The Innocent Man (20 page)

After Ron Williamson had spent two months in jail, no one involved in his prosecution or defense had questioned his mental competency. The evidence was blatantly obvious. His medical history was extensive and readily available to the court. His rantings in jail, though somewhat regulated by the arbitrary dispensing of medications by his lawyer and his jailers, were clear warnings. His reputation in Ada was well known, especially to the police.

And his behavior in court had been seen before. Two years earlier, when the state attempted to revoke Ron’s suspended sentence on the escape charge, he so completely disrupted the hearing that he was sent to a mental hospital for evaluation. Presiding then was John David Miller, the same Judge Miller who was now holding the preliminary hearing. It was Judge Miller who had adjudicated him to be mentally incompetent at that time.

Now, two years later and with the death penalty at issue, Judge Miller evidently saw no need to inquire into Ron’s state of mind.

Oklahoma had a statute that allowed a judge, including one presiding over a preliminary hearing, to
suspend the proceedings if the competency of a defendant became an issue. No motion from the defense was required. Most trial lawyers would argue strenuously that their client had a history of mental problems and should be evaluated, but absent such a plea it remained the judge’s duty to protect the constitutional rights of the defendant.

The silence of Judge Miller should have been shattered by Barney Ward. As defense counsel, he could have requested a complete psychological evaluation of his client. The next step would have been to seek a competency hearing, the same routine procedure David Morris had pursued two years earlier. A final step would have been an insanity defense.

With Ron out of the courtroom, the preliminary hearing proceeded quietly and in order. It ran for several days, and Ron never left his cell. Whether he was competent enough to assist in his own defense made little difference.

Dr. Fred Jordan testified first and went through the autopsy and the cause of death—asphyxiation by either the belt around the neck or the washcloth stuffed in the mouth, or probably both.

The lying began with the second witness, Glen Gore, who testified that on the night of December 7 he was at the Coachlight with some friends, one of whom was Debbie Carter, a girl he’d gone to school with and had known most of his life. At some point during the night she asked Gore to “save” her or to “rescue” her
because Ron Williamson was there, too, and he was pestering her.

He did not see Dennis Fritz at the Coachlight on December 7.

Under cross-examination, Gore said he told the police about this on December 8, but their report of his interview does not mention Ron Williamson. Nor was their report submitted to the defense, as required by the rules of procedure.

Thus, Glen Gore became the only witness with direct evidence against Ron Williamson. By placing him in contact and in conflict with Debbie Carter just hours before her murder, he, technically, established the link between the murderer and his victim. All other evidence was circumstantial.

Only a prosecutor as determined as Bill Peterson would be brazen enough to allow a criminal like Glen Gore anywhere near his case. Gore had been brought to the preliminary hearing in cuffs and chains. He was serving a forty-year prison sentence for breaking and entering, kidnapping, and attempting to kill a police officer. Five months earlier, Gore had broken into the home of his former wife, Gwen, and taken her hostage, along with his young daughter. He was drunk and for five hours held them at gunpoint. When a policeman, Rick Carson, glanced through a window, Gore aimed, fired, and hit Carson in the face. Fortunately, the injuries were not serious. Before sobering up and surrendering, Gore also shot at another police officer.

It was not his first violent altercation with Gwen. In 1986, during the unraveling of their rocky marriage, Gore was charged with breaking into Gwen’s house and
stabbing her repeatedly with a butcher knife. She survived and pressed charges, and Gore faced two counts of first-degree burglary and one count of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon.

Two months earlier, he’d been charged for assaulting Gwen by choking her.

In 1981, he’d been charged for forcibly entering the home of another woman. Gore also had an assault-and-battery charge from his Army days and a long list of convictions for petty crimes.

One week after his name was listed as an additional witness against Ron Williamson, a plea-bargain agreement was filed. At the same time, one charge of kidnapping and one of assault with a dangerous weapon were dismissed. When Gore was sentenced, his ex-wife’s parents filed a letter with the court in which they begged for a long prison sentence. It read, in part:

We want you to be aware of how dangerous we feel this man is. He intends to kill our daughter, granddaughter, and ourselves. This he has told us. We have gone to great lengths to make our daughter’s home burglar proof, but all failed. To go into detail all the times he has attacked her would make too lengthy a letter. Please give our daughter enough time to get the child raised before he is out of prison and the terror starts, so the little one never has to live through that again.

For years, Barney Ward had suspected that Glen Gore was involved in the Carter murder. He was a career criminal with a history of violence against women, and
he was the last person seen with the victim. It was incomprehensible that the police showed so little interest in Gore.

Gore’s fingerprints were never submitted to the OSBI for analysis. Prints from a total of forty-four people were submitted, but not Gore’s. At one point, he agreed to take a polygraph exam, but one was never administered. The Ada police lost the first set of hair samples Gore gave them, some two years after the murder. He then submitted another set, and perhaps another. No one could remember exactly.

Barney, with his uncanny ability to hear and remember the courthouse gossip, firmly believed that Gore should have been investigated by the police.

And he knew that his boy, Ronnie Williamson, was not guilty.

The Gore mystery was partially explained fourteen years after the preliminary hearing. Glen Gore, still in prison, signed an affidavit in which he stated that during the early 1980s he was selling drugs in Ada. He mentioned methamphetamine. Some of his transactions involved Ada policemen, specifically one Dennis Corvin, whom Gore described as a “primary supplier” and who frequented Harold’s Club, where Gore worked.

When Gore owed them money, they would arrest him under false pretenses, but for the most part the cops left him alone. Under oath, he said in his affidavit, “However, most of the time during the early 1980’s I was aware that I was receiving favorable treatment from Ada law enforcement because I was involved in drug transactions with them.”

And, “This favorable treatment ended when I was no longer involved in the drug business with Ada police.”

He blamed his forty-year prison sentence on the fact that he “was no longer selling drugs to the Ada police.”

Regarding Williamson, Gore said in 2001, he did not know if Ron was at the Coachlight the night of the murder. The police showed him a lineup of photos, pointed to Ron, and explained that he was the man they were interested in. “Then they directly suggested that I identify Mr. Williamson.”

And, “To this day I do not know if Ron Williamson was at the bar on the night that Debbie Carter disappeared. I made the identification because I knew the police expected me to do that.”

Gore’s affidavit was prepared by an attorney, and it was reviewed by his own lawyer before he signed it.

The state’s next witness was Tommy Glover, a regular at the Coachlight and one of the last to see Debbie Carter. His initial recollection was that she was talking with Glen Gore in the parking lot and that she pushed him away before driving off.

But four years and seven months later, he remembered things a bit differently. Glover testified at the preliminary hearing that he saw Gore speak to Debbie and that she got in her car and drove away. Nothing more or less.

Charlie Carter testified next and told the story of finding his daughter on the morning of December 8, 1982.

OSBI agent Jerry Peters, a “Crime Scene Specialist,” was called to the stand. It wasn’t long before he was in trouble. Barney smelled a rat and grilled Peters on his conflicting opinions about the palm print on the Sheetrock. A firm opinion in March 1983, then, surprise, an about-face in May 1987. What prompted Peters to rethink his original opinion that the palm print did not belong to Debbie Carter, Ron Williamson, or Dennis Fritz? Could it have been that this opinion didn’t really help the prosecution?

Peters did admit that nothing happened for four years, then a phone call early in 1987 from Bill Peterson prompted him to ponder his earlier judgment. After the exhumation and reprinting, he suddenly changed his mind and issued a report that was exactly what the prosecution wanted.

Greg Saunders joined the assault on behalf of Dennis Fritz, and it was obvious the evidence had been reconstructed. But it was only a preliminary hearing, not a trial that required proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Peters also testified that of the twenty-one fingerprints found in the apartment and on the car, nineteen belonged to Debbie Carter herself, one to Mike Carpenter, one to Dennis Smith, and none to either Fritz or Williamson.

The prosecution’s star was the amazing Terri Holland. From October 1984 to January 1985, Holland had been locked up in the Pontotoc County jail for writing bad checks. As far as unsolved murders went in Oklahoma, it was a productive and remarkable four-month stay.

First she claimed she heard Karl Fontenot admit everything about the Denice Haraway kidnapping and murder. She testified in the first Ward/Fontenot trial in September 1985 and gave the jury all the lurid details that Detectives Smith and Rogers had furnished Tommy Ward during his dream confession. After she testified, she was given a light sentence on the check charges, in spite of having two prior felonies. Ward and Fontenot went to death row; Terri Holland fled the county.

She left behind some unpaid court fines and such, nothing the authorities would take seriously under normal circumstances. But they found her and brought her back anyway. Facing more charges, she suddenly had some astounding news for the investigators. When she was in jail hearing Fontenot’s story, she also heard Ron Williamson make a full confession.

What an amazing stroke of luck for the cops! Not only had they generated a dream confession—their favorite investigatory tool—but now they had another snitch, their second-favorite weapon.

Holland was vague on exactly why she had not told anyone about Ron’s confession until sometime in the spring of 1987. Over two years had passed without a word. She was never asked why she rushed to tell Smith and Rogers about Fontenot’s admissions.

On the stand during the preliminary, she had a grand time with her fiction. With Ron absent from the proceedings, she was free to create all sorts of tales. She told of one episode in which he yelled into the phone at his mother and said, “I’ll kill you just like I killed Debbie Carter.”

The only telephone in the jail was on a wall in the front office. On the rare occasions when inmates were
allowed to make calls, they were forced to lean over a counter, stretch to get the receiver, and talk in the presence of whoever happened to be working the front desk. Eavesdropping by another inmate was unlikely, if not impossible.

Terri Holland testified that Ron once made a phone call to a church, asked someone there for cigarettes, and threatened to burn down the place if they didn’t bring him some.

Again, no one could verify this statement. And she was not quizzed on the layout of the jail, and how, exactly, did a female prisoner get so close to the men?

Peterson led her along: “Did he ever say anything that you overheard him say about what he had done to Debbie Carter?”

“Yeah, he was talking in the bullpens,” she answered. “It was right after they brought in Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot.”

“What did he say in the bullpens in relationship to what he said he had done to Debbie Carter?”

“He just said that—I don’t know how to say it. He said she thought she was better than he was, and that he showed the bitch she wasn’t.”

“Anything else?”

“He said he made her make love to him, only that’s not how he said it. I don’t even remember how he said it. He said that he shoved a Coke—catsup bottle up her ass and her panties down her throat, and he taught her a lesson.”

Bill Peterson plowed ahead with his leading questions. “Did he say anything in relationship about Debbie should have come off of it or anything like that?” Peterson asked.

“Yeah, he’d tried to go with her, and she didn’t want nothing to do with him, and he said she’d been better off if she would just come off of it and give it to him.”

“And that he would not have had to do what?” Peterson asked, desperate to prompt his shaky witness.

“Wouldn’t have had to kill her.”

It was remarkable that Bill Peterson, as an officer of the court and charged with the duty to seek the truth, could elicit such garbage.

A crucial part of snitching is getting paid. Terri Holland was allowed to plea-bargain herself out of trouble and out of jail. She agreed to a monthly payment plan for restitution, but soon abandoned her obligations.

At the time, few people knew that Terri Holland had a history with Ron Williamson. Years earlier, when he was peddling Rawleigh products around Ada, he stumbled upon a little unexpected sex. He knocked on a door, and a female voice asked him to step inside. When he did, a woman named Marlene Keutel presented herself completely in the nude. There appeared to be no one else at home, and one thing quickly led to another.

Marlene Keutel was mentally unstable, and a week after the episode she committed suicide. Ron returned several times to sell her more products, but never found her at home. He did not know she was dead.

Her sister was Terri Holland. Shortly after the sexual encounter, Marlene told Terri about it and claimed Ron had raped her. No charges were brought; none were contemplated. Though Terri knew her sister was crazy, she still believed that Ron was responsible for Marlene’s
death. Ron had long since forgotten about the quickie, and had no idea who Terri Holland was.