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.