December 14, 2020 • 24 mins
He thought the police would recognize this was just a dream, not reality.
Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin bring us a story from Ada, Oklahoma where a young woman went missing. A few months after her disappearance, a man named Tommy Ward told police that he’d had a bad dream about her murder. Incredibly, the police took that dream and turned it into a false confession... and into a prison sentence that continues to this day, 35 years later.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to wrungful conviction, false Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Dressing. In nineteen eighty four, a
woman from Aida, Oklahoma went missing. A few months later,
a man named Tommy Ward told police that he'd had
a bad dream about her murder. Incredibly, the police took
that dream and turned it into a false confession. Tommy
(00:23):
Ward's story has fascinated the world. In two thousand and six,
the author John Grisham wrote a book about Tommy and
his co defendant, Carl Fonteno. John's career as a writer
was changed by Tommy and Carl's case, but he's not
the only one who's been moved by it. A few
years ago, their story was made into a Netflix Global
series called The Innocent Man. Now the whole world has
(00:47):
been moved to it's our honor to be part of
the fight to exonerate Tommy Ward and Carl Fonteno. Here's
hoping we can deliver a wake up call in this
nightmare of a case. I'm John Grisham, author of a
(01:11):
number of legal thrillers. In one work of nonfiction, About
fifteen years ago, I found myself in Ada, Oklahoma doing
the research for a nonfiction book that was eventually titled
The Innocent Man. That's just a truly fascinating case because
there were no clues, there were no witnesses, there was
(01:31):
no body, there was no corpse, there was no murder weapon,
there was nothing. But Tommy Ward confessed to the crime,
and from that moment on he was a guilty man.
The judge allowed this case to go forward without a body.
Even on my most creative days, I'm not sure I
could create stuff like this. Once I started researching Tommy's case,
(01:53):
Carl's case, I realized that there are thousands of innocent
people in prison, and I never realized that before. At
that point I moved away, for the most part, from
suspense intrigue thrillers to something still similar, but much more
issue driven capital punishment, wrongth of confiction, mask and conceration,
(02:15):
the issues I care about in the criminal justice system
and the injustices that we tolerate. When we could fix
this stuff if we had the will to do it. So,
Tommy Willard Carl font No case had a profound impact
on me as a writer. You know, Steve John Christians right,
in this case, the truth really is stranger than fiction.
This is one of the most bizarre kinds of false
(02:35):
confessions you can imagine. This case is fascinating because it
is about a dream that is converted by police officers
into a confession. Cases like this are extremely rare, right,
I mean, how many dream cases do you know about?
I've studied hundreds of false confessions and maybe there's a
dozen of them to our listeners. If you haven't heard
(02:56):
this story, get ready. It's an incredible one. If you
have read John Grisham's book or seeing the Netflix series,
we have some new developments to share with you because
attorneys at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, the organization You
and I Codirect, have uncovered new information that makes it
clear that Tommy Ward is innocent, but he's still in prison.
(03:18):
He's been there for thirty five years. He needs to
come home now, right now. Tommy's story starts in the
town of Ada, a rural Oklahoma community of about seventeen
thousand people. It's a Bible belt town where the churches
are full but the factories are empty. In Ada, poverty
(03:40):
can sometimes make justice seem like a far away dream.
In nineteen eighty four, Denise Harroway was one of Ada's
seventeen thousand people. Denise was twenty four years old, a petite,
blonde woman who had recently gotten married. She was enrolled
in college and helped pay tuition by working the evening
shift herself at Mcinelle's convenience store. But when customers walked
(04:04):
into Mcinale's at eight fifty pm on April twenty eighth,
they found an open cash register and no attendant in sight.
Denise had vanished. There'd be no sign of her for
a year and a half. Ada police started investigating Denise's disappearance,
and right away they suspected foul play. A customer who'd
(04:27):
been at Mcinale's earlier that evening told police he'd seen
Denise leave the store with a strange man who drove
her away in a pickup truck. Police also spoke to
a female clerk at a different nearby convenience store. She
reported that a few hours before Denise disappeared, two men
came into her store. They were a rowdy, she said,
(04:47):
and kept buying alcohol. They made her nervous. She gave
the cops some rough descriptions, and a police artist made
two composite sketches in terms of evidence that was it.
No one knew what happened to Denise. There was no body,
no sightings, no nothing. Police showed the composite sketches on
TV and asked for the public's help. Dozens of tips
(05:11):
were phoned in. A few callers thought that the sketches
looked a little bit like a twenty four year old
Ada man named Tommy Ward. Now. The Ward family was poor.
They lived on Ada's South Side, in the part of
town that everyone knew was on the wrong side of
the tracks. Growing up, there were eight kids in the house.
Tommy was number seven. Everyone children included was expected to
(05:35):
pitch in to keep the lights on and the rent paid.
The older kids would work, the younger kids would spend
hot Oklahoma summers walking along the highway searching for empty
beer cans that they could turn in for a five
cent deposit. The Wards were a law abiding family. When
Tommy was a teenager, he'd been arrested a few times
for petty crimes like public drunkenness, but nothing serious. The
(05:59):
idea of him suddenly kidnapping Denise Harroway was pretty crazy.
Despite this, police brought Tommy in for questioning just a
few days after Denise's disappearance. Tommy told them he had
nothing to do with Denise. In fact, he said, on
the night she disappeared, he was at a keg party
out of town twenty five miles away. Police released Tommy
(06:21):
and tracked down some other partygoers. Several of them confirmed
Tommy's alibi, but police also caught wind of a rumor
that had been spreading around town. Tommy supposedly told others
at the party that he'd done something terrible. That one
word was apparently enough to make the cops think that
(06:42):
Tommy had killed Denise. They bring Tommy back to the
station months later, on October eighteenth, nineteen eighty four, for
what would become nine hours of interrogation. Who killed that girl?
Did you kill her? You thought she was pretty, didn't you.
The questions come fast and furious, but Tommy still denies
(07:02):
having anything to do with Denise's disappearance. He reminds his
interrogators of his alibi, but they administer a polygraph. They
falsely tell Tommy that it proved he'd been lying. That's
when the interrogation turns nightmarish. Tommy tells the cops that
maybe he failed the polygraph because he was nervous. In fact,
he says, knowing he was a suspect in this case
(07:25):
had upset him so much that he had a bad dream.
Tell us about your dream, the police say, and Tommy does.
In the dream, Tommy was out by Ida's local power plants,
sitting in a pickup truck with three people he didn't know,
two men and a woman. One of the men tried
to kiss the woman and Tommy told him to back off.
(07:48):
Then Tommy said he wanted to go home. You're already home,
the man answered. Suddenly, Tommy was standing at his kitchen
sink trying to scrub a dark liquid off his hands.
The cops pounce your dream, They say, matches the fact
of the case. There's a pickup truck in your dream,
and we believe Denise was kidnapped in a pickup truck.
(08:11):
It doesn't make sense to say this was just a dream,
They say. You know what does make sense, you and
these other two men killing Denise. So where did the
story and Tommy's dream come from? Turns out, a few
days before this nine hour interrogation, police had briefly talked
to Tommy, and during that questioning, the police officers said
(08:34):
to Tommy, use your imagination for just a moment. This
girl was taken out of a grocery store at night.
Two guys come in and got her, and they gotten
a pickup and they drove away a beautiful girl like that.
Maybe they raped her before they killed her. That is
a direct quote from these detectives. The police officers had
(08:58):
planted the core ideas of this crime in Tommy's mind,
including the pickup truck, which remembers a detail that a
witness had already told them about, and Tommy began to
have nightmares about the story the police told him. The
interrogation continues for hours. Police tell Tommy he'll get the
death penalty if he doesn't confess to killing Denise. Eventually,
(09:22):
Tommy caves. He starts changing his dream to include what
the police tell him. In his dream, he says he
did recognize the other guys. They were two Ada men
named Carl Fontano and Odell Tittsworth. He dreamed that they
had robbed mcinally's together, that they'd kidnapped Denise and raped
her in a pickup truck. They stabbed her in the
(09:45):
dream too, he says, and left her body in a
culvert by the power plant. After nine hours of this,
police bring in a video camera. According to Tommy, they say,
time to cut the dream. Bullshit. This wasn't something you dreamed.
It was something you did, Tommy Halford, and you have
a powerplant for Nashar Webscume iBOT oh too black? Why
(10:09):
did you go to the paraplant HiT's Worth and pull
it over? Tommy finds himself repeating the whole story on camera,
not as a dream but as cold hard reality. It
was the first person in the store. Did you have
any kind of weapons? He told me that it was
going to kill her. That's we're going have too paraplant.
(10:29):
You understand how serious this investigation is. Interested Incredibly, the
police have transformed Tommy's dream into a murder confession. Let's
talk a little bit about dream statements. You know, there
comes a point in every interrogation where the police officers
have tried to get the suspect to confess, and the
(10:51):
suspect just says, well, I have no memory of committing
this crime, or I can't help you. I wasn't there.
And then either the police officers suggest to the suspect,
have you had any dreams about this case? Or the
suspect will suggest on his own accord, you know, I
(11:11):
have had some dreams about this, and what that does
is it gives police officers something to exploit. It allows
the conversation to continue, and the police officers end up
converting what was a dream into a confession. During Tommy's
videotaped statement, the only lingering reference to any of this
(11:34):
being a dream comes at the very end. Is there
anything else you want to add? Police ask him. I
thought it was just a dream. Tommy quietly says he
always thought that the police officers would recognize this is
not reality. Go out investigate the case, and you're going
(11:55):
to find out that this is all a bunch of horseship.
Based on his so called confession, Tommy Ward found himself
in jail, charged with capital murder, and the investigation that's
to come, well, horseshit is exactly the right word. I
(12:22):
was stationed on an earthquak when my sister called and
start telling me that they'd got Tommy for this. It
was not a good day. That's Melvin Ward, one of
Tommy's older brothers. He was in the service when he
found out that Tommy had been arrested, and he flew
back to Ada right away. I did not believe it.
I thought, well, you know, he's going to get awfulness
(12:43):
because I know he didn't do it. It's not Tommy's
character to do something like this. He was not a
bad kid. He'd never heard anybody. He'd stay out of
trouble other than a few public drunks. Tommy would have
been the kind of person that if somebody was attacking
this lady, he would have been there to protect her.
That's Tommy. Tommy did nothing for them to go after
(13:07):
him like they did, other than we living on another
side's track. We was not in the proper society at
the time. They believed that Tommy was guilty and they
was going to pull no stops he getting him to confess,
and that's not proper police work at all. Tommy wasn't
the only person from the wrong side of the tracks
who got ensnared in this case. Within hours, police arrest
(13:31):
Tommy's dream accomplices, Carl Fontineau and Odell Tittsworth and questioned
them both. Carl was twenty years old, a friend of
Tommy's who was seriously intellectually disabled and pretty much alone
in the world. Carl was a nice guy. I know
my mom liked him, and my mom blessed her heart.
She was a good judge character. At the time, she
(13:53):
was working at one of the convenience stores down there
in Aida, and the kid would come in and he
didn't have much of the family. She gave him a
sandwich from the story every now and then. And I
think Tommy met Carl by he was sleeping on my
sister's front porch. Tommy kind of took carl owner's wing
and they become friends. To understand how Carl's interrogation went down,
(14:17):
you need to know that a few months earlier, Carl
had witnessed his own mother's death. The two of them
had been driving on the highway when their car broke down.
Carl's mom got out and headed for a nearby restaurant
to call for help, but as she was crossing the highway,
she was hit and killed by another car. Carl felt
(14:37):
terrible guilt. He blamed himself for not being the one
who'd gone for help. It was that sense of guilts,
along with his disability, that police used to manipulate Carl
during his interrogation. The police suggested that Carl should make
amends for his mom's death by saying he was involved
in Denise's death. Can you imagine the trauma have been experiencing.
(15:01):
I mean, he saw his mother die. The police officers
used that prior traumatic event to help break down Carl
into accepting responsibility for Denise's death, and he caved much
sooner than Tommy did. Just like with Tommy. Police took
a videotaped statement from Carl. In it, he agreed that
(15:24):
he helped Odell Titsworth and Tommy Ward rape and stabbed Denise.
Ask you this at any point in time, did you? No?
I did not, nor did Tommy. O'Dell done all this
day right there? Did Joe Travis stop him from stabbinger? No?
Carl even said they'd burned her body afterwards? Who spread
(15:47):
the gas? Right? Ohd He poured all the gas on
her inar in side, and we threw the match on
her and walked out, and then I asked us burn
up on the inside. Based on this confession, Carlotto was
charged with Denise's death, right alongside Tommy. Knowing that Tommy
was innocent. That made me know that Carl was innocent. Tommy.
(16:09):
It took him almost nine hours to break him down,
and Carl he was a little bit more acceptable to
their interrogation. I think it hiring forty five minutes. But
the supposed third guy, Odell Tittsworth, well, he's another story.
O'Dell was a four time convicted felon with experience in
the interrogation room. When police questioned him about Denise, he
(16:31):
doesn't budge an inch. I don't care what Ward and
Fonteno say. He insists I had nothing to do with
Denise's disappearance. Now O'Dell is thrown in jail anyway, but
pretty soon it becomes clear that he's got a great alibi.
Two days before Denise's disappearance, Odell had an altercation with
the police and they'd broken his arm badly. On the
(16:54):
night Denise disappeared, Odell Tittsworth was laid up with a
spiral fracture. Struggle with a grown woman, hold her down
and rape her, stab her. It was physically impossible. Odell
was cleared. This is one point I've always trying to
wrap around people's head. If they were not being fed information,
how did both of them boys come up with a
(17:17):
totally innocent man's name. He can't happen. See what I'm saying.
While Odell Titsworth got to go home, Tommy and Carl
weren't so lucky. Prosecutors pressed forward with cases against Tommy
and Carl, even though their confessions turned out to be
wildly different. The confessions didn't agree on who raped Denise,
(17:37):
where she was stabbed, or when she died, And when
it came to the big question, where was Denise, the
confessions disagreed there too. Remember, Tommy said they'd left her
body in a culvert near the power plant, but Carl
said they'd burned Denise's body in an abandoned house, and
then they burned the house down too. The authorities checked
(17:59):
out both stories, but they found no sign of Denise
in either the culvert or the abandoned house. In fact,
Carl's abandoned house actually burned down ten months before Denise disappeared.
Their confessions just didn't match reality. In a last ditch
effort to get Carl to clean up his story, police
try something pretty outrageous. So Carl is sitting in jail,
(18:25):
he's just confessed to this crime, and the police officers
go to a local university and gather a bunch of
bones from the science lab human bones, and they bring
this bag of bones into the jail and they say,
we found Denise Harraway's skull where you said it was,
(18:47):
but we can't find the rest of her body. And
Carl can't answer the question. He says, I wish I
could help, but I don't know where her body is.
Carl's terrified. He can't tell him a thing. I mean,
what the fuck is this. I've never seen this before, Lara.
This is just beyond the pale. Carl and Tommy were
(19:13):
tried together on September twenty fourth, nineteen eighty five. At trial,
prosecutors called a McNally's customer named James Moyer. Moyer testified
that he'd seen someone who looked like Tommy Ward in
the store an hour before Denise disappeared. That's pretty thin evidence,
but the prosecutors had more. As the centerpiece of the trial,
(19:34):
they played Tommy and Carl's confession tapes for the jury.
Prosecutors conceded that sure, Tommy and Carl got a lot
of things wrong, Sure their confessions were false when it
came to Odell's involvement, and sure the facts that they
seemed to get right, like the pickup truck had been
fed to them by their interrogators. But set all that aside.
Prosecutors said, we've got proof. They said that Tommy and
(19:58):
Carl's confessions are reliable, a real ace in the hole.
So what was that proof? Prosecutors argued that Tommy and
Carl's confessions could be trusted because they both accurately described
what Denise was wearing the night she disappeared. During Tommy's confession,
(20:19):
he said Denise was wearing a button up blouse with
little blue roses on it and lace on the collar
and sleeves. Similarly, Carl had said she was wearing a
button up blouse with ruffles on the collar and elastic
on the sleeves. Now, prosecutors said, at the time of
the confessions, the police had no idea what Denise had
(20:40):
been wearing, so the interrogators couldn't have fed details about
the blouse to Tommy and Carl. The only explanation for
Tommy and Carl's matching stories was that they had both
actually been with Denise that night. To really clinch the case,
Denise's sister took the stand and revealed that Denise to
(21:00):
own a blouse with blue flowers and a lazy, ruffled collar.
Also after Denise disappeared, the sister reported that that blouse
was missing from Denise's closet. Denise's sister said she hadn't
told police about the missing blouse until after Tommy and
Carl confessed. Going into trial, the police and prosecutors have
(21:21):
two confessions that are at odds with the objectively noble
facts of the crime. There's no corroboration of this confession
and it's filled with errors, But the police have one
fact that is the anchor of their case. The defense
counsel had no explanation for why both Tommy and Carl
(21:44):
independently had described Denise's missing blouse the same way. That
anchor ended up taking both Tommy and Carl down. On
day thirteen of the trial, the jury returned a verdict.
Both men were gilt of murdering Denise Harroway. Shortly afterwards,
the judge sentenced Tommy Ward and Carl Fontineou to death.
(22:07):
The district attorney got a conviction on his boys was
caused the description of the shirt that supposedly no one
knew at the time of their confessions. I knew that
Tommy and Carl was innocent, but having Tommy and Carl
both to say something about that shirt that was a
pretty hard thing to get past. These men were sentenced
(22:28):
to death on the basis of a single fact, a
description of a blouse. Tommy and Carr were able to
lead police to evidence that they didn't already have. I mean,
these are the kinds of facts that you and I
look at when we assess the reliability of a confession, Laura.
And if police don't know information and the suspect leads
(22:51):
them to it, that's a red flag for a reliable confession.
How could Tommy and Carl have been wrong about so
many facts yet right about this fact despite it all,
Could they possibly be guilty? It's sure look that way.
At least at first, decades would pass before we found
(23:13):
out the truth. There's so much more to this case,
more than we can tell you today. So join us
next week as we close our second season, we'll bring
you part two of the story of Tommy Ward and
Carl Fontaneau. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of
(23:33):
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flam and
Kevin Wards. Our production team is headed by senior producer
Ann Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
(23:57):
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
Nirid and you can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast
dot com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Welcome to wrungful conviction, false Confessions. I'm Laura and I
writer and I'm Steve Dressing. In nineteen eighty four, a
woman from Aida, Oklahoma went missing. A few months later,
a man named Tommy Ward told police that he'd had
a bad dream about her murder. Incredibly, the police took
that dream and turned it into a false confession. Tommy
(00:23):
Ward's story has fascinated the world. In two thousand and six,
the author John Grisham wrote a book about Tommy and
his co defendant, Carl Fonteno. John's career as a writer
was changed by Tommy and Carl's case, but he's not
the only one who's been moved by it. A few
years ago, their story was made into a Netflix Global
series called The Innocent Man. Now the whole world has
(00:47):
been moved to it's our honor to be part of
the fight to exonerate Tommy Ward and Carl Fonteno. Here's
hoping we can deliver a wake up call in this
nightmare of a case. I'm John Grisham, author of a
(01:11):
number of legal thrillers. In one work of nonfiction, About
fifteen years ago, I found myself in Ada, Oklahoma doing
the research for a nonfiction book that was eventually titled
The Innocent Man. That's just a truly fascinating case because
there were no clues, there were no witnesses, there was
(01:31):
no body, there was no corpse, there was no murder weapon,
there was nothing. But Tommy Ward confessed to the crime,
and from that moment on he was a guilty man.
The judge allowed this case to go forward without a body.
Even on my most creative days, I'm not sure I
could create stuff like this. Once I started researching Tommy's case,
(01:53):
Carl's case, I realized that there are thousands of innocent
people in prison, and I never realized that before. At
that point I moved away, for the most part, from
suspense intrigue thrillers to something still similar, but much more
issue driven capital punishment, wrongth of confiction, mask and conceration,
(02:15):
the issues I care about in the criminal justice system
and the injustices that we tolerate. When we could fix
this stuff if we had the will to do it. So,
Tommy Willard Carl font No case had a profound impact
on me as a writer. You know, Steve John Christians right,
in this case, the truth really is stranger than fiction.
This is one of the most bizarre kinds of false
(02:35):
confessions you can imagine. This case is fascinating because it
is about a dream that is converted by police officers
into a confession. Cases like this are extremely rare, right,
I mean, how many dream cases do you know about?
I've studied hundreds of false confessions and maybe there's a
dozen of them to our listeners. If you haven't heard
(02:56):
this story, get ready. It's an incredible one. If you
have read John Grisham's book or seeing the Netflix series,
we have some new developments to share with you because
attorneys at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, the organization You
and I Codirect, have uncovered new information that makes it
clear that Tommy Ward is innocent, but he's still in prison.
(03:18):
He's been there for thirty five years. He needs to
come home now, right now. Tommy's story starts in the
town of Ada, a rural Oklahoma community of about seventeen
thousand people. It's a Bible belt town where the churches
are full but the factories are empty. In Ada, poverty
(03:40):
can sometimes make justice seem like a far away dream.
In nineteen eighty four, Denise Harroway was one of Ada's
seventeen thousand people. Denise was twenty four years old, a petite,
blonde woman who had recently gotten married. She was enrolled
in college and helped pay tuition by working the evening
shift herself at Mcinelle's convenience store. But when customers walked
(04:04):
into Mcinale's at eight fifty pm on April twenty eighth,
they found an open cash register and no attendant in sight.
Denise had vanished. There'd be no sign of her for
a year and a half. Ada police started investigating Denise's disappearance,
and right away they suspected foul play. A customer who'd
(04:27):
been at Mcinale's earlier that evening told police he'd seen
Denise leave the store with a strange man who drove
her away in a pickup truck. Police also spoke to
a female clerk at a different nearby convenience store. She
reported that a few hours before Denise disappeared, two men
came into her store. They were a rowdy, she said,
(04:47):
and kept buying alcohol. They made her nervous. She gave
the cops some rough descriptions, and a police artist made
two composite sketches in terms of evidence that was it.
No one knew what happened to Denise. There was no body,
no sightings, no nothing. Police showed the composite sketches on
TV and asked for the public's help. Dozens of tips
(05:11):
were phoned in. A few callers thought that the sketches
looked a little bit like a twenty four year old
Ada man named Tommy Ward. Now. The Ward family was poor.
They lived on Ada's South Side, in the part of
town that everyone knew was on the wrong side of
the tracks. Growing up, there were eight kids in the house.
Tommy was number seven. Everyone children included was expected to
(05:35):
pitch in to keep the lights on and the rent paid.
The older kids would work, the younger kids would spend
hot Oklahoma summers walking along the highway searching for empty
beer cans that they could turn in for a five
cent deposit. The Wards were a law abiding family. When
Tommy was a teenager, he'd been arrested a few times
for petty crimes like public drunkenness, but nothing serious. The
(05:59):
idea of him suddenly kidnapping Denise Harroway was pretty crazy.
Despite this, police brought Tommy in for questioning just a
few days after Denise's disappearance. Tommy told them he had
nothing to do with Denise. In fact, he said, on
the night she disappeared, he was at a keg party
out of town twenty five miles away. Police released Tommy
(06:21):
and tracked down some other partygoers. Several of them confirmed
Tommy's alibi, but police also caught wind of a rumor
that had been spreading around town. Tommy supposedly told others
at the party that he'd done something terrible. That one
word was apparently enough to make the cops think that
(06:42):
Tommy had killed Denise. They bring Tommy back to the
station months later, on October eighteenth, nineteen eighty four, for
what would become nine hours of interrogation. Who killed that girl?
Did you kill her? You thought she was pretty, didn't you.
The questions come fast and furious, but Tommy still denies
(07:02):
having anything to do with Denise's disappearance. He reminds his
interrogators of his alibi, but they administer a polygraph. They
falsely tell Tommy that it proved he'd been lying. That's
when the interrogation turns nightmarish. Tommy tells the cops that
maybe he failed the polygraph because he was nervous. In fact,
he says, knowing he was a suspect in this case
(07:25):
had upset him so much that he had a bad dream.
Tell us about your dream, the police say, and Tommy does.
In the dream, Tommy was out by Ida's local power plants,
sitting in a pickup truck with three people he didn't know,
two men and a woman. One of the men tried
to kiss the woman and Tommy told him to back off.
(07:48):
Then Tommy said he wanted to go home. You're already home,
the man answered. Suddenly, Tommy was standing at his kitchen
sink trying to scrub a dark liquid off his hands.
The cops pounce your dream, They say, matches the fact
of the case. There's a pickup truck in your dream,
and we believe Denise was kidnapped in a pickup truck.
(08:11):
It doesn't make sense to say this was just a dream,
They say. You know what does make sense, you and
these other two men killing Denise. So where did the
story and Tommy's dream come from? Turns out, a few
days before this nine hour interrogation, police had briefly talked
to Tommy, and during that questioning, the police officers said
(08:34):
to Tommy, use your imagination for just a moment. This
girl was taken out of a grocery store at night.
Two guys come in and got her, and they gotten
a pickup and they drove away a beautiful girl like that.
Maybe they raped her before they killed her. That is
a direct quote from these detectives. The police officers had
(08:58):
planted the core ideas of this crime in Tommy's mind,
including the pickup truck, which remembers a detail that a
witness had already told them about, and Tommy began to
have nightmares about the story the police told him. The
interrogation continues for hours. Police tell Tommy he'll get the
death penalty if he doesn't confess to killing Denise. Eventually,
(09:22):
Tommy caves. He starts changing his dream to include what
the police tell him. In his dream, he says he
did recognize the other guys. They were two Ada men
named Carl Fontano and Odell Tittsworth. He dreamed that they
had robbed mcinally's together, that they'd kidnapped Denise and raped
her in a pickup truck. They stabbed her in the
(09:45):
dream too, he says, and left her body in a
culvert by the power plant. After nine hours of this,
police bring in a video camera. According to Tommy, they say,
time to cut the dream. Bullshit. This wasn't something you dreamed.
It was something you did, Tommy Halford, and you have
a powerplant for Nashar Webscume iBOT oh too black? Why
(10:09):
did you go to the paraplant HiT's Worth and pull
it over? Tommy finds himself repeating the whole story on camera,
not as a dream but as cold hard reality. It
was the first person in the store. Did you have
any kind of weapons? He told me that it was
going to kill her. That's we're going have too paraplant.
(10:29):
You understand how serious this investigation is. Interested Incredibly, the
police have transformed Tommy's dream into a murder confession. Let's
talk a little bit about dream statements. You know, there
comes a point in every interrogation where the police officers
have tried to get the suspect to confess, and the
(10:51):
suspect just says, well, I have no memory of committing
this crime, or I can't help you. I wasn't there.
And then either the police officers suggest to the suspect,
have you had any dreams about this case? Or the
suspect will suggest on his own accord, you know, I
(11:11):
have had some dreams about this, and what that does
is it gives police officers something to exploit. It allows
the conversation to continue, and the police officers end up
converting what was a dream into a confession. During Tommy's
videotaped statement, the only lingering reference to any of this
(11:34):
being a dream comes at the very end. Is there
anything else you want to add? Police ask him. I
thought it was just a dream. Tommy quietly says he
always thought that the police officers would recognize this is
not reality. Go out investigate the case, and you're going
(11:55):
to find out that this is all a bunch of horseship.
Based on his so called confession, Tommy Ward found himself
in jail, charged with capital murder, and the investigation that's
to come, well, horseshit is exactly the right word. I
(12:22):
was stationed on an earthquak when my sister called and
start telling me that they'd got Tommy for this. It
was not a good day. That's Melvin Ward, one of
Tommy's older brothers. He was in the service when he
found out that Tommy had been arrested, and he flew
back to Ada right away. I did not believe it.
I thought, well, you know, he's going to get awfulness
(12:43):
because I know he didn't do it. It's not Tommy's
character to do something like this. He was not a
bad kid. He'd never heard anybody. He'd stay out of
trouble other than a few public drunks. Tommy would have
been the kind of person that if somebody was attacking
this lady, he would have been there to protect her.
That's Tommy. Tommy did nothing for them to go after
(13:07):
him like they did, other than we living on another
side's track. We was not in the proper society at
the time. They believed that Tommy was guilty and they
was going to pull no stops he getting him to confess,
and that's not proper police work at all. Tommy wasn't
the only person from the wrong side of the tracks
who got ensnared in this case. Within hours, police arrest
(13:31):
Tommy's dream accomplices, Carl Fontineau and Odell Tittsworth and questioned
them both. Carl was twenty years old, a friend of
Tommy's who was seriously intellectually disabled and pretty much alone
in the world. Carl was a nice guy. I know
my mom liked him, and my mom blessed her heart.
She was a good judge character. At the time, she
(13:53):
was working at one of the convenience stores down there
in Aida, and the kid would come in and he
didn't have much of the family. She gave him a
sandwich from the story every now and then. And I
think Tommy met Carl by he was sleeping on my
sister's front porch. Tommy kind of took carl owner's wing
and they become friends. To understand how Carl's interrogation went down,
(14:17):
you need to know that a few months earlier, Carl
had witnessed his own mother's death. The two of them
had been driving on the highway when their car broke down.
Carl's mom got out and headed for a nearby restaurant
to call for help, but as she was crossing the highway,
she was hit and killed by another car. Carl felt
(14:37):
terrible guilt. He blamed himself for not being the one
who'd gone for help. It was that sense of guilts,
along with his disability, that police used to manipulate Carl
during his interrogation. The police suggested that Carl should make
amends for his mom's death by saying he was involved
in Denise's death. Can you imagine the trauma have been experiencing.
(15:01):
I mean, he saw his mother die. The police officers
used that prior traumatic event to help break down Carl
into accepting responsibility for Denise's death, and he caved much
sooner than Tommy did. Just like with Tommy. Police took
a videotaped statement from Carl. In it, he agreed that
(15:24):
he helped Odell Titsworth and Tommy Ward rape and stabbed Denise.
Ask you this at any point in time, did you? No?
I did not, nor did Tommy. O'Dell done all this
day right there? Did Joe Travis stop him from stabbinger? No?
Carl even said they'd burned her body afterwards? Who spread
(15:47):
the gas? Right? Ohd He poured all the gas on
her inar in side, and we threw the match on
her and walked out, and then I asked us burn
up on the inside. Based on this confession, Carlotto was
charged with Denise's death, right alongside Tommy. Knowing that Tommy
was innocent. That made me know that Carl was innocent. Tommy.
(16:09):
It took him almost nine hours to break him down,
and Carl he was a little bit more acceptable to
their interrogation. I think it hiring forty five minutes. But
the supposed third guy, Odell Tittsworth, well, he's another story.
O'Dell was a four time convicted felon with experience in
the interrogation room. When police questioned him about Denise, he
(16:31):
doesn't budge an inch. I don't care what Ward and
Fonteno say. He insists I had nothing to do with
Denise's disappearance. Now O'Dell is thrown in jail anyway, but
pretty soon it becomes clear that he's got a great alibi.
Two days before Denise's disappearance, Odell had an altercation with
the police and they'd broken his arm badly. On the
(16:54):
night Denise disappeared, Odell Tittsworth was laid up with a
spiral fracture. Struggle with a grown woman, hold her down
and rape her, stab her. It was physically impossible. Odell
was cleared. This is one point I've always trying to
wrap around people's head. If they were not being fed information,
how did both of them boys come up with a
(17:17):
totally innocent man's name. He can't happen. See what I'm saying.
While Odell Titsworth got to go home, Tommy and Carl
weren't so lucky. Prosecutors pressed forward with cases against Tommy
and Carl, even though their confessions turned out to be
wildly different. The confessions didn't agree on who raped Denise,
(17:37):
where she was stabbed, or when she died, And when
it came to the big question, where was Denise, the
confessions disagreed there too. Remember, Tommy said they'd left her
body in a culvert near the power plant, but Carl
said they'd burned Denise's body in an abandoned house, and
then they burned the house down too. The authorities checked
(17:59):
out both stories, but they found no sign of Denise
in either the culvert or the abandoned house. In fact,
Carl's abandoned house actually burned down ten months before Denise disappeared.
Their confessions just didn't match reality. In a last ditch
effort to get Carl to clean up his story, police
try something pretty outrageous. So Carl is sitting in jail,
(18:25):
he's just confessed to this crime, and the police officers
go to a local university and gather a bunch of
bones from the science lab human bones, and they bring
this bag of bones into the jail and they say,
we found Denise Harraway's skull where you said it was,
(18:47):
but we can't find the rest of her body. And
Carl can't answer the question. He says, I wish I
could help, but I don't know where her body is.
Carl's terrified. He can't tell him a thing. I mean,
what the fuck is this. I've never seen this before, Lara.
This is just beyond the pale. Carl and Tommy were
(19:13):
tried together on September twenty fourth, nineteen eighty five. At trial,
prosecutors called a McNally's customer named James Moyer. Moyer testified
that he'd seen someone who looked like Tommy Ward in
the store an hour before Denise disappeared. That's pretty thin evidence,
but the prosecutors had more. As the centerpiece of the trial,
(19:34):
they played Tommy and Carl's confession tapes for the jury.
Prosecutors conceded that sure, Tommy and Carl got a lot
of things wrong, Sure their confessions were false when it
came to Odell's involvement, and sure the facts that they
seemed to get right, like the pickup truck had been
fed to them by their interrogators. But set all that aside.
Prosecutors said, we've got proof. They said that Tommy and
(19:58):
Carl's confessions are reliable, a real ace in the hole.
So what was that proof? Prosecutors argued that Tommy and
Carl's confessions could be trusted because they both accurately described
what Denise was wearing the night she disappeared. During Tommy's confession,
(20:19):
he said Denise was wearing a button up blouse with
little blue roses on it and lace on the collar
and sleeves. Similarly, Carl had said she was wearing a
button up blouse with ruffles on the collar and elastic
on the sleeves. Now, prosecutors said, at the time of
the confessions, the police had no idea what Denise had
(20:40):
been wearing, so the interrogators couldn't have fed details about
the blouse to Tommy and Carl. The only explanation for
Tommy and Carl's matching stories was that they had both
actually been with Denise that night. To really clinch the case,
Denise's sister took the stand and revealed that Denise to
(21:00):
own a blouse with blue flowers and a lazy, ruffled collar.
Also after Denise disappeared, the sister reported that that blouse
was missing from Denise's closet. Denise's sister said she hadn't
told police about the missing blouse until after Tommy and
Carl confessed. Going into trial, the police and prosecutors have
(21:21):
two confessions that are at odds with the objectively noble
facts of the crime. There's no corroboration of this confession
and it's filled with errors, But the police have one
fact that is the anchor of their case. The defense
counsel had no explanation for why both Tommy and Carl
(21:44):
independently had described Denise's missing blouse the same way. That
anchor ended up taking both Tommy and Carl down. On
day thirteen of the trial, the jury returned a verdict.
Both men were gilt of murdering Denise Harroway. Shortly afterwards,
the judge sentenced Tommy Ward and Carl Fontineou to death.
(22:07):
The district attorney got a conviction on his boys was
caused the description of the shirt that supposedly no one
knew at the time of their confessions. I knew that
Tommy and Carl was innocent, but having Tommy and Carl
both to say something about that shirt that was a
pretty hard thing to get past. These men were sentenced
(22:28):
to death on the basis of a single fact, a
description of a blouse. Tommy and Carr were able to
lead police to evidence that they didn't already have. I mean,
these are the kinds of facts that you and I
look at when we assess the reliability of a confession, Laura.
And if police don't know information and the suspect leads
(22:51):
them to it, that's a red flag for a reliable confession.
How could Tommy and Carl have been wrong about so
many facts yet right about this fact despite it all,
Could they possibly be guilty? It's sure look that way.
At least at first, decades would pass before we found
(23:13):
out the truth. There's so much more to this case,
more than we can tell you today. So join us
next week as we close our second season, we'll bring
you part two of the story of Tommy Ward and
Carl Fontaneau. Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of
(23:33):
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flam and
Kevin Wards. Our production team is headed by senior producer
Ann Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Jeanie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
(23:57):
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
Nirid and you can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast
dot com. Be sure to follow the show on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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