by Robert Mayer
Some people viewed Wyatt as a bully; some of those close to him thought his forceful manner was a cover for insecurity. Whatever his inner feelings, he clearly could adopt a bullying stance when it suited his purposes. Such was the mood Tricia found him in when she went to his office on Tuesday, September 3. He had called and said he wanted to see her and members of the family. Tricia rounded up her mother and Kay and went down there, and found the lawyer angry with them. He was angry about money.
They had given him $5,000 to date, Wyatt told them (most of it from Joel); much of this had gone to the private investigator; some for the transcript; some to a psychiatrist who examined Tommy in the jail. There was only $500 for his own fee. He wanted something settled about the house; he was not going into the courtroom next Monday to defend Tommy unless they settled first about the house.
This was pure bluff and bluster. Once Wyatt took the case, his fee was his own problem; the court would not have let him withdraw because he wasn’t being paid. He had told that to Tricia at the beginning; she remembered it now. But she didn’t want him angry like that.
Miz Ward said she’d had an offer of $15,000 for the house and the property on which it stood; Wyatt said that would not be settled by Monday. He wanted her to sign over the deed to him, now, though the original agreement gave them until October 25 before he was entitled to the house. Miz Ward smiled blandly, not seeming to understand. Tricia told her to go ahead and sign the deed, pointing out that Miz Ward did not want the house anyway, that she preferred living in Tulsa now.
Miz Ward agreed. She signed over to the lawyer the house she’d moved into in 1938, the day Jesse planted the pecan tree. When that was done, Wyatt’s attitude changed. Suddenly he was their friend again. He told them about Richard Kerner’s findings. They were encouraged; they felt that after all these months, Wyatt was finally working full speed on the case.
He told them about the trial procedure. He said they should dress well. He said those who were not witnesses should be in the courtroom as much as possible, showing support for Tommy. Miz Ward should hug him whenever possible, he said. Miz Ward said she had done that anyway, at the preliminary hearing, and an officer told her he was about to shoot her when she first moved toward Tommy. After that she had always asked permission. Wyatt told her, “Don’t ask permission. Just ignore them and go hug him. That carries weight with the jury. So does support by the family in the courtroom.”
He told them he wanted as many family members as possible present during the jury selection, so they could tell him, or write notes to him, about any prospective jurors who’d had fights with the family, who might have grudges against family members; so he could reject them as jurors; and, in the same way, to point out to him any people they knew had good feelings about the family, so he could try to keep them on.
He also mentioned a woman who had called his office to say she had information that would “definitely” exonerate Tommy. She was coming to see him on Wednesday.
Buoyed by this, and by the investigator’s findings, Tricia, Kay, and Miz Ward left the attorney’s office feeling optimistic. His anger at not being paid was forgiven; he was working hard for Tommy.
When they got home, Tricia fixed on an idea that wouldn’t go away. The woman who had called, who had said she could definitely exonerate Tommy: who better could prove he was innocent than Denice Haraway! Perhaps it was Denice Haraway herself who had called! Or if not her, then someone who knew her, someone who had seen her alive!
That night, obsessed with the possibility, the hope, Tricia could hardly sleep. Her mind was going ninety-to-nothin’.
On Wednesday afternoon, she called Wyatt, to find out. He told her that yes, the woman had shown up. But if she had any real information, he said, she had become frightened and had not told him. What she did have to say, the lawyer told Tricia, “didn’t amount to a hill of beans.”
The Indians of Oklahoma once lived in harmony with the wealth of the land, as did Indians across America. Now, most of them lived close to the poverty level, victims of culture shock, poor education, racial prejudice—as were Indians across America.
Days before the trial was to begin, a poor Indian woman was stabbed to death amid a cluster of mobile homes at the southern edge of Ada. The police detained her husband briefly, then released him. Apparently there were no witnesses, or none that would talk to the police. The killing was the subject of a brief item in the Ada News the next day; then it disappeared from public view, quickly forgotten.
Maxine and C. L. Wolf wondered aloud why this Indian woman’s life seemed to mean nothing to the authorities, while they were still pursuing the Haraway case after a year and a half, in the absence of a body.
They wondered aloud, but they felt they knew the answer: the dark-skinned and the poor did not count for much, in Ada or anywhere else.
Don Wyatt told Miz Ward he wanted Tommy to have a clean, pressed suit to wear, every day of the trial. She was relieved to discover that Bud’s suits fit Tommy; he could wear those. Then she was called by a deputy at the jail, and was told to bring over a suit for Karl; he could not be tried in his prison garb; that would be prejudicial.
Miz Ward did not know why it was her responsibility to supply Karl; she knew him, but not well; she had not even been to visit him. But by her quiet, retiring nature, and her general bewilderment at the way the world worked, she was not one to question authority. She went to the Salvation Army store a few blocks from Tricia’s house and picked out a rust-colored, three-piece suit, in good condition, marked “$15.” She was able to buy it for ten dollars—more than she could afford—along with a shirt. The Saturday before the trial she brought them to the jail.
Only later did she learn that the deputy thought Miz Ward was in possession of Karl’s clothing.
Don Wyatt held a Sunday meeting at his office with George Butner, Fontenot’s attorney. Butner had been unable to obtain money from the state to hire a private investigator; Wyatt filled him in on Richard Kerner’s latest scenarios. In mounting the defense, they agreed, Butner would have to follow Wyatt’s lead. Wyatt had told Tricia and Miz Ward he thought they had a fifty-fifty chance of getting the boys off. Butner was not that optimistic. He did not see how they would get around the tapes.
At the jail, waiting, Karl Fontenot used an evocative phrase to a visiting journalist. He said he felt “lost in the case.”
Bill Peterson went to church with his family, then went home, his mind, too, going ninety-to-nothin’, as not he but Tricia would have said. The sun was blazing outside, the temperature on September 8 still in the nineties. Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers and Mike Baskin and Chris Ross waited. Steve Haraway, in from Norman for the duration of the trial, was at the home of his parents, east of Ada. He, and they, waited. Judge Donald Powers, at his home in Chandler, packed a suitcase; he would drive the eighty miles to Ada in the morning, would stay at the Raintree Motel on Mississippi, a Best Western motel.
In the evening, many of the people of Ada went to church, as was the Baptist practice. Some drove to Wintersmith Park, and walked around the lake in the humid air, watching the ducks and geese glide on the surface. Students from East Central played touch football. On Main Street, Sunday traffic was light, as usual. One of the films showing at the McSwain Twin was a James Bond picture: A View to a Kill. Atop the highest turret of the feed mill a red light flashed, flashed, as it did every night.
Bud and Tricia had fifteen people staying in their cluttered three-bedroom house: themselves and the three children; Miz Ward; Melvin; Joice and her four kids, down from Tulsa; Kay and Billy and their infant son, also down from Tulsa. Joel and Robert would be arriving Sunday night. Mattresses were strewn on the floor everywhere; and babies; and children. But unexpectedly amid the chaos, there was an evening of quiet. Joice’s husband, Robert, when he arrived from Tulsa, took one look around the jammed house and took Joice and their four kids to the Indian Hills Motel, on Broadway, to give Tricia some peace. For a few hours, Bud, Tricia, the
ir own three children, and Miz Ward were alone there. The calm seemed almost unnatural amid the clutter.
Tricia shooed the kids to their room, went in to put them to sleep. Bud and Miz Ward sat in the living room. Most times the TV set would have been on; the TV was always on, whether anyone was watching it or not. But now the tube was dark, silent, its innards burned out by the lightning. In retrospect, even that lightning storm seemed to have a meaning: the broken set would spare them from seeing the nightly reports of the trial on the news.
Tricia looked down at the scrubbed faces of the kids. She was feeling better about Rhonda. She had talked to Rhonda’s teacher about the coming ordeal; the teacher had warned the sixth-grade class: no one was to say a word to Rhonda about her uncle, about the trial; if they did, they would be punished severely. Thus far, all the kids had been obeying.
In the living room, beneath the large painting of Jesus, Bud and Miz Ward talked quietly about the case. Bud said a large part of him still believed Denice Haraway was alive; that she had run off, taken a new identity, was living somewhere far away, in Pennsylvania, or West Virginia, or California. Not that she would willfully let someone be tried for her murder, he said. But that she was unaware of what was going on in Ada. He raised what he said was a “weird” question: what would happen if Tommy was convicted, and then, just as the gavel rang out, Denice Haraway walked into the courtroom? He wondered what the legal situation would be then.
Miz Ward agreed with Bud. She said she, too, still felt Denice Haraway was alive; that she had run away with someone, for some reason.
The kids were safely asleep. Tricia returned to the living room. She sat down heavily, tiredly, easing the weight of her large belly. She was due November 5; she was hoping the emotions of the trial would not be too much of a strain on the infant inside her.
Only a few days earlier, when the woman with “information” had called Don Wyatt, Tricia had hoped it was Denice Haraway. But now she said no, that after all she had heard about the Haraway girl, she didn’t think she would run away like that; the greater part of her now felt Denice Haraway was dead.
12
TRIAL BY JURY
At 6:07 in the still-dark morning of September 9, the first train whistle of the day wailed across Ada—at first, from a distance, mournfully; and then, as the train drew closer, maniacally. It was heard by many of those involved in the Haraway case as they lay in their beds, awakened early by adrenaline rush.
Detective Captain Dennis Smith was out and about soon after, with his wife, tossing the day’s copies of the Daily Oklahoman onto the lawns of subscribers. Many of those involved in the trial due to begin that morning were startled as they unfolded the paper and read the front-page headline sprawled across four columns:
CUSTOMERS FIND
BODY OF CLERK
Their astonishment was only momentary, however. The headline had nothing to do with the Haraway case. It referred to the robbery-murder of a male convenience store clerk in Oklahoma City the night before.
At 8 A.M., District Attorney Bill Peterson was already in his office, alone, behind a locked door. Even at that early hour the air was warm and moist; the heat wave was continuing, and the courthouse air conditioning had not yet taken effect. The district attorney removed the jacket of his suit. He sat in the large swivel chair behind his desk, leaned back, gazed abstractedly at the walls, on his face a look of contemplation. His hand idly toyed with the wide end of the striped tie that rested on his belly.
Across the street from the courthouse was the office of the local gas company; beside it, a large dirt parking lot. Slowly the lot began to fill with cars, station wagons, pickups, as the people who had been called for jury duty this day arrived from their homes in Ada, or from the smaller towns of Pontotoc County: Roff, Stonewall, Tupelo, Francis, Byng…They walked across Thirteenth Street, alone or in clusters, entered the courthouse through the double glass doors, passed the D.A.’s office on the left, the sheriff’s office on the right; passed vending machines displaying wrapped candy bars, bags of chips, passed soft drink machines, to the stairs; found their way by prior knowledge, or by asking, or by following the stream of people, to the third floor. There, outside the larger courtroom, a rectangular table had been set up; behind it sat court clerks. A single line formed at the table, crossed the third-floor hall, wound down the stairs as the prospective jurors gave their names to the clerks, who had to find them on a list that was seven legal sheets long. Signatures were then scrawled beside typed names, typed numbers. As each prospective juror signed in, he or she was given a temporary badge, and shown the way into the courtroom, through a small outer office to the left of the central doors. The main doors were locked, would be kept locked throughout the trial, for tighter security. The prospective jurors were not searched, but several sheriff’s deputies stood in the corridor, others near the entrance, watching.
Slowly the entire spectator section in the courtroom was filled with prospective jurors, including the front row, normally reserved for the press, when there was any press. Additional chairs were carried in by bailiffs and placed along the side walls. When all were seated, there were eighty-three prospective jurors, from whom twelve, and two alternates, would be chosen.
The district attorney placed a box of books on the prosecution table. The defense team—Don Wyatt, Leo Austin, George Butner—huddled in a rear office they would use during the trial. Judge Ronald Jones, the presiding judge of the county—the one who had withdrawn from the case—entered the courtroom, and spoke to the assembled citizens about doing their public duty. Originally there had been a panel of 225 people who had been called for jury duty this day, he told them. More than 70 had been excused because they were physically unable to serve; some had been excused because they were convicted felons, others for other reasons. Now it was down to the people in front of him. He told them that those chosen as jurors would receive $12.50 a day. The jury would not be sequestered, he said—at least not at the start of the trial. He stated their goal in a single sentence: “We are seeking the truth as it is found to be established by competent evidence.”
Then he left the courtroom.
On the lawn between the courthouse and the jail, two stories below, there were, somewhat unexpectedly, no spectators gathered, no gawkers, and no lines of deputies to keep them away. The door to the jail opened from the inside. Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were escorted out into the morning air. Ward was wearing a dark blue suit, a light blue dress shirt, a tie, all courtesy of his brother-in-law, Bud; Fontenot was wearing the rust-colored corduroy suit and the pale striped shirt that Miz Ward had bought at the Salvation Army; and a tie. Both were wearing handcuffs. Four uniformed sheriff’s deputies walked with them the forty-three steps from jail to courthouse, a deputy on each side of each suspect, holding lightly to their upper arms. The sun shone brightly. The pecan tree beneath which they passed was in leafy bloom.
In the first-floor corridor the small retinue waited for the elevator. On the third floor, in the small outer office, out of sight of the prospective jurors, the handcuffs were removed. A moment later, at 9:52 A.M., Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot walked into the crowded courtroom, to go on trial for their lives.
They sat at the defense table, facing the front, their backs to the prospective jurors. Don Wyatt, Leo Austin, George Butner joined them at the table. At the prosecution table to the right sat Bill Peterson, Chris Ross, Gary Rogers. From a rear entryway that led to the judge’s chambers, the court reporter, a well-groomed young woman named Dawn DeVoe, entered, took her place at her machine at the far side of the bench. A moment later all in the courtroom stood at the bailiff’s command as Judge Donald Powers entered and climbed to the bench, looking courtly in his black robe, with his wavy white hair, his rimless eyeglasses that were round at the bottom, flat on top.
“You may be seated,” the judge said.
All sat.
The trial in the Haraway case was under way, thirty-nine days short of a year after the
suspects were arrested, sixteen months and twelve days after Donna Denice Haraway disappeared without a trace.
DAY ONE
In brief opening remarks, the judge explained to the panel the procedure to be used in selecting the jury: each side would be allowed nine peremptory challenges, with which they could dismiss jurors without stating a reason; the number of dismissals for cause would be unlimited.
The court clerk, seated to the judge’s left, reached into a box, pulling out tags. One by one she read out a number, a name. One by one the people whose names were called edged their way out from among the crowded benches, walked through the low swinging half door held open by the bailiff, took their places in the jury box, across the courtroom from the judge, to the left of the defendants. A few of those called winced as they heard their names, their faces clearly showing that they did not want to serve. Some strode forward purposefully, with an aura of grim satisfaction. Most tried to remain expressionless. As the jury box filled, the attorneys on both sides watched intently. It was an axiom of trial law: often the case is decided by who winds up in the jury box.
When all twelve of the brown swivel chairs were filled, Judge Powers told them of the case: the State of Oklahoma versus Thomas Jesse Ward and Karl Allen Fontenot; the defendants accused of robbing, kidnapping, and murdering Donna Denice Haraway. He then asked if any of them had read of or heard of the case.
All twelve raised their hands.
The judge told them to think about whether, based on what they had read or heard, they had formed an opinion. He said they had formed an opinion if, in their minds, they knew, “I’m not starting out even right now.”
There was laughter in much of the courtroom.
The judge said he would read a list of names: of the principals in the case, the attorneys, and all the witnesses that would be called by the state. They were to think about whether they knew any of these people, had had any dealings with any of them. He would not name the defense witnesses, he said, because the defense, under the law, did not have to make that public. He read the list. Then, one by one, beginning with the first seat in the jury box, he questioned the panel about whether they knew any of the names he had read, about whether they had formed an opinion in the case that they could not set aside.