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.