The Dreams of Ada (23 page)

“Get away from him,” Bud had yelled, but Tommy had kept jumping on the snake as it slithered toward the water, jumping up and down on it and yelling, “Shoot him, Bud!”

Finally the snake had slithered into the water and gotten away, and Tommy had wailed, “Why didn’t you shoot him?”

“Because you were riding the thing,” Bud replied, “because if I shot, I would have killed
you
.”

Tricia had been there, too, hiding behind a tree far from the snake, and for months afterward they laughed at Tommy, and called him “the snake rider.”

Another time, Bud remembered as he walked along, looking for the burned-out house, he had shot a snake, and he and Tommy had run to it and cut off its head; and as they did, a frog’s leg began to move in the opening. There was a lump in the snake, and it moved toward the opening and crawled out: a frog that the snake had just eaten, a frog that was still alive, that Bud’s shot seemed to have saved. But after crawling a few feet away, the frog, too, died, its belly punctured by the same .22 shot that had killed the snake.

Recalling the times that he and Tommy had shared, Bud admitted to himself, or took upon himself, a burden of guilt: the feeling that if only he had stayed close to Tommy, his brother-in-law might not be in this mess. But Tommy had gotten in with a bad crowd, with drug users, and they had drifted apart.

Bud paused, looked around. It had been years since he’d been out this way. He couldn’t find the house. Then he remembered that it was on a hill. Tricia used to say she would like to live in that house because it was high up with a view of the highway but was also isolated. He climbed over a barbed-wire fence and to the top of the hill behind it. There he found the remains of the house.

The spot held pleasant memories. In the days when the house was standing, abandoned, Bud used to station himself in front of it to shoot at doves. When he missed, and the doves wheeled about in the sky above the trees, Tommy, standing behind the house, would get a shot at them.

Now there was no house left, just a foot-high foundation, filled with rubble, fragments of burned wood, a broken old stove. A few inches above the ground, the foundation was sectioned into quarters by thin white string, placed there by the police when they searched it in October for evidence, for some proof that Karl’s and Tommy’s “confessions” were true. The string was still intact. On a tree about a hundred feet away, bright yellow ribbons fluttered: also placed there by the police, as a marker, five months earlier.

In his tape, Tommy had said Odell Titsworth carried Denice Haraway here from the power plant. According to a story in the Ada
News
, Denice Haraway weighed 110 pounds. Bud thought: I couldn’t carry Rhonda this far. Heck, I couldn’t carry Laura Sue this far.

He looked at the rubble in the corner of the house where, Karl had said, they burned the body. Police had gone over the area with a metal detector, looking for dental fillings. All they had found were rusty nails, which lay haphazardly now where the police had tossed them, outside the foundation of the house.

The place, with its curious strings, had the undeniable feel of a murder scene—except that the police had found no evidence here of a murder.

Bud looked farther through the rubble. Near the rear had been a room that had been tiled. A mound of broken tiles was all that remained. Atop the mound, washed clean by the rain that still was falling, was a curved fragment, about an inch and a half wide. Painted in the broken tile, against a soft white background, was a lovely pink rose.

The first pretrial hearing in the case of the State of Oklahoma versus Tommy Ward, following his March 4 arraignment, was held on March 21. His mother and his brother Joel drove down from Tulsa, leaving at four in the morning, to be present in the courtroom. Dorothy Hogue of the Ada
News
sat in the first row, taking notes. Alone at the prosecution table, District Attorney Peterson browsed through lawbooks, chewing on the end of a black pen. Attorneys Wyatt and Addicott arrived, carrying books and folders. The court reporter, Hugh Brasher, took his place beside the bench, and then Judge Ronald Jones arrived, also laden with lawbooks, and took his place. The spectator section was empty, because this would be a day for technical motions only. For the same reason, the defendant was not required in the courtroom; Tommy Ward this day would not get forty-three steps of fresh air.

The court convened at 9:45
A.M
., fifteen minutes late. The hearing lasted two hours and five minutes. Little of substance was decided. Wyatt and Addicott, taking turns, argued their case on eleven motions they had filed with the court.

The major motions requested a separation of the trials of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot; a separate trial for Tommy Ward on each of the three counts remaining against him: armed robbery, kidnapping, and murder; a change of venue because of pretrial publicity; a request for state funds to pay for a psychologist or psychiatrist to examine the defendant; a request for examination at a state mental hospital; a motion to suppress certain statements made at the preliminary hearing, on the ground that on October 25 Don Wyatt had been prevented by the police from visiting his client in jail. On all of these the judge requested written briefs to be submitted to the court by April 1. He would then give the prosecution ten days, till April 11, to respond with its own written briefs.

Two other motions involved requests that the prospective jurors be questioned individually, out of earshot of the others, about their opinions on the death penalty; and that the jury be sequestered during the trial. The judge said he would rule on these motions at the time of the trial.

On only one motion did the judge issue a ruling that day. The defense had requested that he declare the death penalty unconstitutional, as cruel and unusual punishment. The judge noted that the United States Supreme Court had already decided that issue. Mike Addicott argued that the Supreme Court had been “flip-flopping” on the issue, and might change its mind again next year. The judge overruled the motion.

Only a few comments during the two-hour hearing seemed noteworthy: Regarding the tapes, the district attorney said, “We have confessions in which each defendant admits his guilt.” To which the defense replied that the confessions had not been given “freely and voluntarily,” that they had been “illegally obtained by coercion by the police, the investigators reciting to the defendants their beliefs about what happened and then asking the defendants, ‘That’s what happened, isn’t it?’…It’s clear from the inconsistencies [on the tapes] that these people weren’t even there.”

At one point Judge Jones asked if there would be a defense of insanity. “We don’t know at this point,” Don Wyatt replied. “Not at this moment.”

When the defense said it would need transcripts of the preliminary hearing in order to argue some of its motions, the court reporter said, when asked by the judge, that the transcripts would not be ready until early May. The judge seemed upset by the delays in bringing the case to trial. He looked at the defense attorneys.

“We are not urging a speedy trial,” Don Wyatt said.

The district attorney was hoping that physical evidence against the defendants—perhaps even Denice Haraway’s body—would turn up in the months that now still lay before a trial. The defense, apparently unafraid of this, believed that the more time that passed between the disappearance of Denice Haraway and the trial of Tommy Ward, the more time there was for public passions to cool—as, indeed, they seemed to be doing—the better the chance that Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot might be acquitted.

That night, on Ada’s one local television station, KTEN, the anchorwoman reported on both the six and ten-thirty newscasts about a hearing “in the death”—not the disappearance—of a local convenience store clerk. The station showed film of Tommy Ward, in his prison whites, with his hands cuffed behind him, walking from the jail to the courthouse, then back again. Superimposed on the film was the word “today.” The only problem with the showing of the film was that Tommy Ward had not been in the courtroom—had not left the jail—that day.

To the Ward family, the newscast was one more example of a determination by the media to help convict Tommy.

More likely, it was simply small-town journalistic incompetence: bad reporting; loose use of file film.

The impact, however, might be the same.

Don Wyatt still did not know what his defense of Tommy Ward would be. He felt that he would have to put Ward on the witness stand, in an attempt to refute the prosecution’s taped confession. But he knew that because of the many lies that Tommy had been telling, the district attorney could easily rip apart his credibility.

Affidavits had not yet been taken from the witnesses who could give Tommy an alibi. Robert Cavins had been under pressure from the corrections department, for which he now worked, not to be certain in his testimony about which night that weekend he had found Tommy asleep at 11:20. Robert had been threatened with the loss of his job if he did not agree to be interviewed by the OSBI about his knowledge of the case, without an attorney being present. He had agreed to do so. An affidavit was needed, as well, from Willie Barnett about the time the family said Willie had spent with Tommy on the crucial night.

Wyatt decided that what was needed was a meeting of all prospective witnesses for the defense. Following the hearing on March 21, in a parking lot across the street from the courthouse, he told Joel and Miz Ward to pick a day on which all members of the family who had anything to say relevant to Tommy’s defense could get together, along with any other witnesses they knew of, such as Willie Barnett, and he would meet with them.

Wyatt was feeling pinched by the poverty of the Ward family. The $3,000 retainer was almost gone. He wanted to hire an investigator to follow up on possible leads that Tommy and the family had mentioned. But he did not want to spend his own or the firm’s money to do it. He wanted to win the case, but he was not in the charity business; he had sometimes done charity work in his younger days; but he felt he was too old for that now. He wanted more cash to use in Tommy’s defense.

He got word of this to Tricia, who relayed it to Miz Ward and Joel. The afternoon of the hearing, while Tricia rested on the sofa, trying to preserve her pregnancy, Joel and Miz Ward went to a finance agency to try to mortgage the house and the land it stood on. They asked for $20,000.

There were legal problems, they were told. The house and the land had belonged to Jesse Ward, and when he died six years before, it had not been probated. Legal work was necessary before clear title could be established and a loan be given.

The lawyers were set to work on the problem. Joel and Miz Ward drove back to Tulsa to await developments.

On Ninth Street, the telephone was ringing. Bud answered it, frowned, cupped his hand over the receiver. He turned to Tricia.

“Do you want to talk to Lisa?” he asked.

Tricia was hesitant, afraid. She’d had no contact with Lisa Lawson for a long time. She was afraid the district attorney had talked to Lisa, had learned of Tommy’s rage the night they had split up, was afraid he would put Lisa on the stand as a witness against Tommy, to testify to his violent temper, to suggest he might well have killed Denice Haraway. Reluctantly, Tricia took the phone.

The call was not what she had feared. Lisa Lawson Smith merely said she wanted to be friends; she said she believed Tommy was innocent, that he could never do such a thing, that even in his rage she knew he would never hurt her. She wished Tommy well.

Tricia debated about the note from Tommy to Lisa: whether to tell Lisa about it, whether to give it to her. It was an odd coincidence, Lisa calling out of the blue, just a few days after Tommy’s love note to her arrived. Tricia decided not to mention the note; there was no point. Lisa was a married woman now. Why stir up old feelings?

She did not know what to do with the note. She decided to give it to Miz Ward, for her to decide. The question was whether to tell Tommy, now, that Lisa was married, and have him face reality; or to let him, alone in his jail cell, hold on to his fantasy.

Sometimes Tricia thought that the best thing would be for Lisa to go down to the jail one Sunday and tell him the truth herself, shout it through the little glass window. Other times she thought that would be the worst thing.

Nearly eleven months had passed since the disappearance. The police no longer were actively searching for the body. But when officers or deputy sheriffs happened to be out in rural areas for any reason, they automatically poked around in the underbrush, on the slim chance they might find something. Dennis Smith did that; Mike Baskin did that; District Attorney Bill Peterson did that.

Smith was well aware of the topsy-turvy nature of the case, how it was the exact opposite of most murder cases. In most cases you find a body, he mused; then you reconstruct the crime; then you look for a suspect. In this case they got the suspects first; then they reconstructed the crime; they still didn’t have the body. Without the body, he knew, “we’re putting all our eggs in one basket.” The basket was the confession tapes.

At the district attorney’s office, seated behind his desk, with several volumes of transcripts of the Rawlings “no-body” case piled on the floor beside him, Bill Peterson that week discussed the Haraway case with a journalist visiting from out of state.

“There’s lots of pressure in this case,” he conceded, “but it’s all self-imposed. No one is bringing pressure from the outside. I’m convinced they’re guilty. I want to get a conviction because of the viciousness of the case. I want to get a conviction because of the criminal justice system. God will take care of what comes later. They violated not only the laws of man but the laws of God.”

Regarding the failure to find a body, he said, “They could have chopped her up in little pieces and left her all over the county. The pieces wouldn’t be there anymore. Animals would have gotten them.” He said he did not know why they had confessed but refused to give up the body. But he was convinced Denice was dead, and that Ward and Fontenot had killed her.