“Well, somebody’s beatin’ on the door,” Wade says about the morning of the fire. “I could sleep through a bomb, but Kim wakes up and goes to the door. I stumble out and see it’s that Bell.”
Back in 1999, the blue heelers stood by their masters, keeping quiet when the door opened to Jack Bell and the moonlit ranch behind him, one of Charolais and Angus breeds of beef cattle.
“Hey, I’m on my way to work,” Jack calmly started. “But the Freemans’ house is on fire up the road there.”
Kim Sherrick called 911 at 5:50. At this time, Jack and Diane Bell continued to drive to their place of work.
They’d not speak of the incident publicly again.
Wade and Kim went to their children’s bedrooms. They wrapped their six- and four-year-olds in the covers they still slept in, the parents slipping on their boots quietly in the dark by the front door with their sons’ heads in the crooks of their necks. “It’s five something in the morning. We get the kids up and throw ’em into the truck and get up there.” The family of four squeezed into the cab of the family truck, summoned by the tiny light at the top of the road that shone red like the sun. The sleepy boys rubbed their eyes to inspect the sight ahead. When they reached the home, only half of the trailer was on fire (Kim remembers the east side while Wade remembers the west side). But the Sherricks couldn’t leave their truck on account of the Freeman family dog, Sissy, a brute of a Rottweiler, jumping on the car doors and barking her jowls off. Helpless, all they could do was watch when a sudden swell of fire whooshed and washed over the other half of the trailer within the matter of a second. “We were, like, ‘Whatta we do? Whatta we do?’” Wade recalls. Today, the Sherrick sons, now working on the family farm, remember not the fear of the fire, but the fear of the dog in their long-ago, hazy memories.
The Welch Volunteer Fire Department showed up at 6:10, twenty minutes after the call to police. The Sherricks knew the firemen as they came one by one, all of them bread-and-buttered on the same ol’ farms. The pair rolled down the windows and shouted to them from the truck. “We told them that all the cars were accounted for,” says Wade. “We knew that much about the Freemans.” The Sherricks stayed for less than an hour, with Kim having to be at work by seven o’clock.
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.