The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  The day after Thomas and Vernon left, the social worker telephoned Tricia: Could they take two more? Tricia said they could.

  They were brother and sister. David was nearing two and a half, a beautiful, blond child with, even at that age, a startlingly handsome face—and a twisted foot that needed mending, that apparently had been broken through the neglect, if not the actual abuse, of his parents. Lisa was more cute than beautiful, with a crooked smile that could bring warmth into the coldest heart. She was fifteen months old—and weighed only sixteen pounds. Her weight had been dropping rapidly, the social worker told Tricia; she was losing strength. She could not keep food down, would throw up everything she ate. The diagnosis of the doctor was that she had a nervous stomach, probably caused by not enough touching and fondling at home, by lack of love. To put her in a hospital would be to see her wither and die, the doctor had said. The social worker felt that Bud and Tricia might be the only people in town who could save her.

  Bud and Tricia took the children in, and fell in love. The other kids—Rhonda, Buddy, and Laura Sue—did not seem to mind sharing the attention with the constant strangers in their midst. David and Lisa were so cute that, more than any of the others, they seemed like instant members of the real family. If love could help, then they would have it.

  For the first few days, nothing seemed to help with Lisa. She had a twinkle in her eyes, was clever for her age; that was apparent to anyone. But she kept giving back her food; she lost her newly acquired ability to walk; she lost yet another pound, was down to fourteen pounds now. Tricia called the social worker; the doctor’s diagnosis was repeated; love was what she needed; in a hospital she would die.

  One night Lisa seemed weaker than ever. She was throwing up, had not kept any food down in days. Even the twinkle in her eye was hard to find. Tricia held her, sat with Lisa on her lap, paced the floor with Lisa in her arms. All night long Tricia stayed up, holding the child, calming her, trying to give through the power of her will the love in her heart to the child. She was afraid Lisa would be dead by morning.

  In the morning it was as if Lisa had weathered some internal storm. She seemed more her cute self again. Tricia had an intuition that perhaps some major crisis had passed.

  She also had a revelation: perhaps it was not merely a nervous stomach; perhaps the child was allergic to milk. Tricia had heard of such cases. She eliminated milk from the child’s diet, as a test. Her food began to stay down. In a few days she had gained half a pound back, then a pound. Little Lisa was clearly recovering; was even stumbling about the house with her funny stutter-step. She was, that year, their Christmas child.

  While most of Ada prepared for the holiday, crowding the stores on Main Street, decorating their homes with Christmas lights, District Attorney Bill Peterson was busy preparing for the preliminary hearing in the Haraway case. The purpose of a hearing is to establish, to the satisfaction of the judge, that there is enough evidence against the defendants to bring them to trial. The burden of proof at this point is on the state—proof not of the defendant’s guilt, but of the weight of the evidence. Such hearings usually take a few hours, in some cases a few minutes. This time, Peterson knew, it was going to take a lot longer. With no body found, with not a speck of physical evidence to prove that Denice Haraway was dead, the district attorney would have to marshall all his resources, all the witnesses he could conjure, to establish the corpus delicti.

  Ultimately, he knew, unless they found the body, the case against Ward and Fontenot would rest on the videotaped statements. But under the law in Oklahoma, as in most states, confessions cannot be introduced into evidence unless the state first proves the corpus delicti—proves, that is, that a crime has been committed, and that the defendants are somehow linked to that crime, with enough evidence that they may be brought to trial.

  The Nettie Brown case had been crucial because it established the legal precedent that proof of Denice Haraway’s murder could be circumstantial. The linking of the defendants to the crime would have to come from the witnesses at McAnally’s and at J.P.s up the road, and from any other testimony he could unearth that might link the suspects to an old gray pickup, or to a lock-blade knife that might have been the murder weapon. So he conducted interviews.

  At the offices of the two defense attorneys, Don Wyatt’s out on Arlington and George Butner’s in Wewoka, there was less to do at this point. They, too, had to research the legal precedents on no-body cases, on circumstantial evidence, on other points of law. But they did not have to prepare a defense; that would come later, at a trial, should the case ever go to trial. For the preliminary hearing, both attorneys were preparing to make their major stands on two points: that the state could not prove that a crime had even been committed, because it could not prove that Denice Haraway was dead; and that, even if she were, there was no evidence, independent of the taped statements, linking either suspect to the woman’s disappearance.

  Unless the state had evidence it had not yet made public…

  If the judge, or any other judge down the line, would rule that the videotapes were not admissible, for whatever reason, both lawyers felt, the bulk of the state’s case would disappear.

  Wyatt was aided in his research by his junior partner, Mike Addicott, a tall, thin, moustached young attorney. Butner, without a staff the size of Wyatt’s, was pretty much on his own.

  A short, slender, dark-haired man who dressed neatly in three-piece suits, George Butner, like most of those involved in the case, had deep roots in this part of Oklahoma. His grandfather had moved to nearby Seminole County from Arkansas in 1888. The family was one of only three white families in the area at the time—amid the mostly Indian settlements—and the town where they settled was soon named Butner, after them. A previous town of Butner, in North Carolina, had been named after their ancestors.

  At the time of the Haraway case, George Butner had been an attorney for ten years. He and Barney Ward were the only two lawyers in the district who did mostly criminal law; such cases comprised about 60 percent of Butner’s work. When he was asked by Judge Miller to represent Karl Fontenot as court-appointed attorney, Butner had just completed another murder case, in which he had done all the work himself, a case he had lost to Bill Peterson. He did not know much about the Haraway case when he accepted the appointment. Usually he did not have to follow cases in the newspapers; the cases came to him; and, not living in Ada, he had read even less about it.

  He went to see his client at the city jail.

  Karl told Butner he was innocent. But beyond that, he was of little help. He could not remember what he had been doing the night of April 28. He could not remember anyone who could testify to his whereabouts. He could give Butner the names of nearly everyone in the town he knew, in the hope that one of them might remember where he had been that night. But Butner did not have the staff—nor the money to hire investigators—to go on such a fishing expedition; there would have to be a starting point, and Fontenot could give him none.

  The attorney felt that by holding the two young men in jail for twenty days before bringing charges, the police and the district attorney had handled the case “obnoxiously.” From what Karl told him, he felt his client had been threatened at times during those twenty days, and perhaps before he made the taped statement as well. His best defense, he felt early on, would be to find some way to get the tapes declared inadmissible, so that the case would never go to trial.

  Mercy’s is a sandwich shop half a block from the courthouse, where Bill Peterson often ate lunch, along with judges, lawyers, courthouse workers, and other citizens. The name of the sandwich shop had nothing to do with the quality of justice in Ada, or anywhere else; the person who owned it and did most of the cooking was an Oriental woman named Mercy.

  Every year, Mercy threw a Christmas party for her regular customers. So Bill Peterson went to escape from the pressures of his work—and was approached there by Norman Frame, Denice Haraway’s faculty adviser, who liked especially to c
ome to Mercy’s on Wednesdays, when the daily special was Chinese. Frame asked the district attorney about the case; he had been notified to appear at the courthouse in January to testify as a witness to Denice Haraway’s character; he would be glad to, he said, but he hoped it would not interfere with his teaching schedule.

  Peterson assured him that, as a character witness, his testimony probably would not take very long; they would do what they could to work his appearance around his class schedule. Frame was pleased.

  The district attorney was beginning to understand that, perhaps for a long time, there would be no getting away from the Haraway case.

  A few days later, Christmas came to Ada; the lights blinked on the trees, the sound of singing filled the churches. Models of the infant Jesus slept in crèches; in gaily wrapped boxes slept Cabbage Patch kids. Gifts were exchanged at the Wyatts’ and the Butners’, the Petersons’ and the Smiths’.

  At the home of the Haraways there was a terrible vacancy; it was the first Christmas since the disappearance—since the murder, perhaps—of Denice. At the home of the Wolfs and the Wards the joy was darkly tempered; Tommy was in jail accused of murder, something they believed he didn’t do, believed with all their hearts.

  From his jail cell Tommy wrote a Christmas letter to Tricia. It moved her to tears. In it he said that this was the happiest Christmas he’d ever had, because he was in God’s hands, because he had had time to think, and when this ordeal was over and he was released, he would make something of his life.

  The Sunday before Christmas, Tricia and Bud and the kids and Miz Ward and as many of the others as could fit into the closetlike visiting room went to see Tommy, to show him their support; to offer him what Christmas cheer they could.

  No one came to visit Karl Fontenot. No one had come to visit him since his arrest more than two months before.

  Karl did get one present, however: a Christmas basket of fruit and candy.

  It was from Detective Captain Dennis Smith.

  7

  TESTIMONY

  The preliminary hearing in the case of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot began as scheduled in the Pontotoc County courthouse in downtown Ada on Monday, January 7. On the third floor of the courthouse there are two courtrooms: a small one to the left as you leave the elevator, normally used for hearings and small trials, and a larger one to the right. The larger courtroom was used for this hearing, to accommodate the large number of spectators. It contained four and a half rows of blond wood benches, each of which could seat about twelve people. For the first time that anyone could remember, spectators were frisked for weapons by sheriff’s deputies as they entered the courtroom, lest anyone try to end the proceedings with a knife or a gun.

  As in most courtrooms, many of the spectators were retired men and women who did not have to be at work that day and could find in the proceedings a form of free entertainment. Among the more concerned spectators were Tricia, Kay, and Miz Ward. Seated in the back row was a tall, lean man wearing high cowboy boots, blue jeans, a leather belt with his name carved in the back, a style of belt common in Ada, and the grounds for a strident joke:

  Why does a cowboy wear his name on the back of his belt?

  So he’ll know who he is when he takes his head out of his ass.

  As he entered the courtroom balancing a pile of lawbooks against his belly, District Attorney Peterson was aware that he would now be the central player in a highly unusual drama: the attempt to make a murder case in the absence of a body, in the absence of any physical proof of death. But in his own mind there was little doubt that Donna Denice Haraway was dead.

  It was all a matter of personalities. His own father, for instance, was proof. His father had been a popular physician at the old Sugg Clinic across from the courthouse, now abandoned, and then at Valley View Hospital. For fifty years he served the people of the town as a doctor, and you could set your watch by his comings and goings. On the last day of his life—October 13, 1975—still practicing medicine at the age of seventy-two, he went out to cut down a tree on his property. He’d been talking about cutting down that particular tree; Bill had warned him not to do it himself, that he was too old for that sort of thing, that he should hire some eighteen-year-old kid to do it. But Dr. Peterson was stubborn, self-reliant; he went out on the property alone, with a chain saw, to do it himself. Later in the day a neighbor was passing the Peterson home; he noticed that the garage door was open; he had never in all the years they had been neighbors known the doctor to leave his garage door open when he was not putting in or taking out his car. The neighbor knew immediately that something had happened; feared immediately that Dr. Peterson was dead. At the hospital, the doctor was late for his rounds; he had never been late before without calling to say what time he would be in, or having someone call for him. Staff members at the hospital suspected immediately that he was dead.

  He was found beneath the tree. It had fallen backwards, crushing him, instead of falling away. They could tell from the position of the body that he had seen it falling, had tried to scramble out of the way, but his feet had gotten tangled in the weeds. All he could do at the last instant of his life was to raise his hands in front of him, to try to ward off the crushing blow.

  The point being—the district attorney had made the connection in his mind many times since Denice Haraway disappeared—that as soon as his father was seen to depart from his normal routine, people knew something was wrong; he was that kind of a man. Likewise, he felt, Denice Haraway had not just up and left on a whim. When people asked him about the possibility that she had faked her own disappearance, he replied, “Elephants could fly. But they don’t.”

  His task now, as he entered the courtroom, was to convince Judge Miller of this under the rules of evidence. And also to convince him that there was sufficient evidence to bring Ward and Fontenot to trial. The district attorney had seen the tapes; he had little doubt that they were guilty. Dennis Smith and Mike Baskin thought of the two defendants as “trash”; the D.A., having been raised more genteelly, thought of them in different terms: “They are not the kind of guys you would invite home to dinner.”

  Peterson sat at the prosecution table, along with Dennis Smith. At the defense table to the left—farther from the judge’s bench, closer to the jury box, should there ever be a trial in the case—sat the suspects and their attorneys: Don Wyatt and his associate, Mike Addicott, representing Tommy Ward; George Butner representing Karl Fontenot. The court reporter, Hugh Brasher, sat at his curious machine in the far corner, beyond the bench.

  Judge Miller, tall, lean, moustached, twenty-nine years old, entered. All in the courtroom rose at the bailiff’s direction, then sat as the judge did. Under Oklahoma law, Judge Miller would preside only at the preliminary hearing; should he rule that there was enough evidence for the case to go to trial, another judge, District Judge Ronald Jones, would preside.

  Bill Peterson began his presentation with an elderly neighbor of the Wards, who said he had sometimes seen Tommy riding in an old gray pickup. Then came four witnesses who the D.A. knew were not his best: four young men whom he also would not invite home to dinner. They were part of Ada’s running crowd—some of them had been in prison—who had run at times with Tommy Ward. A prudently logical man, Peterson believed that the best way to construct a case, be it for a judge or a jury, was in straightforward, chronological fashion. Since the evidence he hoped to elicit from these four predated the disappearance of Denice Haraway, he began with them.

  The district attorney tried to establish through the four young men two things: one, that Ward had been in possession of a lock-blade knife of the kind he had described in his tape as the murder weapon; and two, that he had normally worn his hair long, like the men in the composite drawings, but that immediately after April 28, 1984, he’d had it cut short. The four young men, under Peterson’s questioning, testified vaguely to that effect. Under cross-examination, however, the defense elicited from the witnesses that an incident in which Ward h
ad showed one of them a knife at a party had occurred in 1982, and that a witness who’d said Ward’s hairstyle had changed right around April 28 had in fact not seen Ward from about four months before that date until four months after, and had no real knowledge as to when he’d had his hair cut short.

  Peterson was not happy with the outcome, but he hadn’t expected much more from this bunch; he would build his case slowly, methodically. He called two character witnesses for Denice Haraway: Norman Frame, her faculty adviser, and Donna Howard, with whom she’d been student teaching. Both testified about Denice’s regular habits, to establish that she was not likely to have run off. Then he called Denice’s younger sister, Janet Weldon. Ms. Weldon, too, testified about Denice’s regular habits—about how happy she had been; about how she had talked to Denice on the phone less than two hours before she disappeared, and everything had sounded fine. Then came the following series of questions and answers:

  BILL PETERSON: Do you recall giving Donna, as a gift, a blouse?

  JANET WELDON: Yes, I do.

  PETERSON: Okay. And would you describe that blouse to the Court, please?

  WELDON: Well, it had a white-lace collar and it was light lavender and it had little blue flowers on it. And it was buttoned up the front. And it was pretty worn, because it was a shirt I had that I gave to her. It was pretty old. It was almost white.