May 1, 2023 • 25 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, OK 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.
Since this episode's original release, in January 2021, a District Judge vacated Tommy's conviction, yet he remained in prison while the state appealed. The state won, reinstating the conviction, and Tommy and his team are still fighting for his freedom.
At the end of this episode, Laura says that Part 2 will be available next week. However, this is a re-issue, so Part 2 is available right now in your feed!
To learn more and get involved, visit:
http://www.centeronwrongfulconvictions.org/
https://www.facebook.com/tommywardslegalteam/
Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey guys, it's Laura and I Writer. In Season two
of False Confessions, we brought you the stunning story of
Tommy Ward, and unfortunately I have some sad news to
share about his case. In January twenty twenty one, a
district judge at the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals gave
us the news we were all hoping for and vacated
Tommy's conviction, but he waited in prison still while the
(00:27):
state appealed that decision. Sadly, justice hasn't yet been served.
This innocent man is still in prison. The state won
their appeal reinstating Tommy's conviction in twenty twenty two, and
as of this update, Tommy and his legal team are
preparing to file again with the federal courts. Tommy, We're
all hoping that the courts get it right this time
(00:49):
and grant you the freedom you deserve. Keep fighting and
stay strong. Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura
and I Writer, and I'm Steve Dressing. In nineteen eighty four,
a woman from Ada, Oklahoma, went missing. A few months later,
a man named Tommy Ward told police that he'd had
(01:12):
a bad dream about her murder. Incredibly, the police took
that dream and turned it into a false confession. Tommy
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 Fontaneau. John's career as a writer
was changed by Tommy and Carl's case, but he's not
(01:35):
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
been moved too. It's our honor to be part of
the fight to exonerate Tommy Ward and Carl Fontineau. Here's
hoping we can deliver a wake up call in this
nightmare of a case.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I'm John Grisham, author of a number of legal thrillers
and 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. It's
just a truly fascinating case because there were no clues,
(02:26):
there were no witnesses, there was no body, there was
no corpse, there was no murder weapon, there was nothing
for Tommy Wiard confessed to the crime, and from.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
That moment on he was a guilty man.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Once I started researching Tommy's case Carl's case, I realized
that there are thousands of innocent people in prison, and
I've 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, wrong
(03:10):
for confiction, mass incarceration, 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, the Tommy Willard Carl Fontina
case had a profound impact on me as a writer.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
You know, Steve John Grisham's right in this case, the
truth really is stranger than fiction. This is one of
the most bizarre kinds of false confessions you can imagine.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Right, I mean, how many dream cases do you know about.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
I've studied hundreds of false confessions and maybe there's a dozen.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Of them to our listeners. If you haven't heard this story,
get ready, it's an incredible one. If you have read
John Grisham's book or seen the Netflix series, we have
some new developments to share with you.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
He's still in prison. 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.
(04:36):
In Aida, poverty can sometimes make justice seem like a
faraway 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'd recently gotten married. She was
enrolled in college and helped pay tuition by working the
evening shift by herself at mckinellly's convenience store, but when
(05:01):
customers walked into mcinally'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.
(05:23):
A customer who'd been at mcinally'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 rowdy, she said,
(05:45):
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
(06:08):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Now.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
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 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
(06:41):
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 idea of him suddenly kidnapping Denise
Harroway was pretty crazy. Despite this, police brought Tommy in
(07:03):
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 and tracked down some other partygoers, several
of them confirmed Tommy's alibi, but police also caught wind
(07:26):
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 Tommy had killed Denise. They bring Tommy back
to the station months later, on October eighteenth, nineteen eighty four,
(07:46):
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 denied having anything to do with Denise's disappearance. He
reminds his interrogators of his alibi, but they administer a polygraph.
(08:08):
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 had upset him so much that he had
a bad dream. Tell us about your dream, the police say,
(08:29):
and Tommy does. In the dream, Tommy was out by
Ada'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. Then Tommy said he
wanted to go home. You're already home, the man answered. Suddenly,
(08:51):
Tommy was standing at his kitchen sink trying to scrub
a dark liquid off his hands. The cops pounced. They say,
matches the facts of the case. There's a pickup truck
in your dream, and we believe Denise was kidnapped in
a pickup truck. It doesn't make sense to say this
was just a dream. They say. You know what does
(09:12):
make sense, you and these other two men killing Denise.
So where did the story in Tommy's dream come from?
Turns out a few days before this nine hour interrogation,
police had briefly talked to Tommy, and during.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
That questioning, the police officers said 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'd 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
(09:52):
from these detectives. The police officers had planted the core
ideas of this crime in Tommy's mind, including the pickup truck,
which remember as a detail that a witness had already
told them about, and Tommy began to have nightmares about
the story the police told him.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
The interrogation continues for hours. Police tell Tommy he'll get
the death penalty if he doesn't confess to killing Denise. Eventually,
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 eight of
men named Carl Fontaneau and Odell Titsworth. He dreamed that
(10:35):
they'd robbed Mcanelli's together, that they'd kidnapped Denise and raped
her in a pickup truck. They stabbed her in the
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,
(10:57):
it was something you did.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Tommy.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
You have the power plant where nay share?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Why did you go to the para plant It's worth
and pulled over.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Tommy finds himself repeating the whole story on camera, not
as a dream, but as cold hard reality.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It was the first person in the door.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
Did he have any weapons? They told me that he
was going to kill her.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
That's where got out to you understand how serious this
investigation is.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Incredibly, the police have transformed Tommy's dream into a murder confession.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
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 suspect just says, well, I have no memory of
committing this crime, or I can't help you. I wasn't there.
(11:57):
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
have had some dreams about this And what that does
is it gives police officers something to exploit. It allows
(12:17):
the conversation to continue, and the police officers end up
converting what was a dream into a confession.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
During Tommy's videotaped statement, the only lingering reference to any
of this 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.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
He always thought that the police officers would recognize this
is not reality. Go out investigate the case, and you're
going to find out that this is all a bunch
of horseship.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
I was stationed on an aircraft current when my sister
called and started telling me that they got Tommy for this.
It was not a good day.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
I did not believe it. I thought, well, you know,
he's going to get awf on this because I know
he didn't do it. It's not Tom's character to do something
like this. He was not a bad kid. He'd never
heard anybody. He'd stayed 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
(13:58):
have been there to protect her. That's Tommy. Tommy did
nothing for them to go after him like they did,
other than we living on another side 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 to get into confess, and that's not proper
(14:20):
police work at all.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Tommy wasn't the only person from the wrong side of
the tracks who got ensnared in this case. Within hours,
police arrest Tommy's dream accomplices, Carl Fontano and Odell Titsworth
and questioned them both. Carl was twenty years old, a
friend of Tommy's who was seriously intellectually disabled and pretty
(14:42):
much alone in the world.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
Carl was a nice guy. I know my mom liked him,
and my mom, bless her heart, she was a good
judge character. At the time, she was working at one
of the convenience stores down there in Ada, and the
kid would come in and he didn't have much of
the family. She would give him a sandwich from a
the story every now and then, and I think Tommy
met Carl by he was sleeping on my sister's front porch.
(15:08):
Tommy kind of took Carl on his wing, and uh
they become friends.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
To understand how Carl's interrogation went down, 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 terrible guilt.
(15:37):
He blamed himself for not being the one who'd gone
for help. It was that sense of guilt, 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.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Can you imagine the trauma he must have been experiencing
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.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Just like with Tommy. Police took a videotaped statement from Carl.
In it, he agreed that he helped Odell Titsworth and
Tommy Ward rape and stabbed Denise.
Speaker 5 (16:27):
Carl, let me ask you this, at any point in time,
did you stab her?
Speaker 4 (16:32):
No? I did not, nor did Tommy Odell done all
this day right there?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Did y'all try to stop him from stander?
Speaker 4 (16:40):
No?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Carl even said they burned her body afterwards?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Who spread the gas?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Odell?
Speaker 4 (16:47):
He poured all the gas on her air side and
went threw the match on her and walked out, and
then I asked to burn up on either side.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Based on this confession, Carl Fontaneau was charged with Denise's death,
right alongside Tommy.
Speaker 5 (17:02):
Knowing that Tommy was innocent. That made me know that
Carl was innocent. Tommy, it took him almost nine hours
to break him down, and Carl he was a little
bit more acceptible to their interrogation. Now they could higher
in forty five minutes.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
But the supposed third guy, Odell Titsworth, well, he's another story.
Odell was a four time convicted felon with experience in
the interrogation room. When police questioned him about Denise. He
doesn't budge an inch. I don't care what Ward and
Fontineau say. He insists I had nothing to do with
Denise's disappearance. Now Odell is thrown in jail anyway, but
(17:41):
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
night Denise disappeared, Odell Titsworth 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
(18:05):
was cleared.
Speaker 5 (18:07):
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 totally
innocent man's name. He can't happen, see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
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,
where she was stabbed, or when she died. And when
it came to the big question where was Denise, the
(18:43):
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
out both stories, but they found no sign of Denise
in either the culvert or the abandoned house. In fact,
(19:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
So Carl is sitting in jail, he's just confessed to
this crime, and the police officers go to a local
university and gather a bunch of bones.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
From the science lab human bones.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
And they bring this bag of bones into the jail
and they say, we found Denise Haraway's skull where you
said it was, 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.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Carl's terrified he can't tell him a thing. I mean,
what the fuck is this.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
I've never seen this before, Lara, this is just beyond
the pale.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Carl and Tommy were tried together on September twenty fourth,
nineteen eighty five. At trial, prosecutors called a mcinally'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.
(20:33):
As the centerpiece of the trial, 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
(20:57):
got proof. They said that Tommy and Carl's confession 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, he said Denise was
(21:20):
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 been wearing, so the
(21:41):
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 did own a blouse
with blue flowers and a lacey ruffled collar. Also after
(22:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
Going into trial, the police and prosecutors have 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
(22:40):
no explanation for why both Tommy and Carl independently had
described Denise's missing blouse the same way.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
That anchor ended up taking both Tommy and Carl down.
On day thirteen of the trial, the jury returned a verdict.
Both men were guilty of murdering Denise Harroway. Shortly afterwards,
the judge sentenced Tommy Ward and Carl Fontana to death.
Speaker 5 (23:08):
The district attorney got a conviction on his boys because
the description of the shirt that supposedly no one knew
at the time of their confessions. I knew that Tommy
and Carl was but having tom and Carl both to
say something about that shirt that was a pretty hard
thing to get passed.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
These men were sentenced to death on the basis of
a single fact, a description of a blouse. Tommy and
Carl 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
(23:49):
know information and the suspect leads them to it, that's
a red flag for a reliable confession.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
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 sure looked that way,
at least at first, decades would pass before we found
out the truth. There's so much more to this case,
more than we can tell you today. So join us
(24:20):
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
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm and
(24:42):
Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by senior producer
An Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
and I Writer, and you can follow me.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
On Twitter at Sdrizzen.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
For more information on the show, visit wrongfulconvictionpodcast 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
Hey guys, it's Laura and I Writer. In Season two
of False Confessions, we brought you the stunning story of
Tommy Ward, and unfortunately I have some sad news to
share about his case. In January twenty twenty one, a
district judge at the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals gave
us the news we were all hoping for and vacated
Tommy's conviction, but he waited in prison still while the
(00:27):
state appealed that decision. Sadly, justice hasn't yet been served.
This innocent man is still in prison. The state won
their appeal reinstating Tommy's conviction in twenty twenty two, and
as of this update, Tommy and his legal team are
preparing to file again with the federal courts. Tommy, We're
all hoping that the courts get it right this time
(00:49):
and grant you the freedom you deserve. Keep fighting and
stay strong. Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura
and I Writer, and I'm Steve Dressing. In nineteen eighty four,
a woman from Ada, Oklahoma, went missing. A few months later,
a man named Tommy Ward told police that he'd had
(01:12):
a bad dream about her murder. Incredibly, the police took
that dream and turned it into a false confession. Tommy
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 Fontaneau. John's career as a writer
was changed by Tommy and Carl's case, but he's not
(01:35):
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
been moved too. It's our honor to be part of
the fight to exonerate Tommy Ward and Carl Fontineau. Here's
hoping we can deliver a wake up call in this
nightmare of a case.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
I'm John Grisham, author of a number of legal thrillers
and 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. It's
just a truly fascinating case because there were no clues,
(02:26):
there were no witnesses, there was no body, there was
no corpse, there was no murder weapon, there was nothing
for Tommy Wiard confessed to the crime, and from.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
That moment on he was a guilty man.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Once I started researching Tommy's case Carl's case, I realized
that there are thousands of innocent people in prison, and
I've 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, wrong
(03:10):
for confiction, mass incarceration, 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, the Tommy Willard Carl Fontina
case had a profound impact on me as a writer.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
You know, Steve John Grisham's right in this case, the
truth really is stranger than fiction. This is one of
the most bizarre kinds of false confessions you can imagine.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
Right, I mean, how many dream cases do you know about.
Speaker 4 (03:47):
I've studied hundreds of false confessions and maybe there's a dozen.
Speaker 1 (03:51):
Of them to our listeners. If you haven't heard this story,
get ready, it's an incredible one. If you have read
John Grisham's book or seen the Netflix series, we have
some new developments to share with you.
Speaker 4 (04:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
He's still in prison. 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.
(04:36):
In Aida, poverty can sometimes make justice seem like a
faraway 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'd recently gotten married. She was
enrolled in college and helped pay tuition by working the
evening shift by herself at mckinellly's convenience store, but when
(05:01):
customers walked into mcinally'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.
(05:23):
A customer who'd been at mcinally'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 rowdy, she said,
(05:45):
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
(06:08):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:17):
Now.
Speaker 1 (06:17):
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 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
(06:41):
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 idea of him suddenly kidnapping Denise
Harroway was pretty crazy. Despite this, police brought Tommy in
(07:03):
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 and tracked down some other partygoers, several
of them confirmed Tommy's alibi, but police also caught wind
(07:26):
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 Tommy had killed Denise. They bring Tommy back
to the station months later, on October eighteenth, nineteen eighty four,
(07:46):
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 denied having anything to do with Denise's disappearance. He
reminds his interrogators of his alibi, but they administer a polygraph.
(08:08):
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 had upset him so much that he had
a bad dream. Tell us about your dream, the police say,
(08:29):
and Tommy does. In the dream, Tommy was out by
Ada'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. Then Tommy said he
wanted to go home. You're already home, the man answered. Suddenly,
(08:51):
Tommy was standing at his kitchen sink trying to scrub
a dark liquid off his hands. The cops pounced. They say,
matches the facts of the case. There's a pickup truck
in your dream, and we believe Denise was kidnapped in
a pickup truck. It doesn't make sense to say this
was just a dream. They say. You know what does
(09:12):
make sense, you and these other two men killing Denise.
So where did the story in Tommy's dream come from?
Turns out a few days before this nine hour interrogation,
police had briefly talked to Tommy, and during.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
That questioning, the police officers said 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'd 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
(09:52):
from these detectives. The police officers had planted the core
ideas of this crime in Tommy's mind, including the pickup truck,
which remember as a detail that a witness had already
told them about, and Tommy began to have nightmares about
the story the police told him.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
The interrogation continues for hours. Police tell Tommy he'll get
the death penalty if he doesn't confess to killing Denise. Eventually,
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 eight of
men named Carl Fontaneau and Odell Titsworth. He dreamed that
(10:35):
they'd robbed Mcanelli's together, that they'd kidnapped Denise and raped
her in a pickup truck. They stabbed her in the
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,
(10:57):
it was something you did.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
Tommy.
Speaker 3 (11:00):
You have the power plant where nay share?
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Why did you go to the para plant It's worth
and pulled over.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Tommy finds himself repeating the whole story on camera, not
as a dream, but as cold hard reality.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
It was the first person in the door.
Speaker 4 (11:20):
Did he have any weapons? They told me that he
was going to kill her.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
That's where got out to you understand how serious this
investigation is.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Incredibly, the police have transformed Tommy's dream into a murder confession.
Speaker 4 (11:36):
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 suspect just says, well, I have no memory of
committing this crime, or I can't help you. I wasn't there.
(11:57):
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
have had some dreams about this And what that does
is it gives police officers something to exploit. It allows
(12:17):
the conversation to continue, and the police officers end up
converting what was a dream into a confession.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
During Tommy's videotaped statement, the only lingering reference to any
of this 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.
Speaker 4 (12:42):
He always thought that the police officers would recognize this
is not reality. Go out investigate the case, and you're
going to find out that this is all a bunch
of horseship.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:20):
I was stationed on an aircraft current when my sister
called and started telling me that they got Tommy for this.
It was not a good day.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
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.
Speaker 5 (13:37):
I did not believe it. I thought, well, you know,
he's going to get awf on this because I know
he didn't do it. It's not Tom's character to do something
like this. He was not a bad kid. He'd never
heard anybody. He'd stayed 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
(13:58):
have been there to protect her. That's Tommy. Tommy did
nothing for them to go after him like they did,
other than we living on another side 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 to get into confess, and that's not proper
(14:20):
police work at all.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
Tommy wasn't the only person from the wrong side of
the tracks who got ensnared in this case. Within hours,
police arrest Tommy's dream accomplices, Carl Fontano and Odell Titsworth
and questioned them both. Carl was twenty years old, a
friend of Tommy's who was seriously intellectually disabled and pretty
(14:42):
much alone in the world.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
Carl was a nice guy. I know my mom liked him,
and my mom, bless her heart, she was a good
judge character. At the time, she was working at one
of the convenience stores down there in Ada, and the
kid would come in and he didn't have much of
the family. She would give him a sandwich from a
the story every now and then, and I think Tommy
met Carl by he was sleeping on my sister's front porch.
(15:08):
Tommy kind of took Carl on his wing, and uh
they become friends.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
To understand how Carl's interrogation went down, 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 terrible guilt.
(15:37):
He blamed himself for not being the one who'd gone
for help. It was that sense of guilt, 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.
Speaker 4 (15:56):
Can you imagine the trauma he must have been experiencing
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.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Just like with Tommy. Police took a videotaped statement from Carl.
In it, he agreed that he helped Odell Titsworth and
Tommy Ward rape and stabbed Denise.
Speaker 5 (16:27):
Carl, let me ask you this, at any point in time,
did you stab her?
Speaker 4 (16:32):
No? I did not, nor did Tommy Odell done all
this day right there?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
Did y'all try to stop him from stander?
Speaker 4 (16:40):
No?
Speaker 1 (16:41):
Carl even said they burned her body afterwards?
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Who spread the gas?
Speaker 1 (16:46):
Odell?
Speaker 4 (16:47):
He poured all the gas on her air side and
went threw the match on her and walked out, and
then I asked to burn up on either side.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
Based on this confession, Carl Fontaneau was charged with Denise's death,
right alongside Tommy.
Speaker 5 (17:02):
Knowing that Tommy was innocent. That made me know that
Carl was innocent. Tommy, it took him almost nine hours
to break him down, and Carl he was a little
bit more acceptible to their interrogation. Now they could higher
in forty five minutes.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
But the supposed third guy, Odell Titsworth, well, he's another story.
Odell was a four time convicted felon with experience in
the interrogation room. When police questioned him about Denise. He
doesn't budge an inch. I don't care what Ward and
Fontineau say. He insists I had nothing to do with
Denise's disappearance. Now Odell is thrown in jail anyway, but
(17:41):
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
night Denise disappeared, Odell Titsworth 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
(18:05):
was cleared.
Speaker 5 (18:07):
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 totally
innocent man's name. He can't happen, see what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
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,
where she was stabbed, or when she died. And when
it came to the big question where was Denise, the
(18:43):
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
out both stories, but they found no sign of Denise
in either the culvert or the abandoned house. In fact,
(19:04):
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.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
So Carl is sitting in jail, he's just confessed to
this crime, and the police officers go to a local
university and gather a bunch of bones.
Speaker 1 (19:34):
From the science lab human bones.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
And they bring this bag of bones into the jail
and they say, we found Denise Haraway's skull where you
said it was, 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.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
Carl's terrified he can't tell him a thing. I mean,
what the fuck is this.
Speaker 4 (19:58):
I've never seen this before, Lara, this is just beyond
the pale.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Carl and Tommy were tried together on September twenty fourth,
nineteen eighty five. At trial, prosecutors called a mcinally'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.
(20:33):
As the centerpiece of the trial, 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
(20:57):
got proof. They said that Tommy and Carl's confession 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, he said Denise was
(21:20):
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 been wearing, so the
(21:41):
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 did own a blouse
with blue flowers and a lacey ruffled collar. Also after
(22:05):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
Going into trial, the police and prosecutors have 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
(22:40):
no explanation for why both Tommy and Carl independently had
described Denise's missing blouse the same way.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
That anchor ended up taking both Tommy and Carl down.
On day thirteen of the trial, the jury returned a verdict.
Both men were guilty of murdering Denise Harroway. Shortly afterwards,
the judge sentenced Tommy Ward and Carl Fontana to death.
Speaker 5 (23:08):
The district attorney got a conviction on his boys because
the description of the shirt that supposedly no one knew
at the time of their confessions. I knew that Tommy
and Carl was but having tom and Carl both to
say something about that shirt that was a pretty hard
thing to get passed.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
These men were sentenced to death on the basis of
a single fact, a description of a blouse. Tommy and
Carl 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
(23:49):
know information and the suspect leads them to it, that's
a red flag for a reliable confession.
Speaker 1 (23:59):
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 sure looked that way,
at least at first, decades would pass before we found
out the truth. There's so much more to this case,
more than we can tell you today. So join us
(24:20):
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
Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company Number
one Special thanks to our executive producers Jason Flamm and
(24:42):
Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by senior producer
An Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane.
Our show is mixed by Genie Montalvo. John Colbert is
our intrepid intern. Our music was composed by Jay Ralph.
You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura
and I Writer, and you can follow me.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
On Twitter at Sdrizzen.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
For more information on the show, visit wrongfulconvictionpodcast 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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