say,” says Floyd. “It was important to me when I became sheriff to pull us out of that rough patch.”

  The next evening, we eat at a steak restaurant, where the sheriff, dressed in a tee and sweats, keeps his head low under a baseball cap to avoid being interrupted by locals. Before us, the bright lights of Route 66 flash on our skin, sweet potatoes and butter warm on our forks. In thought, he looks out to the very town, the very county he is sworn to protect. His eyes don’t necessarily land on anything; he knows what’s out there. “It’s something of a haunting place,” he says. “Once you’re part of it, you can’t ever leave.” So I have noticed.

  I don’t need to venture far into the backcountry to see the grip that meth has on his county, an epidemic like a slippery bar of soap in the sheriff’s hands. “Meth came in like a tidal wave,” he explains, discussing the modern-day outlaws who arose in the investigation into Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman’s disappearance. “Meth was the biggest monster to this area and still is.” And it was safe to say that it made its grand entrance in the 1990s, not long before the murders of Kathy and Danny Freeman. Back then, drug-related murders were rampant, as drug enforcement agencies scrambled to keep up with the influx of meth in Oklahoma.

  Tomorrow, I will head to Wyandotte, where the first two official searches for Ashley and Lauria took place weeks apart, only a cigarette toss away from each other in the summer of 2001.

  Wyandotte, home to the federally recognized Wyandotte Nation American Indian tribe, sits anatomically in the stomach of Ottawa County. A town of only about three hundred people, it is here where investigators on the Freeman-Bible case lingered for most of 2001, just twenty-seven miles east of Welch. Northwest of Wyandotte is Twin Bridges State Park (most locals refer to the 2001 searches for Ashley and Lauria as taking place in Twin Bridges, though the searches never occurred on the park grounds themselves, but nearby). Maps show its rivers tangled in knots and gangs of unspoiled forestry, a mecca for snagging spoonbills (paddlefish) and catfish and other bottom feeders, human and not.

  For summers, I saw it alight with handheld sparklers and smelled burning charcoal. American flags were vibrant against clear sky and pontoons skimmed across the s
himmer of the Neosho River. For falls, the white pelicans came in droves, honking against a multicolored backdrop of leaves falling onto the water. As winter creeps in like sickness, I watch the gaunt frame of a meth head come out of his house at one in the morning to mow his dead lawn by the light of the moon. Looking down the river, I might make out the glow of the bonfires on top of a hill where the river begins to bottleneck and bend into what’s named Lost Creek. At the time of the Welch murders, a documented meth cook named Chester Leroy Shadwick II lived here, and in 2001, it was where authorities conducted their very first search for the girls. However, it’s hard to deny, based on the records at hand, that the girls were only an afterthought in the execution of meth house raids and pursuit of other drug charges, with Lauria’s and Ashley’s names being brought up only when addicts were looking down the barrel of jail time. It was never a matter of authorities looking for the girls that led them here, rather authorities coming here and the meth heads bringing up the girls.

  It bears repeating that many of the names throughout this book, especially in this chapter, have been changed.

  “Wild and fun.” Amber Powell laughs when I ask her what the parties out in Wyandotte were like. “I mean, for back then.” We sit at one of those classic American diners closer to Tulsa, the kind that desperately cling to time-honored values. Our interview is chaperoned by posters of Marilyn and Sinatra over fried pickles and ranch and a jukebox full of the oldies. Amber Powell: meth addict, reformed, long familiar with the underbelly of Ottawa. She is thin, and she surely would have been beautiful in her heyday, now left with a crooked smile where parts of her teeth were knocked out of her skull from one domestic incident or another. She has with her an air of hard times and menthol. But most important, she is one of the many people mentioned by name in a 2001 affidavit for a search warrant.