Tommy Ward said she received multiple knife wounds while lying in the back of Odell's pickup during the gang rape. She died there, and they flung her body into a ditch near a concrete bunker. Fontenot didn't recall it that way. In his version, they took her into an abandoned house where Odell Titsworth stabbed her, stuffed her beneath the floor, then poured gasoline over her and burned down the house.
But the two were in almost complete agreement on Odell Titsworth. He had been the organizer, the mastermind who rounded up Ward and Fontenot to go riding in his pickup, to drink some beer, smoke some pot, and at some point rob McAnally's. Once the gang had decided on which store to rob, Odell went in and stole the money, grabbed the girl, and told his buddies they would have to kill her so she couldn't identify them. He drove out to the power plant. He directed the gang rape, going first himself. He produced the weapon, a six-inch lock-blade knife. He stabbed her, killed her, and either he burned her or he did not.
Though they admitted their involvement, the real blame rested on Odell Titsworth, or Titsdale, or whatever his name was.
Late in the afternoon of Friday, October 19, the police arrested Titsworth and questioned him. He was a four-time convicted felon with a lousy attitude toward cops and far greater experience with their interrogation tactics. He didn't budge an inch. He knew nothing about the Har-away case, didn't give a damn what Ward and Fontenot said, on tape or off. He had never met either of the gentlemen.
No video was made of his interrogation. Titsworth was thrown in jail, where he soon recalled that on April 26 he had broken his arm in a fight with the police. Two days later, when Denice disappeared, he had been at his girlfriend's house, wearing a heavy cast and in great pain.
In both confessions, he had been described as wearing a T-shirt, with tattoos covering his arms. In truth, his left arm had been covered with a cast and he'd been nowhere near McAnally's. When Dennis Smith investigated this, he found hospital and police records that clearly verified Odell's story. Smith spoke with the treating physician, who described the break as a spiral fracture between the elbow and shoulder and very painful. It would have been impossible for Titsworth to carry a body or commit a violent attack only two days after the fracture. His arm was in a cast, and the cast was in a sling. Impossible.
The confessions continued to unravel. As the police sifted through the rubble of the burned house, its owner appeared and asked what they were doing. When he was told that they were looking for the remains of the Haraway girl, and that one of the suspects had confessed to burning her with the house, the owner said that was not possible. He'd burned the old house himself in June 1983, ten months before she disappeared.
The state medical examiner completed an analysis of the jawbone and concluded that it came from a possum. This was given to the press.
However, the press was not told of the burned house or Odell Titsworth's broken arm, nor of the fact that Ward and Fontenot had immediately repudiated their confessions. In jail, Ward and Fontenot were adamant about their innocence and told anyone who would listen that the confessions were extracted by threats and promises. The Ward family scraped together enough money to hire a good lawyer, and Tommy described to him in great detail the tricks used by Smith and Rogers during the interrogation. It was just a dream, he said a thousand times.
There was no family for Karl Fontenot.
The search for the remains of Denice Haraway continued in earnest. The obvious question asked by many was, "If those two confessed, then why don't the police know where the body is buried? "
The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects against self-incrimination, and since the easiest way to solve a crime is to get a confession, there is a thick and rich body of law that governs police conduct during interrogations. Much of this law was well established before 1984.
A hundred years earlier, in Hopt v. Utah, the Supreme Court ruled that a confession is not admissible if it is obtained by operating on the hopes or fears of the accused, and in doing so deprives him of the freedom of will or self-control necessary to make a voluntary statement.
In 1897, the Court, in Bram v. United States, said that a statement must be free and voluntary, not extracted by any sorts of threats or violence or promises, however slight. A confession obtained from an accused who has been threatened cannot be admissible. In 1960, in Blackburn v. Alabama, the Court said, "Coercion can be mental as well as physical." In reviewing whether a confession was psychologically coerced by the police, the following factors are crucial: (1) the length of the interrogation, (2) whether it was prolonged in nature, (3) when it took place, day or night, with a strong suspicion around nighttime confessions, and (4) the psychological makeup-intelligence, sophistication, education, and so on-of the suspect.
And in Miranda v. Arizona, the most famous of all self-incrimination cases, the Supreme Court imposed procedural safeguards to protect the rights of the accused. A suspect has a constitutional right not to be compelled to talk, and any statement made during an interrogation cannot be used in court unless the police and the prosecutor can prove that the suspect clearly understood that (1) he had the right to remain silent, (2) anything said could be used against him in court, and (3) he had a right to an attorney, whether or not he could afford one. If, during an interrogation, the accused requests an attorney, then the questioning stops immediately.
Miranda was decided in 1966 and became instantly famous. Many police departments ignored it, at least until guilty criminals were set free because they had not been properly advised of their rights. It was harshly criticized by law-and-order types who accused the Court of coddling the bad guys. It worked its way into our culture, with every cop on TV spitting out the words "You have the right to remain silent" as he made his arrest. Rogers, Smith, and Featherstone knew its importance because they made sure Tommy's Miranda procedure was properly recorded. What was not seen on the video was the five and a half hours of nonstop threats and verbal abuse.
The confessions of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were constitutional disasters, but at the time, in October 1984, the cops still believed they would find the body, and thus some credible evidence. Any trial was months away. They still had plenty of time to build a solid case against Ward and Fontenot, or so they thought.
But Denice was not found. Tommy and Karl had no idea where she was, and they repeatedly told this to the police. Months dragged on with no evidence, not a shred of it. The confessions became more and more important; indeed, they were to become the only evidence the state had at trial.
Chapter 6
Ron Williamson was well aware of the Haraway case. He had the best seat in the house-a bed in the Pontotoc County jail. After serving ten months of his three-year sentence, he was paroled back to Ada and placed under house arrest, a rather loose arrangement that severely restricted his movements. Not surprisingly, it didn't work. Ron was unmedicated and unable to keep track of time and dates or anything else.
In November, while living at home, he was charged with "willfully and wrongfully, having been sentenced to confinement with the Department of Corrections for the crime of Uttering a Forged Instrument, and while on house arrest status did escape from such status and confinement by leaving his house during a time not consented to by the D.O.C."
Ron's version was that he walked down the street to buy a pack of cigarettes and returned home thirty minutes later than expected. He was arrested, jailed, and four days later charged with the felony of escape from a penal institution. He made a pauper's oath and requested court-appointed counsel.