Hell in the Heartland

by Jax Miller

  Later in the evening, after I leave the overpass, I meet with Karen Cook, Judith’s daughter, and Karen’s husband, James, in the blackjack hills of Wyandotte where they live, about 36 miles southeast of Chetopa. It’s that winter kind of quiet that paints the darkness a peculiar moon blue and turns the wind into a stinging grain and an ominous warning. I go to listen to Karen’s memories of her mother, and in typical Chetopa fashion, they come with the mention of pecans. “We’d collect them from all around the yard and sell them so that we had Christmas money,” Karen remembers. Like Lorene, she smiles at my pronunciation of “pecan.” And it is no wonder, since Chetopa is the self-proclaimed pecan and catfish capital of Kansas.

  In 2004, Judith Shrum was a cafeteria cook for the Chetopa school district where her killer, Charles Krider, worked as a janitor in the mid-nineties and where he had attended school as a kid. Widowed by her husband’s sudden heart attack a year prior, Judith was a woman of church potlucks and crocheting, with shelves of knickknacks delicately placed and dusted around her home. “She loved her grandbabies,” says her daughter; Judith had two grandchildren. But Judith was also young at heart, with short sandy blond hair, bright blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, and gold studs that sparkled from her double-pierced ears. “She was a nurturer, always taking care of someone. That’s just who she was.” Her close friend Mary had made it a point to visit Judith often in the wake of Judith’s husband’s death. But on January 19, 2004, Mary reported her missing after going to her house, as previously planned, and receiving no answer at the door or on the phone. Mary thought it peculiar: the front door was unlocked, and Judith’s phone and keys had been left on the kitchen counter. Calling her friend’s name, Mary made her way down the hallway, past the wedding photos and Judith’s own pictures from Glamour Shots and into Judith’s bedroom. While nothing major seemed out of place, wet towels had been left on the floor.

  Concerned that Judith could have been depressed as a result of grief, police sealed off the house and began a search. Four days later, a young local boy stumbled upon her half-naked body in the shallow creek bed some ten miles away. Judith had been strangled to death.

  It didn’t take long for Chetopa police to name Charles Krider as a suspect; the Chetopa police chief himself claimed to have seen Charles driving in the area that night and reported his suspicions (DNA taken from a pubic hair in Judith’s shower would later implicate him). Charles claimed that on the night of her murder, he had watched a football game at a friend’s house and was home by nine p.m., before venturing off to go hunting for beavers at eleven p.m. and returning at two the next morning. He also claimed to have his own tilling business, admitting that he at one point had tended to Judith’s garden prior to her disappearance.

  Charles Krider was found guilty of second-degree murder.

  But even before Judith’s murder, locals and shopkeepers thought Charles to be “unusual,” and “weird,” and this was the general consensus in Chetopa. I have a habit of asking anyone I run into in these little flyover towns—a cashier, a diner, a neighbor—what they’ve heard, and several recount how Charlie used to walk around at odd hours in the dead of night wearing nothing but his overalls. A couple of former coworkers say he was caught more than once masturbating at the local welding company. “He’s the guy you hold your breath when you see him walking past, hoping he don’t see you,” says one man. Despite all this, Charles seemed to come from a good, God-fearing home, a unit consisting of a successful brother, a mother now in her eighties, and a father, once a manager at the local charcoal plant, who had passed on.

  “Be very careful up there [in Chetopa] asking questions,” Charles writes me from prison. Even though we spend a couple of years corresponding back and forth, there are cards he keeps close to his chest. “There are people there connected to the ones [murderers] I will not speak of until I’m out. They are not to be messed with in any way. There have been people found killed in barns and old silos, and those are the only ones that have been found.”

  Speaking with Charles is the first time I really feel like I’m getting somewhere with this case. In spite of the vagueness and the wishy-washy statements, there is a hunch, a feeling that maybe, if for the first time, I am looking in the right direction, that the family is aimed in the right direction. But when I speak to Lorene about her own hunches, she is as stoic as ever, maintaining, once again, that there are other avenues she has to pursue. “Another day I look for my daughter.”

  “There are old mine shafts and air vents to the mines that I think they have used for years to dispose of things,” says Charles in reference to the men he refuses to speak of. “They are the people you don’t want to meet.”

  Charles Krider fills his letters with promises of crucial information and of the identities of killers and of all the dirty secrets at the heart of Chetopa. “It will have to wait until I am out,” he writes as he expresses fear for his elderly mother, who must continue to live in Chetopa.

  25

  * * *

  THE SEARCHES OF CHETOPA

  * * *

  Come to the old Charlie Krider place and look in the well.” This was the extent of an anonymous tip to the Bibles on Facebook, but it strikes a chord with Lorene, who hadn’t heard the name since the murder of Judith Shrum. It is the winter of 2016, and the words bring the first real buzz to the case in over a decade, since Jeremy Jones’s false confessions from Alabama’s death row. Lorene keeps the tipster’s identity safe, not just from me but from authorities. She is a steel trap. “I went there to Krider’s well and checked it out,” Lorene tells me. “Once I found the well, I told authorities I’d gotten a tip. I didn’t say who I got it from, but I was going with or without them.” Once again, Lorene takes it upon herself to investigate, so it’s second nature, never an instance of grumbling.

  At the time of the Freeman murders back in 1999, Charles Krider’s residence was a large two-story farmhouse near the center of Chetopa. It was a clapboard house with peeling white paint tinged with the faintest shade of foxglove purple, in old-fashioned Midwestern style, on a block of smaller houses that seemed to shy away from its stature as one of the oldest houses in the town. After the house was sold, soon after Charles’s arrest, Chetopans watched from their front yards as the building went up in flames in the middle of the night, casting everything else in Chetopa into darkness. The fire was so big and bright that it could have been seen from the ghost towns nearby, had those of the living world occupied them. Following a brief investigation, it was ruled an accidental electrical fire, and the case was closed.

  By 2016, there is nothing left of the corner property, which stretches from one block to the next. All that remains on the otherwise vacant lot is a small yellow shed that contains items belonging to the current owner, and on the other side, a large square slab of concrete on the ground. Underneath that is a brick-lined well narrow enough that if it had been used to hide the bodies of the missing girls, they would have first needed to be dismembered.

  On January 15, 2016, the backhoes were on standby, along with a large group consisting of officials from two states: the Labette County (Kansas) sheriff; a Labette County Sheriff’s Office detective; the Chetopa police chief; two representatives of the District Attorney’s Office District 12 (Craig, Mayes, and Rogers counties in Oklahoma), along with their investigator, Gary Stansill; OSBI agent Tammy Ferrari; and two anthropologists from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. A pop-up blue canopy was erected, the land around them sticky with wet leaves and that after-rain, earthy smell thick in their nostrils. For the first time in over a decade, since the empty searches of Galena instigated by Jeremy Jones, the Freeman and Bible families reunited with the same hope that had aligned them from day one: finding the girls and bringing them home.

  The search brought with it a swell of media attention, beyond the few loyal reporters who’d stuck with the Bibles since the early days of the case. As the crowds gathered in their colorful fleeces—with the exception of Lor
ene, who wore black—they huddled, fixing their attention on a small screen that streamed live as authorities used what the Parsons Sun local newspaper called “a long extension pole, similar to what supports a camping tent” attached to an underwater camera to start exploring the bottom of a well once owned by Charles Krider. Moving delicately under the black water, the camera skimmed the sides until it reached the solid bottom made of a concrete base twelve feet beneath. The authorities slowly stirred the two to three inches of sediment, hoping to capture any little thing: a piece of clothing, a ring, perhaps a bone.

  The three-hour search, to everyone’s simultaneous disappointment and relief, yielded nothing.

  OK, what’s next? Lorene remembers thinking. This tip didn’t pan out, so what’s next?

  However, the search on Charles Krider’s property, unbeknownst to the wider public, seemed to open the floodgates for new leads. Bystanders jerked their necks for Lorene to go over and they sent messages through third parties to the girls’ relatives as they lingered in Chetopa. “We had people coming left and right, talking about where the girls’ bodies were,” says Lorene. The impregnable collective silence in Chetopa began to come apart, with neighbors coming forward to share what they’d heard, what they’d seen. “They were talking about Charles Krider, and then other meth cooks and dealers from the area, like a man named Phil Welch,” Lorene says, referring to the religious meth cook who had also lived in Chetopa but had parked his meth-cooking trailer in Picher at the time of the Freeman murders. “And two of his friends, Ronnie Busick and David Pennington.” They were said to follow Phil Welch wherever he went, a pair who’d also been reared right there in Chetopa. Suddenly, the families were inundated with information.

  By summer, I am no stranger to the latest rumors that have arisen in the wake of the well search—one of them being that Charles didn’t dispose of the girls down the well, but rather that they are under the basement where his house once stood. There, in the discolored grass, I can see the square left after the house burned down. In 2013, after the fire, the owner of the property had men with bulldozers push what remained—all the burned parts and furniture and debris—into the basement, and cover the junk pit with dirt.

  The current owner, and several other people, consistently mention that beneath this rubble, there is rumored to be a square concrete slab on top of the concrete floor. It is the belief of several Chetopans that there you’d find the girls’ bones, but they very well might be just the small-town rumors one finds around a town like this. I have little to go on and no photographic evidence of the basement floor, but as the theory becomes compounded by one tip after another, I want to pursue a second search on the Krider property, even if authorities deem the tip weak, which it was. I hate the idea of never knowing, and in my zeal, I hire a local man with a backhoe to dig when no one else cares to. Alongside a cameraman I’d personally hired out of Brooklyn to help me here in the Midwest, I contacted local Kansas authorities and all the necessary people to ensure we weren’t risking hitting underground mains and lines. But it is this very decision that causes the OSBI to stop speaking to me, and for this, I am regretful. Though I can look back and see that this may have been a foolish decision based solely on my impetuous nature, I can’t say that I fully regret the decision to look here.

  Until I have published this book, Charles Krider will never know that this search was my orchestration.

  While the crew sets to work on burrowing into the heart of Chetopa, which takes up most of the day, the cameraman and I decide to send his own underwater cameras down the well. I remember the feeling of getting on my belly, facedown in the well with the father of Lauria Bible, Jay, standing over me, in the event that we discovered his daughter’s remains in the black water. We divide our attention between the echoes of our voices down the well and a small screen as the cameraman directs the camera’s movements like a surgeon, bobbing in and out of the water. When we look at the footage later on, it is unnerving trying to inspect every speck of something that floated by and hearing our own muffled voices from under the water. Was this Ashley’s and Lauria’s fate?

  Like the search team before us, we find there is nothing here.

  People and objects around me move with my pulse in my sight, and dark shadows strike from the corners of my eyes. Each of the 105 degrees adds a beat in my heart, and I can’t distinguish the sounds of locusts from the sounds of the snakes in the trees and the sounds of the sun. Hypersensitivity. I look up at the rustling elms, spellbound by the white-hot light piercing from the trees like a million little eyes in wait. I can hear heat and taste the black water that the backhoe scoops from the basement just by looking at it. With the Bible family nearby, the arm of a digger scoops for what feels like days, and Lisa, Lauria’s cousin, stands clutching a silver cross at her chest. We all pray silently today. Together, we watch the backhoes scrape and rev under the inky water, while locals arrive with their own water pumps to drain it. Each bend of the machine’s arm unearths old hamper baskets, a shower curtain, the odd shoe and pants. Large piles of mud and glass are excavated and dropped in sloppy piles onto the grass, where we sift for answers with our hands and the toes of our boots, mindful of broken glass. And just as we begin to wonder if we’ll ever reach the bottom, there it is: the concrete slab, which before now I wasn’t even sure existed.

  “People might think it’s an emotional roller coaster from where they’re sitting, but I don’t feel it,” says Lorene Bible, who can move on to the next tip as fast as she can zero in on one.

  Though half of me can’t wait to hightail it out of Chetopa, the other half can’t look away from the gaping hole in the ground, the basement of a convicted murderer. I feel like Chetopa is where I need to be. Through the anxiety, the panic attacks, the suffocating heat, and the palpable danger of the place, something keeps pulling me here.

  Tip after tip came in to the Bibles, all saying the same thing: everything you want to know is right here in Chetopa.

  26

  * * *

  REVIVAL

  * * *

  1999

  In 1999, the fumes of meth moved over the plains. It was early and the morning stars shone against the unfolding of sunrise. It could have been Picher. It could have been Chetopa. Today no one is sure, but in this part of the world, life is divided in half: cutthroat skies on top and black and blue below, mud and prairie violets. A scar that ran across its middle, the horizon, held motherless men, the very men private investigators found in the ruins of Picher. Their leader, Phil Welch of Erie, Kansas, the religious fanatic found at the edge of a ghost town. It was one of many trailers where Phil held his sermons, where memory was short and suffering was long. Still tacked to the wall, a missing flyer with Ashley’s and Lauria’s pictures.

  Today there is nothing here, but if I stay in this grassy lot long enough, I can hear “Nothing but the Blood” and a sermon on its third day, no matter where. In Picher, Phil Welch’s trailer was bulldozed or swept up by an EF4 tornado. On the outskirts of Chetopa, his home was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.

  “He was as evil as they got,” says R.H., the man who led me to where Chetopa’s Charles Krider disposed of a school lunch lady. It was a town where everybody knows everybody, and R.H. knew them all. “He [Phil Welch] had one of his girlfriends hanging by her wrists in his closet, and he kept whipping her with the belt, just whipping. She was screaming and Phil said to me, ‘Don’t mind her. The bitch loves it.’”

  Phil Welch fancied himself an ordained minister and demanded that the living room of his home be vaulted instead of finished like the other rooms. “He said it would make a good chapel,” his landlord once said to the Tulsa World. “There was always gospel music playing. Always.”

  “He could talk for days while high,” says a relative of Phil’s. “And he was intelligent, as if everything he said was at the edge of something profound.” At the root of his babbling was bullshit. However, there was no denying that Phil cast a spell over
his small congregation of followers, including two men named David Pennington and Ronnie Busick.

  It always seemed that Phil Welch was at the top of the food chain, only keeping company with people he could have dominance over, and that was most people; for Phil feared no one and nothing. Most that I speak to, including a family member named Rhonda, recollect horror stories about Phil Welch’s former family: the wife he beat and the four children they had. They are stories laced with cattle prods and bullwhips, of sexual abuse against his own biological children. He implemented impossible rules that relatives weren’t aware of. Eating a slice of pizza that Phil had mentally declared his own meant a whipping and sleeping outside; having butter at supper not melted to his liking meant taking a hammer to his wife’s fingers, one by one.

  I come to learn that there was a cop who lived next door, one who heard the beatings and watched the meth cooks for years. When asked why he did nothing, “I am sorry,” he answered. “I had a wife and kids.” Even the law was afraid of Phil Welch.

  “When he flew into his rage, it went for hours and hours, all through the night,” says Rhonda, who explains that Phil would make his children beat up a mentally challenged neighbor kid, lest he beat them. “He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.” Even years before the Freeman-Bible murders, he was a meth manufacturer and dealer, perhaps one of the first in the Midwest. “He’d go out to the barn for hours.” Phil used to cook there. “Then he’d come back with nosebleeds and get into one of his lectures and talk for days. I mean, days. And you couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”