The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  It was late Friday afternoon. There would be no time to show the tape that day. The trial was recessed till Monday. The attorneys from both sides, along with Dennis Smith, went into the district attorney’s office, to edit the tape; to excise the part in which Ward was asked to take a polygraph and agreed to do so. Judge Powers drove home to Chandler, to his wife and his own bed, for the weekend.

  The county fair was in town at the old rodeo grounds. There were rides, food booths, exhibits. An intermittent drizzle was falling, but Bud and Tricia wanted to get out of the house that night to get their minds off the trial. They took Rhonda, Buddy, and Laura Sue to the fairgrounds, to walk around.

  Melvin and Miz Ward stayed home in the house on Ninth Street. In early evening, the telephone rang. Melvin answered it. The woman calling identified herself as Peggy Lurch.

  She said she was the wife of Jason Lurch. She said that police investigators had come to their house that day; they had told her husband they wanted him in court Monday morning. Peggy was a friend of Joice, she said; she thought the family should know what was going on. Jason might call later, she said.

  When Melvin hung up, he told Miz Ward; she called Don Wyatt at home. Wyatt asked her what she knew about Lurch. She said that Jason knew Tommy. At the preliminary hearing, she said, he had come up to her during a recess and told her, “I know Tommy didn’t do it.”

  “What did you think he meant by that?” the lawyer asked.

  “I just thought he was being nice,” Miz Ward said. “He knew Tommy, and he knew he wouldn’t do something like that.”

  Wyatt kept his own thoughts to himself: perhaps Lurch knew Tommy didn’t do it, because he knew who did; perhaps because he, Lurch, had done it! Wise and Moyer thought they had seen him that night…

  “Tell him I’d like to meet with him in my office,” Wyatt said. “Sunday. At three o’clock.”

  When Bud and Tricia got home from the fair with the kids, they were told about the call. Soon after, the phone rang. Bud answered. It was Jason Lurch.

  Lurch agreed to come to the Wolf house at 2 P.M. Sunday, and to go with them from there to the lawyer’s office.

  But on Sunday, Jason Lurch didn’t show.

  13

  “MYSTERY MAN”

  Steve Haraway went to Norman for the weekend, to spend time with his friends. Karl Fontenot spent Saturday night making picture frames out of empty cigarette packs. Tommy Ward joked about the case with a friend, who was in jail briefly for driving without a valid license.

  “When I get out of this mess,” Tommy said, “I’m gonna get me a police escort out of this town. When I get rich, I’m gonna buy me a brand-new pickup—and I’m gonna paint it gray primer.”

  On Sunday, after church, Bud and Tricia waited at home for Jason Lurch. Two o’clock passed, and two-thirty, and three. Lurch did not appear. They went to Wyatt’s office without him.

  Bud went over the testimony he would swear to about Tommy’s having short hair at the time. He said that on Saturday, April 21, late in the afternoon, Tommy had come by the house to borrow five dollars, because he had a date that night and was broke. He was wearing a baseball cap and looked different; no hair was falling from beneath it.

  “What happened to your hair?” Bud recalled saying. Tommy, he said, swept off his baseball cap with a flourish, and said, “Ta-da,” and did a full, bowing turn, showing off his new short haircut.

  The attorneys were much impressed with Bud; he was gentle, soft-spoken, a solid citizen; he’d held the same job at the feed mill for six years; before that he had worked as a bookkeeper for the city of Ada.

  He was a leader of his church. They could not ask for a better witness. Except that he was Tommy’s brother-in-law.

  Bud told them he was convinced that Tommy was innocent.

  Richard Kerner arrived at the law office, bringing Jannette Roberts; the lawyers went over her testimony about the Polaroid pictures of Tommy and Karl with short hair. Then Wyatt turned to Kerner.

  “Find Jason Lurch,” he said. “Give him a subpoena. See if you can get him down here to talk to us.”

  Wyatt told the investigator to explain to Lurch the lawyer’s current theory: that Lurch had done nothing wrong; that he had been in J.P.’s the night of the disappearance, shooting pool with someone who looked like Tommy Ward, someone with a red-and-gray-primer pickup; that the pickup at McAnally’s—described as grayish-green—was different; that the two incidents were not related. Tell Lurch he had nothing to fear from the defense, Wyatt said.

  But Wyatt feared that the district attorney had already gotten to Lurch, and that to remain uninvolved in the case, he would deny being at J.P.’s that evening.

  They had no idea of Lurch’s whereabouts. The investigator set out to find him.

  Wyatt and Austin met the same afternoon with the psychiatrist from Oklahoma City who had interviewed Ward in his cell, had given him a battery of standard tests. They were hoping he would say that Tommy, psychologically, was incapable of committing such a crime.

  The doctor told them that on the basis of his tests, he felt Tommy was below normal in intelligence; that he had a lot of insecurities, neurotic problems, bundled up inside him; that he could easily be programmable by the police. But he could not say for sure that that was what happened. He could not rule out that Ward might have done it. He thought, in fact, that he might have, he said.

  The lawyers were disappointed. They felt the young, bearded shrink was making sure he would not be asked to testify.

  They decided that he wouldn’t.

  When he left the office that evening, Wyatt’s mind turned again to the man in the back of the courtroom. The “mystery man,” the Daily Oklahoman had called him, after the playing of the Jim Moyer tape. No lawyer likes an unknown quantity at a trial. “I’m afraid of Lurch,” Wyatt said.

  DAY SIX

  A video screen was already set up in the middle of the courtroom, facing the jury box, as the jurors took their places in the morning. A smaller video screen was placed on the judge’s bench. The spectator section was full.

  The overhead lights were turned off. There were no windows in the courtroom. The only light was from the corridor, coming in through the small glass panels in the doors.

  The videos were switched on. In near darkness, the jurors watched the screen facing them. The spectators and the press could see the screens at oblique angles.

  The image of Tommy Ward appeared on the screens. He was seated, wearing a light-colored athletic shirt, blue jeans, sneakers. His questioners in this October 12 tape, Detectives Dennis Smith and Mike Baskin, were not visible. Only their voices could be heard; they spoke softly most of the time. When, for about half of the hour-and-forty-five-minute tape, Smith held a picture of Denice Haraway up in front of Ward, the back of the picture appeared on the screen as a dark rectangle.

  The jurors saw Ward being told his rights, and saying he did not want a lawyer. They saw him tell a different story of what he’d been doing the night of the crime than he had told the detectives on May 1. They heard him say that the first time he was questioned, he had been confused about the dates. They then saw him deny repeatedly, for more than an hour and a half, that he’d had anything to do with the disappearance, or that he knew anything about it.

  They did not see any reference to a polygraph.

  When the tape ended, there was a short recess; afterward, Mike Baskin resumed the witness chair. Under questioning by the assistant D.A., Chris Ross, Baskin admitted letting on during the interrogation that he knew more about the crime than he did; this was standard procedure, he said. Ross asked about the incident of bringing the skull and bones from the college to the jail; he knew that if he did not bring it up, the defense would. Baskin said they had done this to try to learn the location of the body.

  As they walked down the stairs for the lunch recess, Ross and Baskin, who looked somewhat alike, were joking.

  “Well, Baskin, did I minimize your damage?” Ross asked.


  “No,” Baskin said, “you’ve thrown me to the wolves.”

  In the corridor, Melvin Ward was standing by himself, smoking a cigarette, looking shaken. He had left the courtroom while the tape was on, because, he said, he could not bear to watch this “police badgering” of his brother.

  In the afternoon, Don Wyatt cross-examined Baskin. He asked if he had lied to Ward on the tape when he said there were witnesses. “Part of it was lies,” the detective said. Wyatt pressed the point further, saying a claim that the police had a statement given by a witness under oath was “an absolute, bald-faced lie.” Baskin said he would call it “a poor choice of words.”

  Wyatt walked to the defense table. He opened the paper sack that had been carried into and out of the courtroom for four days. He pulled out a skull and some bones.

  “Wasn’t this the same mind games,” he asked, “as when you brought this into the cell at night?”

  If the jurors were startled by the skull and bones being produced in court, as Wyatt had hoped, there was no indication of it. They continued to watch impassively.

  Baskin conceded that bringing the skull to the jail was not proper police procedure; he said the district attorney had chewed him out about the incident several times. “I agree that probably I shouldn’t have done it, and it was a mistake,” he said.

  George Butner focused his cross-examination on the notion that all of the major statements in Tommy Ward’s subsequent confession had been planted in Tommy’s mind by the police during the October 12 questioning: the ideas that there had been two men, a pickup, a kidnapping, rape, murder, that Denice had screamed, had cried, had run away, had slipped and fallen. Punching his fist into his hand, he enumerated how each of these facts or actions had been contained in the police questions on this tape, as when the detectives asked: Do you think she screamed? Do you think she tried to run away?

  Butner asked how the police could not have known what blouse Denice had been wearing until after the confession tapes were made, since Ada policeman Richard Holkum had seen her that night. Baskin replied that communication in the Ada P.D. was not well coordinated.

  The detective conceded that fingerprints were never taken at the scene. He said a cigarette found burning in an ashtray at McAnally’s had been discarded before he arrived. Don Wyatt suggested that since Denice Haraway did not smoke, the cigarette might have been the perpetrator’s; and that through saliva tests, they might now know the blood type of the perpetrator—if such tests had been done on the cigarette. Wyatt noted that the man leaving with the girl had opened the glass door, according to the eyewitnesses, and that glass is the very best surface from which to take fingerprints.

  The next witness was Jim Allen, who had been an inmate in the county jail in December of 1984. He was a trustee, a cook, and could wander around inside. He said Tommy Ward had told him in the jail that Ward and Marty Ashley had abducted and raped and killed Denice Haraway, and that Ashley had dumped her body into the Canadian River. He said he and several detectives had gone out in that area to look for the body, but had found nothing.

  It was 4:20 P.M. Detective Captain Dennis Smith took the stand, the fifty-first witness for the state. He was wearing a beige suit, a yellow button-down shirt, a striped tie. Under direct examination, he reviewed his involvement in the case, from the night of the disappearance to the present moment. Of the October 12 questioning, he said he had attempted to bluff Ward, in order to elicit information. He said this was a common procedure, “to try to get at the truth.”

  Of the skull incident, he said that when, around October 25, he pulled the bones out of a sack in front of Karl Fontenot, “Karl stepped back and asked if Tommy had given a confession, and you found her at the river.”

  The questioning moved to the January 9 story by Ward that Denice Haraway had run away with Marty Ashley. An audiotape of the statement was played for the jury. Late in the tape, Ward said he hadn’t known what Denice Haraway looked like, and that Jim Allen got hold of a picture, to show him. At the defense table, Don Wyatt whispered to Butner, “That’s it!” And he wrote in large capital letters on a pad: “ALLEN PLANTED THE STORY.”

  Also on the tape, the jury heard Wyatt ask Ward: “You never told Karl before today about your dream?” And Tommy said, “No.”

  Richard Kerner’s gray 1985 Mercury Marquee glided smoothly along State Road 99, heading south, away from Ada. He was going to find Jason Lurch.

  On Sunday he had located Lurch’s grandmother in an outlying town; she did not know where Lurch was living. On Monday he sought out other relatives, in decrepit houses in town. Early in the afternoon, in exchange for half a pack of cigarettes, someone told him Lurch was working as a cowboy, breaking horses, in a village twenty-five miles south of Ada. “Go to the store, and down a road, and there’s the place where Jason is at,” he was told.

  Kerner followed the directions. He found the lone store in the village, drove a short distance down a dirt road to a house. Three men in their twenties were standing in the open space in front of it, talking. Flat land, parched by the drought, spread in every direction.

  Kerner got out of his car and approached them; all three were dressed like cowboys.

  “I’m looking for Jason Lurch,” he said. “You know where I can find him?”

  The men looked from one to the other. None of them spoke.

  Kerner chose the tallest of the three and addressed him. “You Lurch?”

  At first there was no response. Then the man said, “Yeah. What do you want?”

  The other two edged away. They moved between the investigator and his car. They positioned themselves, blocking the way to the driver-side door.

  The sun beat down on the flat land. Kerner did not know if he was in trouble or not. He could feel the extra weight he had let accumulate around his middle in recent years; he was aware that he was fifty-two, a grandfather. He thought: years ago I could have taken on three guys, but not now.

  “I’m a legal investigator, working for Tommy Ward’s attorney, Don Wyatt,” he said. “The attorney would like to talk to you.”

  “What about?” Lurch said.

  Kerner told him what about. Lurch said he did not think he wanted to talk to the lawyer.

  Kerner persisted. He told Lurch how he might be able to help out his old buddy, Tommy, who was in a jam. He wasn’t committing himself to anything, Kerner told him. Why not just come see what Don Wyatt had to say?

  After half an hour, Lurch wavered. He said he had no transportation. Kerner said he would drive him to Ada, and bring him back afterward.

  Lurch agreed.

  They climbed into Kerner’s car and, mostly in silence, rode north.

  When court adjourned for the evening, Wyatt, Austin, Butner, and Willett stood talking in the parking lot across the street. Leo Austin was extremely dismayed by Ward’s Ashley tape; he felt several of the jurors, hearing these lies, had already made up their minds that Ward was guilty. Butner also seemed down, even though things appeared to be going well for his client; there had been no evidence yet against Fontenot.

  “What’s going on at your office tonight?” Butner asked.

  “We’re gonna talk to Lurch,” Wyatt said.

  “You think he’ll show?”

  “He’s there now.”

  Butner, who had dinner plans elsewhere, said, “I’ve got to see Mr. Lurch.”

  They drove to Wyatt’s office. Jason Lurch was waiting in the conference room, with Richard Kerner.

  Lurch was a tall, thin man with long dark hair that he was wearing in a ponytail, falling from under a cap. He had on blue jeans, a red T-shirt, cowboy boots that reached to his knees, that had scuffed, rounded toes. Lurch sat in a chair, Wyatt in another; the others were on a sofa across the room. Wyatt explained why they wanted to talk to him. At times Lurch grinned, showing a lot of teeth. There was something that seemed eerie, even evil, about the grin, the others would agree later. Kerner thought: he’s the kind of guy who would stab you in the
back for a nickel.

  Lurch admitted to being in the courtroom every day of the preliminary hearing. “I’ve known Tommy about ten years,” he said. “I wanted to see what kind of evidence they had against him.”

  He confirmed that he had said to Miz Ward that he knew Tommy didn’t do it. “I don’t know who did it,” he said now. “I just know Tommy didn’t.”

  Wyatt leaned forward in his chair. “I want to make this clear,” he said. “We don’t believe you had anything to do with it, either. We’ve come to believe that the incidents at J.P.’s and at McAnally’s were two separate incidents; that perhaps you had been at J.P.’s, and were remembered by Karen Wise, who recognized you at the preliminary. We don’t think you were involved. But if we could show that you were at J.P.’s that night, with someone else, and then left, that would help Tommy prove his innocence.”

  Lurch told them that in April 1984 he was working at an auto repair shop in Ada; that he worked for the shop most of the day, was trusted by the owner, and had his own key; sometimes he would stay after closing, paint cars and trucks, to make extra money for himself.

  The attorneys remained expressionless as the information registered: Lurch could easily have painted a truck without suspicion.

  Lurch said he had a nephew, about twenty years old, who lived a block and a half from J.P.’s. “Lots of times we’d stop in there for a pack of cigarettes or a soda pop,” he said. “We were in there a whole lot. That girl”—he meant Karen Wise—“was always in there.”

  “Is it possible you went in there the evening of April 28, 1984?” Wyatt asked.

  “Yeah, it’s possible,” Lurch said. “I coulda been workin’, and gone over there to get some pop and stuff.”