It didn’t take long for people to suspect that Danny had finally gone off the deep end.
At around eleven, there was a tangible shift at the scene when OSBI agent Steve Nutter finally arrived. He was a tall, slightly stocky, owl-eyed man with wavy silver hair, known for sporting a ten-gallon hat and pointed cowboy boots. He came from the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Office (OCSO), the next county over, where he was working on another case. Shortly after his arrival at the Freeman property, the investigation passed from the CCSO into the hands of the OSBI, with the CCSO only assisting from then on out. Nutter cast his eyes over the glowing embers in the front yard, looking back to the Welch Volunteer Fire Department, whose members had stuck around to make sure the fire remained contained.
Agent Nutter found Undersheriff Mark Hayes and CCSO investigator Charlie Cozart standing off to the side, speaking at a whisper. When he approached them, Hayes said, “We have a problem,” and cited the bad blood between the Freemans and the CCSO that had formed in that past year. Mark Hayes was mousy but bright-eyed, as though welcoming anyone who made eye contact, a forty-year-old black-haired man with a thick mustache and round silver-rimmed glasses. To his side was Cozart, a brute of a man with his forearms decorated in tattoos, a wild mane on his face, and a near-finished smoke in his teeth at most any given time. “This has bullshit written all over it,” Charlie observed, his chest inflated with apprehension as he put his cigarette out at the crime scene.
The townspeople’s curiosity was beginning to spill over into impatience and anger, none of them strangers to the friction between family and county that had commenced upon the death of the Freeman son, Shane, earlier that year. They shouted questions from the driveway, demanding answers about who was inside the trailer and whether it was arson or an accident. Sighing, Nutter instructed the deputies to move the perimeter farther back, but that only sparked further irritation from the crowd and soon their voices grew louder, calling for more family and friends to join them, to watch the events unfold at the Freeman farm.
“Where is my child?” Lorene shouted to Nutter.
“Ma’am, you have to let us do our job. We’re the experts,” he answered.
“What about the cars?” the Bibles shouted. “Have any of you thought to look in their cars? What if they’re in the trunks?!”
Nutter met the question with silence, in thought. He blushed and cleared his throat, moving swiftly toward his team; perhaps that was next on his list anyway. Hours after arriving on the scene, the OSBI commanded deputies to inspect the cars. Kathy’s, Danny’s, and Lauria’s were all accounted for, and while nothing was noted in the trunks, Lauria’s car keys were still in the ignition (not a terribly unusual thing for rural Oklahoma).
It wasn’t the only thing overlooked, as Nutter and a couple of others on behalf of the OSBI also didn’t thoroughly search the trailer. Not a piece of furniture was turned over; not a smudge of ash appeared on their clothes.
“The girls could have been hidden under a bed, for all they knew,” Lorene tells me. “They didn’t let any of us near the trailer, but they didn’t do a thing themselves.”
Meanwhile, Assistant District Attorney Clint Ward made a guest appearance at the scene. He was a well-built man with a crew cut and deep-set eyes, overly starched in a suit and tie, a politician down to the bone. He was only days away from leaving his position as the ADA before entering private practice with the new year. According to witnesses, he was seen and heard telling several Welchans, “Danny owed a lot of money in drug debt.” Even before the investigators would wrap up, the notion that the murder and the fire were drug-related arson began to gain traction quickly, and according to several on the scene, it started with Clint Ward.
But when I first spoke to Clint Ward, he stated that he “thought Danny went off the deep end,” admitting that Danny was a “loose cannon” and the “prime suspect.” When asking about the rumors of drugs that would swirl around the case, Clint stated that he “didn’t know Danny was into drugs,” contradicting the accounts of firsthand witnesses I had on record. Clint Ward said that he thought that Danny “burned the place down and had taken the family elsewhere,” when he observed the crime scene that first day.
“There was nothing to suggest that this was related to drugs,” said Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil. “But this was all part of the conspiracy that started to transpire.” And then, that first day at the crime scene, Danny’s words kept replaying. If anything happens to me or my family, anything, look to the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.
Arriving late at the scene due to a four-fatality accident that had held her up, Medical Examiner Donna Warren showed up at about three thirty. She disappeared into the debris, where the wall of the master bedroom still stood precariously upright.
The head of the waterbed pressed against the southern wall, with the upper body of the deceased female lying facedown across the bed with her head pointing west and feet pointing east. Her knees were off the bed, slanted, while the remains of her feet were on the floor. The waterbed had exploded and preserved the front of her body so it stayed mostly unburned, but the back side was charred. Her nightgown was also burned away.
The Bibles grew increasingly agitated outside and began to resist staying put with the rest of the onlookers. After a few choice words, the OSBI allowed only Dwayne Vancil and Lauria’s father, Jay Bible, to search down near the crick to see if there was any trace of the girls. Agent Nutter permitted them to do so, provided they kept a certain distance from the crime scene.
At four o’clock, the body was hauled out by deputies and placed in the back of a white hearse that contrasted with the blackened home behind it. At the sight of the body bag, silence fell briefly.
But the silence didn’t last long, and the bystanders began to rev back up in no time. In the crowd, ME Donna Warren sought out Lorene’s face. They’d known each other, as Warren had once been Lorene’s mother’s primary physician, and Lorene waved her over.
“Who is that?” Lorene demanded in reference to the body inside.
Warren swallowed and leaned into Lorene’s ear. “It’s a woman who’s bore children. And there’s a wedding ring on her finger.”
This confirmed for Lorene that the body in the house in fact did belong to Kathy Freeman.
“And you’re sure that there’s no one else in there?” Lorene searched for confirmation.
“That’s what they’re saying.”
It should have offered relief, but it instilled in Lorene only a sense of panic she’d never let show.
Shortly after four o’clock, as dusk began to encroach, the burned body of Kathy Freeman was driven away from the premises and headed west with the sun toward Tulsa. Agent Steve Nutter wrapped up the investigation and called it to an end. He released the scene to Danny’s stepbrother, Dwayne Vancil, and handed him a search warrant for the residence at around five o’clock, signed by Judge H. M. “Bud” Wyatt. The property, described in the search warrant as the “charred remains of a mobile home,” was now out of the hands of the investigating officers and in the hands of the Freemans’ next of kin. The warrant had been signed at 2:06, an hour and a half before the medical examiner even arrived at the crime scene and two hours before Kathy’s body was removed.