The Oilman's Daughter (3 page)

In February 1994, a lawyer for M. A.
Wright’s estate traveled from Houston to Tulsa to depose Ethel
Louise Williams. Once Louise was sworn in, the lawyer coaxed from
her an intimate and at times excruciatingly sad account of how she
and Wright had become lovers. The lawyer pressed her on her
specific memories of the man, asking if she remembered anything
unusual about his physical appearance.

A: I recall his ears being big. He had huge ears, I mean—

Q: Big ears?

A: I mean, big ears.

…

Q: Was he well built? I mean, was he muscular?

A: He was a very well-built man. He had a—large shoulders and he
was—he carried hisself very well.

…

Q: You did have an intimate sexual relationship with him?

A: Yes.

Q: Was he circumcised?

A: I don’t think he was.

…

Q: What sticks out in your mind as being the most—the thing you
remember most?

A: The thing that I remember most was that he was—he was such a
gentle person, you know.… I deeply loved him.

When it came to the events that occurred after their affair had
ended, however, Louise’s recollection grew muddled and
contradictory. She remembered that he sent or gave her a deed—to
what exactly she couldn’t say, maybe an oil field in Texas—and that
she tore something up. She remembered receiving some checks,
perhaps, in the first years after Judith was born—checks with
little holes punched along the edge, signed by M. A. Wright. “It
was very nice handwriting, penmanship,” she told the lawyer. “It
was just—it was really nice.” She’d deposited a couple of them at a
bank in Joplin, but they’d stopped coming.

She said she had not spoken to Wright after she last saw him, at
the foot of the stairs of the Mayo Hotel in July 1955, until March
1990, when Judith—who had already contacted Wright—had asked her to
call and confront him with the truth. “I don’t want to hear this,”
he’d repeated over and over when she told him who she was, Louise
testified.

“You don’t want to hear no more about it because you, you made a
mess out of everything,” she’d replied. “You didn’t give a damn
what happened to me.”

“There’s nothing I can do about this now,” he’d said. So she
hung up on him and never called back.

Judith had come down to Tulsa for the deposition as well; Funk
had told her to bring paperwork from a blood test, to be submitted
to the court, and she’d done so. Louise, too, was to supply her
medical records or a blood test. If there was a match, Funk had
told Judith, the estate would likely want to settle.

After the deposition, Judith and her mother drove back north.
Then, a few weeks later, according to Judith, Funk called her and
said that the estate was offering her $50,000 to end the case. “He
said, ‘Judith, you should take it,’” she told me. But something
about it didn’t feel right, not having the results of the blood
tests, not having seen any documents. “I asked for some kind of
paperwork,” she said, “and that’s went it all went strange.”

In July of 1994, Funk abruptly withdrew from the case. Not long
after, the judge threw out Judith’s claims. Her pursuit of a share
of M. A. Wright’s estate, and with it a court’s seal of approval of
her identity as his daughter, seemed to be over. 

Judith’s former life, the one in which
she was just the daughter of George and Sue Adams couldn’t be
recovered. She came from somewhere else, she knew, not just a
physical place but an unfamiliar world populated with rich and
powerful people. But what good was that knowledge? It destroyed
something and built little in its place.

The court case in Texas, as Judith understood it, had ended
mysteriously. She couldn’t figure out why exactly she’d lost, why
the blood-test results that would’ve revealed the truth had never
come back. In any case, M. A. Wright’s money was gone, most of it
to Wright’s second wife and his daughter by his first marriage. By
the mid-1990s, Judith was, irrespective of her lineage, a
struggling single mom with another young son to raise: Ryan, who
had been born in 1993. Another marriage came and went, but she kept
the man’s last name, Patterson. She worked as a telemarketer and
then sold cosmetics. There wasn’t much time to dwell on what the
money might have meant for her and Ryan.

But if Judith’s newly discovered birthright hadn’t brought her a
fortune, her mother’s reappearance had brought her a new family.
Louise’s other children came to accept her as a blood relative, and
Judith reached out to as many of them as she could find. She kept
up with her half-sister Diana in Kansas and occasionally talked on
the phone with Vicki, who was out in California. She got to know
her mother a little better, too, although they were never what
you’d call close.

Judith spent the most time with her half-brother Rick Harris,
who turned out to live just a few miles down the road. In 1995, he
had opened up Rick’s Appliances in Joplin, which wasn’t far from
Carthage, where Judith and Ryan now lived. (Shawn, her older son,
was in his early twenties by then and out of the house.) One day,
Rick called to ask if she could fill in for an absent employee at
the appliance store. What started out as a favor soon became a
regular job.

There was a darkness around the edges of her mother’s family,
though. It crept up on Judith slowly, as she and her son were drawn
into Louise’s orbit. Robert Harris, Louise’s first husband and
Rick’s father, was said to have killed himself sometime in the
1960s or 1970s—“stuck a gun in his mouth and blowed his head off,”
Louise had said in her deposition, although she couldn’t remember
when it had happened. There were drug problems in the family. One
of Louise’s sons had some kind of brain condition that prevented
him from working; Louise had once said matter-of-factly that it was
the result of her own mother hitting her in the stomach with a
chair when she was pregnant with him. Vicki, Judith later told
me, died mysteriously in 2001.

But Judith figured they were family now, and every family came
with some drama. Maybe this one just had a little more than
usual.

For several years, Judith had a recurring
dream. She was at an opera with M. A. Wright, sitting in an ornate
hall filled with people. He was dressed in a suit and tie but never
spoke. She couldn’t remember much about the opera itself; in real
life she’d never been to one. The vision haunted her in her waking
hours. Every time she managed to bury her thoughts about the man
she believed to be her father, the dream would exhume them.

After the dream came to her again one night in 2006, Judith
called her friend Alice Burkhart. “We need to pray about this,”
Burkhart told her, and they did. Judith asked God to help her find
out everything, to uncover the truth about who she was and what had
happened to her family.

The first step was finding out what exactly had happened in the
Texas case more than a decade earlier. So she called up the lawyer
down in Houston who had represented M. A. Wright’s estate in the
battle over his will. “I know I’m late in looking,” Judith told
her, “but what happened?”

“I really can’t talk to you about this,” the attorney said,
according to Judith. “But it was that lawyer that you had.” Judith
hadn’t lost the case really; her filings had been thrown out
because her attorney, Terry Funk, hadn’t been licensed to practice
law in Texas.

It shook Judith deeply to discover that someone she’d trusted to
help her had failed her like that. Even worse, she thought, was the
fact that he’d never told her what had happened, so that she might
somehow fix it before it was too late.

Judith got to talking with the Wrights’ attorney about Judith’s
scoliosis, and the lawyer told her that M. A. Wright had suffered
from it as a child as well. Judith asked what had happened
to Josephine, Wright’s widow. The lawyer said she heard that she’d
died, but she didn’t know the details.

Tracking down an obituary for Josephine, Judith discovered that
Wright’s widow was living in Seattle at the time of her death. She
located a lawyer in Washington who agreed to represent her on
contingency and filed a petition in an attempt to recover something
from Josephine’s estate. The money had already been dispersed back
in 2004, most of it to M. A. Wright’s daughter from his first
marriage. (According to the terms of the will, once Josephine died,
a good portion of Wright’s money was designated for his “issue.”)
But under Washington law, if Judith could prove that she was
Wright’s daughter and had been unlawfully excluded from the will,
she could still recover whatever portion of the money a court
deemed should have been hers.

M. A. Wright’s first daughter fought the petition—her name,
incredibly, was also Judith—and was joined by one of Josephine
Wright’s daughters. Judith’s lawyer handed the case off to an
accomplished litigator named Michael Olver, who argued in filings
that when Wright’s will stated that he intended his fortune to pass
to his children, it was written in a way that should include not
just his legitimate daughter but Judith as well. The blood tests
that could have proved definitively that Judith was Wright’s
daughter had never been completed, but DNA could now provide the
answer just as easily. “The biological mother has twice sworn that
Judith Patterson is the issue of M. A. Wright,” they wrote  “Simple
noninvasive testing with cotton swabs will confirm it.”

To fully pursue her new identity, though,
Judith was going to have to undo her old one. To bolster the case,
her Washington lawyers suggested she go to court in Kansas to have
her adoption nullified. Josephine Wright happened to have moved to
a state that specifically barred children given up for adoption
from later claiming inheritance from their biological parents. The
lawyers contacted a well-respected attorney in Kansas City named
Gene Balloun, who agreed to represent Judith and filed to have her
adoption vacated in the state of Kansas. To do so, however, he was
going to need Louise’s testimony.

So one morning in August of 2006, Judith drove Louise two hours
up to Kansas City. Ryan, now 13 years old, came along, as did
Judith’s friend Alice Burkhart. That afternoon, Judith and Louise
sat in Balloun’s office with a court reporter, and just like back
in 1994, the lawyer asked Louise to recount every detail of her
affair with M. A. Wright. Balloun walked her through the whole
story, from the bus ride to the idyll at the Mayo Hotel to Wright’s
discovery of her pregnancy and her return to Baxter Springs. The
deposition was wrapping up when Balloun decided to clarify one
detail for the record. “How long was it then before you ever saw
your daughter again?” he asked.

“What was it, ’89?” Louise said.

Judith turned to her mother. This wasn’t right, she knew; she
remembered the afternoon when she was 16, the strange woman on the
porch, the men standing around the truck in the driveway. “You came
to my house on 413 22nd street,” she said.

“Oh yeah, sure,” Louise said. “Probably around ’72, but I didn’t
actually see her.”

“And how did that come about?” Balloun asked.

Louise suddenly looked wild-eyed and scared, Judith remembers.
“I came down there to see if Sue would let me take her to Houston,”
she finally blurted out. “Because they wanted me to—they wanted to
see her. They didn’t believe that there was a daughter or
something.”

“So you went down to Baxter Springs to see her?” Balloun
continued.

“Yeah.”

“Did you actually get to see her?”

“No, not really. I saw her from the door, but I didn’t. Sue had
two kids.”

Judith broke in again. “I answered the door, Mama.”

“Well, I didn’t know it was you.”

Judith felt the room pressing in on her. For a second time, the
woman sitting across from her had collapsed the story of her life
as she knew it. After that last night at the Mayo Hotel in 1955,
Wright
hadn’t
disappeared without a trace. Louise had
somehow been in contact with him, or his proxies at Exxon, and then
he’d even sent someone to find her—to bring her to Houston so that
he could see her for himself.
You have not gotten what you
deserved.
Now that statement contained so much more meaning
than Judith had understood.  

When the deposition concluded, Judith drove back to Carthage,
Ryan in the front seat and Louise and Alice in the back, all four
sitting in near silence. When Judith and Ryan returned to their
house late that night, there were messages on the machine from her
half-brother Rick Harris wanting to know how the trip to Kansas
City went. That’s odd, Judith thought. She didn’t recall telling
him that they were going. 

The next evening, a stranger came to the
door. When Ryan answered it, the man asked if his father was home.
Thinking better of revealing that it was just him and his mother
living there, Ryan said, “He’ll be home any minute.”

The man had left the trunk of his car open. He walked over to it
and returned with three peaches. “There’s three of you?” he said.
“Here are three peaches.” He handed them to Ryan and Judith, who
had joined her son in the doorway, then got in the car and drove
away.

A week and a half later, Judith was napping in the bedroom when
Ryan rushed in. “Mom, that man is back, and he’s driving a
different car,” he said. “He’s trying to disguise himself.” The man
had parked in the driveway, left the driver’s side door and back
door open, and was ringing the doorbell. This time, Judith called
the police. When they arrived, the man pulled a box of peaches out
of the trunk and said he was just delivering an order. The cops
laughed at that. They started calling the man “Peaches.”

Up in Kansas City, Gene Balloun had
obtained the depositions from the original court case over M. A.
Wright’s will, nearly 15 years earlier. He mailed Judith copies,
and when she opened them her unease turned to dread. Now all the
inscrutable things that Louise had said back then suddenly made
sense. M. A. Wright had once tried to make things right, and
something had gone terribly wrong.

At the end of the deposition, Louise had described to the
lawyers how her mother and her aunt had taken the jewelry that
Wright had bought her, stolen it from her flat out, along with the
deed. “The pearl necklace, it was wrapped up in real pretty
velvet,” she said. “And I had the ring in a ring box and the watch
in a box. My mother’s sister, June Van Horn, came over there and
started taking my stuff away from me, and her and I got into a
fight. And she broke my necklace and Diana stuck the pearl up her
nose and I had to take her to the doctor and get the pearl.” Van
Horn, she said, had ended up with everything.

Later, after she’d moved out of her mother’s house, Louise had
been back there and found “envelopes after envelopes from Humble
Oil Company.” They were empty, she told the lawyers, and her mother
had told her that they’d just been utility bills.

The tale grew stranger from there. In the 1960s, Louise had
said, she found a letter at her mother’s house from a Houston
lawyer named George Devine, telling her she urgently needed to
contact him. When she called him, her mother took the phone away
and hung it up. Then her aunt called Devine back pretending to be
Louise.

Louise said that after that she wrote letters for years to
Humble Oil in Houston, always addressed to “dear sirs,” trying to
get ahold of Wright. “I had built him on a pedestal,” she said. “I
felt like he would protect me and all my things was taken away from
me, and I felt like that he would help me get Judy back.”

She never got an answer, she said, but in 1972 she did get a
letter from Humble Oil asking her to return any documents she had.
So she decided to go down to Houston and try to find M.A. herself.
After she was unable to convince Sue Adams to let her take Judith,
she brought her third husband and her son Rick, now a teenager, and
managed to meet Humble’s then-president, Randall Meyer. “He said
that he wanted me to come back that afternoon and we would probably
get this matter all straightened out,” Louise recalled. But her
husband had gotten a parking ticket when they went for lunch.
Flustered and fed up with his wife’s oilman tales, he demanded that
they drive back to Kansas and abandon the whole thing.

Louise’s memory seemed uncommonly sharp on certain details but
foggy on others. “A lot of this stuff is blank in my mind,” she
said at one point. “I’m going to tell you the truth, the way it’s
happened. My mother beat on me ever since I was a child, and my
mother was very angry with me when I got pregnant by M.A., because
back in the ’50s, you didn’t get in trouble. You didn’t have a baby
out of wedlock, and you didn’t live with people not married or
anything. And lot of this stuff I don’t remember. I can’t
remember.”

The family Judith had begun to feel close
to, she now saw, had some connection to M. A. Wright beyond just
Louise’s several-month affair. Once-cryptic details—Wright’s query,
“What’s this about, your grandmother?”—suddenly clicked into
place.

And yet the story remained a collection of fragments: Wright had
somehow tried to send money and oil deeds to Louise, and maybe even
to Judith. They had been intercepted along the way. It was unclear
if her mother was a perpetrator or—if her deposition was to be
believed—a victim of her own crooked family. Whichever it was,
Judith was beginning to suspect that the new family she’d embraced
had drawn her close for reasons she’d never imagined.

Still, Judith pressed on with her attempt to nullify her
adoption. Even if elements of the family she was joining appeared
increasingly sinister, she needed to be legally part of it to
attain the place among Wright’s heirs that she so badly wanted. In
November 2006, a district judge in Cherokee County, Kansas, issued
a judgment voiding Judith’s adoption and confirming the facts of
the case as Judith herself now understood them. “Ms. Patterson was
born Judy Diane Bryant on January 30, 1956,” he wrote. “Her birth
mother was Ethel Louise Harris, also known as Ethel Bryant, and now
known as Ethel Louise Williams. Her birth father was Myron A.
Wright.”

There it was, at last, on paper. As soon as the verdict came
down, Judith started going by Judith Wright Patterson.