Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  Investigators soon dismissed Jeremy Jones’s claims to have killed the couple, when they learned he was incarcerated in Oklahoma at the time of the murders, only to be released a couple of days before their decomposing bodies were found.

  The Fenton-Palmer case remains open with Kansas authorities today.

  Every one of these cases had one thing in common: the families of the victims uniformly believed the investigations had been halfhearted or botched, and the blame tended to fall on the victims themselves for becoming involved in the local culture. As Jeremy Jones continued to provide authorities with vague details of these various killings, there was no denying that there were a lot of bodies surrounding the meth circles that intertwined with one another. Furthermore, it gave way to the possibility that Jones’s relationships with the people involved could have given him the opportunity to hear something from one of the many outlaws he associated with. Connections could be made between Jones and every one of the victims and suspects he named and didn’t name, many of them associated with the likes of the Glovers and the other outlaws in Wyandotte, where authorities searched for the bodies of Lauria and Ashley in 2001. I wondered if he’d heard the rumors and possibly something about the whereabouts of the girls. If the New Year’s party accommodated dozens of meth-addled criminals who came to take turns on the girls, and with Jeremy Jones closely tied to the men who came forward, could he know something?

  If Oklahoma was a beautiful woman, then this case was a scar on her face. It hurts the heart when I am swimming through sunsets so spectacular and so wide that they’re like drowning in color, and welcomed by prairie afternoons when the wheat meets me with a wave that smells like sunshine and youth’s foolish first love. All my years here in Oklahoma, like my writing, will be a love-hate relationship.

  It becomes easy for me to be drawn down these rabbit holes, investing every waking moment researching and investigating each one of these cases. Some bring death threats that I’m still too scared to talk about. Some bring new friends who come to see me from Oklahoma. But I have to focus. God willing, I have time to return. But for now, I have to be here for Ashley and Lauria and remember this story is theirs and not his.

  We can’t lose focus. Lorene’s words reverberate in my head.

  Today, Jeremy Jones is suspected not only of the murders in Oklahoma, but of many others across the South, and despite many agencies traveling to Mobile, Jeremy Jones was convicted only for the capital murder of Lisa Nichols in 2005, along with rape in the first degree, sexual abuse in the first degree, and burglary in the first degree.

  He was sentenced to death and continues to call me from death row. Stranger danger! Over the years, I’ve carefully studied several murders in which Jones remains a suspect. I became close to the families of his alleged victims. I visited them in their homes. I’d learn, and I’d grow and harden all at once.

  “Jax is stressed,” Jeremy Jones tells my husband. “Here’s what you do. Go draw her a bath. Give her a nice massage with some rose petals. She’ll love it. All women love it.” He can paint scenes of romance without any effort, rather hopelessly. In the years that we’ll talk, I’ll maintain a certain distance. Despite all the detestable things that came from his interrogations, I’d heard for too long of the women who fancy him, the love letters in prison, and the bullshit. I’m not too proud to think I’m immune to anything I don’t understand.

  I have yet to meet a person familiar with the Bible-Freeman case who doesn’t associate it with Jeremy Jones.

  “I mean, I knew of him,” Paul Glover Jr. once told me. “He wasn’t a stranger to me or nothing. I knew of him, but he never ran.”

  It was known that Jones was associated with Paul Glover Sr. and many of the criminals of Wyandotte.

  Every conversation and every investigation into violent crime in the state at that time told me one thing: Jeremy Jones knows something about every terrible thing that took place in Oklahoma. And more important, he may have known the perpetrators who took the girls. So when he turned his attention to the Welch case, I knew I had to listen—even if it meant picking through countless layers of misdirection and deception.

  I lie awake at night, thinking about whether the girls could smell Jeremy’s sweat in the cab of the pickup: the choking stench of the chemicals dripping from his pores, panic. Did Ashley watch her home burning in the rearview mirror as they drove into the night? Was this when the girls realized their fate, racing through the flickering darkness of the passing forests as they headed to their death? Is this the stretch of road, or this yard, or that hole where their bones will one day be found?

  Jeremy’s story changes multiple times, but ultimately he settles on the iteration wherein the girls ran from the front of the trailer and jumped into the truck with him just as he slammed the door to leave the scene of the fire (another confession had him taking the girls at gunpoint and forcing them into his truck). This narrative, however, is not supported by the physical evidence, which indicates that the path of the accelerant started at the woodstove next to the front door. The fire would have blocked their route, so they would have had to leap through the flames in order to make their way to the truck from the front door. According to Jones, after locking the girls in his white ’91 Ford pickup, he sped through the back roads toward Miami and came to a stop in Galena, Kansas, about forty miles northeast of Welch, one of many mining towns Jones frequented in his youth, where he alleged he used to sell dope with the Glovers. Located in the Tri-State Mining District, Galena was named for the galena ore that came from its land and it is lauded as the oldest mining town in Kansas.

  Jones claimed to have parked by one of the mines in Galena, increasingly alarmed about what he was going to do with the girls. They had seen his face. There was no turning back. He said that after forcing them out of the car at gunpoint, all three of them were crying in the headlights of the truck, near the edge of one of the bottomless cavities. Jones claimed that he shot one, and when the other tried running, he shot that one twice. He had never been able to discern which girl was which. He said he dragged them into the mine. Jones said that he never heard a splash, not even when he threw railroad ties in after them to cover them up. He denied any sexual assault.

  During the investigation, neither Jones nor any of the authorities bring up Jones’s arrest at the Frontier Motel in the early hours of the morning of the fire.

  Today, people dispute whether Jeremy Jones could have realistically set the fire in Welch, traveled to Galena to murder and dispose of the girls, and circled back to the Frontier Motel in time to become embroiled in his argument with Cowboy. OSBI agent Nutter, who helped conduct the interview about the Welch case down in Alabama (along with the cases of Oakley and Harris, Justin Hutchings, Fenton and Palmer, and others), did not believe Jeremy would have had the time, claiming he would have only had a “twenty-minute window” to get high (though this was a detail more linked to the Oakley-Harris confession), dispose of the girls, and return to the motel. Sheriff Sooter, however, was convinced that Jones was responsible, insisting that “he had plenty of time to start that fire.”

  “I think that’s why Sooter didn’t work the case well in the end,” said Danny Freeman’s stepbrother, Dwayne. “He had it in his mind that Jones did it, and that was that.” But because Sooter didn’t have any law enforcement background prior to his being elected to office, some questioned the veracity of his beliefs.

  Based on the arrest report from the morning of the fire, the time of arrest initially began with “06,” but this was crossed out and rewritten as “0359.” The repeated instances of amended documentation were a consistent source of fascination in the case, but this change wasn’t hugely telling without a firm sense of when the fire in Welch actually started. Due to the natural inability to remember all of the details after so many years, or unable to offer any official expertise related to the science of fire, or even because the answers were unknown to them, everyone from the OSBI to the local sheriff’s offices t
o the victims’ families told me to refer to the fire marshal’s investigative report. But, as I came to learn, no such investigation took place, according to the Office of the State Fire Marshal.

  I can find no record.

  We were not called to do an arson investigation.

  We did not investigate a fire in Welch.

  No such request was made to the State Fire Marshal’s Office.

  No.

  Without a fire investigation having been conducted, so much remains unlearned about the murders in Welch, including, but not limited to, the possible involvement of Jeremy Jones. Between the varying answers of the families, the local men of the Welch Volunteer Fire Department, and law enforcement, the time when the fire started ranged in a large window between ten p.m. on December 29, 1999, and near dawn the next morning. Many factors had to be considered, such as the currents of air inside the trailer, the arsonist’s common trick of lighting a candle and letting it burn down to the accelerant (which could delay the fire for hours as the culprit made his or her escape), the kind and quantity of accelerant used, and all the other things that contribute to an arson investigation.

  In the wake of Jones’s confession, he sat with authorities, drawing maps and discussing the specifics of the mines and sinkholes in the Galena area.

  Six months later, on June 29, 2005, authorities examined the pits of Galena. The wind was hot that day, the kind that feels like it’s the only thing keeping your skin from burning. The effort constituted the largest search for the girls to that point, with thirty-five members of law enforcement, including state and federal agencies, combing the grounds with dogs and the wells with cameras in wind-kicked dust. “What we are looking for is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Sheriff Sooter in an interview with the Oklahoman.

  In my own meeting with Sooter, he tells me that there are “several thousand miles of mines under the ground. They go all over northeast Oklahoma into Joplin, Missouri, into Kansas, and so forth. There are running rivers underneath, in the mines. And the thing is, if the bodies were in the mines, the temperature in there is a constant fifty degrees, I believe. So if the bodies were in there, they wouldn’t be as bad as you think.” Then, just as the searches began accruing media attention and Jones’s own profile was raised, Jones changed his story for the last time.

  With no signs of the girls, Jones recanted all of his confessions, claiming that he only wanted better food and phone privileges. And above all, he was hoping for extradition so that he could go back to Oklahoma, where his family was.

  Today, he denies involvement in any and all of the murders he was ever suspected in.

  “I didn’t think he did it,” says Lorene. “But we know he was tied to some of the earlier suspects.” Lorene still believes that Jones may very well know something about Lauria’s and Ashley’s final days, that he might have information about the much-discussed New Year’s Eve party. “All of them, all those drug people, are intertwined,” Lorene continues. “I think Jeremy’s heard things. But the bottom line was he was free for several years before his arrest, four years. You can learn a lot in that time, just reading the papers.”

  “You know, back then, I wasn’t thinking ahead,” admits Jeremy Jones, who now claims he feels regret for giving false confessions. “I wasn’t thinking about how this can affect someone’s mother.” Today, he says he is sorry. “I just hope Mrs. Bible will forgive me one day.”

  Lorene, however, says that Jeremy Jones has never reached out to her.

  In the end, no charges were filed in any of the Oklahoma murders to which Jeremy Jones confessed. And despite the highly public buzz surrounding the charismatic death row inmate, there were no significant leads between his 2005 confessions and my arrival in Oklahoma in 2016. And even though no significant suspects came to light for the next eleven years, a new fact was about to come to light, when a woman named Winnie came to Lorene with information.

  It would take the families seventeen years to learn about the last person to possibly see the car transporting the girls and their captors in the early-morning hours on the day of the Freeman fire.

  SECTION 4

  * * *

  LATER LEADS

  * * *

  22

  * * *

  THE EDGES OF OKLAHOMA

  * * *

  December 30, 1999

  The Morning of the Fire

  Where the local historical maps are scribbled in black because even the archivists of the town consider this nowhere land, deep in the hinterlands of the Neosho River where cowboy country ends and Indian territory begins, there lived a young couple. Deep in the country, it’s a place known only to locals, far enough from any town limits to happen upon by accident. It’s in these little no-name towns of Oklahoma that time seems to have stopped: traditions reign supreme, and its people continue to live unaffected by the revolutions and trends of the outside world. And happily so. These are the places for people who want to be left alone, where the pecan trees twist tighter and the homes lie camouflaged against thick, dark briar.

  It was only a few hours before Kathy Freeman’s body was found on the morning of December 30, shortly before three a.m., when Winnie (traditionally named Awinita, Cherokee for “fawn”) became restless by way of TV reruns in her farmhouse. Even the early-rising farmers were in the thickest cycles of sleep. Winnie was already an hour off her shift at the local casino, but the phantom beeps of the slot machines still tinged in her ears, and insomnia kept her in its vise.

  Still in her waitress uniform, she stepped outside, hoping the cold air would be enough to make her at least want to change into her pajamas and crawl into bed. She crossed the yard, a small property landscaped with frostbitten spices and winter-dormant flower beds. She walked toward the edge of her flat property by the country road, lit by a lone yellow spotlight on a telephone pole. Winnie took in the chill and looked out to the nothingness of the grasslands ahead and heard the deafening silence of the winter’s night.

  According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, there was visibility of 9.9 miles, which, if it had been light, would have allowed Winnie to see the chimney smoke of her closest neighbors some five miles out. But then the wind dropped, and the sound came of a roaring engine in the distance closing in. It was unusual to spot a car around here, even in the daytime, but at this ungodly hour, and with no sign of headlights to accompany the noise, it was just unnerving.

  Winnie’s gut rippled with fear; she stepped back off the edge of the road and took shelter in the darkness, sewn into bushes of juniper. She held her breath as the spotlight washed the 1980s model car in silver and yellow for a moment. Not far from where Winnie stood camouflaged, the car suddenly stopped, the driver braking hard enough to create a large cloud of dust that further hid Winnie, but kept her from seeing clearly. In that moment, she thought she’d been spotted. While the car still ran, one of the doors opened so the interior light glowed through the dirt and the dinging sounded to alert of an open door: a scuffle, a screech of a female, a deep roar from a man’s throat. The commotion lasted all of a few seconds, but Winnie knew fear when she heard it, and the indecipherable voices relayed to her that something was very wrong. The door slammed shut, and the lightless car left as fast as it could.

  As the car raced away from Winnie’s home, the taillights exploded into life just before it disappeared into the overgrown backcountry where the moonlight didn’t touch, illuminated hazy red in the dust. Winnie stood frozen for several moments, trying to discern by its sound which direction the car was heading, until the last echoes faded entirely. As stiff as the winter branches at her back, Winnie reached into her bra to pull out a cigarette case. The scrape of her Zippo was loud in the silence, and Winnie cupped her hand around the glowing smoke and darted back up the steps of her home, unable to shake off the unnerving sense of fear and rage that came from the voices.

  In the kitchen, she sat by herself in the dim stove-top light, waiting restlessly for Noah, her husband, to
wake up. Her ashtray was overflowing when Noah finally bounced down the stairs, dressed for the day. He dropped a kiss on Winnie’s cheek and went for the coffeepot. “What’s the matter? Couldn’t sleep again?”

  With circles growing darker under her eyes, she looked up. “I saw something this morning.” She couldn’t stop replaying the memory, second-guessing what she saw.

  Noah turned to her and cleared his throat, only then noticing the pile of cigarette butts in an ashtray on the breakfast bar. “Everything OK?”

  “A car full of people,” she answered. “The headlights were off, and I heard a girl’s cry. And a man’s yelling.”

  “Maybe just some kids gallivanting around.”

  She looked across the room and out the window toward the sounds of the morning birds. “Maybe …”

  Noah, late for his job all the way in Tulsa, took her hand and gave it a shake. “You look tired, honey. Go and sleep for the day. Those night shifts aren’t doing a thing for your nerves anyhow.”

  She gave him a closed-lip smile, a brief reassurance as he took his lunch box from the countertop, gave a quick pat on his wife’s head, and left the house.

  But word spread around Oklahoma quickly, and before long, there wasn’t a soul who hadn’t heard about the commotion happening over in Welch. As conjecture swept through the community in the following weeks, and the missing-persons posters sprang up all over town and on local TV, Winnie made a realization, with a sinking heart, that the car she saw could have been driven by the man or men who had taken Lauria and Ashley. It was the right time, the right direction, and in all her years on those country roads, she’d never seen anything like it.

  Years later, Lorene Bible, never having heard of this event, caught wind of Winnie and drove over to meet the woman herself (Lorene investigated all parts of her daughter’s case). According to Lorene, Winnie and her father called the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation back then to report what she’d seen. The OSBI assured them several times that they’d send someone out to take Winnie’s statement.