The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  Strangers, too, called. One day an old woman on the phone asked Tricia if she was the sister of that Thomas Ward who killed that girl. Tricia didn’t know who the woman was, or how she knew she was Tommy’s sister, since her name had been Wolf, not Ward, for eleven years.

  “Are you his sister?” the woman persisted.

  “It hasn’t been proved. He didn’t do it,” Tricia said.

  “It’s terrible that he killed that girl,” the woman said.

  “This isn’t funny,” Tricia said.

  “I don’t think it’s funny that he killed that girl,” the woman said.

  Tricia hung up the phone, wondering what she was doing even talking to this woman. She went over to Maxine’s, to get away from the ringing phone. For days afterward she burst out crying every time she heard in her mind the old woman’s voice.

  Maxine, soon after, got a different kind of telephone call. It was from a friend and fellow churchgoer, Mildred Gandy, who lived in a trailer at the Brook Mobile Home Park, a large trailer court off Country Club Road, about a mile from McAnally’s. Mildred Gandy told Maxine she had seen Denice Haraway out at the trailer court, just a few trailers away. She was standing there with two guys, Mrs. Gandy said. This had been back in the spring, Mrs. Gandy told Maxine—but it was two days after the Haraway girl supposedly was killed. She hadn’t told the police, she said, because she did not want to get involved. But since Tommy had been arrested, she thought she ought to tell Maxine.

  Maxine excitedly told Tricia of the call. It reinforced their belief that Denice Haraway was still alive. It was something else to tell Tommy’s lawyer—as soon as they could find him a lawyer.

  Barney Ward—no relation to Tommy Ward or his family—grew up in Ada. In high school he was in an accident that left him permanently blind. Despite this, he went on to graduate from East Central—where as a stunt he flew an airplane one day—and then from law school. He set up shop in Ada as a criminal attorney. In thirty-three years at the bar he had earned a reputation as the best criminal lawyer in town. A large, stocky man, he was a familiar figure at the courthouse, always walking slowly on the arm of his female legal assistant, black glasses shielding his eyes. His office was in the American Building, diagonally across the street from the courthouse; there his assistant read to him whatever material he needed in the preparation of his cases. He was known to be sympathetic to poor people in trouble.

  Barney Ward was the first choice of Tricia and Joel to defend Tommy. Joel called the lawyer’s office from Tricia’s house; his legal assistant took the call. For many long minutes Joel explained the situation—Tommy’s tale of his dream, all the information that had not been in the news accounts. The assistant asked Joel to hold on. He held while for many more long minutes the assistant relayed the information to the attorney. Then she got back on the phone. She said that Mr. Ward was sorry, but that he would not be able to take the case.

  Barney Ward did not know the defendants. But he had heard the scuttlebutt: that they were not very bright, that they had repudiated the confessions. And it was public knowledge that no body, no physical evidence whatever, had yet been found. Unlike most of the town, he was not convinced that they were guilty. But he had his own problems about taking the case. One was financial. The case gave every promise of being long and arduous and time-consuming, of being a losing proposition financially. More important, he knew Dr. Haraway, who was a familiar figure around town. Whoever defended these boys would earn the undying bitterness of the Haraway family. And in a town that small, he would continue to run into the Haraways. In his younger days Barney Ward might have sacrificed such considerations to his desire for legal and social justice. But now he felt he was too old for that sort of strain. So he turned it down. There were other attorneys who could defend the boys.

  The second attorney Joel called reflected a different attitude, the one that pervaded most of Ada’s legal community. “Frankly,” the lawyer told Joel coldly, “I’d rather prosecute.”

  Though they did not want to settle for a court-appointed attorney, Bud and Tricia went to see Assistant District Attorney Chris Ross, to find out how the system worked, should it become necessary. They knew Chris Ross; they had been in the same foster-parent class. The visit sent a shudder of apprehension through the law offices of Ada. No one wanted to defend Tommy Ward. One consideration was money. The fee an attorney received from the state, if appointed in a capital case, was only $2,500—chicken feed, in the eyes of most of the lawyers. And defending Tommy Ward, most of the lawyers feared, would be devastating to their livelihoods. They received most of their income not from criminal cases but from civil suits: divorces, accident and injury cases. The town was convinced that the suspects were guilty; the town was outraged about what, according to the taped confessions, had been done to Denice Haraway. Whoever defended these boys was likely to see much of his civil practice drop away.

  That was the scuttlebutt in the law offices and in the courthouse and in the restaurants near the courthouse where the lawyers and the judges often ate—the Feed Store, Mercy’s sandwich shop. Several attorneys said they would quit the bar before they would defend Tommy Ward or Karl Fontenot.

  For several days, Tricia and Bud and Joel and Miz Ward did not know what to do. Then, at the feed mill, Bud heard about Don Wyatt. He heard it from several people: Don Wyatt had represented them in accident cases, workmen’s compensation cases, and had won. He was not afraid to take on the big factories, the big insurance companies. They needed someone who was not afraid. Why not give Don Wyatt a call, over at Wyatt & Addicott?

  Joel did. Don Wyatt told him over the phone that his fee to represent Tommy would be $25,000, that $3,000 would have to be paid as a retainer; the rest would have to be paid within a year.

  Joel called Tricia, told her what Wyatt had said. The fee seemed enormous. But they had to get Tommy out of this trouble; they were sure he was innocent. Perhaps, if they couldn’t raise $25,000, the lawyer would take Miz Ward’s house on Ashland Avenue. Joel wired Tricia some money from Tulsa. They got in touch with their sister Melva out in California, told her what was going on. Melva, too, was convinced that Tommy could not have done such a thing. She wired the rest of the money. Tricia took the $3,000 to Don Wyatt’s office on Arlington.

  The lawyer wasn’t in. She left the money with his receptionist. A few hours later, Wyatt phoned her. There had been some misunderstanding, he said. He would need a $3,000 retainer if he agreed to take the case. But he had not yet agreed to take it. First he wanted to talk to Tommy, he said. Then he would decide. Meanwhile, she’d better come and get the money.

  Tricia went and got the money and drove back home, at a loss as to what to do next.

  In their taped statements, both Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot said the crime had been committed with Odell Titsworth’s truck. Since the police were convinced within a matter of days that Titsworth could not have committed the crime, they were left with yet another problem: what pickup had been used? And where was it now? Neither Ward nor Fontenot owned a truck. A check of motor vehicle records indicated that Titsworth did not own a pickup, but that one of his sisters, Melba, did. The police obtained a search warrant for it. On the Monday after the arrests they located the pickup. It was parked outside a sumptuous two-story sprawling home at 110 Mayfair Way; the home of Don Wyatt, attorney.

  Marie Titsworth, Odell’s mother, had been cleaning the houses of well-off Ada residents for eight years. For six of those years one of her employers had been Don Wyatt. On Wednesday evenings and on Saturdays she dusted and vacuumed his large suite of offices. On Mondays she cleaned his home. The relationship between the busy attorney and his wife, and the small, gentle Indian woman, had become through the years one of total trust and affection.

  That Monday, Mrs. Titsworth had borrowed her daughter’s truck to get to work, as she often did. Midway through the day, as she was cleaning the lawyer’s house, with the Wyatts away at work, she happened to glance out the front window, and not
iced a police car parked outside; parked right behind her truck, blocking it. As she continued with her cleaning, her vacuuming, she glanced frequently out the window. The police car remained where it was. Finally she went outside, to see what the problem was.

  The patrolman in the squad car asked if it was her truck. She said it belonged to her daughter. Since it wasn’t hers, the officer said, he could not tell her what this was about, except that the truck was being impounded in an investigation. The investigation, she would later recall him saying, had to do with narcotics trafficking.

  Marie moved toward the front of the truck, to get a sweater that she had left on the seat. The officer stopped her. He told her she could not take anything from the truck.

  Mrs. Titsworth returned to the house, embarrassed that the patrol car was parked there, in front of Mr. Wyatt’s, for all the neighbors to see. She phoned Melba, who got a ride over. For more than two hours the patrol car was parked behind the pickup, till a tow-truck arrived and towed it away. Before they left, the police allowed her to get her sweater.

  Marie asked her friend and employer, Don Wyatt, for help. Mrs. Titsworth told Wyatt that her boy could not have hurt the Haraway girl; that the police had broken his arm two nights before, in her own home.

  Wyatt informed the district attorney’s office of this. The authorities already knew it. Odell Titsworth, they said, was being held on an outstanding warrant for his assault on a policeman the night his arm was broken, not for the Haraway case.

  It was nearly a week before Marie Titsworth got her daughter’s truck back. The OSBI had treated every inch of it for hairs, fibers, fingerprints, anything that might connect it to Donna Denice Haraway. They found nothing. When the truck was returned, it was covered with a film of black soot used in the analysis. Marie Titsworth felt that the least they could have done before returning the truck was to clean up the mess they had made. Don Wyatt agreed with her.

  Wyatt was a maverick among the attorneys of Ada. A loner by nature, he did not belong to the Rotary Club or any other civic organizations at whose functions other attorneys hobnobbed with clients or prospective clients. His own clients were mostly poor criminals, or poor factory workers engaged in claims against management. For him to mingle socially with the opposition would have made both sides uncomfortable.

  Born and raised in Oklahoma City, Wyatt moved to Ada after O.U. law school, because of its quiet beauty. There was an aura about him of a city slicker in the country, an aura fraught with contradictions. His city upbringing was reflected in the pale gray suits and ties and white shirts he favored in court, in the gold watch he wore with its face turned toward the inside of his wrist, as if he were guarding the privacy even of his time. He was mildly stocky, had a full moustache, was not tall but somehow gave the forceful impression of being taller than he was. He spoke in a soft, well-modulated voice, but his words were usually direct, sometimes even brusque. His rural side was reflected in the dark plaid wool or cotton shirts, open at the neck, that he wore when he did not have to go to court; in the green and cream–colored Ram Charger he drove; in the spent buckshot shells that littered the rear of the Charger, hunting pheasant and shooting skeet being his favorite ways to relax.

  He came to Ada in the 1970s as an assistant district attorney. After several years he quit to practice criminal law. In the view of some of Ada’s law enforcement people, that switch was almost like a policeman quitting to become a burglar. At first he handled only criminal cases; some of his first clients were people he had helped to convict, who, in trouble again, wanted him to represent them now. Gradually he branched out into civil suits. His firm, Wyatt & Addicott, was one of several law firms in the state that advertised on television at times for accident or personal injury cases; in the eyes of the town’s upper classes, this made him an “ambulance chaser.” Yet it was of these same injury cases that he was most proud. On a wall in the stunning law building he had designed for himself was a state map dotted with clusters of light blue and dark green pins; there were large clusters of pins around Ada, around Oklahoma City, around Tulsa, and individual pins scattered through the state; the pins represented more than 400 workmen’s compensation cases and 300 civil suits—personal injury cases, automobile accidents—that were pending in his computerized files at any given time, in addition to 40 or 50 criminal cases.

  The success of his practice was evident in the size of his staff—the firm had nine employees—as well as in the office building itself, which some passersby thought, while it was being built in the summer of 1984, would be Ada’s fifty-first church. Made of red brick, it had a peaked roof, vaulted windows, beautiful wood parquet floors, handcrafted wooden chair railings, thick carpets, soaring ceilings and skylights, a library, a conference room with stained glass in the doors, a computer room, a kitchen, a large parking lot out back, manicured lawns that sloped to Arlington Boulevard in front. The building was a monument to Wyatt’s taste, to the 20 to 33 percent fees he got for winning civil cases, and to the number of cases he won. His business card listed phone numbers in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, where the industrial courts were located, as well as in Ada; all of the toll-free numbers rang in Ada, but the clientele was statewide.

  Because of all this, Don Wyatt did not have the fears other Ada attorneys had about representing the defendants in the Haraway case. By the time he was asked to represent Tommy Ward, his hackles had already been raised by what he viewed as police mistreatment of his cleaning lady, Marie Titsworth. There would be no conflict of interest, he was confident, because Odell Titsworth was not likely to be charged in the case.

  Wyatt had heard of Tommy Ward’s confession. He did not want to take the case merely to enter a plea of guilty. He knew the Ward family was poor; a court-appointed attorney could do that. So he went to talk to Tommy Ward. He went back several times, questioning Tommy in the jail about why he had made the taped confession. Tommy told him his account of the dream, of the questioning by Gary Rogers and Dennis Smith. He insisted that he hadn’t done it. After three or four visits, Wyatt was not totally convinced that Ward was innocent. But he felt there was a strong possibility that he was. He decided to take the case.

  Tricia, Miz Ward, and Joel went back with the $3,000 retainer. Wyatt repeated that his services would cost $25,000. He agreed that if they could not pay him in full within a year, he would take the old Ward house on Ashland Avenue, and the three acres on which it stood, in lieu of cash. The date the house would change hands, if the fee was not paid in full, would be one year to the day, on October 29, 1985.

  Soon after, Don Wyatt filed a writ of habeas corpus. The suspects had been in jail for eleven days, with no charges brought against them. The district attorney would have to file formal charges, body or no body, or set them free.

  The first response of the D.A.’s office was to claim that the men were being held as material witnesses in the case. But that didn’t hold up in court. On November 7, twenty days after their arrests, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were formally charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon; with kidnapping; with rape; and with the murder, in the first degree, of Donna Denice Haraway.

  There was still no body.

  TWO MEN CHARGED

  IN HARAWAY CASE

  announced the Ada News the next day.

  Odell Titsworth was still in jail, but he had not been charged. District Attorney Bill Peterson went to great lengths to explain to the public why.

  “After an extensive investigation by the officers of the Ada Police Department, the Pontotoc County Sheriff’s Department, the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the District Attorney’s Office, Odell Titsworth has been eliminated as a suspect in the Donna Haraway case,” Peterson stated. He said Titsworth was still being held in jail on charges in an unrelated assault-and-battery case.

  A broken arm suffered by Titsworth in the unrelated incident two days before the disappearance of Denice Haraway was one of the main factors used to rule him out as a suspect, the News reported to t
he people of Ada. According to Peterson, although both Ward and Fontenot implicated Titsworth as having a major part in the crime, Titsworth had been ruled out for three main reasons.

  “First, Ward and Fontenot said Titsworth had on a short-sleeve shirt the night of the crime and had no scars or tattoos or anything wrong with his arm, when in fact he is heavily tattooed on both arms from his knuckles to his elbows. Titsworth had a cast on his left arm from wrist to shoulder at that time. Medical records and police reports show his arm was broken two days prior to Haraway’s abduction,” Peterson said.

  “Secondly, statements by Ward and Fontenot implicating Titsworth include actions allegedly done by him which would not have been physically possible with an arm in a cast or with a broken arm had the cast been removed. Third, Karl Fontenot was unable to pick Titsworth out of a photo lineup.

  “Titsworth’s medical record, along with witnesses’ statements, establish his whereabouts, his actions, and his physical condition on April 28, 1984. All these facts and other factors which cannot be released at this time indicate Titsworth is not a suspect in the commission of this crime,” Peterson said.

  The news of the murder charges swept Ada like a verbal tornado, swirling, doubling back upon itself. Some people wondered why it had taken so long to bring the charges. “Because they can’t find the body,” other people answered, and wondered how you could even bring murder charges without a body. Still others, aware of Odell Titsworth’s reputation, felt the police had cleared the wrong man. But most of the town could only assume the police knew what they were doing: that Ward and Fontenot were the guilty ones, because they had confessed.