The Dreams of Ada

by Robert Mayer

  “Confessions are highly suspect,” Wyatt told the jury. That was why, under the law, a crime had to be proven before the jury could consider a confession.

  He reviewed what he called the pressure tactics of the police in this case: the pressure put on Odell Titsworth, the bringing of the bones to the jail. “You have the opportunity,” he said, “to stop the type of tactics the police are using—to coerce, to intimidate.”

  He recalled the testimony of the alibi witnesses, who had sworn under oath that Tommy Ward was somewhere else—was in his own home—at the time the alleged crime was taking place.

  He asked why the state had not called Jannette Roberts to the stand, which it had every right to do. And he answered his own question: “Because they could not disprove those photos!”

  He concluded by reading a newspaper quotation from Bill Peterson, which had appeared the previous November. In it, the D.A. had warned that it would be difficult to get a conviction in this case without a body.

  And Wyatt asked for an acquittal.

  It was 10 P.M. when he finished. The judge ordered a fifteen-minute break. Tommy Ward’s family huddled around him, hugging him, showing their support, after the jurors had filed out.

  Karl Fontenot sat alone.

  There was weariness in the faces of the jurors when they filed back in, settled into their chairs; one juror, a gentleman, appeared to be well over seventy years old. Weariness was reflected in the visage of Judge Powers, in the rumpled suits of the attorneys on both sides, in the slumping shoulders of the defendants. A weary determination seemed to pervade both the Haraways and the Wards, and even the spectators with no personal stake in the trial.

  Chris Ross walked to the center of the courtroom, his broad shoulders squared. And he launched eagerly into his closing statement, the last argumentative words the jury would hear before being sent to deliberate.

  Ross tweaked the defense attorneys. “We don’t attract clients if we win a big case,” he said of the D.A.’s office. And he defended the police. “It is no great flaw in investigative technique that they couldn’t find a truck or a knife six months later.” He justified a conviction even though no body had been found: “We are not to reward criminals for their stealth.”

  Of Karl Fontenot, he said his hair had become darker during his long months in jail, out of the sunlight. Of Fontenot’s confession, he said, “There’s many a man who tells a good fish story. But how many of them tell it to the game ranger?”

  He derided Odell Titsworth’s testimony about intense pressure from the police. “He’s a con!” Ross said. And he asked, “Who testified to the pressure on Ward and Fontenot who was there? Not a person!”

  He held up for the jury the Polaroid pictures offered by Jannette Blood Roberts, showing both men with short hair. He recited with scorn her criminal record. “Her credibility stinks!” he shouted.

  The pictures, he said, could have been taken in Easter of 1982 or 1983. But not 1984. The child in the picture, he said, was much too small to be seven years old.

  He asked why, if Jason Lurch was a suspect, Don Wyatt had not put him in the witness chair, instead of just showing a snapshot with “his spanking new building in the background.”

  Of the private investigator, Ross said, “Mr. Kerner is a hired gun, who came in this courtroom loaded with blanks.”

  The assistant D.A. retold, in vivid, bloody detail, the story of rape and murder on the tapes, the rape of a corpse with her entrails showing. Cinda Haraway began to sob. She ran out of the courtroom, to hear no more of this tale of the murder of her brother’s wife.

  Ross said the defense had implied the police knew Ward and Fontenot were innocent. “Why show them the bones to get more evidence, if police knew they didn’t know?”

  “Who was playing mind games with who?” Ross asked.

  Tommy Ward stared at him with hatred as he spoke; Fontenot, as always, looked impassive.

  Conviction in this case, Ross said, would be “a very small step indeed, when you consider they’ve already told you they did it.”

  A frequent question in the case, Ross said, was why Denice did not seek help from Lenny Timmons when he passed her in the doorway of McAnally’s. “How would she know he wasn’t in on it too?” Ross asked.

  Then he offered the jury his own interpretation of the confession tapes, as he had refined it in the bathtub the week before. He said “Odell” on Tommy’s tape was Tommy himself. The proof, he said, was that everywhere on the tape, when Odell was doing something, Tommy was not present. And vice-versa. Because if Tommy had said “Odell and me” did this, it would have amounted to saying “me and me did this.”

  On the tape, Odell raped her first, Ross said. But that was really Tommy raping her first. And because he had already raped her as “Odell,” Tommy himself could not get an erection. Tommy was not in the store, because “Odell” was, Ross said. But “Odell” was Tommy; they could not do anything together. When “Odell” was stabbing her to death, Ross noted, Tommy was back at his house. Because, Ross said, Tommy was Odell, and they could not both be in the same scene. In truth, he said, it was Tommy who had stabbed her to death, Tommy who set fire to the body. Because we know Odell Titsworth wasn’t there!

  Denice Haraway’s body was burned, Ross said, “maybe not in that house, but somewhere!”

  “Surely,” he said, “God did not intend for Denice Haraway to die that night. These two men made that decision.

  “We ask for everything in the name of truth. All we want is the truth.

  “The evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that these defendants are guilty of these crimes.”

  Ross stopped. Ross sat. A dark, total silence enveloped the courtroom, suggesting a black vacuum hole in outer space. The silence was thunderous, the inverse of a burst of theatrical applause. The assistant D.A. had brought the trial to its emotional height. The understudy had become, for this moment, the star.

  The round-faced clock above the spectators showed 11:45. Fifteen minutes till the witching hour. Perhaps because of that, there was an eerie power to Ross’s interpretation of Ward’s tape; a power that few in the courtroom could escape, could deny. Or perhaps it was more than the hour. Perhaps it was the infusion of interior logic into a story, into a tape, into a case itself, where logic had been a stranger.

  For some in the courtroom it would be several long midnight hours before the eerieness fell away, before other logical questions would begin to assert themselves. Such as: If “Odell” was an aberration, merely Tommy’s alter ego, why did Odell Titsworth appear in Fontenot’s tape as well? Such as: On Tommy’s tape, Odell and Tommy were in the store together. Such as: This was an interesting theory Ross had, but it was only a theory; it was not evidence; the case still was supposed to be decided on evidence. Where had the body gone? And the truck? Why give a genuine confession made of lies?

  What would hold sway in the minds of the jury, no one, at that late hour, could say.

  The testimony and the arguments were done. The judge dismissed the two alternate jurors. And he submitted the case to the jury. He told them to retire to the jury room, to select a foreman. After that, he said, they could stay as long as they wanted to deliberate; or they could return to their motel till morning.

  The jury was led out by the bailiff. George Butner crossed the courtroom and shook Chris Ross’s hand. He congratulated him on a strong summation. Privately, Butner was in turmoil. He felt that Ross’s theory made sense. The assistant D.A. smiled about his statement, winked to someone at the rear of the courtroom.

  In the corridor, Jannette Roberts, who had sat through the summations, was crying quietly. Ross’s shouted words—“Her credibility stinks!”—would not fade from her mind.

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” she murmured, over and over.

  “For what?” Bill Willett asked.

  “For my past,” she said.

  It was six minutes after midnight when the jury returned to the courtroom. They would
like to retire for the night, they told the judge, and begin their deliberations in the morning.

  The judge asked if they had chosen a foreman.

  They had.

  They had chosen juror number one: a young man named Leslie Penn. He was the man, in his early thirties, perhaps, who had spent the past nine days, almost without interruption, staring at the defendants with a stern, unwavering look.

  The judge recessed the trial till 9 A.M. The weary jury filed out. In the corridor, Jannette Roberts continued to cry.

  “My daughter is small,” she said, telling anyone who would listen. “I should have brought her down here.”

  DAY TWELVE

  When the jurors returned in the morning after a night’s rest at the Raintree, two to a room, men with men, women with women, they filed slowly into the jury room, behind the courtroom, to deliberate. The people who would decide the fate of the defendants, perhaps even whether they lived or died, were, in the position in which they sat in the jury box:

  Front row—Leslie Penn, Claudia Mornhinweg, Larry Myers, Joanne Manning, Janet Williams, Nina Ambrose.

  Second row—Darlene Berry, Virginia Rowe, Thomas Daniel, Diana Brotherton, Mary Floyd, Alfred Byers.

  A handful of spectators sat in the quiet courtroom. Among them was Steve Haraway, making his first appearance since he testified two weeks earlier. Unable to watch the trial because he was a witness, he had also been unable to work, because his job selling pharmaceuticals involved travel. He had spent the time chopping wood, doing paperwork for his job. Each night his mother and father and sister would tell him how it was going. He said he had no doubts that the defendants were guilty.

  Several of the Wards, too, sat in the courtroom, or stood in the corridors. One of them, Melvin, was still incensed about Chris Ross’s closing argument the night before. “He wasn’t only attacking Tommy,” Melvin said, fighting back tears his shipmates on the Coral Sea had never seen, “he was calling my whole family liars.”

  At 10:15, the jury sent three oral requests to the judge. They would like to have all of the exhibits brought to the jury room, except for the skull and bones; they would like a magnifying glass; and they would like to review the tapes, with no one else present, so they could discuss them while they watched.

  Judge Powers responded that a magnifying glass was not available, and that even if one was, he was not sure its use would be proper, since none had been used in the courtroom. He had a problem with letting them see the tapes again. “Giving them part of the testimony, but not all, magnifies one part out of proportion,” he said.

  The attorneys debated. Bill Peterson wanted the jury to see the tapes again. Butner argued that after eight and a half days of testimony, to allow them to review only two hours of it would be prejudicial. He and Leo Austin objected strenuously.

  The judge denied the jury’s request.

  In a second-floor corridor, Jannette Roberts sat with her daughter, Jessica, the little girl in the picture with the Easter basket. Jessica had turned eight years old two weeks earlier. She appeared very small for her age—the point Mrs. Roberts wanted to make.

  “I used to let them baby-sit my kids,” she said of Tommy and Karl. “I’ve been in prison. I’ve talked to murderers. I know how they speak. I have a little bit of insight of how they would act and talk. I spent six years in there. It’s an experience I had that helps me choose my friends, and the people I want around my children.”

  She recalled how she and her husband had urged Tommy to talk to the police, because they knew he had nothing to hide; they were devastated when he was arrested. “I still feel I throwed him to the wolves over a dream,” she said. “I can’t believe they took that dream and twisted it. This whole thing seems like a dream.”

  Remembering Chris Ross’s scathing attack on her credibility the night before, she turned away, to hide her eyes, to maintain her image of toughness. “I was planning to move back to Ada,” she said, bitterly. “He blew it.”

  Jannette, too, once had a dream about Denice Haraway. It was a few nights after Tommy and Karl had been arrested. She dreamed that she and her husband were standing someplace, looking at Denice Haraway, who was alive. No one else was in the dream. In the morning she told the dream to her husband. “God,” Mike said. “Don’t say nothing about it.”

  At 12:40 P.M., the judge summoned the jury to the courtroom. He asked if they had reached any verdicts, on any of the six counts. The foreman said they had not.

  The foreman reiterated the jury’s desire to review the tapes. The judge again denied it. He sent them, in the care of the bailiff, to lunch, at Polo’s Restaurant, on Main Street.

  George Butner, always pessimistic about the outcome, saw a small ray of light for the defense. “The thing I’m encouraged about is that we’ve got someone—at least one person—in there holding out for acquittal. Even if he’s a weak noodle, it’s someone.”

  But he could not get too optimistic. Whenever he tried to, he thought again of Fontenot’s tape, and how, despite the discrepancies, it told basically the same story as Ward’s. The tapes, he feared, would “marry them together.”

  “It looks like there’s light at the end of the tunnel,” Butner said. “And then every time you get there, it’s not light, but a brick wall you run smack into.”

  The jury returned from lunch, resumed its deliberations. Bill Peterson remained in his office. The defense attorneys chatted in the office of the court clerk. Some of the Haraways and some of the Wards sat quietly in the courtroom. The defendants were across the lawn in the jail. Charlene, the young woman who said she wanted to marry Tommy, stood, stocky and tough-looking, alone on a stairway landing, waiting nervously, chain-smoking.

  At 4:20, word spread—the jurors would be returning to the courtroom. It filled quickly, with the D.A., the defense attorneys, the spectators, the press. The defendants were brought in.

  The bailiff said the jurors would like some Cokes in the jury room. For a moment, it seemed that was why everyone had hurried back.

  The law says no refreshments in the jury room, Judge Powers said. But when both sides stipulated it would be okay, the judge agreed.

  Judge Powers turned toward the spectators. He warned them to show no facial expressions or emotions toward the jurors, to let them do their job. Any outburst could be subject to contempt of court. “I know none of you would want to spend time in the county jail,” the judge said.

  The jurors entered and took their seats.

  “Have you reached a verdict?” Judge Powers asked.

  “Not yet,” the foreman, Leslie Penn, said.

  “Have you reached a verdict on one or more of the counts?” the judge asked.

  “Yes,” the foreman said.

  “You are not at an impasse at this time?”

  “No.”

  He sent them back to continue deliberating, with Cokes.

  Outside the courthouse, from which the town now seemed to spread in concentric circles, people were following the case avidly. There were bulletins on the radio. The case led the local TV newscasts. Copies of the Ada News, which often languished unbought in the metal cages in which they were offered for sale, were grabbed up as soon as they hit the streets. People continued to go to work, of course, to do their jobs, to earn their pay; Bud Wolf, sometime “big brother” to Tommy, whose emotions were strung tight, was at the feed mill as usual that afternoon, preparing feed that would be shipped throughout the Midwest for the coming winter.

  In mid-afternoon, one of Bud’s co-workers approached him. “I just heard it on the radio,” the man said. “They convicted Tommy.”

  “You’re a lying scuzzball,” Bud replied.

  “No, I just heard it. They convicted him!”

  “You’re a lying scuzzball,” Bud said again.

  At five in the afternoon, with the jury still out, Don Wyatt received a phone call at the courthouse. His wife’s father had been undergoing exploratory surgery that day, in Oklahoma City, for a problem the
doctors couldn’t define. They’d opened him up and found many of his vital organs rife with cancer. It was spread wide; it was inoperable. They’d sewn him up and given him three months to live, at most. He was still under the anesthetic; he might not come out of it. Jean needed to get up there right away; she wanted Don to come with her.

  For a few moments the lawyer felt impaled. His wife needed him—her father was dying. His client needed him—his fate, his life, was in the balance.

  He felt a sense of déjà vu. About five years earlier, in the middle of a trial, Jean’s grandfather had died. Wyatt had decided then that the trial was too important to leave. He had stayed in court.

  Neither had forgotten it. His decision had become one of those faint gray clouds that hang over even the best of marriages.

  Wyatt decided he could not do that again.

  His defense of Tommy Ward was completed, he reasoned; the testimony was done, the final arguments had been made. Now it was up to the jury.

  Should they bring in a guilty verdict, and have to go into the second phase, the penalty phase—deciding on life imprisonment or death—Leo Austin could handle that.

  Wyatt told Austin and Willett the situation. He hurried out of the courthouse, across to the parking lot, climbed into his Charger, drove home to get his wife. He drove her the ninety miles to the city, believing he had done the right thing.

  From Baptist Memorial Hospital, where his father-in-law still lay under the anesthetic, he phoned Tricia at her home. He explained the situation, assured her that Tommy’s case was still in good hands.

  Tricia understood. She was grateful he had taken the trouble, personally, to call.

  For a few minutes after 5 there was bustling in the courthouse as municipal workers, not involved in the trial, went home. Dennis Smith, Mike Baskin, Bill Peterson, Gary Rogers chatted in the D.A.’s office, waiting. Rogers had his jacket off; his pistol in its shoulder holster was exposed. When the workers had gone, the only sound in the first-floor hallway was the refrigerator-like shuddering of the Dr Pepper machine.