by Jax Miller
When it came to the early hours of December 30, 1999, Jeremy Jones stated to authorities that Danny Freeman owed his friend Marvin Roden some money, an outstanding debt for methamphetamine. “He was a feener,” Jeremy said of Danny Freeman, a common term for a drug fiend. Jones said that while Roden, an alleged higher-up in the meth world who owned a body shop just across the street from the Frontier Motel in Dotyville, never instructed Jeremy to collect the debt, Roden’s wife drew Jeremy a map to the Freeman trailer. Jeremy claimed that he became lost on the back roads west of Welch for hours, cruising along unlit dirt drives under the cover of night, until finding the mailbox with the Freeman surname in his headlights. It would have been a chilly and pin-drop silent night just a few days after Christmas, his favorite time of year.
Lauria Bible’s, as well.
At this stage in the interrogation, Jeremy seemed to become confused about many of the details. He said he went up the short driveway, when in reality the driveway was quite long, changing his mind only when investigators prompted him with several “Are you sures?” He then said he went up the porch steps. When asked what kind of steps, he could not remember, before fumbling and guessing. “Wooden … I think they were metal?” They were in fact concrete.
The cherry on the top of the inconsistencies came when I found out for myself that Marvin Roden, for whom Jeremy was allegedly collecting a debt, had died two years before the Freeman murders.
When authorities asked Jones to give the layout of the house, he consistently offered up wrong details, adding breakfast bars where there were none, turning in the wrong direction to hunt down the couple in the master bedroom. During the course of the interrogation, however, whenever Jeremy had trouble remembering specifics, he and the officers took bathroom breaks, snack breaks, only for Jeremy to return with his story straight and all the information ironed out. But then Jeremy would get distracted or forgetful, reverting back to the discrepancies.
Speaking with Oklahoma authorities Sooter and Nutter when they arrived down in Alabama, Jeremy claimed that his weapon of choice was a pistol. Later, he backtracked and claimed he’d had a rifle. Further down the line, this changed once more to having a shotgun. Over several hours of interrogation, the following exchange was typical:
“I pulled out my pistol and shot them both in the head,” claimed Jeremy.
“You remember you used a shotgun, right?” asked one of the investigators.
“Yeah,” Jeremy answered.
Jeremy also went back and forth with who died first and when. He claimed that he stood at the doorway, facing Danny and Kathy from the foot of their bed, which wouldn’t have been accurate; rather, from the doorway (where Danny’s body was later found), he’d have been facing the side of the bed, with the head of the bed to his left and the foot to his right. First he claimed that he killed Danny first, then had to tackle and wrestle with Kathy as she tried to get out of bed. Then he said that he killed her first, that she died instantly, and that he saw the jerk of her body under the covers. He also claimed to have used “twos and fours,” referring to the shotgun buckshot pellet size, while the families insist Danny and Kathy were killed with “sevens or eights,” which would indicate bird shot from a twelve gauge, as confirmed by the autopsy. Later he would say he used an 1100 semiautomatic shotgun, then an automatic rifle, then a .25 pistol because he wanted to be sure they were dead, none of which was supported by the evidence (based on the damage caused by the one shot each that killed them, there would have been no doubt that their deaths were immediate).
Jeremy peddled the idea that Danny and Kathy were sleeping when the attack began, which was not generally thought to be true. There was the position of Kathy’s body, lying over the covers across the bed, with Danny in the doorway, along with the fact that Danny was still wearing his shoes, which were found melted onto his body, suggesting he hadn’t yet retired for the evening. Or perhaps he’d just slipped them on upon hearing a noise, a bark, a knock at the door.
The reports from Jeremy on the accelerant he used also changed frequently, from Coleman fuel he found in the kitchen (a popular component in cooking methamphetamine) to gasoline from his own truck. Even acetone was mentioned a couple of times.
As I played the interrogation tapes back, it looked like guess after guess after guess. Despite hours of interrogation, throughout which he claimed not to remember either one of the girls, he suggested that after killing Ashley’s mother and father and leaving them in bed, he went from room to room, eventually finding the girls. This would ultimately change (and remain changed) to the notion that after Jeremy Jones lit the fire, he left for his truck, never knowing that there were two girls still inside the trailer until they came running out, screaming. This seemed like a theory that everyone could focus their attention on. Jeremy intimated to the girls that he had just driven up after seeing the fire from the road, and convinced Ashley and Lauria to jump into the truck so that he could take them to the police station. Jeremy claimed that after he turned onto the road in the opposite direction of the highway, the girls became scared as they realized they’d gotten into a truck with the man they’d possibly just heard gun down Kathy and Danny. “I had automatic locks, locked them in.”
“There were some issues with the interviews,” admits Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) agent Larry Thomas, who’d later become the bureau’s assistant director after famously capturing Dennis Rader, known as the BTK Killer, one of the most infamous serial killers in America. “My boss then called down to Mobile and suggested they carefully look into how some of the information was handled.” Agent Thomas traveled down to Alabama after one of Jones’s confessions pertained to the 1992 unsolved murder of Picher, Oklahoma, native Jennifer Judd, twenty, who was brutally stabbed to death in her home just over the Kansas border in Baxter Springs nine days after getting married. Unable to provide comment on the other crimes that Jones confessed to, as they weren’t his own cases, and unable to speak on behalf of the KBI on account of his 2008 retirement, Thomas explains that false confessions aren’t an uncommon thing; they’re often forged out of a suspect’s need for attention or desire for jail amenities; the latter seems to be the case with Jones. “Not always, but sometimes you get an investigator who is so sure they have the right guy, they give away more information than they’re getting.”
Thomas explains to me the necessity of “hold-back information,” details of crimes never made public in the hope that suspects can provide them to authenticate their confessions. “We started to work on it, on this hold-back information, and Jones didn’t have a clue as to what we were talking about,” says Thomas, recalling his 2005 interview with Jones. “Then, while we were having the conversation, Jeremy would take a smoke break with the Alabama authorities and come back with the information we wanted.”
Thomas’s suspicions matched my own while I reviewed the interviews for the Welch case. The interrogators seemed happy to accept Jones’s mismatching information, his guessing, his tendency to take a leak every time an important detail was brought up.
“They’d send me back [to my cell] with all the files of the victims,” Jones reveals. “They’d encourage me, telling me to steer this way or that way. They were holding a carrot on a string for me.”
Immediately following his confessions, Jeremy Jones became the next it boy in the world of true-crime sensationalism, checking off all the boxes that turned him from bona fide killer to celebrity: handsome, chatty, a bottomless source of information and confessions. The media and law enforcement alike reveled in it. The press wanted a piece of his charm, and agencies from all across America had cases that showed superstar potential and needed closing. “They saw me as dollar signs and book deals,” Jones says, admitting that he never minded, because it gave him better jailhouse amenities.
Even my interview with OSBI agent Nutter corroborated this. “As I recall, the detectives at the Miami [Oklahoma] Police Department were upset with some sheriff’s deputies from Alabama that had come
up with a journalist and were investigating the Freeman murders,” said Nutter. “They said that Jeremy Jones had confessed to it, and they were up there [in Oklahoma] doing some legwork on it. And this reporter was going to write a book about it.”
“My personal opinion,” retired KBI agent Thomas continues, “was that Jones was obviously coached.”
While I feel confident that Jones was lying in his confessions, his information isn’t necessarily wasted. By the time I begin speaking to Jones and by the time I lock myself in a dark room for weeks on end to study the confession tapes, I am no stranger to many of these details: Marvin Roden, the Coleman fuel, the layout of the house, down to the finer details falsified by Jeremy, such as frosted tips that Danny Freeman did not have in his hair to worrying about neighbors who actually didn’t exist.
Then something clicks. I go back to my phone photos, to the blacks and whites of the graveyard girls at the library, and discover something new.
Jeremy Jones is confessing to the wrong murder.
What Jeremy was aptly describing was another double murder, in a trailer park called Carriage Hills, a frightening drive up the bluffs of Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees at the back side of Afton, Oklahoma, just twenty miles southeast of Welch. When I drive through myself, all the locals emerge from the trailers, scattered haphazardly among the hills. Many of the residents show obvious signs of meth addiction as they eye my car. The message is clear: outsiders not welcome. Burned-out cars line the sides of the roads, and windows are covered in aluminum. Babies wearing only diapers wander in yards without supervision. Jones’s descriptions of the murders at Welch are a perfect match for the case of another couple shot to death. Another trailer burned. Another unsolved murder, of a couple named Danny Oakley and Doris Harris on February 21, 1996.
Much of what I learn about the Oakley-Harris case comes from Paula Barnett, the sister of forty-year-old victim Doris Harris. We are on our way up to a U2 concert in Kansas City when we talk about Doris. “She was just the most wonderful person in the world,” says Paula. Today, she still considers Jones a suspect in her sister’s murder, which occurred while Doris and her thirty-seven-year-old boyfriend, Danny Oakley, were sleeping on their waterbed, another similarity to the Freeman case. Both were shot in the head and killed instantly prior to their trailer being set on fire. While there wasn’t any evidence at the crime scene in Welch to suggest that the murders there were drug related, the double murder of Danny and Doris in Afton in fact was. “My sister got caught up,” says Paula, discussing the fact that Doris’s boyfriend was a locally known manufacturer of meth. “But it didn’t mean she wasn’t someone’s daughter, someone’s mother … my sister.”
Even today, some locals still confuse the Freeman murders with the Oakley-Harris murders from three years prior.
Together, Paula and I pore over autopsies and phone records, reports, the things that murder cases are made of, the things lost in the Bible-Freeman case. And like the Bible-Freeman case, the Oakley-Harris case comes with its faults, most of them arising when authorities found a man named Denny Ray Hunnicutt passed out behind the wheel of a car that matched the description of the car neighbors saw leaving the scene. Hunnicutt had fresh burns up his arms and quickly became a suspect, but he was never charged. And the case was littered with authorities who were known to dabble in scandal, much of which has been documented over the years, including one involving the sheriff back then, who was later ordered to pay more than $13 million in compensation for raping female inmates in 2011. Then there is ADA Winston Connor, who was arrested and charged in 2019 with solicitation for murder, witness tampering, assault with a dangerous weapon, pandering for prostitution, obtaining unlawful proceeds, and racketeering after plotting with a convicted murderer named Slint Tate, who ran a million-dollar-per-week meth ring from prison. Former ADA Connor also faced counts of “conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance, unlawful communication with a convict, solicitation of prostitution and committing a pattern of criminal offenses,” according to the Tulsa World. I spend a long time researching murders and crimes that became lost in the hullabaloo of corruption and scandal, and back-burner priorities that ended up fading.
Today, criminal charges against the former ADA Winston Connor remain pending.
According to Jones in his Alabama confessions, he ran into Hunnicutt (now deceased) in the parking lot of a bar weeks after the Oakley-Harris murders. Hunnicutt went on to explain to Jeremy Jones how he had been there when the fire was set, having spent the night using meth with Doris and Danny, about which Jeremy played dumb. Hunnicutt told Jones that he’d snuck off to the bathroom to inject meth and a man (presumably Jones) came in and killed Danny and Doris. Hunnicutt hid in the bathroom and was trapped in the fire, waiting as long as he could before narrowly escaping.
There is hold-back information not made public on this case that led me to believe that Jeremy was not lying about what Hunnicutt had told him about the Oakley-Harris case. Hunnicutt was released shortly after his arrest and died in 2006. No one since has ever been arrested for the murders of Danny Oakley and Doris Harris.
“The case was handed over to the OSBI,” says Doris’s sister, Paula. She says that like the case in Welch, the investigation was headed by OSBI agent Nutter. But to her, “No one cared about two meth addicts.” Drug debt was the prominent theory that swirled around the Oakley-Harris murders, and it seemed the couple knew they’d gotten in too deep and were planning their escape: their bags were packed by the front door, with bathing suits and suntan lotion to boot.
With the disappointment brought on by the Shadwick and Glover searches of Wyandotte that yielded nothing about the girls’ remains, families and authorities were eager to hear what Jones had to say, and what he had to say didn’t stop with the mismatching details of the Bible-Freeman case and the Oakley-Harris case. Jones would confess to several more murders around Welch, many not before heard of by families, cases that would get new attention upon Jones bringing them up.
After confessing to the Oakley-Harris case, Jones confessed to the murder of nineteen-year-old Justin Hutchings, an alleged meth user from Baxter Springs, Kansas, fresh out of rehab who was pushed out of a speeding truck in Picher, Oklahoma, on September 11, 1999, just a few months before the Welch murders and only twenty-three miles away. It was a case also overseen by then Ottawa County Sheriff’s detective Mike Eason, who headed up the Shadwick affidavit and conducted the search on his Wyandotte property back in 2001, along with being present for the Glover search.
Jeremy claimed to have given Hutchings a “hot shot,” a needle of meth mixed with peroxide, because, according to Jones, “peroxide don’t show up in the system.” I confirmed that fact with my medical examiner source Darren Dake, who concurred that peroxide would not show up in your basic toxicology screen unless it was specifically being looked for. Between paramedics and witnesses, the Hutchings death was a strange case not looked at as a homicide until after Jones’s confession, though the manner of death was listed in the autopsy as unknown and the cause was toxic effects of methamphetamine. There was an ominous note found on the body that read “Disciple 13,” and after being pushed out of the truck, Hutchings was dragged into a house, stripped naked, and covered in ice, which was how he was found by paramedics. Even the medical examiner alluded to the rumors of poisoning, noting in the autopsy that “the rumor circulated that … he may have been injected with cyanide and/or some other substance by another person.” But I speak to nearly a dozen people who all say that they know exactly who did it: one notorious man I find operating between several meth circles in the area, and that person is not Jeremy Jones, though I’m easily able to establish a relationship between the two. In fact, even though it wasn’t investigated initially as a homicide, it was a wide-open secret within the community that Hutchings had met with foul play. “Good luck proving it,” one of the firsthand witnesses, a man who watched Hutchings die, says to me with a smirk. And even though several witnesses tell me who di
d it, today the case remains unsolved.
“The double murder in 1996 of Oakley and Harris and the 1999 murder of Hutchings were horrendous,” says current Ottawa County sheriff Jeremy Floyd. “When I took office, I made it a goal to review these cold cases, along with many others. Cases involving the taking of human life should never be archived or forgotten,” which these seemed to be. I ask him about the current state of affairs. “Cold cases are followed up on frequently, especially if we [the sheriff’s office] receive new information and/or tips.” Floyd further explains how the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation has also “recently established a cold case unit in 2019. In conjunction with this new unit, technology, and following up on leads, I pray we can solve these cases.” He looks longingly into the dying fire in his living room. “Those families need closure.”
For all these small communities, for amber waves of grain, there is no shortage of murder in northeastern Oklahoma. Jones also confessed to the 1997 double murder of Harmon Fenton, thirty-three, and Sarah Palmer, nineteen, of Commerce. They were a couple who were heavily involved in methamphetamine and were reported missing. A month later, their decomposing bodies were discovered just over the Kansas border in the bed of a pickup truck in an abandoned shed, up in an unincorporated town called Melrose. It was a brutal murder in which Fenton was shot once in the abdomen, presumably left to watch as the murderer(s) used his girlfriend, Palmer, for target practice, shooting her in various parts of her body—seven times front and back—, strangling her, stabbing her, breaking her bones, and possibly raping her. Despite my efforts to investigate this case, I had to step away after a man confessed the murders to me and threatened to do the same thing to me if I kept nosing around. Based on his documented history, I took the threat seriously enough to step down after issues of stalking and this suspect’s calling me in a fake woman’s voice to try and arrange meetings. None of this does a thing for my nerves.
