about, and hundreds of locals had helped look for her. Her father-in-law was a local dentist who was greatly respected. Ward and Fontenot had been in jail for eleven months. Their confessions had been hot topics in the coffee shops and beauty parlors since October, when first reported in the newspaper.
How could the defendants expect to draw an impartial jury? Notorious trials are moved every day to other venues. The motions to change venue were denied. The other pretrial war was over the confessions. Attorneys for Ward and Fontenot attacked the statements, and especially the methods used by Detectives Smith and Rogers to obtain them. The tales told by the boys were clearly not true; not a shred of physical evidence backed up anything they said.
Peterson fought back with a vengeance. Without the tapes, he had no case whatsoever. After lengthy and heated arguments, the judge ruled that the confessions could be seen by the jury.
The state called fifty-one witnesses, few of whom said anything substantive. Many were friends of Denice Haraway, put on the stand to help prove she was in fact missing and presumed dead. The trial had only one surprise. A career criminal by the name of Terri Holland was called as a witness. She told the jury that she was in the county jail back in October when Karl Fontenot was brought in. The two talked occasionally, and he admitted to her that he, Tommy Ward, and Odell Tits-worth had kidnapped, raped, and killed the girl.
Fontenot denied ever meeting the woman.
Terri Holland wasn't the only jailhouse snitch to testify. A petty criminal named Leonard Martin was also behind bars. The prosecution hauled him over, and at trial, he told the jury that he once overheard Karl in his cell talking to himself and saying, "I knew we'd get caught. I knew we'd get caught."
Such was the quality of the state's evidence-proof offered to persuade a jury of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
With no physical evidence, the taped confessions were beyond crucial, but they were filled with discrepancies and obvious lies. The prosecution was forced into the bizarre position of admitting Ward and Fontenot were lying while asking the jurors to believe them anyway.
Please disregard all that stuff about Titsworth, because he wasn't really involved.
Please overlook such trifling matters as the burned house with the dead body, because the house had been torched ten months earlier.
Monitors were rolled in. The lights were dimmed. The tapes were played. The grisly details emerged, and Ward and Fontenot were headed for death row.
In his closing argument, his first in a murder case, Assistant D.A. Chris Ross aimed for high drama. In graphic narrative, he recalled the gory details from the tapes-the stab wounds, the blood and guts, the brutal raping and knifing of such a pretty girl, then the horrible burning of her body.
The jurors were sufficiently angered. After brief deliberations, they returned with guilty verdicts and death penalties.
The truth, though, was that the body was not stabbed and it was not burned, regardless of what Ward and Fontenot said in their bogus confessions and regardless of what Bill Peterson and Chris Ross told the jury. Denice Haraway was killed by a single gunshot wound to the head. Her remains were found the following January by a hunter deep in the woods near the settlement of Gerty, in Hughes County, twenty-seven miles from Ada and far from any place that had been searched.
The true cause of death should have convinced everyone involved that Ward and Fontenot had indeed dreamed up their ridiculous tales and had been coerced into confessing. It did not.
The true cause of death should have prompted the authorities to admit they were wrong and begin searching for the real murderer. It did not.
After the trial, but before the body was found, Tommy Ward was waiting to be transferred to death row at McAlester, a prison fifty-five miles east of Ada. Still stunned by the events that had led him to now face death by lethal injection, he was frightened, confused, and depressed. One year earlier he had been a typical Ada twenty-something looking for a good job and a good party and a cute girl.
The real killers are out there, he kept thinking, laughing at us. Laughing at the cops. He wondered if they, the killers, had been brazen enough to watch his trial. Why not? They were safe.
One day he had visitors-two Ada cops. They were his friends now, his buddies, very concerned about what would