Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  When I spoke to Nutter and asked him about this witness, it didn’t ring a bell. “I don’t remember that,” he said.

  According to Lorene, no one went out to take Winnie’s statement, as promised, not until Lorene reported it herself to authorities in 2016.

  23

  * * *

  ANOTHER AVENUE

  * * *

  2016

  I spend a chunk of my life investing every heavy ounce of emotion in the pursuit of one theory only to be forced to jump to the next until my head starts to spin from the number of suspects: from the drug circles of Wyandotte that included names like Chester Shadwick and the Glovers, to the confessions of suspected serial killer Jeremy Jones. I’ve fallen into an ocean of blood, and on some days, I feel like I’m floating on my back, doing my best to go with the currents with open eyes and open ears; I learn slowly that fighting the tides leads to more frequent panic attacks. And all the good things I once knew about myself are drifting away in those tides—my sanity, above all. But navigating her way through the waters alongside me is Lorene, through the bones of winter and the flesh of summer. She has spent decades chasing leads, fetching the false hope thrown her way and bringing it back without fail. This is her life’s purpose.

  The prairies remain empty, without answer, never changing.

  “[Sheriff] Sooter seemed to put his eggs all in one basket, and that was Jeremy Jones,” said Danny Freeman’s stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, one of many who considered Jeremy Jones low-hanging fruit for officers wanting to get this case finished with as quickly as possible. “Between that and Nutter not doing much, it quieted down after Jones. The case just went into limbo.” Dwayne went on to share his resentment that Sooter had no law enforcement background prior to his being elected to the sheriff’s office. “It’s like taking a carpenter to work on your car.”

  “It slowed down after Jones,” admits Lorene. “There were more minor leads, leads that we the family looked into. But it was mostly quiet for the next eleven years.”

  Discreetly between the more significant leads, the Freeman family legally declared Ashley Freeman dead in 2010. The decision largely stemmed from Danny’s father Glen Freeman’s desire to take ownership of the land in Welch where he keeps to himself today. Ashley, being the sole heir, had the right to inherit the land after her parents were killed, but with no sign of the girls surfacing in the case, the Freemans felt they had to move on.

  But for the Bibles, declaring Lauria dead isn’t an option.

  “Hope is all we have,” says cousin Lisa.

  Come 2016, there is a fresh generation on the case, now led by OSBI agent Tammy Ferrari and DA investigator for District 12 Gary Stansill. Stansill comes with the Freeman-Bible case being a special interest of his after his 2010 retirement as a sergeant for the Tulsa Police Department, where he was acting supervisor of the Sex Crime Unit, as well as the Child Crisis Unit. After retirement, upon learning there was a position open at the district attorney’s office, Stansill took the job. In an article for the Claremore Daily Progress titled “Back on the Saddle,” he describes crimes involving children as being the hardest. “They’re the most emotionally difficult ones to work.” Stansill seems to acknowledge that this case needs special attention, that it requires the mentality he’s acquired over the years from his work with children. He once described working on the Freeman-Bible case in an interview with the Tulsa World as akin to “having four jigsaw puzzles dumped into one pile and being asked to sort one out.” For anyone familiar with the case, this is plain to see.

  For both the Bibles and the Freemans, the case seemed—finally—to be in good hands. A new team. A new season. A new direction for the investigation, perhaps.

  When I spoke with current OSBI agent Ferrari, she was open about her frustrations with the Bible-Freeman case, citing that most tips were from anonymous sources and came so vague that they were hard to follow up on. She also discussed the obstructions brought about by witnesses getting older or passing away, often from addiction. “I don’t know if it’s going to take a dying declaration from somebody or what, but I definitely want to solve it,” she said.

  Ferrari also expressed her hopes that the girls might still be alive. “I would never want them to be held captive out there, God forbid,” Ferrari started, making reference to Elizabeth Smart. “But to be alive somewhere, that would be wonderful for us to be able to find them and return them to their families. There’s that possibility, and I would hope for that.”

  “By now, I know the girls have passed away,” says Lorene matter-of-factly in the bleachers at her grandson’s baseball game. “You hope that after so many years your child will come home and it’ll all be all right, but if that’s not the case, then I have to bring their bodies home.” I have come to know Lorene well enough to know that there is nothing cold or cut off in her resolve; she is guarded, she is wary, and who can blame her?

  I ask Lorene about the eleven-year space between Jeremy Jones’s confessions and my meeting her. “I just do the best that I can. I follow tips. I speak to people. I listen.”

  In addition to the newer generation of investigators, the Bibles create a Facebook page titled “Find Lauria Bible—BBI,” on which tips began to pour in almost immediately. “We saw it as a new opportunity, a new way to bring exposure to the case, and a way for people to reach out to us,” says Lorene. “It’s another avenue. We will take any avenue we can to help find the girls.” It is successful in creating a new burst of interest.

  “The page was started in 2016,” says Lauria’s cousin Lisa, who helps Lorene run the page. “There’s been so much exposure because of it, getting beyond this four-state area and reaching all over the world. It especially became vital for people who didn’t want to go to police.” She explains that some of the people reaching out to the “Find Lauria Bible” page are integral witnesses who, in the initial days of the fire, were ignored by law enforcement.

  One such witness was Winnie, the insomniac who lived out in the country and witnessed what very well could have been the getaway car speed by. In 2016, Winnie reached out to the Bibles via the Facebook page. “She could have seen the car that the girls were transported in, which came from the direction of Welch, where the Freeman trailer fire was,” says Lorene. “I believe her.” Lorene, the one-woman investigation team determined to track down her daughter, went out to visit Winnie to hear her account directly. Convinced her information was genuine, Lorene demanded that the new authorities get out there and take down Winnie’s statement.

  It’s this pattern I see throughout the investigation: Lorene leading the charge, carrying out all of the initial legwork before authorities get involved.

  Other sources who begin to come forward prefer to use Facebook to contact the Bible family because they are cautious about dealing with the police directly. Lisa explains that many of the people offering information are still active in the drug scene and fear arrest. “Locally, people know there’ve been issues of trust between us and law enforcement, so they trust us by default. They’ve long heard us announce that their tips are confidential, and that’s important to them. Sometimes, these people are afraid.” Overall, social media proves to be “a blessing.”

  As soon as the Bibles published the Facebook page in January of 2016, the tips began arriving thick and fast, some sound, others clearly not. As they sifted truth from fiction, the tips that appeared the weightiest and most consistent all pointed back to Chetopa, Kansas.

  “The thing that really steered the case back to Chetopa was a tip to the ‘Find Lauria Bible’ page,” said Lisa.

  Here, the case seemed to go full circle, back to Chetopa’s own Charles Krider, Danny’s best friend, who’d kept his cattle on the property at Welch and regularly visited the trailer to smoke grass.

  24

  * * *

  CHETOPA

  * * *

  1999

  I am back at the edge of the Freeman property, outside looking in, up a cold hill and a
t the blackened smudge against the leaden sky that is the burned trailer. It is 1999 and most signs of life are nowhere to be found. The barn cats are lost and the cattle of a family friend stand waiting. The bursts of laughter once belonging to the girls aren’t even a memory here. I don’t know why I miss them.

  Only a few days after the fire, an unwashed, callused man named Charles Krider took his truck south of the Kansas–Oklahoma state line. He came from Chetopa, Kansas, which sat just above the border, and headed toward Welch, which sat just under. He drove down to the Freeman property, where the remnants of a crime scene that had been picked apart down to the bones stood unattended. His route there was no different from what it had been in the days before the fire, when he would go to visit his best friend, Danny Freeman, with a bag of grass, like he had a hundred times before. Back in 1999, there was a large round dirt track toward the middle of the driveway so that you had the option of turning east to a barn long before reaching the house. Charles took the right-hand turn and crawled past, avoiding the path that ran close to the trailer’s remains. The old guns that the families had spread across the yard remained, now cold. The suspension squeaked as the old truck bounced in the potholes, and he kept his eyes straight ahead. At the request of Dwayne Vancil, Charles had come over to fetch the two head of cattle that Danny had been raising for his friend, since his quarter-acre corner property in Chetopa lacked the space.

  Charles lifted his sunglasses and skimmed his eyes across the pastures for his red cattle. His fingers were shaped like spoons, and the cold months chapped his lips. “Look at big mama cow and big daddy cow,” he said as he spotted them across the property.

  Near the barn, Dwayne helped Charles round up the cattle and load them onto a stock trailer behind his truck. Danny’s stepbrother had long heard a lot about Charlie, but never met him personally until then. They exchanged phone numbers. “He was a little emotional, crying,” says Dwayne. “But it felt forced.” A few days later, Dwayne made the trip back up to Chetopa to meet with Charles, who came out of his house on Walnut Street to speak with Dwayne in Dwayne’s truck. “I was there to ask him about his and Danny’s dealings,” says Dwayne. “I knew the two of them were into growing pot, but it was for their own personal consumption.”

  Charles and Danny discovered their love for smoking weed while working together at a welding company called Wiseda, and they wound up exchanging their own homegrown plants to see whose was better. After one particular trip to Louisiana, when Danny took his wife and two kids to visit relatives, he returned to find his “mother” plants had died. He turned to Charles for a favor, as he’d once traded plants with him, asking to have some of the females back. “This is how we ended up in business together,” says Charles.

  “I knew they’d dealt together in the past,” says Albert Lynn, the younger friend of Danny’s who’d join him on gigging trips on the river at night. Albert denies ever knowing Charles Krider personally, but when I ask him to think back to the time around Danny’s death, Albert says that he believed “Danny was doing his own thing” separate from Charles by that time.

  Despite claiming to be Danny Freeman’s best friend, Charles wasn’t considered a suspect in the immediate aftermath of the murders. He received a brief visit from then OSBI agent Steve Nutter, and then appeared to drop out of the picture.

  “We started questioning some of Danny’s coworkers at a welding shop up there,” said Nutter in our interview, claiming that the men of the mining machines all told him that he was best to go and talk to Charles in Chetopa. “He cooperated,” Nutter continued. “[But we were] never able to get enough to write a warrant.”

  Chetopa (pronounced “sha-topa”) is a peculiar little town, one of “rural omens and barnyard prophecies,” as one friend puts it, another town where everyone knows everyone else’s comings and goings. It’s seemingly wholesome, a town of about a thousand people raised on the same Neosho River that courses down through to Oklahoma. In my back-and-forth over the years, most of the residents I talk with speak plainly of evil, giving credit for bad men to the devil and the merits of good men to their personal Lord and Savior. “If you don’t believe in Jesus and the devil, just wait till you hear those missing girls’ voices from Charlie Krider’s old place,” says one random local. “You’ll become a believer then.”

  It’s as slow as most small towns in Middle America are, but with an edge of superstition mixed with fervent religious devotion that rests on the thin white line that draws out Oklahoma’s never-ending horizon. Folklore and superstition are rampant. God forbid the roosters crow before midnight to summon the bad weather or the moon shines on your face while you sleep to make you go insane. And maybe that’s what happened in Chetopa. Maybe the full moon showing over the town as it slept gave birth to monsters.

  All I have to go on regarding Charles’s appearance are his mug shot photos: a bald man with a long, untamed beard marbled with olive green hues that become whiter the closer to his chest they get. His brown eyes are stark against his blue prison jumpsuit, and he stares into the camera as though he knows exactly who’ll be looking at these pictures later.

  Charles’s and my correspondence begins while he is in prison, and much of the conversation revolves around him and his relationship with Danny. “We became good friends because of our mutual interest in the growing and consumption of a certain plant that God made and we used,” he starts in one of many letters. Because our letters are monitored, he doesn’t use words that can implicate him in a crime. “I would call Danny Freeman my best friend after knowing him and his good family for many years—some of the best people I have ever had the good fortune to know in my lifetime.”

  By Charles’s own admission, he and Danny were in the marijuana business of “marrying the male plants with the female plants.” There isn’t a tinge of regret to this. “To start off, the Freemans were not my neighbors,” Charles corrects me. “I met Danny Freeman when I went to work at a large welding shop in Baxter Springs [Kansas]—they built large, mining haul trucks for the mining industry. I worked the evening shift and he [Danny] was a lead man for the day shift.” Wiseda was one of several places where Danny found employment when the migraines caused by the gun-cleaning accident parted in his head like storm clouds, long enough for the man to do what he could to make a living.

  Charles speaks highly of Danny, claiming to know Kathy and the children only loosely; they were very much in the background. “Danny and I smoked a lot, but he wouldn’t do it around his kids.” He says that Ashley and Shane were usually away at school ball games or off with their friends. “I was there every Friday evening when I knew the kids would be gone, sometimes on Saturdays.” While this became a routine, he’d also occasionally stop by midweek to check on the cattle he kept on Danny’s property, equipped with his own bag of the grass that bonded them together. But then he alludes to the fact that in the two years leading up to his murder, Danny began to use methamphetamine.

  “I will never lie to you,” Charles tells me in one letter. But while meth is brought up often, no evidence of the drug was found at the crime scene in Welch, and in all my conversations with those closest to Danny, Charles is the only person to claim to have seen Danny use meth. “I am willing to bare my soul to you if you are out for only the true facts.”

  According to sources, Danny and Charles each had their own fair-sized number of crops. “Danny grew marijuana in Welch, and Charles grew it in Kansas,” Lorene tells me. “That way if one got caught, it wouldn’t affect the whole crop because of the state line between them,” where a jurisdictional conflict would arise. Despite living in separate states, there was only a ten- to twenty-minute drive between the two, making them nearly next-door neighbors in the deep, dark country.

  I ask Charlie why he thought the OSBI started to suspect him, and he figures it stemmed from the deathbed confession of a man named David A. Pennington, a name I’d heard thrown around when looking into the drug scene in Chetopa, but not a name I’m especially
familiar with. “The OSBI visited me a few months ago, telling me that David Pennington had made a dying declaration,” Charles writes from prison.

  But according to Charles, the dying declaration never came to anything.

  “I and an FBI agent interviewed him. I think on the third day,” said OSBI agent Nutter in regard to Charles Krider, asserting that it never really led to anything substantial. “But then he came back on my radar when he was arrested for murder.”

  It is a snowy afternoon in Chetopa, Kansas, and everything is muffled and still. In the car, I follow a local man known as R.H. east out of the town, coming to a stop on a rural road where a spectacularly golden dusk spills over into a frozen creek and the icy howls of the westerly wind. Squinting hard from the overpass into the shadows of the creek, I make out an old wooden train trestle wrapped in ivy and dead overgrowth. Its dozens of legs are crooked and long, like the teeth of the man who brought me here. “That’s where Charlie Krider dumped her body.” The local points with a yellow fingernail. He takes a few steps back and looks up the dirt road like it’s done him wrong. He leans on a sign made illegible by rust and riddled with bullet holes. “I’ll keep a lookout if you wanna go over.” We’re somewhere in between the unassigned lands outside of Chetopa: maybe ghost town, maybe unincorporated, but nameless, in any case. I try to imagine the train trestle when it had life and connected to Picher once upon a time. Instead it was here where, fifteen years ago almost to the day, the partially clothed body of fifty-eight-year-old Judith Shrum was found.