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