Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  I am reminded of Shannon Burleson’s New Year’s GIF to me prior to his blocking me shortly before his death.

  “We heard about the New Year’s Eve party since the first whispers from Wyandotte,” Lorene tells me, and retells rumors laced with mentions of gang rape, sodomy, drugging up, tying up, murder, and dismemberment, all things that no mother should ever have to hear about. “The party took place somewhere there [in Wyandotte]. The problem is we don’t know where. Could have been the Shadwick property. Could have been the Glovers’. All of those drug guys, they’re connected in one way or another. Anyway, that’s how we first caught wind of the Glovers.”

  The Glover property is situated just three miles upstream from Chester Shadwick and once housed a hard-eyed father-and-son duo of stocky stature: Paul Glover Sr. and Paul Glover Jr. Rumors of how dangerous they were were brought up nearly every time I mentioned their names. Today, the Glover residence is a run-down brick house that sits on a tall-grass corner of an elevenacre property just across the street from a church whose crows outnumber its parishioners. The yard is littered with junk cars and old water tanks.

  “They had a very bad reputation in the drug world,” Lorene explains. “You cross ’em, you pay for it.”

  “Well, if they start shooting at you, at least you know you’re in the right direction,” says Jay Bible.

  Back in July 2001, Paul Glover Sr. and his son, Paul Glover Jr., were serving time for the manufacturing of methamphetamine and running a chop shop in which stolen automobiles and motorcycles were disassembled and sold. Like Chester Shadwick, the Glovers catered to an ever-growing community of meth addicts nearby, cooking more product than their neighbors across Twin Bridges. “The Shadwicks were where you partied,” says one source. “But the Glovers was business, and you don’t fuck with business.”

  “The Glover family involvement with this homicide was the result of a jailhouse rumor,” said OSBI agent Nutter in our previous interview. “I was able to get enough evidence to get a search warrant of the area that they had been living in at the time.” I wasn’t sure which was correct: the Bible family’s assertions that young meth cook Johnny Rose had opened his mouth to a driver and talked about the Glovers’ involvement, or the OSBI’s response that the tip came from jail.

  To learn what the official record was, I went and tried to obtain a copy of the 2001 Glover affidavit, drawn up by OSBI agent Nutter himself. It should have been easy enough to do: a quick call to the county clerk’s office, being as the affidavit fell under the statutes of public record. But upon several searches by the office’s personnel, the Glover affidavit was found to be missing.

  When I mentioned the mix-up to Lorene, she called everyone that she had to call, finally locating the Glover affidavit in Tulsa with the OSBI. Though Nutter had drawn it up back in 2001, it was never filed with the district court. Because it had not been filed, there existed the implication that should anything have been found on the property during this search—and there was—it would have likely been inadmissible in a court of law, or grounds for a mistrial. Essentially, if anything was found during the course of this search, it’d all go south.

  Seventeen years later, the Glover affidavit was finally filed by the clerk’s office after current OSBI agent Tammy Ferrari submitted it. However, reading the affidavit doesn’t make clear how authorities came to the Glovers.

  According to the affidavit, which is considerably thinner at five pages than the twenty-one-page version belonging to Shadwick, Agent Nutter focused the search on “human remains, fingerprints, blood, hairs, fibers, and other microscopic and physical evidence” related to the cases of Danny, Kathy, Ashley, and Lauria. Most of the information provided in the affidavit seemed to come from Johnny Rose.

  As stated in the 2001 affidavit, Rose told the OSBI that back in 2000, shortly after the deaths of the Freemans, he witnessed Lauria and Ashley inside the Glover residence “shooting pool and not acting normal.” Rose said he was sure that he recognized the girls from missing posters being circulated in the area. He claimed this was the only time he ever saw them.

  However, a few days after seeing the girls, Rose said, he saw Nick Joseph “driving a backhoe he had rented from Big D Rentals and Sales, Miami, Oklahoma.” Rose stated that Joseph was doing some “dirt work,” and that he personally witnessed Joseph with a large roll of cash for his work soon after. Agent Nutter determined that Joseph had in fact rented a backhoe on February 12, 2000. According to the affidavit, “ROSE reported JOSEPH began having nightmares about the time ROSE had seen the girls. On one occasion, exact date unknown, JOSEPH told ROSE he was as deeply involved in what was going on as the rest of them, although he was never clear about what he meant about the comment.”

  “Come on, of course I know about the New Year’s Eve party,” said one of my Wyandotte sources as we sit by a home where he used to cook meth. “Everyone knew about the New Year’s Eve party. But am I going to tell you about it? Nope.”

  “Why not?” I ask.

  “Because I like living.”

  I was sure Ashley and Lauria did too.

  Lorene tells me of a time she went to visit Johnny Rose in a Tulsa jail, at a later point in time when he claimed to have been saved. “He [Rose] went to leave. But then he came back with a pencil and paper. He wrote a name and said, ‘This is my alibi.’ Then he swallowed the piece of paper right in front of me.” Lorene believes it was an act of nervousness, as cameras above monitored the pair. I would learn the name written on that piece of paper, but have never heard it again, though it’s reported to belong to one of the several people at the New Year’s Eve party.

  When I reach out to Johnny Rose, he is serving time in a federal prison for drug-related charges. He will, however, be released before I finish this book, a man whose body has been made rock-hard by prison walls and who has a rap sheet saturated with assaults and meth manufacturing. The look of him scares me. And he never responds.

  The Glover affidavit continues.

  On top of Rose’s claims that he’d seen Ashley and Lauria held against their will at the Glover house, and his suspicions that Joseph had later been involved with burying the girls, the affidavit mentions a damning OSBI interview with a man named Jesse Black, another known meth addict and violent criminal, from Galena, Kansas. Jesse Black insisted that at about the same time Rose claimed to have seen the girls at the property, Jesse had “observed two [American] Indian males come into the [Glover] residence … and go into a bedroom with Glover.” Despite the information in the affidavit, Nutter wasn’t clear as to whether or not Jesse was referring to Glover Jr. or Sr. Nutter also went on to write that “He [Jesse Black] heard two gunshots and another man walked into the bedroom with a saw. He heard the noise of the saw. The two Indian males never came out of the bedroom.”

  These were the new outlaws of Oklahoma. These were the names whispered from the scabbed-over lips of the junkies who replaced the tommy guns and bootleggers. And in 2001, they were the biggest leads the families had to date.

  On the early morning of July 26, 2001, three members of the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office, including Mike Eason (who led the Shadwick search), and lead agent Nutter and Ben Rosser of the OSBI, a member of the FBI, two members of the DA’s office, and dozens of both Bible and Freeman relatives met at Twin Bridges State Park. There, they exchanged plans before flocking over to the Glover property, where relatives waited on the sidelines, something that wasn’t afforded to them for the Shadwick search. Hearts thumped and stomachs sank at the idea of finally, after a long year and a half, finding the remains of Ashley and Lauria. Before the sun had breached the horizon, five search dogs lined the ditch by the temporarily empty Glover home.

  “You learn not to get your hopes up,” says Lorene. I’m not sure why this single line, which she’ll repeat over time, makes my spirit cringe with grief.

  As authorities combed the Glover property that summer morning, and news cameras followed, the community waited with bated breath.
The new sun on the rows of abandoned cars blinded bystanders, the tall grass attracting bugs from nearby swamps and black pools of old rainwater. The community had long known that both the Freemans and the Bibles took issue with how authorities had been handling the case, and this was the biggest break the OSBI had managed so far. Celesta Chandler, Kathy’s mother, continued to share her frustrations. “They got there and were gone in two hours. They said they definitely covered everything, but who knows?”

  According to OSBI spokeswoman Kym Koch, they used “equipment similar to a metal detector” to locate two spots on the property where the ground had been recently disturbed. The families say authorities didn’t dig, but that Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, returned with a backhoe after authorities left the Glover scene. The biggest revelation of the day, however, came when Nutter emerged from the house and made his way over to the families, who were waiting outside at the weedy border of the property. I wonder if it brought their minds back to the days of the fire in 1999, when they had been waiting at the edge of a crime scene and made to keep away a certain distance.

  “We got something here,” Nutter said.

  In the search warrant return, an official list of what was confiscated during the search at the “Residence of Paul F. Glover Jr.,” Agent Nutter wrote the following:

  On July 26 2001, a search of the residence identified above was completed by law enforcement officials from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office, and Ottawa County District Attorney’s Office.

  As a result of that search, one suspected bloodstained piece of carpet, approximately 12 inches by 12 inches in size, was obtained as evidence and retained by the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation.

  It is a winter’s night in Missouri, a wintry mix falling outside as Paul Glover Jr. and I sit in front of a restaurant’s large window. It is the first time he speaks publicly. I am down twenty pounds, and it shows in my face, my appetite held hostage by anxiety; my eely stomach can’t handle much more than water, which is what I order. My previous visions of some bumbling, scrawny tweaker are replaced by a muscular man in a tracksuit with the most intense and fastened stare I’ve ever seen. He is well-spoken, polite, and fixed on the subject. “I was in Oklahoma City, in the jail being held,” he explains when I ask about when he first became a suspect. “I was watching the news and see my mug shot come on.”

  We discuss the events leading up to the search on his property. He makes note of someone not listed in the affidavit: Johnny Rose’s then girlfriend pointed authorities there with testimony of seeing the girls playing pool and acting like they were there against their will. “She told them that her and her boyfriend were driving down the road in front of my house, pulled into my house, went up, knocked on the door. So they went through the kitchen window and looked in there and saw the two girls playing pool and drinking beer.” Paul Glover Jr.’s eyes never leave mine. “She didn’t know if it was a dream or not because she was really high at that time.” It’s his opinion that because he and his father were already locked up, the OSBI wanted to seal the case and hang it up as fast as they could; the Glovers were all easy pickin’s on account of their active role in the local meth scene.

  Paul Jr., sober today, distances himself from his father, who still lives in the same house out in Wyandotte. He denies knowing many of the names I bring up from the affidavit and elsewhere, and he also vehemently denies involvement in abducting, abusing, or killing Ashley and/or Lauria. “I don’t know those girls. I don’t know their families. I don’t know anyone that knows them,” Glover starts. “Never had any dealings with them and nobody ever told me anything in the drug world while I was out there or in jail or anywhere else.” Glover also expresses his disappointment in authorities who plastered his face all over the news in relation to the Welch crimes. “Everything I know is from the TV and media. So knowing that, I thought, why are these people pushing me so hard? Why are they on my place out there?”

  While Glover hasn’t been back home in years and has settled into a new Missourian life after not using in eighteen years, the reputation sticks. Today, only weeks after Johnny Rose’s release from federal prison, where he served fourteen years of a twenty-two-plus-year sentence, Glover has begun helping Rose get some work in Missouri.

  “I guess I was one of the bigger names around in the drug scene at that time, so.”

  After Nutter and company took the carpet sample from the 2001 search and submitted it as evidence, there was only radio silence. Despite consistent pressure from the families, every response from the OSBI was that there was a backlog, and when the results were finally obtained, four years later, they were arguable and disclosed only by word of mouth.

  Agent Nutter told Lorene Bible that the sample collected was an “oily red substance,” like chain saw oil.

  Agent Nutter told Dwayne Vancil that it was animal blood.

  No family member related to this case has ever seen an official report, so no one can be sure what the actual results were.

  “We found numerous buried drug labs all over the property, but found no bodies,” Agent Nutter told me. “There was a bloodstain found in the Glover house. I don’t recall it being animal blood, but I recall it wasn’t human blood. I think it may have been something else, but I’m not sure.” This was the closest I could get to the official results of the stained carpet.

  Despite this, ultimately nothing came from either the Shadwick or the Glover property searches, and once again, everyone was back to square one.

  That winter’s night in Joplin, I watch Glover Jr. leave and I focus more on my rearview mirror than on the road ahead. In winters identical to the one I drive in, and the lights of the city bright with Christmas’s greens and reds, I remember that this was Lauria’s favorite time of year. And on the drive back, I contemplate the numerous anniversaries and Christmases that have come and gone.

  For years following the empty searches, the festive carols felt like dirges, and the snow went from soft and delicate to hard and embittered. In the Bible house, what stood as a symbol of hope for the family was the Christmas tree that Lauria had erected herself in 1999. Lorene kept that tree up in the living room all year round, a reminder of a time when Lauria still lit up her life. It stayed permanently adorned with tinsel and angels and twinkling lights. But it was around 2005 that it finally disintegrated, marking one of the very few times anyone close to Lorene saw her physically grieve for Lauria.

  Lauria’s cousin Lisa remembers that Lorene packed those emotions back down as quickly as they came. “We had work to do,” she says, “and that was to find the girls.”

  The winters continued without the girls.

  So did the springs, summers, and falls.

  The three-and-a-half years after the Glover searches didn’t feel very long for investigators, but they dragged like a dull knife across the skin of the families of the missing girls, families left in the dark.

  It was about this time that a thirty-one-year-old called “Oklahoma” came forward to claim responsibility for the deaths of Danny, Kathy, Ashley, and Lauria. And though I’d heard about him long before I came to the Midwest, I had to understand his confessions in context, taking me back to 1999 and the morning of the fire, just east of Welch, to a man named Jeremy Jones.

  19

  * * *

  EAST OF WELCH

  * * *

  December 30, 1999

  The Morning of the Fire

  From Welch, along the dust roads, through the vast swaths of buffalo grass, the land will open up to reveal an underbelly glistening with crystal meth. This land—these blighted lengths of the prairie—robs virtue, takes teeth, carves notches on the crooked bedposts of the area where Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas almost meet, counting the lovers she takes and leaves. Crystal meth sweeps the plains like a thief in the night, turning meadow into abscessed wound. Its victims emerge at sundown, skinnier than the day before.
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br />   At night their anxiety is contagious. I relate.

  Jeremy Jones (not to be confused with the other Jeremys I’ve met so far) was by all accounts a handsome man: a scamp sculpted by the gods of straw and sun mixed with a touch of trailer trash mischief. “Hey, I never lived in no trailer, OK?” he corrected me over the phone. He struck a match and lit a Maverick, only smoking because he had a few beers in him. He was reared to have a permanent smirk on his face, no matter what his mood, like he always kept a secret in his pocket for emergencies. He perched himself atop the rusted-over shell of a Ford Model T Roadster from the 1920s, reminiscent of times as a boy when he would pretend to be one of the many “Public Enemy”–era outlaws who had once governed this land. He ran his hands through his dark, wavy hair and looked out to the fields where imaginary shadows moved, conjuring up the ghosts of Ma Barker and her sons, who were buried over in Welch. Or Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, their famous hideout just over in Joplin. Jesse James, even, whose gold was buried somewhere in the state. Give Jeremy a twenty, and he’d show you where.

  Jeremy’s nerves were jangling as he started to come down off his last high. The puncture wounds in the crook of his arm were scabbed over, growing sorer by the minute. A light sweat germinated on his skin, almost steaming in the cold air of Dotyville, Oklahoma, about fourteen miles east of Welch in Ottawa County.

  It would be two hours before the Bells would find the Freeman trailer burning … or it was ten minutes after the fire was discovered, depending on which version of the official record I’ll choose to believe.

  Today, Dotyville juts into the famous Route 66 for half a block, just long enough to check your gas gauge at fifty-five miles per hour before putting your eyes back on the long road ahead. It’s a town that never crosses my mind, even as I drive through it daily. In comparison with Welch, it’s but a lump of coal, a town with a population of only seventeen people back in 1999. Less than a square mile of land area, it consists mostly of a junkyard that has no confines, where the town spills the corroded remains of Route 66’s classic-car shows: Buicks and Chevrolets in decay, abandoned school buses, junk cars that outnumber Dotyville’s people by the hundreds. The town feels like it is in mourning for the “could have beens”; it brings to mind tetanus and the rusty recollections of the heartland.