Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  “I think it ate on him,” comments Pastor Whetstone, who would later conduct the funerals of both David Pennington and Phil Welch. “There were some bad things in his heart.”

  With Pennington’s name released in 2018, there comes the affidavit’s longest statement, stemming from an interview with a young man called R.E. As it goes, R.E. is the person who opened up the can of worms and helped direct the entirety of this investigation back to Chetopa. He was the boy forced by the three men to look at the Polaroids of the girls.

  The affidavit makes reference to a 2005 interview of R.E. by former OSBI agent Nutter and a KBI agent. But R.E., like others, was dismissed.

  It was a quiet night in 2017; Ottawa County sheriff Jeremy Floyd was just leaving the office, turning his lights off and taking his Stetson with him. But just as he was leaving through the back emergency exit, he found a scraggly gentleman under a lamppost, waiting. A man who knew to keep his cool, Floyd approached R.E., who appeared jittery and anxious. “So I invited him inside,” said Floyd.

  “I know the person who killed the girls,” R.E. started. “Phil Welch.”

  According to the affidavit, R.E.’s mother dated David Pennington at the time of the Freeman murders and the abductions of the girls. He stated that though he talked to authorities in the past and told them what he knew then, authorities didn’t put any stock in the young man’s confessions due to his lifestyle and the people he associated with. Having lived around this Chetopa/Picher crowd and the likes of Pennington and Phil Welch over the years, he said that he was terrified of Welch.

  R.E. explained to authorities that back then, he had to sleep with a kitchen knife under his bed, and would wake to his phone ringing in the middle of the night. “Don’t you say a word,” Phil Welch would growl before hanging up. Like others, he spoke about Phil’s coming over to the house to cook dope with Pennington and to sing Bible hymns. He described Welch as “evil.”

  In 2017, R.E. confessed to authorities, including Sheriff Floyd, DA investigator Stansill, and OSBI agent Ferrari that both Welch and Pennington had admitted to killing the girls. He also said the pair claimed it was all over drugs (though he couldn’t be certain as to whether or not it was over debt or a deal gone bad). He admitted that his mother would “get beat” by Pennington “over this stuff.” In one standout incident, Pennington and Welch bragged over the Polaroids they kept of the girls like a trophy. R.E. perceived the men as being so prideful, in fact, that they shoved the photos into his face, near giddy.

  Out of respect for the families, and to avoid sensationalism, the DA’s office does not detail all that is included in the photographs. From what I learn through some of the confidential witnesses and law enforcement, the photos include the very things that the mind tries to protect you from.

  As written in the 2018 affidavit, “R.E. stated he heard there was another person with Phil Welch that night [the night of the Freeman murders] … R.E. stated David Pennington and Phil Welch were ‘laughing’ about the girls being in a mine shaft and they would state ‘good luck in trying to ever find them.’”

  When asked if either Pennington or Welch indicated how the girls had died, R.E. replied, “Yeah, they were raped and violently strangled to die.”

  Before the new investigators’ 2017 interview with R.E., they’d also spoken to his mother, L.E., back in 2016. She confirmed that she had in fact lived with David Pennington at the time of the murders (while it was maintained that he also kept his home with Jerri’s mother and spent most of his time with Welch). L.E. told authorities that she had to hide from Pennington based on Pennington’s numerous confessions to killing the girls and his threatening that if she ever left him, he’d kill her too. She told authorities it was a “bad drug deal … They decided to take the girls and have fun with them. Know what I mean?”

  According to L.E., Pennington told her that “one of the parents” (presumably Danny Freeman) was buying drugs from Pennington when the “girls walked into the room.” She said that Welch, Pennington, and Busick were responsible, each one having sexually abused the girls. While she claimed not to know where the girls were, she said, “They may be at the bottom of a pit,” where Pennington said she’d end up too if she ever told.

  L.E. passed away before the release of this affidavit.

  Neither mother nor son, L.E. and R.E. respectively, was a stranger to the car that was reportedly used to drive to the Freeman trailer on the night of the fire and then used to take the girls out. According to the affidavit, “L.E. reported that a car belonging to a woman who Phil Welch was seeing was used and that the woman’s ‘ID’ was found on the ground.” And in regard to her son, he also knew about the card, saying he’d heard both Pennington and Welch talking about it, fearful that it would be the piece of evidence that could lead back to them.

  Even Pastor Whetstone and his wife know about the insurance-verification card, believing that authorities must have known. “Everybody here knew about the insurance card for years,” says Nancy. “People talked about it all the time, starting shortly after the murders. Why did no one follow up on it?” I have no answer.

  Another associate of David Pennington, J.B., said that three to six months before he died, according to the affidavit, Pennington said he “knew more about the murders than what he was letting on to people about it.” J.B. also claimed that “everybody already thought David Pennington was involved in it anyway.” This witness also pointed toward Phil Welch’s girlfriends E.B. and T.W. as having information.

  Yet another witness, J.R., claimed that he walked into a friend’s trailer, where he observed his friend, along with Busick, Pennington, and Welch, looking at several Polaroids, and while they scrambled to hide the photos from J.R., this witness claimed he was able to see one of them in David Pennington’s hands; in the photograph were Lauria and Ashley “duct-taped to a chair with their hands bound.” Having heard the men on several occasions talk about the girls, he recalled one saying, “Yeah, we got them, didn’t we?”

  A fifth witness, a fugitive who’d only speak in brief moments to current investigators on the phone due to a warrant for his arrest, told Agent Ferrari that “David Pennington spilled his guts” and that Pennington got drunk and said that he “and that Welch dude” were involved. This witness also claimed to know the pair as meth cooks. When this on-the-lam informant could finally be interviewed in jail after being arrested in 2018, he told Stansill and Ferrari that he heard Welch, Pennington, and Busick talk about the murders often, referring to the girls as “them two little bitches,” as though it were some kind of inside joke. He also claimed that it was a “robbery gone bad,” that Danny Freeman owed the men “a bunch of money,” as stated in the affidavit.

  “I remember the ten-year anniversary [of Ashley and Lauria going missing], and they had a thing about it on the news,” recalls David Pennington’s stepdaughter, Jerri. “And I had looked over at him [David] and said, ‘It’s really sad that nobody has found them yet.’”

  “They’re at the bottom of a mine shaft with water running through it,” he abruptly answered, saying that he knew a guy who used to dump cattle in it. He shifted in his stepdaughter’s silence. “At least that’s where I’d look.”

  Jerri tells me that she hadn’t been contacted by authorities, not even after the press conference that named her father as one of the murderers. Instead, it was Jerri who reached out to the Bibles herself. “They have the most right to be angry,” says Jerri, in regard to the public’s anger, which is often misdirected at her. “They don’t lash out. They don’t say terrible things. It’s really amazing how strong they are.”

  “This solves nothing,” Lorene contends. It seems this flood of information, as officially released by the district attorney’s office, offers little to no solace to a woman whose only purpose is to find her daughter. “This is about bringing the girls home, and until then, it’s not solved.”

  The affidavit discusses several more men and women and women’s children who lived
for years under the threats of Phil Welch, Ronnie Busick, and David Pennington. I collect hundreds of pages of records pertaining to Welch, including arrest records that document assaults, batteries, burglaries, child abuse, domestic violence, terrorist threats, and more. Several of these reports revolve around the very witnesses of the 2018 affidavit. When one of his former girlfriends tried leaving him, Phil Welch chased her down. Witnesses say he threatened to slit her children’s throats and dump them in mines: they’d “end up like the girls.” Witness after witness saw Welch lying with the girls in the photos.

  I come up from reading the affidavit feeling angry and empty. My belly fills with disgust at the thoughts of the men, these girls.

  Today, Ronnie Dean Busick is still awaiting trial. By law, he is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

  David Pennington and Phil Welch died in the course of the investigation.

  Charles Krider is not currently a suspect in the Freeman murders and continues to reside in Chetopa.

  While the investigation feels on the right track, for both the Freemans and the Bibles alike, who all believe that the three men named are in fact the ones responsible for the murders, a division remains; and the mention of police involvement is inescapable.

  “Now, he [Ronnie] did not know a damn thing about who really wanted it done,” says Busick’s niece the first time we speak, offering the information without prompting. “He would have been kept in the dark about that … The whole ‘It was a drug deal’ sits wrong with me. As soon as it happened, everyone knew what had gone down, because everyone knew about the court case coming up.”

  I ask for clarification. “Are you referring to Danny Freeman and the potential lawsuit against police?”

  “Yup.” From there, she chooses to go off the record.

  I even asked R.H., who knew all three men, why, even now that Busick was in jail and the other two men were dead, people in Chetopa are still too scared to talk.

  “Law enforcement,” he says straightforwardly. “A lot of the younger generation is listening to the older generation. Keep your mouth shut. There’s things I couldn’t be paid a million bucks to make me say.”

  At the end of the interview, R.H. and I stand up. Together, we walk outside, looking next door to where David Pennington lived with Jerri and her mother at the time of the murders.

  “There were people who weren’t scared of nothing who were terrified of that guy Phil,” he says.

  “But he’s dead now.”

  R.H. lights a cigarette. “Thank the Lord.”

  This is where my research has to end, a line drawn in the white dust of the poisonous chat. Like those who loved Lauria and Ashley the most, I feel like I can dig forever. I even feel guilty for not having an ending for this book to give the families. Because while the men who did this are no longer able to commit more horrific crimes, I’m not sure anyone’s any closer to finding the girls. Sure, I know it feels like the end is near, but I know the families have felt like this a thousand times before. As Lorene will say, it’s best not to get your hopes up. I believe hope is all a person needs to survive most anything, but I see how it can also make a person mad.

  32

  * * *

  LIKE LIGHTNING

  * * *

  Today

  It is a year since the first arrest. My trips home are fewer than my visits to Oklahoma, where I’m always welcomed back by the shadows and the grip of fear masked in the nourishment of the prairie, where dawn’s lines of color fluctuate like the sea, looking back to a shore made of stars. She is not mine to visit. I am hers to take. But every time I pass the sign that welcomes me to Oklahoma, I swear I hear the breath of Ashley blowing out her candles, a breath that matches the wind on the grain. And Lauria’s laughter laced in, something playful, a reminiscence of youth. A mother and father’s slow round of applause. The blood of murderers’ veins that runs cold like the rivers that cut through out back by the dam.

  It all fades to the silence that belongs to the prairie when the wind pauses, then revs back up with the unchanging taunts that keep the answers close to her chest: somewhere out there, Ashley and Lauria remain.

  I feel a certain honor to have seen the case come this far. Through the ups and downs and the ons and offs, where every red herring in the four-state area comes like catfish (for every suspect I mention, there are more who didn’t make the cut). It is dizzying, it is emotional, it is frustrating, and sometimes it is terrifying. But it feels like everyone is making progress. The news of the naming of the three men brings forward a new wave of people and information, and helps narrow in on where authorities believe the girls’ remains could be found today: the scourge that is Picher on Oklahoma’s beautiful figure.

  But while focus stays on the abandoned superfund site, the families and the authorities accept all tips, from everywhere.

  As late as January 2019, I follow a rumor back to a former member of law enforcement. Not expecting much, I leave with a CD that holds a recording from the early 2000s of a deathbed confession, the elderly father of a suspect trying to point authorities to where the girls’ bodies are. The leads still flow, and the families still listen.

  “Why now?” I ask the former member of law enforcement who gave me the CD.

  “I have my reasons,” my source says, alluding to concerns of police corruption.

  In typical Lorene Bible fashion, I learn not to get my hopes up. The grim reality remains that Lauria and Ashley might never be found, that even if precise coordinates are provided, the mines are a largely inaccessible maze filled with moving water that could have flushed the girls’ bodies thousands of miles, into any one of several neighboring states. And though the Bibles concede this, they will never give up.

  “Lauria’s grandparents died before we could find her,” Lorene tells me. “Her grandpa, on his deathbed, asked if there was something more he could have done to find her.” Hearing about the loved ones making promises to glean information from heaven and get it back to Lorene in this life nearly breaks my heart.

  During the course of my writing this book, Celesta Chandler, Kathy Freeman’s mother, also passes away.

  For the first time in about a decade, I even watch Dwayne come back publicly to the case. “This crime was too vicious, too personal,” he says to reporters, never convinced that the motivation for the murders was drugs. He also expresses his anger. “We knew all three names in the first few days of the fire,” he says, referring to Busick, Pennington, and Welch. “We told Agent Nutter, and he said, ‘No, they had nothing to do with it.’”

  No one in the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, the Craig County Sheriff’s Office, or any other agency related to the case has made an official comment on the missteps or negligence or corruption of the investigators of old.

  Like I tell those back home about what I actually do in Oklahoma: 99 percent of my job is gaining trust. It’s only after the arrest, in the summer of 2018, that Dwayne shares with me documents that have been kept out of the public eye since DeAnna Dorsey clutched them on the talk show taped in Los Angeles days before her 2002 murder.

  In my hands for the first time is Shane’s autopsy report.

  In my hands is the signed statement of CCSO’s Mark Hayes, brother of shooting officer David Hayes.

  In my hands is the signed statement of CCSO’s Jim Herman.

  In my hands is the signed statement of CCSO’s Troy Messick.

  In my hands is the signed statement of CCSO’s Charlie Cozart.

  Delivered are the promises of a video taken by the Freeman family of Shane’s body, as Dwayne helped prop up the boy’s corpse in the basement of the funeral home, motioning toward the suspect bullet wound on the side of Shane’s chest.

  According to the autopsy report, Medical Examiner Donna Warren’s finding was that the slug entered and exited the back of Shane’s upper left arm (in and out through the triceps). It then entered the torso about two inches right of his left nipple. The slug never hit the bone of h
is arm, but went through his chest through the fifth rib and hit his lungs and heart. The slug remained lodged in Shane’s body and was extracted by the ME from the muscles of his back on the opposite side of where the bullet entered at a slightly downward angle.

  Based on the entrance and exit wounds at the back of the arm, and the path of the burn as the slug grazed the side of the chest, the Freemans believe that Shane was in the physical position of attempting to run away. However, when I speak once again to coroner and teacher Darren Dake, he insists that the autopsy report does not definitively imply whether Shane was in such a position.

  But, to repeat Danny Freeman’s words in the Tulsa World shortly after his son’s death, “We might not know everything.”

  Today, there remains a great divide.

  “I’m a little bit reluctant to even talk about it,” says David Hayes to me after three years of my pleading, the first time he ever speaks publicly about the shooting. “And it’s not because of you.”

  When I speak to David Hayes, now the captain of police in neighboring Rogers County, he sounds remorseful over the shooting death of Shane—not regretful that he shot him, but regretful that he had to shoot him back on January 8, 1999.

  On that cold and windy late afternoon, David Hayes drove west of Welch, where people are few and the skies are low. With rumors flying that the Red Light Bandit was armed, David Hayes was the first to arrive, and when he turned onto the road, his patrol car was facing Shane. “Things happened pretty fast,” he tells me.