Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  Those three words will be repeated in nearly every subsequent visit I have with the Freemans. “When Vaughn came up to the trailer, he told them, ‘No gun visible.’”

  According to Danny’s father and siblings, the story changed to Shane’s having a rifle. About a week after that, it changed one last time to Shane’s having a pistol.

  DeAnna Dorsey could have also chimed in on number four from Kathy’s list: “Sent body to Oklahoma City before we were notified.” I am not sure if this is a legitimate claim of wrongdoing here or what the due process ought to have been, so I speak to my friend, a former-sheriff-turned-coroner and current teacher named Darren Dake out of Cuba, Missouri, to clarify.

  “The family is not required to ID the body prior to a police investigation or autopsy,” Darren tells me. “In fact, if the police were familiar with him and/or they ID’d him through a driver’s license, then the family doesn’t have to ID him at all.” When I inquired about possible reasons Shane might have been sent to Oklahoma City as opposed to the nearer medical examiner’s office in Tulsa, which was another concern of the Freemans’, he said that this was commonplace. “It stands to reason that the local office may not have had the resources to do the autopsy or had sent the body to a bigger office and out of local jurisdiction since it was a police-involved shooting.”

  Despite Kathy’s claims in the letter, however, I am not able to verify that Shane’s body was taken to Oklahoma City. Without an autopsy, and with the medical examiner Donna Warren having passed away years prior, it is virtually impossible to know for sure, unless I can speak to nurse and friend DeAnna Dorsey.

  The fifth item on the list is, once again, something that could possibly be confirmed by her. “Sheriff lied to hospital that we had already been notified.”

  But sixth on the list is the most damning, if true, as the family suggests. And while this information isn’t well-known around the community, the remaining Freemans bring it up regularly. Kathy’s phrasing is a little unclear, but she referred in the sixth point to an event that occurred one February afternoon, a month after Shane’s death. “Shane’s father [Danny] was stopped on Main Street of Vinita, because he drove through Big Cabin on his way home from work. Held shotgun on Danny. He was told if he took off on foot then he would shoot. His truck was searched and took him to the courthouse. Sheriff let David Hayes yell and scream at Danny.”

  Big Cabin is the name of a town thirty miles south of Welch, more specifically, where shooting officer David Hayes then lived, and where I’d meet his brother, Undersheriff Mark Hayes, at his converted barn.

  Kathy’s mother’s letter is slightly more detailed about this incident. “Feb 9, 1999, a month after Shane’s death, Danny was stopped because he came to Big Cabin. He had a shotgun pointed at him, was handcuffed, and his truck was searched. The deputies took him to the office and rant and rave about him being a no-good father. Sheriff George Vaughn saw and watched as this was going on and never tried to stop it. Other officers were present.”

  It would have been a small spectacle for a town like Vinita: a car full of deputies in front of the old KFC handcuffing Danny before traffic. I had first heard about this specific incident from former sheriff Vaughn during one meeting with him over tea (coincidentally, Jeremy Hurst walked in on us in the middle of our interview). When I asked about the alleged arrest of Danny, Vaughn claimed that “Danny had been stalking David in Big Cabin,” and that Danny would sit “down there in his car close to [David’s] house. Best that I can remember we called him in and talked to him and told him, ‘That’s not to be done.’” Vaughn switched his cane between hands.

  Undersheriff Mark Hayes also recalled that Danny, at one point shortly after Shane’s death, had arrived in the town of Big Cabin, where his brother then lived. Danny pulled his truck up to a group of kids playing in the street “and asked these children if they knew where the deputy was who shot his boy.” One of the kids’ parents called the sheriff’s office. “We proceeded to go toward Big Cabin to see what was going on, and as it turned out, we met Danny at his vehicle on Route Sixty-six, this side of Vinita. We pulled him over, and he agreed to follow us to the sheriff’s office.”

  Waiting at the sheriff’s office were Deputy David Hayes, Investigator Charlie Cozart, Lieutenant Jim Herman, and possibly others, all part of Vaughn’s entourage.

  According to several family members, Danny explained that the deputies took turns screaming at him, getting in his face, making threats toward his family. The deputies claimed they were the law and that no one would believe Danny if he tried to blame them for anything. Relatives kept insisting the deputies threatened to kill his entire family. According to Danny’s brother, Lonny Freeman, when Sheriff Vaughn came in to see the deputies surrounding Danny as he was handcuffed to the chair, Danny called out, “Why are you letting them do this to me?” Sheriff Vaughn didn’t respond and walked back out of the room without a word.

  By these accounts, this detention may have been a violation of Danny’s constitutional rights.

  “I think Danny was reading them,” Danny’s stepsister, Chris, once said. “I don’t think Danny thought they were all bad there at the sheriff’s office, but he wanted to sift through which ones were and which weren’t.” She went on to describe how it took Danny, a man known to never take any lip from anyone, all that he had not to fight back. “They wanted Danny to react. They wanted to have a reason to lock him up and throw away the key.”

  “It was a tit for tat,” said Lorene Bible. “Danny was threatening David Hayes’s family, stalking his kids and all, and the sheriff’s office was fighting back.”

  Some said that Danny was out for blood.

  Others said he was out for dirt.

  It wasn’t much of a stretch to believe Danny’s account of how he had been mistreated by CCSO officials, since it was well known, and well proven, that corruption plagued several sheriffs’ offices in northeastern Oklahoma in the eighties and nineties: a Wild West mentality and a long, dark history of sheriffs caught up in scandals, sheriffs implicated in murder, sheriffs murdered (Sheriff Harkins of neighboring Ottawa County was stabbed to death only two-and-a-half weeks before the Freeman murders). There is a steady stream of alleged corruption and people with firsthand accounts of police wrongdoings, and I spend four years talking to people with the wildest of tales. “I watched Deputy So-and-so OD in my living room, needle still in his arm. I must have been about ten years old, watching my mother try and revive him” is just one of many stories I’d hear (and that same Deputy So-and-so did confirm this). At first, I chalk some of it up to rumor and bad feeling, but there are countless accounts, many well documented in newspapers after arrests or trials of the officers, of police engaging in drug use, illicit sex, and unlawful harassment.

  “Neither side was blameless,” said Lorene in regard to Danny Freeman and the CCSO.

  But Kathy isn’t the only one related to the case who brings up the police provocation. One account of police harassment comes from Jeremy Hurst, Ashley’s boyfriend, who remembers a spring afternoon when he and Ashley stopped at a store in Welch. They collected several bags of chips from the shelves, elbowing each other playfully, blue eyes smiling back and forth, when they noticed one of the familiar deputies enter the store. The deputy neither shopped nor looked around, just watched the couple. And when Ashley and Jeremy left, the deputy followed, getting in his patrol car and crawling behind them. “We weren’t speeding or nothing,” says Jeremy. But the deputy pulled them over, asked about where they were going and what they were doing. Jeremy confirms that these instances occurred almost every time they went out. “We weren’t doing anything wrong.”

  I spend a good amount of time spider-webbing over the four-state area, listening to dozens of claims from family and friends of police harassment of the Freemans at their rural home. I hear how in the witching hours, deputies came out there to the middle of nowhere to ignite their spotlights up at the trailer: blinding white light spilling into the wind
ows enough that it moved the Freemans from their trundles and caused the dog to have a conniption. And of the many times Ashley got off the school bus to find deputies parked there, watching, where there was nothing but back roads and farms. Sometimes she’d be nearly crying with anxiety. And by most accounts, this consistent harassment was led by CCSO investigator Charlie Cozart.

  “He was the ringleader of them,” many say on both the Freeman and Bible sides. “The sheriff didn’t run the deputies. Charlie and the Hayes brothers did.”

  According to the letter written by Celesta Chandler, “Officers from the department started parking their cars in front of the Freeman home, on the county road in view of the Freemans.” It appeared that Kathy had never been alone in having a grievance with the sheriff’s office.

  Returning to Kathy’s letter, the seventh thing that she writes is: “Road signs west of Welch went up suddenly (because ambulance couldn’t find location).” The family looked to the county for answers as to why there had been street signs missing from the country roads. It was their belief that the ambulance got lost on its way to the scene because of the lack of signs, which resulted in the ambulance showing up one hour and twenty minutes after the fatal gunshot was fired. Without a police or investigative report, I have no idea still.

  The eighth and final thing listed is, “Wouldn’t let EMT in to help. She lived close by the scene,” referring to a Welch woman who stopped and tried to help Shane at the scene. There wouldn’t be, however, any violation here if Shane had already been pronounced dead (which he had) and had the area been secured as a crime scene.

  Signed by Kathy at the bottom of the page, a slogan of sorts: “One cop, one kid, one shot.”

  An almost identical slogan was coined by Danny in the Tulsa World: “One cop, one shot, one seventeen-year-old kid.”

  According to Celesta Chandler’s letter, Kathy and Celesta attended a community meeting at the Public Service Company of Oklahoma building in Welch on October 6, 1999, two-and-a-half months before the murders. There, residents made several complaints about the sheriff’s office. The Freemans were instructed by someone (by whom would be cut off at the bottom of the letter and never discovered) to put their complaints about the CCSO in writing and have them notarized.

  The letter, perhaps inevitably, is a product of emotion, hearsay, and—at times—conspiracy theory. But throughout my investigation into this case, I consistently find that where there is smoke, there is fire.

  I can see Kathy Freeman rising from the kitchen table and slapping the page onto the refrigerator with the cow magnet, unaware that she is only days away from being shot to death.

  In speaking with former undersheriff Mark Hayes previously, he told me that in February 2000 he and his brother passed the OSBI-mandated polygraph tests taken in light of the Freeman fire. The tests were administered by the OSBI about their possible involvement in the deaths of Kathy and Danny and the disappearance of Ashley and Lauria.

  “I thought it was a good idea from the beginning,” Undersheriff Mark Hayes said in regard to the polygraphs as we sat in his home. “For whatever reason, Shane made a choice that late afternoon, and the deputy reacted as he had been trained.”

  I look at a Tulsa World article from February of 2000 titled “Rumors Spur Tests in Case of Two Missing Welch Girls,” with a subtitle that reads: “Two brothers, a deputy and an undersheriff, pass polygraphs [sic] exams regarding the disappearance of two girls.” But the reports of the men passing the tests seem to be claimed only by the Hayes brothers themselves. The same article also states, “An OSBI spokeswoman [Kym Koch] cited confidentiality rules and would not comment Tuesday about any polygraph tests.” This leaves me confused.

  As of today, I have never seen an official report pertaining to the results of the polygraph tests, nor am I any more aware of what questions were asked.

  It is undeniable that there was heat on the department at the end of Vaughn’s term, partly because of the implications of police involvement in the murders of the Freemans. To add fuel to the flames, in August of 2000, it was discovered that CCSO investigator Charlie Cozart, the lead investigator for the department and alleged harassment ringleader, resigned when he failed to provide a record that he’d received so much as a GED (general equivalency diploma), which rendered him unqualified to be part of the sheriff’s office. In an article in the Oklahoman in 2000, Sheriff Vaughn was quoted as saying, “Cozart has worked in law enforcement in this state and the area for many years … I never had any reason to question his eligibility.” With Vaughn’s arm being twisted by the Council on Law Enforcement Education and Training, Vaughn asked for Cozart’s resignation with the hope that he could get Cozart a job in the jail, which “doesn’t require state certification,” he told the Tulsa World.

  An investigative report from the Joplin Globe noted that “at least one drug case that Cozart had worked was dismissed because of his lack of certification.”

  “I was just shocked,” Mark Hayes said to me, and described Cozart as being his best friend. In our interview, Mark smiled as he handed me photos of Cozart, the first ones I’d ever seen. He laughed. “Wanna know a secret?” he said. “I think it was his brother who turned him in.” Mark was referring to Marvin Cozart, a violent criminal and neo-Nazi from Picher who had a history that included prison escape, assaults, burglary, and even murder. “I think Marvin was looking at some time and decided to turn on his brother” in an attempt to get a more lenient sentence when he was facing charges along with six others in beating a man to death with a pipe.

  Marvin Cozart, who is in prison today, despite previous escapes, never responds to any of my letters.

  The first time I speak to Mark Hayes on Facebook, he is tagged in a public photo with Charlie Cozart. In the comments, someone has written of Cozart: “He was my dealer, then he became a cop and busted me … not right.” It is a sentiment I hear often.

  “Charlie was loud, boisterous, and ignorant. Oh, yeah, he was a drug dealer,” says now-retired CCSO lieutenant Jim Herman when we speak. Herman was a fellow deputy of Cozart and part of Vaughn’s posse who was present at the crime scenes of both Shane and later Shane’s parents. I’d personally speak to several people who supported the claim that CCSO investigator Cozart was a meth cook. “In Big Cabin, he was the only town cop, mechanic, and town drug dealer … He sold dope like it was nothing,” says Herman, who went into detail about instances when Cozart would pull over some “hoodlums” and take dope right out of his boot to plant it on the kids.

  Jim Herman had always been described as a bit of a bumbling man, slow off the mark. But when I spoke with him for the first time, there wasn’t a time, date, phone number he couldn’t remember decades later; he has the kind of smarts my father has. He is an enthusiastic source who says that the Freemans believed that he, and not Cozart, was the one watching the trailer at all hours. “Our two cars looked eerily similar,” admits Herman. “We [CCSO] all knew Cozart was heading west of Welch, toward the Freeman house. He was seeing if he’d see cars going in and out. Danny was a drug dealer on a far larger scale than Charlie.” When I asked Jim Herman what it was like to work with Cozart, he said, “I didn’t want to get in the car with him. I didn’t want to be with him, uh … when he did something. I didn’t want to be associated with him.”

  By the end of 2000, the men at the heart of the Craig County Sheriff’s Office were more or less gone after Sheriff George Vaughn was voted out of office, his first loss since 1968. He lost his bid in November 2000 to Jimmie L. Sooter, who would take office in the new year. “Let’s just say Sooter cleaned house,” said Mark Hayes. It was known that the Bible-Freeman case was a significant factor in Vaughn being defeated by Sooter. Troy Messick, who’d delivered the news of the fire to Lorene Bible and was the first to respond when the Bibles found Danny the next day, was said to have left before the end of the year to go to the Vinita Police Department.

  Cozart resigned in light of his falsified certification, eventually passin
g away in April 2003 of esophageal cancer.

  Mark Hayes went on to Rogers County as a deputy.

  David Hayes also went on to Rogers County as a deputy, where today he is captain of the Rogers County Sheriff’s Office.

  “Sheriff Sooter promised to solve the case,” said Glen Freeman. In fact, this was something both the Freemans and the Bibles agreed on: that Sooter’s assertions that he would solve this case were more than confident; they were sure. In the towns of Welch and Bluejacket alone (where Ashley and Lauria had gone to school, respectively), the residents “voted three to one not to reelect Vaughn.”

  “He worked it well in the beginning,” said Lorene. “But not toward the end.”

  Looking back at the time, and at Shane’s death, with the benefit of hindsight, the Freemans concede there does exist the possibility that the shooting of Shane was justified, that Shane made a wrong move with his hand and got himself in trouble. The fact remains that police behavior in the wake of the shooting was often suspect: the loss of documents, the harassment over the next year, the shocking deaths of Shane’s parents and the disappearances of his sister and her best friend, then the resignation of Cozart.

  But there is one missing piece of the puzzle that I know I need to understand before I can move on to look more closely at the theories of drugs, as provided by the Bibles. And that is DeAnna Dorsey, the friend of the Freemans who was best positioned to answer all the questions I had about the possible cover-up involving Shane Freeman, the anticipated lawsuit, and the theory that the Freemans were killed so the police could keep a lid on Shane’s death. In fact, in talking to the Freemans, I find that most of their anger comes to a head when their narratives land on DeAnna.

  “If someone told you, ‘If something happened to me, then look here,’ wouldn’t you listen?” said Dwayne, who also expressed over the years that Danny firmly believed that he wouldn’t be alive a year after Shane died because of what he knew. “If police didn’t kill my brother and his family, then they hired the people who did. And I think DeAnna’s murder proved to us once and for all that this was police related.”