The Innocent Man (9 page)

He took another job teaching ninth-grade biology and coaching basketball in the town of Noble, an hour away. The school officials allowed him to live in a small trailer on campus, and he commuted back and forth on weekends to spend time with Elizabeth and his mother. Noble had no nightlife, and occasionally Dennis would drive to Ada on a weeknight to see his daughter, then get a drink or perhaps meet a girl.

One night in November 1981, Dennis was in Ada. He was bored and wanted a beer, so he drove to a convenience store. Parked outside and sitting in the front seat of his mother’s old Buick was Ron Williamson, strumming his guitar and watching the world go by. Dennis also played the guitar and just happened to have his in the backseat. The two struck up a conversation
about music. Ron said he lived a few blocks away and invited Dennis over for a jam session. Both men were looking for friends.

The apartment was cramped and dirty, a sad little place, Fritz thought. Ron explained that he lived with his mother, who didn’t tolerate tobacco or alcohol. He had no job, and when Dennis asked what he did all day, he replied that he usually slept. He was friendly enough, easy with conversation and quick with a laugh, but Fritz noticed a detached air. He would gaze off for long periods of time, then stare at Dennis as if he weren’t there. A strange guy, thought Dennis.

But they enjoyed playing their guitars and talking about music. After a few visits, Fritz began to notice Ron’s excessive drinking and mood swings. Ron loved beer and vodka, and his routine was to start drinking late in the afternoon, once he was fully awake and away from his mother. He was flat and depressed until the booze kicked in, then his personality came to life. They began to frequent the bars and lounges in town.

Dennis stopped by one afternoon, earlier than usual and before Ron had a drink. He chatted with Juanita, a pleasant but long-suffering soul who said little but seemed to be fed up with her son. She disappeared, and Dennis found Ron in his bedroom, staring at the walls. The room made Ron nervous, and he seldom entered it.

There were large color photos of Patty, his ex-wife, and of himself in various baseball uniforms.

“She was beautiful,” Fritz said, looking at Patty.

“I once had it all,” Ron said with sadness and bitterness. He was twenty-eight years old and had thoroughly given up.

Barhopping was always an adventure. Ron never entered a club quietly, and once inside he expected to be the center of attention. One of his favorite routines was to wear a nice suit and claim to be a rich Dallas lawyer. By 1981, he had already spent enough time in courtrooms to have the lingo and the mannerisms, and his “Tanner Act” was played out in lounges all over Norman and Oklahoma City.

Fritz would stay in the background and enjoy the show. He gave Ron plenty of room. He was also becoming a little tired of the adventures. A night out with Ron usually involved a conflict of some sort and an unexpected ending.

During the summer of 1982, they were returning to Ada after a night in the bars when Ron announced he wanted to go to Galveston. Fritz had made the mistake of telling a story about deep-sea fishing out of Galveston, and Ron claimed that he’d always wanted to do that. They were drunk, and an unplanned eight-hour drive did not seem totally far-fetched. They were in Dennis’s pickup truck. As always, Ron had no car, no license, and no money for gas.

School was out, Fritz had some cash in his pocket, so why not go fishing? They bought some more beer and headed south.

Somewhere in Texas, Dennis needed a nap, so Ron took the wheel. When Dennis woke up, there was a strange black man in the back of the pickup. “Picked up a hitchhiker,” Ron said proudly. Somewhere in Houston, just before dawn, they stopped at a convenience store to buy beer and food, and when they returned, the truck
was gone, stolen by the hitchhiker. Ron said he forgot and left the keys in the ignition, and upon further reflection admitted that he had not only left the keys in the ignition but had probably left the engine running as well. They drank a few beers and pondered their bad luck. Fritz insisted on calling the police, but Ron wasn’t so sure. They argued, and Dennis called them anyway. When the cop heard the story, he laughed in their faces.

They were in a very rough part of town, but they found a Pizza Hut. They ate pizza and drained several pitchers of beer, and began roaming around the city, quite lost. At dusk they stumbled upon a black honky-tonk, and Ron was determined to go inside and party. It was a crazy idea, but Fritz soon realized that things were probably safer inside the club than out. At the bar, Dennis sipped a beer and prayed no one would notice them. Ron, typically, began talking loud and attracting attention. He was wearing a suit and was now the hotshot Dallas lawyer. Dennis was worrying about his truck and hoping they didn’t get knifed, while his sidekick was telling tall tales about his close, personal friend Reggie Jackson.

The main man of the club was a guy named Cortez, and he and Ron soon became pals. When Ron told the story of the stolen pickup, Cortez roared with laughter. When the honky-tonk closed, Ron and Dennis drove away with Cortez, whose apartment was nearby and did not have enough beds. The two white boys slept on the floor. When he awoke, Fritz was hungover, angry about his truck, and determined to get back to Ada in one piece. He jolted Ron out of his coma, and together they convinced Cortez to drive them, for a small fee, to a bank where Dennis could hopefully withdraw some
money. At the bank, Cortez waited in the car while Ron and Dennis went inside. Dennis got the cash, and as they were leaving, a dozen police cars came screaming from all directions and surrounded Cortez. Heavily armed officers yanked him out of his car and threw him into the backseat of one of theirs.

Ron and Dennis ducked back into the bank, quickly assessed the raid in the parking lot, and made a hurried exit on the other side. They bought bus tickets. The ride home was long and painful. Fritz was sick of Ron and angry that he’d let the truck get away from them. He vowed to avoid him for a long time.

A month later, Ron called Dennis and wanted to go out. Since the adventure in Houston, the friendship had cooled considerably. Fritz enjoyed going out for a few beers and some dancing, but he kept things under control. Ron was fine as long as they were having a drink and playing guitars in his apartment, but once he hit the bars, anything could happen.

Dennis picked him up and they went out for a drink. Fritz explained that it would be a short night because he had a rendezvous with a young lady planned for later. He was actively on the prowl for a love interest. His wife had been dead for seven years, and he longed for a stable relationship. Ron did not. Women were for sex and nothing else.

Ron, though, proved difficult to shake that night, and when Dennis went to visit his lady friend, Ron went with him. When he finally realized he wasn’t welcome, he got mad and left, but not on foot. He stole Dennis’s car and drove to Bruce Leba’s house. Fritz stayed with the woman, and when he got up the next morning, he realized his car was gone. He called the police, filed a
report, then called Bruce Leba and asked if he’d seen Ron. Bruce agreed to drive Ron and the stolen car back to Ada, and when they arrived, both were stopped by the police. The charges were dropped, but Dennis and Ron did not speak for months.

Fritz was at home in Ada when he received a phone call from Detective Dennis Smith. The police wanted him to come down to the station and answer some questions. What kinds of questions? Fritz asked. We’ll tell you when you get here, Smith replied.

Fritz reluctantly went to the station. He had nothing to hide, but any such encounter with the police was unnerving. Smith and Gary Rogers asked him about his relationship with Ron Williamson, an old friend he hadn’t seen in months. The questions were businesslike at first, but slowly became accusatory. “Where were you on the night of December 7?” Dennis wasn’t sure at that moment; he’d need some time to think about it. “Did you know Debbie Carter?” No. And so on. After an hour, Fritz left the station, mildly concerned that he was even involved in the investigation.

Dennis Smith called again and asked Fritz if he would take a polygraph. With his science background, Fritz knew that polygraphs are wildly unreliable, and he wanted no part of an exam. At the same time, he’d never met Debbie Carter, and he wanted to prove this to Smith and Rogers. He reluctantly agreed, and a test was scheduled at the OSBI offices in Oklahoma City. As the day approached, Fritz became more and more nervous, and to calm his nerves, he took a Valium right before the exam.

The test was administered by OSBI agent Rusty Featherstone, with Dennis Smith and Gary Rogers lurking nearby. When it was over, the cops huddled over the graphs, grimly shaking their heads at the bad news.

Fritz was informed that he had “severely flunked” the exam.

“Impossible” was his first response.

You’re hiding something, they said. Fritz admitted to being nervous and finally confessed that he’d taken a Valium. This upset the cops, and they insisted that he take another polygraph. He felt as though he had no choice.

A week later Featherstone brought his machine to Ada and set it up in the basement of the police department. Fritz was even more nervous than before, but answered the questions truthfully and easily.

He “severely flunked” it again, only this time even worse, according to Featherstone, Smith, and Rogers. The post-polygraph interrogation began with a fury. Rogers, playing the bad cop, began cursing and threatening and saying, “You’re hiding something, Fritz,” over and over. Smith tried to play the role of Fritz’s true friend, but it was a juvenile act and an old one at that.

Rogers was dressed like a cowboy, boots and all, and his style was to strut around the room, fuming, cursing, threatening, talking about death row and lethal injections, then suddenly he would lunge at Fritz, jab him in the chest, and tell him that he was going to confess. The routine was frightening enough, but not very effective. Fritz said over and over, “Get out of my face.”

Rogers finally accused him of the rape and murder. He got angry, and his language became even more abusive as he described how Fritz and his sidekick,
Williamson, broke in on the girl, raped her and killed her, and now he, Rogers, was demanding a confession.

With no evidence, only a confession could’ve solved the case, and the cops were desperate to squeeze one out of Fritz. But he didn’t budge. He had nothing to confess, but after two hours of verbal abuse he wanted to give them something. He told the story of a road trip he and Ron had made to Norman the previous summer, a rowdy night in bars looking for girls, one of whom hopped in the backseat of Dennis’s car and became hysterical when he wouldn’t let her out. She finally jumped, ran away, called the cops, and Ron and Dennis slept in the car, in a parking lot, hiding from the police. No charges were filed.

That story seemed to placate the cops, for a few minutes anyway. Their clear focus was Williamson, and now they had more proof that he and Fritz were friends and drinking buddies. The relevance to the Carter murder was unclear to Fritz, but then most of what the cops were saying made little sense. Fritz knew he was innocent, and if Smith and Rogers were after him, then the real killer had little to worry about.

After hammering away for three hours, the cops finally quit. They were convinced Fritz was involved, but the case wouldn’t be solved with a confession. Good police work was needed, so they began watching Fritz, following him around town, stopping him for no reason. Several times Fritz woke up to the sight of a police car parked in front of his house.

Fritz voluntarily submitted hair, blood, and saliva samples. Why not give them everything? He had nothing to fear. The thought of talking to a lawyer crossed his
mind briefly, but why bother? He was completely innocent, and the cops would soon realize this.

Detective Smith dug into Fritz’s background and discovered a 1973 conviction for growing marijuana in the town of Durant. Armed with the information, an Ada policeman contacted the junior high school in Noble where Dennis was teaching and informed the authorities that Fritz not only was under investigation for murder but also had a drug conviction he’d neglected to disclose when he applied to teach. Fritz was fired immediately.

On March 17, Susan Land at the OSBI received from Dennis Smith “the known scalp and pubic hairs of Fritz and Williamson.”

On March 21, Ron went to the police station and voluntarily submitted to a polygraph test administered by B. G. Jones, another examiner with the OSBI. Jones declared the exam to be inconclusive. Ron also gave a saliva sample. A week later, this was submitted to the OSBI, along with a sample from Dennis Fritz.

On March 28, Jerry Peters with the OSBI completed his fingerprint analysis. In his report he stated, without qualification, disclaimer, or equivocation, that the palm print on the Sheetrock sample did not belong to Debbie Carter, Dennis Fritz, or Ron Williamson. This should have been good news for the police. Find a match to the palm print, and they had their killer.

Instead, the police quietly informed the Carter family that Ron Williamson was their prime suspect. Though
they did not have enough evidence, they were pursuing all leads and slowly, methodically, building a case against him. He certainly seemed suspicious; he acted strange, kept weird hours, lived with his mother, didn’t have a job, was known to pester women, was a regular at the honky-tonks, and, most damning of all, lived close to the murder scene. By cutting through a back alley, he could be at Debbie Carter’s apartment in minutes!

Plus, he’d had those two problems up in Tulsa. The man had to be a rapist, regardless of what the juries decided.

Not long after the murder, Debbie’s aunt Glenna Lucas received an anonymous phone call in which a male voice said, “Debbie’s dead, and you next will die.” Glenna recalled, with horror, the words scrawled in nail polish: “Jim Smith next will die.” The similarities sent her into a panic, but instead of notifying the police, she called the district attorney.