The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  “I told you,” Bud said. “That’s my brother-in-law.”

  Ben asked, “Well, what’d he do?”

  “He’s one of the suspects in the Haraway case.”

  Ben fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “I don’t judge. I just cut hair.” He paused. “Somebody done it.”

  Bud said, “Yeah, somebody done it.”

  “Well, if those boys didn’t do it,” Ben said, “then they should let ’em outta there.” The rest of his thought he didn’t speak aloud. The rest of his thought was: if they did do it, they should kill ’em, long and slow.

  Ben charged five dollars for the haircut, the usual; no extra charge for going to the jail.

  The next day the barber received another call, this one from a policeman who was a regular customer. Ben was almost expecting it.

  “I’d like you to do me a favor,” the policeman said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d like you to come over to the city jail and cut someone’s hair.”

  Just as he anticipated, it was Karl Fontenot. The boy’s black hair hung in waves to his shoulders. He seemed to Ben like a wiseguy teenager. As Ben worked with the scissors, and clumps of hair fell to the floor, Fontenot said, “You’d better save that hair. Pick it up and make a wig out of it.”

  “Why should I do that?” the barber asked.

  “That hair’s gonna be famous some day,” Karl said.

  Ben decided the hair wouldn’t be famous. He didn’t pick it up. He thought: if I did bend down and pick up that hair, and carry it out, and people found out about it, they would jump me and beat me up.

  The day that Tommy Ward got his haircut, Richard Kerner drove east on Interstate 40 to Seminole, where he had lunch with the assistant chief of police, Dexter Davis, in a small downtown cafe. Amid the clatter of silverware on formica tabletops and the rancid smell of old grease on the grill, they discussed at length the details of the Patty Hamilton disappearance. Kerner knew, from the newspaper stories he’d punched up, the many similarities between the Hamilton and the Haraway cases: both disappeared from convenience stores, never heard from again, no bodies found. In both cases money was missing from the register, but in both cases it was possible the money had been taken by the next person who came along, after the abduction; it was possible robbery had not been a motive in either case. Davis told Kerner of vehicles the Seminole police had checked out in the Hamilton case, of a suspect from Enid, Oklahoma, who had been checked out and cleared by the OSBI. He said he was still investigating the Hamilton disappearance, that he thought the girl might still be alive, that there could well be a connection between the crimes in Seminole and Ada.

  The next day, after numerous unsuccessful attempts, Kerner established telephone contact with Willie Barnett—“the elusive Willie,” as Don Wyatt had called him. After a brief conversation, Willie hung up. Kerner called back immediately. A female voice said that Willie was not at home. After a bit more conversation with the woman, however, Willie got back on the line, and agreed to talk to the investigator. He said he did visit Tommy Ward at his house one evening, about 8:30 to 8:40 P.M., when Ward was stretched out on the couch, asleep. He had walked to Ward’s house from his own, he said, and Tommy woke up and they talked for about ten minutes, and then he left. He said that Ward’s “uncle” had been there at the time, and told him that Tommy had been on the couch because he was feeling sick. Willie said he had known Tommy for only about two months at the time. He told Kerner that this might have been the night the Haraway girl disappeared—but that he couldn’t be sure. He said Ward’s “uncle”—presumably he was referring to Tommy’s oldest brother, Jimmy—had told him it was the same night, but that he himself could not recall positively whether it was or not.

  To Kerner, pulling answers out of Willie felt like pulling teeth. To some questions Willie did not respond at all, and after a long silence Kerner had to ask if he was still on the line. Willie said that in the two months he’d known Tommy he’d never seen him in a pickup truck. Kerner repeatedly asked Willie to meet him somewhere, to talk. Willie refused. But he did, reluctantly, give Kerner his address, on West Twelfth Street. The investigator wrote it down, for a follow-up visit.

  The next day, May 23, Kerner went to Ada. He drove out Country Club Road, past the Arlington Shopping Center, past a small industrial complex that housed Blue Bell jeans, Remington Arms, and others, and turned left at the entrance to the Brook Mobile Home Park. He was hoping to interview Mildred Gandy. She was the woman who allegedly had told Maxine Wolf the previous November that she had seen Denice Haraway alive at the trailer park, in the company of two young men, two days after she disappeared.

  The Brook was a well-kept mobile home park, in which circular cul-de-sacs, five to ten mobile homes on each, opened off two long entry and exit roads. In some of the cul-de-sacs there were basketball backboards, and on some of the hoops, fresh cloth nets hung undamaged. A swimming pool, unused as Kerner passed, was enclosed with wire fencing. Clothes were hanging to dry on clotheslines beside some of the trailers. The investigator drove along the entry road until he spotted the park office toward the rear. In the office he found the manager, Mary K. Lavielle.

  Kerner told Ms. Lavielle whom he was looking for. The manager said Mildred Gandy had lived at lot number 97 at the park, but that she had moved away two weeks ago; she had left a forwarding address and phone number in Choctaw, Oklahoma. When the investigator stated his mission, Ms. Lavielle pulled out a map of the trailer park. Together they checked the records of the trailers surrounding lot 97, which would have been visible from Mrs. Gandy’s place; nothing of value was obtained, Kerner felt.

  As they looked at the records together, the investigator felt that Ms. Lavielle was nervous. She kept asking questions about the case. Kerner had the feeling that there was something on her mind that she was hesitant to talk about; if not, he thought, she would have given him the information he wanted and then escorted him to the door. But her questions continued; she showed Kerner into an adjoining room, where they sat on chairs beside a bare table; the rest of the room was empty; Kerner had the feeling it might have once been a recreation room for the trailer park residents, with a Ping-Pong table or something.

  The investigator became more and more convinced that Ms. Lavielle had something to say; he switched into his “keep the conversation going mode,” to see what would happen. The manager told him how back in August of 1983, a fellow named Monty Moyer lived in the park, and that Steve Haraway had been planning to move in with him, but never had. (That was the month, Kerner would realize later, that Steve Haraway married Donna Denice Lyon.) Ms. Lavielle talked on and on, which is what Richard Kerner wanted. He’d been there about thirty-five minutes, he calculated, when Mary Lavielle finally blurted out what was on her mind. She said that at the time that Denice Haraway disappeared, she had been working at the Ada Finance Company, that she and three other persons had looked at the composite drawings in the newspaper, and that they had all agreed on who the two men were. They were not, she said, the two who were presently being held in jail!

  Kerner was wearing a business suit, a white shirt, a tie, as he always did while working. One reason he always wore a suit, aside from neatness, was so that he could keep his microcassette tape recorder invisible but handy in the inside breast pocket. The recorder was not turned on; he only used it surreptitiously when he felt the person he was interviewing would not cooperate, would not record a statement voluntarily. His excitement began to build as Mary Lavielle responded to his questions; he could feel his heart thumping against the small leather case of the recorder.

  “What were the names of the men who looked like the drawings?” Kerner wanted to know.

  “One of them was named Randy Rogers,” Ms. Lavielle said. “The other was named Sparcino.”

  Did she feel sure of that?

  The drawings looked just like them, Ms. Lavielle said. And, she said, Janice Manuel, who had worked with her at the finance company, fe
lt the same way. And so did Kendall Holland, who owns the Ada TV Rental. And so did Shirley Brecheem, the manager of Security Finance. The names tumbled out of Mary Lavielle, as if they had been bottled up for a long time. All four of them had agreed at the time, she said: Randy Rogers was the suspect with the blond, earlobe-length hair; the other was his friend, Sparcino, who had shoulder-length brown hair.

  They felt sure of it, she said. They had notified the police of those identifications at the time.

  And the police? Richard Kerner wanted to know—had the police come to talk to her about these identifications?

  “No,” Mary Lavielle said. None of them had ever been interviewed by the police.

  Richard Kerner was intrigued. If what Lavielle was telling him was true—and he couldn’t imagine why she would make it up—then he might be onto something big, a major break in the case, right at the start of his investigation. Four different people identifying the composite drawings as another set of suspects entirely! And the police not contacting them for further information! At best, he thought, that was shoddy police procedure. In his experience, the police did that routinely: they would visit with the people who phoned in identifications; show them the originals of the drawings, which were usually better than the newspaper reproductions; ask how they knew the people they were naming, why they thought it looked like them, what their habits were; get all the information they could; follow every lead, however slim. If Lavielle was correct, then that had not been done in this case. He could only wonder why.

  But was Lavielle correct?

  Kerner thanked her for her time. He drove out of the trailer park, went to the Security Finance Company on North Oak Street. There he interviewed the manager, Shirley Brecheem. Ms. Brecheem confirmed Mary Lavielle’s story. She went a step further. She said the composite drawings were so like Rogers and Sparcino that they looked like photographs of each of them. She said she recognized them because Rogers sometimes had come in to the company for loans, and Sparcino was with him.

  Kerner asked Ms. Brecheem if she would give him a recorded statement about what she was saying; Ms. Brecheem said she would. Kerner took his recorder from his coat pocket, set it on the desk between them. Part of their ensuing conversation went like this:

  KERNER: Okay, as I understand, you have had dealings with two men in making them loans and/or rejecting loans, and you identified the police composite drawings as being these two men. Is that correct?

  BRECHEEM: That’s right, I did.

  KERNER: We’re talking about a Randy A. Rogers and a Robert A. Sparcino, is that correct?

  BRECHEEM: Yes, sir.

  KERNER: In your own words could you tell me briefly what happened when you saw the composite drawings of the suspects on the television?

  BRECHEEM: Well, I hollered at my husband and said, “I know these two guys. One of them has a loan and I turned the other one down.”

  KERNER: And then what happened?

  BRECHEEM: Well, I called the police station and told them who I thought it was.

  KERNER: Okay, did you call anybody else about…

  BRECHEEM: I called the next morning and talked to some sergeant—gave the social security numbers, date of birth, areas where they were originally from.

  KERNER: And this was immediate. You saw the drawing on TV, and you immediately said this is Randy Rogers and Robert Sparcino?

  BRECHEEM: Yes. I mean to me they looked identical to the two…

  KERNER: Shirley, you have seen pictures of Tommy Jesse Ward and Karl Fontenot on television and in the newspapers, and I have showed you a picture of both, and it’s my understanding that the composite drawings still fit Rogers and Sparcino, better than they fit Ward and Fontenot.

  BRECHEEM: Well, it looks most like them. It looks like a photograph taken of them.

  KERNER: You’re talking about the composite drawings?

  BRECHEEM: Yes.

  KERNER: Looks close enough…

  BRECHEEM: Of Rogers and Sparcino, that it could have been someone taking a picture of them.

  The conversation went on a bit longer. At the conclusion, Shirley Brecheem said, “I would of bet a hundred dollars that it was the two. I was that convinced, and I still am. It looks just like them.”

  Brecheem had said she had never been interviewed by the police about her identifications. Kerner had it all on tape now. He got copies from Ms. Brecheem of all the background information the loan company had on Rogers and Sparcino. He hurried to his next stop, the Ada Finance Company on North Constant. He interviewed the manager there, Janice Manuel. She told, with a tape recorder running in front of her, a story similar to Shirley Brecheem’s. She didn’t know Robert Sparcino, she said, but she felt at the time that one of the drawings looked just like Randy Rogers; she had called the police to tell them that; the police had never contacted her further.

  Kerner moved on, to the Ada TV Rental on Main Street. Again getting permission to use the recorder, he interviewed the manager, Kendall Holland. Kerner showed Holland the composite drawings. The manager said one of them was a very good likeness of Randy Rogers. He said Rogers had worked for him some time prior to the disappearance of Denice Haraway; he said he had fired Rogers after about three days for poor work performance. He said he had never personally called the police about the resemblance, but that he’d had discussions about it with Jan Manuel at Ada Finance, and that when she called the police she’d most likely mentioned his identification as well. Like the other three, the description Holland gave of Randy Rogers fit the one under the composite drawing on the police flyer. He added that Rogers had “a wild crowd of friends.”

  The investigator returned to his car. His report on this first phase of the investigation was not due till the end of the month, but this was information he felt couldn’t wait. As he drove out Arlington toward Don Wyatt’s office, he could hardly believe what he had. The first four people he had talked to, all in one day, had all named the same person as the man in the composite drawing. They were all upstanding, responsible citizens, with no reason to be biased in the case. And they all said it wasn’t Tommy Ward, it was Randy Rogers. The investigator was shocked, dumbfounded, that the Ada police or the OSBI had not talked to any of these people.

  Kerner met with Don Wyatt behind the closed door of the lawyer’s office; he told him what he had. Wyatt, often unperturbable, grew excited as Kerner continued with his narration. He did not play the three tapes for Wyatt, but told what was on them.

  What about Mary Lavielle at the trailer park, Wyatt wanted to know. You didn’t tape her? Kerner said he had not. Well, get on back there, Don Wyatt said; get her on tape as well.

  Kerner returned to the trailer park. Mary Lavielle voluntarily repeated on tape what she had told him earlier. Now he had all four.

  As he drove home to Yukon that evening, the investigator was exhilarated. His first real day in the field, and he believed he might have cracked the case.

  For the next week the investigator spent much of his available time on the case. On May 24 and 25 he had long telephone conversations, from his office, with Mildred Gandy at her new residence in Choctaw. He summarized the conversations on paper for his written report to Don Wyatt:

  After lengthy discussion, Gandy said it was about five weeks before the disappearance that she saw Donna Haraway standing in the doorway of a trailer on lot #95 at Brook Trailer Park. She seemed reasonably sure it was Haraway, and recalled the incident when Haraway’s picture was observed on television and in the paper. On the day Gandy [had] seen Haraway, an older model Chevrolet pickup truck, dull gray in color, with large tires on the rear end, was departing this trailer at lot #95. She recalled that a sandy-blond-headed man lived in this trailer and drove the truck. The hair length was to the earlobe. Gandy said a lot of parties went on at this trailer with a younger crowd. She observed the truck pulling a small trailer with saw horses in it and was told by the park office that the occupants of this trailer were in the construction business. She did no
t know if the blond-haired person lived at the trailer or not. She believed the people in the trailer on lot #95 moved shortly after Haraway disappeared. Gandy recalled that during this period in March and April 1984 a Cherokee Paving Company owned some land near the trailer park and was dumping a lot of loose dirt on this land from the construction site of McDonald’s in Ada. Gandy wondered about the missing girl being buried under this dirt, making a connection with her at the trailer…Gandy seemed sure the girl at the doorway of the trailer was indeed Haraway, but was shaky on the dates. At first she agreed it was after the disappearance, on either May 2 or 3, 1984, but later said she figured out the date to be in March 1984. This investigator has a feeling that Gandy believes that if she says she saw Haraway before the disappearance she will not get involved in a court appearance. It seems somewhat unlikely that Gandy would see Haraway weeks prior to the disappearance and then make a connection from a news photograph.

  Kerner called Mary Lavielle and got the names of the people who had rented the trailer on lot #95 from August 1983 to August 1984; they indeed had been in the construction business; the names were unfamiliar to the case. His first attempts to track them down were unsuccessful.

  On May 29 Kerner once again went to Ada. With his tape recorder ready to go in his pocket, he pulled off the highway in front of J.P.’s Pak-to-Go. He was hoping to interview Karen Wise about her positive identification of Tommy Ward as being in her store the night of the disappearance. But inside the store was another clerk. Karen Wise was not on duty; she had recently moved, and had no telephone. Kerner reached Wise’s mother at Kerr Lab, where she worked; the mother agreed to help Kerner get in touch with Karen; she said she expected a call from Karen later in the day. Kerner called the mother back three times; he was told that Karen had not yet phoned.

  Stymied there, Kerner went to interview Vicki Jenkins. She was the woman who had come to Tricia’s house to tell her that Karen Wise had not been sure about her identification of Tommy. Vicki denied this to the investigator; she said Karen Wise had never said anything to her about being unsure of the identifications she had given to the police.