The Dreams of Ada (19 page)

DON WYATT:
What year is that case?

PETERSON:
1980. It states, moreover, a jury may reasonably rely upon circumstantial evidence; to conclude otherwise would mean that a criminal could commit a secret murder, destroy the body of the victim, and escape punishment despite convincing circumstantial evidence against him or her.

WYATT:
In each case, judge, the case stands for the proposition that the body is not essential; circumstantial evidence to prove a death occurred is sufficient. It’s the same line of thinking in every case he’s presented and you have no circumstantial evidence that a death occurred here.

PETERSON:
But in conjunction with any confession given, the circumstantial evidence. We’ve got circumstantial evidence of a kidnapping, and we’ve got circumstantial evidence of a death. There has been no one who has seen or heard of this girl since April 28.

BUTNER:
Amelia Earhart, too, but that doesn’t make her dead.

The legal wrangling went on for hours. When it was done, Judge Miller ruled that the tapes could be admitted in evidence.

A recess was taken while a video monitor was set up in the courtroom. The spectators waited. Some had been there all day—it was almost 5
P.M
. now—others were attorneys come to hear the arguments. The tall booted cowboy was in the back row once again. Tricia Wolf had not come today; she did not want to see the tapes. When Bud got off work at the feed mill at 4
P.M
. he went over to the courthouse to see what was going on; he found a seat from which to watch the tapes, to report back to the family.

Tommy Ward’s statement was played first. At the start of the tape, agent Rusty Featherstone could be heard reading Tommy his rights. The defense attorneys interrupted the tape, objected; no evidence had been introduced to show that Ward had been read his rights before the eight hours of questioning had begun, before the video machine had been turned on. The judge overruled the objection.

The thirty-one-minute tape was played in its entirety, showing Tommy Ward answering questions, telling how he and Karl Fontenot and Odell Titsworth had robbed and kidnapped and raped and killed Donna Denice Haraway.

Then Karl Fontenot’s tape was played, after similar objections had been overruled. He, too, told of robbery, kidnapping, rape, and murder—and the burning of the body.

Many of the spectators wept as they watched.

The hearing was adjourned until morning.

In the corridors of the courthouse and out in the street, the defense attorneys talked to the news media. It was the first time they had seen the tapes. George Butner spoke of the “glaring inconsistencies” between the two tapes. “Not one shred of evidence has been produced to prove or disprove what is in the statements,” he said. Mike Addicott said the defense would seek a change of venue for any trial, because of the emotional impact the crime had had on the local populace.

Some of the discrepancies between the two tapes were pointed out on radio and television newscasts that night, and in the Ada
News
the next day. It was the first indication the people of Ada had that the stories on the tapes were not identical.

Bud went home and reported to Tricia what was on the tapes. There was terrible stuff; but they had known that before. He focused on the inconsistencies; on how, several times on the tape, Tommy had called Odell Titsworth “Titsdale,” until the police corrected him. To Bud this showed that the police had given him that name, that he didn’t know Titsworth; and that if the police had planted that information, what else might they have planted? Because of the inconsistencies on the tapes, Tricia and Bud had new hope that the charges might be dropped.

The defense attorneys were gratified by the inconsistencies. They could be viewed as showing that Ward and Fontenot had not participated in the same event. The tapes were brutal and gory, however. And one passage on each tape bothered the attorneys the most; it had to do with the blouse Denice Haraway had been wearing. A portion of Ward’s tape went like this:

Q. Can you tell me what her blouse looked like that she was wearing?

A. It was—it was white with little blue roses on it, I think, blue roses.

Q…. So it was a white blouse. Button-up or slip-on?

A. It’s a button-up.

Q. Did it have buttons on the collar?

A. Uh-huh.

Q. Or would it be just a regular collar?

A. It had buttons on the collars and then it had little fringe deals around her collar and around the end of her arm, end of the sleeves.

Q. By little fringe, do you mean a lace kind of deal?

A. Yeah, uh-huh.

A portion of Karl Fontenot’s tape went as follows:

Q. What kind of shirt did she have on? Was it a pullover type or button-up type, Karl?

A. Button-up.

Q. Did it have anything that you noticed about it, as far as any designs or—

A. Just the ruffles around the buttons and sleeves. The sleeves had elastic like in them.

Q. Was it a short-sleeved shirt?

A. Yes, it was short-sleeved.

Q. Did it have any lace around the collar?

A. Yes, it had ruffles around the collar like the front.

In the matching descriptions of the blouse, there was an ominous consistency that gave both Don Wyatt and George Butner a sinking feeling. Did these descriptions prove that Ward and Fontenot had both been there? That they were guilty after all?

Karen Wise was nervous. Since testifying at the hearing the week before, she’d gotten several disconcerting phone calls: quiet clicks, heavy breathing. Now, looking out the window of her second-floor apartment, she could see a man standing in the darkness of the alley below. Standing, watching.

The night was dark; the porch light cast a faint yellow glow into the alley; it let her see his outline, his shape, but not his face. He was tall, he was lean; he was wearing blue jeans; he was wearing cowboy boots; he was staring up at her window in the dark.

Her address was listed in the phone book: 223½ West Thirteenth. It was part of a rabbit warren of two-story frame buildings, once painted white, now graying, in need of a new coat; wooden stairways to the second-floor apartments crisscrossed the sides of the building and the rear.

Frightened, Karen moved away from the window; she kept out of sight; then she moved to another window and peered down. The man still was there, his hands jammed into his pockets, looking up at her.

The man walked down the alley; he came back and stared up at her. She moved away. She looked out another window. He was staring up at her. He walked down the alley a second time, again came back to stare at her windows. He walked the alley a third time, and again he came back.

Karen Wise called the police.

By the time a squad car arrived to check the alley, the man was gone.

The image wouldn’t leave her mind: the tall, lean cowboy. She felt so vulnerable. She still worked at J.P.’s, where any stranger could walk in. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been working that April night, had never gotten involved. Other times she felt lucky. Instead of Denice Haraway, it could have been her.

She’d testified she was sure Tommy Ward had been in her store that night; she’d made no identification of Fontenot; now there was the cowboy in the alley; he looked a lot like the other man who’d been in her store that night.

In the daylight she went to the district attorney’s office. She told him about the man in the alley. Bill Peterson told her she was being spooked. It was understandable, he said, involved in a murder case as she was. But it was nothing to worry about. It was probably somebody who was lost, who was looking for another apartment.

Karen Wise didn’t think so—not in that lonely alley, not at that time of night, not the way he was looking up at her.

The hearing resumed on Tuesday. Bill Peterson called Odell Titsworth to the stand. He had a reputation as a fearsome thug, with his four felony convictions; he had black hair that fell in waves to his shoulders. But despite his record, there was a quiet gentleness about him; it was when he got drunk that he could turn violent.

Titsworth testified about all the reasons he could not have been involved in the disappearance, despite what Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot had said on their tapes: he’d had a broken arm, broken by the police; he’d been nursing his broken arm that night at the home of his girlfriend and her mother. Peterson asked Titsworth to unbutton his sleeves and roll them up; there were tattoos from his wrists to his shoulders, on both arms. He said he had others: a tattoo of the grim reaper on his chest; a peacock on one leg; human figures on the other leg; a motorcycle on his back. He’d gotten them all in prison while serving time, he said.

Titsworth testified that while under arrest he asked the police to put him in a cell next to the suspects, so he could try to gather information from them; the police agreed. He said he was in the cell next to Ward for fifteen to twenty minutes. “He [Ward] said he was sorry he involved me and Fontenot, because he thought it came from a dream, and I was in his dream,” Titsworth said.

He said he had never met either of the suspects before he was arrested in the case.

Peterson called Titsworth’s girlfriend, Julia Wheeler, and her mother, Agnes Lumpmouth, to the stand. Both testified that Odell had been at home with them all that evening, in pain from a broken arm. The D.A. called Dennis Smith. The detective said Karl Fontenot had been unable to pick Titsworth from a photo lineup, and had said there were no tattoos or bandages on his arm the night of the crime.

On cross-examination, the defense attorneys kept trying to ascertain what information the police may have planted in the minds of the suspects before the taped statements were made. Smith was asked if in fact he was not the person who first mentioned Titsworth’s name to the suspects. Smith said he didn’t remember, that he might have mentioned it in the questioning of Ward.

The detective was asked whether he or anyone in his presence told Ward he had flunked a lie-detector test on October 18, before he taped his statement. Smith said he did not tell Ward that, and he did not remember anyone saying that in his presence. He was asked if he remembered a dream that Tommy Ward had had. “You asked, do I remember a dream that he had?” Smith said. “I don’t know what he dreams. I wasn’t there in the dream.” Later he said, “Yes, I remember him telling me that he had a dream.” But he said that had occurred days after the tape had been made.

About the town’s response to the composite sketches, Smith said more than thirty people had called to suggest Ward, and that at least that many other names had been given as well. When he said the police had not taken the names of the people who were calling in, Mike Addicott asked, “How do you know that one person didn’t make fifteen separate phone calls saying that looked like Tommy Ward?”

“I have no way of knowing,” Smith replied.

After more than four days of testimony spread across two weeks, the hearing was not yet complete. But the judge and the attorneys had other cases coming up on their calendars. Judge Miller recessed the preliminary hearing until February 4.

The suspects were handcuffed and taken back to their cells, where they had been for almost three months. The attorneys for both sides left the courtroom, as did the spectators. Tricia was once more among them, now that the tapes had been played. Still among them, too, was the tall cowboy with the knee-high boots and his name carved into his belt.

Don Wyatt had an opening on his staff for a legal assistant. One of those who applied for the job that week was a pleasant, hard-working woman named Winifred Harrell. She’d been employed as a legal assistant for more than twenty years. For the first three years she had worked for Barney Ward, the blind attorney; she felt that was the best training she could possibly have had, having to do all of his reading for him. She then spent sixteen years with another local attorney, Lewis Watson. She had taken time off at the start of her second marriage, then had worked the past two years for still another attorney, Harold Hall. She was no longer happy there.

Don Wyatt was impressed with Winifred and her credentials. As he offered her the job, he felt he had to warn her. “If you take the job,” he said, “you will be handling the Tommy Ward file.”

Wyatt felt it was only fair to warn her.

Winifred, who lived on Kings Road, had stopped letting her little daughter walk home alone from the schoolbus after Denice Haraway disappeared. She had been following the case, the hearings, in the newspaper and on television; she was convinced that Tommy Ward was guilty; she was convinced that, should the case go to trial, a jury would convict him. But she took the job anyway. Handling the Ward file would involve doing research, keeping the lawyers apprised of when various motions had to be filed. She felt that she could do the job, despite her personal opinion of Ward’s guilt.

Her opinion was shared by just about everyone she knew, on wealthy Kings Road and elsewhere—everyone except one old friend: Barney Ward. Her mentor, she knew, believed the suspects were innocent.

Don Wyatt didn’t know what to believe. He was getting sick of Tommy Ward—of his lies, his phony stories, his making statements despite Wyatt’s advice to keep his mouth shut. His confession tape had been proved to be full of lies; at Wyatt’s request he had written a long account of what had happened the weekend of the disappearance—he said he had been at home that night—and during the early days of his arrest; across the front page of the narrative, which was 110 handwritten pages, Ward had written, “This statement is the truth nothing but the truth so help me God”; then he had turned around and made up the Marty Ashley story. In between he’d given other names to the police of young men who he said had been there. Filled with frustration, Wyatt went to the jail to talk to his client. He told him he had had enough of Tommy’s lies. He said he believed Tommy had been involved, although he did not think he killed the girl. He said if the case went to trial, a jury would convict Tommy and sentence him to death. He said he believed Tommy was protecting the person who was with him; he wanted to know whom he was protecting and why. He said Tommy should tell the truth, name the real killer, and plead guilty; the most he would then get would be life imprisonment, which could mean parole in only five years.