Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  “Dad said I could stay another night.” Lauria grinned.

  “Make sure you don’t forget about the dentist’s appointment in the morning. Be home at eight o’clock.”

  “I will!” Lauria shouted back the last words to her mother. Like with her father, the words “I love you” would be the last words Lorene heard from her daughter. Kathy smiled back at Lorene and slowly started to move the car forward.

  The three of them made one more stop, this time at the Jack’s convenience store in Welch, owned by the grandmother of Ashley’s boyfriend, Jeremy Hurst. They picked up some soda and invited Jeremy as a last-minute decision, which he accepted.

  It was to be a night of modest celebration. They settled in, with Ashley and Lauria shifting near the kitchen table by Danny, and Jeremy Hurst following shortly after. Kathy took the cake to the counter and planted seventeen candles in it, including one for luck, using it to light her cigarette. With her back to the rest, Kathy glanced over at the piece of paper on the fridge. One shot. It took her attention long enough that she didn’t notice the wax melting until she felt the heat under her face. She forced herself away from the letter, a manifesto of sorts, and set down her smoke, instructing Jeremy to turn off the lights as he came in.

  The lights went out, and Kathy came with birthday cake ablaze. The flames of the candles sparkled in her beady but smiling brown eyes as she set the cake in front of her daughter. They sang “Happy Birthday to You,” Lauria singing louder than the rest, as Jeremy took a seat and playfully pinched Ashley’s side.

  Ashley closed her eyes and made a wish.

  The birthday candles were extinguished by breath, a breath as long as the prairie’s. Now the unlit home could not be noticed against the nighttime outside, and the cheers of her family and friends rolled in short form from the hills. It is from here, from this jumping-off point, that it is anybody’s guess as to what happened after, between a wish and the dawn’s early light when the trailer was found in flames.

  I’ve driven the route between Vinita and Welch more times than I can count, more times than I’ve visited my childhood home. Each trip is slightly brighter and louder than the last, to a place where it takes time for my eyes and ears to adjust. Coming here, to where they were last seen, isn’t something I’m able to resist. I’m drawn. Obsessed. Manic. Sometimes I come up the driveway and think of the five of them here: Danny, Kathy, Ashley, Lauria, and Jeremy. Sometimes I imagine I am them. But as my senses adjust to deep, dark country, I light a smoke there on the Freeman property and imagine that I am the killer or killers who struck the first flame. I blow out my match, adding a pinch of sulfur to the pastures surrounding in the same way as Ashley blew out her birthday candles.

  And then the prairie falls silent.

  5

  * * *

  ONE BODY

  * * *

  December 30, 1999

  The Morning of the Fire

  Like the Freemans, Welchans Jack and Diane Bell lived in an area so rural that it didn’t even fall within the city limits of any existing town. Instead, it was referred to as West of Welch; what locals called “the sticks.” It was early morning, and their farmhouse was dimmed, so as not to wake their capricious teenage son. The home, only a few miles deeper into the country than the Freemans’, was all long shadows, the smell of Scotch pine sap, and the emphysemic breathing of a percolator. In the stillness at the bottom of each exhale, the outside sound of handcrafted wind chimes made of hammer-flattened spoons and forks. Every house in Oklahoma seemed to harmonize with the wind.

  The pickup warmed up outside. Only a few miles south of the Kansas border, the ranching town was starry and still as the married couple got ready for work. They were employed at the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane, located about twenty miles south in Vinita, where a working farm for the patients once served as an economic factor for the county. Jack dried his chest-length yellowed beard over the woodstove’s heat as Diane fixed thermoses of chili and a side of leftover corn bread. His teeth ached that morning as he tied his beard into a single ponytail with three rubber bands, staring absently into the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree.

  “Fetch the coffee,” Diane whispered through the dark. Jack went to the open kitchen and filled two large mugs with Folgers. After Jack pulled the cord of the Christmas tree lights from the wall, they left, clad in their Carhartts and long johns, going on with the hackneyed “just like any other morning.”

  It was a wonder that the lightest breeze could find this town, and that morning, it crooned like a raw bow across a cello string, long and low. At approximately 5:40, Jack and Diane climbed into their Dodge pickup, not planning to fully wake until their tires reached the pavement of a God’s honest road. The leather shifted under them, the radio tuned to the local weather.

  “You unplugged the tree, right?” asked Diane.

  Jack grunted, not a yes or no about him at that ungodly hour, ungodly because of the way he had tossed and turned the night before, prodded by toothache. They headed south over the vast stubble that was the landscape, serenaded by the soft scrape of tires on dirt, fiddling with the heating vents. Nothing but blackness for as far as their sleep-crusted eyes could see, but for the pockets of illuminated grit caught in the truck’s headlights. Had they driven on just a little farther, they would have seen the familiar yellow signs inflamed in the lights, warning: HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES—signs you’ll still find in the area today.

  As Diane sipped her coffee, she noticed a glow in the eastern sky just beyond a hill, a moving shade of tawny blotting out the stars. She nudged her husband’s arm, pointing his attention due east to this little light that danced on the world’s edge. For a split second, she wondered if it were the first flash of day, a brief panic at the idea of being late for work, but that couldn’t have been right. Jack tilted his head and let a silent profanity fall down his ponytailed beard.

  He turned the car east toward the light, his headlights streaking the hand-painted sign that read JUSTICE FOR SHANE at the end of the long driveway. The town being small enough, they knew the farm belonged to the Freemans, a family of four. A family of three now, Jack had to mentally correct himself, since the Freeman boy had been found near a ditch about ten miles west the winter before. Suddenly the couple was wide-awake, turning north up the moderate incline of the seven-hundred-foot-long driveway and edging closer. The Freeman trailer was engulfed in flames.

  Jack slammed the gears into reverse and raced in the direction of the highway, stopping at the first house he saw: the Sherricks’.

  Today, Wade Sherrick is a cattle rancher who lives at the end of that dirt road, he on the south end, the Freemans once at the north. “And you thought I was dead, eh?” he laughs when I mention that it took me three years to see him, because I had been misinformed; I thought he was an elderly man who’d died some years before. “Not sure what that says about me.” It was only out of curiosity that I stopped my car by his barn in early 2019 when seeing two young men doing farmwork from the sheds. I knew by their young faces that they probably didn’t have much firsthand information about the 1999 fire up the road, but I ask about the late Wade Sherrick, only to learn that Wade was alive and well, and just over there. Wade comes from the barn, winter pale from the shadows, middle-aged but still handsome in that callused-hand way you’d find around Welch. I follow him across the street to an office connected to his farmhouse, a cluttered room filled with agricultural newsletters and dusty trophies and belts from his days as a rodeo rider, a hobby that his two sons inherited (they all had a laugh at my thinking Wade was dead). I ask to wear his cowboy hat before inquiring about the morning of the fire. He and his sons are kind. Wade’s wife, Kim, a local mail carrier, is working that day.

  “Well, somebody’s beatin’ on the door,” Wade says about the morning of the fire. “I could sleep through a bomb, but Kim wakes up and goes to the door. I stumble out and see it’s that Bell.”

  Back in 1999, the blue heeler
s stood by their masters, keeping quiet when the door opened to Jack Bell and the moonlit ranch behind him, one of Charolais and Angus breeds of beef cattle.

  “Hey, I’m on my way to work,” Jack calmly started. “But the Freemans’ house is on fire up the road there.”

  Kim Sherrick called 911 at 5:50. At this time, Jack and Diane Bell continued to drive to their place of work.

  They’d not speak of the incident publicly again.

  Wade and Kim went to their children’s bedrooms. They wrapped their six- and four-year-olds in the covers they still slept in, the parents slipping on their boots quietly in the dark by the front door with their sons’ heads in the crooks of their necks. “It’s five something in the morning. We get the kids up and throw ’em into the truck and get up there.” The family of four squeezed into the cab of the family truck, summoned by the tiny light at the top of the road that shone red like the sun. The sleepy boys rubbed their eyes to inspect the sight ahead. When they reached the home, only half of the trailer was on fire (Kim remembers the east side while Wade remembers the west side). But the Sherricks couldn’t leave their truck on account of the Freeman family dog, Sissy, a brute of a Rottweiler, jumping on the car doors and barking her jowls off. Helpless, all they could do was watch when a sudden swell of fire whooshed and washed over the other half of the trailer within the matter of a second. “We were, like, ‘Whatta we do? Whatta we do?’” Wade recalls. Today, the Sherrick sons, now working on the family farm, remember not the fear of the fire, but the fear of the dog in their long-ago, hazy memories.

  The Welch Volunteer Fire Department showed up at 6:10, twenty minutes after the call to police. The Sherricks knew the firemen as they came one by one, all of them bread-and-buttered on the same ol’ farms. The pair rolled down the windows and shouted to them from the truck. “We told them that all the cars were accounted for,” says Wade. “We knew that much about the Freemans.” The Sherricks stayed for less than an hour, with Kim having to be at work by seven o’clock.

  Wade closes our meeting by adding, “It was spooky.”

  Firefighters wrestled with the blaze for somewhere between one and three hours until it was extinguished, the trailer collapsing like paper under the pressure of the hoses’ water. Elsewhere, as Welch began to wake at the edge of dawn, bored, fattened housewives coupled themselves to their home police scanners, few surprised, though ever fascinated, to hear about more trouble over at the Freemans’ place.

  The CCSO came to the scene soon after the fire department, sunrise trailing not far behind and with Sheriff George Vaughn at the helm. Vaughn’s position as sheriff was an elected one as opposed to one based on academic or vocational merit, though he’d previously served as sheriff of the same county from 1969 to 1973 before being a twenty-one-year state representative (referred to by the Oklahoman in 1988 as one of the worst in the state at that time). He was tall and beer-bellied, and his expression, perhaps involuntarily, was one of sour certainty. Parts of him retained water, fingers like full rubber hoses and feet a little too wide for his shoes. He was fleshy and spoke slowly, albeit scrupulously, as though each slurred word had been carefully selected.

  In these Midwestern towns, where sheriffs are elected for four-year terms, it’s common to find that they come with their own posse. “Being a deputy for the sheriff’s office isn’t secure,” one of my CCSO sources tells me. “You can come in with the sheriff and leave with the sheriff once his term ends. A lot of these guys are in and out before going back to the ranches and auto shops.” Alongside Vaughn was a group of men from the CCSO, names synonymous with Vaughn’s term: Undersheriff Mark Hayes, Lieutenant Jim Herman, Investigator Charles Cozart, and Deputy Troy Messick (though despite the titles, one wasn’t afforded more training than another, as the positions were handpicked by Vaughn himself).

  At the burning trailer, a volunteer fireman surfaced from the charred remains of the home, removing his helmet and gulping down fresh air. “There are fatalities.” He pointed a thumb behind him as he informed the deputies. “Just the one, from what I see.” Several more firefighters followed him out.

  After firefighters discovered the body, CCSO deputies briefly poked their heads in, noting that the body was found near 7:30. At 7:33, the sun showed up to extinguish the stars, and the men returned to the front yard.

  “Call Donna,” Vaughn said to the officers beside him as he let his head fall, referring to Medical Examiner Donna Warren. “Then call the OSBI [Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation].”

  “The OSBI?” asked Investigator Charlie Cozart.

  “That’s what I said; we’re standing down.” The men stopped at their cars. Vaughn crossed his arms and leaned on his heels as he looked back at the smoke. “No one does a thing until OSBI gets here. We got too much bad blood with this family.”

  “Our hands are clean, boss.”

  Vaughn raised his eyebrows at Cozart. “That so?”

  The single body found by the fire volunteers and only briefly observed by deputies was located in one of the bedrooms, lying facedown in the wrong direction on the bed. All trace of breakfast and open air had been tainted with the smell of burned flesh, which was caught in workers’ throats for days to come. You know that smell, they’d say. You know that smell outta nowhere.

  The fire had destroyed much of the body. The upper back and buttocks were burned to the muscle, and the feet and lower legs had been burned off. But most telling was the fact that the skull was shattered. Around the body’s unrecognizable head, bricks were scattered about. The fire had caused the ceiling to collapse, and it was soon learned that on the roof were bricks from where Danny had left an unfinished roofing project in warmer months prior. Authorities initially assumed that the bricks, either by raining from above or by malicious strike, were the cause of this person’s death. And so this rumor began to filter from the burned trailer, down to the few Welchans who’d stopped their pickups and tractors at the edge of the property.

  That Danny and his dadgum temper, it soon started.

  At the end of the driveway, locals began gathering and stepping cautiously along toward the trailer site, peering up the incline to the curls of smoke. Police cordoned off the scene with yellow DO NOT ENTER tape. The rumor mills quickly started to crank, lubricated by chewing tobacco and tractor grease.

  Many said they had seen this coming.

  The CCSO kept to the front of the house, where three cars were parked; they refused to reenter the home until the OSBI arrived. The first was a white 1990 GMC flatbed truck that belonged to Danny Freeman. Then the silver 1998 Toyota Corolla belonging to Kathy. They were the only cars the Freemans owned.

  “I’m guessing this third one belongs to the daughter?” one of the deputies asked.

  “Christ almighty,” Sheriff Vaughn sighed, looking across at the blue 1989 Chevrolet Cavalier. On the front, an airbrushed license plate read DRAGON WAGON, with bangles and curios hanging from the rearview mirror to match the Bluejacket school colors of blue and gold, the high school from the next district over. “No, but I think I know whose it is though.” Vaughn shook his head, exhaling slowly as he spoke: “The Bible girl.” He was referring to Lauria Bible, the best friend of Ashley Freeman.

  The wood continued to hiss, an angry whisper about the dead. From the ashes there would be answers. From the ashes there would be questions. On this day, a single body was found.

  The question was, which one?

  6

  * * *

  ONE WOMAN, LORENE BIBLE

  * * *

  Today

  I chose to write about the case in late 2015. Living for most of a decade in Ireland (though I was born and raised in New York), I spoke to Lauria Bible’s mother for the first time in early 2016. It was nighttime, and a carnival spun brightly outside my office when I called Lorene, six hours behind me. I was newly wading the waters of nonfiction, a little apprehensive.

  “To be honest, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” I said to her. After al
l, I was just a writer with no law enforcement experience (at least not on the right side of the law) or any experience in investigating.

  “Neither do I, but I just keep doing it anyway,” she responded.

  That single sentence would help me get through it all.

  I come to Oklahoma, thinking that it’ll be hard to write about the dead, but it has proven harder to write about the living, about those who’ll have to read themselves through my eyes. This is most true for Lorene Joyce Bible. She is guarded. She holds her head high and listens more than she speaks. She is Lauria Bible’s mother, and she is the only reason this case isn’t forgotten on a shelf somewhere. Her maiden name is Leforce, and it’s always felt apt to me.

  I meet Lorene for the first time at the Bible farm, the cattle ranch that runs through her husband’s family as the hay baler runs outside. I’m not the first person to sit face-to-face with her and ask her the tough questions about her daughter’s 1999 disappearance, and I won’t be the last. She sifts through a thousand photos of Lauria, knowing by only the feel of her hand which worn photo is the one she prefers the world to see—it is one of Lauria posing in her cheerleading uniform. It is the same photo that makes up Lorene’s Facebook cover on the “Find Lauria Bible—BBI” page, where I first contacted the Bible family in early 2016. In the photo, Lauria looks like her father, Jay.

  “The Bible Bureau of Investigation,” Lorene explains when I ask what BBI stands for, “because we never stop searching.” She comes from a large family, including Lisa Bible-Brodrick, Lauria’s cousin, a woman who was raised like Lauria’s sister, one of Lorene’s own. She is Lorene’s right-hand woman, especially in this new age of technology. This network of Lauria’s relatives and friends comes with children who know their long-lost cousin or aunt only by word of mouth, by the stories and photos of those I interview today. They know her only as well as I do. But the Bibles are a people who have withstood the unbearable, a people who manage to find God’s peace not when the clouds part but in the midst of the storm.