Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  I wonder after all this time, sixteen years later, if there is even anything that can be found.

  SECTION 2

  * * *

  CORRUPTION

  * * *

  10

  * * *

  THE INITIAL THEORIES

  * * *

  Today

  I have a defect of the mind. I love the same Lord that these people do, but this is what He gave me. It is a shadow that lurks on the sidelines of my mind, trailing me all throughout this research. It stalks. While fear finds me in Oklahoma, I’m not sure it’s because of Oklahoma. I’m not talking about the word “panic,” which is so often loosely thrown about today, but the paralyzing terror that makes you vomit where you stand and unable to speak. It is an inherited psychosomatic disorder only compounded by my immersion in a case filled with death and fire.

  It is hell.

  Forgive the sweats and shaking hands, or the mad dash to the closest bathroom to get sick, or my sitting without speaking until I can bring my heart rate back down. I begin to lose confidence, and if not for the wit that I just manage to keep, those closest to me will start to wonder if I’m back to old habits. Sure, I still miss the needle in my arm all these years later, but I fight to work with the demons at bay. Fighting, I’ll learn much later, would be the very thing that encourages the shadows of my mind to lurk, ready to pounce without warning. Panic.

  Working the case through this lens wasn’t easy, but I’m a person who fixates; I’m not naturally designed to let go, and I’m shit at multitasking. So off to Oklahoma I went, over and over (and over) again. Isn’t this the very definition of insanity? And then I try to escape, ending back in the prairie, lost in prayer and surrounded by killers who aren’t really there. Then the frustration of being able to see the wind but not the tangible flesh of the girls turns hope into bitterness and the earth’s sweetness into decay, like the taste of blood when left too long on the tongue. I fix my gaze to the distance, off into the pecan groves ahead.

  “Puh-cahn,” Lorene Bible will forever correct my pronunciation of “pee-can.” “It’s puh-cahn. How many times will I have to tell ya?”

  What the hell are my frustrations compared with those of a woman who has spent the past two decades searching for her daughter and her best friend? And then my sense of hopelessness becomes a sense of wonder. While the story of the girls’ disappearance brought me here, it is a mother’s plight that keeps me.

  Over the next few years, I receive information in random bits, mostly due to the fact that it takes time for people to sit with me, to speak to me. “What is it that you do when you’re in Oklahoma?” people ask me back home.

  “Ninety-nine percent of my job is gaining trust,” I say. “The other one percent is investigation, research, and sunblock.”

  The sun is so bright that my memories are in shades of hot white and platinum, and the nights so dark that it’s like having amnesia. I don’t know where the fuck to start.

  “We don’t say those kinds of cusses here.”

  “So what kind do you say?”

  “Well, shit, I don’t know.”

  These are not my people, and I am not theirs. But something keeps pulling at me to come here. It’s an itch, a hunch, a fight with the husband. “We didn’t even think you’d come,” Lauria’s cousin Lisa admits. I’m not the first person to show interest in writing their story. But now it’s been sixteen years … The girls have been missing for as long as they’d walked this earth.

  Today, two prominent theories stand a foot above the rest: corruption and drugs, the Bibles believing the latter, two theories that have divided the two families since 1999. I will walk between them, edging along a great divide and listening with each ear. I have my days when I’ll latch my hooks into one, and then I have days when I’ll latch my hooks into the other. “What’s your theory, Jax?” “Depends on my mood.” It sometimes feels like a balancing act, an unsteady one that sends my brain spinning.

  “Much of those first couple of weeks were just chasing up the leads of drugs and Danny’s doing and dealing of drugs,” Lorene contends. But in my talking to Lorene so many times, it’s difficult to distinguish whether she’s referring to marijuana or methamphetamine, as they seem synonymous to her. And while not even the Freemans dispute the fact that Danny was an avid grower and smoker of weed, the meth angle was thrown around loosely as being the route by which Danny brought trouble to his home … perhaps murder.

  It bears noting, however, that no evidence of drug use was discovered at the crime scene, and I’ve never been convinced that meth had anything to do with the murders (though I remain open-minded). Furthermore, Danny’s and Kathy’s toxicology reports were never included with the autopsies I received from the state, which could have been indicative of whether or not the couple was actively using methamphetamine and/or marijuana. I was first told by the state that they’d been lost, as was the case for reporters before me, then later told that they were not subject to open record (they would be the only Oklahoma autopsy reports out of the two dozen I receive that don’t come with toxicology).

  This is something I also discuss when first meeting Wade Sherrick and his sons, the ranchers who lived at the end of the Freemans’ road and who called 911 on the morning of the fire. “It was pretty well known,” Wade concedes. “Cars would come back and forth this road, at all hours.” On the long dirt road, between where the Sherricks and the Freemans lived, was a small, easy-to-miss, and rickety house that looked like something from the Grapes of Wrath era. I would pass the house countless times and hardly notice it exists, as do others. There is a total of only three residences on the road. “I’m not sure if the traffic was going there or to the Freemans’, but we’d always heard rumors. Everyone here kinda knew about it.”

  “Do you know who lived at the other house?”

  “No,” they answer. “No idea.”

  While rumors of Danny’s dealings in drugs have long circulated, and I will examine them closely throughout my work, they’re usually assessed separately from the notion of cartel involvement, which pops up now and again. Back then the Mexican cartel had small influence in the county, where mom-and-pop meth labs still sprout around the mushroom farms of nearby Miami and Commerce, where many Mexican immigrants found employment starting in the early 1990s. But Lorene knows everything there is about this case, and she is quick to dismiss these.

  “So, in your mind, do you have any doubts that the Mexican cartel could have been involved?”

  “They weren’t,” Lorene answers.

  “How do you know?”

  “I have my ways.”

  Lorene’s curtness is something that takes getting used to. She doesn’t mince words, never slips. If there is something she doesn’t want to answer, she’ll stare into my eyes and meet me with silence, or never answer a text. There’s never an “I’ d rather not say” or “No comment.” Just an arresting silence as impenetrable as her belief that Danny Freeman’s dealings with drugs had everything to do with the murders.

  “So how did the rumors of the cartel begin?” I ask.

  “Danny’s missing hand,” she admits. “The rumor was that his hand was cut off”—like a signature, something telltale.

  When I read Danny Freeman’s autopsy report today, it is not possible to know exactly how his hand disappeared, whether by fire or with intent. It did not, however, show up separately from Danny’s body, with the other parts of his body rolled in on the cart, including a lower leg below the knee and the other foot, which were assumed to have been burned off, and parts of Danny’s nasal bone and upper jaw, which were shot away.

  “This is something the authorities looked into?” I ask.

  “No, it was something that I looked into.” She makes sure I know as much. “Like I said, the authorities were done with the case.” It would take some time, and trust, but Lorene will eventually go on to tell me about her own encounter with the cartel in 2000. It was the dead of night when she and the small
posse of people she’ll never reveal rolled along the lifeless back roads just under the Kansan border in a pickup truck. No one spoke as she drove. They rode slowly, and everywhere around them was the shushing of switchgrass. She knew that somewhere nearby, a local cartel kingpin waited with his own posse for Lorene to arrive. She doesn’t divulge how the meeting was set up, but Lorene parked the truck with steady hands. She and the man she was meeting, a well-known, violent drug dealer, kept the cars running and left their comrades behind as they exited their vehicles, walking toward one another in the brazen headlights. They came face-to-face, breath crystallizing in the cold night air.

  “How do you know I won’t kill you?” the kingpin asked as he tilted his head and scanned Lorene.

  “How do you know I won’t kill you?” she coolly responded, and it was a response that could only have come naturally from a woman like Lorene Bible.

  The nocturnal intensity between them faded, however, once Lorene began asking him all the questions she had come equipped to ask. In the end, Lorene felt satisfied that the cartel had had nothing to do with the girls’ disappearance. “That’s not their nature. He told me so,” Lorene tells me. “They’d have no qualms killing people over drug debt, but to abduct two girls as retribution would just be too risky for them.”

  And just like every other time I ask Lorene if she was scared in this situation, her answer is always the same, delivered with the familiar fixed stare. “Just another day I look for my daughter.”

  It is a sunny afternoon when I sit in a bright, air-conditioned office with now-retired OSBI agent Steve Nutter in the Northeast Regional Office of the OSBI in Tulsa, just an hour and a half southwest of Welch. With him is OSBI agent Tammy Ferrari, an attractive round-faced woman with long highlighted hair and a background in law enforcement; she’s from Fort Smith, Arkansas, near the eastern Oklahoma border. Ferrari leads the investigation today, but speaks less than Nutter, not having been there for the initial stages of the 1999–2000 investigation that I’m here to discuss.

  “This one was unique to me,” starts Nutter, “because after you process the scene, which is the first thing that gets gone, you start looking for leads, and for the first week, there were no rumors in an entire county in Oklahoma about this homicide. None whatsoever. And generally speaking, in cases like this that I’ve worked in northeastern Oklahoma, I spend the first week or two just chasing down false rumors. That was what was very unique about this case.”

  This contradicts the information I have at hand, but it is not my objective to trip anyone up. I don’t hunt witches, and I don’t come just for the truth. I come for people’s versions of the truth. I come for what some think I want to hear. I come for their lies. So when Nutter tells me that there were no rumors, I don’t confront him with articles and with the statements of those who’ve said otherwise over the years. I never felt pressed to say, “Gotcha,” and become some arrogant know-it-all, and I want to keep this line of communication open. If I call him out, he’ll end this. Besides, lies can be just as revealing if you already know the God’s-honest truth.

  My list of theories didn’t stop at the cartel. After Danny’s body ruled him out as the prime suspect, and when murder-suicide was dismissed when no gun was found near him, one of the earliest theories was that Lauria and Ashley had killed Ashley’s parents themselves. While this angle was largely dismissed by the family, especially since Lorene found Lauria’s purse containing two hundred dollars inside, it continues to course slowly through website forums today: that the girls are playing out some happily ever after on the white sands of the Mexican Riviera, that they are criminal masterminds who had the stomach and the psychopathic streak to execute Danny and Kathy in such a violent fashion.

  “Anything is possible,” Nutter answers in response to the idea of the girls being killers. “But the Bible girl would have eventually called her mother. Their bond was so tight that she could not avoid calling. And when she didn’t that first year, that told me she wasn’t gone by her own volition.”

  Another theory that soon arose in those initial days was that it was a random passerby, though most agree that the Freeman trailer wasn’t a place that one just stumbled upon. The trailer was too pushed back from the desolate road, a road you’d never come upon accidentally—anyone lost would have turned back in the direction from which they had come long before reaching there.

  It’s important that I look at these secondary theories before really tackling the angles of drugs and corruption, which survive imagination today. But the relatives of the Freemans remain vocal in their belief that this was a murder instigated by one or more employees of the sheriff’s office, just as Danny had warned Dwayne Vancil in the days before his death. “Danny told us where to look,” the Freemans say.

  “There’s been some speculation of possible drug use,” interjects Agent Tammy Ferrari. She explains that it’s not necessarily the case that the murders occurred because of drugs, but that many of the people with information over the years are or were active in the drug scene. “A lot of these people involved in drugs, they’re turning up dead.” But there’s not much more the agents care to say on the topic.

  When law enforcement failed to find the body of Danny, it only fueled for the Freeman relatives what they’d already suspected: that Danny was right about the sheriff’s office being involved in the murders, that corruption was in all of it.

  “The next day, when Danny’s body was found, he was found under six to eight inches of ash,” explains Nutter. “I and other people probably walked right by it a couple of times. And even after we dusted the ash off, you could not recognize it as a human body. That’s the only explanation I have.”

  But this goes against the statements of the Bibles and Dwayne Vancil, who all saw Danny’s intact corpse that morning. Nutter also seems to shift the blame of not finding the second body on two fire marshals who were at the crime scene prior to his arrival. “The fire marshal said that they had searched the debris and had found—The only thing they found had been a body located on a bed in what was later determined to be the bedroom of Danny and Kathy Freeman.” And while the OSBI, the DA’s office, and other branches of the law will spend years referencing an assumed fire marshal’s report, no one can recall such an investigation taking place. What the families learned about the fire came largely from the information of a local retired fire marshal who went to the scene only after catching wind of the action, and he was not there in an official capacity. According to Nutter, and no one in the family has ever argued against this, gasoline was used as an accelerant to start the fire: arson.

  “I can find no record of the December 1999 fire in Welch,” said the state fire marshal’s office in May of 2017. “Apparently we were not called to do an arson investigation.”

  In January 2018, I contacted the assistant state fire marshal himself. “I searched our records, and we did not investigate a fire in Welch, Oklahoma, on December 30, 1999. By state statute, the state fire marshal must be requested by the local fire chief, police chief, or sheriff’s office to conduct a fire investigation. No such request was made to the state fire marshal’s office.”

  Pressing once more for confirmation in the fall of 2018, I requested some further information and requested that they look into all dates, in case of some clerical error. Their response was a curt one. “Like the previous e-mail stated. We were not called to that fire.”

  According to family members’ opinion, partly based on the hypothesis of the retired unofficial marshal, the path of the accelerant went around the kitchen table, was tossed into the living room, and set by the killer(s) at the woodstove just at the front door of the trailer. A later conversation saw a former volunteer from the department say with certainty that the accelerant started on Kathy’s body. Without a report, I’ll never know.

  “I used to think I could handle anything,” Nutter says toward the end of our meeting. “When I retired, I wanted to live in the country. Well, now, after I worked these year
s with the OSBI, I want to live in a town where if something happens, at least there’ll be a witness.”

  With this, my meeting with Nutter and Ferrari concludes. It will be the last time I speak with either one of them on the record, and Nutter’s last public interview.

  I wanted to get a take from CCSO officers on the scene as well; however, no one wanted to speak with me those first couple of years—my interview with Nutter comes three years before I’d meet with then CCSO undersheriff Mark Hayes, who, in 1999, took serious issue with the way Nutter quickly abandoned the scene.

  It’s a biting January afternoon when I meet retired undersheriff Mark Hayes at his home, which has been creatively converted from a barn at the top of a hill in Big Cabin, Oklahoma. I’m so far in the country that my car stereo can’t find a radio station, and a tinge of fear starts as a prickly sensation in my scalp—my anxiety is charging. Inside, his home is cozy, adorned with cuckoo clocks and old, rustic tools on the walls. A woodstove keeps us warm. He is kind and welcoming, and he doesn’t mask his feelings toward Nutter. “There are a lot of great agents in the OSBI,” Mark tells me. “And why and how we got this one will always be beyond me. Nutter started wrapping up the scene so fast, I said, ‘How are you done already?’ He told me there was nothing more that could be done, but that wasn’t true. I even pointed out a shotgun shell right in the driveway. He shrugged it off.” Hayes gives a dry laugh. “If you can’t tell, I’m not a fan of Nutter.”