Hell in the Heartland

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.