Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  I wear the twenty-one pages of the affidavit out until they are soggy after years under the oil and sugar of my fingers. The document was created and sworn by then OCSO detective Mike Eason. Today, Eason is the district attorney’s investigator for Delaware County, just south of Ottawa and bordering Arkansas. While never assigned to investigate the Freeman-Bible case, he was once the director of the District 13 Drug and Violent Crimes Task Force, which made him well acquainted with the miscreants of the ever-growing methamphetamine scene here in Ottawa County. Eason wasn’t looking for the girls when “[f]rom July 2000 through November 2000, Affiant [Eason] received information from different sources which were either CI’s [confidential informants / cooperating individuals] or sources who were incarcerated in the Ottawa County Jail.” While Detective Eason was the affiant named in the affidavit, it is standard practice that reports are written in the third person.

  “We had a lot of guys start talking about those girls,” Eason told me. “But that was a long time ago.”

  As I pore over the affidavit, it tells of several sources who lived in and/or frequented the seedy areas of Wyandotte, namely around the home of established meth cook Chester Shadwick. On January 5, 2001, just over a year after the fire, Detective Eason spoke to an Ottawa County Jail inmate by the name of Donovan Maxwell, a thirty-one-year-old white man with a shaved head and scarred chest in prison for attempting to manufacture methamphetamine.

  Maxwell stated that in the last part of November 2000, he received a “videotape from a Shannon Burleson [a criminal with a litany of drug charges, burglaries, and assault on his record] that showed Amber Powell having sex with James Payne.” Amber, the same Amber I’m sitting with in the diner, is the mother of James Payne’s mentally disabled son. She tells me of a time when James Payne, a boxer and rumored meth cook from Wyandotte, was charged with assault and battery with the intent to kill after beating Amber with his bare fists until her heart stopped. As it goes, it was Detective Eason who performed CPR on her bloodied, broken body until the Life Flight helicopter arrived and plucked her lifeless eighty-pound body from the black hills of Wyandotte. Eason confirms all of this when we speak.

  Beyond the claims from the affidavit, I can get no actual details of how this videotape exchanged hands, nor can I gather how inmate Maxwell first gained Detective Eason’s attention from jail. But Amber admits to me with a laugh that she and James Payne often made sex tapes. “Back then, I was so skinny that I’d make my shirts by tying a bandanna around my body.” She looks longing, and I ask if she misses those days. “Just the crash,” she admits as she relives it in her mind. “I just miss that sleep.”

  According to inmate Maxwell’s statement to Eason, the recording of Amber and James having sex ended, but the tape went on, leading to a previously recorded scene in which Maxwell watched a “young, dirty-blond-headed girl tied up by the wrists, on her knees, and a James Payne W/M [white male] 28-years having sex with this girl.” Maxwell described that the room had a “rock wall in the background.”

  “It was the girl I saw on the news,” Maxwell told Eason, referring to one of the missing girls.

  Amber denies having any knowledge about the alleged video on which her son’s father and the man who left her to die was recorded raping one or both of the missing teenagers.

  After seeing the video, inmate Donovan Maxwell claimed, he gave the tape back to Shannon Burleson.

  Detective Mike Eason tracked down Shannon Burleson. Shannon Burleson claimed that he had borrowed it from a man named Logan Sherry. Giving a statement nearly identical to the one made by Maxwell in jail, Shannon said that on the tape was a young girl “tied up by the hands on a bed and that James Payne was performing sex with this young girl.” Again, like Maxwell, the one distinguishing factor he described was a rock wall in the background. Shannon Burleson didn’t know which of the two girls it was by name but he did admit that it was the one “with the sandy blond hair,” which could have described either one of them. Shannon Burleson claimed that he later returned the tape to Logan Sherry in December of 2000, and he believed Sherry still had it.

  I reach out to Shannon Burleson on Facebook, but he denies being the same man featured in the affidavit (although it’s easy to establish that he is, by comparing all his public photos with his mug shots on file, and verifying birth date, et cetera). But I’m not out to trap anyone, and I accept his lie. He wishes me luck and I go on my way. But after months of no correspondence, he sends me a “Happy New Year” GIF before blocking me from writing back.

  Nine months later, Shannon Burleson will die in a motorcycle accident.

  I later try to reach out to Logan Sherry, who was the last person said to be in possession of the sex tape. It was reported that Logan has since cleaned up and become the owner of an auto repair shop in Ottawa County. But when I go to ask him about the affidavit, his wife makes a scene at their place of business, marching up toward me and screaming in my face. Even though I feel her breath, I can still watch Logan stare off with a blank expression on his face, lost in some other world where not even his wife’s screaming is enough to break his attention. She also threatens to involve Eason, as though he were some pit bull she kept locked up in her yard. And though I go on to meet several suspects, seeing Logan Sherry drift off is the only instance in all my time in Oklahoma that I get the chills from a man. I’ll forever wonder where he went in those blank-stare moments, and wonder if the girls were there.

  On February 16, 2001, Detective Eason obtained a warrant to search Sherry’s property for the videotape. No tape matching the description given by Burleson and Maxwell was found, though Sherry, along with two other cooks who were present, was arrested for attempting to manufacture methamphetamine. According to the affidavit, “Sherry said that he heard a rumor that the tape existed but has never seen it.”

  In June 2001, a “cooperating individual” known as CI#99 (often the initials for a confidential informant) said that Logan Sherry told CI#99 that he did see the tape, which showed “the two Welch girls” being molested. According to CI#99, Sherry said that Chester Shadwick, the popular Wyandotte meth cook who threw the wildest parties in the hills overlooking the Neosho River, was angry with Sherry for showing the tape to Shannon Burleson and “another person,” and that Shadwick wanted the tape back. Sherry claimed that Shadwick came to pick up the tape prior to February 16, 2001, and that Shadwick told Sherry that he had subsequently “got rid” of the tape.

  CI#99, who had at one point lived on the Shadwick property, went on to describe, in great detail, Chester Shadwick’s tricks of the trade: where Shadwick would bury the cookware and chemistry equipment for meth production by a tree line in the backyard, how Shadwick opted to cook in the garage as opposed to the main living quarters. He gave precise measurements on how to divvy up the red phosphorus, warnings of violent chemical reactions. CI#99 claimed that Shadwick threatened to bury CI#99 “with the rest of them” should Shadwick’s name be raised in any drug investigation. As stated in the affidavit, and as confirmed by a relative of Shadwick’s when I speak to them, Shadwick was known to bury barrels and boxes of incriminating evidence by that tree line, with “numerous” rifles and long guns, not far from one of the several campers on the Shadwick property.

  Shadwick’s property consisted of two acres, only accessible through a red cattle gate at the end of a dirt dead end that ran uphill from US Route 60. Beyond the gate, there was the main residence, a tan single-wide mobile home with brown trim. Another dwelling consisted of a gray single-wide mobile home with maroon trim, as well as a white camper and several outbuildings, junk cars, and other curtilage and appurtenances. Surrounding the two acres belonging to Shadwick was dense and weedy land owned by the Grand River Dam Authority.

  Six months before the submission of this affidavit, which was created by Eason to ultimately search for the girls’ bodies in light of all the rumors, CI#99 said that he was with Shadwick by the camper on the property and that “there was a hole dug by the c
amper and there was also a 55 gallon drum.” According to the informant, the drum contained what he described as “a leg bone with a foot bone connected to it.”

  At night, the tweakers drove up the hill to the Shadwick house, pairs of headlights dancing above the Neosho where the echoes of heavy metal music hollered downstream and over Lost Creek. The bonfires were lit and the ripples of the black river lit with amber like nerves. The property seemed to float over dense vegetation and swampy ground where the trees were bare by winter, as skinny as the guests around them. The windproof torch lighters stayed hot under blackened thumbs, contouring lean, hard faces. Because of the increased sex drive and reduced inhibitions brought on by methamphetamine highs, you’d sometimes catch a flash of thumping flesh from the shadows.

  By day, they slept, having blacked out the windows with shoe polish and soggy newspaper, unable to let their eyes adjust to the light outside. Today, these partygoers are older, and the india ink on their skinny arms has faded to a sickly green. But that generation of vampiric lost boys is still feared today. I am repeatedly warned to steer clear of the outlaws, told that they’d skin me alive without much thought and that they have the police deep enough in their pockets that it wouldn’t cause too much of a blip on the radar of law enforcement. Just like in Craig County, the plethora of documented scandals and the extent of police corruption run deep in Ottawa.

  “I’d heard through the grapevine that some of the local law enforcement were confiscating drugs for their own use,” says current sheriff Jeremy Floyd. But I sense he doesn’t want to discuss the subject much further than this.

  At the time the affidavit was created in 2001, Chester Shadwick was serving part of a three-year sentence for charges related to possession of meth, firearms, and a police radio, the latter being a popular charge leveled against the outlaws for alerting and being alerted by dirty cops to approaching danger. This corruption was raised at every corner, in fact, and extended as far as a former sheriff who was implicated in the executions of minors. And another sheriff who was stabbed to death only days before the Freeman murders. Even during my own visits to Oklahoma, I’d see a former assistant district attorney arrested for the solicitation of murder and pandering for prostitution (among other charges). I’d also see a state representative who felt the need to publicly defend himself on Facebook by asserting, “No, I have not murdered anyone, and no, I am not a child molester.” While this is a permanent backdrop to my investigation, it’s something I have to put on the back burner.

  “We can’t lose focus,” Lorene Bible tells me time and time again. She consistently says that she’ll have her day to come back and get angry at authorities and law enforcement who botched the case or saw to it that certain crucial people were not adequately interrogated. “You see it all the time, and you know what happens? It becomes about them, and not about the girls.” Even though I uncover more than a dozen murders and missing-persons cases throughout northeastern Oklahoma in which families cry police corruption, I have to put them on the back burner. There has been a series of shocking misdeeds at every level of law enforcement, but I am here to find out what happened to Lauria and Ashley, and no one can afford to get distracted.

  As authorities readied for a search, and with Chester Shadwick in a Missouri prison, Shadwick’s residence was being watched over by a man named Nick Joseph, who was staying there temporarily to keep an eye on things. After conferring with the local drug task force, Detective Eason learned that Joseph was a career meth cook and was “in possession of a machine gun and a .50 caliber.” On June 8, 2001, the same day that the affidavit was written and signed by Eason, he sought the help of a CI who went by CI#98, an informant whose information had led to meth-related arrests and the confiscation of a meth lab in the past. CI#98 advised Eason that while they had been to the Shadwick property before, they were “scared to go out there because people get shot at,” and stated that they “heard that there are people buried out there at the residence.” Eason opted to fly a plane over the property, which isn’t an uncommon practice for law enforcement—the county has its own municipal aircraft available out of Grove, Oklahoma. Eason noted each of the two mobile homes on the property, a tin garage, a camper, and what appeared to be disturbed dirt near the camper, all coinciding with what CI#99 had previously mapped out. The places near the camper where the loose dirt was were “where CI#99 saw a barrel buried that had human bones in it.”

  The cover sheet of the search warrant describes how Eason found probable cause to believe that “murder, kidnapping, lewd molestation, manufacturing methamphetamine, possession of automatic weapons, illegal proceeds of drug sales … are being or have been committed” at the Shadwick property. The search, as listed, was planned for fifty-five-gallon barrels, human bones or human remains, videotapes, firearms, and items related to the manufacturing or selling of meth, and paperwork and records documenting meth-related business and traffic.

  On June 14, 2001, four Ottawa County detectives, including Eason, and nine deputies stormed in at sunrise and seized five VHS tapes and one roll of film.

  It was not specified whether or not the sections of disturbed dirt were ever explored, and this question remains today.

  In the end, they found nothing to corroborate the statements of the CIs. No one was charged with any crime relating to the murders of Danny and Kathy Freeman or the girls’ disappearance.

  Though the affidavit and search were executed in June of 2001, it wasn’t filed with the state until the year 2004. While no one would, or could, comment on why it took authorities years to file the documents, Lorene Bible believes it might have been to keep her from knowing about the search, as authorities felt she was “too involved.” It was no surprise that Lorene felt left in the dark still, rightfully angry when she was the one doing all the investigating. She explains that she would have been at the Shadwick search, had someone told her about it. “The OSBI, the sheriff’s office, not one single person kept us posted about what was going on.”

  “We’d have to chase them down and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” says Jay Bible. “It was like pulling teeth.”

  “We didn’t even know about the Shadwick searches until we heard about them at the Glover searches a month later,” says Lorene. “Nutter didn’t tell us anything. In fact, we didn’t even know they were looking in Wyandotte until then.”

  18

  * * *

  THE OUTLAW LANDS (CONTINUED)

  * * *

  2001

  Less Than Two Years After the Fire

  Wyandotte is about a half-hour drive east from Welch and only ten miles from Missouri’s southwest corner. One particular trip finds the roads littered with dead turtles after historic flooding. The snapping turtle, the symbol of the Wyandotte Nation, and of the ancient American Indian belief that life started on its shell, crushed on the shoulders of US Route 60. The mornings are rosy and have no resemblance to the nights and the men who inhabit the Outlaw Lands. Wyandotte feels like a graveyard where you hold your breath upon driving by to avoid drawing up restless spirits. Streetlights dwindle to blackness, and my imagination stirs the darkness into the silhouettes of men leaning on the shadows of broken-down signs and long-out-of-order stores. My headlights reflect off the animals’ eyes that now belong to the shadows of imagined killers. Anxiety is a red-hot flash up my breastbone, like the devil licks my sternum. I shut off the music and roll down the car windows to listen to the hot wind outside and never take my eyes off the road the many times I have to drive past the meth houses.

  My heartbeat is but a demon on my shoulder, tapping the backs of his heels against my ribs. But I fashion my past into a shield so that I meet the addicts where they’re at. I speak their language; I know their pain. Unlike the missing girls, these are the ones that I understand.

  In the spring of 2001, shortly before the Shadwick searches, a twenty-six-year-old up-and-coming meth cook from Miami, Oklahoma, named Johnny Rose was hired to help transport berries from the fr
uit farms of Oklahoma and Colorado. While on one such trip, Rose divulged to the driver that he knew who’d taken Lauria and Ashley. Perhaps the cattiness of meth drove Rose to tell the driver what he’d seen and heard of the girls. Perhaps guilt pressed his impulse control. Perhaps it was to make room at the top of the food chain when Rose told the driver that the crimes landed with the Glovers of Wyandotte, a father-son duo who helped control the local world of methamphetamine.

  When the driver provided the girls’ families with this new information, they sent over one of several private investigators they had hired to speak with Johnny Rose, who’d grow into one of Wyandotte’s more notorious violent criminals over the next few years. “Johnny Rose started talking about the Glovers, but we hadn’t heard of them before,” Lorene says as we drive through Wyandotte. She and I have driven this way before, a terrifying thing in and of itself if you’re familiar with Lorene’s notorious lead foot. “We’d heard a lot of stuff coming from the Wyandotte area.” So Lorene and company took it upon themselves to shake the trees, hoping for fruit to fall. Still, no one was searching for the girls outside the relatives and those they hired.

  One of the more interesting aspects of the families’ investigations was the numerous mentions of a New Year’s Eve party, about forty people in total having brought it up at that time, according to relatives. While still talked about today, the party has never been officially or publicly addressed by authorities (even though most of my Wyandotte sources, in and out of law enforcement, will not disagree that the probability of this party having taken place is quite high). It was not made known whether or not Rose attended this party, which was thought to have a figurative revolving door for criminals coming and going. Several meth heads allegedly partook in the rape, torture, and ultimate murder of Ashley and Lauria, who were held at the party against their will.