The Oilman's Daughter (4 page)

When I called Judith for the first time
in the spring of 2008, it had been two years since her adoption had
been dissolved. Her suspicions about her mother’s family had
calcified into a certainty shot through with anger and fear. She
knew now, she told me, that her mother’s family had robbed her of
the money that M. A. Wright had sent her for decades—and she was
convinced that they were now conspiring to do worse. “My life will
never be the same,” she told me.

In September 2007, Judith had lost her initial lawsuit in
Washington over Josephine Wright’s will. The case hinged on the
fact that the will specifically bequeathed most of M. A. Wright’s
remaining fortune to his “lawful issue,” excluding any illegitimate
children. Her lawyers were appealing the verdict. Meanwhile, she
was engaged in a new legal battle, this one in Missouri, against
her mother’s family. She’d enlisted a local lawyer to pursue a
civil case alleging that her mother and her half-brother Rick—whom
she saw as the ringleaders—along with half a dozen other relatives,
had engaged in a conspiracy to intercept money from Wright that was
intended for her.

“I think basically my dad did try to stop this, at least make
sure this money was going to me,” Judith told me on the phone. “But
I think these folks stepped in and had him over a barrel, saying
that we are going to expose you. There wasn’t anything that he
could do.”

“Were they living high on the money?” I asked her.

“That’s the catch: this is where they fooled everybody,” she
said. “To look at these people, around this area right here, you
would not suspect them in any way.”

Bit by bit over months, Judith described to me the scattered but
tantalizing documentation she’d collected to prove that her family
was not what it seemed. Through a blend of Midwestern friendliness
and an almost frightening persistence, she had amassed a small
mountain of papers. She’d employed private investigators in Texas,
Oklahoma, and Missouri to run traces on family members both
immediate and distant. They’d found evidence, she told me, of
aliases and hidden bank accounts, of money-laundering vehicles and
strange trusts in distant states, of oil wells deeded to names that
matched up with members of her family.

She’d pried loose some documents from Exxon, too, including one
concerning an oil field that Louise had mentioned in one of her
depositions. It was in Tomball, Texas, just outside Houston. The
field had changed hands over the years, but Judith had followed the
trail of ownership through a series of oil companies until she
found a link between one of the Tomball leases and an address
Louise Williams had once used in Coweta, Oklahoma.

The documents indicated that some oil royalties had been sent to
that address. According to a letter she received from Exxon, the
payments had begun in the 1950s, only to be suspended sometime in
the next decade. “It dawned on me: That’s why my mother contacted
me in 1972!” she told me excitedly. “My father must have known that
the money wasn’t going to the right people, so he sent an
investigator down and stopped the payments.” She suspected that her
mother had used another relative to impersonate her—which would
explain some of the confused conversations she’d had with Wright on
the phone before he died.

The most important document that Judith had gotten out of the
Exxon archives, however, was a handwritten letter that the company
had received back in 1958 when it was still Humble Oil. The letter
read:

Humble Oil and Refining Co

dear sirs,

m. a. wright passed away after spending 3 years in a state
mental hospital. I cashed his checks and sent him clothes until he
died the bank will no longer cash them unless they are made to me.
I am his sister the last in his immediate family the checks are not
much but I am nearly blind and I can use it I want to put a marker
at his grave. Wright’s funeral home Coweta okla could furnish death
certificate.

Ethel Williams

Coweta, OK

Enclosed with the letter was a copy of a
half-filled-out document marked “Record of Funeral” for one Marcus
Arrington Wright. It was the name that M. A. Wright had given
Louise during their tryst at the Mayo Hotel.

Judith and her lawyers were certain this meant that Louise
had tried to extract money from Wright’s company by duping its
executives into believing their employee was dead. It seemed like a
clumsy con, but if that’s what it was, Judith believed, it proved
that her mother had been trying to get her hands on Wright’s money
for years.

Judith took the information she had gathered to the police
department in Carthage, hoping to secure an identity-theft claim
against her mother and half-brother. The cops didn’t laugh about
“Peaches” this time, but they were flummoxed by the complexity of
her allegations. They quickly ascertained that whatever had
happened had occurred mostly outside their jurisdiction; Judith’s
story ranged across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and New York.

But before the police dropped the case, Judith had managed to
procure one more piece of evidence that would later prove valuable.
One afternoon she went to Louise’s house and—despite their ongoing
legal dispute—convinced her to ride down to the nearby Baxter
Springs police station and give a new statement. Why her mother
agreed to it is entirely unclear. Later she’d claim that her
daughter had “kidnapped” her—raising the question of whether the
statement was written under duress. But at the station that day,
Louise hand-wrote and signed an affidavit witnessed by a clerk. “My
entire family blackmailed M. A. Wright for money for gas and oil
stocks property trust fund,” she admitted.

The document, like all the scraps that Judith had gathered,
seemed at once to suggest everything and add up to nothing. But at
the very least, someone had admitted, on paper, to blackmailing
Wright. 

In early 2009, Judith’s lawsuit in
Missouri was thrown out. If the family had stolen money from M. A.
Wright, the court concluded, the proper place to pursue the claim
would be in Harris County, Texas, where Wright’s estate had
originated. Judith found a lawyer there and filed suit in Houston,
where Wright’s will had been adjudicated back in 1994.

It was at this point that I began to discern a pattern in
Judith’s legal representation. Her lawyers almost always took up
her case on contingency, hoping to make their money back when she
won—Wright’s estate, after all, had been worth millions, and in its
basic outlines Judith’s case seemed like a promising one. But
Judith would inevitably part ways with them along the road to
justice. Whether the attorneys somehow lost faith in the cause or
just grew weary of struggling with Judith’s story wasn’t always
clear.

Every time I talked to her, it seemed, she’d added one lawyer
and subtracted another, to the point where, after several years, I
had trouble keeping them straight—even as she continued to bring up
names I’d not yet heard. There was Terry Funk, of course, and a
character named Jim Lloyd who had once represented her mother.
There was Daniel Whitworth, a local attorney, and Gene Balloun, out
of Kansas City. There’d been Michael Olver and Richard Wills in
Washington, and then there were others who seemed to pop up in our
conversations once and then never appear again. “Gary Richardson,
attorney in Tulsa, I’m going to see if he can’t line up with this
attorney that I have here,” read my notes from a conversation with
Judith in September 2008. Richardson never did. Judith once
suggested she was going to engage the famed celebrity lawyer Robert
Shapiro. Nothing ever came of it.

When I tracked down Judith’s lawyers and investigators, they
usually told me versions of the same story. “She gets excited and
she just kind of goes on a roll,” Whitworth told me. “Normally,
when you talk to people like that, you weigh it with a grain of
salt. But the interesting thing is that when you dig into it, there
appears to be merit in what she is saying. My opinion is that she’s
right.” He paused. “I suppose I represent her, so I’m supposed to
say that.”

When Michael Olver first heard Judith’s story, it sounded to him
like “a Friday night movie of the week.” But over time, he told me,
he came to trust her. “I can tell you that in dealing with Ms.
Patterson, every time we’ve heard her describe something and we’ve
checked it out, it’s been accurate,” he said.

Then there was Joseph Norwood, another Tulsa attorney who
briefly seemed like the man to talk to about the case; Judith had
described him to me as “kind of like my spokesperson” at one point
in 2008. “Right now I’m still kind of getting my head wrapped
around it and figuring out where to take the deal,” Norwood told me
when I reached him at his office. “I do believe there is merit.” I
began running through the litany of accusations and conspiracies
that I’d piled up in my notes. “Here’s the problem,” he said.
“Judith has been completely overwhelmed and turned obsessed on this
situation. She sees things that are not there. She’s become damn
near full-blown paranoid.

“I daresay I can’t blame her,” he added. “She’s been through a
lot.”

A few months later, when I brought up Norwood, Judith told me he
was no longer representing her. “He’s not wealthy enough to put
together the case,” she said. “Brilliant man.”

And so lawyers came and went, drawn in by Judith’s story and
then driven off by its complexity and the expense that would be
necessary to make anything out of it. Judith herself, however,
remained undaunted. By 2010, she had lost her appeal in Washington
but was still confident that she could win in Texas. “I think this
thing is going to blow wide open, is what I think,” she told me.
She had enlisted the services of Jeff Zimmerman, a litigator from
Kansas City, who had found out about Judith’s case when she rented
a house from a former client of his. Now he was serving as a kind
of consigliore, interpreting between Judith and her own
lawyers.

When I called Zimmerman, I found myself listening to a refrain
that by now was so familiar I could practically mouth the words
along with him. “If you asked Judith to sit down for a couple hours
and tell you the story, you’d say ‘that’s really kooky,’” Zimmerman
told me. “But when you start to tie together all the evidence—I
tell you, it’s probably the strangest case I’ve ever been involved
with.”

Even as her legal battles were flagging,
Judith was at last finding some purchase in the world Wright had
inhabited. In 2005, she had looked up the phone number for the
Oklahoma ranch that had belonged to the Phillips oil dynasty. In
her depositions, Louise had described a pair of Phillips sisters
and Waite Phillips as being close friends of Wright. Perhaps one of
them could shed some light on the affair.

Judith eventually found her way to Jean Phillips, one of the few
remaining members of the Phillips family from the same generation
as M. A. Wright and a good friend of his. Phillips “wasn’t
surprised at all when I contacted her,” Judith told me. “She said,
‘You were a secret through the Phillips family and in the oil
industry for years.’”

The two women became friends. Phillips was one of the few people
who accepted Judith for who she now wanted to be. “It was never
like, ‘What makes you think he’s your father?’” Judith told me.
“She knew he was. She said, ‘Honey, you need to hold your head up
high. You come from good blood.’”

Phillips took a particular interest in Judith’s son Ryan, then a
teenager, and once invited the two of them to Tulsa. “This was a
million-dollar neighborhood; J. P. Getty had lived across the
street,” Ryan recalled. “And walking in there, it was a whole
different world.” Phillips, he said, treated them like they
belonged. She told Ryan that he should get into the oil business
like his grandfather had. “She said right off the bat, ‘That was
your grandfather, be proud.’ We hadn’t taken any DNA or brought
pictures, and she is showing family photos.”

But at the end of the day, it was time to go back. “You’ve got
all these thoughts, and then you come back to your little town
where you grew up, and you don’t see the same future in it,” he
said. “You suddenly don’t feel like you belong. You go back to your
friends—you can’t be that and be here. You’re in a Cinderella
world. And you come back to this world and you are trapped in
between.”  

In December of 2011, I went to visit
Judith in Carthage. I pulled my rental car up to a yellow one-story
condo with a gravel front path, in a new-looking development of
cookie-cutter buildings on the east side of town. When Judith
opened the front door, she greeted me like an old friend. Which, in
a way, I was; we’d talked every few weeks or so for the better part
of three years now. She had dyed her hair black and wore it long.
Her eyebrows were painted on, and her face was framed by oversize
hoop earrings.

By this point, I’d evolved almost by sheer force of exposure
from a reporter to someone she seemed to view as a mixture of
confidant and potential advocate. At times I found myself
overwhelmed by the complexity of her tale and the strange menagerie
of characters who drifted in and out of it. Now, at least, I could
cross-reference it with the evidence she’d described to me so many
times on the phone, contained in bankers boxes of documents stacked
up in her closet.

By the afternoon, we were sitting in her living room—decked out
for the holidays with wreaths and a tree—with papers and
photographs stacked in concentric circles around us on the carpet.
The files seemed to be ordered according to some methodology that
only Judith understood, so I leafed through documents randomly,
occasionally setting aside ones that seemed to hint at some
significance.

Judith pulled out a photo album. “These I treasure,” she said,
paging through the pictures. “This is my heart. This is what I’m
leaving to my kids. These pictures I’ll never be able to replace.”
The album contained what looked like official corporate photos of
M. A. Wright, along with photocopies of his college yearbook. These
were interspersed with pictures of Judith on her trips to see Jean
Phillips and encouraging letters Phillip had sent her over the
years.

On the phone, Judith had recounted evidence that seemed to fit
perfectly into the narrative she had assembled. When I sat down
with her and went through all the documents myself, the puzzle was
more challenging. It wasn’t that the documentation didn’t exist; it
was that the conclusions Judith drew from it required a chain of
connections that each rested on an additional piece of evidence.
Documents like her mother’s letter to Humble Oil seemed
tantalizingly close to proving her story but in some ways only
invited more questions.

The evidentiary touchstone to which Judith kept returning was
always Tomball. The oil field outside Houston that Humble Oil once
operated had been transferred to another company and then another.
But Judith had called all of them and eventually turned up a record
of unclaimed money in M. A. Wright’s name, which indeed appeared to
have been headed for Rural Route 1 in Coweta, Oklahoma, and was now
held by the Oklahoma state treasury. One of her investigators found
the same Rural Route 1 address associated with Louise Williams.
That much of the story seemed tangible: At some point, oil
companies had been sending checks in an M. A. Wright’s name to a
Louise Williams, whether he knew it or not. Judith even convinced
the Oklahoma Unclaimed Property Division to send her one of the
checks, for $76.96.

Where the conspiracy had gone from there was a matter of
speculation. Judith met and befriended a local woman named Violet
Jean Vasquez, who had grown up down the street from Louise’s family
and described having heard, while playing at their house as a
child, Louise and her relatives discussing how they were collecting
money from an oilman. Vasquez later dated Rick Harris and worked at
Rick’s Appliances, and reported a wealth of suspicious details to
Judith: his handling of large amounts of cash, strange
life-insurance policies, and mysterious government checks.

By this point, Judith’s relationship with
her mother’s side of the family had long since soured. This wasn’t
surprising, given that they’d all been served papers for the fraud
lawsuit she’d filed against them. Her half-sister Diana, who had
once described to her meeting M. A. Wright in Tulsa as a child, now
refused to speak to her. Things only worsened after a 2007 story on
Judith’s lineage by local TV news anchor Dowe Quick. Quick managed
a brief interview with Louise at her front door in which she
angrily declared, “I’m the victim of all of this. I’ve had this
stuff stolen from me, years ago.”

After that, strange events kept happening around Judith’s home.
Her car’s engine went haywire, and one of her tires blew out not
long after. She called the police about possible prowlers out
behind the house and to report that someone may have tampered with
her heating vents when she was out. She thought the house might be
bugged. And there’d been the man who’d showed up at the front door
claiming to be delivering peaches; later, Judith became convinced
that he was connected to Rick Harris.

Years before, when Judith worked at Rick’s appliance store, she
and her sons would attend weekend barbecues at his house. They took
trips and even spent holidays together. But as they grew close,
Harris had always struck her as a volatile man, with a
lighting-quick temper and a haughty pride born from the fact that
he’d come from nothing and made something of himself. To outward
appearances, the appliance store never seemed like a thriving
business, but he was extravagant with his money, flashing it around
and gambling liberally on weekend trips to casinos outside Kansas
City and spur-of-the-moment jaunts to Las Vegas. He bought new cars
and a wood-paneled hot tub that he put in the yard out behind his
house.

In July 2008, I called Judith and found her in an unusually
agitated state. “I had something very traumatic happen today,” she
told me. “There wasn’t much air coming in, and I called somebody to
look at the air conditioner. And the guy said, ‘Ma’am, you better
come out and look at this. Somebody has opened up your box and
pulled out one piece, the relay. You’ve got somebody mad at
you.’”

Judith said she didn’t know who was behind it, but she thought
it quite a coincidence that Rick owned an appliance store and here
someone had vandalized her central air. She called the police, who
filed a report and agreed to send a patrol car by periodically to
check on the house. Not long after, while out to dinner with Violet
Jean Vasquez, a man followed them out of a restaurant and, Judith
says, ran them off the road.

After one too many scares, she stopped letting Ryan ride the bus
to school. He took to sleeping with a butcher knife between his
mattress and box spring. Judith started sleeping in a chair in the
living room, not knowing if she would wake up with someone standing
over her. “I was scared to leave my own house for a long time,” she
later told me. “I didn’t know if I was going to get a bullet put to
me or what.” For a while, she and Ryan moved into Alice Burkhart’s
house and only returned home by day to pick up clothes.

By then, however, it was too late for Judith to turn back.
Unraveling the story of M. A. Wright had become her full-time
occupation. The job at Rick’s shop had ended, predictably, when she
served him with papers. She had thrown her back out working as a
massage therapist back in 2006 and was living off the disability
payments. By the end of 2008, she’d lost the house in Carthage and
moved out of town temporarily, to a cheaper place in Loma Linda, a
town outside Joplin. But the Texas lawsuit was up and running, and
she felt like there was light coming at the end of a very long
tunnel.

In April 2009, she flew down to Houston for a few days to meet
with her lawyers. Ryan stayed with Alice, and they picked Judith up
from the airport when she returned. As they made the last turn back
to the house in Loma Linda, they passed a car coming the other
direction.

“There’s Rick,” Ryan said.

“No way,” Judith replied. 

When they pulled into the driveway, however, Rick pulled
in behind them, blocking the way out. “He didn’t get out of his
car,” Judith told me. “He just sat there” and stared. Ryan jumped
out and ran to the neighbor’s house, but no one was home. So the
three of them made a break for the garage, and inside Judith called
the sheriff. Harris left before the sheriff arrived. Later, her
neighbors said Rick had been asking around for her.

The next week, Judith went to court and got an order of
protection against Rick. By the time I visited her in Carthage, she
had become convinced that her half-brother was the mastermind, the
linchpin to the whole conspiracy and the reason she’d feared for
her and her sons’ lives for years. But after reading the police
reports from the incidents Judith had described, I’d begun to
wonder if they were really anything more than the confrontations
you’d expect between feuding relatives. The only way to find out, I
figured, was to go to Joplin myself.