The Dreams of Ada (8 page)

The agent questioned Ward about his activities on April 28. As paper moved through the machine, as the moving arm charted his biological responses, Ward repeated what he had told Smith and Baskin three days earlier. He said he had worked on plumbing at home with his brother-in-law, Robert Cavins. Then he had showered, he said. About 9
P.M
. he had left the house and walked over to Jannette and Mike Roberts’s place, about a twenty-minute walk. They had gone to a party over at one of Jannette’s neighbors, Gordon Calhoun. Karl Fontenot was at the party as well. They had partied till about four in the morning. Then he had walked home.

The moving finger moved across the paper, scrawling its ups and downs, its two-sided triangles. Rusty Featherstone repeated the questions. Tommy Ward repeated the answers. On and on the questioning went, without a break, until 1:30
P.M
. The entire time, Ward denied any knowledge of what had happened to Denice Haraway.

The agent unhooked the machine. He told Ward he would be back soon, and he left the room. Tommy felt elated. He knew he had done well. There would be no problem.

The agent returned about five minutes later. He looked over the test. He asked Tommy what he thought. Tommy replied that he knew he had passed the test, that perhaps now they would believe that he hadn’t done anything to Denice Haraway. Tommy began to stand, preparing to leave.

The agent said he was afraid not; he was afraid Tommy had flunked the test. He told him to remain seated.

At first Tommy didn’t believe him. But Rusty Featherstone insisted that he had failed the test, that he was involved somehow in the Haraway kidnapping. He asked if Tommy wanted to talk about it.

Tommy said there was nothing to talk about, that he hadn’t done it.

The polygraph doesn’t lie, the agent told Tommy. It was right there on the paper: Tommy was holding something back; he knew something about the case that he wasn’t telling; he was carrying some kind of burden that he needed to rid himself of; he would feel a lot better if he talked about it. Didn’t he want to talk about it?

In a nearby room, Gary Rogers and Dennis Smith were waiting.

In Ada, eighty miles to the southeast, Mike Baskin, too, was waiting. He could not be certain what for. He would have preferred to be up there in the city, taking part in the questioning. He had been in Norman with Dennis last Friday; he had been the first—the only—detective on the scene at McAnally’s.

At three in the afternoon, the phone rang at headquarters in Ada. It was Gary Rogers calling. Ward was talking, Rogers said. He told Baskin to go out to the power plant west of town, to make a quick search of the area, to look there for the remains of Denice Haraway.

Baskin got into a squad car, drove out past Latta, a community of a few square blocks on the western edge of Ada. He circled under Richardson Loop, a highway bypass of the town, drove up a slope to where the power plant rested on a level site. He parked beside the gray gridwork, the network of wire cables that kept the lights on in Ada, the refrigerators working, the television sets, the machinery at the factories. He got out and looked around. There was a wide area of dirt, with gravel ground into it. Off to the right were grassy fields, trees, woodlands that sloped away. It was an open space, a lot of area to cover. He made a brief search but could find nothing. You would need a lot of people to cover this area thoroughly. He returned to his car and drove back to headquarters.

He had been back only a short time when Gary Rogers called again. Tommy Ward was giving more information, Rogers told him. According to Ward, there is a burned-out house in the woodland to the right of the power plant as you approach. Go on back out there, the OSBI agent told Baskin. Find that house. Search it for the remains of Denice Haraway.

Baskin drove back to the power plant. He parked and walked off into the yellow autumn grass, circling about, looking for the burned-out house. He could only imagine what the remains of the girl would be like after five months out in the rain, the summer heat, fair game for foxes and other small animals. It would not be a pretty sight.

He found the house. There was nothing left of it but a foundation, about twenty-five feet square; there was burned timber scattered about. One area—it must have been a bathroom once—contained mounds of broken tile. The detective poked about in the rubble, looking for the remnants of a body.

He found none.

He drove back to headquarters.

Gary Rogers called a third time. Baskin told Rogers he had looked near the power plant and in the burned-out house; he hadn’t seen a body. Go back, Rogers told him, to the same area. Find a concrete bunker. Ward had said the body was in the bunker.

The sun was low in the sky; it would soon be dark. Baskin drove to the area a third time. The power plant was only a silhouette now. He found the bunker, a concrete vat in the ground. It was deep, filled with garbage; there was no telling what was under there. He returned to headquarters, called Rogers, told him he had found the bunker. But it was huge, he said, and it was getting dark. There was not much he could do out there by himself.

Get help, Rogers said.

Baskin got the Ada police chief, Richard Gray, and Sergeant James Fox to go out to the bunker with him. They searched it as best they could. They were still searching the area, under floodlights, finding nothing, as night descended on the town.

Shortly after Rusty Featherstone told Tommy Ward he had flunked the lie-detector test, Gary Rogers and Dennis Smith came in and took over the questioning. The mood in the room had changed. It was no longer an interview. It was an interrogation. The manner of the interrogators was no longer gentle. For five hours this new questioning continued, interrupted only by visits to the bathroom or by the phone calls Rogers made to Ada.

At 6:58
P.M
., Ward sat in a chair in front of a video camera. Arrayed around him were Rogers, Smith, and Featherstone. An agent named Dee Cordray switched on the camera. Featherstone read Ward his Miranda warnings. Ward indicated that he understood them, that whatever he was about to say he was saying voluntarily.

For the next thirty-one minutes the three officers asked Ward questions while the videotape rolled. In the tape Ward is slouched in a chair, drinking a Coke, puffing on a cigarette, telling in grisly detail, his voice flat, almost bored, how he and Karl Fontenot and an ex-con named Odell Titsworth had kidnapped Denice Haraway, driven to a power plant on the outskirts of town, and raped her and cut her; and how he, Tommy, had then left, and the others had killed her and tossed her off a concrete bunker near Sandy Creek. The knife used was described several times as Titsworth’s five- or six-inch lock-blade knife.

At 7:29 the camera was switched off. Handcuffs were placed on Tommy Ward. Smith and Rogers drove him back to Ada. They locked him in the windowless, one-story cement building that is the Pontotoc County Jail.

They did not charge him with anything.

No one informed Mike or Jannette Roberts that Tommy Ward would not be coming home that night.

The next morning, Smith and Rogers called a news conference. They told the local press that they believed they had solved the Haraway case. They said that Tommy Ward, twenty-four, of Ada, had confessed to the robbery, kidnapping, rape, and murder of Denice Haraway, and had been arrested. They said he had implicated two other men, who were being sought. The names of the other suspects would be withheld pending their apprehension.

The officers asked that the story be withheld until the other arrests were made. Dorothy Hogue of the Ada
News
complied with the request; the 11
A.M
. deadline for Friday’s paper passed with no story written. But a television reporter called the OSBI public information office in Oklahoma City, which apparently did not realize that the story was supposed to be withheld. The TV reporter got confirmation; the news went out over the air: Tommy Ward of Ada had confessed to killing Denice Haraway, according to the police, and had implicated two other suspects.

In the early afternoon, two officers went to the home of Joice and Robert Cavins in Hominy, Oklahoma, near Tulsa, about three hours north of Ada. They found Karl Fontenot there. They asked him to step outside so they could ask him some questions. When he did, they thrust him against a squad car, frisked him, and placed handcuffs on him. They brought him back to Ada. At police headquarters, Rogers and Smith questioned Fontenot about the Haraway case for an hour and a half. For a brief period Fontenot, a twenty-year-old, dark-haired youth with a slightly pudgy face, denied any involvement. Then he, too, made a videotaped statement. On it, in answer to police questions, he said that he, Tommy Ward, and Odell Titsworth had raped and killed Denice Haraway.

When the video machine was turned off, Fontenot was placed in a cell in the city jail, in the basement of police headquarters, across the street from the county jail, where Tommy Ward was being held. Fontenot had never been in jail before.

The Ward tape and the Fontenot tape were in agreement that Odell Titsworth had been the ringleader, had had the pickup and the lock-blade knife, had done the actual killing. But there were a number of discrepancies between the two tapes as to how the crime had been committed. The biggest discrepancy concerned the disposal of the body. Fontenot’s tape, unlike Ward’s, said they had burned the body in the abandoned house near the power plant, and then had burned down the house.

“What portion of the house was this in, Karl?”

“It was in one of the bedrooms.”

“…Did you go through the front-door portion of the house?”

“Yes.”

“…And then what did you do after you poured the gas on her?”

“We lit the house. We lit the gas and burned the house and her.”

“Did the whole house catch on fire or just part of it?”

“It just more or less built itself up, flames built up.”

“…Who lit the match to start it?”

“Odell.”

In early evening, in a town called Tallequah, headquarters of the Cherokee Nation, Odell Titsworth was arrested. He was brought back to Ada. In the basement of police headquarters, he was subjected to questioning far more aggressive than that of Ward and Fontenot, because the police knew him as a “cop-hater” with four felony convictions. No videotape was made. Titsworth, with black hair that hung to his shoulders, insisted throughout that he was innocent, that he knew nothing about the Haraway case.

He, too, was locked in a solitary cell in the city jail.

The police fleshed out the story for the press. They said they believed Tommy Ward, Karl Fontenot, and Odell Titsworth had raped and murdered Donna Denice Haraway, and had disposed of her body in an area west of Ada. They said state crime laboratory officials were searching the remains of a burned-out house. They said the initial search had turned up pieces of what appeared to be a jawbone. The medical examiner had not yet determined if the bones were human.

The three suspects would probably be charged with the crimes on Monday, the police told the press.

Tricia Wolf was at home Friday morning, in the living room with the large painting of Jesus in it, done by her father-in-law. She had already completed her morning rounds: had driven Bud to work at the feed mill, for the eight o’clock shift, then gotten the five kids to three different schools by 8:30. Three of the kids were hers and Bud’s; two were foster kids they had taken in a few weeks before.

The foster kids were Indian boys: Vernon, eight, and his brother Thomas, seven. Unlike some Ada residents, Tricia and Bud did not look down on Indians; kids were kids. Though the house was already crowded, when the welfare department called about the two boys, they had converted their small laundry room into an extra bedroom. The boys had been removed from their family, the social worker told them, because their father used to beat their mother, and their mother cried a lot and drank a lot.

Tricia was particularly concerned about Vernon. A few days earlier, a psychologist had asked him to draw a picture of the devil. He drew a man with holes all over his body, with bright red blood spewing out of all the holes. The psychologist told Tricia this was a common symbol among children who had been beaten and abused by their parents.

The house was a mess that morning, as it too often was with five kids between the ages of five and nine, playing, eating, sometimes fighting. Tricia turned on the small TV in the cluttered living room, sat for a bit, pondering which room to tackle first. She was barely paying attention when a news report came on: Ada police and the OSBI had arrested a suspect in the Denice Haraway case. The suspect had been identified as Tommy Ward, twenty-four, of Ada. Police were seeking two other men…

The words leaped at Tricia.

…were searching a burned-out house where they believed the missing clerk’s body had been disposed of…several bones which might be Haraway’s…

Tricia slumped in her chair. It couldn’t be! Tommy couldn’t have done something like that. Tommy was her baby brother!

Memories ran wild through her mind…Tommy at eight years old, playing by the power plant, a couple of blocks from their house in Latta. He got his hand caught in a machine. He couldn’t get it out. The moving gears were dragging him along, pulling him into the machine. By the time he was pulled free, the bones in his hand were crushed…Tommy at ten, that big concrete bunker filled with mud. Tommy fell in. The mud was like quicksand, pulling him down. It was almost up to his neck when Mama got there. She threw him a fishing line. He held onto the line, stopped sinking. But it wasn’t strong enough to pull him out with. He clung to the line down in the bunker, in the mud, Mama holding to the pole on top, till rescuers got there with strong ropes and saved his life…Tommy at twelve years old, climbing a tall tree near the house. It was about forty feet high. He fell, slammed into the thick lowest branch with his stomach. Then he hit the ground. He wandered around dazed, spastic, choking on his tongue. The family rushed to him, was certain he would die. But he had recovered.