The news was soon broadcast over southeastern Oklahoma.
A few hours later, Karl Fontenot was arrested near Tulsa and driven back to Ada. Smith and Rogers, fresh from their success with Tommy Ward, handled the interrogation. Though a video recorder was ready, no tape was made of the questioning. Karl was twenty years old and had been living on his own since he was sixteen. He grew up in Ada, in wretched poverty-his father had been an alcoholic and Karl had witnessed his mother's death in an auto accident. He was an impressionable kid with few friends and virtually no family.
He insisted he was innocent and knew nothing about the Haraway disappearance. Karl proved to be considerably easier to break than Tommy, and in less than two hours Smith and Rogers had another taped confession, one suspiciously similar to Ward's. Karl repudiated his confession immediately after he was placed in jail, and would later state: "I've never been in jail or had a police record in my life and no one in my face telling me I'd killed a pretty woman, that I'm going to get the death penalty so I told them the story hoping they would leave me alone. Which they did after I taped the statement. They said I had a choice to write it or tape it. I didn't even know what the word statement or confessing meant till they told me I confessed to it. So that's the reason I gave them an untrue statement so they would leave me alone."
The police made sure the story got to the press. Ward and Fontenot had made full confessions. The Haraway mystery was solved, most of it anyway. They were working on Titsworth, and expected to charge all three with murder in a matter of days. The site of the burned house was located, and the police found the remains of what appeared to be a jawbone. This was soon reported in the Ada Evening News. In spite of the careful coaching, Karl's confession was a mess. There were huge discrepancies between his version of the crime and Tommy's. The two were in direct contradiction on such details as the order in which the three raped Denice, whether or not she was stabbed by her attackers during the rape, the location and number of stab wounds, whether or not she managed to break free and run a few steps before being caught, and when she finally died. The most glaring discrepancy was how they killed her and what they did with her body.
Tommy Ward said she received multiple knife wounds while lying in the back of Odell's pickup during the gang rape. She died there, and they flung her body into a ditch near a concrete bunker. Fontenot didn't recall it that way. In his version, they took her into an abandoned house where Odell Titsworth stabbed her, stuffed her beneath the floor, then poured gasoline over her and burned down the house.
But the two were in almost complete agreement on Odell Titsworth. He had been the organizer, the mastermind who rounded up Ward and Fontenot to go riding in his pickup, to drink some beer, smoke some pot, and at some point rob McAnally's. Once the gang had decided on which store to rob, Odell went in and stole the money, grabbed the girl, and told his buddies they would have to kill her so she couldn't identify them. He drove out to the power plant. He directed the gang rape, going first himself. He produced the weapon, a six-inch lock-blade knife. He stabbed her, killed her, and either he burned her or he did not.
Though they admitted their involvement, the real blame rested on Odell Titsworth, or Titsdale, or whatever his name was.
Late in the afternoon of Friday, October 19, the police arrested Titsworth and questioned him. He was a four-time convicted felon with a lousy attitude toward cops and far greater experience with their interrogation tactics. He didn't budge an inch. He knew nothing about the Har-away case, didn't give a damn what Ward and Fontenot said, on tape or off. He had never met either of the gentlemen.
No video was made of his interrogation. Titsworth was thrown in jail, where he soon recalled that on April 26 he had broken his arm in a fight with the police. Two days later, when Denice disappeared, he had been at his girlfriend's house, wearing a heavy cast and in great pain.
In both confessions, he had been