The Dreams of Ada (48 page)

Slowly his pulse quieted. He decided the dark spot was only tar.

DAY ELEVEN

Don Wyatt learned over the weekend that Jason Lurch and his wife had, for a time in 1984, lived at the Brook Trailer Park in the trailer of an elderly man, a Mr. Potter; ostensibly, for a fee from the state, they were taking care of him. If the trailer was in the old man’s name, Lurch could have been living there without it showing on the trailer park records.

The first witness he called Monday morning was Pat Rockley, a social worker with the Oklahoma State Human Services Department. Ms. Rockley testified that the Lurches were supposed to be providing care for Mr. Potter, but that in fact they were stealing his welfare checks. She said she had recommended to Chris Ross that he prosecute the Lurches for their treatment of Mr. Potter, but that charges were never brought. Her investigation had begun in March of 1985, she said, and the Lurches had been associated with Mr. Potter for two years. Jason Lurch, she said, was in and out of the Brook.

During his cross-examination, Chris Ross said he had not brought charges because the only complainant against the Lurches would have been Mr. Potter, and he was not competent. Asked if she knew where Jason Lurch was living on April 28, 1984, the social worker said she did not.

The witness stepped down. The defense attorneys huddled at their table, conferring. In the corridor outside, Tricia sat; she’d been told she would be the last witness called by the defense, to leave a good impression with the jury, and that today would be the day. Eleven blocks from the courthouse, on Broadway, Richard Kerner was talking to a clerk at the Indian Hills Motel.

The conference at the defense table went on for several minutes. The clock on the wall read 9:30 when Don Wyatt stood and faced the judge. “On behalf of defendant Ward,” he said, “we will rest.”

There was a stirring in the courtroom. The end had come unexpectedly soon.

Judge Powers summoned the defense counsels to the bench for a private conference; Bill Peterson, Chris Ross, Gary Rogers remained at the prosecution table.

Richard Kerner parked his car across the street and hurried into the courthouse, up the two flights of stairs. He had new information, he told Bill Willett: Lurch may have been living in Ada at the time of the disappearance, at the Indian Hills Motel. The old room records were not available at the motel, he said, but he would track them down.

Kerner was told the defense had just rested. He was extremely upset. How could they have rested, he wanted to know, without putting Jason Lurch on the stand?

Don Wyatt had evolved a different strategy. If he called Lurch as a witness, he reasoned, Lurch would deny living in Ada at the time, would deny being in J.P.’s with his nephew that night. And that would be the end of it. Wyatt could not badger his own witness. He was hoping that because Kerner had named Lurch from the stand as his prime suspect, and because the social worker had just painted a picture of Lurch as a sleazy guy who would steal a sick old man’s welfare checks, the district attorney would feel compelled to put Lurch on in the rebuttal period to follow, to say he had not been in Ada at the time. Then, Wyatt reasoned, on cross-examination, where attorneys have a lot more freedom, he could attack Lurch. He could bring out what Lurch had told the lawyers in their first meeting: that he had lived in Ada at the time, that he had painted trucks, that he and his nephew might well have been in J.P.’s that night.

He could only hope that Peterson would take the bait.

The attorneys returned to their seats. The clock said 9:57. George Butner stood and addressed the judge. “Defendant Fontenot,” he said, “for the purposes of this hearing, rests.”

In the corridor, Tricia was surprised. After all the rehearsals, she would not need to testify. It was fine with her. The attorneys knew best.

The rebuttal phase of the trial began. The state called David Stark, the director of emergency services at Valley View Hospital, in an attempt to impeach Ward’s alibi witness. Stark said he knew Joice Cavins; that he taught a class she attended Saturdays in the spring of 1984. He produced his attendance record for the class. They showed, he said, that Joice had been present in his class for about six hours that day; that she had taken an exam that day, and scored 70 percent.

Wyatt was prepared for this. Joice had told him that sometimes the instructors had softball games scheduled on Saturdays, and canceled the class but marked everyone present anyway. That’s what happened that day, she’d said. The instructor, on the stand, denied this.

“Your class was not in session between the hours of 5
P.M
. and midnight, was it?” Wyatt asked.

“No,” the instructor said.

The state called Larry Johnson, the deputy sheriff of Lincoln County, to shoot down one of Richard Kerner’s scenarios: that among the possible suspects in the Haraway case were Don Wilson Hawkins and Dale Austin Shelton, the two men still being sought in the recent kidnapping in Oklahoma City. The sheriff, a record book open on his lap, said that Don Hawkins had been in his jail from December 19, 1982, to September 18, 1984—which covered the night of the Haraway disappearance.

On cross-examination, Wyatt asked if Dale Shelton was in his jail that night. The sheriff said no.

“How about Mr. Jason Lurch, was he in your jail?”

“I don’t recall the name,” the deputy said.

The state recalled Karen Wise to the stand, in an attempt to show that Jason Lurch and Ricky Brewer were not the ones she’d seen in J.P.’s the night Denice Haraway disappeared. Peterson showed her a photograph of Brewer, asked if she knew him. “I didn’t know him by name. He was a regular customer of mine,” Ms. Wise said.

He showed her a picture of Lurch, asked if he was in her store that night. “No, sir, I don’t believe so,” Ms. Wise said. “They were regular customers, but I don’t believe so.”

On cross-examination, she was asked, “If this is your old buddy you knew from the store, I’m wondering why he would make you nervous.”

“He looked familiar to me, and he was staring at me,” Ms. Wise said. “I do not like to be stared at.”

Wise was excused. Wyatt hoped that Jason Lurch would be next.

Bill Peterson huddled with Ross and Rogers. He decided that Karen Wise had effectively shot down the Lurch-Brewer scenario, when she said they were regular customers. The district attorney stood. It was 10:22
A.M
. “Your honor, the State of Oklahoma rests,” he said.

Seven minutes passed while Wyatt, Butner, and Austin conferred about whether to call rebuttal witnesses of their own. Then Wyatt and Butner stood.

“The defense rests,” Wyatt said.

“The defense rests,” Butner echoed.

Despite all the backstage drama, the jurors would never see Jason Lurch, the “mystery man.”

The judge sent the jury from the courtroom. Ward and Fontenot, in their respective chairs, watched silently. Butner asked that the judge issue a directed verdict of acquittal, for lack of evidence, and that the charges against Karl Fontenot be dismissed.

“Overruled,” Judge Powers said.

Wyatt adopted the same motion on behalf of Tommy Ward.

“Overruled,” the judge said.

He retired to his chambers, to consider his instructions to the jury. An hour later the jury was returned to the room. The judge told them that as of that moment they were under sequestration; they were in the custody of the bailiff, and could go nowhere without him. The bailiff was sworn in to sequester the jury.

It was time for lunch. The judge told the jurors they would be escorted by the bailiff to Mercy’s sandwich shop.

17

VERDICT

W
ith testimony completed, the ban on witnesses in the courtroom had ended. The personal tragedy of the case was ever more visible in the second and third rows. In the second row, Steve Haraway’s father, mother, sister still sat; Steve would come tomorrow. Directly behind them, filling the entire third row, were the Wards—Tommy’s mother, three of his sisters, all of his brothers. The rest of the courtroom was jammed as well—with seekers of justice or of vengeance; with students of legal procedure; with lovers of a mystery.

Bill Peterson, who had lived with this case as with a ghost in the bedroom since the day of the arrests, had gone to lunch, alone, at McCartney’s Drug Store on Main Street; had eaten a sandwich at a formica table. Now he sat at the prosecution table, listening, as the judge read sixty-nine technical legal instructions to the jury. He would be first up when the judge was through.

Dennis Smith, who had lived with the case since Baskin’s phone call awakened him that Saturday night, could sit in the courtroom for the first time since he testified; he squeezed into a space in the press row.

The defendants sat in their customary seats, the judge’s instructions passing over their heads like clouds. The lawyers sat behind them, listening carefully. On such technical matters as the instructions to a jury many a conviction has been overturned on appeal.

Above the witness stand a microphone hung, useless, dead. It had hung there throughout the trial, without being used, like a mute symbol, signifying nothing. Whether it would have worked, had a switch been thrown, was a matter of speculation.

The judge’s instructions took twenty minutes. When he was finished, at 3:04
P.M
., Bill Peterson went to a blackboard on the wall. He wrote on it the critical dates of the case:

April 28, 1984

May 1, 1984

October 12, 1984

October 18, 1984

Others

Then he began his summation. In his customary, logical way, the only way he liked to work, he began at the beginning, and worked forward. He recalled for the jury every witness the state had presented, and what they had said under oath. He recited at length all the work the Ada police and the OSBI had put into solving the case.

In the press row, Dorothy Hogue whispered to a colleague: “Is he trying to convict them, or defend the investigation?”

He recalled what Jim Moyer had seen at McAnally’s at 7:30 that night; what Karen Wise and Jack Paschall had seen at J.P.’s at 8. Then his voice grew rounder, filled the courtroom. “About 8:30 that evening,” Peterson said, “death drove up to the front of McAnally’s, in a gray primer pickup.”

In lengthy detail, the D. A. reiterated the testimony of all those at the scene: the witnesses, the cops. As he talked, Barney Ward, the blind attorney, stood outside the courtroom, conversing with a man in a peaked cap. The attorney had sat in on the trial several times, guided by his secretary.

“Barney, I don’t know how they’re going to get a verdict,” the man in the cap said.

“I don’t know either,” Barney Ward said, from behind his opaque black glasses.

“I don’t know how they got a jury,” the man said.

“Neither do I,” Barney Ward said.

Then he added, “But I’ll tell you this. They’ve got the best judge in the state.”

In the courtroom, Peterson continued his review of the case. He spoke with derision of Jannette Roberts’s hand-dated Easter pictures. They could have been taken any year, he said.

He reviewed the gruesome story on the confession tapes. “Was it a dream to Denice?” he asked, his voice rising again. “Or a living nightmare?”

He turned to the testimony of the defense’s private investigator. “Richard Kerner, crime-fighter!” he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “Dick Tracy in disguise!…I for one am going to sleep a lot easier knowing that Mr. Kerner is out there, solving crimes by taking pictures of people and pickups that had absolutely nothing to do with the disappearance.”

Recalling Kerner’s testimony that Jason Lurch and Ricky Brewer resembled the composite drawings, Peterson pointed a finger at his own assistant D.A. “If Mr. Ross would lose about fifty pounds,
he
would resemble that composite,” Peterson said.

“There’s only two people in this courtroom who know where Denice is,” the D.A. said. And he stared at the defendants.

The summation went on for hours. The key moment in the case, Peterson suggested, was when David Timmons saw a man and a woman leaving McAnally’s, the man’s arm around the woman’s waist. “What was in that hand,” Peterson asked the jury, “and why did she walk out of there?”

It was ten minutes after six in the evening when the district attorney concluded. The judge acknowledged to the jury that they had already put in a long day; but he wanted to finish the closing arguments this evening, he said. The jury would be taken during the supper hour to their place of sequestration, the Raintree Motor Inn, where they would be assigned rooms. He would like them back in court by 7:30
P.M
., or as soon thereafter as possible.

“We certainly won’t start till you get back,” he said.

They were not back at 7:30. They were not back at 8:15. The courtroom was packed with spectators, waiting, wanting to be in on the climax. On the second floor, alone, Don Wyatt paced the dim corridor, his closing remarks running through his head. In the press row, the most experienced of the news reporters, Cheryl Fathree of the Tulsa
World
, offered a bit of gallows humor: “What’s the difference,” she asked, “between a dead skunk in the road and a dead lawyer in the road?”

No one knew.

“There are skid marks in front of the skunk.”

Fed and registered at the motel, the jurors returned, accompanied by the bailiff, at 8:45
P.M
. George Butner began his closing statement on behalf of Karl Fontenot.

Butner noted that while three people had placed Tommy Ward in the area, not one of these—or anyone else—had placed Fontenot there. He pointed out that the “other man” had been described as sandy-haired, and that Karl’s hair is black.

There was not one shred of evidence, he said, to back up the taped statements. Where is the pickup? he wanted to know. Where is the knife? Where is the body? The prosecution did not even have a scene where it took place, he said. “Nothing. Not anything.”

He recalled how Gordon Calhoun and Terry Holland had said Karl took pride in telling a good story. “Do you put more credibility in Wise and Moyer, or in Karl?” he asked. “Wise and Moyer said he wasn’t there!”

He castigated the police actions in the case. “Two good confessions,” Butner said, “can cure a lot of incompetent investigation.”

He said he had a problem in his mind with the times before the videotapes were turned on. He recalled Karen Wise’s fear of Jason Lurch at the hearings; her fear of the man in the alley outside her house, who fit Lurch’s description. He recalled the threatening calls she had received, long after these defendants were in jail.

“You’ve heard all the evidence about Karl,” he said. “It doesn’t fly. No ifs, ands, buts, or ors. It doesn’t fly.”

He concluded by urging the jury to give each defendant “separate consideration.”

As Butner moved toward his seat, Tommy Ward looked at him with what seemed like pained hatred. Either Ward did not understand the separate loyalties of the two attorneys, or he understood it, at that moment, all too well.

Butner concluded at 9:17. Don Wyatt rose and took his place.

He began by focusing on the Polaroid pictures of Ward and Fontenot with short hair. These, he said, were “the only hard physical evidence in the case.”

Of the tapes, he said, “The statements are gruesome. They’re gruesome! But they’re also not true.”

He said the ideas on the tapes had been planted during the October 12 questioning; that on October 18, Tommy Ward had already been programmed to elaborate his dream into the fantasy they had seen on the tape.

He defended Richard Kerner against the sarcasm Bill Peterson had displayed. The state, Wyatt said, had all the resources of the Ada police, the sheriff’s office, the OSBI. “And we had one detective. And he was a good one. A darn good one.”

He recounted for the jury his theory of two separate incidents. He said the truck that had belonged to Jason Lurch’s nephew was “identical in every way” to the one seen at J.P.’s.

“I’m not saying he did it,” Wyatt said. He was saying that Lurch and Brewer were the ones seen in J.P.’s that night—not Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot.

“Confessions are highly suspect,” Wyatt told the jury. That was why, under the law, a crime had to be proven before the jury could consider a confession.

He reviewed what he called the pressure tactics of the police in this case: the pressure put on Odell Titsworth, the bringing of the bones to the jail. “You have the opportunity,” he said, “to stop the type of tactics the police are using—to coerce, to intimidate.”

He recalled the testimony of the alibi witnesses, who had sworn under oath that Tommy Ward was somewhere else—was in his own home—at the time the alleged crime was taking place.

He asked why the state had not called Jannette Roberts to the stand, which it had every right to do. And he answered his own question: “Because they could not disprove those photos!”

He concluded by reading a newspaper quotation from Bill Peterson, which had appeared the previous November. In it, the D.A. had warned that it would be difficult to get a conviction in this case without a body.

And Wyatt asked for an acquittal.

It was 10
P.M
. when he finished. The judge ordered a fifteen-minute break. Tommy Ward’s family huddled around him, hugging him, showing their support, after the jurors had filed out.

Karl Fontenot sat alone.

There was weariness in the faces of the jurors when they filed back in, settled into their chairs; one juror, a gentleman, appeared to be well over seventy years old. Weariness was reflected in the visage of Judge Powers, in the rumpled suits of the attorneys on both sides, in the slumping shoulders of the defendants. A weary determination seemed to pervade both the Haraways and the Wards, and even the spectators with no personal stake in the trial.

Chris Ross walked to the center of the courtroom, his broad shoulders squared. And he launched eagerly into his closing statement, the last argumentative words the jury would hear before being sent to deliberate.

Ross tweaked the defense attorneys. “We don’t attract clients if we win a big case,” he said of the D.A.’s office. And he defended the police. “It is no great flaw in investigative technique that they couldn’t find a truck or a knife six months later.” He justified a conviction even though no body had been found: “We are not to reward criminals for their stealth.”

Of Karl Fontenot, he said his hair had become darker during his long months in jail, out of the sunlight. Of Fontenot’s confession, he said, “There’s many a man who tells a good fish story. But how many of them tell it to the game ranger?”

He derided Odell Titsworth’s testimony about intense pressure from the police. “He’s a con!” Ross said. And he asked, “Who testified to the pressure on Ward and Fontenot who was there? Not a person!”

He held up for the jury the Polaroid pictures offered by Jannette Blood Roberts, showing both men with short hair. He recited with scorn her criminal record. “Her credibility stinks!” he shouted.

The pictures, he said, could have been taken in Easter of 1982 or 1983. But not 1984. The child in the picture, he said, was much too small to be seven years old.

He asked why, if Jason Lurch was a suspect, Don Wyatt had not put him in the witness chair, instead of just showing a snapshot with “his spanking new building in the background.”

Of the private investigator, Ross said, “Mr. Kerner is a hired gun, who came in this courtroom loaded with blanks.”

The assistant D.A. retold, in vivid, bloody detail, the story of rape and murder on the tapes, the rape of a corpse with her entrails showing. Cinda Haraway began to sob. She ran out of the courtroom, to hear no more of this tale of the murder of her brother’s wife.

Ross said the defense had implied the police knew Ward and Fontenot were innocent. “Why show them the bones to get more evidence, if police knew they didn’t know?”

“Who was playing mind games with who?” Ross asked.

Tommy Ward stared at him with hatred as he spoke; Fontenot, as always, looked impassive.

Conviction in this case, Ross said, would be “a very small step indeed, when you consider they’ve already told you they did it.”

A frequent question in the case, Ross said, was why Denice did not seek help from Lenny Timmons when he passed her in the doorway of McAnally’s. “How would she know he wasn’t in on it too?” Ross asked.

Then he offered the jury his own interpretation of the confession tapes, as he had refined it in the bathtub the week before. He said “Odell” on Tommy’s tape was Tommy himself. The proof, he said, was that everywhere on the tape, when Odell was doing something, Tommy was not present. And vice-versa. Because if Tommy had said “Odell and me” did this, it would have amounted to saying “me and me did this.”