“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.