Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  I sit through countless tales of horror.

  It wasn’t hard to see how a man who demanded such power could get the likes of Pennington and Busick to follow him anywhere he went.

  David Pennington and Ronnie Busick were more of your miscreants, raised under the shaking heads of disappointed Chetopans who expected nothing more than trouble from the boys, poor boys, boys of angry fathers and neglectful mothers. Those in the area knew enough that if Pennington and Busick walked into a bar, you were best to sit on the other side and avoid making eye contact. “I knew they was dangerous,” says one local. “But if you didn’t bother them, they didn’t bother you.”

  “I just didn’t make eye contact,” another says. “Just kept my head down when I seen them driving by.”

  Today, people refer to the men as though they were wild animals, and they even kept themselves in such a state. Ronnie, the fairer one, was always crazy eyed, with a mane of salt and pepper that poked in all directions, while David was your mouth-breathing, thin, and dirty kid whose clothes never fit him right. Both carried with them long lines of felonies, most involving drugs and domestic violence.

  Chetopa was one of those towns that died by night, though it wasn’t uncommon to see the likes of Welch, Busick, and Pennington, or any of the other meth heads of the area, rolling their trucks at night, stealing cattle and bales of hay. But even if farmers knew they’d taken their things, not a God-fearing soul went up against Phil.

  “This is what you do if one of these rancher types pulls a gun on you,” several people would hear Phil Welch say before he’d go into demonstration, noting the importance of breaking the clavicle. “There’s nothing like seeing a man’s face once you’ve disarmed them. Power. That’s power.” Phil habitually sucked on his teeth between sentences while high.

  I thought about one of the more overlooked facts in the murders of the Freemans, and that was the collarbone that the medical examiner had noted was broken right before Danny’s death. Could Phil Welch have disarmed Danny?

  Pennington and Busick listened with meth-induced concentration, maybe too afraid of Welch not to listen. The three men gathered by the kitchen stove, cooking up a fresh batch of methamphetamine as Phil ranted on about something that he’d fixed his attentions on, talking until he had no voice. Often scripture, what he’d adamantly call “church.” And Pennington and Busick, claiming to love the Lord, nodded, trying to listen over the gospel music that Phil played for days on end. Until Phil turned to them with that black-eyed, intense gaze, bringing lines of crystal under their noses, carrying on with out-of-context, askew verses of the Bible. Together, they partook of meth.

  “He would talk about ‘By his stripes be healed,’” said Phil’s relative Rhonda. “Then he’d whip one of the kids with a switch.” His children, now adults, still carry the burns and the scars of his beatings on their backs and their legs.

  Another relative recounted an event that saw Phil Welch take his twelve-year-old son and strangle him under the water in a bathtub until the boy lost consciousness. Welch proceeded to lift the nearly lifeless, soaking-wet body from the water and place him on the floor, spending a few minutes trying to revive the boy. When he finally came to, Phil pulled his face to his. “Now you know what it feels like to die.”

  As the three men got high and brought twisted versions of Jesus Christ into their nonexistent hearts, a young boy walked in.

  “When Phil yelled for you to c’mere, by God, you went,” said one of the relatives of Phil Welch.

  The boy R.E. was the young son of one of Pennington’s girlfriends. He came into the kitchen, where the men huddled around a short stack of Polaroid pictures.

  “Wanna see something?” Ronnie called out to the boy, looking over at Welch to suss out his reaction, which came across as approving. Beside him, Pennington chuckled. Busick slapped the boy on the back of his head, grabbing the scruff of his neck and rubbing his nose in the photos.

  “We got ’em,” commented Welch. “We got ’em good, didn’t we?”

  In the photographs were two of Phil’s victims, gagged and tied to chairs, Phil lying beside them.

  “I remember that about Phil,” Rhonda continues. Sources say he used to take pictures, even of his own children, whom he’d sometimes have stand naked in the living room just to humiliate them. He’d sometimes go as far as cutting their clothes off with a knife. While his relatives got dressed, he’d jump from behind the door and get a shot of them naked before running off, laughing with entertainment.

  The boy R.E. closed his eyes when having his face shoved in the photos, the way a dog has his nose shoved in shit. In the pictures were Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman days after the fire.

  And they were alive.

  27

  * * *

  “THIS PLACE IS ATE UP.”

  * * *

  It has been more than a year since the basement and well searches of Charlie Krider’s property in Chetopa turned up empty. I spend months living on the Grand Lake o’ the Cherokees. Floating docks line the lake, and the smell of gunpowder becomes a pleasant fixture in the air when I am writing my notes or transcribing interviews in a hammock. I watch the seasons change and the hills distill campfire smoke. I lie about who I am to neighbors and spend the odd hour enjoying slot machines and learning to cook over fire until the cold months come and the nights stretch long.

  In the lead-up to this reckoning, I wrestle with darkness like a dog with a bone. In trying to understand this world, the people who make up these communities, and the terror that lurks on the fringes of their lives, I speak with child-rape victims who have since grown and given their lives over to drugs, and addicts with their faces disfigured by knives as a result of drug debt. I receive phone calls from someone who just breathes on the other end in the middle of the night. And maybe this doesn’t seem so ominous if you’re normal, but I am mentally chained to a bed, listening to the ebb and flow, the breathing of darkness.

  A text from a source tells me to “get out of there now.” And panic comes when my down-to-earth, calm husband starts closing every blind of our home and packing our bags to leave. As one blind closes, I see the shadow of a figure outside that is my fear.

  “I’m getting the fuck out of this place,” he yells.

  “I’m. Not. Done!”

  I call Lorene Bible, barely able to breathe in the grip of a panic attack. Lorene has long been dealing with the characters I fear, and she listens patiently that night and calms me down. “Go into a room,” she says. “You’re going to stay away from the windows. You’re going to breathe. Then you’re going to hang up with me and call the sheriff.” She talks me down for a good amount of time until the panic recedes.

  For the first time, listening to her maternal words of comfort, instead of trying to see Lauria through Lorene’s eyes, I finally see Lorene through Lauria’s. It is a bloodred stitch that keeps this story from falling away, and it is called mother.

  The next morning, while we were waiting at an airport in northwestern Arkansas, our flight was canceled. Then another. Only for us to learn that our connecting flight from New York to Dublin was canceled on account of a storm. As it went, something kept me here in Oklahoma.

  I stayed, nerve-filled nights and the occasional shooting star. And while I am here with death and despair on my mind, it is hard to deny Oklahoma’s red-faced beauty, its butchered red skies and the way the wheat offers you the chance to see the wind. It is in these moments of relative peace, while I look out over those spectacular frames of the Midwest, that I stop and reflect on the lives of Lauria and the Freemans, and feel my resolve harden. I have to tell the girls’ story.

  I try to hold on to that sense of purpose and certainty while driving north, sweaty palms and all, to meet Charles Krider up in Chetopa not long after his 2017 release from prison. September clings on firmly to the summer heat, and the air is thick, swirling slowly like treacle. Pecan farmers move about in the hot morning fog that hovers just above the earth.
They move in and out of the twisted trees of the groves, armed with buckets, floating like ghosts.

  This time of year, I hear the nuts dropping to hit the earth, like the tapping of fingers anxiously waiting for a cool breeze. Many in the area recall wearing metal cans on their heads as children to hear the thundering of hickory beat on their makeshift helmets. Every memory is accompanied with a smile and the stories about the old harvesting traditions of their late grandparents. In Kansas, tradition is everything, and nostalgia tends to be more forgiving than history would allow.

  I send a should anything happen to me precaution to my sister.

  Charles is on parole and can’t cross state lines. We choose to meet at Veterans Park in Chetopa, just on the Neosho River and full of picnic tables and canopies. As I pull up, I see he’s already here. I feel faint with anxiety, but while every limb tingles, and though my stomach is cramping enough to make me cry out in pain, I’ve learned a few tricks over the last year that feel like small pieces of armor.

  Use a pen from a hotel I’m not staying at.

  Remove my wedding ring an hour before to hide the line.

  Always have an exit strategy.

  After a year of prison letters, then phone calls and texts, I spend the next several hours speaking face-to-face with Charles Krider.

  He is cleaner than in the mug shots I’ve seen: where his facial hair back then was wild and discolored, it’s now neat and tinged with shades of blond and red. He is calm and ready to talk, but beset by intermittent bouts of blame for most things that have gone south in his life. “My ex-wife was the one that did that dig,” he says, referring to the second excavation, which—unbeknownst to him—I helped conduct. Or maybe he does know and is stringing me along. I manage to remain impassive. “She’s always out to get me,” he continues.

  The truth of it is that the searches of Charles Krider’s property in 2016 proved to be a dead end; there was nothing beneath the concrete slab at the bottom of the basement but undisturbed soil. As I am beginning to recognize in this case, the frequent, persuasive misdirection often leads everyone back to square one.

  “Next,” says Lorene.

  But there is still an undeniable momentum to the attention falling on Chetopa, and as more people in the area start to reach out to the Bible family via the Facebook page, the two families’ sights, as well as my own, remain fastened here in the southeastern corner of Kansas.

  “This place is ate up,” says Charles as we sit opposite each other on a picnic table. He wears mirrored sunglasses, so it’s like speaking to my own reflection. I try to focus on what he’s saying while reminding myself to breathe down to my belly (inadvertently shallow breathing, as anyone with anxiety can attest to, can make a person feel like they’re at the edge of passing out, and I am in no rush to be unconscious around a convicted murderer). “People keep secrets here.”

  He is also better spoken than I imagined from our e-mails; his real-life voice is gruff, different from the voice I’d associated with him when I read his words. His forearms are sinewy and strong, that prison hardness formed out of bitterness and time. Throughout our correspondence, I’d pictured him as heavyset, and I spend the first section of our meeting recalibrating my view of the man. Despite all the rumors I’ve heard, he never strikes me as weird during this meeting in the park, and he is respectful and kind, pardoning himself the few times he lets slip a cuss. Before now, Charles was little more in my mind than an amalgamation of rumors and pieces of gossip I’d absorbed from locals, and he confounds my expectations. I’ve long since adjusted to the stoicism and reserve common to the people in these communities, and Charles is no different: he never smiles or shows any emotion.

  Speaking at length about Danny Freeman, we touch on Danny’s fears of the local deputies from the Craig County’s Sheriff’s Office back in the nineties. “If they would have treated him like a decent human being,” Charles starts, before readjusting his line of thought. “I’m sure they treated him differently because of the way things are down there [in Welch]. I’m pretty sure they knew what he was doing, but they were so dirty, they didn’t know what he had on them.”

  Charles explains that after Shane’s death, Danny was engulfed in grief; he describes how when he’d go to visit Danny, they’d smoke up, and Danny would just sit and obsess over Shane’s autopsy, talking about how to proceed with a lawsuit against the county. Charles and I discuss the possibility that Danny might have let the lawsuit go, had he not believed that the police were trying to cover it up—that perhaps a mea culpa from the sheriff’s office could have pacified him and prevented the subsequent war, even if shooting officer David Hayes was on the right side of the law. “Maybe then it wouldn’t have gotten to the point where he [Danny] wanted to kill anybody.”

  Charles confesses that Danny Freeman asked him to be his ride when Danny, according to Charles, went over to kill David Hayes. “‘If you hadn’t’ve told me,’” Charles told Danny. “If Danny hadn’t’ve told me what he was doing, I would have driven him anywhere, but knowing he was going to kill that man? I said, ‘No way. If you hadn’t’ve told me, Danny.’”

  I spend the morning talking about the drug rings in the area until I feel comfortable enough to steer this conversation back to the one thing I really want to know, the thing he had promised: the identities of the men he had refused to speak of while in prison.

  The heart of what I want to hear from Charlie is something I first heard from current OSBI agent Tammy Ferrari when I asked her about her own interview with Charles. “He just went back to the same stuff,” she said. “Says he was very good friends with Danny … feels whoever is responsible for it needs to pay the ultimate price.” But then Ferrari gestured to something that didn’t tend to feature in the narrative I’d heard countless times from the wider community, something that only those closest to the investigation had caught hold of. “He talks about an incident where some people came up to the [Freeman] residence, like a week or two before the fire.”

  This had also been brought up by Danny’s father. “Some guys came here to try and threaten Danny, and Danny was having none of it,” said Glen Freeman. “Danny told one of them, ‘Don’t bring that killer here ever again.’” But Glen couldn’t recall any names. “I just know it was someone he knew who’d brought someone dangerous, and there might have been a few of them.” Relatives say that Danny chased the carful of people away under the threat of a shotgun. Some suggest he fired a warning shot.

  I think about the used shotgun shell that CCSO deputy Mark Hayes found in the driveway on the morning of the fire, the one he begged Nutter to take into evidence.

  When I tell Lorene about this piece of information, the shotgun shell is news to her. However, she was fully aware of the rumored incident in which Danny chased a carful of people off his yard.

  “Danny called Kathy after they left,” Lorene said. She went on to explain that Kathy was at her parents’ house when Danny called to tell Kathy about the incident, and that Kathy was rumored to tell Danny that she feared those men, that she wanted her husband to have nothing to do with them.

  “We don’t know if they have anything to do with the fire,” continued OSBI agent Ferrari. “But we’d like to.”

  “It was the Sunday before [the fire],” continues Charles. “I went over and saw Danny was upset. So I asked him what was wrong, and he said, ‘Well, I had some problems this week.’ So I asked, ‘Well, why?’”

  According to Charles, Danny said, “A pickup pulled in, had three people in it. They were very adamant about buying my whole crop.” This will be something Charles insists on: that Danny Freeman began selling his marijuana in exchange for meth, two drug worlds that operated rather separately from each other. This divided those involved on the details of the case: some are convinced he sold marijuana to pay for his legal costs for the lawsuit pertaining to Shane’s death, while others—those closest to Danny—are firm in their belief that his dependencies never exceeded the pot plants he’d sown
for himself. Throughout my research, there are small variations. To this day, the details of Danny’s alleged marijuana and meth businesses remain without specifics, though it’s possible that whatever trouble Danny found himself in might have had something to do with these dealings and run-ins … possibly murder.

  Charles continues. “Danny knew two of them, and one of them had just gotten out of prison.” But when it comes to actually naming the three men, Charles becomes fidgety, visibly a little tongue-tied. Some sources claimed Danny even said, Get that murderer off my property. “Jax, the way people operate around here … there’s always people in the shadows. And they’re in the shadows because of a reason.”

  I leave Chetopa that afternoon after several hours of talking (much of the conversation revolved around Charles’s declarations of innocence and his being framed), but my gut says to keep looking here for the same reasons it tells me to run away. There is something about this town and the men in it that just doesn’t sit right with me (though little does, in this case). It is an eerily fascinating place: many people come out of their way to find me, claiming to know something about the girls, but then they refuse to say more out of fear. Countless people talk about hauntings, saying that they can hear the girls from holes in the ground or have spiritual visions of their murders. Chetopa’s main street (Maple Street) has dilapidated water mills and abandoned storefront windows with messages written in dust and an old lady peeking out from her lace curtains at the sound of my boots walking up and down the road. And by God, the best pecans you’ll find.

  I return to the town again and again, right up until the fall of 2017, when Lorene abruptly tells me to stop talking to certain people in that area.

  I go back to the lake house after speaking to various people in Chetopa. It smells like Halloween; crisp, like faraway fire and rotting fruit. I sit alone with a cigarette (I’ve since quit) on the second level of the floating dock as the sun starts to double over into the lake. Small fires ignite around the foothills. I’m in a difficult stretch of the investigation, and I’m swallowing down the distinct feeling of defeat and menthol when I receive a call from Lorene.