The Innocent Man (13 page)

Play along. Good police work will find the truth.

If his dream confession was sufficiently ridiculous, how could anyone believe it?

Didn’t Odell go in the store first?

Sure, why not, Tommy said. It was only a dream.

Now the cops were getting somewhere. The boy was finally breaking under their clever tactics.

Robbery was the motive, right?

Sure, whatever, it was only a dream.

Throughout the afternoon, Smith and Rogers added more and more fiction to the dream, and Tommy played along.

It was only a dream.

Even as the grotesque “confession” was happening, the police should have realized they had serious problems. Detective Mike Baskin was waiting back in Ada at the police department, sitting by the phone and wishing he was at the OSBI in the thick of things. Around 3:00 p.m., Gary Rogers called with great news—Tommy Ward was talking! Get in the car, drive out to the power plant west of town, and look for the body. Baskin raced off, certain the search would soon be over.

He found nothing, and realized he would need several men for a thorough search. He drove back to the police station. The phone rang again. The story had
changed. There was an old burned house on the right as you approach the power plant. That’s where the body is!

Baskin took off again, found the house, picked through the rubble, found nothing, and drove back to town.

His goose chase continued with the third call from Rogers. The story had changed yet again. Somewhere in the vicinity of the power plant and the burned house there was a concrete bunker. That’s where they put the body.

Baskin rounded up two more officers and some floodlights, and took off again. They found the concrete bunker, and were still searching when darkness fell.

They found nothing.

With each call back from Baskin, Smith and Rogers made modifications to Tommy’s dream. The hours dragged on, the suspect was beyond fatigue. They tag-teamed, back and forth, good cop, bad cop, voices low and almost sympathetic, then bursts of yelling, cursing, threatening. “You lyin’ little sonofabitch!” was their favorite. Tommy had it screamed at him a thousand times.

“You’d better be glad Mike Baskin ain’t here,” Smith said. “Or he would blow your brains out.”

A bullet to the head would not have surprised Tommy.

After dark, when they realized that the body would not be found that day, Smith and Rogers decided to wrap up the confession. With the video camera still unplugged, they walked Tommy through their story, beginning with the three killers riding around in Odell Titsworth’s pickup, planning the robbery, realizing Denice would identify them so they grabbed her, then
decided to rape and kill her. The details on the location of the body were vague, but the detectives felt sure it was hidden somewhere near the power plant.

Tommy was brain-dead and barely able to mumble. He tried to recite their tale but kept getting the facts mixed up. Smith and Rogers would stop him, repeat their fiction, and make him start over. Finally, after four rehearsals with little improvement and their star fading fast, the cops decided to turn on the camera.

Do it now, they said to Tommy. Do it right, and none of that dream bullshit.

“But the story ain’t true,” Tommy said.

Just tell it anyway, the cops insisted, then we’ll help you prove it’s not true.

And none of that dream bullshit.

At 6:58 p.m., Tommy Ward looked at the camera and stated his name. He had been interrogated for eight and a half hours, and he was physically and emotionally wasted.

He was smoking a cigarette, his first of the afternoon, and sitting before him was a soft drink can, as if he and cops were just finishing up a friendly little chat, everything nice and civilized.

He told his tale. He, Karl Fontenot, and Odell Titsworth kidnapped Denice Haraway from the store, drove out to the power plant on the west side of town, raped her, killed her, then tossed her body somewhere near a concrete bunker out by Sandy Creek. The murder weapon was Titsworth’s lock-blade knife.

It was all a dream, he said. Or meant to say. Or thought he said.

Several times he used the name “Titsdale.” The detectives stopped him and helpfully suggested the name “Titsworth.” Tommy corrected himself and plodded on. He kept thinking, Any blind cop could see that I’m lying.

Thirty-one minutes later, the video was turned off. Tommy was handcuffed, then driven back to Ada and thrown in jail. Mike Roberts was still waiting in the parking lot of the OSBI building. He’d been there for almost nine and a half hours.

The next morning, Smith and Rogers called a press conference and announced they had solved the Haraway case. Tommy Ward, age twenty-four, of Ada, had confessed and implicated two other men who were not yet in custody. The cops asked the press to sit on the story for a couple of days, until they could round up the other suspects. The newspaper complied, but a television station did not. 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 Haraway 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 described as wearing a T-shirt, with tattoos covering his arms. In truth, his left arm had been covered with a cast and he’d been nowhere near McAnally’s. When Dennis Smith investigated this, he found hospital and police records that clearly verified Odell’s story. Smith spoke with the treating physician, who described the break as a spiral fracture between the elbow and shoulder and very painful. It would have been impossible for Titsworth to carry a body or commit a violent attack only two days after the fracture. His arm was in a cast, and the cast was in a sling. Impossible.

The confessions continued to unravel. As the police sifted through the rubble of the burned house, its owner appeared and asked what they were doing. When he was told that they were looking for the remains of the Haraway girl, and that one of the suspects had confessed to burning her with the house, the owner said that was not possible. He’d burned the old house himself in June 1983, ten months before she disappeared.

The state medical examiner completed an analysis of the jawbone and concluded that it came from a possum. This was given to the press.

However, the press was not told of the burned house or Odell Titsworth’s broken arm, nor of the fact
that Ward and Fontenot had immediately repudiated their confessions.

In jail, Ward and Fontenot were adamant about their innocence and told anyone who would listen that the confessions were extracted by threats and promises. The Ward family scraped together enough money to hire a good lawyer, and Tommy described to him in great detail the tricks used by Smith and Rogers during the interrogation. It was just a dream, he said a thousand times.

There was no family for Karl Fontenot.

The search for the remains of Denice Haraway continued in earnest. The obvious question asked by many was, “If those two confessed, then why don’t the police know where the body is buried?”

The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against self-incrimination, and since the easiest way to solve a crime is to get a confession, there is a thick and rich body of law that governs police conduct during interrogations. Much of this law was well established before 1984.

A hundred years earlier, in
Hopt v. Utah
, the Supreme Court ruled that a confession is not admissible if it is obtained by operating on the hopes or fears of the accused, and in doing so deprives him of the freedom of will or self-control necessary to make a voluntary statement.

In 1897, the Court, in
Bram v. United States
, said that a statement must be free and voluntary, not extracted by any sorts of threats or violence or promises, however slight. A confession obtained from an accused who has been threatened cannot be admissible.

In 1960, in
Blackburn v. Alabama
, the Court said, “Coercion can be mental as well as physical.” In reviewing whether a confession was psychologically coerced by the police, the following factors are crucial: (1) the length of the interrogation, (2) whether it was prolonged in nature, (3) when it took place, day or night, with a strong suspicion around nighttime confessions, and (4) the psychological makeup—intelligence, sophistication, education, and so on—of the suspect.

And in
Miranda v. Arizona
, the most famous of all self-incrimination cases, the Supreme Court imposed procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the accused. A suspect has a constitutional right
not
to be compelled to talk, and any statement made during an interrogation
cannot
be used in court unless the police and the prosecutor can prove that the suspect clearly understood that (1) he had the right to remain silent, (2) anything said could be used against him in court, and (3) he had a right to an attorney, whether or not he could afford one. If, during an interrogation, the accused requests an attorney, then the questioning stops immediately.

Miranda
was decided in 1966 and became instantly famous. Many police departments ignored it, at least until guilty criminals were set free because they had not been properly advised of their rights. It was harshly criticized by law-and-order types who accused the Court of coddling the bad guys. It worked its way into our culture, with every cop on TV spitting out the words “You have the right to remain silent” as he made his arrest.

Rogers, Smith, and Featherstone knew its importance because they made sure Tommy’s
Miranda
procedure was properly recorded. What was not seen on the
video was the five and a half hours of nonstop threats and verbal abuse.

The confessions of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were constitutional disasters, but at the time, in October 1984, the cops still believed they would find the body, and thus some credible evidence. Any trial was months away. They still had plenty of time to build a solid case against Ward and Fontenot, or so they thought.

But Denice was not found. Tommy and Karl had no idea where she was, and they repeatedly told this to the police. Months dragged on with no evidence, not a shred of it. The confessions became more and more important; indeed, they were to become the only evidence the state had at trial.