The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  Kerner tried to reach Karen again, but couldn’t; he left a message at J.P.’s for her to call him collect; he tried to reach Jack Paschall, the other witness at J.P.’s that night, but couldn’t. He went to another place where Randy Rogers had worked for a time, got the names of people that Rogers used to run with. One of the names mentioned was Marty Ashley. A friend of both told Kerner the composite drawing favored Randy Rogers and did not look like Tommy Ward at all.

  Continuing on his rounds that day, the investigator went to interview Jay Dicus; he learned that Dicus had moved to Denver, Colorado, just a few weeks earlier. The person he spoke with connected Dicus and Marty Ashley with Randy Rogers and Bob Sparcino, through a mutual friendship with a woman named Jackie Mantzke. The interview was being conducted at Dicus Cycle, a bike shop. In the midst of it, Jay Dicus’s father returned to the shop; he gave Kerner his son’s telephone number in Denver; he said Jay had left town merely because he was tired of Ada.

  As the investigator left the shop, phone number in hand, a third generation of Dicuses approached him: Frank Dicus, Jay’s grandfather. Frank Dicus told Kerner that someone he didn’t want to name had said there were two burned-out houses west of town, and that the police had searched the wrong one, that Denice Haraway’s body was probably in the other one. The grandfather didn’t say who it was that had told him this; Kerner suspected it had been Jay. Frank said he just had to tell someone about this, that he could take the investigator to the building. Kerner told him he might return later to go inspect this second burned building.

  For now, Kerner went to the courthouse to check the Pontotoc County records on all the names that were turning up. He discovered that an arrest warrant for burglary had been issued for Randy Rogers on July 27, 1983—and that he had apparently left town about that time. To the investigator, this did not necessarily mean that Rogers had not been involved; the highways that led out of Ada also led back. He also learned that Marty Ashley had been arrested four times in 1979 and 1980.

  Kerner went to the law office, finished reading the 110-page statement that Tommy Ward had written for Don Wyatt shortly after his arrest; he jotted down other names mentioned by Ward as part of his running crowd. Then he called Jay Dicus in Denver. Dicus denied any knowledge of the pickup truck involved; he said he did not know Rogers or Sparcino; he admitted knowing Jackie Mantzke; he said it was his belief that Odell Titsworth had killed Denice Haraway and had moved the body since doing so, and had threatened Ward and Fontenot with death if they told on him.

  The conversation went on for a long time. Kerner felt it produced little of value, since Odell Titsworth seemed to have been effectively eliminated by the police as a possible suspect; Dicus seemed to be only guessing.

  The month of May was drawing to a close. Back in his office in Yukon, the trees in full bloom outside the one-way glass wall, Kerner compiled a written report for Don Wyatt on all that he had obtained; he summarized possible areas for further investigation; he attached an itemized bill for the work he had done to date; and he waited for further instructions.

  On Memorial Day weekend, Melvin Ward was discharged from the Navy in Virginia. He returned home to Ada. He gave Tricia a homecoming gift of two hundred dollars. Tricia used most of the money to buy new shoes for all of the children, and for herself; Bud bought himself a used three-piece suit at the Salvation Army for $15, and a new tie for $4.95.

  On Sunday, Melvin went to visit Tommy; he was the closest in age to Tommy of all the boys in the family; they had been the closest friends, hanging out together, one time—a chagrined memory—jumping up and down on the roof of a car until it caved in. He hadn’t seen Tommy in more than a year, since long before the trouble began.

  Rhonda went with Melvin to the jail. They entered the visiting room before Tommy was visible through the window. Melvin sat on the low stool, Rhonda sat on Melvin’s lap; when Tommy entered, all he could see at first was Rhonda. He asked how she was doing; she said she was doing fine. Tommy leaned over to spit some tobacco; as his head was turned, Rhonda jumped off Melvin’s lap; when Tommy faced the window again, there was Melvin, unexpectedly, a big gleaming grin on his face.

  On opposite sides of the glass, the appearance of the brothers contrasted sharply—Tommy extremely thin from his seven months in the jail, darkness under his eyes from worry, his hands shaking, his hair darker than normal for lack of sunlight; Melvin fresh from the service in lean good shape, biceps bristling, belly firm, hair bright yellow, face tanned. They exchanged greetings, jokes, pleasantries. Then Melvin asked Tommy about the case.

  “Why did you make that tape?” Melvin said.

  “They question you for five hours,” Tommy said. “They keep telling you you did it, you did it. After five, six hours you don’t know what you’re saying anymore. After five, six hours you’ll say anything.”

  It crossed Melvin’s mind to ask Tommy if he was holding something back; if he knew who did it, and was protecting someone else. But Melvin didn’t ask the question; he didn’t want Tommy to think he didn’t have faith in him.

  The next court hearing in the Ward-Fontenot case was scheduled for June 11. Winifred Harrell helped Don Wyatt prepare the motions, already argued once, before Judge Jones, that now would be argued again, before Judge Powers.

  In recent weeks there had been changes at the law firm of Wyatt & Addicott. Don Wyatt had added to the firm a third partner, a tall, youngish former judge in the area, Leo Austin. New business cards were printed up: “Wyatt, Addicott & Austin.” Judy Wood, the receptionist at the front desk, had to get used to this new, longer way of answering the phone in her smooth, pleasant voice. In less than a month, however, the firm’s name changed again. Mike Addicott, who had helped with the Ward case, moved to Florida, where his wife’s family lived; new cards had to be printed up, a new sign posted on the lawn: “Wyatt & Austin.” Leo Austin began the tedious task of getting acquainted with the firm’s many pending cases; most important, he had to read and absorb the five volumes of the preliminary hearing in the Tommy Ward case; when it went to trial, he would be at Don Wyatt’s side.

  Soon after, Wyatt hired another young lawyer, Bill Cathey, to help primarily with the industrial cases. Once more the cards, the signs, were changed, this time to “Wyatt, Austin & Associates.”

  Tommy Ward’s family did not yet know about Richard Kerner’s findings. Wyatt, visiting Tommy, told him that things were looking up, but did not elaborate.

  In private, Wyatt was feeling good about the case for the first time. Over and over he read the investigator’s report, to explore its details, its various implications: Rogers, Sparcino, named by all those witnesses; the police not contacting them; possible connections with Ashley. The leads would have to be followed up. He was beginning to see, for the first time, how he might be able to raise in the minds of a jury the critical seedling of reasonable doubt.

  There was also the mention of the second burned-out house. Perhaps that was only gossip, perhaps not. It could be where the remains of Denice Haraway could really be found. Wyatt did not know if he wanted the investigator to check that out. His job was to defend Tommy Ward, not convict him; there was no telling what a second burned house might reveal.

  The irises of May were barely clinging to life; the scent of lilacs perfumed Ada’s mansions and shanties alike; June’s roses peeped newborn from tight buds; the pecan trees were hung again with green husks. At the Unity Missionary Baptist Church, Buddy Wolf, soon to become eight years old, was baptized amid pride and joyful noise. And in the county courthouse, a date was set for the start of the trial of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot.

  After all this time it sneaked up on the town, even on the principals, unawares. The spectator section in the courtroom was vacant; even Tricia was unaware that the boys would be in court this day, June 11.

  They sat at the defense table, in their jailhouse coveralls, with their attorneys; Bill Peterson at the opposing table; Judge Donald Powers, with his court robes and his courtly mann
er, presiding.

  The attorneys argued their motions; they had filed written briefs; the judge made his rulings, swift and sure. They had argued to sever the trials of the two defendants. Denied, Judge Powers said; the suspects would be tried together. A victory for the prosecution. They argued for a change of venue, because of the publicity about the case, because of the emotions it had aroused in the town. Denied for now, Judge Powers said; he would attempt to hold the trial in Ada; if it was determined at that time that an impartial jury could not be empaneled here, then he would move it elsewhere. They argued about the manner of jury selection, wanting the prospective jurors to be questioned individually, out of earshot of each other, particularly as to their views on capital punishment. Rulings on jury selection would be postponed until jury selection was about to begin, the judge said. The defense requested a copy of the October 12 interview tape, in which Tommy Ward repeatedly maintained his innocence; granted, the judge said.

  More technicalities. Then, suddenly, it was done. The judge said he was ready to go to trial; there had been enough delays; the trial could start in eight days, on June 19, if that was the will of the defendants.

  There was a moment of anguish, of mental throat clearing, at both tables. Eight days? Neither side was ready.

  That was impossible, Bill Peterson told the judge; it would take a week merely to prepare the subpoenas for all the witnesses. (Thinking: some of these guys you don’t just call up and say come on over; you have to track them down, hit them with the legal papers to make sure they will show.)

  There was also the question of vacations; most people took their vacations in late June or in July or in August; key witnesses might be unavailable. Both sides joining in. The attorneys had conflicts in the next few weeks. Don Wyatt would be taking his vacation in July; Bill Peterson in August.

  The judge listened patiently, or perhaps impatiently. The suspects had been in jail for nearly eight months; they had a constitutional right to a speedy trial. If there was going to be another long delay, he wanted to hear from the mouths of the suspects themselves, have it in the court record, which the court reporter was busily punching into his tapes, that this was agreeable. He told the two defendants that they should be aware of the advice of their attorneys, but if in spite of this they wanted an early trial date, now was the time to speak up. He particularly wanted Fontenot to speak, because his attorney had been appointed by the court.

  “I am in no hurry,” Tommy Ward said.

  “It [a later court date] is fine with me,” Karl Fontenot said.

  That being the situation, the judge ordered that jury selection in the case would begin in this courtroom on the morning of Monday, September 9.

  Bill Peterson was pleased; there would be plenty of time to prepare.

  Don Wyatt and George Butner were pleased; there would be a lot more time for Richard Kerner to proceed with his own investigation.

  The defendants seemed incapable of opinions. Three more months in jail before they would be freed, or three more months in jail before they would be convicted—you could look at it either way. Confinement, there being no choice in the matter, was becoming a way of life to Karl Fontenot; confinement, there being no choice in the matter, was becoming the Will of God to Tommy Ward.

  September 9, then.

  In the corridor outside the courtroom, Dorothy Hogue, who had been in the front row taking notes, was approached by Judge Ronald Jones, who had withdrawn from the case; Jones’s office opened off the corridor. Ms. Hogue was excited; it was a big story.

  “I wish you didn’t have to print the trial date in the paper,” Judge Jones said to the reporter.

  “Why is that?” Ms. Hogue asked.

  “Because half the town will schedule their elective surgery that day,” the judge said.

  At home that evening, Tricia and Bud heard the news for the first time on television: a trial date had been set. September 9. Tricia calculated in her mind. She was due the first week in November; she would be seven months pregnant during the trial.

  The next day it was the front-page headline in the Ada News:

  FONTENOT, WARD

  TRIAL DATE SLATED

  The town was buzzing once again.

  10

  THE SECOND SUMMER

  Summer in Ada was hot, humid; afternoon temperatures climbed to 100 degrees, hovered there week after week; combined with the high humidity it made a simple outdoor stroll an act of discomfort. The air felt wet to the touch, but such clouds as rolled in seemed rarely to crack and let loose rain. The sun blazed on all alike, rich and poor, involved or unconcerned, except for the two suspects, Ward and Fontenot, tucked away in their cells, far from the light; and except perhaps on the victim, whose whereabouts, dead or alive, remained unknown. But the glare of the Haraway case did not blaze on all alike; to each of those involved it was refracted by the prisms of their individual backgrounds, their differing status in Ada society, their professional training or lack of it, their unavoidable prejudices, the depths of religion in their lives and in their souls.

  To the family of Denice Haraway, to the police, to the district attorney, to most of the town’s establishment, the prism refracted a simple spectrum of guilt. Denice was gone, and because they knew no power on earth could have induced her to leave her family, her husband, her career, willingly, or to put them through this torment without a phone call or a letter or some other possible sign, then she most certainly, however terrible the thought, was dead; and, if dead, then someone had killed her. Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were part of the despised running crowd, whose members were probably capable of any imaginable affront to society, to the sanctity of life; most important of all, they had confessed; they had put on videotape their despicable tale of rape, torture, murder. Viewed through this respectable prism, there was no reason why anyone, even under police questioning, intense or not, would say they had done such things if they had not; the fact that they had immediately repudiated the confessions was simply the normal attempt of criminals—of butchers—to avoid paying the price for their crimes. They had rung in Odell Titsworth to place the blame for the actual killing on someone else; all the other statements on the tapes that had been proven false they had simply made up to baffle the police, to confuse the issue, to conceal what they had done with the body. And if, in spite of unofficial talk of a life sentence in exchange for the body, they still held out, it was because they had burned the body and thus had nothing to offer; or because they had thrown it more than a year ago into the Canadian River, or the North Canadian, and had no idea now where it might be, where the denuded bones now rested. The spectrum of this crime might contain shadows absent from most murder cases: the lack of a body, the lack of a weapon, the lack of the vehicle; but these were, by summer, merely disconcerting nuances in the black and white picture of guilt. Tommy Ward, between May and October of 1984, had changed his story to the police of what he had been doing the night of the disappearance. Everything else had flowed from that, inexorably, and would culminate, they fervently hoped and mostly believed, in the conviction of Ward and Fontenot in the county courthouse in September, and in a sentence of death. Only this would satisfy the demands of justice; only this would put the case to rest.

  To the family of Tommy Ward, to his mother and Tricia and Bud, to all seven brothers and sisters, to many people at the lower, less-educated, less-sophisticated end of Ada life, the light refracted differently. By now most of them were admitting to themselves that Denice Haraway was probably dead; from everything they’d heard, she wasn’t the kind of person to run off. But how could the police be sure, without a body, so sure that they could bring murder charges? She was a college girl, she was pretty, she’d only been married for eight months…she might have seen something better come along; perhaps not, but how can they be so sure? And then the tapes: they were fantasy, in this view. Titsworth had not been there, though that was on the tapes; the house had not been burned down that night, though that was on the tapes;
where had the pickup gone? Where had the body gone? Hardly anything on the tapes checked out. “Disregard everything they confessed to,” they seemed to hear the police, the district attorney, saying, “but believe they are guilty nonetheless.” From this vantage point they wanted to know why they, or anyone, should. Some felt they themselves had been harassed by the police from time to time; they knew firsthand the fear that could lurk at the end of a nightstick, or in a cell. They knew of the unsolved Patty Hamilton disappearance in Seminole, of the unsolved Debbie Carter murder in Ada; they viewed Dr. Jack Haraway of the Rotary Club and the First Christian Church as “high society”; they sensed on the police and the OSBI a great pressure to solve this one; they believed that the police—most of them once poor and unnoticed like themselves, but now in positions of power—were capable of doing anything to get a conviction when they felt they needed one. And so, through this prism, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were victims as much as Denice Haraway might be. Tommy had demonstrated his innocence by not leaving town, they felt, by repeatedly answering all police questions voluntarily, without being arrested, without even getting a lawyer; he had taken a polygraph voluntarily, to prove his innocence, and no evidence had been produced, beyond the unsupported word of the OSBI, that he had failed it. Uneducated, not very bright, Tommy could have been confused and manipulated by the police; weary after five hours of questioning, he had said on tape whatever they wanted him to say, merely to get them out of his face, believing that his lies would free him when they were exposed as lies. Karl Fontenot, in this view, totally incapable of violence, had been fed Tommy’s “confession” by the police, had regurgitated most of it back for the same reasons. If Tommy had been smart enough to ask for a lawyer right away, neither boy would have spent a single day in jail, and the police might be doing what they ought to be doing: might be out there looking for the truth, for the real killer of Denice Haraway. If she was dead.