Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  While the remains of Lauria and Ashley have yet to be found, it feels like a day of mourning, of paying respects to two beautiful girls who, as we are all coming to learn, lost their lives at the hands of monsters. I thought I had become inured to the darkness of this case, but reading the affidavit, learning about the dozen people who kept silent and the statements to authorities that were never investigated, I become horrified anew at the missed opportunities that blighted the investigation.

  The affidavit identifies witnesses only by their initials, though it doesn’t take much for those closest to the case or longtime residents of Chetopa to figure out who they are. The DA’s spokeswoman explains the decision to redact names as a practical necessity: “The reason for this is they are cooperating witnesses, and because of the nature of the crimes and the ongoing investigation there is a need to protect identities, and that will remain the practice going forward.”

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  RONNIE DEAN “BUZZ” BUSICK

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  Despite the arrests of Ronnie Dean Busick and the deaths of Phil Welch and David Pennington, the subject of the three men had always been a touchy one for locals. Even today, I will meet many people who still fear Phil Welch in death. So when I speak to Busick’s niece Dawn for the first time, the borders are clearly drawn as to what is allowed to be on record and what strictly isn’t.

  Dawn recalls being a child in southern Kansas, running through the purple and cream iris beds of her grandparents’ yard. The home provided by Dawn’s parents seemed in a perpetual state of disrepair, and she was happy enough staying with Gramma Nadine and Papa Alpheus on the weekends in Chetopa. Her father’s parents were shrewd antiques dealers who tried to help her hone the skills required to spot genuine pieces versus the fake stuff; Sundays were busy with yard sales and flea markets, sticky with the week’s pecans rounded up to make turtles and brittle. She was a towheaded eight-year-old who’d feel the grief of losing her pistol of a grandmother. “Lung cancer,” Dawn tells me years later. “I can’t remember how many times they went in and took pieces of lung. She was tough as shit, though, took years to die. Even the active-dying part took days, and we kept vigil. Gramma Nadine’s last words were ‘Well, shit, I can’t even die right.’”

  It was the day of Gramma Nadine’s funeral, and Dawn took on the job of washing and presenting the dress her grandmother would be buried in. She ran around the “jumbly, weedy” property where old and dark outbuildings were filled with rusty machinery. “Somewhere in all of that was Papa’s still.” Grandpa Alpheus had been a bootlegger into the 1940s. But as she explored the yard in search of the impressive apparatus, she found her uncle Ronnie with his back against one of the sheds. Before him, an albino woman with only a few teeth left to her smile, as though they rattled about in her head, on her knees for Ronnie. Dawn says that Uncle Ronnie caught her eye, then winked. He pointed at the woman giving him head, gave Dawn a thumbs-up, and jerked his head as a gesture of saying C’mere to the eight-year-old child. “Well, I ran like hell.”

  The home in which Ronnie was raised sat crookedly where a few dirt roads end and furrow into deep, wide ditches, becoming dense with wild radish and prairie aster. But Nadine took pride in her flower beds, bringing color against the dull and dated wallpapers and grime-stained carpets of inside, features that had never changed over the decades since Alpheus built the house himself in the forties or fifties. His daughter (Ronnie’s sister) had her husband build hers next door; the several small homes where the Busicks lived looked run-down over the years of weathering storm after storm, just a short two-mile walk from the state line. When Ronnie was a child, the porches had been full of junk, washers, and wringers, so he and his older brother and sister would have to use the back door, where cacti grew among collections of Kewpie dolls and ceramic hobo clowns looking down at their pants with sad faces. The kitchen’s and the hallway’s windows were filled with antique glassware, so that the light painted the whole house in carnival red. “Nadine fried three meals a day and smoked like a chimney, and the ventilation wasn’t that great,” says another relative. “The walls and everything that didn’t get used had its own flocked wallpaper made of dust stuck to grease and tar.”

  Today, Dawn seems of high intelligence, the kind that comes with a touch of crazy, and she talks fast with the frequent use of the word “fuck.” “He actually never touched me, but when I was no longer a child, I’d call him ‘Uncle Bad Touch.’”

  Ronnie Dean Busick spent much of his life in and out of jail, mostly for drug convictions, but the home of Nadine and Alpheus would forever be his home base. Relatives say that he was “slippery-eyed clever,” but also refer to him as being as dumb “as a box of hair.” It is the general consensus that he was equal parts bumbling and conniving. And when the sixty-seven-year-old man was arrested in Wichita on a parole violation, then later extradited from Kansas to Oklahoma on murder charges, no one who knew him entertained the idea that he was higher in the food chain than the likes of Welch and Pennington.

  “No one was surprised to hear about all of this,” says one relative of Busick’s. “Sure, they were surprised it was someone they knew, but not that he could do it.”

  For Dawn, one of the most memorable things about growing up with Ronnie Dean Busick coming in and out of the home was a specific cowboy belt buckle he sported—one with a cartoonish depiction of a woman with her legs spread, viewed from the explicit perspective of a gynecologist, and her bubbly breasts and nipples in the background, with a “long, hard dick and hairy balls” aimed for her, ready for penetration; on the top of the buckle were the words I’ d Rather and on the bottom were the words Than Eat. Ronnie Busick wore this belt even to his own mother’s funeral. “Of course, growing up with him around, in the times he wasn’t in jail, he’d catch me staring at it,” says Dawn. And how could she not? “He’d call me over and measure my head against his waist and say, ‘Honey, if only your head was flat, I’d marry you.’” He was referring to a place for a man to set his beer while receiving oral sex.

  Fortunately for Dawn, her parents never let him be alone with their daughter, noticing the sideways glances he’d give her or the way he’d stare for long, uncomfortable moments. Gramma Nadine, who usually had Dawn sleep on the couch, would have the child sleep on a cot right next to her and Alpheus’s bed on the occasions that Ronnie returned home from one stint in jail or another. Even after Ronnie’s brother died in 2009, Ronnie always called his brother’s wife, who was described as timid and sweet, perhaps the only woman kind and patient enough to put up with his yarns, no matter how squeamish they’d make her. They were often uninhibited tales of sex and urges, bragging about “picking up women and fucking them.” On one notable occasion, Ronnie said of the girls in his life, “If they don’t want to give it up, then by God, I fucking take it.” But in the mercurial fashion of meth addiction, he’d say in the same breath, “If only I married a sweet little thang like you, I’d never get in any of these messes.”

  Tom Pryor, the private investigator who found the insurance card on the Freeman property a few days after the fire in Welch, had had his own encounter with Busick when Pryor was still the police chief in Chetopa. “This is how stupid he is,” says Pryor, explaining that it was during Busick’s “younger years” in the 1970s when Pryor went to inquire about Ronnie’s sister on Nadine and Alpheus’s homestead. “Ronnie came from the woods or the back of the trailer, ran inside with a big bag of pot, and goes straight into the bathroom, right where we could all see him because he didn’t even close the door behind him, starts dumping it all into the toilet right in front of us.”

  Relatives also mentioned the art of dowsing most revered by the Busick clan, a family in which water witching was used to sense the natural resources offered underground in Chetopa. “Grandpa Alpheus was a dowser and dug the gas well on the property my dad and Uncle Ronnie lived on, and it was about a hundred feet from the gas stove in the house,” says Dawn. “So, he’s [Ronn
ie] standing at the stove and cooking up a big, fat batch of meth, and there’s a knock at the back door. He yells, ‘Come on in!’ and the deputies did.”

  Though the son of a bootlegger and a dowser (the practice of divination is largely shunned and was once viewed as satanic in small American towns like Chetopa), Ronnie was also known for being loose-lipped, a man who couldn’t keep a secret. “That’s why I don’t think he knows where the girls are,” says one relative. “He’s too dumb and had too big of a mouth.”

  The man described by unsurprised relatives versus the man that is walked into the Craig County jail is a clear juxtaposition: the wild, silver-haired and -bearded man with eyes so dark that you couldn’t see your reflection in them, and now the fat old man with no hair on top, stringy in the back down past his shoulders, and walking with a cane, without which he is hardly able to move on his own. In a video recording from Lisa Bible-Brodrick’s phone, you can hear those who loved Ashley and Lauria the most shout out to Busick when he comes down from Kansas, ushered from the truck with DA investigator Gary Stansill and Craig County sheriff Heath Winfrey at either side.

  “Do you want to tell me where my niece is at?” yells Lorene’s brother as soon as Ronnie exits the SUV.

  “Huh?” Ronnie asks.

  Lorene’s brother repeats himself from the other side of the metal gate.

  “I wish I could,” answers Ronnie, hardly audible. “I don’t have a clue.”

  “How do you not know?” calls out a reporter.

  “’Cause I wasn’t there.”

  “Are you afraid to admit what you’d done?” another woman calls out.

  “I didn’t do nothing.” Ronnie crawls from the car to the back doors of the courthouse, feebly limping. His sideburns are thick and white, as is a long horseshoe mustache.

  “He puts that limp on when the cameras are on,” Lisa tells me. “When we see him in the courthouse, he walks just fine. He’s pathetic.”

  Most of the 2018 affidavit issued by the district attorney’s office, which consists of the statements of twelve people, revolves around Phil Welch, said to have been the mastermind behind the Freeman murders, purportedly the consequence of drug debt related to methamphetamine and/or a drug deal gone south. However, one 2017 interview has a confidential witness called R.H. tell of a time he spotted Ronnie Busick on Maple Street in Chetopa. Knowing that Ronnie was staying up at his parents’ old place, the home he had inherited from Nadine and Alpheus, R.H. stopped and gave Busick a ride and offered to buy him some potatoes and such, saying that Busick “appeared about to starve to death,” according to the affidavit, and that Busick knew R.H. to be a “soft touch for a free meal.”

  As it turned out, R.H. would be the very man who kept the lookout when I followed him to the old abandoned train trestle east out of town, where Charles Krider dumped Judith Shrum’s body. I’ ll keep a lookout if you wanna go over.

  According to both my conversation and the affidavit’s information about R.H., Busick started “running his mouth” about his involvement with the Freeman murders and the girls’ abductions while on the way to the grocery store, telling R.H. that the girls were tied up in a trailer in Picher, “where they were raped and tortured.” When I meet with R.H. after the press release, he tells me that Busick admitted the girls were kept alive for several days, but says that he [Busick] was not the shooter of Kathy and Danny, though he stayed behind with David Pennington to light the trailer on fire.

  “Had I heard about the fire and the missing girls when it all happened? Sure I had,” R.H. says as we sit together in the kitchen of a mutual acquaintance. “Hell, I knew Danny [Freeman] from working together. Pretty good guy, actually.” But R.H. cannot confirm any drug involvement with Danny. “We never went on any picnics or anything.”

  R.H. and I discuss his encounter with Busick, reviewing what was already spelled out in the affidavit. He added that it was about two years after the girls went missing. “He started mouthing off, bragging about what he did to them two little bitches, how they had them taped up, raping them, torturing them, messing with them and stuff.”

  The term “them two little bitches” rings familiar, echoing what Phil Welch told private investigators when they found him in Picher.

  Busick continued talking to R.H. as they drove. “And they ain’t ever gonna find them bodies neither.” At that point R.H. slammed on the brakes and yelled at Busick to get the hell out of the truck, not far from the Busick property on the train tracks.

  “Did he seem remorseful?” I ask.

  “He was smiling ear to ear,” R.H. tells me. “That bothered me for years.” R.H. claims he went straight to the police department there in Chetopa.

  R.H. says that the current investigators found his “name scribbled on a piece of paper” (it’s insinuated in the affidavit to have been discovered in the mystery box in the Craig County Sheriff’s Office). R.H. told current investigators that all of his information should be on record, but they said they could find no records. “Well, I just don’t understand that,” R.H. says.

  With the inability to locate R.H.’s statements, it seems there are now two states that lost important documents related to the Bible-Freeman case.

  When Agent Ferrari and DA investigator Stansill interviewed Busick in 2017, his statements contradicted those of witnesses, including wishy-washy admissions that he’d known Welch and Pennington. He spent the majority of the interrogation in silence, not moving when investigators kept accusing him of the four murders, though I can’t imagine that there was much happening in his head. He spent most of the time with his eyes lost on the reward poster that agents set before him—one that offered the fifty thousand dollars collected from a Freeman-Bible fund-raiser in Welch, and on each side were two bold school photographs of Lauria and Ashley in color. Perhaps, in spending hours staring at the girls’ pictures, Busick hoped they’d come back to life … Perhaps he was silently remembering their time together.

  It was a copy of the same poster that Phil Welch had tacked to his trailer in Picher.

  With his cheeks sagging and a blank expression dull across his face, Busick contended, “I’d tell you where they was if I knew.”

  “Well, who did know?” asked Stansill.

  “I’d probably say Phil, and probably Dave,” he answered, stating that when he’d ask the other two where the girls were, they’d keep it “hushed up.”

  “You think they had something to do with it?”

  “Pretty sure Phil did.”

  In the end, Ronnie Dean Busick would resort to staying mostly quiet.

  As of September 2019, Busick still sits in the Craig County jail, having spent months being evaluated by those assigned to see if he is competent to stand trial. The defense argues that he might be able to plead guilty by reason of insanity on account of his being shot in the head back in the 1970s.

  “The family always used that as an excuse, every time Ronnie did something wrong,” says one of his relatives. Oh, don’t mind him—he was shot in the head years ago, they’d say as if it explained his peculiar ways, the sideways looks at children, and the fights he’d find himself in.

  “He was caught in bed with some fella’s woman,” says Lorene Bible. “Got himself in trouble and got shot.”

  “I really don’t think he does know where those girls are,” says Dawn. “And I hate that so much. I hate to think of those girls’ bones settling at the bottom of a water-filled mine.”

  Lorene, however, has her own opinions. “He knows,” she delivers with the familiar silence, unwilling to share her secrets. “He knows.” While my own, amateur guess would be that Busick does not actually know where the girls were, I’d learned better than not to believe Lorene.

  Though Busick denied any involvement in the murders of Kathy and Danny to investigators, he confessed that he “became suspicious [of Pennington’s and Welch’s involvement] after they found the insurance card.” Even simple Ronnie Busick surmised that “it didn’t take a rocket scie
ntist” to figure out whose car was at the Freeman trailer that night, and the mention of the insurance card left behind came back to him in the initial days after the murders.

  The insurance card, in fact, is central in the evidence that led to Busick’s arrest and the naming of Pennington and Welch posthumously in the murders.

  In the first few days after the Welch fire, Private Investigator Tom Pryor walked back up the incline of the driveway, past the dogwoods and bois d’arcs where Ashley and Lauria had collected food for the goats only days before, and asked around for who was in charge, at least on an official level. After a moment, he found Agent Steve Nutter. Introducing himself, Pryor held out the card. “This might be of some interest to you. Might be nothing, but every little thing counts in these things, don’t they?”

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  THE INSURANCE-VERIFICATION CARD

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  This 2018 affidavit is how the public first hears about the insurance card found on the property of the Freemans by private investigators Tom Pryor and Joe Dugan, the card supposedly presented to and refused by OSBI agent Steve Nutter. This valuable piece of evidence is what led the pair to the likes of Phil Welch, whom they found singing on the side of the road near the chat piles of Picher. But the card also opened most of the doors in Chetopa for the private investigators, who chose to follow up on the card in the first days of the millennium, so that when the later generation of investigators assigned to the Bible-Freeman case reinterviewed many of the ignored witnesses (including Tom Pryor himself), it seems as though they’re the last to learn about the card.