Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  “We knew about it right away,” says Dwayne Vancil. “We thought it had been followed up on.”

  “One to two days following December 30, 1999, a search party found an insurance-verification card belonging to E.B. near the crime scene,” the affidavit reports. According to records, on January 3, 2000, less than a week after the fire, the FBI interviewed E.B., the then girlfriend of Phil Welch, who claimed to have no idea as to how her insurance card wound up on the Freeman property. The affidavit, while it never admits the mistakes of past agents, does acknowledge that “Affiant Ferrari could not locate the insurance card in the evidence file on the Freeman case which should have contained a list of all physical evidence to the case.” An FBI lead sheet from January 2000 referenced E.B.’s insurance card, though the FBI had only briefly come onto the case on account of a nearby spree killer on the run and the heavy possibility that whoever had the girls had crossed state lines.

  “Then they were gone, just like that,” says Dwayne Vancil.

  It is revealed that on January 9, 2001, just over a year after the fire, OSBI agent Steve Nutter interviewed T.W., another girlfriend of Phil Welch’s, one who, in the four months after the fire, began living with him in his Picher trailer, where she overheard all three men refer to the people “who were killed in Welch,” people who owed them drug money. T.W. stated that “Pennington and Busick set fire to the home.” The OSBI interview with Nutter also mentions that the reward poster with the girls’ faces on it was “nailed to the wall” at Phil Welch’s trailer, and that T.W. had “seen several Polaroid pictures, which Welch kept in his soft leather briefcase.” T.W. said she was certain that the girls in the photographs, who were held captive against their will, were the very girls in the reward poster. The Polaroids showed Lauria and Ashley, with their “hands tied and mouths gagged,” and a distinctive bedspread identified by T.W., who easily recognized it from the time she had spent living with Phil Welch. T.W. also made reference to Phil Welch’s former girlfriend E.B., confirming that Phil Welch had kept the ex-girlfriend’s car, the same ex-girlfriend whose insurance card was discovered at the scene of the crime.

  Following up on T.W.’s information six months later, OSBI agent Nutter interviewed E.B. for the first time since she’d been interviewed by the FBI a year and a half earlier. It seems that the notes of the FBI regarding the first interview with E.B. had not been factored into the Oklahoma side of the investigation. In June 2001, E.B. confirmed to OSBI agent Nutter that Phil Welch lived in two homes, in Chetopa, Kansas, and Picher, Oklahoma, but she had “no idea how the card had gotten to the location where it was found.” While she denied knowing Danny Freeman, she claimed that Phil Welch in fact did know him. E.B. explained that she left Phil Welch a few months after the fire due to his physical abuse, which would be brought up by almost everyone who knew the man, horrible accounts of beatings and rapes.

  Eighteen years later, the insurance-verification card is a barefaced fact looking me straight in the face. There is the sudden realization that had it been followed up on, there is a strong possibility that Ashley and Lauria could still be alive today.

  According to Private Investigator Pryor, the insurance card was not collected as evidence until investigators took it off him in August of 2017. The affidavit states that “Pryor reported to law enforcement about finding the insurance-verification card, but they did not take possession of the card.” Pryor confirms to me that it was Nutter who denied taking the key evidence. For those close to the case, it’s nearly impossible to learn of these disasters on top of the already well-known mishandling when authorities failed to find Danny’s body and when there were no efforts to search for the girls.

  But the shocking and infuriating facts of witnesses ignored or not followed up on and the card that could have led them all in the direction of the missing girls and their captors aren’t the only shocking missteps in the course of the investigation.

  “After finding the card, I traced it back to E.B. and her car, the car that Phil Welch used to transport them girls,” PI Pryor tells me, further explaining that he got to speak with E.B. personally, until the mention of Phil Welch scared her into shutting up. “And guess what happened.”

  According to the information provided in the affidavit, Pryor found the car reportedly driven by Phil Welch to the Freemans on the night of the murders in a salvage yard in Picher, Oklahoma. The affidavit reads: “Pryor stated he reported finding the vehicle to law enforcement and requested they process the vehicle. Pryor reported he was told the vehicle had been through too many hands to be processed [for evidence].” If true, then I wonder if this case met with either the most inept or the most corrupt collection of law enforcement agencies ever seen in American history. For all we knew, it could have held crucial physical evidence that proved the girls had been in the car, evidence that could have led investigators to the men who took the girls before they took their secrets with them in death. And who was to say there wasn’t a clue inside that could have led authorities to the girls’ whereabouts?

  Either way, the refusal to follow up on the car wasn’t the last of it, and in reading the district attorney’s documents, I know I’m not the only one whose face becomes red with rage, whose guts get sick because of the failures of others.

  The affidavit also reports that current authorities reached out to PI Joe Dugan, Tom Pryor’s partner, and in learning that he’d passed away in 2009, they spoke with Dugan’s relatives. “Joe Dugan’s relatives reported that Joe Dugan had a box of investigative material pertaining to the Freeman case,” the affidavit says. “After his death, relatives of Joe Dugan took the investigative material to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office. The sheriff’s office refused to take the material, and it was eventually destroyed by Joe Dugan’s relatives.”

  While the glaring miscarriages of justice are overflowing, from one state into the other, from one decade into the next and the next, the newer generation seems more hell-bent on fixing the wrongs made by past investigators, starting with reinterviewing some of the old witnesses.

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  * * *

  DAVID “PENNY” PENNINGTON

  * * *

  Iremember one of my letters from convicted murderer Charles Krider, the fellow marijuana businessman and best friend of Danny Freeman whose basement and well were searched to no avail in 2016. In the letter, which I received from prison, Charles mentioned David Pennington two years before Pennington’s name went public, and that Pennington had made a deathbed confession that pointed to Charles.

  But after the 2018 press release that named the three men, Charles denied knowing Pennington at all, despite growing up in the same small town. I wondered to myself if Busick, Pennington, and Welch were the three men that Charles refused to speak of, the men Danny chased off his property.

  It is troubling to see the relatives (and survivors) of the murderous trio, Ronnie Busick, Phil Welch, and David Pennington, get the brunt of the public’s outrage. The public sometimes ignores the fact that relatives of murderers are often victims themselves, and this is what springs to mind the first time I speak to Jerri Shelton, the stepdaughter of accused killer David A. Pennington. “He was the only man I knew as a father,” she tells me. While admitting the fact that David had been tied up in meth addiction, she says that he cleaned up and “became everything to us.”

  Also a lifelong resident of Chetopa, David Pennington was a big-eared boy raised on the river, catfishing for as long as anyone could remember. Even fellow Chetopan Charles Krider’s elderly mother would mention, “Pennington and Busick knew all the farm ponds,” elaborating that Pennington talked about fishing all the time in the doctor’s office where Mrs. Krider worked. She, along with most who knew the Penningtons of Chetopa, knew them to be as poor as church mice. “As boys, he [David] and his brother would come by my home—they didn’t have much in life,” Mrs. Krider explains. “I’d give them food and whatever I could for them to play with. His dad beat their mother and the boys, then left
town and became a preacher but the boys would have nothing to do with him. As he [David] got older, he’d cut hedge wood for me.” And while David’s life choices weren’t surprising to those who knew him and watched his health deteriorate over the years, many believe he came to change his life for the better in those later years before dying in 2015. Mrs. Krider even has her own testimony to that, saying that David Pennington came to the doctor’s office and told her he’d given his heart to the Lord. He even professed this by singing her a hymn.

  David’s love for fishing carried all the way up until he got too sick to do it, succumbing to COPD “and numerous other diseases from the drugs he sold and did,” according to Jerri, which led to his dying at age fifty-six. Upon a doctor’s suggestion, Pennington used to sit with a bag of deflated balloons in his pocket, blowing them up as an exercise for his lungs between fixes from his oxygen mask. While his life was cut short by the demons of his past, Jerri maintains that he was the best grandpa to her children that anyone could ask for, since becoming sober ten years before his death.

  “He did meth for so long, he couldn’t breathe,” says Pastor Raymond Whetstone when I speak with him and his wife in their Chetopa home. “We’d buy him inhalers. He lost all his teeth from meth, his stomach swelled up … but it’s our job to accept them where they are.”

  Up until his later years, when he couldn’t even make it to the bathroom without passing out, David was just another man who worked odd jobs between drug deals and cooks. “He was either welding or cutting wood—those were his big things, even when I was a kid,” says Jerri, who would have only been ten years old at the time of the Freeman-Bible murders. Because David had a work history similar to those of Danny Freeman and Charles Krider, who had both held welding jobs there in Baxter Springs just twenty miles east, I ask Jerri Shelton if her father worked at Wiseda. “I think so,” she answers. “Me and my mom was just talking about that, and she said there were a few different companies he worked for back then, so most likely.”

  I get the chance to speak with Jerri in her Missouri home, a dialogue punctuated with photos of her father fishing or with his grandchildren on his lap. While she insists that her father’s life changed “drastically” with sobriety, she also admits that she spent much of her childhood removed from the home upon the state’s intervention due to drink- and drug-fueled Saturday nights and bursts of domestic violence between David and her mother. Recollecting their past, and the couple’s inevitable separation years later, Jerri maintains that “he loved her with all his heart and soul, to the very end.” While David Pennington was reported to be seeing several girls at once, there seems to have been a special place reserved for Jerri’s mother, whom he married a couple of months after the murders in Welch.

  I sit with Pastor Raymond and Nancy Whetstone, a lovely elderly couple. Pastor Ray still leads Chetopa’s Faith Baptist Church, where Pennington and Welch were regular attendees. “I would always find Pennington’s wife after David beat her,” says Nancy, who helped Jerri and her mother move to a safe house days after the fire. “David Pennington stalked me, stalked me by driving by my house over and over while my husband was away on a revival. This would have been the weekend this all happened,” says Nancy. “That’s the only time I really ever felt fearful during the time with the men.” And even though Nancy explains in detail how David “beat the tar” out of Jerri’s mother, even the devout Whetstones were surprised that David could have helped wipe an entire family clean off the face of the earth. But Phil Welch was another story.

  It is rare to hear about David Pennington without the mention of Phil Welch. They liked to hole up, bouncing between several ramshackle homes and trailers to manufacture and use drugs. Even years before the murders, Pastor Whetstone walked in on them smoking marijuana, only for Phil Welch to cast a devilish smirk. “He looked right at me and said, ‘This is what Jesus died for, Pastor.’”

  David Pennington’s stepdaughter also nods to Phil Welch as contributing to her father’s newfound and fanatical devotion to God. “Phil was such an intense person,” she says. “He [Pennington] got really into religion. They were singing religious songs together, doing church services at Phil Welch’s home, that kind of thing. Don’t get me wrong. That’s not a bad thing, but it was really, really intense.”

  David Pennington started attending Whetstone’s services irregularly in 1976, when Pennington had only “been doing marijuana, I think,” according to Mrs. Whetstone. Over the decades, Nancy was very involved with Pennington and the woman who’d become his wife, even after they were married by Pastor Whetstone in the Picher trailer on February 1, 2000. “He’d stomp her or throw a cup that would gash her head open, really serious stuff,” says Nancy. The pastor’s wife tells of how her son had to come over with a gun to protect her when David was demanding to know where Nancy had taken the girls the weekend after the fire. “But she’d always call him and go back.” Eventually, David Pennington took Jerri and her mother and moved them very near to Phil Welch’s trailer in Picher, as though gravitating toward the man. Since these men spent more time where they cooked than where their families were, it could be said, and often is said, that David and Phil lived together.

  Phil Welch’s influence on some edged dangerously close to cult-leader status, and David Pennington didn’t seem immune to his spell. Pastor Whetstone pointed to his own head and then to his chest. “He had the Bible here, but he didn’t have it here,” he said, regarding Welch’s claims of being an ordained minister and holding his own church services in the very trailer he’d cook and sell methamphetamine in. “He’d be so religious but did such terrible things.” Pastor Whetstone had known David for years because he had been raised in the same small town. Phil Welch came from Erie, Kansas, about forty-five miles north of Chetopa, where he was primarily raised, though his family moved around often. It was when Pastor Whetstone was doing jailhouse ministry that he first met Phil Welch, at the Labette County jail in Oswego, Kansas. “He was as mean as an old rattlesnake.”

  While the Picher trailer was gone forever, either because of demolition upon the exodus of Picher’s civilization or because of the tornado that ripped through those hanging by a thread, Phil Welch’s other home, his last, was struck by lightning and destroyed. “It wasn’t even a big storm, just a small cell,” said the landlord to the Tulsa World. “As though the storm came straight for that house.”

  I go to the ruins of Welch’s last home and sift through the burned and rusty debris, far and deep in the Kansan country near the unincorporated town of Hallowell. Here, where he died from complications of ALS in 2007, I find an old Bible.

  “He was scary when you looked at him,” says Jerri Shelton. “He didn’t even really have to say anything to you. He could just look at you, and it made your stomach turn.” She goes on to address the fanaticism that came with Welch. “He would come over and do Bible hymns. I don’t know if it was drugs with my dad or what, but it was almost like a cult following. You know what I mean? He thought he could exorcise demons, and he [Welch] was intense and out there. He was extremely scary.”

  “I remember him reading books on witchcraft and demonic stuff,” says a relative of Phil Welch. “He thought he was holy or divine enough to be above it, that none of it could touch him. That the devil couldn’t touch him.”

  Even one of Ronnie Busick’s relatives who acknowledges having had a brief affair with methamphetamine back in the day admits to being on the wrong end of Welch’s attentions. “Those eyes … I’d believe any horrible story anyone could tell,” she distantly remembers. “Let’s just say he’d like to watch, sometimes give instructions. Laugh. When it got good, he’d sit forward with his elbows on his knees, and those fucking eyes.” She says Welch was a sexual deviant who performed unspeakable acts of abuse that included foreign objects and multiple people he could control, “suggesting various contenders for the next round of ‘will it fit.’”

  “When they said Phil’s name, I wasn’t surprised,” says
Jerri, which seems to be the sentiment of everyone who personally knew him. But one of the most damning things to come from David Pennington’s stepdaughter is the mention, for the first time in about seventeen years, of a New Year’s Eve party, which she brings up unsolicited during our first conversation. While never mentioned in the affidavit, the rumors of the New Year’s Eve party, which in the early 2000s ran rampant throughout the Wyandotte meth circles some thirty-five miles away from Chetopa, still hold water for the likes of the Bible and the Freeman families.

  “Remember when I said all these drug people knew one another?” Lorene asks. “Over state lines, over the years, they’re all connected.”

  “He always said he regretted going to that party,” Jerri casually starts, remembering that her stepfather was home “before the ball dropped.”

  This night, when he returned from the alleged party, was only days before the pastor’s wife helped Jerri and her mother escape to a safe house, giving David his reason to stalk Nancy. “When he came home [from the party], he kept me and my mom in the house for days. He was scared. And of course, he was high and had found religion in the wrong person. Phil was that person.” Jerri further explained that Phil believed he was a true prophet of God. In an event that seemed “out of character for him,” Jerri remembers it being the only time she saw her stepfather truly scared, locking them in, perhaps locking others out. “Anytime my dad talked about that party, he referred to it as that party,” she continues. “He always regretted going to it. I don’t know if that’s when he maybe became involved as far as the girls went. I’m not sure, but he regretted it … He wasn’t the same after.” She says that while the details of the party were never disclosed to her, David became paranoid in a fit that erupted when he came home that night, and he began “throwing stuff in our fireplace.”