Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  15

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  THE MURDER OF DEANNA DORSEY

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  2001

  Less Than Two Years After the Fire

  I knew very little about forty-five-year-old DeAnna Dorsey when I first began to work on the case, and I’m afraid I know little more upon writing this. She was a heavyset woman with curly, short honey-colored hair and lively brown eyes, a good woman from Welch. In the few newspaper articles that exist about her, she is described as a God-fearing woman of “deep religious faith,” a woman with a “strong work ethic.” She’d worked at Craig County General Hospital since 1996, often going home with tears in her eyes for all the people she couldn’t help, the sick and the unsaved.

  It was during the late days of DeAnna’s (née Bartell) adolescence, in Bernice on a particularly unforgiving hot day in August that the man who would be her husband first saw her. It was the mid-seventies, and he recalled her being “pretty cute,” as she shoveled thirteen tons of sand from the back of her father’s truck. Like many of the women I met in Oklahoma, from Lorene to Chris and others, she had that breakback strength, and a stoic, biblical approach to the world around her. Years later, people would jokingly refer to her as a drill sergeant. And back then, on that day in Bernice, she declined the boy’s advances. “So I walked down to the store, bought bottles of Mountain Dew, and took one back to her,” Dale Dorsey was quoted saying. And as luck would have it, it was DeAnna’s favorite soda.

  Five months later, they were married.

  She was a woman who believed that God was constantly preparing her for His good work. As the secretary and treasurer of the local Assemblies of God church, she clung close to its Pentecostal doctrines: To passionately proclaim. To strategically invest. Vigorously plant. Skillfully resource. And to fervently pray.

  “She was the closest thing to a saint that I ever knew,” Dwayne Vancil said, citing that DeAnna worked for him at an automotive plant in the early nineties. Dwayne remembered that she had it rough, with her marriage starting out in poverty—the young couple lived in a home with walls and part of the roof gone—but stated that you had never met anyone “more committed to her family than her.” While employed by Dwayne, DeAnna also went to nursing school, reportedly once working as a candy striper (though I never found proof of this), burning the midnight oil to see herself through school while raising her children and working on the assembly lines. At forty years old, she was the first in her family to earn her college degree, often having her family study with her at night. DeAnna persevered, and by all accounts, she was a successful woman who worked hard for the life she had, the life she was so proud of.

  “She had such an air about her, such self-sufficiency,” the charge nurse at Craig County General Hospital told local papers in 2001. “I wanted a piece of that.”

  In the aftermath of Shane’s death, DeAnna was the person Kathy entrusted with all of the information pertaining to the shooting, delivered to her friend with the now familiar warning “If anything should happen to us …” And when the premonition came true on December 30, 1999, when DeAnna found herself at home with a daughter who, but for the grace of a last-minute grounding, would have been sleeping at the ill-fated Freeman trailer the night before, she was ready to publicly speak out against the Craig County Sheriff’s Office. DeAnna did not hesitate in pointing a finger at them for the deaths of Danny and Kathy and the abductions of Ashley and Lauria.

  Entrusted with the documents pertaining to Shane (presumably his autopsy report, the police narratives of the men present, and any documents pertaining to the lawsuit), DeAnna kept them close to her chest in the months following the shocking deaths of the Freemans. She was rightfully devastated about what had happened, even saying that “Ashley was like another daughter” to her.

  In September of 2001, DeAnna and her daughter, Katie, equipped with the papers left in her care, joined Lorene and Jay Bible, Dwayne Vancil, and CCSO lieutenant Jim Herman on a trip to Los Angeles, where they were going to be filmed for a series pilot for an upcoming show called “What Really Happened,” hosted by Rolonda Watts.

  Unable to find a distributor, the show never aired, but I manage to track down the original tape.

  DeAnna and Katie sat in the audience. Dressed in a matching teal-colored blouse and pants, DeAnna had a small stack of papers in her hands. Rolonda Watts asked Katie to stand and recount how she was supposed to have been at the sleepover that night. When asked how this tragedy had affected her, the teary high school senior paused. “It’s very difficult at school—you don’t have anybody there,” she said, her voice breaking. “Not the person you ate lunch with every day, not the one you spent every waking moment with.” She was referring to Ashley.

  When asked what she thought could have happened, DeAnna’s daughter’s voice sharply changed to anger. “I believe very, very strongly that the Craig County Sheriff’s Department had everything to do with it.” From the stage, Lorene and Jay watched Katie Dorsey speak. “Just because I know of instances that Ashley would tell me about. They [the CCSO] would watch their house. They’d park just, like, down the road in a barn. And they would follow Danny into town and then follow him back home, park in that same barn, and just watch every moment they left the house.” At her side, DeAnna nodded.

  “So, then, Ashley did express fear for her family, because of the police shooting of her brother, and the fact that they stood up to the police officers?” the host asked.

  “Yes,” DeAnna’s daughter answered matter-of-factly. “Yes.”

  Dwayne explained that on the day of the taping, DeAnna had a great deal to say about the situation, laying the blame at the door of the sheriff’s office, as her daughter had. According to the families, at one point DeAnna stood up from her chair and yelled toward Lieutenant Jim Herman that the Freeman murders and the girls’ disappearances were all their fault, that they’d lied about what they said while delivering the news of Shane’s death when saying, “No gun visible.” But by the time I finally come across the tape of the show, these parts have long ago been left on the cutting room floor, so I’m never able to see this confrontation firsthand. This said, there is a clear moment during the recording when a continuity error shows DeAnna taking her seat after Jim Herman scrambles to defend himself. This is where I can assume she scolded him. There are also parts where I see DeAnna standing, looking at the host as if she’s waiting for her turn to speak, with those papers still in her hands.

  During the show, when asked why no one searched for the girls, Jim Herman said it wasn’t their job, that it was the job of the OSBI, whom they had turned the case over to. He would repeat this years later, as would Mark Hayes. It seemed they took the position that calling in the OSBI meant they were absolved of all responsibility. Lorene garnered applause when pointing out that each agency passed the job off to the other and that was the reason that parents, like herself and Jay, had to beat the bushes and ask the hard questions, and then be told that they were making trouble. “And I’m gonna keep on making trouble until I get my daughter home.” As I’d come to expect, Lorene was the crusader, setting out her intentions to go to the ends of the earth and back to do whatever it took to find her daughter and her daughter’s best friend, while Jay sat beside her, wrestling with his emotions.

  What is particularly fascinating about this video for me is that it features the first public appearance of the OSBI that I’ve seen on record, as spokeswoman Kym Koch joined them via satellite and defended the bureau’s actions. When first asked what the OSBI’s investigation uncovered, she answered, “There were no rumors around town, really. It was real quiet, if you talk to Steve Nutter, our case agent. After that, the rumors started flying and—”

  “I beg your pardon,” Dwayne interrupted. “There were plenty of rumors flying around!”

  At this point, Kym Koch confirmed that there had been rumors during the first few days—of Danny killing Kathy, then of the girls killing the parents, then of Danny dealing drugs out of
the home, then of Mexican nationals, then of the girls being sold as sex slaves to truck drivers. But Koch was insistent that they had all been fruitless. “Nothing,” she stated firmly. “We found nothing to corroborate or substantiate those rumors, including the one about the sheriff’s office.” It didn’t look good for the spokesperson to have shifted so quickly from claiming no rumors to listing six right off the top of her head. She seemed smug, a little righteous in her power over these country folks. When asked what their most recent theory was, she stumbled and looked around for what to say. “Probably the most prominent one was the drug lead,” she said, rolling her eyes, “that he [Danny] was involved in some sort of drug activity out of the house.” The audience booed and heckled.

  She would, however, admit that the OSBI had made a mistake and should have found Danny’s body. When asked why the OSBI didn’t notice Danny, how they couldn’t feel his body under their feet, she simply shook her head: “I cannot explain that to you.”

  Listening to the tape, I can hear Dwayne’s voice tremble as he comments on the fact that there are still two of their family members missing with nobody from the OSBI out there helping. “And now you tell us you made a mistake?”

  Lorene and Jay, who did not comment on the accusations against the police at the time, later stated that they knew the show was trying to get the two families to fight with one another, but they refused to be baited, so they kept quiet about their instincts about the case on camera. The truth was, since the initial days of the fire, the Bibles had kept busy chasing the rampant rumors of drug debt that the OSBI seemingly refused to investigate while the Freemans firmly planted their feet in the notion of police corruption. The Bibles, since day one, had never publicly entertained the connection between Shane and the alleged cover-up of his death, and the murders of Kathy and Danny and the girls’ possible abductions. The host returned to DeAnna’s daughter, who was now standing, ready to defend the Freemans and directing her questions to the OSBI. “I just want to know, exactly, where she gets the proof that there were drugs involved. Where’s the proof? We have yet to see any!”

  “You asked for a theory, and I gave you a theory,” Kym answered, once again to the audience’s disapproval.

  Dwayne Vancil never believed his stepbrother’s marijuana use had had anything to do with the murders, and he defended his position well. “The cops had spent a year trying to get him on something, to lock him up,” Dwayne pointed out. “If Danny was doing something illegal, they would have put him in the slammer.”

  At the end of the show, as the audience applauds, you can see host Rolonda Watts make her way over to shake her guests’ hands, starting with DeAnna Dorsey.

  DeAnna wore her white nurse’s uniform with pride. Before the days when nurses of all levels wore scrubs, the esteemed white signified not just cleanliness, but the hard work entailed in training and braving the hue against the garden-variety stains of the profession. It was October 6, 2001, a Saturday morning, and not an especially busy one, with only six patients on the wing. It was twelve days or less than a week (different articles cite different dates, and I am not able to find the exact date of filming) since DeAnna had traveled to Los Angeles and pointedly denounced the sheriff’s office for their failures in her friend’s case. That morning, she wore her watch, an old-fashioned nurse’s honor. DeAnna had just changed the linens in room 100 and returned to the nurses’ station to call her daughter, Katie. The call was never connected. A moment later, the phone still in her hand, a man wearing military-issue camouflage pants and a long army coat, with a red bandanna on his head, entered the hospital. Some locals have claimed that the man asked for DeAnna Dorsey by name, though I wasn’t able to verify this. He shot at her six times, hitting her five times, in front of her coworkers and patients.

  While I was never able to speak with DeAnna’s children or husband, I called on a woman named Sydney Horton. Sydney was only ten years old on the day of the shooting, and she was there with her father, a doctor who worked at the hospital.

  “He was making rounds,” she said to me. “I was sitting at the other physician’s [empty] desk, and I heard this noise and looked up.”

  Her father said he heard what he thought were lightbulbs popping.

  “I saw DeAnna start to fall,” Sydney continued, saying she was only ten to fifteen feet away from where DeAnna was gunned down. “And then my dad grabbed me and yanked me into the back room. There were some more loud noises. We just hid back there. Then once everything got quiet, my dad went out and checked if DeAnna was OK, which obviously she was not. Then he came back to me and made sure everything was fine. He told me to close my eyes when he walked me out.” When I asked her if she knew what had happened, she said she didn’t until seeing her father’s face and realizing the severity of the situation.

  Sydney was unsure if she ever actually saw the killer, or if the memory emerged from everything she read about the day over the years.

  Five bullets pierced DeAnna Dorsey that day when the killer emptied a gun into her, missing once. The first one went through her left eyebrow, entering her brain and lodging there. The second went through the base of the front side of her neck, exiting through her upper back. The third entered right behind her left ear, through the bottom of her skull, dislodging a molar on the opposite side and exiting the right cheek. The fourth and fifth bullets went into the back of the head on the left side, behind the ear, exiting out of her forehead. She died instantly at 9:50 a.m.

  Moments later, forty-seven-year-old Ricky Martin attempted to reload his semiautomatic pistol out in the parking lot. Officers responding to the scene, part of the Vinita Police Department, found Martin standing on top of a car there at the hospital. Martin cursed at them as the two officers drew their weapons, demanding that Martin drop his gun. When Martin pointed his now-loaded gun at the officers, they each shot their gun once, one being a shotgun and the other a .40 caliber pistol. According to his autopsy, Martin died only minutes later, with five large shotgun pellets hitting his lungs, heart, liver, and “other soft and bony tissues.” He died only ten minutes after witnesses watched him gun down DeAnna Dorsey.

  It was later reported that Ricky Martin was a paranoid schizophrenic who had had zero affiliation with DeAnna. The local police could never explain why he sought DeAnna out, admitting, “For some reason, he just picked her.” According to reports, there were no drugs or alcohol found in his system.

  Prior to the murder, Ricky was often seen wandering around the streets of Vinita, wearing his fatigues and long army coat, a vagabond who seemed to have fallen from the grace of one of those all-American youths many people dream of: the football scholarship, the good looks, the wholesome family, all of which he apparently had while being raised in Ada, Oklahoma, a three-hour drive from Vinita. But the symptoms of schizophrenia reared their ugly head shortly after high school, and Ricky Martin soon found himself traveling from town to town, where people often found him sleeping in alleyways or by the train tracks behind the virtuousness of Vinita’s Route 66, intermittently trying to find somewhere to level out his medications. One family member reported that Ricky’s issues first came to light after a car accident, in which he was ejected from the vehicle, causing lasting brain damage.

  Before DeAnna’s murder, in January of 2000, the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane in Vinita began to close its doors, a process that seemed to take months, from state-implemented downsizing to fading from existence altogether, creating an exodus for hundreds of mentally ill patients to relocate to the overcrowded asylums in Tulsa and several smaller and ill-equipped community-based hospitals and residential care facilities. The latter centers fell under contract with the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services (ODMHSAS), and some of the buildings on the hospital grounds in Vinita were converted into a facility for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (it was already the official treatment center for all ODOC inmates in need of court-ordered evaluations and observations since 1979), whe
re prisoners found not guilty by reason of insanity were stationed; the last of its patients seeking mental health care were all moved out of the original houses by 2008.

  Patients, many spending years at Eastern State, had once kept busy in work programs, making the hospital one of the biggest employers in Craig County (their Holstein cows were prizewinners). The grounds were equipped with barns, greenhouses, and canning plants, and even military barracks during World War Two. It grew more in America’s ending of segregation, adopting patients from the Taft State Hospital for the Negro Insane in the sixties. Today, thousands of patients are still buried there, though only a few hundred markers remain due to vandalism and teenage hijinks and a lack of record keeping in the now-abandoned premises that looks more like a haunted attraction than a once-working hospital. The yellow signs reading HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES still stand erect, though go mostly unnoticed by locals. For years, the hospital in Vinita was a home base for Ricky, where he’d frequently admit himself to have his medications readjusted. When the hospital went under, Ricky reportedly became aimless, wandering without knowing where to turn to receive the help he was so accustomed to. One week before the shooting, Ricky was in Tulsa getting help, but for what were assumed to be budgeting reasons on behalf of the hospital and state, Ricky was turned away, and he returned to Vinita, where he hoped help was calling him.

  Locals agree that DeAnna’s murder was a senseless act committed by an unstable man with mental illness who had either run out of or stopped taking his antipsychotic meds. There was no concrete reason outside of Ricky’s ill mind to kill the woman.