Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  Dotyville can’t be found on most local maps, and there’s no sign, complete with some spurious claim to fame or a wholesome homemaker’s smile painted on wood, to welcome me or see me off. Today, only locals know Dotyville by its Christian name, since it later became part of the larger Miami area. It is a dark town without any streetlights, but at night it glows a sickly yellow. A small convenience store with bloodstains at the gas pump, sprinkled with kitty litter. A family-owned butcher that has done well since 1969. Other than this, there is just one business operating, and locals know not to go there past sundown.

  The Frontier Motel.

  It’s hard to imagine back to when it attracted family-friendly crowds in the fifties and sixties, when it had a pool, which now serves as the butcher’s pond, where the carcass heads of cattle are tied to ropes, thrown in so the snapping turtles can rip the meat off with their beaks, then returned with just the bones. In its day, beautiful cars lined the front of the motel. I speak to many who hold to the delicate memories of the motel, an older generation remarking that those were the best summers of my life.

  In 1999, the Frontier Motel came alive at night, two ramshackle rows of one-story rooms on either side that were available by the hour and by the month only. The motel was guarded by BB, a fat man with a handlebar mustache and everlasting sweat stains whom people once knew as one of the best rodeo bull riders in town. But in a town of seventeen, that wasn’t saying much at all. “He was like Patrick Swayze in the day, before he let himself go,” Jeremy Jones tells me. On the dark early morning of December 30, BB leaned against the window that faced the highway, using a pocketknife to strip some copper phone cord in the small motel’s front office, which was only the corner room closest to the street. As Jeremy Jones passed by for the sixth time that morning, BB used the tip of his knife to tap on the glass. He tilted his Stetson just high enough that he could lock eyes with Jeremy. “Yer tap-dancing on my nerves, boy.”

  Jeremy never stopped, only turning and walking backward to salute the manager. “Aye, aye, Cap’n.”

  BB went back to his copper.

  Jeremy was a frequent visitor at the Frontier, where he’d find fellowship with the like-minded people there. He’d sometimes clean rooms in lieu of rent, thinking it’d help him pocket the odd watch or coin, but to his disappointment, valuables were never kept long enough in the kind of company you’d find there.

  One couldn’t park at the Frontier, since the pavement had been washed out by flooding, leaving the few guests who owned cars to park with the engineless clunkers that surrounded the motel and hope someone didn’t mistake their vehicles for scrap. If anyone owed BB a dime, then it was in one of those old rust buckets they slept: a graveyard of cars and trucks that whined when the wind turned the wrong way. From the tall grass, those junkies still in the black emerged at dusk, snaking in from the wildflowers and wheat. The same still goes today.

  The northern side of the building was reserved for the drug fiends, while the south was known for those seeking companionship of an illegal nature. An emaciated mother looked out for a suitor for her ten-year-old daughter, selling her cheap at half price if it got her the next fix. Another room had a police show blaring so loud that it made guests even more paranoid. A man crashing from the highs of meth hadn’t been conscious since the previous morning, though no one cared to check if he was alive after almost twenty-four hours.

  It takes me two years to locate a man by the name of Randy Madewell, also known as Cowboy, who can tell me firsthand what happened that night at the Frontier Motel. When I find him seventeen years after the Welch murders, he’s recovering from a punctured lung and sepsis after being stabbed weeks prior. He is sober, but meth has already taken what it wanted out of him, including some of his real teeth. He discusses what it takes to cook meth, which is exactly what he was doing at the Frontier Motel that night. “I ain’t in that game, not no more,” he tells me several times.

  Right before the publication of this book, Cowboy was murdered in his home west of Tulsa. With OSBI agents leading the case, it remains unsolved.

  “You drop the iodine crystals and the red phosphorus, and that’s the devil’s breath.” At the risk of turning this book into an instruction manual on the best way to cook methamphetamine, I skip writing the lengthy details. But I let him talk. That’s something he likes to do: talk about meth. “If anyone asks, I only saw this on YouTube. But I was rolling back then. Two short swords on my back. That was my calling card. And Jeremy Jones? Well …”

  That morning, sometime near to when Kathy and Danny Freeman were shot to death, Cowboy was cooking away in one of the rooms of the motel, hot plates turned up high and chiming with beakers. With him was one of his ex-girlfriends. “And this bitch, she was talking about race wars and God knows what else. Couldn’t get her to shut up.” The room would have been sticky and hot, his veins like razor blades. “Jeremy was a rat, and he kept knocking on the fucking door. Excuse my French. I couldn’t stand that prick.”

  Back then Cowboy had long dirty blond hair he’d tuck behind his ears. He turned the electric hot plates down and moved the red phosphorus around, the brick red that exactly matched the iron-rich roads that led there. It was the same chemical element used in matches—Oklahoma was the striking surface of a burning fatherland. He was a local celebrity in that world, cooking some of the finest product and traveling often, moving labs to avoid getting caught and to tailor to a wider clientele. That night, he wore only a pair of boxers and stockman cowboy boots, his flesh stamped with skulls and crosses, prison dots and knives of greening india ink. Sometimes he’d see the ink crawl under the skin, slithers of methamphetamine carnality keeping him restive at the edge of sanity’s hold. On his right arm, the words “Death Before Dishonor.”

  A knock on the door.

  “I was going to beat his ass,” Cowboy says. For the third time that night, it was Jeremy Jones. He was shirtless, not minding winter, not since his by-the-hour girlfriend waited for him across the driveway at the south side of the motel. Her name was Stacy, and she was a Texan who would recall this specific night because it was when Jeremy Jones gave her crabs, of which she publicly told the Miami News-Record in 2005. Today, Stacy seems to still carry a torch for Jeremy Jones. “He’d never hurt no one,” she tells me. “Not a soul.” But many records, transcripts, and victims would disagree with this sentiment.

  “He was the type of guy you’d keep close like your enemies, because he’d stab you in the back just like that,” says Cowboy. “Everything about him was black. His eyes, his hair, all of it. His soul was black. Just had one of ’em faces, that shit-eating grin. Couldn’t trust him. We all knew he was a rat fiend.”

  Jeremy scratched his arms, biting into a pear and leaning his head on the other side of Cowboy’s motel door. From the next room, the mother attempting to solicit men to have sex with her daughter came out to see who was there, only for Jeremy to hiss at her like a snake until she went back inside, locking the door behind her.

  “Cowboy, I’m dying out here,” Jeremy said as he stretched out his arms and curtsied to no one. “Dry as sun-bleached bone, baby.” Jeremy tossed the pear’s core and kicked it with the top of his sneaker so that it landed on the roof of an already-paranoid Cowboy’s room.

  Amped up on meth and on day four of not sleeping (all fear from day three onward), Cowboy nearly took the door from the hinges as he ran after Jeremy and chased him for a good quarter mile north on a lightless section of Route 66 toward Miami (“My-yam-uh”), Oklahoma. No one noticed Cowboy in nothing but boxers and cowboy boots running after Jeremy Jones in the early-morning hours, not that they’d tell you if they had. Then again, there is little that hasn’t been seen before around the Frontier. One man would say that he remembered the echo of Jeremy’s rapscallion laugh as the pair ran into the darkness, soles slapping on the road’s surface. Another said that Jeremy was in distress.

  Moments later, Jeremy was arrested for public drunkenness and possession of drug
paraphernalia when Ottawa County deputy Joe Corley pulled up to him. Corley had merely been patrolling when he saw Jeremy running in his general direction, as Cowboy retreated near naked into the shadowy fields nearby. Sometime between Jeremy’s outrunning Cowboy and the deputy’s pulling up, Jeremy became agitated, paranoid, and lost his sense of time. He was on the verge of hyperventilation and pie-eyed. It was said that Jeremy was out of his mind, yelling, “He’s going to kill me. Cowboy’s going to kill me!”

  As stated in the arrest report from that morning by arresting officer Joe Corley:

  Subject was running down highway with another subject chasing him. Once I made contact with him I observed a very strong odor of an alcoholic beverage on his breath, bloodshot eyes & slurred speech [scribbled out/initialed]. While patting him down [scribbled out/initialed] a [scribbled out/initialed] used syringe was found in his sock. After Miranda [being read his rights], he admitted to using the syringe to inject meth earlier in the evening.

  This arrest report, filed with the district court of Ottawa County, was filled out on the morning of December 30, 1999, the same morning as the Freeman fire. The charges: “Public drunk, poss of drug paraphernalia.” Jeremy remained in the Ottawa County jail with an order to sleep it off for several hours, until being bailed out by bail agent Mike McVay at 10:23 a.m. for $1,160. In theory this ruled him out as a suspect.

  Coincidentally, according to my interview with him, OSBI agent Steve Nutter was at the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office when he got the call about the fire in Welch in the next county over, putting him in the same place as Jeremy Jones that morning.

  On the small blank line left for the time of incident in the arrest report, the arresting officer had written: “06.” This had then been scribbled out and replaced with “0359,” and unlike the other sections of the report that had been altered, this had no initials of endorsement.

  “I advise you to tread carefully on your project,” arresting officer Corley, reportedly now living destitute in the state of Florida, publicly posted on my Facebook wall after two years of not responding to me. “It has many dangers. I know I am very careful with what I say and to whom I say it.”

  It will be the last time I hear from the man.

  For the next five years, this incident with Jeremy Jones was never examined as having any relation to the murders of the Freemans and the abductions of Ashley and Lauria. Nor was there a reason that it should be. It went unexamined, and there really wasn’t any reason to look hard into Jeremy Jones.

  That is, until a man named John Paul Chapman brought the morning up to authorities down in Alabama, over seven hundred miles away, in late 2004.

  20

  * * *

  THE BALLAD OF JOHN PAUL CHAPMAN

  * * *

  In 2001, Welchans were still nervous in the wake of the Freeman murders, still shook up by the idea that whoever had done this was still out there, lurking in the tall grass of the prairies, perhaps even walking among them. A lack of updates, and a marked absence of any apprehended suspects, cast a long shadow over the wide-open ranches west of Welch. “I feel silly for saying this, but I felt really paranoid,” says Missy Dixon, another one of Lauria’s cousins and a close ally of Lorene and Lisa. “I was scared out of my mind.”

  But the families and friends were also hopeful. No remains had been found, so maybe the girls were still alive.

  It was early January 2001, not long after the first anniversary of the Freeman murders. A man named John Paul Chapman studied a date of birth and social security number scrawled on a bar napkin once he had safely boarded the Greyhound bus that took him through the haunted hills of Arkansas’s Ozarks. The napkin had been given to him by a bartender out of Joplin, Missouri.

  Today, you will find virtually nothing about John Paul Chapman. He was a man most women found handsome; he’d say that he wanted to leave his past behind and put Oklahoma in the rearview mirror. Back home, he had three charges of sexual battery from 1996, to which he pleaded guilty, thereby reducing them from a rape charge and affording him probation. “He was a very determined man,” says former girlfriend Sherry Davis. “When he sees something he wants, he’ll find a way to get it.” Even while recounting her horrific rape, for which Chapman was charged, she manages to show kindness toward him, nodding to the earlier days that came in shades of lovesick pink in her memories. “I suppose I wouldn’t be the woman I am today had it not been for him. He used to be so kind and charming, always opening doors for me, wining and dining me like no one had before.” Sherry explains that once his addiction to meth took hold, he had trouble staying true to who he really was, that he “very much lost himself,” becoming paranoid and violent, constantly lying to her. In fact, this is the general consensus of the women from his past: that he was a darling of a man until meth took its hold.

  Also on his rap sheet are a second-degree burglary charge and a felony possession charge, both from 1996. Then, on his very last day of probation, he was charged with a new rape and jumped bail. He hopped on the Greyhound with not much more than what was on his back, and that bar napkin in his pocket. Chapman’s next stop, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the red trollies rang and the Bama Belle paddle-wheel riverboat of the Black Warrior River attracted many Bamers in the western part of the state, just over an hour east of the Mississippi state line.

  The twenty-seven-year-old held dreams of living happily ever after on a beach, and headed south. He was a stranger to most places there, but had met with some distant friends of his family, as arranged by his mother in those early days before he embarked on a rather nomadic lifestyle. A hyperactive man by default (he was later diagnosed with attention deficit disorder [ADD]) and never one to be unemployed, Chapman found work in no time. He explains that his time in Tuscaloosa was a transitional period, and that he was still planning to move farther south to plant roots. “But then one day, I’m not there. I’m at work, and they call me saying the US Marshals or some bounty hunter was there looking for me after I skipped bail in Oklahoma, so off I went.” Tuscaloosa became just the first of many passing towns.

  Chapman, nicknamed by most as Oklahoma, could happily talk his way into any home, onto any one of the many couches where he’d lay his head between odd jobs that kept him occupied. After all, he claims to have been raised well, not dragged up, surrounded by men’s men who had shown him the ropes when it came to mechanics and guns, hunting and construction; he became a jack-of-all-trades. “There are reports out there that I was abused, this and that, but that isn’t true,” he once said. “I was a happy little kid.” But his drug habits were never really under control, and while he’d hoped for change, that fresh start, a monkey called meth wouldn’t get off his back. “Once I put the needle in my arm, I was an evil monster.”

  Learning that the Oklahoman authorities were on his tail, Chapman headed south toward the Gulf Coastal Plain, stopping in Mobile, Alabama, a French-influenced city known as America’s birthplace of Carnival/Mardis Gras. Here, every morning I’m served the best grits I’ll ever eat, and a muddy sea breeze sticks to my skin at sunup. Today, it is a beautiful city on the Gulf of Mexico filled with palm trees and hanging Spanish moss, grand cathedrals and live oaks that capture roads and turn them into tunnels. Busy streets are lined with magnolia trees and beaux arts architecture, a proud antebellum picture of the Deep South where the Mobile River opens to the country’s ninth largest port. “I call it a big small town,” says Paul Burch, current captain of the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office.

  Our correspondence began while I was still living in Ireland back in 2016, though we’d meet in both Alabama and Oklahoma and continue speaking in between. “There’s nothing like growing up and living on the Gulf Coast,” Captain Burch continues. And there is something lively about this place. I have danced here a time or two.

  Mobile is half an hour east of the Mississippi state line and less than an hour west of Florida’s panhandle. Chapman arrived there and quickly made friends with a couple named Kim and Mar
k Bentley, a church-oriented couple from Turnerville, on the northern outskirts of Mobile. Mark, who had his own construction business, helped John find work.

  But despite sweet home Alabama, Chapman still missed his family: mother Jeanne, teenage brother Jesse, and stepfather Tony, who’d raised him since he was two. When I ask Chapman about his favorite childhood memories back in Oklahoma, he replies without hesitation, “Christmas,” recalling his uncle towing an entire backseat full of gifts. “I’d look at the labels, and every single one was for me. This one. Then this one. Next. Next.” In him I always felt a sense of nostalgia.

  As his addiction to crystal meth began to take a stronger hold, Chapman had a falling-out with the Bentleys. Soon, he was sent packing, and he settled in a cheap motel in a seedy part of the Azalea City. There, Chapman’s days were seventy-two hours long, and he was getting so high that his vision would break in flashes of black, like his brain was shorting out. “He was strung out,” Mark Bentley remembered. Chapman was losing weight, living day to day and high to high.

  While at the motel, Chapman met a man named Craig Baxter from Douglasville, Georgia, who’d temporarily left home to find work in Mobile, where he was a plant manager for a mattress company. Though they knew each other for only a couple of weeks, they conversed as though they’d been friends for years. “He had the gift of the gab,” Baxter tells me in 2019. When Baxter decided to leave on account of not being happy with the work there in Mobile, and with Chapman nowhere to be found, Baxter left a note on Chapman’s motel door: “If you’re ever in Georgia, give me a call!”