by Jax Miller
It is the first time I hear about this shotgun shell, one referred to by Hayes as being “fresh.” Then I think back to the thirteen guns never collected from the front lawn.
According to Hayes, Nutter rolled his eyes and told the others to bag the shotgun shell, “if it makes Hayes here happy.”
“I’ll tell you why Nutter really rubbed me the wrong way,” Hayes continues. “He was acting like we were partners, like we were friends. But it didn’t take long to realize that he wasn’t being buddy-buddy with me. He was treating me as a suspect.”
“Were you a suspect?” I ask.
“Sure, I was,” he answers. “They made me and my brother take polygraph tests, asking us if we murdered Kathy and Danny, if we had anything to do with abducting the girls.”
“And this was because of your previous dealings with Danny?”
“That’s right.” He nods. “From when my brother shot Shane.”
I knew that, according to the Freemans, the killing of seventeen-year-old Shane Freeman lay at the heart of this story, and before I could examine the theories of drugs that continue to cumulate over the years, it was best to start on the boy who had been shot and killed less than one year prior by CCSO deputy David Hayes.
11
* * *
SON, SHANE FREEMAN
* * *
Less than a year before his parents’ murders, seventeen-year-old Shane Freeman’s hazel eyes matched the dusk of January 8, 1999, when he waited by the broken-down truck he had stolen a couple days before. Several Welchans, even though they knew he was wanted by police, stopped their cars as they passed, asking if he needed any help, upon seeing the truck was disabled, with one front tire pointing straight and the other pointing outward. “No, thank you; help is on the way,” he politely answered them all with a nervous smile and with a storm stirring in his head. The chill locked the smell of cologne and gun smoke in the air around him, a smell you can still catch on Welch boys today. Shane inherited his handsome parts from his father, took with him that hand-me-down temper he never wanted. As he waited by the disabled truck west of Welch, about ten miles from the Freeman trailer, he waited for death, just minutes away, on the snow-dusted prairie.
I visit Kathy’s parents on the outskirts of Vinita in 2017. Their trailer is tucked far back in the shade of coffee trees and surrounded by cattle ranches. In the front, by the road, a large sign that reads JUSTICE FOR THE FREEMAN FAMILY stands all these years later. As I walk up the driveway, I hear the blaring of daytime television. The door has nearly a dozen varieties of locks. Answering is a shirtless Bill Chandler, whose bald head is scabbed over and partially bleeding. Before I can finish introducing myself to him and explain who I am, Celesta pushes Bill out of the way. “It was the police who killed my family! They deserve to burn in hell,” she barks, using both her hands to come down the steps of her home. Celesta is an elderly woman with an incomplete bottom row of teeth, and is braless in a matching gray sweatshirt and sweatpants on a hot day. “Shane might still be alive if Danny treated him better.”
But she has her reasons for not liking Danny, reasons that include a 1985 assault and battery (misdemeanor) charge against Danny after he attacked Bill Chandler for accidentally mowing over Danny’s marijuana plants. Despite this, Celesta was quoted in the Joplin Globe, a daily newspaper out of Joplin, Missouri, saying, “There was only one thing wrong with Danny, and that was his temper. He was one of those guys that would say things to Kathy and the kids both that hurt their feelings. But he wasn’t a killer.”
Sadly, Celesta and Bill go on to blame Shane’s death on the White House, the ancient history of Ireland, and the Obama administration (though once Trump took office, they shifted their blame to him). The loved ones, the survivors of the Welch murders, are deteriorating as fast as their little, once prosperous farming towns. “The sheriff’s office killed my whole family,” Celesta repeats each time we speak. As we sit outside her trailer in a few flimsy lawn chairs, it’s hard not to look at a blue 1985 Chevrolet pickup truck parked at the side of her trailer. “That’s the one Shane took,” she tells me. She doesn’t have to explain it to me. I already know what she’s referring to, just like she knows why I look at it.
“May I?” I gesture my desire to take a look at the truck.
“Go ahead.”
Sitting alone in the pickup, I trace my fingers along the steering wheel, grip the blue leather, and begin to talk to Shane. I ask him what set him off, what made him run, what made him tick, what really happened in the moments before his death. There’s something sacrosanct about sitting in the very spot that Shane, a boy I’ve spent years familiarizing myself with, panicked and fled in the days before his death. I breathe in the old leather; the truck still starts, and when I turn on the radio, a staticky gospel sermon plays. I try to find some rock and roll but end up with only fire and brimstone. I touch every part of the truck he would have touched, from the armrest to the door handle, trying to imagine what raced through his mind that night. I want to sit with him and watch.
Tell me what happened, I silently request of the dead.
It’s easy to picture Shane in one of the many trucks he’d steal for joyrides. Beer bouncing in the bed, midnight in a Midwestern summer, when the winds are warm and the skies spangled with stars bright enough that you swear to God you can hear them burn. He was five feet seven and a muscular 169 pounds, with short brown hair and a clean shave, garnished with a stud in his ear. The soft scrape of tires on dirt overpowered by the revving of a V-8 and a late-nineties song. With the dust sticking to his sweat, and cooling off under the condensation of a beer can, he rode off into the witching hours of Route 66. Scanning over one sleeping town after another, Shane had all the swagger of adolescent defiance, powered by hormones and adrenaline.
Among classmates, friends, and family, people’s opinions differ in trying to peg just who Shane Freeman was. Perhaps his personality changed in the company of each one. He was the rebel without a cause, yet people were charmed somehow by his capacity for reckless abandon.
“Joy!” he once called out to a girl among a group of locals hanging out in the parking lot of the Pizza Hut in Vinita, his head and arm hanging from the driver’s-side window. “I’m gonna marry you one day. You best believe it.”
Another girl called back, “You said the same thing to me last week!”
“I did?” He smiled. “Dunno if I can make an honest woman outta you, though.”
Despite the playful tales exhibiting Shane’s charisma, others described him as shy and reserved. I get much of my information from Shane’s best friend, Justin Green, an athletic man who has since moved out of state, though we talk often.
“Shane was very athletic. Funny, outgoing, when he didn’t—how do I say this?—when he didn’t have his family life on his mind,” admits Justin.
“Shane was handsome as anything,” most people I talk to will agree. “And he ran faster than anything.” These are the two attributes that most remember him for today: dashing looks and tree-trunk legs. “He ran like you wouldn’t believe, go hell for leather.” And Shane seemed to know this much about himself. When watching the show Cops, he always commented on how he’d outrun them all.
“All the girls wanted him. They’d follow him anywhere he went,” says Justin.
On many occasions, I drive to the godforsaken section of the country road where Shane died. Each sporadic passerby stops to see if I need help; then I ask about Shane. “Sure, I remember him,” says one passerby. “The boy ran like lightning.”
But rumors of Shane’s home life are buzzed with whispers of a quick-tempered father and poverty. Shane gloried in rebellion, with a striking contempt for authority. “Let me ask you this,” says Justin. “Wake up on a Saturday morning, and you have a choice: go fishing or hunting, or go play some basketball and meet some girls at the county fair? Shane would grab a basketball. Danny hated that.”
In writing this book, I always hesitate over how best to faithfull
y describe Danny. As with Shane, there seem to be two sides to who Danny really was. No one ever argued that he didn’t have a knee-jerk temper, but it appears to have come and gone, and there were periods of tenderness and calm too. Of the lightheartedness of his and Ashley’s ambling through the pastures and gathering up every beautiful flower from the fields to sell. Of his soulful connection to the birds in the backyard. Of looking to the waxing moon as a sign of good fortune, before it doubled over into the crick.
But then there are the stories of Danny’s anger. Justin Green alleged that one winter’s day, when he and Shane had fallen asleep on Shane’s bed, they were woken by Danny’s closed fists raining down on them, and he called them faggots and cocksuckers. Waking into this red-hot reality, the boys, still in their pajamas, ran out of the back of the trailer while Danny stormed out of the room. When he returned, it was with a high-powered rifle. Danny ran outside and jumped into his pickup truck to chase the boys into the creek amidst a hurricane of homophobic slurs and profanity, shooting the gun in their direction as they braved the cold waters of the stream.
It was the very stream where Danny would later feed the wild turkeys and lament for his firstborn child.
The boys, shaking and cold in the creek, believed that Danny was prepared to kill them that morning.
Even Sheena, the friend of Lauria and Ashley who recounted the Rambo story to me earlier, said that Ashley confided in her, telling her that Danny had once thrown Kathy through a wall. “I wish I did something then,” Sheena said.
But other friends contradict Danny’s tales of horror. “I never saw anything like that,” says one. “I always knew Danny as very kind. In fact, when I read something that I wrote at Shane’s funeral, Danny just cried and held me.”
During one visit to Welch, I visit Danny Freeman’s friend Albert “Ally” Lynn at his farm. He talks about the kind of friend Danny was. “He was older than me. I was about nineteen,” says Ally. Though he was closer to Shane’s age, Ally describes Danny as the best friend he ever had. “One time, I came over from work, and I was tripping on acid.” The friend laughs through his crying. “Danny, he was always tsk-tsking me. That’s who I was. That’s who he was. And we went on the pee-ro [pirogue] and went gigging that night. I was tripping. We loved doing those kinds of things together.” Gigging, a sport found in the Ozarks. Many an evening could Danny and Ally be found smoking grass in a pee-ro, a flat, shallow watercraft. Ally would row from the stern while Danny took the bow, skimming across the black waters of the crick with a flashlight out back and through clouds of mosquitoes and the sparkle of lightning bugs, looking for the glowing orange eyes of frogs at the water’s surface, before using a long prong to pierce through them, and bring them home to cook frog legs over the fire. “Sometimes we’d go out to where Shane died, just me and him, and he’d just cry and cry,” Ally continues. “Before they died, me and my wife made plans with Danny and his wife to drink blue tarantula margaritas and light off fireworks on New Year’s in memory of Shane.”
Others who knew Danny, including Lorene Bible, said his rage stemmed from the time he accidentally shot himself in the head. “That muzzle in his forehead gave him some mean streak.” The migraines kept his temper bubbling just beneath the surface.
“Shane wanted something better,” says Justin. “He wanted to get as far away as he could so that he couldn’t become his dad. I think that was his worst fear.”
Like his sister, since their preteen days, Shane had known how to hunt and field-dress game like squirrel, rabbit, and deer, when it was in season. He’d stroll aimlessly on the back roads with a rifle bouncing on his back, not minding the animal blood on his pants (nothing about this picture would ring peculiar to Welchans anyway). The days were quiet, outside of his gunshots, as he kicked “ay-kerns” and the taste of oak filled the air. By summer, the countryside shimmered. By winter, it was stark, and for most teenagers like Shane, it was the most boring place in the world.
March of 1998, which many claimed was when Shane’s troubles became evident to locals, probably wasn’t when Shane first brushed with crime, but it would be, at a family member’s insistence, when the involvement of law enforcement was initiated. In fact, the then sixteen-year-old’s small-time crimes were so regular that when something in town did go missing, the first thought was There goes that Shane Freeman again. For reasons not entirely understood, his burglaries were usually contained to friends’ houses, where he would shower and eat. During one burglary, he got his hands on a red emergency light.
“I regret ever bringing law enforcement into the family.” It was Dwayne Vancil who’d remorsefully bring in the police. It all started when Dwayne and his family were out of town in Branson, Missouri. When Dwayne returned home, he found his truck caked in mud, and the gas tank nearly empty. Without thinking twice, he knew it was Shane, who had permission to access Dwayne’s shop while they were away. Shane had broken the locks of Dwayne’s house and taken the keys. And I’m sure Shane loved every second of spinning doughnuts in the fields wet with melted snow; I can imagine him lying on his back in the bed, whistling at the stars, smirking at his own delinquency. In the end, I’m not so sure he’d take it back.
Dwayne drove straight to one of Shane’s friends’ houses, where he knew Shane was sleeping over, and all but dragged him by his ear all the way to the sheriff’s office. “I filed a report down there,” Dwayne said. “We wanted to scare a little bit of sense into him before he could run into some dangerous consequences.” Waiting there at the Craig County Sheriff’s Office in Vinita were Shane’s parents. Together, they explained the troubles they’d been having with the teenager: the local burglaries, the lifting of trucks, the sneaking out. They even arranged to give Shane a tour of the local jail, to show him where he might end up if he didn’t get his act together. At first, the intervention seemed to be successful. They even went through the Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS), where they attended family counseling: Shane, Danny, Kathy, and even then fourteen-year-old Ashley. It seemed to improve Shane’s behavior, at least for a short while. But after a couple of months, Shane capitulated to the itch that could only be scratched by petty crime.
In the late summer of ’98, Shane was helping Danny on a job across Welch, at the home of a family acquaintance. With the garage door open, Shane saw the opportunity to steal a length of telephone cord, which he continued to steal on multiple occasions over several workdays (for reasons unknown, Danny had recently stripped Shane of his phone privileges). That defiant spirit in Shane emerged on the morning of August 20, 1998, before school, and Shane snuck some of the phone wire to improvise an ad hoc line from his bedroom to a phone box on the side of the trailer home. His father found out.
While rumors churned about the way Danny treated Shane, there was a faction that defended him. “He was strict with Shane, but the kid was out of control. Danny only did what he had to do to try and get him in line. He may have spanked him here and there or whipped his behind with a belt, but he didn’t abuse him,” Danny’s stepsister, Chris, once told me when I visited her in Louisiana. It’s worth noting here that a majority of Oklahomans favor corporal punishment, with paddling still allowed in the state’s public schools if parents sign a permission slip. Shane’s family feared that if they couldn’t get him on the right track, then the cops would do it for them—or, worse yet, a righteous gunshot from a homeowner aimed at their teenage trespasser would.
But then again, who isn’t invincible at age sixteen?
That August, Shane’s junior year had just started, with his basic studies in session for the first half of the school day before he was bused over to vo-tech (vocational school) at the Northeast Technology Center about a half hour away in Afton, where he studied autoservice technology, a fancier term for “mechanics.” But that August day, when Shane arrived at Welch High School after his father’s punishment, a track coach found Shane “oozing blood” from his gym shorts as he entered the hallway. Sure, he was the popular jo
ck who would high-five his friends in the hall and had all the girls chasing after him, but he was also a hurt and angry boy shrinking with humiliation when faculty had him recount what had happened.
According to the Craig County deputy who took Shane’s statement, Shane reported that Danny “hit him with a telephone cord approximately thirty times, along with slapping in the face and punching him with his fist three times.” The officer also noted that Shane’s buttocks were “black-and-blue and bleeding.”
After this, Shane did not return home. In response, Danny met with CCSO deputy Troy Messick at Roscoe’s convenience store, where Ashley Freeman worked part-time, and reported Shane as a runaway. Still in the town of Welch, Shane moved in with his best friend, Justin, and his family; Shane was close with them all, and Justin’s mother had long been like a second mother to him. That night, before Shane could settle in, police brought Shane into the sheriff’s office to make an official statement before returning him home with Justin.
By all accounts, Shane was happy living with this new adoptive family. He continued going to school, and if only in small slivers, those months on the brink of his turning seventeen provided happy memories for Shane.
On September 2, 1998, an arrest warrant was issued for Danny Freeman, charging him with “Injury of Minor Child (Felony).” Clint Ward, who reportedly announced that the Freeman crime scene had drug debt written all over it, was then the assistant district attorney. According to Dwayne Vancil, Danny felt like the DA’s office was letting the case go too far for someone who was only trying to correct his son’s behavior, that the commotion surrounding the event was BS. That day, Danny was arrested, then released on five thousand dollars bond, a small fortune for a family with the barrel-scrape income you’d find in Welch.
In court during a preliminary hearing on October 20, 1998, Shane Freeman was quoted as saying the only words I ever find directly attributed to him: “I was talking to someone I wasn’t supposed to. He caught me and tried to find a belt and couldn’t, so he got the telephone cord and used it.” Soon after, on November 6, 1998, Shane turned seventeen.