HELL IN THE HEARTLAND
Jax Miller

Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

First published in the US in 2020 by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

Copyright © Jax Miller 2020

Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover photograph © Drunaa / Trevillion Images

Map by David Lindroth

Jax Miller asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008335182

Ebook Edition © July 2020 ISBN: 9780008335205

Version: 2020-07-03

Dedication

My writing is forever dedicated to my children, LA, K, AI, & S.

This book is dedicated to Lauria and Ashley, forever young.

Map

Disclaimer

While this book contains dramatizations and some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals, this is a true story.

Epigraph

I was born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.

—Carl Sandburg’s “Prairie” (1918)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Disclaimer

Epigraph

Prologue

SECTION 1: THE FIRE

1. Mother, Kathy Freeman

2. Daughter, Ashley Freeman

3. Father, Danny Freeman

4. Best Friend, Lauria Bible

5. One Body

6. One Woman, Lorene Bible

7. The Scene of the Crime

8. The Prime Suspect

9. Day Two and the BBI

SECTION 2: CORRUPTION

10. The Initial Theories

11. Son, Shane Freeman

12. The Alleged Cover-up of Shane Freeman

13. Boyfriend, Jeremy Hurst, and Pop Pop, Glen Freeman

14. The Last Letter of Kathy Freeman

15. The Murder of DeAnna Dorsey

SECTION 3: DRUGS

16. The Most Toxic Place in America

17. The Outlaw Lands

18. The Outlaw Lands (Continued)

19. East of Welch

20. The Ballad of John Paul Chapman

21. The Confessions

SECTION 4: LATER LEADS

22. The Edges of Oklahoma

23. Another Avenue

24. Chetopa

25. The Searches of Chetopa

26. Revival

27. “This Place Is Ate Up.”

SECTION 5: THE ARRESTS

28. The Arrest

29. Ronnie Dean “Buzz” Busick

30. The Insurance-Verification Card

31. David “Penny” Pennington

32. Like Lightning

33. No End

Picture Section

Page on how to help

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Jax Miller

About the Publisher

The sheriff once told me this part of Oklahoma was haunted, that once you’re a part of it, you can’t ever leave. Here I am, walking along the edge of the Freemans’ forty-acre property in the middle of the night and hoping not to be shot. I’m up against my own crippling anxiety and a backdrop of stars where in the winter of 1999 sat a small trailer that you’d never find by accident. In the pitch-black, from a dark and desolate dirt road I look up the hill, imagining how the home would have looked in flames, where inside were thought to be parents Danny and Kathy Freeman, their teenage daughter, Ashley, and Ashley’s best friend, Lauria Bible.

God help them all.

Twenty years later, the Freemans and the Bibles remain without answer about what really happened that December night, strangled in the prickly weeds of rumor, rumors that include drugs, police corruption, serial killers, and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ himself. The secrets are out there in the Oklahoma prairie’s whisper, her taunts. And as imaginary shadows move around me, I learn that while the prairie is playful by day, she plays tricks at night. Somewhere out there, closure might be found after all this time. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times: the prairie has her way.

But the stranger-than-fiction story of the Freeman-Bible case has hardly blipped on the radar of true crime, and it’s hardly made its way out of Oklahoma and the intersection where Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas almost meet to make crosshairs crookedly aimed at the gut of America. The fervors of youth are fading from those who stand today with questions, and those suspected to know where Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible are now are taking the answers to their graves. Time is running out for an untold story, and I wonder who will be left to tell it when those closest to it are no longer here.

The taste of the prairie wind brings me back to being high, and a panic attack begins to spark in my chest. If I don’t work this story, I’ll have to sit with the unimaginable fear that found me only once I began this case. It is a hereditary monster that took the lives of the women before me in my family, including my mother, who will die from the effects of drugs in the midst of my investigation. Escapism. Fixation. While I get my demons from my mother, I take the diligence of my on-the-spectrum father and spend the next four years with the ghosts of Oklahoma.

Standing at the edge of the Freeman property, I go over (and over and over) what happened in the hours leading up to the fire and silently ask the girls where they went. But they don’t answer, and instead, the hills whisper around me like they can smell my fear.

Like I said: the prairie has her way.

SECTION 1

1
MOTHER, KATHY FREEMAN
December 29, 1999
The Day Before the Fire

Summer is when I come to Oklahoma to meet the living, but I reserve winters for trying to acquaint myself with the dead; in the season when those I came to write about last lived, when it’s still. I sometimes hear them better in the silence than from the survivors who still talk about them today. I may never get inside their minds the way I wish I could, or the way they get into mine. But I can at least feel the snow on my skin atop this hill where the trailer once sat, and wrap my fingers around the shoulder of an ax and wonder if our knuckles ache the same. In the lockjaw of winter, when memories of braiding watermelon vines and of blackberry-stained feet are long forgotten, Oklahomans carry on as they always have. They’re hunters and gatherers by nature, canning and pickling, with freezers full of dove and deer, not just prepared but fortified for winter. They are, by default, a people who can withstand most anything.

Amidst the buzz-cut fields and dead-grass whistle, the white-tailed deer stand on their hind legs and pluck for persimmons’ sweet orange flesh from the trees, which helps hunters track their paths. The folklorists tell me that cutting into the fruit at autumn’s first frost is a way to predict the winter ahead. In 1999, the kernels were shaped as knives, foretelling of blade-twist winds (the spoon-shaped seeds mean heavy snow, while the fork-shaped formations forecast only dustings).

In 1999, blade-twist winds it was.

Kathy Freeman, age thirty-seven, paused momentarily to watch her breath hit the cold air hard. She was smoking more and more, to the point where the December air offended her lungs and the stains on her teeth were growing more prominent. The bleakness of winter brought with it a palette of homestead tans and doeskin browns, something lacking color, lacking life. Then a chop and a crack echoed down the hill when Kathy split another piece of wood. Outside the twenty-eight-by-fifty-six-foot mobile home, the air smelled like fresh coffee, bacon, and maple, an ambience of something cozy and all-American. Young barn cats played by the splinters, coming and going as they pleased, attracted to the smell of breakfast inside. Despite the temperature being thirty degrees Fahrenheit, Kathy kept warm by the sweat of her brow, wearing only faded Levi’s and a T-shirt branded with the logo of the optometrist’s office where she used to work. With breakfast still on the stove, she had just enough time to split a few more logs before returning, leaving the ax behind.

It was her daughter’s sweet sixteen, there was much to do, and she was running behind on her homemaking chores.

She took the yard’s chill inside with her, where a woodstove cooled just to the left of the front door. The home was small but nicely kept, toeing that fine line between cluttered and comfy. Kathy dropped an armful of firewood by the stove as she walked in, wincing at a splinter that found its way into her thumb’s knuckle. She sucked on it, kicking off her worn Keds, which kept her feet cold, and dashed for the stove top, always the dutiful wife despite hating the cliché, for she also worked like a man with backbreaking endurance until her hands were nothing but two callused mitts.

The faux-wood-paneled walls were filled with display cases of Cherokee arrowheads, hundreds of points made of flint and bone, vibrant against red velvet and protected by glass, stained by the blood of the American Indians to whom this land once belonged. The open living room seemed to hang by the deer antlers that sprouted from the walls, with Ashley’s laundry neatly folded on the couch. The TV was mistakenly turned to a soap, electric blue and amber light glowing through pan grease and unfiltered-cigarette smoke. On the floor was the family Rottweiler, Sissy, more nourished than any of the Freemans. The dog hardly raised her ears toward Kathy’s moving about, half asleep for the lazy Wednesday afternoon.

Kathy added cracked black pepper and a touch of fresh milk to the fat drippings for the sawmill gravy, a Southern staple she was fixing for her husband for a late biscuits-and-gravy breakfast. Where the sausage smoke ended and Kathy’s Natural American Spirit smoke began was clear from two different shades around her head, like a dual-toned halo. Her husband, Danny, had excused himself to go outside shortly before, halfway done for the day with whatever it was he was doing, living in a perpetual state of being in between odd jobs. Welding here, selling his own handpicked wildflowers and willow branches to the florist there, whatever it took.

“My head’s at it again,” Danny often groaned, half excusing, half resentful. “Damn it anyway.” He dropped a pat of butter into his black coffee and disappeared into the afternoon, swallowed by silver sun, never feeling the need to explain to Kathy where he was going or what he was doing. Then again, she never felt the need to ask. She didn’t want to be that kind of farm wife, the kind whose floral dresses matched the wallpaper, the kind to put curlers in her hair before bedtime. God forbid. Gone were the calico-dressed women longing for their husbands out in the dust. Gone were the cowboys lit by a lantern’s flame and navigating by the stars. Broken was the American dream and the barefoot girl that she used to be, playing in the bog and twirling red clover in her teeth. And she was just fine without all them frills. Between stirring the gravy and grabbing fresh eggs from their carton, she found a good ten seconds to find a sewing needle and go after that damn splinter.

Kathy had this natural-born killer’s stare about her, one she was hardly aware of, what people refer to today as “resting bitch face.” Her hair matched the fields that gave birth to her, just as wild, always catching the breeze. But 1999 was a trying year for the woman, her shoulders a fixed inch higher since her teenage son’s death. Murder! she’d correct you if you mentioned it within earshot. Cold-blooded murder! Her eyes were but two swollen welts, the eyelashes plucked one by one out of nervous compulsion. Who could blame her?

Outside in the backyard, the blast of Danny’s shotgun at the bottom of the hill, taking her attention from the splinter and over to the door of the refrigerator, where a lined piece of paper hung, a page she’d rewritten several times over earlier in the week. At the top, under a magnet made to look like a cow, in her tall but neat cursive, the words “ONE SHOT,” a reference to the shotgun slug that had pierced her son’s side.

My name is Kathy Freeman. I live west of Welch, OK—a Craig County resident all my life …

She gave it a read, once over, with her hands on her hips and that inadvertent look of contempt nudging down the corners of her mouth.

“Ashley!” she called out over the stove top’s bubble and hiss. “Grab yer breakfast, birthday girl. It’s already after noon!” Kathy sucked hard on her cigarette, knuckles wide by chores never-ending and the pressing need to distract herself from seventeen-year-old Shane’s death. Murder, goddamn it!

2
DAUGHTER, ASHLEY FREEMAN
December 29, 1999
The Day Before the Fire

Ashley Freeman had that adolescent thickness about her, one she was just starting to grow out of as the teeth in her head straightened into their adult positions. Her hair was dirty blond and homespun but tamed in a ponytail, her skin paler from bunkering in the shelter of “ay-kern” trees while wearing camouflage jackets that reversed into safety orange. She was just at the age when you could glimpse into what she’d look like as an adult, like her mother, but young enough that you could put your finger on exactly what she had looked like as a child. She was as country as country came. Photos often showed the girl, tall at five feet seven, sporting rifles and slinging the carcasses of various animals over her shoulder, proud like mink. Family bragged of her marksmanship and ate the deer she’d drag home from the hills, supper killed with unflinching precision. Sometimes, over the woodstove, Danny would make snack trays of turkey strips and deer steaks, paired with cans of Pepsi to wash them down, of which he could drink a six-pack in a day. Later, he’d make wind spinners from the cans and hang them from the gutters, to add flutter and rustle to their singing home. As a child, Ashley would watch the hypnotic silver and blue play against the sky on idle afternoons.

Like a good Oklahoma girl, she did her best to suppress her emotions, bred to see crying as weak but anger as strong. This is the Oklahoma way. But pain seemed to gnaw its way from the inside out, and in the past year, she’d lost a few pounds of that baby chub and the gold of her hair was losing its luster. Life had slapped her hard in the face, leaving a red mark of grief on her cheek that just wouldn’t go away since her big brother’s death. That afternoon, she arranged and rearranged the handpicked flowers of a bouquet, one made of hay from the yard, holly, Christmas rose, and fiery witch hazel sprigs, ready to replace the last bouquet from the side of a rural county road that had been stolen, plucked from the gravel.

The floral arrangement took her back to times when she and her father traveled together, over and under the nearby Oklahoma state lines between there and Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. They went anywhere the gas could take them to collect cattails and lotus pods and various wildflowers (cattails were their best seller at ten cents apiece to local florists). Ashley’s mother would stay home to work at an optometrist’s office while Shane continued on with his extracurricular activities and time spent with friends. Notwithstanding the cattails, which would fill the backseat at any given time, Ashley and Danny would arrange their handpicked commodities into spectacular sprays of sunroots, rattlesnake masters, and Indian blankets, displays of fire and sky wrapped in ribbon and sold for twenty bucks apiece, though you could get the price down to fifteen if Ashley was feeling kind enough. That was summertime, when red sunsets lingered over the fields after long days, hair tangling in the thick, hot wind of a speeding truck. She’d trace her hand over the passing fields and a dirty fingernail along the horizon, wishing for all the things that teenage girls wished for: the carefree heart, the white-trash kiss, reckless love. What little she could have known of growing up back then, walking in her father’s shadow and eating fried pickles and pink lemonade on the side of the road to let the truck cool.

And now her sixteenth birthday.

It was the second half of winter break, one that lacked the vibrations of Christmas due to the weight of mourning. Ashley straightened the blond straw under her knee while listening to Billboard’s Best of Country from her brother’s radio. Because she had just moved up from her room to his, half of his furniture remained, though she couldn’t bear looking at his Sports Illustrated calendar a second longer. She kept his football trophies and dusted them often, his worn Nikes at the foot of her bed, the blue-and-white Welch Wildcats football jersey he should have been buried in hung on the wall. She’d even spray his favorite Tommy Hilfiger cologne once in a while on her own flannel shirts just so she could feel him near.

Ashley ignored the thick smell of breakfast, appetite lost with her youth. She thought of a million things she’d rather be doing than turning sixteen, including, but not limited to, practicing for her driver’s test.

“You know you’re ready,” her friend reassured her. “You’ve only been doing it since you were five.”

“It’s different when you’re taking a test,” Ashley replied. “You have to signal and all that crap. That’s why Jeremy’s been driving with me. Showing me all the formal stuff.”

“Sure.” The friend smiled, making quotation marks with her fingers. “‘Formal stuff.’”

Ashley threw baby’s breath at her best friend, sixteen-year-old Lauria (pronounced “Laura”) Bible, who planted the flower behind her own ear.

The best friends had spent the day before preparing for the livestock showings for the county and state fairs, as part of the FFA (Future Farmers of America) and the 4-H Club, community-leadership and agricultural clubs to which they belonged. They knew all there was to know about roughages, dehorning, cattle parasites, castration, cuts of beef. These were country kids who’d spent the morning adjusting the gaits and training the coats of Ashley’s goats, Jack and Jill. (Lauria had her own two pigs and a lamb back home.) They talked about seeding out the competition and making it all the way to the great Tulsa fair, which attracted more than a million visitors annually. Imagine, parades of antique tractors brandishing American flags, pie-eating contests with sun-warmed blueberries exploding on clean cotton, demolition derbies, carnival rides, and bull-riding rodeos. The county and state fairs were the very embodiment of American life in the heartland. But back in the bleakness of winter, they trained with their sights set on summer. Ashley and Lauria wandered around the property that morning, gathering the leaves of dogwoods and bois d’arcs for the goats to eat as the cold made their rough hands ache. While the “crick” babbled at the bottom of the backyard, a weeping willow swished against the ground like the straws of a broom at the west side of the trailer. In fact, that was what helped Ashley decide on leaving her old bedroom on the east end of the house for Shane’s on the west end: the branches that brushed against the windows and filtered dusk through strips of light like honey, a sense of security when the sun went down.

“Ashley!” her mother hollered from the kitchen. “Grab yer breakfast, birthday girl. It’s already after noon!”

Ashley rolled her eyes—the picture of teenage disdain. Sometimes she wished that she didn’t have to be the strong one within the family unit. Had it not been for Lauria’s stability and her support, she wondered if she’d have been able to survive that last year of the millennium.

I spend years sitting with Ashley’s family, friends, and neighbors, ambling her school hallways and stomping grounds, visiting classmates and teachers. I want to know what being Ashley Freeman was really like, and soon, another side of her emerges. Despite Ashley’s outwardly tough persona, there was something tender about her. Back then, the kids in school knew that her family home wasn’t the best, and the rumors as to why had long circulated, coming to a head with Shane’s death. One friend tells of a time she forgot that Ashley was supposed to ride home with her from school and left without her, only for Kathy to show up on the doorstep with a sobbing Ashley, demanding to know why her daughter had been forgotten. While she could hunt for and field-dress a deer by herself, she required validation from others. Though she could lift any grown man, she’d dance in her room when alone. She was never able to throw away her favorite Berenstain Bears books and stuffed animals, yet took no issue in cutting the heads clean off turkeys. She had her feet planted in the manure and her heart in the clouds. There were the face she let others see and the face she reserved for behind closed doors, the real heart of her spirit she’d share with those closest to her, including Lauria.

“We’re already late,” Kathy yelled.

“Gimme a minute!”

Together, the friends got ready to leave, oblivious of their whole lives before them. Ashley slipped on her boyfriend, Jeremy’s, high school ring and slipped into her sneakers, the soles dusty. Out there, the cricks and grain were stitched together with dirt roads that led off the beaten paths. That land breathed under their feet, heart pounding with hunger. In wait.

3
FATHER, DANNY FREEMAN
December 29, 1999
The Day Before the Fire

Out here you’ll find no one, and no one will find you, and that was exactly its appeal when Danny Freeman moved his family from rural Vinita to West of Welch back in 1995: father, mother, son, and daughter striving for a simpler way of living.

While Kathy prepared a late breakfast, and Ashley and Lauria got ready in the trailer, forty-year-old Danny Freeman wandered out back, sipping buttered coffee with a shotgun over his shoulder and hunting ancient arrowheads. This was how you’d find him most days. His shadow before him was long, and he couldn’t catch up to it no matter how hard he tried, like he swore he could once when he was a boy. The sun warmed the quilted flannel on his shoulders. As he walked down the slight hill from his trailer to Big Cabin Creek that early afternoon, he paced along the edge of the river and listened for the familiar rasps of prairie rattlesnakes and water moccasins and other venomous pit vipers. To himself, he dared them to come out.

Danny eyed the land around him, bitter, feeling cheated by a little bit of everything: by the world, by God, by lawyers. He paced his way back toward a concrete dam at the top of the crick, where a feed bucket full of soybeans waited. With the sounds of the brook nearby, he spent the morning with fistfuls of the handpicked legumes, attracting rafters of wild turkeys. He even had the local game warden’s permission to do so, provided he kept the routine up, lest they become dependent and later starve to death as a result. Danny agreed, feeding the birds every other day, just to listen to the whishing of their wings as they came close to him. They came with harvest-colored and copper plumage, Danny’s eye catching on brief flashes of purple, red, and green.

But life weighed heavily on his shoulders, more heavily still since the death of his only boy, Shane. And Danny knew that death, once more, was lurking close, hiding out on the prairie. The sharp taste of paranoia lodged itself in the back of his throat, his shoulders winding tight. In those final days of 1999, Danny warned his friends, and warned his stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, that she’d be a-coming, and that if anything were to happen to him, “you’d be best to look right here.” Dwayne Vancil would repeat this exhaustingly over the years, asserting that in those last days, Danny pointed a finger hard into his stepbrother’s chest and said, “If anything happens to me or my family, anything, look to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.” Dwayne described that Danny’s demeanor struck him as “fearful” and “absolute,” traits rarely ever seen in Danny.

Some feared Danny’s paranoia was a result of his overt marijuana use. Others feared he was right. Either way, rage seared just under Danny’s skin, like sunburn at the back of his neck, mood fickle like fire. And perhaps, in many ways, the man was just … misunderstood.

After all, who could really understand a man who, once upon a time, had accidentally shot himself in the forehead?

It happened while he was cleaning a rifle, when the breech plug in the rear of the muzzleloader barrel blew back into his head and through his skull. With the plug actually lodged in his brain, Danny drove to the local hospital, waited two hours, got fed up, then drove two hours more to the city hospital, where doctors immediately rushed him in for brain surgery, replacing part of his skull with bone from his hip. The scar was a prominent badge in the middle of his forehead. So when people said that Danny was a tough guy, they meant just that.

Danny Freeman had inherited the rock-hard jaw and the bison-wide shoulders of the men before him, a lineage that emanated masculinity. Now alone, doleful, with an appetite for all things dwindling by the day, he wondered just how long it would take for him to waste away altogether. Unemployed with the exception of the odd welding jobs up in Kansas and cattail scavenges, he felt removed from the American dream of his ancestors. And the accidental injury caused crippling migraines and made steady employment an impossible feat to maintain.

He squatted on the dam, and nearing the bottom of the soybeans, Danny held the shotgun across his knees and pried his lips with a pipe. Fanned by the wings of turkeys, Danny could briefly forget it all, inhaling his grief into the depths of his lungs where it belonged, each hazy day blurring into the next. He’d rise and spend his days smoking, canvassing the riverbed for American Indian arrowheads, a hobby instilled in him since childhood. He didn’t even have to search for them; they’d just catch his eye from the mire. He swore it was a gift inherited alongside that one-eighth of Cherokee hiding somewhere in his blood.

Despite the drug-induced sway in his gait, Danny shot his gun off and caught the leather belly of a cottonmouth snake. It was the same shot that took his wife’s attention from the splinter in her thumb’s knuckle back at the trailer.

The turkeys thundered into the air, yelping against the breeze. He walked over to the snake, tucked his thumb under its jaw like a trigger, and swung it into the creek. “Bastard,” he muttered. Left with the gentle sounds of falling water, he returned to arrowhead hunting.

Then Danny, this epitome of all things virile, wept for his only son.

When Danny paused a few moments later, his eyes stung with salt as he scanned the unspoiled acreage that waved before him. Once gold from Indian grass and red with Oklahoma rose, today Welch was painted the color of sorrow. He smoked the burned resin of the pipe until there was nothing left. And when the waves of grief passed, as they always did, he swung the shotgun back over his shoulder and climbed the moderate incline back to the front of his house.

As he rounded the side of the trailer in the low winter sun, Danny watched his daughter unintentionally make the sign of the cross with her body spray, a cloud of pink in the afternoon light to smell like Cotton Candy Fantasy and hay. He passed behind her and rubbed the top of her head. “Happy birthday, Ash,” he managed, just as Lauria followed from the front door.

The girls waited for Kathy at the bottom of the precast-concrete steps. Ashley zipped up her coat as Lauria looked under the bleached skull of a longhorn that hung on the front of the house. With the girls’ backs to him, Danny stuffed the pipe deep in his jeans pocket and made his way up to the front door as his wife was leaving.

“We’ll be back in a few hours,” said Kathy as she blew the bangs from her face. “We’ll bring back the birthday cake with us.”

Danny stared her down, as he often did, and she hurried down the steps to avoid the familiar heat of his glare. Even before the night’s events would unfold into one of the most far-reaching mysteries of the Midwest, there wasn’t a person in town who hadn’t heard of Danny’s knee-jerk temper. Some even had their own accounts of how he had wound up with a scar in the middle of his forehead.

Danny leaned in the doorway and crossed his arms. “The big sweet sixteen,” he remarked, and the trace of a smile crossed his daughter’s face.

“You bet,” Ashley responded.

Lauria left her 1989 blue Chevy Cavalier with Danny’s truck and climbed into the backseat of Kathy’s car. Danny watched them drive off down the seven-hundred-foot driveway into the December frost, passing by a JUSTICE FOR SHANE sign at the property’s edge, decorated with a football signed by Shane’s classmates and a few Beanie Baby bears and candles.

Pulling up only a moment after Kathy and the girls left was Danny’s best friend, Charlie Krider, a bald man with a long beard and a bag of grass, to whom Danny waved from the front door. He came from Chetopa, the town just north of Welch but over the Kansas border, just eight miles from Danny’s house as the crow flies but a twenty-minute drive on a rocky country road. Charlie parked in front of the trailer, trying to discern through dust the tail end of Kathy’s car in his side-view mirror. “Perfect timing, I suppose,” called Charlie as he exited his truck.

Danny repeated his daughter’s words. “You bet!”

Charlie lifted his sunglasses and skimmed his eyes across the pastures for his red cattle. His fingers were shaped like spoons and the cold months chapped his lips. “Look at big mama cow and big daddy cow,” he said as he spotted them across the property. “Too bad we gotta slaughter ’em.”

Ready to partake in green communion, Danny dismissed the comment and thumbed over his shoulder for Charlie to start rolling a couple of joints without him inside the trailer. “I’m right behind you,” he said.

But there was something anticipatory about Danny from those porch steps, looking after the road’s dust from Kathy’s car on the other side of the trees. He licked the aftertaste of dope from his lips and turned his attention to the empty ends of the road, away from his missus, where Danny watched a Craig County Sheriff’s Office deputy’s car crawl slowly along the edge of his property. The police officer looked out his window and up at Danny, and Danny stared right back. The deputy’s car stopped. They watched each other without a word, the way Danny silently dared snakes out back. Danny cocked his head with a smirk and pointed his fingers in the shape of a gun, closing one eye and pulling an imaginary trigger at the deputy. The officer sneered back up at Danny, tilted his cap, and drove on after the girls.

4
BEST FRIEND, LAURIA BIBLE
December 29, 1999
The Night Before the Fire

With Ashley at her side, and Kathy driving, Lauria wiped the fog from the car window, scanning the neon lights of Route 66 as they ignited around her. The colors shone wet in her hazel eyes, streaking over the skin that maintained part of its tan from the long summer that now felt far. It was no wonder that Vinita, having been the first city in Oklahoma with electricity, felt brighter than other towns budding along the Main Street of America. Lauria’s curly brown hair was shoulder length, and she came complete with a beauty mark stamped between her right nostril and upper lip like a maker’s mark. Cozy in her blue-and-gold cheerleading jacket, which creaked with every movement, she settled, watching the sun shrink behind the historic art deco storefronts to the smell of car exhaust and deep-fried anything. The days were shrinking, with sundown at only a quarter after five.

The original plan was for Lauria to return home in rural Vinita that evening, but because they had a later start in the day than planned, and because Lauria wasn’t allowed to drive after dark, they decided they’d later ask Lauria’s parents to let her stay another night; since her house would be on the way to some of their errands, they’d stop there later.

The first stop was at a feed store to fetch food for Ashley’s goats. Lauria helped Ashley and her mother pack the clover and alfalfa into the trunk of Kathy’s Toyota before heading off to Pizza Hut in Vinita for Ashley’s birthday dinner. Lauria was oblivious to the strands of straw stuck in her curls as they squeezed into a booth and enjoyed their dinner. Lauria and Ashley talked about fairs and cars as Kathy looked on in awe, wondering how the raptures of youth were so long ago. After they ate, they crossed the highway and went to Walmart. There, Lauria helped Ashley handpick her birthday cake: white frosting piped with blue. “Chocolate. No. Vanilla. No. Chocolate,” Ashley argued with herself. Lauria, always the problem solver, offered, “Half and half,” relieving Ashley of her indecision. Nighttime fell over Route 66 during the course of their errands and the neon signs kindled. The night remained cold and bitter and would feel this way in all the years since.

They then drove to the lightless outskirts of Vinita to the home of Kathy’s mother, Celesta, and stepfather, Bill Chandler; Kathy would often haul water for drinking from there. (Contrary to several reports, the Freemans did have running water, suitable for laundry and toilets and showers; however, the water came from the Big Cabin Creek in the back of the Freeman trailer and was not drinkable. Therefore, Kathy made frequent visits to her parents’ to collect drinking water for the family.) Lauria’s house was only a few minutes from the Chandlers’, and it was their next stop.

Kathy and Ashley waited in the car as Lauria ran into her house; the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree could be seen from far across the surrounding farmlands. Her father, Jay, had just returned from his job at an auto parts store in Langley. He was a nine-to-five man always topped off with a rugged baseball cap and plaid, a Midwestern man with Jack Webb–ish features and a thick, syrupy drawl. Hurrying so as not to keep her friend and her mother waiting, Lauria dashed for her bedroom, collecting a new set of clothes in her arm.

“Whoa, whoa, where’s the fire?” Jay called out.

“My car’s over at Ashley’s, and we only just fetched the cake,” she shouted down the hall. “Can I stay over just one more night? Pretty please?”

Jay gave in, always having a hard time saying no to his only daughter. “Well, now, you know you got animals you gotta take care of tomorrow, get around and take care of your show animals and stuff. You need to be home by noon.”

Years later, Jay tells me, “Noon never came the next day.”

Lauria squealed, rushing about and stuffing a couple of bottles of nail polish in her coat pocket. She was so rushed that she nearly bolted out the door without saying goodbye. But she stopped and turned around before planting a kiss on her father’s cheek. “I love you, Dad.” They were her last words to her father as she hopped down the steps of her porch, then skipped back into the idling car. The prairie, now dark, took her in with open arms, as it always had. It had something of the delirium of adolescence about it. And I’m sure Lauria’s natural curls bounced off her shoulders, and I’m sure winter was kinder to her skin than to most people’s. As they set off, Lauria’s mother, Lorene, just on her way home from work, slowed her car to a stop beside Kathy’s on the road where the Bibles lived.

“Dad said I could stay another night.” Lauria grinned.

“Make sure you don’t forget about the dentist’s appointment in the morning. Be home at eight o’clock.”

“I will!” Lauria shouted back the last words to her mother. Like with her father, the words “I love you” would be the last words Lorene heard from her daughter. Kathy smiled back at Lorene and slowly started to move the car forward.

The three of them made one more stop, this time at the Jack’s convenience store in Welch, owned by the grandmother of Ashley’s boyfriend, Jeremy Hurst. They picked up some soda and invited Jeremy as a last-minute decision, which he accepted.

It was to be a night of modest celebration. They settled in, with Ashley and Lauria shifting near the kitchen table by Danny, and Jeremy Hurst following shortly after. Kathy took the cake to the counter and planted seventeen candles in it, including one for luck, using it to light her cigarette. With her back to the rest, Kathy glanced over at the piece of paper on the fridge. One shot. It took her attention long enough that she didn’t notice the wax melting until she felt the heat under her face. She forced herself away from the letter, a manifesto of sorts, and set down her smoke, instructing Jeremy to turn off the lights as he came in.

The lights went out, and Kathy came with birthday cake ablaze. The flames of the candles sparkled in her beady but smiling brown eyes as she set the cake in front of her daughter. They sang “Happy Birthday to You,” Lauria singing louder than the rest, as Jeremy took a seat and playfully pinched Ashley’s side.

Ashley closed her eyes and made a wish.

The birthday candles were extinguished by breath, a breath as long as the prairie’s. Now the unlit home could not be noticed against the nighttime outside, and the cheers of her family and friends rolled in short form from the hills. It is from here, from this jumping-off point, that it is anybody’s guess as to what happened after, between a wish and the dawn’s early light when the trailer was found in flames.

I’ve driven the route between Vinita and Welch more times than I can count, more times than I’ve visited my childhood home. Each trip is slightly brighter and louder than the last, to a place where it takes time for my eyes and ears to adjust. Coming here, to where they were last seen, isn’t something I’m able to resist. I’m drawn. Obsessed. Manic. Sometimes I come up the driveway and think of the five of them here: Danny, Kathy, Ashley, Lauria, and Jeremy. Sometimes I imagine I am them. But as my senses adjust to deep, dark country, I light a smoke there on the Freeman property and imagine that I am the killer or killers who struck the first flame. I blow out my match, adding a pinch of sulfur to the pastures surrounding in the same way as Ashley blew out her birthday candles.

And then the prairie falls silent.

5
ONE BODY
December 30, 1999
The Morning of the Fire

Like the Freemans, Welchans Jack and Diane Bell lived in an area so rural that it didn’t even fall within the city limits of any existing town. Instead, it was referred to as West of Welch; what locals called “the sticks.” It was early morning, and their farmhouse was dimmed, so as not to wake their capricious teenage son. The home, only a few miles deeper into the country than the Freemans’, was all long shadows, the smell of Scotch pine sap, and the emphysemic breathing of a percolator. In the stillness at the bottom of each exhale, the outside sound of handcrafted wind chimes made of hammer-flattened spoons and forks. Every house in Oklahoma seemed to harmonize with the wind.

The pickup warmed up outside. Only a few miles south of the Kansas border, the ranching town was starry and still as the married couple got ready for work. They were employed at the Eastern State Hospital for the Insane, located about twenty miles south in Vinita, where a working farm for the patients once served as an economic factor for the county. Jack dried his chest-length yellowed beard over the woodstove’s heat as Diane fixed thermoses of chili and a side of leftover corn bread. His teeth ached that morning as he tied his beard into a single ponytail with three rubber bands, staring absently into the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree.

“Fetch the coffee,” Diane whispered through the dark. Jack went to the open kitchen and filled two large mugs with Folgers. After Jack pulled the cord of the Christmas tree lights from the wall, they left, clad in their Carhartts and long johns, going on with the hackneyed “just like any other morning.”

It was a wonder that the lightest breeze could find this town, and that morning, it crooned like a raw bow across a cello string, long and low. At approximately 5:40, Jack and Diane climbed into their Dodge pickup, not planning to fully wake until their tires reached the pavement of a God’s honest road. The leather shifted under them, the radio tuned to the local weather.

“You unplugged the tree, right?” asked Diane.

Jack grunted, not a yes or no about him at that ungodly hour, ungodly because of the way he had tossed and turned the night before, prodded by toothache. They headed south over the vast stubble that was the landscape, serenaded by the soft scrape of tires on dirt, fiddling with the heating vents. Nothing but blackness for as far as their sleep-crusted eyes could see, but for the pockets of illuminated grit caught in the truck’s headlights. Had they driven on just a little farther, they would have seen the familiar yellow signs inflamed in the lights, warning: HITCHHIKERS MAY BE ESCAPING INMATES—signs you’ll still find in the area today.

As Diane sipped her coffee, she noticed a glow in the eastern sky just beyond a hill, a moving shade of tawny blotting out the stars. She nudged her husband’s arm, pointing his attention due east to this little light that danced on the world’s edge. For a split second, she wondered if it were the first flash of day, a brief panic at the idea of being late for work, but that couldn’t have been right. Jack tilted his head and let a silent profanity fall down his ponytailed beard.

He turned the car east toward the light, his headlights streaking the hand-painted sign that read JUSTICE FOR SHANE at the end of the long driveway. The town being small enough, they knew the farm belonged to the Freemans, a family of four. A family of three now, Jack had to mentally correct himself, since the Freeman boy had been found near a ditch about ten miles west the winter before. Suddenly the couple was wide-awake, turning north up the moderate incline of the seven-hundred-foot-long driveway and edging closer. The Freeman trailer was engulfed in flames.

Jack slammed the gears into reverse and raced in the direction of the highway, stopping at the first house he saw: the Sherricks’.

Today, Wade Sherrick is a cattle rancher who lives at the end of that dirt road, he on the south end, the Freemans once at the north. “And you thought I was dead, eh?” he laughs when I mention that it took me three years to see him, because I had been misinformed; I thought he was an elderly man who’d died some years before. “Not sure what that says about me.” It was only out of curiosity that I stopped my car by his barn in early 2019 when seeing two young men doing farmwork from the sheds. I knew by their young faces that they probably didn’t have much firsthand information about the 1999 fire up the road, but I ask about the late Wade Sherrick, only to learn that Wade was alive and well, and just over there. Wade comes from the barn, winter pale from the shadows, middle-aged but still handsome in that callused-hand way you’d find around Welch. I follow him across the street to an office connected to his farmhouse, a cluttered room filled with agricultural newsletters and dusty trophies and belts from his days as a rodeo rider, a hobby that his two sons inherited (they all had a laugh at my thinking Wade was dead). I ask to wear his cowboy hat before inquiring about the morning of the fire. He and his sons are kind. Wade’s wife, Kim, a local mail carrier, is working that day.

“Well, somebody’s beatin’ on the door,” Wade says about the morning of the fire. “I could sleep through a bomb, but Kim wakes up and goes to the door. I stumble out and see it’s that Bell.”

Back in 1999, the blue heelers stood by their masters, keeping quiet when the door opened to Jack Bell and the moonlit ranch behind him, one of Charolais and Angus breeds of beef cattle.

“Hey, I’m on my way to work,” Jack calmly started. “But the Freemans’ house is on fire up the road there.”

Kim Sherrick called 911 at 5:50. At this time, Jack and Diane Bell continued to drive to their place of work.

They’d not speak of the incident publicly again.

Wade and Kim went to their children’s bedrooms. They wrapped their six- and four-year-olds in the covers they still slept in, the parents slipping on their boots quietly in the dark by the front door with their sons’ heads in the crooks of their necks. “It’s five something in the morning. We get the kids up and throw ’em into the truck and get up there.” The family of four squeezed into the cab of the family truck, summoned by the tiny light at the top of the road that shone red like the sun. The sleepy boys rubbed their eyes to inspect the sight ahead. When they reached the home, only half of the trailer was on fire (Kim remembers the east side while Wade remembers the west side). But the Sherricks couldn’t leave their truck on account of the Freeman family dog, Sissy, a brute of a Rottweiler, jumping on the car doors and barking her jowls off. Helpless, all they could do was watch when a sudden swell of fire whooshed and washed over the other half of the trailer within the matter of a second. “We were, like, ‘Whatta we do? Whatta we do?’” Wade recalls. Today, the Sherrick sons, now working on the family farm, remember not the fear of the fire, but the fear of the dog in their long-ago, hazy memories.

The Welch Volunteer Fire Department showed up at 6:10, twenty minutes after the call to police. The Sherricks knew the firemen as they came one by one, all of them bread-and-buttered on the same ol’ farms. The pair rolled down the windows and shouted to them from the truck. “We told them that all the cars were accounted for,” says Wade. “We knew that much about the Freemans.” The Sherricks stayed for less than an hour, with Kim having to be at work by seven o’clock.

Wade closes our meeting by adding, “It was spooky.”

Firefighters wrestled with the blaze for somewhere between one and three hours until it was extinguished, the trailer collapsing like paper under the pressure of the hoses’ water. Elsewhere, as Welch began to wake at the edge of dawn, bored, fattened housewives coupled themselves to their home police scanners, few surprised, though ever fascinated, to hear about more trouble over at the Freemans’ place.

The CCSO came to the scene soon after the fire department, sunrise trailing not far behind and with Sheriff George Vaughn at the helm. Vaughn’s position as sheriff was an elected one as opposed to one based on academic or vocational merit, though he’d previously served as sheriff of the same county from 1969 to 1973 before being a twenty-one-year state representative (referred to by the Oklahoman in 1988 as one of the worst in the state at that time). He was tall and beer-bellied, and his expression, perhaps involuntarily, was one of sour certainty. Parts of him retained water, fingers like full rubber hoses and feet a little too wide for his shoes. He was fleshy and spoke slowly, albeit scrupulously, as though each slurred word had been carefully selected.

In these Midwestern towns, where sheriffs are elected for four-year terms, it’s common to find that they come with their own posse. “Being a deputy for the sheriff’s office isn’t secure,” one of my CCSO sources tells me. “You can come in with the sheriff and leave with the sheriff once his term ends. A lot of these guys are in and out before going back to the ranches and auto shops.” Alongside Vaughn was a group of men from the CCSO, names synonymous with Vaughn’s term: Undersheriff Mark Hayes, Lieutenant Jim Herman, Investigator Charles Cozart, and Deputy Troy Messick (though despite the titles, one wasn’t afforded more training than another, as the positions were handpicked by Vaughn himself).

At the burning trailer, a volunteer fireman surfaced from the charred remains of the home, removing his helmet and gulping down fresh air. “There are fatalities.” He pointed a thumb behind him as he informed the deputies. “Just the one, from what I see.” Several more firefighters followed him out.

After firefighters discovered the body, CCSO deputies briefly poked their heads in, noting that the body was found near 7:30. At 7:33, the sun showed up to extinguish the stars, and the men returned to the front yard.

“Call Donna,” Vaughn said to the officers beside him as he let his head fall, referring to Medical Examiner Donna Warren. “Then call the OSBI [Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation].”

“The OSBI?” asked Investigator Charlie Cozart.

“That’s what I said; we’re standing down.” The men stopped at their cars. Vaughn crossed his arms and leaned on his heels as he looked back at the smoke. “No one does a thing until OSBI gets here. We got too much bad blood with this family.”

“Our hands are clean, boss.”

Vaughn raised his eyebrows at Cozart. “That so?”

The single body found by the fire volunteers and only briefly observed by deputies was located in one of the bedrooms, lying facedown in the wrong direction on the bed. All trace of breakfast and open air had been tainted with the smell of burned flesh, which was caught in workers’ throats for days to come. You know that smell, they’d say. You know that smell outta nowhere.

The fire had destroyed much of the body. The upper back and buttocks were burned to the muscle, and the feet and lower legs had been burned off. But most telling was the fact that the skull was shattered. Around the body’s unrecognizable head, bricks were scattered about. The fire had caused the ceiling to collapse, and it was soon learned that on the roof were bricks from where Danny had left an unfinished roofing project in warmer months prior. Authorities initially assumed that the bricks, either by raining from above or by malicious strike, were the cause of this person’s death. And so this rumor began to filter from the burned trailer, down to the few Welchans who’d stopped their pickups and tractors at the edge of the property.

That Danny and his dadgum temper, it soon started.

At the end of the driveway, locals began gathering and stepping cautiously along toward the trailer site, peering up the incline to the curls of smoke. Police cordoned off the scene with yellow DO NOT ENTER tape. The rumor mills quickly started to crank, lubricated by chewing tobacco and tractor grease.

Many said they had seen this coming.

The CCSO kept to the front of the house, where three cars were parked; they refused to reenter the home until the OSBI arrived. The first was a white 1990 GMC flatbed truck that belonged to Danny Freeman. Then the silver 1998 Toyota Corolla belonging to Kathy. They were the only cars the Freemans owned.

“I’m guessing this third one belongs to the daughter?” one of the deputies asked.

“Christ almighty,” Sheriff Vaughn sighed, looking across at the blue 1989 Chevrolet Cavalier. On the front, an airbrushed license plate read DRAGON WAGON, with bangles and curios hanging from the rearview mirror to match the Bluejacket school colors of blue and gold, the high school from the next district over. “No, but I think I know whose it is though.” Vaughn shook his head, exhaling slowly as he spoke: “The Bible girl.” He was referring to Lauria Bible, the best friend of Ashley Freeman.

The wood continued to hiss, an angry whisper about the dead. From the ashes there would be answers. From the ashes there would be questions. On this day, a single body was found.

The question was, which one?

6
ONE WOMAN, LORENE BIBLE
Today

I chose to write about the case in late 2015. Living for most of a decade in Ireland (though I was born and raised in New York), I spoke to Lauria Bible’s mother for the first time in early 2016. It was nighttime, and a carnival spun brightly outside my office when I called Lorene, six hours behind me. I was newly wading the waters of nonfiction, a little apprehensive.

“To be honest, I have no idea what the hell I’m doing,” I said to her. After all, I was just a writer with no law enforcement experience (at least not on the right side of the law) or any experience in investigating.

“Neither do I, but I just keep doing it anyway,” she responded.

That single sentence would help me get through it all.

I come to Oklahoma, thinking that it’ll be hard to write about the dead, but it has proven harder to write about the living, about those who’ll have to read themselves through my eyes. This is most true for Lorene Joyce Bible. She is guarded. She holds her head high and listens more than she speaks. She is Lauria Bible’s mother, and she is the only reason this case isn’t forgotten on a shelf somewhere. Her maiden name is Leforce, and it’s always felt apt to me.

I meet Lorene for the first time at the Bible farm, the cattle ranch that runs through her husband’s family as the hay baler runs outside. I’m not the first person to sit face-to-face with her and ask her the tough questions about her daughter’s 1999 disappearance, and I won’t be the last. She sifts through a thousand photos of Lauria, knowing by only the feel of her hand which worn photo is the one she prefers the world to see—it is one of Lauria posing in her cheerleading uniform. It is the same photo that makes up Lorene’s Facebook cover on the “Find Lauria Bible—BBI” page, where I first contacted the Bible family in early 2016. In the photo, Lauria looks like her father, Jay.

“The Bible Bureau of Investigation,” Lorene explains when I ask what BBI stands for, “because we never stop searching.” She comes from a large family, including Lisa Bible-Brodrick, Lauria’s cousin, a woman who was raised like Lauria’s sister, one of Lorene’s own. She is Lorene’s right-hand woman, especially in this new age of technology. This network of Lauria’s relatives and friends comes with children who know their long-lost cousin or aunt only by word of mouth, by the stories and photos of those I interview today. They know her only as well as I do. But the Bibles are a people who have withstood the unbearable, a people who manage to find God’s peace not when the clouds part but in the midst of the storm.

Lorene tells me she named her daughter after Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the children’s Little House on the Prairie series, part of which was based nearby. Having herself seen the tougher side of country living, Lorene holds the children’s stories close to her heart. “It is still best … to make the most of what we have,” Wilder wrote in The Long Winter. “To be happy with simple pleasures; and have courage when things go wrong.” They are the kinds of principles that the Bible family clings to, the simplicity that gives birth to perseverance over the years. Lauria’s mother added the “i” to her daughter’s name to make it more distinctive, Lauria’s own.

Like many witnesses years later, it remained silent.

Lauria is the only daughter of Lorene and Jay Bible and the only sibling of Brad, who is two-and-a-half years older. Her middle name, Jaylene, is a portmanteau of her parents’ names. She came from a family built on Midwestern convention, of Sundays at Grandma Dixie and Grandpa Kenneth’s, sit-down dinners with the family, of faith. Lauria used to babysit for several families in the Bluejacket–Vinita area, toting a large bag filled with coloring books and board games, making her the most beloved babysitter among children to the point that kids used to beg their parents to leave the house so that Lauria could come over.

Lauria materializes for me in Technicolor through those who can’t wait to talk about her. How summer days were spent lighting firecrackers here on the Bible farm, putting them under the feed buckets and sitting on them, accompanied by hysterical laughter, pop and snap, and the smell of gunpowder under the white Oklahoma sun. How Lauria would walk barefoot through the garden rows, milk and black pepper and corn bread in hand as the pecans landed hard on the tarps across the yard (I even hear how she’d skim the cream from the top of Grandma Dixie Bible’s fresh milk and pretend not to know who had done it).

“She certainly wasn’t one to lay around,” says her cousin Lisa.

“Let me tell you about Rambo,” one of Lauria and Ashley’s best friends, Sheena, recollects, laughing with tears in her eyes. She tells me of a time back in kindergarten class in Bluejacket, where most friendships are formed in the first few years of the local students’ lives, and Sheena had just sat in front of Lauria. “You should have seen it. She was wearing a matching yellow windbreaker jacket and pants, a jogging suit. It was ridiculous, but it was fashionable for back then.” She smiles. “She had one of those sweatbands around her head, looking like Rambo. I didn’t know how to take her.” Sheena describes the mischief in Lauria’s eyes when Lauria wrapped her feet around the legs of her desk. With a raised eyebrow, and with Sheena pulling her head back to study the girl, Lauria leaned back and quickly lifted up her windbreaker and shirt, flashing her bare-skinned chest at the stranger for a laugh. “I knew right then, I wanted to know this girl. She was wild.” It was the start of an unbreakable friendship.

The stories that fill Lauria’s short sixteen years are plentiful, as are Lorene’s boxes of her daughter’s report cards and childhood drawings, which she regularly keeps in the trunk of her car when media appearances are steady enough. Despite this, I connect with Lauria best through her school binder, filled with Lauria’s creative writing assignments written months before her disappearance. I carry them with me over time, over visits to Oklahoma, running my fingertips over the long-dried ink as though they’re an epitaph on a gravestone. I hear Lauria better through the voice that continues here on paper than through her grinning in fading photographs.

“You say a bedtime prayer, and in the darkness, it’s so peaceful, and you can rest,” Lauria wrote for her creative writing class only weeks before the fire. On another page, she wrote, “Each locust, steaming madly across the smoke-filled,gray sky. One by one they attack their prey, pounding them helplessly into the ground. Not one locust is slowed down or shot down. And when the helpless prey surrender, they are attacked and captured by the forceful locusts, who torture and kill their prey, sucking their blood until every last drop of blood is drank and the life of their prey is sucked right out of them. Every last breath gasped, a slow and painful death they had.”

Somehow, through her schoolwork, I find myself nostalgic for a childhood that I hardly remember. And I find I’m no longer connecting to Lauria, but I am connecting to her absence. Youth, lost.

Lorene watches me as I look over Lauria’s belongings, stiff and of stoic ilk. Her yeses and nos are drawn out mm-hmms and uh-uhs, notes of observances and approvals with few words. There is a coldness to her, but it comes with understanding. The years against her haven’t been all that kind, and she’s adapted a tolerance to suffering. She talks about local events with her relatives as I sift through Lauria’s things, memories that are not mine.

Glasses of iced tea sweat on the counter; the low sounds of farming equipment rumble outside on this clear summer day. We are far away from the cold, and far away from 1999, but I want Lorene to take me back. She fastens her stare on mine as we sit together in the kitchen. She is dressed in the colors of springtime, but her eyes are hard like times in winter—there seems nothing bereaved about her. I will never see her cry, and she will never get choked up or trip over a word. She has talked about her daughter and told this story a thousand times over, so when I ask about the morning of the fire, she remains still and composed.

“I was already working that morning,” she starts, leading me back to 1999.

7
THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
December 30, 1999
The Morning of the Fire

News was spreading fast around the county, and the townspeople shifted their morning routines and steered toward the farmlands of Welch, where deputies continued to wait for the OSBI to arrive. Since the first few hours of the fire, no efforts had been made to search the trailer or the surrounding property for any person dead or alive, beyond the first, unidentified body in one of the bedrooms.

After the CCSO noted Lauria Bible’s car at the scene, CCSO deputy Troy Messick made the drive from Welch to downtown Vinita, where he knew he’d find Lorene Bible. Messick was young, what Oklahomans call a boy’s boy, and a newlywed. As he made the slow walk from his patrol car into McDonald’s, where Lorene worked, he slowed his breathing.

Lorene had just received a call from her son, Brad. He’d heard from his girlfriend, who lived in Welch at the time, that there was a house fire at the Freemans’. They didn’t know the severity and imagined only a small kitchen fire. Lorene immediately hung up and called the Freemans, but the phone just kept on ringing. A moment later, Deputy Messick walked in.

Messick and Lorene were already acquainted with each other; it was a small town and strangers were rare. “We need to go somewhere and talk,” he said. Lorene remembers that his face was blank. She took him back to her office; she had been promoted to regional manager several years prior, having climbed the ranks since 1987. “Lorene, the whole house is gone. It’s totally gone.”

It would be a life-changing moment for any mother, but Lorene Bible isn’t like most mothers. She is fixed in the Midwestern stoicism that reared generations before mine; in rural America, a save your tears for the pillow culture stands firm in the face of catastrophe. Crying is saved for the poets and the soft. More than once, I’d be embarrassed when getting teary-eyed for the victims in front of her. (One time I excused myself to bawl outside with the farm animals nearby, only to return to the house once I’d gotten it out of my system, for Lorene to watch me and say, “That’s OK. I’ll have my day. When I’m standing over the hole in the ground and looking down at my daughter, that’s my day.”)

Sitting with Lorene for the first time, a foreigner in her world, I feel confused when her reactions confound my expectations, or when her answers echo articles in the newspapers from years before. I struggle to understand what drove Lorene, what got her from one day to the next, how she resisted the draw of booze and hopelessness that has toppled so many parents in similar circumstances. But who am I to judge? If I had to describe Lorene in a single word, it would be “fearless.” And how can she not be? Her worst nightmares have already come true, so what is left for her to fear?

Deputy Troy Messick continued. “They found one body, in the front bedroom.”

Lorene knew that the front bedroom belonged to Kathy and Danny and said this much, assuming that the body must belong to one of them. Deputy Messick got on the radio and relayed to authorities still on the scene that Lorene had confirmed the room in which they found the body was the parents’ bedroom.

“I had to get there” was Lorene’s initial thought. There was no hypothesizing, no time for different scenarios to play out in her mind. “I just had to go and find my daughter.” This single-minded urgency and resolve characterized Lorene’s response to the tragedy in the weeks and years following the fire.

On receiving the news, Lorene called her husband, Jay, over at the auto parts store, just a fifteen-minute drive away. He picked her up in Vinita and, unable to get in touch with Celesta and Bill Chandler, the pair stopped off at the Chandler house and told Celesta that there had been a fire at her daughter’s home. Celesta broke down, screaming and hollering, and refused to leave until Bill returned from a church meeting he was attending that morning at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses. She insisted that they do nothing until her husband got home.

“I’m not waiting for Bill! If you’re coming, then let’s go. If not, we’re heading on without you,” Lorene shouted. And at that, they left—with Celesta in tow.

The three of them arrived in Welch at nine fifteen. Deputies stopped them halfway up the Freemans’ driveway. Jay and Lorene watched the scene unfold the best they could; the blackened remains of the home were still smoldering and townspeople gathered on the road, looking up with curiosity. A number of eyewitnesses confirmed that the deputies of CCSO were “just sitting on their laurels” and watching, along with the citizens, a smoking pit of wood cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. Once the CCSO made the choice to hand the scene over to the OSBI, they put their hands up and surrendered all responsibility.

Unofficial news quickly drip-fed from the home at the top of the hill and down to the citizens of the small town: that the body belonged to a woman. One fire department volunteer would tell me that he specifically remembered the body being facedown on the bed, that when he leaned the body over, he exposed a woman’s naked breast.

But the body was too destroyed to know which female it belonged to: if Kathy, if Ashley, if Lauria, if someone else.

It seemed as though every Welchan gravitated toward West of Welch, with rumors of the fire running through the town like a virus. It was an extended game of telephone, with details shifting and morphing with each retelling. Neighbors and friends began to show up with whatever they had to offer to help. But for Lorene, the only question was what the sheriff’s office was doing to search for the girls. Perhaps they had escaped and were hiding. Perhaps they were hurt and not far from the home … Perhaps it was something worse.

From behind the yellow tape, Welchans stood atop the beds of their pickups and the wheels of their tractors. With a snap of a finger, they could hightail it into gear and swarm the place if commanded to. Some even picnicked at the edge of the property, mouths wet with sweet tea and gossip. In the space of a few short hours, there wouldn’t be a person left in town who hadn’t heard about the fire.

It didn’t take long for people to suspect that Danny had finally gone off the deep end.

At around eleven, there was a tangible shift at the scene when OSBI agent Steve Nutter finally arrived. He was a tall, slightly stocky, owl-eyed man with wavy silver hair, known for sporting a ten-gallon hat and pointed cowboy boots. He came from the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO), the next county over, where he was working on another case. Shortly after his arrival at the Freeman property, the investigation passed from the CCSO into the hands of the OSBI, with the CCSO only assisting from then on out. Nutter cast his eyes over the glowing embers in the front yard, looking back to the Welch Volunteer Fire Department, whose members had stuck around to make sure the fire remained contained.

Agent Nutter found Undersheriff Mark Hayes and CCSO investigator Charlie Cozart standing off to the side, speaking at a whisper. When he approached them, Hayes said, “We have a problem,” and cited the bad blood between the Freemans and the CCSO that had formed in that past year. Mark Hayes was mousy but bright-eyed, as though welcoming anyone who made eye contact, a forty-year-old black-haired man with a thick mustache and round silver-rimmed glasses. To his side was Cozart, a brute of a man with his forearms decorated in tattoos, a wild mane on his face, and a near-finished smoke in his teeth at most any given time. “This has bullshit written all over it,” Charlie observed, his chest inflated with apprehension as he put his cigarette out at the crime scene.

The townspeople’s curiosity was beginning to spill over into impatience and anger, none of them strangers to the friction between family and county that had commenced upon the death of the Freeman son, Shane, earlier that year. They shouted questions from the driveway, demanding answers about who was inside the trailer and whether it was arson or an accident. Sighing, Nutter instructed the deputies to move the perimeter farther back, but that only sparked further irritation from the crowd and soon their voices grew louder, calling for more family and friends to join them, to watch the events unfold at the Freeman farm.

“Where is my child?” Lorene shouted to Nutter.

“Ma’am, you have to let us do our job. We’re the experts,” he answered.

“What about the cars?” the Bibles shouted. “Have any of you thought to look in their cars? What if they’re in the trunks?!”

Nutter met the question with silence, in thought. He blushed and cleared his throat, moving swiftly toward his team; perhaps that was next on his list anyway. Hours after arriving on the scene, the OSBI commanded deputies to inspect the cars. Kathy’s, Danny’s, and Lauria’s were all accounted for, and while nothing was noted in the trunks, Lauria’s car keys were still in the ignition (not a terribly unusual thing for rural Oklahoma).

It wasn’t the only thing overlooked, as Nutter and a couple of others on behalf of the OSBI also didn’t thoroughly search the trailer. Not a piece of furniture was turned over; not a smudge of ash appeared on their clothes.

“The girls could have been hidden under a bed, for all they knew,” Lorene tells me. “They didn’t let any of us near the trailer, but they didn’t do a thing themselves.”

Meanwhile, Assistant District Attorney Clint Ward made a guest appearance at the scene. He was a well-built man with a crew cut and deep-set eyes, overly starched in a suit and tie, a politician down to the bone. He was only days away from leaving his position as the ADA before entering private practice with the new year. According to witnesses, he was seen and heard telling several Welchans, “Danny owed a lot of money in drug debt.” Even before the investigators would wrap up, the notion that the murder and the fire were drug-related arson began to gain traction quickly, and according to several on the scene, it started with Clint Ward.

But when I first spoke to Clint Ward, he stated that he “thought Danny went off the deep end,” admitting that Danny was a “loose cannon” and the “prime suspect.” When asking about the rumors of drugs that would swirl around the case, Clint stated that he “didn’t know Danny was into drugs,” contradicting the accounts of firsthand witnesses I had on record. Clint Ward said that he thought that Danny “burned the place down and had taken the family elsewhere,” when he observed the crime scene that first day.

“There was nothing to suggest that this was related to drugs,” said Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil. “But this was all part of the conspiracy that started to transpire.” And then, that first day at the crime scene, Danny’s words kept replaying. If anything happens to me or my family, anything, look to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.

Arriving late at the scene due to a four-fatality accident that had held her up, Medical Examiner Donna Warren showed up at about three thirty. She disappeared into the debris, where the wall of the master bedroom still stood precariously upright.

The head of the waterbed pressed against the southern wall, with the upper body of the deceased female lying facedown across the bed with her head pointing west and feet pointing east. Her knees were off the bed, slanted, while the remains of her feet were on the floor. The waterbed had exploded and preserved the front of her body so it stayed mostly unburned, but the back side was charred. Her nightgown was also burned away.

The Bibles grew increasingly agitated outside and began to resist staying put with the rest of the onlookers. After a few choice words, the OSBI allowed only Dwayne Vancil and Lauria’s father, Jay Bible, to search down near the crick to see if there was any trace of the girls. Agent Nutter permitted them to do so, provided they kept a certain distance from the crime scene.

At four o’clock, the body was hauled out by deputies and placed in the back of a white hearse that contrasted with the blackened home behind it. At the sight of the body bag, silence fell briefly.

But the silence didn’t last long, and the bystanders began to rev back up in no time. In the crowd, ME Donna Warren sought out Lorene’s face. They’d known each other, as Warren had once been Lorene’s mother’s primary physician, and Lorene waved her over.

“Who is that?” Lorene demanded in reference to the body inside.

Warren swallowed and leaned into Lorene’s ear. “It’s a woman who’s bore children. And there’s a wedding ring on her finger.”

This confirmed for Lorene that the body in the house in fact did belong to Kathy Freeman.

“And you’re sure that there’s no one else in there?” Lorene searched for confirmation.

“That’s what they’re saying.”

It should have offered relief, but it instilled in Lorene only a sense of panic she’d never let show.

Shortly after four o’clock, as dusk began to encroach, the burned body of Kathy Freeman was driven away from the premises and headed west with the sun toward Tulsa. Agent Steve Nutter wrapped up the investigation and called it to an end. He released the scene to Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, and handed him a search warrant for the residence at around five o’clock, signed by Judge H. M. “Bud” Wyatt. The property, described in the search warrant as the “charred remains of a mobile home,” was now out of the hands of the investigating officers and in the hands of the Freemans’ next of kin. The warrant had been signed at 2:06, an hour and a half before the medical examiner even arrived at the crime scene and two hours before Kathy’s body was removed.

“We’re done,” Nutter said to Dwayne as he started to leave.

“What do you mean, you’re done?” Dwayne demanded.

“There’s nothing else that can be done here,” continued Nutter. “Listen, some neighbor reported Danny driving through a gate with the girls in his white pickup truck over where the pond’s at.”

Dwayne was surprised—that was where Danny and he had been raised, but Danny’s vehicle had been accounted for. “Well, then, I’ll go up there and look for him,” Dwayne suggested. “Won’t do him any good if I have authorities with me. I’ll be able to talk to him if he has the girls.”

“No, no, it’s dark,” answered Nutter. “We’re liable to get someone hurt tonight. Why don’t you run up there in the morning and see if he’s there, and then you can call me if he is?” Agent Nutter went on his way.

It was interesting to me that based on what the OSBI knew at the time, they’d be so quick, not just to wrap up the investigation, but to hand it over to someone who could potentially have been a suspect.

Seeing that Nutter was on his way out that night, the Bibles approached him. “What about the girls? Aren’t you going to search for them?”

“If Danny’s got the girls, then it’s just best that we let him cool off,” Nutter told them. “It’s getting late. We’ll look for them tomorrow.”

One of my sources in law enforcement tells me that at the time, he feared Danny was actually hiding out there in the shadows or the trees, watching it all unfold with a high-powered rifle. This transpires as a common thread: a number of police officers believed that Danny was more than capable of an ambush on authorities, and it clearly unnerved them, this image of Danny, bitter in the shadows, white-knuckling a firearm with each one of them in his sights. Even before the events of that night, they all knew he wasn’t a man you wanted to be up against.

Dwayne turned to Sheriff George Vaughn, Undersheriff Mark Hayes, and ADA Clint Ward with tears of indignation in his eyes and said, “If in fact you think that Danny did this and you think he’s up there waiting on you with the girls, holding them captive, you all better get yourselves locked up on the top floor of the courthouse, because as sure as anything, Danny will be coming to kill you. If he did all this, there is no doubt in my mind.” Anger coiled around Dwayne’s sternum. After all, it was no secret that his stepbrother had long taken issue with the authorities and how they’d handled his son’s death and the subsequent investigation that past year.

The officers exhaled and began to recede, and the gold of the sun darkened to its last spit, like a flame cut off from oxygen. Winter squeezed what was left of the day from December 30, and still, no first attempts had been made to find the girls, beyond a brief check of the stream out back by Dwayne and Jay Bible. After the cops disappeared into the night, several men brought their geldings and began to comb the property via horseback. The lone headlights of several four-wheelers swept the dark undulating pastures in the distance, the echoes of men calling for Danny and the girls emanating from the shadows.

Fear could have paralyzed any parent at this point, shrouded by night without an inkling of where to look—the sudden hollowing of a person’s soul brought on by helplessness and shock and grief and fear. But not them. Not the Bibles.

The OSBI made appointments to meet with Lorene and Jay that evening, penciling them in to reconvene at the sheriff’s office in Vinita between six thirty and seven thirty.

But unbeknownst to the Bibles, as they stayed behind and formed their own search with what little light was left, was the tip that had been called in. It was the first viable lead and the only one for authorities to go on. The man who called it in was an acquaintance to most in the area. He called the law and claimed that he had seen Danny Freeman at a gas station, filling up a white Ford pickup with the two girls in the truck. “Danny isn’t going to give the girls back,” the man told dispatchers. “He won’t give them back until you give him the man who killed his son.”

It was the only lead they had—but the OSBI insisted they wait until morning to pursue it.

Darkness fell too fast for the families, leaving the hills of the prairie black and blind. The smell of the smoke chained itself to the night, and nothing much could be done until the first, agonizing break of day. It felt far. So, acting on what he learned from Nutter, Dwayne Vancil went to the old cabin where he and his siblings were raised, hoping to spot Danny, knowing that if anyone could calm him down, it was he. Jay and Lorene went to their scheduled interviews.

The lobby of the sheriff’s office in Vinita was full of people, the smell of fire stuck in their flannel and their eyes open but tired. Authorities split them up into groups before interviewing them individually, questions aimed at Danny’s affairs. Who have you seen come in and out of there? Did you ever witness Danny doing drugs? Did you ever see Mr. Freeman with large amounts of cash on hand?

“Our hands were tied,” Lorene says to me. “They questioned all of us individually. They asked us about Danny’s dealings, what kind of stuff he was into, and that’s it. All we could ask was, ‘What are you doing to find the girls?’ They said they were working on it, that they were making plans to, but they didn’t. Nobody was searching for the girls but my family. The authorities were done with the case.” According to Jay and Lorene Bible, Agent Nutter later informed them that he was in the process of entering the girls’ information into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC).

Years later, Nutter would tell me, “I believe the sheriff’s office put out a missing-persons report immediately.”

It was here that authorities told the Bibles that their prime suspect was Danny Freeman, informing them that it was their belief that Danny kidnapped the girls and was now holding them hostage. Of course, this notion had stirred in all their minds throughout the day.

The night ended with more questions than answers. Imagine the shock for a family without any information. The sickness in their stomachs swirling and sleep an impossibility without knowing what had happened to their daughter and her best friend. Each minute that passed was an unbearable strain, their faces numb with distress. It was a wonder a person could muster the strength to breathe, let alone take over the investigation—but that’s exactly what Lorene Bible was about to do.

8
THE PRIME SUSPECT
December 31, 1999
The Morning After the Fire

It was the last day of the millennium. The pink morning light appeared to create a film upon the cold creek, while roosters perched themselves on the Kansas state line, announcing the new day. But for Lorene and Jay Bible, daybreak came like the pains of childbirth. Their skin still tingled with shock after a night of being relentlessly interrogated by OSBI agents in Vinita and fighting with them to get out there and look for the girls. And now it had been over twenty-four hours since Danny, Ashley, and Lauria had vanished, and still, not a single attempt had been made by authorities to search for them.

The married couple made their way up the driveway toward what little was left of the Freeman home, shaky arm in shaky arm, with sunrise to their right. They were intent on sifting through the earth for their daughter one grain at a time. Sleep was far from them; steadfastness took the wheel. A dutiful wife, a father in mourning, a sporty girl doing her best, and a playful friend who loved life, all gone, with nothing to show for it but a blister in the earth.

Lorene and Jay reached the top of the driveway, where the now open crime scene climbed into view. There wasn’t a marker or a streamer of yellow left behind. “Where the hell is the crime scene tape?” Lorene wondered out loud.

Looking around, Jay answered, astonished, “They left this all wide open.” All remnants of law enforcement had disappeared, a lull in the hottest stage of an investigation. All the while, it was assumed, Danny—a man who’d lost his grip on reality—was out there with Lauria and Ashley, his hostages, bunkered in the wooded area, waiting for the police to hand over the man who’d killed his boy in exchange for the girls. The familiar rafter of turkeys arose, hungry without Danny to feed them.

While Lorene retained her stone composure, Jay handled himself differently. Over the years, he’d bubble over at the seams, eyes spilling every time he talked about his little girl. Where his wife always had her footing and found her place in the investigation, Jay felt at sea from the beginning.

“Come daylight, we’re figuring there’s going to be a SWAT team going up here,” Jay tells me of that second morning. “That we’re going to find out where this cabin is and see whether Danny’s got the girls or not. And that didn’t happen.” Hopes for action were replaced with the singing prairie wind and the smell of fire.

Up the road, Dwayne Vancil had waited all through the night at the cabin where he and Danny were raised. It was being used as a hunting cabin, where a man and his two young sons were up early to hunt deer. To Dwayne’s disappointment, there was no sign of his stepbrother or the girls. Compared with Lorene’s self-control and Jay’s grief, Dwayne expressed his urgency in the form of rage. Getting back in his car to meet the sunrise at Welch, he huffed hard from his nostrils. “Where the hell are you, Danny?”

Back at the scene, Jay walked carefully around the yard, where the barn cats played with a part of an unrecognizable something. The feral mixed breeds added a little life to the property, which was otherwise still in the frostbite of morning, hungover from the events of the day before. When he heard Ashley’s Rottweiler, Sissy, whimper from where the house once stood, Jay turned to her. “I know, girl. I know.” Upon inspection, there was a large, fresh knot above Sissy’s brow, stained with dried blood. Jay wished then that Sissy could talk, could point them in the right direction. The dog let out a low cry, standing now in the same spot where the master bedroom had stood, where the body of Kathy Freeman had been removed in a black plastic body bag less than a day before. (Eventually, Sissy would be adopted by distant friends, only to be put down after attacking and killing their chickens.)

The Freeman trailer stood on axles and wheels, and most of the flooring had fallen through to the ground, except for the master bedroom. There, the flooring was mostly intact. “That waterbed had burst and soaked all the carpet and stuff there,” explains Jay. As a result, the master bedroom was more preserved than the other rooms, and Jay tiptoed around the debris, “looking for any pile of ashes big enough to be a human body folded up in a fetal position.” A brown rug lay in tatters in the corner, and the air was cold and damp.

Lorene squatted down at a separate part of the trailer, overturning pieces of wood and other debris. The smell of death still lingered, and the cold found its way to the roots of her hair. Into Lorene’s ears, the gentle sound of the creek water ran slow, unsuitably calming. In the ashes, a framed wedding photo of Danny and Kathy.

With Sissy at his leg, Jay surveyed the unburned floor of the master bedroom. He found what he described as something that looked like a bowl of hamburger meat. “I thought, Wait a minute.” He hesitated, squinting down at it. “Lorene?” he called out.

Lorene rose from the broken glass and soot, ashes wet from the fire hoses. She commanded her knees not to buckle as she reached her husband. Following his gaze, her whole body braced for impact as her eyes alighted on a second body. The sight took their breath away.

At about this time, the sun made its first appearance, still cold on their faces as they peered down. They then stared at each other, dumbstruck. “How the hell did the police miss this?” Lorene breathed. It had taken them less than a minute to stumble across a second body. Every theory about how Kathy had died, and every theory about why Danny took the girls, faded for a moment. Shocked by the sight of the burned body, Jay turned away and stared into the rising sun. “We have to call the sheriff’s office,” he said, unaware that he was crying until his words hit the air. By his feet, the barnyard cats continued to play with what he saw, bringing his gaze back to the ground, was in fact a human nasal bone.

The feet of the second corpse were almost under the corner of the waterbed, partly concealed by the deflated mattress, and the upper body was partially covered by a carpet. While the cause of Kathy’s death remained unknown, and was still generally thought to have been a brick or bricks, the cause of this person’s death was evident to Jay and Lorene. “We knew right away that they were shot in the head, so we figured Kathy must have died this way too.” Years later, Lorene says to me, “Nothing from the jaw up. It was all gone.” What was left of the head was in the doorway, faceup, an arm propped up in the doorframe, and cowboy boot prints largely believed by both the Bible and Freeman families to be those of OSBI agent Steve Nutter were clear on the torso (the families assert that Nutter was the only person on the scene wearing cowboy boots). The fire had burned much of the charred body’s clothes right off to expose the genitalia, so they were immediately able to tell it was the body of a man. On top of that, the metal wiring used to reconstruct the sinus cavities sprouted from what remained of the face and skull.

Within moments of arriving on the scene, Lorene and Jay Bible discovered what authorities had managed to miss the day before: the body of their prime suspect, Danny Freeman.

9
DAY TWO AND THE BBI
December 31, 1999
The Morning After the Fire

I have hung the autopsy reports of Danny and Kathy on a nerve in my brain that acts as a clothesline; I can mentally see the outlines of the ME’s body diagrams like paper dolls. The diagrams are scribbled on with the examiner’s pen, representative of where charring was present all over the bodies, tighter ink lines at the heads, where the skulls were destroyed and mostly gone. Because she died in 2004 of cancer, I would be unable to interview Medical Examiner Donna Warren about her examination and findings. But I sleep through mornings and spend rainy afternoons reading over the external examination of Danny Freeman, which would be written days after the fire. Based on the ME’s evidence, it was deemed that just prior to his death, Danny’s right collarbone was broken, and the shotgun blast entered under the left side of his jaw by the third molar.

Also telling was evidence brought in with Danny on a separate cart that included pieces of men’s brief underpants, portions of the waistband of sweatpants, a shirt, some remnants of sneakers, and part of his upper jaw.

It was soon learned that Kathy had been shot in the head from behind, while Danny was believed to have been shot while facing his killer. Both were dead before the fire started. This is precisely what Jay and Lorene Bible came across when showing up at the Freemans’ burned trailer to look for clues about their daughter’s whereabouts.

Lorene and Jay raced up the road, incapable of finding a signal on their cell phone near the trailer (few in 1999 even had cell phones, though Lorene had bought one the evening before in light of the events, a phone whose number hasn’t changed in twenty years). After driving one mile south, they made it through to 911. From there, they waited for the CCSO to arrive, and this time, the Bibles decided they were taking control. No more waiting for authorities to search for the girls. No more standing back behind the yellow tape while deputies sat there and watched the home cool off. No more trust.

“There’s a body here,” Lorene said to dispatchers.

“How do you know that?”

“Well, there’s a body.”

“You’re at the Freemans’?”

“Yes. We’re at the Freemans’.”

This is the part where I can safely say that the shit hit the fan.

Deputy Troy Messick, who’d delivered the news of the fire to Lorene the day before, was already at the office in Vinita, and he’d be the first to arrive back at the crime scene. He left his coffee and sped over to the Freemans’. Once there, in reference to the OSBI, he commented the same thing to Lorene and Jay that was already on their mind. “How the hell did they miss this? I thought they were supposed to be the experts.”

Wary of locals listening over their police scanners, and they surely did, Messick spoke carefully into his radio when he called in to confirm the body, nearly dumbstruck with disbelief. “What I was sent out to do is confirmed.”

“Can you repeat that?”

“What I was sent out here to do is confirmed.”

Back at the property, as Deputy Messick called in for backup, Jay found Danny’s two front teeth still attached to the gum but detached from the jaw in the grass of the front yard, where the outdoor cats continued to chew at his bones. “Animals had been eating on his body. That’s how gruesome it was, you know,” says Jay. “But that started day two for us.”

At around this time, Dwayne Vancil, who had failed to glean any clues as to Danny’s whereabouts from the hunting family up at the cabin, returned to the property. He was waved over by the Bibles and found himself looking down at his stepbrother’s body in the wreckage. “I felt like I knew right away what’d happened here,” said Dwayne. “Danny told me where to look if something happened to him. Well, it did, didn’t it?”

The CCSO returned between seven and seven thirty a.m.—I imagine a little red-faced—and began to cordon off the area once again with crime scene tape. From there, they called the OSBI back and waited. Aware of the scrutiny this monumental oversight would undoubtedly bring to the bureau, OSBI agent Steve Nutter returned with ten to twelve more agents in tow to oversee the rest of the investigation.

Deputies asserted that what they were doing was going to be a repeat of the day before.

“Oh, no, it won’t be!” Lorene exclaimed. Despite several attempts to clear the Bibles from the scene, Lorene was having none of it. “I ain’t leaving here today, boys. You can tie your tape to the mirror of my vehicle, but we’re not moving. I’m not going to be in your back pocket today. I’m going to be in your front pocket. We’re not leaving here until we know that this place has been searched thoroughly this time.”

The OSBI objected, trying to explain to her that she needed to let them do their job.

If maybe for the first time, Lorene raised her voice. “I stood down that road yesterday and let you do your job. There were nine of you who told me that y’all were one hundred percent sure that there wasn’t another body in here. So we’re not leaving till we take this sucker to the ground.”

When the OSBI continued to try to affirm their authority, she stubbornly reminded them that they’d already released the crime scene over to Dwayne the evening before. “You had your day. Now it’s mine.”

From here, it seemed that every man, woman, and child in town came to aid the Bibles in their crusade to find the girls. By nine o’clock, they were already lining the driveway leading up to the trailer, waiting on the Bibles’ command to storm the trailer, like lightning waits for God’s permission to strike.

Medical Examiner Donna Warren arrived late, having been held up at yet another fatal car accident. Wide-eyed, she came onto the Freeman property for the second time in twenty-four hours. “What the hell happened here?” she asked one of the deputies. “Who found the body?”

The deputy hung his head and pointed at Lorene, who only stared back at Warren in the fixed-gaze demeanor that makes Lorene the imposing figure that she is.

“This is bad,” said Warren. “This is real bad.”

No gun was found within reaching distance of Danny, ruling out any suspicion of a murder-suicide. Soon after, his body was removed. At this, the Bibles sprang into action.

God Himself couldn’t have stopped Lorene from going into the crime scene. She figured that any evidence left behind would have surely been destroyed by the fire. And since authorities failed to find an entire body in the small trailer, she couldn’t trust them to find anything relevant, anything that might point them in the direction of the girls. It was now up to the families. Agents from the OSBI and deputies of the CCSO, about twenty-five in total, stood back as Lorene took over the crime scene, along with approximately a hundred fifty volunteers under her command storming the trailer: distant relatives and high school friends of the girls, neighbors and strangers alike. Even staff from the local funeral parlor came, erecting a canopy tent about fifty feet from the trailer to hand out sandwiches and drinks.

“It was a sideshow,” Lauria’s cousin Lisa admits. “There were so many people there who helped us, but not everyone. Some were just nosy, even letting their kids run around. I even remember people calling out mothers not to let their three- or four-year-old kids let loose to find another body, God forbid.” Some even came and parked on the property just to watch it all unfold, refusing to help at all.

For the first time in recent memory, Welch came to life. The resistance to authority brought on by Lorene, Jay, and Dwayne spread through the residents like a fever. They came by horseback and tractor, insulated in their flannels and with cups of breakfast blend to pepper the dirty blond prairie. Locals withstood the cold and the chaos, restless in spirit and in mind. They came with thermoses of coffee to keep alert those who’d stayed long, and others came with bottles of water to wash the taste of char from their mouths.

The many agents of the OSBI watched, contained, like boys kicked out of their classrooms, their buttonlike eyes lined at the sidelines of the crime scene. The family directed neighbors to rip out the floorboards until hitting the air between the trailer and the ground. A line of nearly one hundred people formed down the long driveway, equipped with makeshift sieves, an assembly line to receive handfuls of clumpy ash, sifting for something, anything, that could be a clue. Many bones from the animals whose heads were mounted on the Freemans’ walls were found in the debris. They didn’t know exactly what they were looking for; they were hoping only to recognize it when they found something.

With her face blackened by wet ash like war paint, Lorene overheard one of the agents say that she was letting everyone destroy the crime scene.

“It can’t be messed up any worse than you did yesterday,” she called over her shoulder. “So if you’re going to be a part of this, you’re just going to have to do it our way.” Lorene went through the larger pieces of rubble first: what remained of the couch, the chairs, the icebox. If the girls had been lost in the fire, they were going to find them, come hell or high water. While Lorene stood as the head of the crime scene, Jay and Dwayne were a two-man command center working from the Freemans’ yard, where they organized a grid search on the forty-acre property, including volunteers who came via horseback, some even taking their canoes to the creek in the back. It took all that they had not to rip off their own skin out of sheer determination, urgency, and frustration.

“Look no further than right there,” said Kathy’s mother and stepfather, who’d sat in their parked Astro van at the end of the driveway, looking up at the action. They locked their eyes on the men in uniform, and burst out in abrupt accusation. “They’re the ones who did this, and they’re all going to burn in hell for it too.” But few seemed to mind the couple, who’d always been known for barking like crows, made of wild tales and batty superstitions.

Dwayne kept an eye on Sissy the Rottweiler, who went to the end of the driveway several times and howled in only one direction, where the road met the driveway to create a T intersection. It was assumed, and accepted today, that the lump with the dried blood on top of Sissy’s head was the result of the butt of a shotgun. Even as he organized the searches, Dwayne became convinced that the girls must have traveled in the direction of Sissy’s whimpers. As a regular visitor to the Freeman home, he also recognized that something was missing from the house—the hundreds of arrowheads and their cases, absent from the walls, along with several buckets full of other arrowheads and tomahawks.

I ask Dwayne if he thinks the arrowheads could have been the motive. “I think they were more of a trophy,” he answers.

Lorene and her volunteers cut the axles on the trailer, and together, they pulled the entire home apart. It would take several more days, but there wasn’t a piece of ash any bigger than a small stone that went unturned. Later in the afternoon of that second day, Lorene found her daughter’s purse at the north wall, where Ashley’s bedroom (formerly Shane’s) used to stand. Inside the purse, Lauria’s ID and Christmas cash, totaling about two hundred dollars. She also found Lauria’s partly burned pajama top in the remnants of Ashley’s bedroom, which suggested to her that the fire had started prior to Lauria and Ashley’s getting ready for bed, or that someone made them change out of their pj’s into something else.

Family and volunteers also found thirteen guns belonging to the Freemans, placing them out in the front yard, one by one. It occurred to everyone that any one of the guns could have been the murder weapon, but on the front lawn they’d stay for at least a week, none of them collected as evidence by the agents or officers nearby.

The possibility of one of the guns being the one used to kill Kathy and Danny remains unexamined today.

Evening was closing in; damned be the short nights of winter. But the Bibles refused to let darkness threaten their efforts to find the girls. Thanks to the Rural Electric Cooperative, a nonprofit electricity producer owned and operated by the people of northeastern Oklahoma, lights were hung around the property to make this little corner of the pitch-black countryside sparkle and glow through the night next to the veils of the plains. Another local brought light plants, illuminating the property like the football fields of local Friday night lights.

Once again, at the close of day, the authorities left.

While the world celebrated the new millennium, and Y2K turned out to be a lemon, the search for the girls at the Freeman property continued into the third day, and into the year 2000. Far from the confetti and noisemakers and hangovers, Welch became a well-oiled machine, functioning without sleep, too distracted to acknowledge the world’s ringing in of New Year’s Day.

Jay Bible said the good Lord put it in his heart to call the radio station and appeal for help, and because of it, there were nearly five hundred volunteers on the scene that third morning. This time, the grid search expanded to a five-mile radius, with Jay and Dwayne delegating small groups to different sections of the property. Each small thing they stumbled on was marked by volunteers, who’d shout out for word to get back to Jay and Dwayne so that they could collect the evidence themselves. It was the family, and not law enforcement, who laid down the evidence markers.

That morning, there was no sign of law enforcement returning at all.

In the afternoon, Lorene enlisted the help of a family friend to make missing-persons posters for both Lauria and Ashley at their office supply house. After picking the flyers up, Lorene drove to an acquaintance down at the Vinita Police Department to confirm that the girls had been properly entered into the databases of the NCIC, as OSBI agent Nutter said he would on the evening of December 30.

“The girls aren’t in here,” the acquaintance replied after pulling up the database on her computer.

“That’s impossible,” answered Lorene. “Steve Nutter said that he was submitting all the info. You mean to tell me there’s no alert out there for them? No one is out there looking for the girls?” For Lorene, it was another dispiriting sign that she was on her own, that law enforcement was not acting in the best interests of her missing daughter. “Well, what the hell do I have to do to get the girls in there and their faces out there?”

The acquaintance advised Lorene that she had to go to the sheriff’s office herself, that she’d have to sign for Lauria, and that there would have to be a next of kin there to sign for Ashley. At that, Lorene stepped outside the station and called Celesta, pleading with Kathy’s mother to go to the sheriff’s office and sign for her granddaughter.

Kathy’s mother, Celesta, and stepfather, Bill Chandler, were an unusual couple. They kept to themselves, isolated in the nameless outskirts of Vinita with dozens of cats and dogs in a small trailer, which you could smell from the road. The couple was paranoid, perhaps rightfully so, given their family’s history, but it went further than that. Years later, they tell me about the helicopters that nearly crash into their house each week and the devices in their walls. They would stay half-dressed throughout the day and scan the skies for spying planes. When I sat outside with them for several hours one particularly hot afternoon, Bill spent the entire interview spraying hundreds of flies with some household chemical spray. It was because of this paranoia that Celesta initially refused to cooperate with Lorene and sign for Ashley to be entered into the NCIC database. “She was screaming and hollering, like she always does,” said Lorene. “But I told her I didn’t care what she thought, that she just needed to get here.” With Lorene not taking no for an answer, Celesta submitted, meeting Lauria’s mother at the sheriff’s office to sign for Ashley. The girls then were officially entered into the database and listed as missing.

Lorene raced back to the Freemans’, and handed out the flyers to various individuals and groups who ventured on out of Welch to circulate the girls’ faces as far and wide as they could. At this point, local media started gathering. The girls’ school photos started to adorn telephone poles and storefront windows. Large magnets with their faces were affixed to the sides of interstate trucks. Phone booths displayed the flyers.

A couple unaffiliated with the police came with a pair of scent dogs and offered to help. Led by their owners, the dogs started at Lauria’s pajama top and Ashley’s pillow up by the trailer and hightailed it down the driveway. Everyone on the scene stopped what they were doing for that heart-stopping moment, spinal fluid like ice water at the sight of the bloodhounds chasing the smell of the girls. The hounds went fast, skimming their snouts across the cold ground and past hundreds of volunteers. At the end of the driveway, they turned in one direction and sped along the edge of the property. It was the same direction in which the Rottweiler Sissy had howled. At a ford in the stream, floodwater from the creek forced the dogs to stop. At the water’s edge, the dogs continued to look on, barking and howling, noses pointed in one direction.

On that third day, at about four p.m., Agent Steve Nutter arrived on the scene to check in. He was described as strutting from his car with his white ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots, looking more like an oil tycoon than an agent for the OSBI, and he asked Lorene, “So, what’d you all get done today?”

She didn’t take to his smugness. “We’ve done a grid search five to ten miles out. We’ve got people driving out there and getting the word out. Now we’re getting their faces out there with these flyers. And they’re on the NCIC.”

“That’s because I put them in there.”

“No, you didn’t!”

“How do you know?”

“Because I went to town, and I had them look for me. And guess who wasn’t in the system. I had to force Celesta Chandler down there to the sheriff’s office and sign for Ashley while I signed for Lauria. That’s how the girls got there.”

Nutter’s blood pooled in his face. “Well, no. I was about to,” he stuttered.

Lorene gestured to one of the young cameramen to film Nutter as she began to give him a tongue-lashing. “This guy’s getting you on tape. You did nothing, nothing, to find my child. Another day … they could be in Canada, in Mexico. Hell, they could be overseas at this point! You said you were going to enter the girls into the NCIC, but guess who did. I did.”

Years later, I’d get one of my law enforcement sources to pull up the missing girls on the NCIC databases, which aren’t open to the public. The date of submission supported Lorene’s timeline; they were entered into the system on January 1, 2000, three days after the fire. It did not align with Nutter’s belief that the girls were entered into the system the night Kathy’s body was found.

Among the hundreds of volunteers who came to aid in the search were two private investigators, named Tom Pryor and Joe Dugan, who’d heard of the murders on a local news program. Abandoning his trust in law enforcement, Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne, hired them on the spot, paying them one dollar to take on the case. The private investigators accepted.

Tom Pryor had been an investigator in law enforcement for twenty-eight years before running his own private company for fourteen, while his partner, Joe Dugan, was a bounty hunter and a friend of Pryor’s for thirty years. They referred to themselves as a dynamic duo, also sporting ten-gallon hats. As soon as they went on the clock, they joined the search party and began combing the property. At the end of the driveway, about fifty feet from the road, Tom Pryor came across a car-insurance-verification card, one belonging to a woman who sounded familiar to no one. Studying the card, Pryor glanced around him; it didn’t seem to have come from the ashes, and it was far enough from the trailer that it struck him as peculiar. PI Pryor had been at this game a long time, and the insurance card of an unknown female this close to a rural road might be nothing—or it might be something.

Pryor walked back up the incline of the driveway, past the dogwoods and bois d’arcs where Ashley and Lauria had collected food for the goats only days before, and asked around for who was in charge, at least on an official level. After a moment, he found Agent Steve Nutter. Introducing himself, Pryor held out the card. “This might be of some interest to you. Might be nothing, but every little thing counts in these things, don’t they?”

Nutter looked down at Pryor, curling his lip. “Why don’t you leave this investigation to the big boys, eh?”

“Well, I just thought—”

“We don’t need any PIs coming around here, screwing things up for us. Keep it up, and I’ll have your license revoked so fast, you won’t even know what hit you.”

At a loss, Pryor pulled out his wallet as Nutter turned and walked away.

His partner, Joe Dugan, moved over toward him. “Whatcha got there?”

“I don’t know,” answered Pryor. “But I think we’ll find out.”

The days went on without any answers, and those days became weeks, became years, became decades. Today, there is no doubt in Jay’s, Lorene’s, or Dwayne’s minds that Lauria and Ashley did not die in the fire.

Welch defrosted into springtime, there to distract its residents with its warmth and the seasonal obligations of its farmers. Life simply went on for everyone. Still, light didn’t dim for the families who bound themselves to the pasturage of Welch. Their eyes stayed wide and their focus was kept narrow but far-reaching.

Almost two decades later, that’s never changed, nor has the sealed-lipped land that offers no closure. But time continues on against their will. Time is something that people don’t feel until it turns against them. Where it’s thought to heal all, for the parents of any missing child it only tears the cut wider; sands of time become grains of salt to an open, bleeding wound.

I wonder after all this time, sixteen years later, if there is even anything that can be found.

SECTION 2

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