Speaker 1: Welcome to wrongful conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I
Speaker 1: writer and I'm Steve Drecy. In nineteen eighty four, a
Speaker 1: woman from Ada, 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 Fontaneau. 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 too. It's our honor to be part of
Speaker 1: the fight to exonerate Tommy Ward and Carl Fonteneau. Here's
Speaker 1: hoping we can deliver a wake up call in this
Speaker 1: nightmare of a case.
Speaker 2: I'm John Grisham, author of a number of legal thrillers
Speaker 2: and one work of nonfiction. About fifteen years ago, I
Speaker 2: found myself in Ada, Oklahoma doing the research for a
Speaker 2: nonfiction book that was eventually titled The Innocent Man. It's
Speaker 2: just a truly fascinating case because there were no clues,
Speaker 2: there were no witnesses, there was no body, there was
Speaker 2: no corpse, there was no murder weapon, there was nothing
Speaker 2: for Tommy Willard confessed to the crime, and from that
Speaker 2: moment on he was a guilty man. The judge allowed
Speaker 2: this case to go forward without a body. Even on
Speaker 2: my most creative days, I'm not sure I could create
Speaker 2: stuff like this. Once I started researching Tommy's case Carl's case,
Speaker 2: I realized that there are thousands of innocent people in prison,
Speaker 2: and realized that before At that point I moved away,
Speaker 2: for the most part, from suspense intrigue thrillers to something
Speaker 2: still similar, but much more issue driven capital punishment, wrong
Speaker 2: for confiction, mass incarceration, the issues I care about in
Speaker 2: the criminal justice system and the injustices that we tolerate.
Speaker 2: When we could fix this stuff if we had the
Speaker 2: will to do it. So, the Tommy Willard Carl Fontina
Speaker 2: case had a profound impact on me as a writer.
Speaker 1: You know, Steve John Christian's right in this case, the
Speaker 1: truth really is stranger than fiction. This is one of
Speaker 1: the most bizarre kinds of false confessions you can imagine.
Speaker 3: This case is fascinating because it is about a dream
Speaker 3: that is converted by police officers into a confession. Cases
Speaker 3: like this are extremely rare.
Speaker 1: Right, I mean, how many dream cases do you know about?
Speaker 3: I've studied hundreds of false confessions and maybe there's a
Speaker 3: dozen of them.
Speaker 1: To our listeners. If you haven't heard this story, get ready.
Speaker 1: It's an incredible one. If you have read John Grisham's
Speaker 1: book or seen the Netflix series, we have some new
Speaker 1: developments to share with you.
Speaker 3: Because attorneys at the Center on Wrongful Convictions, the organization
Speaker 3: You and I Codirect, have uncovered new information that makes
Speaker 3: it clear that Tommy Ward is innocent, but.
Speaker 1: He's still in prison. He's been there for thirty five years.
Speaker 1: He needs to come home now, right now. Tommy's story
Speaker 1: starts in the town of Aida, a rural Oklahoma community
Speaker 1: of about seventeen thousand people. It's a Bible belt town
Speaker 1: where the churches are full but the factories are empty.
Speaker 1: In Aida, poverty can sometimes make justice seem like a
Speaker 1: faraway dream. In nineteen eighty four, Denise Harroway was one
Speaker 1: of Ada's seventeen thousand people. Denise was twenty four years old,
Speaker 1: a petite, blonde woman who'd recently gotten married. She was
Speaker 1: enrolled in college and helped pay tuition by working the
Speaker 1: evening shift by herself at mcinally's convenience store. But when
Speaker 1: customers walked into mcinally's at eight fifty pm on April
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, they found an open cash register and no
Speaker 1: attendant in sight. Denise had vanished. There'd be no sign
Speaker 1: of her for a year and a half. Ada police
Speaker 1: started investigating Denise's disappearance, and right away they suspected foul play.
Speaker 1: A customer who'd been at mcinally's earlier that evening told
Speaker 1: police he'd seen Denise leave the store with a strange
Speaker 1: man who drove her away in a pickup truck. Police
Speaker 1: also spoke to a female clerk at a different nearby
Speaker 1: convenience store. She reported that a few hours before Denise disappeared,
Speaker 1: two men came into her store. They were 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.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 1: The Ward family was poor. They lived on Ada's South Side,
Speaker 1: in the part of town that everyone knew was on
Speaker 1: the wrong side of the tracks. Growing up, there were
Speaker 1: eight kids in the house. Tommy was number seven. Everyone
Speaker 1: children included was expected to pitch in to keep the
Speaker 1: lights on and the rent paid. The older kids would work,
Speaker 1: the younger kids would spend hot Oklahoma summers walking along
Speaker 1: the highway searching for empty beer cans that they could
Speaker 1: turn in for a five cent deposit. The Wards were
Speaker 1: a law abiding family. When Tommy was a teenager, he'd
Speaker 1: been arrested a few times for petty crimes like public drunkenness,
Speaker 1: but nothing serious. The idea of him suddenly kidnapping Denise
Speaker 1: Haraway was pretty crazy. Despite this, police brought Tommy in
Speaker 1: for questioning just a few days after Denise's disappearance. Tommy
Speaker 1: told them he had nothing to do with Denise. In fact,
Speaker 1: he said, on the night she disappeared, he was at
Speaker 1: a keg party out of town, twenty five miles away.
Speaker 1: Police released Tommy and tracked down some other partygoers. Several
Speaker 1: of them confirmed Tommy's alibi, but police also caught wind
Speaker 1: of a rumor that had been spreading around town. Tommy
Speaker 1: supposedly told others at the party that he'd done something terrible.
Speaker 1: That one word was apparently enough to make the cops
Speaker 1: think that Tommy had killed Denise. They bring Tommy back
Speaker 1: to the station months later, on October eighteenth, nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: for what would become nine hours of interrogation. Who killed
Speaker 1: that girl? Did you kill her? You thought she was pretty,
Speaker 1: didn't you? The questions come fast and furious, but Tommy
Speaker 1: still denies having anything to do with Denise's disappearance. He
Speaker 1: reminds his interrogators of his alibi, but they administer a polygraph.
Speaker 1: They falsely tell Tommy that it proved he'd been lying.
Speaker 1: That's when the interrogation turns nightmarish. Tommy tells the cops
Speaker 1: that maybe he failed the polygraph because he was nervous.
Speaker 1: In fact, he says knowing he was a suspect in
Speaker 1: this case had upset him so much that he had
Speaker 1: a bad dream. Tell us about your dream, the police say,
Speaker 1: and Tommy does. In the dream, Tommy was out by
Speaker 1: Ada's local power plants, sitting in a pickup truck with
Speaker 1: three people he didn't know, two men and a woman.
Speaker 1: One of the men tried to kiss the woman and
Speaker 1: Tommy told him to back off. Then Tommy said he
Speaker 1: wanted to go home. You're already home, the man answered. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: Tommy was standing at his kitchen sink trying to scrub
Speaker 1: a dark liquid off his hands. The cops pounce your dream,
Speaker 1: They say, matches the facts of the case. There's a
Speaker 1: pickup truck in your dream, and we believe Denise was
Speaker 1: kidnapped in a pickup truck. It doesn't make sense to
Speaker 1: say this was just a dream, they say. You know
Speaker 1: what does make sense, you and these other two men
Speaker 1: killing Denise. So where did the story in Tommy's dream
Speaker 1: come from? Turns out, a few days before this nine
Speaker 1: hour interrogation, police had briefly talked to.
Speaker 3: Tommy, and during that questioning, the police officers said to Tommy,
Speaker 3: use your imagination for just a moment. This girl was
Speaker 3: taken out of a grocery store at night. Two guys
Speaker 3: come in and got her, and they'd gotten a pickup
Speaker 3: and they drove away a beautiful girl like that. Maybe
Speaker 3: they raped her before they killed her. That is a
Speaker 3: direct quote from these detectives. The police officers had planted
Speaker 3: the core ideas of this crime in Tommy's mind, including
Speaker 3: the pickup truck, which remembers a detail that a witness
Speaker 3: had already told them about, and Tommy began to have
Speaker 3: nightmares about the story the police told him.
Speaker 1: The interrogation continues for hours. Police tell Tommy he'll get
Speaker 1: the 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 eight of
Speaker 1: men named Carl Fontaneau and Odell Titsworth. He dreamed that
Speaker 1: they'd robbed mcinelli'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.
Speaker 2: Tommy, have the power plant? Where nay share webs?
Speaker 4: Why did you go to the para plant? It's pulled over.
Speaker 1: Tommy finds himself repeating the whole story on camera, not
Speaker 1: as a dream but as cold hard reality.
Speaker 2: It was the first person in the store. Did he
Speaker 2: have any guy weapons?
Speaker 3: They told me that he was going to kill her.
Speaker 4: That's where got out to bar.
Speaker 2: You understand how serious this investigation is.
Speaker 1: Incredibly, the police have transformed Tommy's dream into a murder confession.
Speaker 3: Let's talk a little bit about dream statements. You know,
Speaker 3: there comes a point in every interrogation where the police
Speaker 3: officers have tried to get the suspect to confess, and
Speaker 3: the suspect just says, well, I have no memory of
Speaker 3: committing this crime, or I can't help you. I wasn't there.
Speaker 3: And then either the police officers suggest to the suspect,
Speaker 3: have you had any dreams about this case? Or the
Speaker 3: suspect will suggest on his own accord, you know I
Speaker 3: have had some dreams about this, and what that does
Speaker 3: is it gives police officers something to exploit. It allows
Speaker 3: the conversation to continue, and the police officers end up
Speaker 3: converting what was a dream into a confession.
Speaker 1: During Tommy's videotaped statement, the only lingering reference to any
Speaker 1: of this being a dream comes at the very end.
Speaker 1: Is there anything else you want to add? Police ask him.
Speaker 1: I thought it was just a dream, Tommy quietly says.
Speaker 3: He always thought that the police officers would recognize this
Speaker 3: is not reality. Go out, investigate the case, and you're
Speaker 3: going to find out that this is all a bunch
Speaker 3: 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.
Speaker 4: I was stationed on an aircraft current when my sister
Speaker 4: called and started telling me that they got Tommy for this.
Speaker 5: It was not a good day.
Speaker 1: That's Melvin Ward, one of Tommy's older brothers. He was
Speaker 1: in the service when he found out that Tommy had
Speaker 1: been arrested, and he flew back to Ada right away.
Speaker 5: I did not believe it.
Speaker 4: I thought, well, you know, He's going to get awful
Speaker 4: this because I know he didn't do it.
Speaker 5: It's not Tomy's character to do something like this. He
Speaker 5: was not a bad kid. He'd never heard anybody.
Speaker 4: He'd stayed out of trouble other than a few public drunks.
Speaker 4: Tommy would have been the kind of person that if
Speaker 4: somebody was attacking this lady, he would have been there
Speaker 4: to protect her.
Speaker 5: That's Tommy.
Speaker 4: Tommy did nothing for them to go after him like
Speaker 4: they did, other than we living on an other side's track.
Speaker 4: We was not in the proper society at the time.
Speaker 4: They believed that Tommy was guilty and they was going
Speaker 4: to pull no stops to get into confess, and that's
Speaker 4: not proper police work at all.
Speaker 1: Tommy wasn't the only person from the wrong side of
Speaker 1: the tracks who got ensnared in this case. Within hours,
Speaker 1: police arrest Tommy's dream accomplices, Carl Fontano and Odell Titsworth
Speaker 1: and questioned them both. Carl was twenty years old, a
Speaker 1: friend of Tommy's who was seriously intellectually disabled and pretty
Speaker 1: much alone in the world.
Speaker 4: Carl was a nice guy. I know my mom liked him,
Speaker 4: and my mom bless her heart. She was a good
Speaker 4: judge character. At the time, she was working at one
Speaker 4: of the convenience stores down there in Ada, and the
Speaker 4: kid would come in and he didn't have much of
Speaker 4: the family gave him a sandwich from the store every
Speaker 4: now and then. And I think Tommy met Carl by
Speaker 4: he was sleeping on my sister's front porch. Tommy kind
Speaker 4: of took Carl on his wing and they become friends.
Speaker 1: To understand how Carl's interrogation went down, you need to
Speaker 1: know that a few months earlier, Carl had witnessed his
Speaker 1: own mother's death. The two of them had been driving
Speaker 1: on the highway when their car broke down. Carl's mom
Speaker 1: got out and headed for a nearby restaurant to call
Speaker 1: for help, but as she was crossing the highway, she
Speaker 1: was hit and killed by another car. Carl felt terrible guilt.
Speaker 1: He blamed himself for not being the one who'd gone
Speaker 1: for help. It was that sense of guilt, along with
Speaker 1: his disability, that police used to manipulate Carl during his interrogation.
Speaker 1: The police suggested that Carl should make amends for his
Speaker 1: mom's death by saying he was involved in Denise's death.
Speaker 3: Can you imagine the trauma have been experiencing. I mean,
Speaker 3: he saw his mother die. The police officers used that
Speaker 3: prior traumatic event to help break down Carl into accepting
Speaker 3: responsibility for Denise's death, and he caved much sooner than
Speaker 3: Tommy did.
Speaker 1: Just like with Tommy, police took a videotaped statement from Carl.
Speaker 1: In it, he agreed that he helped Odell Titsworth and
Speaker 1: Tommy Ward rape and stab Denise.
Speaker 4: Carl, let me ask you this, at any point in time,
Speaker 4: did you stab her?
Speaker 3: No? I did not, nor did Tommy. Odell done all
Speaker 3: this day right there?
Speaker 2: Did Joe try to stop him from stander?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 1: Carl even said they burned her body afterwards?
Speaker 2: Who spread the Gasdell? He poured all the gas on
Speaker 2: her hair side, and we threw the match on her
Speaker 2: and walked out, And then I asked, just burn up
Speaker 2: on the inside.
Speaker 1: Based on this confession, Carl was charged with Denise's death,
Speaker 1: right alongside Tommy.
Speaker 5: Knowing that Tommy was innocent. That made me know that
Speaker 5: Carl was innocent.
Speaker 4: Tommy, it took him almost nine hours to break him down,
Speaker 4: and Carl he was a little bit more acceptible to
Speaker 4: their interrogation.
Speaker 5: I think it higher in forty five minutes.
Speaker 1: But the supposed third guy, Odell Titsworth, well, he's another story.
Speaker 1: Odell 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: Fontineau say. He insists I had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: Denise's disappearance. Now Odell 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 Titsworth 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.
Speaker 4: This is one point I've always trying to wrap around
Speaker 4: people's head. If they were not being fed information, how
Speaker 4: did both them boys come up with a totally innocent
Speaker 4: man's name.
Speaker 5: 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.
Speaker 3: So Carl is sitting in jail, he's just confessed to
Speaker 3: this crime, and the police officers go to a local
Speaker 3: university and gather a bunch of bones.
Speaker 1: From the science lab human bones.
Speaker 3: And they bring this bag of bones into the jail
Speaker 3: and they say, we found Denise Harway's skull where you
Speaker 3: said it was. But we can't find the rest of
Speaker 3: her body. And Carl can't answer the question. He says,
Speaker 3: I wish I could help, but I don't know where
Speaker 3: her body is.
Speaker 1: Carl's terrified. He can't tell him a thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: what the fuck is this?
Speaker 3: I've never seen I've seen this before, Laura, this is
Speaker 3: just beyond the pale.
Speaker 1: Carl and Tommy were tried together on September twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty five. At trial, prosecutors called a mcinally's customer
Speaker 1: named James Moyer. Moyer testified that he'd seen someone who
Speaker 1: looked like Tommy Ward in the store an hour before
Speaker 1: Denise disappeared. That's pretty thin evidence, but the prosecutors had more.
Speaker 1: As the centerpiece of the trial, they played Tommy and
Speaker 1: Carl's confession tapes for the jury. Prosecutors conceded that sure,
Speaker 1: Tommy and Carl got a lot of things wrong, Sure
Speaker 1: their confessions were false when it came to Odell's involvement,
Speaker 1: and sure the facts that they seemed to get right,
Speaker 1: like the pickup truck, had been fed to them by
Speaker 1: their interrogators. But set all that aside. Prosecutors said, we've
Speaker 1: got proof. They said that Tommy and Carl's confessions are reliable,
Speaker 1: a real ace in the hole. So what was that proof?
Speaker 1: Prosecutors argued that Tommy and Carl's confessions could be trusted
Speaker 1: because they both accurately described what Denise was wearing the
Speaker 1: night she disappeared. During Tommy's confession, he said Denise was
Speaker 1: wearing a button up blouse with little blue roses on
Speaker 1: it and lace on the collar and sleeves. Similarly, Carl
Speaker 1: had said she was wearing a button up blouse with
Speaker 1: ruffles on the collar and elastic on the sleeves. Now,
Speaker 1: prosecutors said, at the time of the confessions, the police
Speaker 1: had no idea what Denise had been wearing, so the
Speaker 1: interrogators couldn't have fed details about the blouse to Tommy
Speaker 1: and Carl. The only explanation for Tommy and Carl's matching
Speaker 1: stories was that they had both actually been with Denise
Speaker 1: that night. To really clinch the case, Denise's sister took
Speaker 1: the stand and revealed that Denise did to own a
Speaker 1: blouse with blue flowers and a lacey, ruffled collar. Also
Speaker 1: after Denise disappeared, the sister reported that that blouse was
Speaker 1: missing from Denise's closet. Denise's sister said she hadn't told
Speaker 1: police about the missing blouse until after Tommy and Carl confessed.
Speaker 3: Going into trial, the police and prosecutors have two confessions
Speaker 3: that are at odds with the objectively noble facts of
Speaker 3: the crime. There's no corroboration of this confession and it's
Speaker 3: filled with errors, But the police have one fact that
Speaker 3: is the anchor of their case. The defense counsel had
Speaker 3: no explanation for why both Tommy and Carl independently had
Speaker 3: described Denise's missing blouse the same way.
Speaker 1: That anchor ended up taking both Tommy and Carl down.
Speaker 1: On day thirteen of the trial, the jury returned a verdict.
Speaker 1: Both men were guilt of murdering Denise Harroway. Shortly afterwards,
Speaker 1: the judge sentenced Tommy Ward and Carl Fontana to death.
Speaker 4: The district attorney got a conviction on his boys because
Speaker 4: the description of the shirt that supposedly no one knew
Speaker 4: at the time of their confessions. I knew that Tommy
Speaker 4: and Carl was innocent, but having tom and Carl both
Speaker 4: to say something about that shirt that was a pretty
Speaker 4: hard thing to get passed.
Speaker 3: These men were sentenced to death on the basis of
Speaker 3: a single fact, a description of a blouse. Tommy and
Speaker 3: Carr were able to lead police to evidence that they
Speaker 3: didn't already have. And these are the kinds of facts
Speaker 3: that you and I look at when we assess the
Speaker 3: reliability of a confession, Laura. And if police don't know
Speaker 3: information and the suspect leads them to it, that's a
Speaker 3: red flag for a reliable confession.
Speaker 1: How could tom 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 Flamm and
Speaker 1: Kevin Wardis. Our production team is headed by senior producer
Speaker 1: A Pope, along with producers Joshi Hammer and Jess Shane.
Speaker 1: Our show is mixed by Genie 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: and I Writer, and you can follow me.
Speaker 3: On Twitter at Sdrizzen.
Speaker 1: For more information on the show, visit wrongfulconvictionpodcast dot com.
Speaker 1: Be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction,
Speaker 1: on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at
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