The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  The day was no different for Miz Ward than any other Sunday; she drove down from Tulsa to visit her son. She picked up Jimmy, and they went over to the county jail; Bud and Tricia would be coming later.

  As Tommy entered the small enclosure behind the narrow glass window, he had two sheets of paper with him. After a quick exchange of greetings, he said excitedly, “I wrote some more poems. You want to hear ’em?”

  “Yeah,” Miz Ward said.

  Tommy read the poems. The first one began:

  What makes life worth living

  Is our giving and our forgiving

  Giving our kindness

  That leaves the joy behind us…

  “That’s pretty,” Miz Ward said when he was finished reading. “Now, how you getting along?” Tommy hesitated. “You feel nervous?”

  “Getting a little shaky and everything,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m ready to go home.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Have they said anything about when they’re going to set the trial and everything?”

  They discussed the new judge being appointed, which Tommy had heard; and noted that he had set arguments on motions for May 16. Tommy had heard his trial might be in June. “I’ll be glad to get out of this mess,” he said. “Everything is okay, I guess. Slow. A lot of things start trying to go through my mind and everything, you know. I think it’s old Satan working on me. Trying to break me down and everything. But I just keep grittin’ my teeth and pushin’ on. ’Cause I know the Lord is looking down on me and everything…It’s just a matter of time and patience…Sometimes when I’m prayin’, I wonder if the Lord can hear me, the way I am locked up in a little room and everything.”

  “He sure can,” Miz Ward said. “He sure can.”

  “I remember one time I was layin’ there and I heard this voice. It goes, ‘Why are you worrying so much? You didn’t do it and everything. So what’s to worry about?’ I mean, I jumped up and I ran to the door and I looked out the door and looked around, and there wasn’t nobody there. I turned around, and boy, I got a rush all through my body, and everything. I said, why, it was the Lord, telling me He’s watching over me, and not to worry. Ever since then, you know, I haven’t been so worried about it and everything. When it starts to get me down, I know it’s Satan. I just praise the Lord, and tell him [Satan] to leave me alone.”

  There was a knock on the door. Tommy’s visiting time was up. He asked his mother if she had a pencil; there were some things he needed her to bring to the jail; he read off a list: hand cream, ink, pen, paper, erasers, a lighter, magazines, stamps, soap, a pencil sharpener.

  He read the list twice more while Miz Ward wrote it down. Then he had to go back to his cell.

  There had been no mention, on either side of the glass, of the significance of the date.

  At the city jail across the street, there was no mention of it, either. It was a day like every other; no one came to visit Karl Fontenot.

  Soon it was night. The clocks read 8:30; then they read 9. The Haraway case entered its second year.

  9

  INVESTIGATOR

  For twenty years, from 1951 to 1971, Richard Kerner was in the Air Force. Thirteen of those twenty years he was with the military police; the other seven he was with the office of special investigations, doing criminal investigations within the military. For three years, from 1957 to 1959, he was on assignment to the Central Intelligence Agency.

  When he left the Air Force, he spent ten years in private industry, with several different firms. He was not doing investigative work; he found the jobs unrewarding, both emotionally and financially. He lived in Yukon, a suburb of Oklahoma City, and in 1982 he set up shop there as a legal investigator, under the corporate name K-Mar Legal Investigations. He did not like the terms “private investigator” or “private eye,” because they smacked of prying into tawdry divorce suits. Kerner handled criminal investigations and civil suits, but refused to get involved in divorces. In the spring of 1985 he was president of the Oklahoma Private Investigators Association. He was fifty-two years old, six feet one inch tall, weighed 230 pounds.

  Kerner had been hired by Don Wyatt in the past, to do investigations in civil suits. In November of 1984, Wyatt called to ask if Kerner would take on some investigations in a murder case. The name of the suspect was Tommy Ward. Kerner said he would, but the attorney did not call him back with a definite assignment. Wyatt made a similar call to Kerner in January, while the preliminary hearing in the case was in recess; again, nothing definite was forthcoming. The case faded from the Oklahoma City newspapers. Kerner knew few of the details. He had all but forgotten about it. Then, in early May, Wyatt called again; he wanted the investigator to work on the case.

  On May 9, Richard Kerner drove to Ada. He met in the attorney’s spacious building—an opulent contrast to his own one-room office—with Wyatt and Wyatt’s office manager, Bill Willett. For more than an hour and a half he listened as Wyatt talked about the case, about how Tommy Ward claimed his confession had only been a dream. It was Kerner’s experience that suspects, in order to get the best possible defense, usually told their attorneys the truth; listening, Kerner felt that Don Wyatt genuinely believed his client was innocent.

  Wyatt outlined several courses of action he wanted Kerner to pursue. The most significant were: (1.) researching the disappearance of other Oklahoma convenience store clerks—notably the one in Seminole—and noting any similarities with the Ada case; (2.) interviewing other potential “suspects/witnesses,” particularly Marty Ashley and Jay Dicus, whom Ward had named in his kiss-and-run story; (3.) trying to locate the pickup truck described by the witnesses; (4.) locating and interviewing Mildred Gandy, who allegedly saw Denice Haraway at the Brook Trailer Park in Ada, in the company of two young men, two days after her disappearance; (5.) interviewing Karen Wise, the clerk at J.P.’s, about why she allegedly told Vicki Jenkins she was not sure about her identifications; (6.) interviewing Willie Barnett, who allegedly was visiting Ward around the time Denice Haraway disappeared. If possible, Kerner was to get recorded statements from those he interviewed: with their knowledge, if he felt they would cooperate; without their knowledge when that seemed more feasible. He was to submit a written report to the law firm by May 31.

  Kerner drove back to Yukon, to his office in the Spring Creek Executive Suite on Vandament Street. There were thirteen offices in the suite, whose members shared a common secretarial service. Kerner’s office was fourteen by sixteen feet, with a desk that faced a floor-to-ceiling one-way glass wall; Kerner could see out, but people outside could not see in; the view was of trees, a green lawn, a medical building across the way. Against one wall was another desk on which rested Kerner’s computer. Here, in front of the keyboard and the console screen, his investigation would begin; Kerner inserted his DataTimes menu into the computer; with it, he could punch up newspaper stories that had appeared in the Daily Oklahoman, as well as in newspapers as far off as Dallas, Chicago, St. Louis. He punched in the code for the Oklahoman, and a series of key words. The computer printed a list of all headlines that had appeared in the Oklahoman in recent years dealing with the abduction of clerks from convenience stores; the list contained convenience store abductions in Chandler, Clinton, Seminole, Cushion, and Wewoka. He punched up the full stories that had appeared under the headlines and printed them; he carried the printouts to his desk and read them; each mention in a story that had a similarity to the Haraway disappearance he marked in red. By far the most similar, in almost every respect, was the disappearance of Patty Hamilton from the U-Totem store in Seminole.

  A few days later, Kerner drove to the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, in a one-story building in Oklahoma City. There he asked to see the complete driving records of Marty Ashley, Jay Dicus, and several others whose names had been mentioned at one time or other by Tommy Ward. He was permitted to inspect and copy the records, at a cost of $4.50 each; any citizen could do the sa
me. From the driver records, he knew, he could acquire a lot of useful information: full names with their correct spellings, addresses, birth dates, social security numbers, the types of vehicles owned. Records of traffic citations could place an individual in a certain town on a certain date.

  Marty Ashley’s records showed an address in Paul’s Valley, about thirty miles west of Ada. An extensive list of traffic citations placed Ashley in the Ada area from June 1980 to February 1983. Since then there were citations in other towns in central Oklahoma. He’d received three citations in 1984; none of the vehicles involved were pickup trucks. Other names Kerner checked, such as Jay Dicus, produced no records; the investigator decided they might be nicknames; he would need more information. Don Wyatt also had asked him to check out a pickup with a certain license tag; Joel Ward had seen the truck in a suburb of Tulsa, and felt it closely resembled the one described as leaving McAnally’s, except that it had recently been painted yellow. The truck turned out to be registered to a name unfamiliar in the case; Kerner called Don Wyatt, who told him not to pursue that avenue for now.

  But Kerner did set up a lunch appointment, for later in the month, with Dexter Davis, the assistant police chief of Seminole. He wanted to learn as much as he could about the Patty Hamilton case.

  On May 16, the attorneys on both sides got their first look at Judge Donald Powers. As he took his place behind the bench in the third-floor courtroom, his black robes seemed to be the cloth he’d been born to wear. He had a large, squarish face, fair skin with a hint of ruddiness, wavy hair combed back that was so pure gray it was almost white. He looked like the Hollywood image of a distinguished judge.

  The business before the court this day was routine. The defense attorneys had requested that Ward and Fontenot be tested as to their competency to stand trial; Judge Powers swiftly granted the motion. He ordered that they be committed to Eastern State Hospital, at Vinita, for a period of no more than sixty days. This would not be a determination of whether they were insane, merely of whether they understood the charges against them and would be able to assist their attorneys in preparing their defense.

  The application filed on Ward’s behalf by Don Wyatt claimed that Ward was unable to distinguish reality from the imaginary, that “continued use of powerful drugs over a long period of time” had rendered his powers of reasoning and comprehension useless, that he could be led and directed by other persons, that he could be manipulated without regard to the consequences, that he “lives in a dreamlike state,” and that therefore he was not competent to undergo further proceedings.

  The judge ordered that the two suspects be transported to Vinita at the earliest convenience of the sheriff’s department. He said all proceedings in the case would be suspended until their return. He would use the time, he said, to read the five-volume transcript of the preliminary hearings, which had been delivered to all of the parties that day.

  As the hearing concluded, Wyatt asked the judge to grant permission for Ward to have a haircut and a shave. His client had been denied a razor and a pair of scissors ever since his arrest, the attorney said. The judge responded that if that were not done at Vinita it should be handled upon their return, that the length of the defendants’ hair at this time had nothing to do with the case.

  When Bud got off work that day, a Thursday, he went to the jail and brought Tommy a carton of cigarettes, to last him through his first few days at Vinita. A jailer gathered his personal belongings—mostly letters he had been saving—into a paper sack, for the family to keep while he was gone. The following morning, Tommy and Karl were placed in a squad car and taken by sheriff’s deputies on the five-hour drive to Vinita, north of Tulsa.

  Looking out the window as they rode, Tommy was thrilled by the deep rich greenery of the countryside. He remembered snow on the ground the last time he’d been outside the jail; he’d expected now to see only a faint green haze of early spring; he had to remind himself it was the middle of May; the time that stood still in the jail went racing along outside.

  Held in separate jails, Tommy and Karl had not seen each other in six months except during their court appearances. Now, with the trees, the hills, the ponds, the cattle and horses, the oil pumps of central Oklahoma passing outside the windows, they had a chance to talk. They gabbed on and off between silent times of looking at the scenery; they did not discuss the case.

  After an hour, the road passed through McAlester, where the Oklahoma State Penitentiary is located. The deputies drove past the prison. The boys could see a wire-mesh gate at street level, and up a grassy slope behind it a high whitewashed wall, with gun towers on the top.

  At the hospital at Vinita, the sheriff’s deputies were instructed to wait until they were told they could leave. Inside the hospital, their forms processed, Tommy and Karl were asked a series of simple questions: Did they know what a judge was? Did they know what a jury was? Did they know what a lawyer was? They answered “yes” to each of the questions. Their answers were noted on a one-page form. They were given a few other simple tests. The evaluator, Dr. Sandra Petrick, noted for her files—but did not write on the form—of Fontenot: “At the time of his arrest, he did not understand the implications of a confession.” Then they were taken out to the patrol car, where the deputies were waiting.

  Take them back, the deputies were told; they are competent to stand trial.

  The deputies shrugged, put them in the car, and began the long drive back. When they passed through McAlester, Karl said, “I want to go by that prison again, and see what it looks like on the outside. Before they put me inside.”

  “Why do you want to do that?” a deputy asked. “You starting to plan your escape?”

  The suspects were back in the Ada jails by early evening. At Tommy’s request, a deputy named Virginia telephoned Bud and Tricia, to let them know he was back already; so they would come to see him on Sunday. When they did, he told them about the trip; about Karl’s remark about being put inside the prison. The comment had shaken Tommy, who was clinging to the hope that, sooner or later, they would be freed. It was a comment open to various interpretations. It frightened Tommy’s family; it made the attorneys, when they were told of it, wonder. Did it mean that Karl was thinking about pleading guilty, whether or not he was guilty or innocent? Or did it show that he was more in touch with reality than Tommy, that he perceived better the serious, perhaps fatal nature of their circumstances, given the confession tapes they had made? All felt that to some degree it reflected the different life situations of the two friends: Tommy poor but deeply loved, with a loyal family, loyal friends; Karl abandoned by his family, no one to turn to, unvisited, living on the outside a homeless existence. Perhaps Karl wanted to be in jail.

  Or had the statement been merely an idle comment, a passing attempt at humor?

  The competency ruling put the case back in the news. The following day, at the Wal-Mart department store, a shopper placed her purchases on the checkout counter. As the clerk rang them up on the register, she commented, “Isn’t it terrible about that Haraway case? Why are they holding those guys so long without any evidence?”

  “They must have some evidence,” the customer said.

  “I don’t know,” the checkout clerk said. “My husband works at the jail, and he’s gotten close to that Tommy Ward. He writes the most beautiful poems. The most beautiful poems. I haven’t heard much about evidence.”

  The silent customer paid by check. The clerk routinely asked for her place of employment.

  “I work at the district attorney’s office,” the customer said.

  Ben Brewer is one of Ada’s barbers. He is the proprietor of Ben’s House of Hair, on Fourth Street. On Tuesday, May 21, he received a phone call from one of his regular customers, Bud Wolf. Bud wanted to know if Ben would go over to the county jail and cut his brother-in-law’s hair.

  Ben had been there a few times before to cut the hair of inmates; it was not his favorite thing to do, but he did it as a favor to customers.
He told Bud he would do it, but that he needed a ride over there; Bud should come by and pick him up about 5:30, when he closed the shop.

  During the afternoon, as he cut a customer’s hair, Ben mentioned that he’d be going over to the jail after work to give a haircut. “I hope it ain’t one of them Haraway guys,” the customer said.

  Ben had had stranger requests than going to the jail. He had, a few times, cut the hair of corpses. The most recent time had been a few months before.

  “Picked him up by the ears,” Ben recounted later. “They was real cold. Just sort of trimmed around the ears, because that’s all you can see in an open casket. Sort of a fake haircut. Didn’t charge ’em for it. Later the funeral home sent fifteen dollars. Told ’em I didn’t want the family’s money. They said no, the haircut was included in the price of the funeral.”

  At 5:30, Bud came by on schedule, and drove Ben to the jail. They entered the waiting room for visitors. A deputy locked the outer door behind them; the jailers brought Tommy into the room. Bud and Tommy hugged, arms tight, chests pressing hard against each other. It was the first time they could hug in six months.

  Tommy wanted his hair cut real short, white-walled on the sides. Ben cut it the way he wanted. Bud watched as shocks of Tommy’s long, straight hair fell to the floor. It was much darker than it used to be, Bud noticed, after six months untouched by sunlight.

  As Tommy was being led back to his cell, one of the deputies grabbed a camera; he looked so different, the deputies felt, they needed a new picture of him.

  Bud drove the barber back. As they rode through the streets, the barber told him, “I did that just for you, because you’re a regular customer. If the jail had called me up, I would have said no. If that prisoner had called me up, I would have said no. I did it just as a favor to you.” He paused. “Who was that, by the way?”