The Dreams of Ada (24 page)

Peterson conceded that he would have a big problem if the courts ruled the taped confessions inadmissible. He said he would still go to trial with other evidence—that Ward was the last to be seen with her alive—but that he would have difficulty getting a murder conviction without the tapes. But he did not expect them to be ruled inadmissible. They had been obtained without coercion, he said.

Peterson had learned during his five years in office never to take a jury for granted. But every time he went over the transcripts of the taped statements, he grew optimistic that he would get convictions of Ward and Fontenot.

“Ward says on the tape that while Denice was screaming, he told her to shut up or he would bite her tit off,” Peterson said. “And he laughs. Later, when Karl is on top of her, he says he saw her guts spilling out, and told Karl he was fucking a corpse, and Karl said, ‘That’s the way I like ’em.’ And he laughs again. When the jury sees that tape, those laughs are gonna convict them.”

In the jail, while Don Wyatt and Mike Addicott and Winifred Harrell were compiling legal briefs on his behalf, Tommy wrote poems. Most were about faith and devotion, but a series of five poems chronicled his lingering feelings for Lisa Lawson. The first four dealt with broken love, in thinly disguised generalities. But the fifth poem seemed to indicate a broadening of understanding, a coming to grips with reality, a maturation. It went as follows, including his own insertion of Lisa’s name:

Isn’t it a shame to lose someone you love

Sometimes you feel that you’ll never rize above

You wonder inside if you will ever forget

Then look for a way, but you cant see one yet

You cry and cry, it seems theres no end

Inside you feel you’ve lost more than a friend

These things I know, because I’ve been there too

May be your way out could be what I write to you

Once I had a girl, and I loved her so much. (Lisa)

I felt I couldn’t live without having her tuch

I told her how I loved her, and how she made me feel

That with the love I had for her, I could climb any hill

Then I found she didn’t love me, and it broke my heart

I felt I would die, and my world fell apart

Then it came to me in the mist of my tears

I looked at what would have happened if we shared our years.

First she didn’t love me, and it cant be one side

You have to love each other or the relationship dies.

I thought of her feelings, and if she’d have lied

Oh, what a disaster, the visions just cannot hide

At first I told myself the problem was me

But love had me blind and I couldn’t see.

The love that I had for her was so true.

Never would I hert her or make her feel blue.

Now how could she turn away somone so real

She must think thats the way for her all the guys feel.

I see her the one losing, now it’s all plain to see

She will never find anyone to love her like me.

Across the street, in the city jail, Karl Fontenot continued to sleep during the day and to stay awake at night. He passed the long dark hours drawing pictures, reading romance magazines—he referred to magazines as “books”—and writing long letters to his family. In the letters he asked his sisters and brother to answer, to write back so he would know they loved him; he never received a reply. Five months had passed; he still had not had a single visitor.

At the city jail, visiting was permitted every weekday afternoon, five days a week. At the county jail, where Tommy was being held—with his family eager to see him—only the Sunday visits were allowed.

On Friday, March 29, George Butner argued a series of motions before Judge Jones on Karl’s behalf, including one that the judge withdraw from the case. There were motions to examine the prosecution’s evidence, motions that Karl’s right to due process had been violated, motions that the defense be informed of any lenient treatment being given prosecution witnesses. Many of the motions were similar to those Don Wyatt had argued ten days earlier on behalf of Tommy Ward. On most of the motions the judge again asked for written briefs, and reserved decision.

As she lay on the sofa, feeling at times like a beached whale, Tricia had a lot of time to think. She tried to put herself in the shoes of Denice Haraway’s family. She could feel their terrible pain, their loss. But there was one attitude she couldn’t understand, try as she might. “They seem to want Tommy to be guilty,” she said. “It’s almost as if they want her to be dead.”

On the last day of March, a Sunday, Tricia roused herself from being “down” and went to the jail with Bud to visit Tommy. They were surprised to see him wearing not prison whites but blue jeans and a brown pullover shirt with his cowboy boots: looking like a normal person. The inmate to whom he’d traded his tennis shoes for the worn boots had been sent to the state prison at McAlester, where prison garb is mandatory. He had given Tommy his jeans and shirt. The jailers had agreed to let Tommy wear them in the jail, though he would have to wear his white coveralls for trips across the lawn to the courthouse. Still, Tommy told Bud and Tricia, the clothing made him feel much better.

He also felt better, he said, because the trustees and some of the jailers had begun to come back to his cell and visit with him. They didn’t used to do that, he said, because they had believed he had done this horrible crime. Now they were getting friendly, telling him they thought he didn’t do it, because if he had, the body would have turned up by now.

Ada is located in Oklahoma Judicial District 22, which is composed of three counties: Pontotoc, Seminole, and Hughes. In each of the counties a different district judge presided over most of the cases that went to trial. In Seminole the judge was Gordon Melson, the former district attorney, who also served as the administrative judge for an eleven-county area. In Hughes County the judge was Gary Brown. In Pontotoc it was Ronald Jones. Round-faced, fastidious, with a thin smile that at times seemed painful, Judge Jones had been the judge in the Haraway case since the conclusion of the preliminary hearing. It had been the belief of everyone concerned that he would preside at the trial.

The prospect did not fill the hearts of the defense attorneys with hope. They knew that Jones was extremely conservative, that he supported the death penalty; they felt his rulings often leaned too far in favor of the prosecution; that was the reason George Butner had filed, among his many motions, one that the judge disqualify himself.

On April 9, with most of the motions still pending before him, Judge Jones stunned all of the participants by doing just that. He issued a half-page “Ruling on Motion to Disqualify,” which concluded, “Having considered the request and motion of the defendant, Karl Allen Fontenot, I find that I have no bias or prejudice in this matter and that no grounds or reasons exist which require disqualification. However, this Trial Judge now requests that this case be assigned to another Trial Judge.”

In other words, he was saying that while there was no legal reason for him to disqualify himself, he was doing so anyway. He declined to elaborate further to the press.

The defense attorneys shared a common speculation as to why the judge had withdrawn. They knew that although Judge Jones publicly supported the death penalty, he had never had to impose it personally; they believed that if this case led to a conviction, and to a recommendation by the jury of the death penalty, the judge, being a staunch Christian, might have a personal moral and religious problem with ordering a man to be put to death.

The district attorney implied that there might be a different reason. “If I told you why he withdrew, you’d laugh,” Bill Peterson said. But he, too, declined to elaborate.

Whatever the reason, Don Wyatt and George Butner were jubilant. They had felt that with Judge Jones presiding, their clients were on an express train to disaster; that without him, they might have a chance. The judge’s withdrawal, they felt, was the first thing that had gone their way since the case began.

The responsibility for assigning a new judge to the case fell on Gordon Melson, the presiding administrative judge for the district. But the very next day, Judge Melson, too, excused himself from responsibility. He requested that the Oklahoma Supreme Court or its administrative arm assign a judge to take over the Haraway case. The judge said he was excusing himself “for a number of reasons.” He, too, refused to elaborate.

Many of Denice Haraway’s relatives lived in Seminole County, where Judge Melson presided. The belief on both sides was that the judge was friendly with members of her family, and had excused himself from appointing a trial judge to avoid any possibility of taint, of reversible error, should the case lead to a conviction.

The withdrawals by Judges Jones and Melson were filed quietly within the judicial system. It was eight days before their actions reached the ears of Dorothy Hogue, who broke the story in the
News
on April 18. During those eight days the state Supreme Court had not yet named a new judge in the case; all motions were on hold; the suspects remained in jail. On the day the story appeared in the newspaper, they had been in jail for exactly six months.

With no reasons given by either judge, the story was the talk of the town. The most widely expressed feeling in the streets and shops and factories was that, with the two suspects in jail for six months, and with still no body found, no definitive proof that Denice Haraway was dead—and with no sign of a trial on the horizon—the case was becoming a political hot potato that neither judge wanted to touch.

The delays in the case were slowly altering the public perception. The majority of the citizens were still convinced that Ward and Fontenot were guilty; if they weren’t guilty, why had they made those tapes? If they hadn’t done it, who had? But some people were beginning to speculate—as Tommy Ward was discovering even inside the jail—that if the authorities had enough evidence, the trial would have been held already. This reasoning led, for some people, to a further step: perhaps they weren’t guilty after all.

Ken Shiplet is the owner of Shiplet’s Tire and Appliance, on West Twelfth Street. He lives near the Reeves Packing Plant. During the first of the citizen searches in the fall, shortly after Ward, Fontenot, and Titsworth were arrested, he and his wife, Susan, joined in the search for Denice Haraway’s body. They looked at a dump site not far from their house, where people had a habit of dumping all sorts of refuse next to a sign that says, “No Dumping.” Susan spotted a burned jawbone. They approached a group of deputies and OSBI agents and gave them the bone. That was the one that turned out, days later, to be the jawbone of a possum. Shiplet also serves as a bail bondsman. In previous, unrelated cases he had arranged bail for Odell Titsworth. Now, six months after the police had cleared Titsworth, Ken Shiplet was not sure they hadn’t let the wrong one go, that Ward and Fontenot might be innocent.

Darichele Alvarado worked backstage at the Ada
News
. As a child, she had gone to school with Tommy Ward. When she heard of his arrest in October, one striking image from their school days had come to her mind. She recalled a day in first grade, when they were having “show and tell,” and Tommy had come to school, barefoot, carrying a chicken snake to show and tell about. Though the snake was coiled inside a glass jar, the girls in the class had screamed; the teacher had shouted, “Out, out!” and made Tommy take the snake out of the school. Darichele recalled Tommy as being a quiet, withdrawn boy; she felt now that for him to be guilty, he would have had to have changed an awful lot.

Teresa Perry is a young woman whose mother rented a house to Dottie Fontenot and the five little Fontenots when Karl was a child. She and Karl went to school together in nearby Byng. She recalled Karl as a slow learner who seemed a little strange, often giggling for no apparent reason. But in her recollection he had never been violent, was always kind, even to animals. She’d been shocked when he was arrested. As the months passed with no action in the case, Teresa became more and more convinced that Karl could not have committed this crime. Coming from a less affluent section of town, she felt, like many in the poorer sections, that the authorities were not above pinning the crime on an innocent person merely to close the case, and that Karl, being alone in the world and scared, with no one to help him, was a perfect person to pin it on.

On and off for the past four years, Teresa had worked at McAnally’s, out on North Broadway, across town from where Denice Haraway had disappeared. The disappearance did not frighten her, did not induce her to quit. Something bad, she reasoned, could happen on your own front porch.

Steve Haraway’s close friend, Gary May, was having a small problem with the logistics of the case. He’d known Denice, was certain she had not run away; he’d helped distribute the flyers after her disappearance. A native of Ada, he’d heard of “the Ward kid,” but did not know him; he’d never heard of Fontenot. He’d assumed from the time of their arrest, from the time he’d heard they had confessed, that they were guilty; he did not really doubt that now. But there was something on the tapes that bothered him, in addition to everything the police had proved to be false. He couldn’t understand why, if you were to kidnap someone from McAnally’s on East Arlington, and wanted to rape her without being caught, you wouldn’t drive from the store out east; there was nothing east of Ada but an unlighted highway, and dark, wooded areas on both sides, as you went out toward Deer Creek Estates, toward Homer, toward Love Lady, toward Happyland, and beyond. But according to the tapes, the suspects had driven west from McAnally’s, along Arlington Boulevard, and then Mississippi, the busiest, best-lighted streets in town, at 8:30 on a Saturday night, when Arlington and Mississippi both would be crowded with traffic. And then, according to the tapes, the suspects had raped her and killed her about two blocks from Tommy Ward’s house. To Gary, a college senior, those logistics didn’t make sense. He did not believe Ward and Fontenot were innocent; confessing to something you didn’t do didn’t make sense either. But the alleged route made him wonder. The whole town, he knew, would be watching the trial, when they got around to a trial. If the suspects were convicted with no body found, he believed, the case would go down in the textbooks; but if they were freed, he felt, they probably would not live very long; someone who’d known Denice would kill them.