The Dreams of Ada
Page 41
He was uncertain, at first, whether to use his theory in his closing argument; it might be too complex for the jurors to follow. But he decided, fairly soon, that he would.
As Ross pored through the transcript, Gordon Calhoun and Jannette Roberts met in Wyatt’s office, a meeting arranged by the attorney. Jannette told Gordon he was correct in that she had taken pictures at Blue River on Memorial Day. But those were different pictures, she said—and he was wearing the same thing.
Gordon said he would have to see the pictures to be sure. Jannette did not have her photo album with her. She said she would drive up to Oklahoma City to get it. They agreed to meet again at eight o’clock the next morning, to look at the Blue River pictures together.
DAY NINE
George Butner was not feeling well. He’d been bothered much of the night by an upset stomach; he thought it might have been caused by some pork he had eaten the day before. His stomach was still queasy when he arrived in court. He informed the judge of this in chambers; if he had to bolt suddenly from the courtroom, he wanted the judge to know, it would not be a sign of disrespect.
The judge asked if he wanted the session postponed. Butner said no, he would continue for as long as he could.
The defense of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot began with an opening statement by Don Wyatt. The attorney summarized briefly what the defense would try to show. Referring to his private investigator, he said, “He’s going to bring you some revelations about who, in his opinion, is involved in this.”
It was not quite the dramatic claim Wyatt had fantasized about months before, but it would have to do.
The first witness called by the defense was Dr. Clyde Butler, a biology professor at East Central. He said that when the detectives came to borrow the skull and bones, they told him the bones would be used to compare with ones found at search sites, to determine if the bones found were human. They did not tell him the bones would be brought to the jail, he said.
The professor was a witness because Wyatt wanted to suggest shoddy police tactics; he was the first witness because Wyatt wanted the jury to see that professors from the college were willing to testify for the defense as well as for the prosecution.
There was no cross-examination.
The next two witnesses, father and son, were Joel Ward’s closest friends in Tulsa. One was an engineer. Both testified that Joel had never owned or been in possession of a gray-primered pickup; if he had, they would have known about it, they said.
Joel Ward was next. He testified about all the vehicles he had ever owned or possessed; none had been a gray-primered pickup, he said. He said the incident testified to by the insurance man had never happened. He did not know why the man had made it up, he said.
There was other testimony Wyatt would have liked to elicit from Joel. He would have liked the jury to hear about a dream Tommy had had at Joel’s house, after seeing a news report about a woman who had been killed and mutilated in a car accident. In his dream, Tommy had caused the accident. Wyatt felt that the dream was psychologically significant; it showed a tendency in Tommy’s inner makeup to have such dreams, in which he was the guilty one when in fact he was not. The attorneys had debated at length about whether to have Joel tell of it. They were afraid the district attorney would claim that such testimony related to Tommy’s character, and that the judge might agree. Testimony involving character—involving things not directly related to the case at hand—was prohibited, unless the defense opened up that area. But if they did, Peterson could then bring in witnesses to tell about Tommy’s getting drunk at times, about his smoking dope—neither of which would help with the jury. The D.A. could also bring in witnesses, prohibited till now, who claimed Tommy had threatened them at other times.
The attorneys had decided they would do without the dream. Joel Ward was excused.
Marie Titsworth was called. She told how the police had confiscated her daughter’s pickup from in front of Don Wyatt’s house, while she was cleaning there, and had returned it about a week later, covered with fingerprint dust.
Then her son, Odell, took the stand. Titsworth, twenty-six, was something of the town bogeyman, because of his four felony convictions and the publicity that surrounded them. He was known to Wyatt, and to Dennis Smith, as a soft-spoken, gentle person—who became violent when he got drunk. He had moved to Oregon in January, after testifying at the preliminary hearing; he’d been flown in for the trial by the state, in case Bill Peterson wanted to call him. But Peterson felt he had already proved through Titsworth’s girlfriend, her mother, and the surgeon that Odell had not been involved. He saw no point in putting on the stand a fellow who hated cops, and whose mother worked for the defense attorney.
Wyatt called him instead. Titsworth, his black hair rolling in waves to his shoulders, told of his arrest the previous October, of his questioning by Detectives Smith and Baskin in a basement room of the police station. “I told them I didn’t know nothing about it,” he said. “I didn’t know what they were talking about.”
Titsworth said he was interrogated four different times while being held, that Baskin repeatedly called him a “sorry son-of-a-bitch.” He said the questioning was much more intense than during any of his prior arrests. “They were hollering,” he said, “trying to get me to say I done it. That I killed her and raped her, and Tommy and Karl was with me.” He said that after one bout of severe questioning, back in his cell, he wondered if perhaps he had gone crazy and done something like that, and didn’t remember it—till he remembered his arm was broken at the time.
Titsworth said that several days after the last questioning, Captain Smith told him. “It was just a dream Tommy Ward had. It was just a dream.”
He said he was kept in solitary confinement, that he was taken to the cells of Ward and Fontenot and told by Baskin to act real tough, as if he was threatening them. “They were scared,” Titsworth said.
He said later he was placed in cells next to Ward’s and Fontenot’s, to see what he could find out. They both told him they hadn’t done it, Titsworth said. He said Ward apologized to him, and told him it had only been a dream.
“Even in your investigation of this matter, Mr. Titsworth, you learned it was a dream?” George Butner asked.
“Yes.”
Titsworth said he had moved to Oregon because of his being linked to this case. “I was threatened by a lot of people around here. And it would be impossible to get a job in Oklahoma.”
Court was recessed for lunch. The members of Tommy Ward’s family dined on stuffed potatoes at the Feed Store. When they returned, the youngest sister, Kay Garrett, took the stand. Eighteen years old, a new mother, in the pretty bloom of youth, wearing a ruffled purple blouse, Kay testified that she had cut Tommy’s hair very short between 3 and 4 P.M. on April 20, eight days before the disappearance. She said she knew it was that Friday because the following week she and her mother had gone to Lawton to visit her sister Melva, and Tommy had been pestering her to cut it before that trip. She produced a small appointment calendar from her purse, on which the trip to Lawton on the twenty-eighth was marked.
On cross-examination, Chris Ross, back in the courtroom, noted that the haircut was not marked on the calendar. Pointing out that she’d said she’d given Tommy a bad, gapped-up haircut, Ross asked why Tommy would let her cut his hair if she gapped it up.
Kay blushed, smiled shyly. “I guess he trusted me,” she said. The warm laughter that erupted in the courtroom, even among some of the jurors, was the first hint since the trial began of any sympathy for the defense.
Bud Wolf was called next: Tricia’s husband, Tommy’s brother-in-law, his hunting partner near the abandoned house in the days, years earlier, when the house was still there. Led by Wyatt, Bud, wearing a three-piece suit, gave a soft-spoken recitation of his solid-citizen work record; of his activities at the Unity Missionary Baptist Church, where he served at times as treasurer and taught a boys’ Bible class. Bud swore, under oath, that on April 21, 1984�
��the day after Kay had said she cut Tommy’s hair—he saw Tommy with very short hair. He told of the incident of Tommy coming to the house to borrow money, taking off his baseball cap, saying “Ta-da!” and turning around to show off the scalping.
On cross-examination, Chris Ross, who knew Bud from foster-parent class, asked why he was certain this had happened on April 21.
“Because it was the day before communion at our church.”
“Isn’t communion every Sunday?” Ross asked.
“No,” Bud said, “at our church we have communion only twice a year. On Easter Sunday, and again in October.”
Ross smiled, shook his head slightly, resumed his seat; his bemused expression seemed to say: you learn something every day.
There was a brief recess. People congregated in the corridors. Don Wyatt told Bud, Kay, and Joel that they had done great on the witness stand. They were vastly relieved.
At the other end of the hallway, Theresa Shumard, a local news stringer who was covering the trial for the Daily Oklahoman, chatted with Gary Rogers and Dorothy Hogue. Mrs. Shumard, pregnant, almost as large as Tricia, said angrily, “As soon as they put the family on the stand, that proves he’s guilty! If they need the family to speak up for him, that proves it!”
George Butner’s stomach was still bothering him. The defense attorneys huddled in a rear office. They went over the witnesses they still planned to call. It was now mid-afternoon on Thursday. At the rate they were going, they would finish on Friday. The judge would probably sequester the jury once testimony was completed and they were ready to deliberate. That meant the jurors would be locked up in a motel, away from their families, for the weekend. They would be like caged animals, eager to get out; they would be angry, perhaps at the defense. An early recess today would allow them to continue the defense into Monday.
George Butner felt his stomach getting worse.
Court resumed. Wyatt called Dr. Bruce Weems, a physics instructor at East Central for eleven years. End the day with another professor, for the jury’s benefit, Wyatt figured. Dr. Weems, consulting a book of astronomy charts, testified that on April 28, 1984, sunset had occurred in Ada at 6:43 P.M.
The significance was that on Fontenot’s tape he said they had kidnapped Denice when it was “almost dark.” By 8:30 P.M. it would have been long dark.
On cross-examination, Bill Peterson noted that at sunset the sky is not yet dark. Weems agreed, to the extent that “twilight lasts for several minutes after it’s set.”
The professor was excused. It was 3:30. George Butner approached the bench. He told the judge that he was sorry, but that his stomach had gotten worse. He did not think he would be able to continue.
Judge Powers was understanding. He announced to the court that Mr. Butner was not feeling well—because of something he ate, perhaps—and therefore they were going to recess for the day. Mr. Butner’s wife was a nurse, the judge said, so he would be in good hands, and hopefully would be ready to resume at nine the next morning.
Butner thanked the judge for his sympathy.
While the case was progressing in court, Richard Kerner was continuing his investigation. Jannette Roberts had told him that Karl had gotten a haircut in April before going to apply for a job at Wendy’s; that at the interview, he’d been told his hair needed to be shorter still, and he had gotten a second haircut. Kerner hoped to prove this was true through the employment records at Wendy’s.
Kerner ascertained that Karl’s first check from Wendy’s was received on May 20. But his first employment application could not be located. The investigator tracked down and interviewed four former managers of Wendy’s, which apparently had rapid turnover. All four remembered Fontenot. But none could recall the exact date he was interviewed and had his hair cut short. “It was believed,” Kerner reported to Wyatt, “that Captain Dennis Smith received the Wendy’s application and employment paperwork on Fontenot a long time ago.”
Thursday morning, as the defense began in the courtroom, Kerner went to the gas station where Jim Moyer worked. He wanted to show him the pictures of the truck Jason Lurch’s nephew used to drive. Kerner did not think Moyer would even talk to him, after it had come out in court that he had secretly recorded their previous conversation.
Moyer looked at the pictures closely. He said one detail was the same. He was studying a second detail when a car drove up. Moyer had to go and pump gas. When he returned to Kerner, the interruption had apparently given him time for second thoughts. He looked at the pictures again, and said he did not want to say if it looked like the truck he had seen at McAnally’s or not. He didn’t say it was not the truck; he just said he did not want to say. To the investigator, this seemed to indicate that it might well be the right truck, that Moyer just did not want to get involved again. Otherwise, Kerner reasoned, he could simply have said it wasn’t the truck, and be done with it.
Frustrated, Kerner showed the pictures to Jack Paschall. As expected, Paschall said it might be the truck he had seen at J.P.’s and it might not be.
The investigator still could not find Karen Wise.
He hung about Wyatt’s office that morning; he could not return to Yukon, because he did not know when he would be needed to testify. While the attorneys were in court, Jason Lurch called in. He talked to Kerner. Lurch said he had been going through his records, and that he had been wrong about what he’d said the other night. He was not living and working in Ada in April of ’84, he said. He was living in Oklahoma City; he did not move into the Brook Mobile Home Park in Ada until July. And therefore he would not have been at J.P.’s that night.
Lurch asked the investigator to come on out to his house, to look at his records, his rent receipts.
Kerner was instantly suspicious. Lurch was a scary guy. This could be some kind of trap. The investigator did not care to be alone with Jason Lurch again on his desolate home turf. Especially now that he was changing his story. In Kerner’s view, rent receipts from Oklahoma City would prove nothing; the city was only a ninety-mile drive from Ada; he could have come down any time. He was still suspicious of Lurch for attending all five scattered days of the hearing.
He could not come out today, the investigator told Lurch; Lurch should bring the rent receipts with him when he came to testify.
Informed of this conversation, that Lurch was changing his story, Don Wyatt was not surprised. He instructed Kerner to pick up Lurch the next morning and bring him into town. He told the investigator to wire his car; to tape their conversation without Lurch’s knowledge. He told Kerner to go over Lurch’s story while the tape was running—to get Lurch to recall what he had told them the other night: that he might have been with his nephew at J.P.’s.
Kerner was not thrilled with the assignment. He made that clear. But he agreed to do it.
Winifred Harrell offered him the use of her revolver. Kerner declined. “I don’t like guns,” he said.
He had carried a pistol for twenty years in the military; he chose not to do so in civilian life.
In all his experience, Kerner had never been still investigating a case while the trial was on—let alone while the defense was already on. He had never heard of a case where the D.A.’s investigator was reading someone else his rights five days into a trial. He’d been involved in many bizarre cases, but none like this; this one, he felt, defied description.
At 8 the next morning, Gordon Calhoun and Jannette Roberts met again in Wyatt’s office, as planned. Jannette had her photo album with her. In it were pictures of Calhoun, hand-dated “Memorial Day, 1984.” In them he was wearing a T-shirt and cutoff jeans—the same outfit he was wearing in those dated April 16.
The handwriting on the Memorial Day pictures looked faded, unlike those dated April. “I wrote these outdoors, with a scratchy pen. By Blue River,” Jannette said.
Calhoun studied the pictures. He told Wyatt he could not say for sure when any of the pictures had been taken. He went to the courthouse and told Bill Peterson the same thing.
If, as he had feared, Calhoun had given the jury the impression that he was sure the Fontenot pictures were dated falsely, that impression would be allowed to remain.
Richard Kerner, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and a tie, bent into his car. His microcassette recorder was in his breast pocket. It was a good recorder—but one of its special features might, this morning, get him into big trouble.
The recorder used thirty-minute tapes. When the tape came to the end, the recorder issued a warning—a buzzing sound. If he was secretly taping Jason Lurch, and the buzzer went off, things might get sticky in a hurry.
He was supposed to pick up Lurch at the village store at 8 A.M. He drove out the highway, pulled up beside the store. Lurch wasn’t there. He went inside, drank a cup of coffee, waited. Lurch didn’t show.
He looked at his watch. It was 8:15. He did not want to walk the lonely road to Lurch’s house; the cowboy made him nervous. He stalled, wrestled with his willpower. Finally he left the store and walked in the crisp morning air the few hundred yards down the road.
There were no other houses nearby, just a decrepit schoolhouse. Lurch’s place, set fifteen feet down an incline, was a graying white-frame, ratty-looking. With trepidation, Kerner knocked on the door.
Lurch was in the kitchen, drinking coffee. Kerner waited just inside the house till the cowboy was ready, keeping the door open behind him. They got into the car. As he eased himself behind the wheel, the investigator reached inside his jacket, as if for a cigarette, and depressed the button that set the tape turning.
Kerner got the conversation going: about the rent receipts; Lurch, it turned out, had none. About where Lurch had been living at the time; Oklahoma City, Lurch said. Kerner tried to edge the talk to what Lurch had told the lawyers on Monday night. But the transition was difficult; he could not get Lurch to repeat that first story.