The Dreams of Ada

5.0 stars - “The Dreams of Ada” by Robert Mayer was published several years ago, but garnered renewed interest with the publication of John Grisham’s “The Innocent Man” and the release of the Netflix documentary by the same name that also delved into the same subject matter as “Dreams”. The author does an excellent job of providing in-depth coverage of the investigation into the kidnapping and murder of Denise Haraway and the subsequent arrest and trial of two local men, Tommy Ward and Dennis Fontenot. The author lays out all of the evidence in a way that the reader is able to make up his or her own mind about whether the defendants were guilty or innocent. This is so different from what the authors of books and articles do today when writing about an event in that they advocate a position rather than just allowing readers to decide for themselves what happened. The access the author had to Tommy Ward’s attorney’s investigator really added a new dimension to the book in that alternative suspects and evidence were presented to the reader that the attorney had to decide whether to use at trial. The author also published the two defendants’ confessions verbatim so that the reader got a better idea of what the defense attorneys had to overcome when attempting to get an acquittal. I absolutely loved this book and would put it with “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote as one of the top two true crime books I have ever read.

<b>“Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the High Court he had never reached? He raised his hands and spread out all his fingers. But the hands of one of the men closed round his throat, just as the other drove the knife deep into his heart and turned it twice.”</b><br />- Franz Kafka, <i>The Trial</i><br /><br /><b>“Ada is…pecan country; on the outskirts are commercial pecan orchards; in the grassy yards of many houses are one or more pecan trees. In the fall, when the pecans are ripe, the adults knock them off the trees with long poles. The children gather the fallen ones from the ground. The nuts not intended for commercial use are taken to the pecan cracker. There, in the small white building, the pecans are dumped into the funnel-like tops of machines…One by one the hard pecans fall into moving gears. The top set of gears cracks open the largest pecans. Smaller pecans fall through, untouched, to another set of gears. These mesh closer and crack apart the smaller pecans. Still some escape and fall again: to another set of gears. These gears mesh tighter still; like steel claws they crack apart even the smallest pecans. Few pecans are too small, few shells too hard, to be cracked and broken…”</b><br />- Robert Mayer, <i>The Dreams of Ada</i> <br /><br /><b>“They say I killed a girl…They told me I killed her and that I’ll get the death penalty. But I didn't do it…I didn't confess…I told them a dream I had. It was only a dream. But they say it’s true…”</b><br />- Tommy Ward, convicted murderer of Donna Denise Haraway <br /><br />I practiced criminal law as a public defender for almost nine years. It is the kind of job that requires constant explanation to family, friends, and people you meet at parties. Whenever I told someone what I did, I received a variation of the same response: <i>How can you defend guilty people?</i> My answer, depending on how much I’d been drinking, coalesced around this reply: <i>How do you know they’re guilty?</i> <br /><br />Doing a job like that (and I won’t claim I was great at it), requires a lot of skepticism, a certainty that there is no certainty, and a willingness to accept that yes, a lot of the people you meet <i>are</i>, in fact, guilty.<br /><br />Also, though, a lot of people are not. <br /><br />Of course, if a crime isn’t serious, you will find that a lot of defendants would rather take a plea bargain for a shorter sentence than validate their constitutional rights in a slow-moving and uncertain process. Thus, a lot of the day-to-day work of criminal justice is comprised of folks holding their noses and pretending the system works just fine. <br /><br />Often, it takes a hard case – a tough murder – to show you the systemic flaws. <br /><br />The murder of Donna Denise Haraway was just such a case. <br /><br />Robert Mayer’s <i>The Dreams of Ada</i> covers it with meticulous research, expansive scope, and a keen sense of place. <br /><br />In April 1984, Haraway disappeared from her job at a convenience store in Ada, Oklahoma. Two young men, Karl Fontenot and Tommy Ward, were eventually accused of her rape and murder, despite a lack of hard evidence (including her body, which had not been found). Unfortunately, Karl and Tommy were not the freshest sandwiches in the picnic basket. They were brought into the police station and interrogated for hours and hours and hours. During that time, they never said the magic word (hint: it starts with "L" and ends with LAWYER), and so were at the mercy of law enforcement’s coercive techniques. <br /><br />At the end of the ceaseless badgering, both men copped to the crime, despite the fact that their stories were contradictory, implausible, and unsupported by physical evidence. The twist in this tale is that the “confession” of Ward was extracted after he mentioned a dream he’d had. That dream became reality for the police, and an unending nightmare for Ward. With so little to go on, the putative admissions of the defendants were the linchpin of the cases against them. <br /><br />(It is worth noting, for those who believe they’d never falsely confess: twenty-five percent of convictions overturned as a result of DNA testing were based on false confessions. It does happen. It does happen a lot). <br /><br />As crazy as the "dream confession" sounds, it was also the basis of another conviction in Ada, that of Ron Williams, accused of raping and killing a woman named Debbie Carter two years before Haraway’s death. Eventually, Williams had his conviction and death sentence, a story told by John Grisham in his estimable <i>The Innocent Man</i>. <br /><br />The lesson, I suppose, is stay clear of Ada if you have an active nocturnal subconscious. <br /><br /><i>The Dreams of Ada</i> is a sad, tragic book. There are no winners, just a string of losers: a young, missing woman; two men with stunted futures convicted by an overzealous prosecutor, with incompetent defense counsel; the multiple families mourning the losses of their sons and daughter; and justice itself, masquerading as infallible. You see, in <i>The Dreams of Ada</i>, how hard people will try, how far they will go, to protect the system, and their place within it. The men and women in the machinery do not matter. They are the pecans, poured into the cracker. It is the illusion that matters. The illusion that our scheme of justice is not riddled with fault lines that typically swallow the most vulnerable: the poor; minorities; the developmentally challenged; the young. <br /><br />Mayer does a fantastic job with this material. There's a real feel for the town and its small-time dreamers. It's like <i>Friday Night Lights</i> filtered through <i>Dateline</i> and mixed with <i>CSI</i>, if every cast-member of <i>CSI</i> used the constitution to wipe their noses. More than that, he makes a huge effort at explaining all the steps along the way, without dumbing anything down. For instance, at one point, he takes us all the way back to 1909, to tell the story of the first no-body murder case in Oklahoma. <br /><br />The best way to explain <i>The Dreams of Ada</i> is to say it is absorbing. When I read it, it enveloped me. It also infuriated me. <br /><br />Nothing about the case against Tommy and Karl feels right. The story they told was ridiculous, and it kept changing. The cops kept searching the area where they said they buried the body and found nothing. They said they burned her. They said they stabbed her. Years later, after the trial, Haraway’s body was found by hunters. She had died from a single gunshot. No bone-scarring from a knife. No signs of burning. The confession was a dream, not just of Tommy and Kirk, but of a law enforcement organization bent on attaining a conviction. <br /><br />Innocent people are jailed. Innocent people have been executed. Those exonerees who manage the Sisyphean task of overturning their convictions typically have a lot of help, help that often comes in the form of outside interest. The West Memphis Three, for example, needed the Dixie Chicks and Peter Jackson. The case of Tommy Ward and Kirk Fontenot never really became a cause célèbre. That may change now that <i>Netflix</i> has turned Grisham’s <i>The Innocent Man</i> into its latest installment of prestige true crime. <br /><br />Even with the publicity, it is unlikely that Ward and Fontenot will be sprung, barring a miracle. They have rotted in prison for decades, despite all the flaws and errors that put them there in the first place. Too much is stacked against them. Not just the careers and reputations of those who prosecuted them, but the fantasy that a guilty verdict is really as meaningful as we pretend.

It's always a little unsettling to say that I "loved" or even "enjoyed" a true-crime story. How can anyone love or enjoy true tales of abduction, rape, murder, torture or any number of heinous crimes? I'm not sure either of those words even actually describe my feelings about the book, so I'll just say I was absorbed in the story. <br /><br />*Some spoilers for those who aren't aware of this case* - In 1984, a young woman named Donna Denice Haraway was allegedly abducted one evening from the convenience store in Ada, Oklahoma where she worked. A witness, driving up to the store, saw two men walking a woman out of the store and into a pickup truck. Based on descriptions of the men, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot were later arrested and convicted of her kidnapping and murder, even though her body had not been located even by the time they went to trial. Both men had confessed to the murder, although Tommy Ward insisted that his confession was merely a dream that he had told the police, and Karl Fontenot stated that his confession was only given due to interrogation tactics. Neither confession matched the actual details of what was later determined to have happened. <br /><br />Much of the book deals with the trials of these two men, and although this was a little tedious, I also found it interesting and typical of what we see at times in regard to some lawyers and their tactics and antics both in the courtroom and in preparation for trial. There were horrible missteps within the Ada police department, some intentional and some not, and there were also what seemed to be prejudicial actions by the court itself. One such action was glaring and incredulous to many, in that both men were convicted of murder although no body had been found, so there was no proof the woman was actually dead. <br /><br />Although it may seem from my comments above that by the end I was convinced that both men were innocent, but that's not the situation. I thought the author did a good job of presenting both sides of the case, the details, the evidence or lack thereof, and the pain of the family members of all. I found myself consistently going back and forth on whether I thought the defendants were guilty or innocent. I would never even assume to make that judgement anyway, as I wasn't there, I don't know all the facts, and as I indicated above, neither the defense team nor the prosecution team seemed to be above twisting things to suit their purpose. But the author did a good job giving us the details as he found them.<br /><br />For those who don't know the outcome (and I didn't before I read the book), I won't give anything else away. Make your own decision on guilt or innocence, if you will. But certainly make your own decision about whether you liked the book or not. I thought it was...absorbing. <br /><br />

Two significant books about the same miscarriage of justice are set in the same Oklahoma town (Ada) and concern the same scapegoat (Ron Williamson), who was unfairly sent to jail for a local murder. One of those books was THE INNOCENT MAN by John Grisham (2006); this one, by Robert Mayer, was first published in 1987. <br /><br />THE DREAMS OF ADA is all about the downside of a bad rep in a small town. Ada isn't a very large town (population about 16,000 during the time these unfortunate events take place), and even though it boasts a public four-year college, it does not seem to rank very high in jurisprudence. This book is a little more detailed; John Grisham's, unsurprisingly, shows its sympathy more obviously (and was the celebrated author's first nonfiction book). Either -- or both -- are well worth reading, though I prefer this one: it offers more depth and analysis. <br /><br />Personally I intend never to set foot inside Ada, Oklahoma, if I can help it.<br />

3 1/2 stars rounded up <br /><br />On April 28, 1984, Donna Denice Haraway vanished from McAnally's, a convenience store in the small town of Ada, OK. Three men arrived at the store and saw a young couple leaving. When the men entered the store, they found that the clerk, Denice, is missing and the cash drawer was open and nearly empty. The police immediately tried to locate the light-colored, older model pickup that was seen leaving the area. This is just the beginning of a case that will haunt Ada for years. <br /><br />Two young men, Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot, were charged with Denice's death, though her body had not been found at the time of their initial trials. Though the men insisted on their innocence, they also provided damning video statements admitting their guilt. There were some problems with the confessions, though. Initially, Odell Titsworth, a Native American, was implicated as the driving force behind the crime. However, he had a broken arm at the time, and had been unable to take part in the alleged abduction, rape, and murder of Denice Haraway. Ward was provided with an alibi by relatives. <br /><br />There was photographic proof that Ward and Fontenot had short hair at the time of Denice's disappearance, while the suspects were described as having long hair. There were several other men who were identified as possible suspects in place of Ward and Fontenot, including a pair (given pseudonyms in the book for legal reasons) who appeared to be very good suspects. Then there was Denice's body - when it was found, it was discovered that she had been shot, not stabbed like Ward and Fontenot had claimed in their confessions. <br /><br />Mayer's book makes a compelling argument for the innocence of Ward and Fontenot. I'm really amazed that Fontenot was even convicted due to the weakness of the witness identification (or complete lack of it). <a href="https://goodreads.com/author/show/721.John_Grisham" title="John Grisham" rel="noopener">John Grisham</a> wrote a non-fiction book, <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/5345.The_Innocent_Man_Murder_and_Injustice_in_a_Small_Town" title="The Innocent Man Murder and Injustice in a Small Town by John Grisham" rel="noopener">The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town</a>, based on an eerily similar case in Ada involving many of the same players. Fortunately, the two men in that case, Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, were cleared. Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot remain in jail, though they are no longer on death row. <br /><br />Why the 3 1/2 star rating? The book's focus is on Tommy Ward and his family. We get to know all of them - Miz Ward (the family matriarch), Tommy Ward, and his seven siblings, especially Tricia, his oldest sister. Karl Fontenot shows up periodically for what I would call "cameos." He's not a terribly likeable character, and I never really cared about him. There is slight emphasis on the Haraways and Denice Haraway's family. They and Denice never really come to life at all. They are just names. We actually see more of Tommy Ward's defense team than we do of the victim's family. <br /><br />I have the Kindle edition of this book and I have noticed some typos in it - It's Lovelady, not Love Lady, and Mercury Grand Marquis, not "Mercury Marquee" (seriously?). Better proofreading would have helped. <br /><br />Overall, a good, interesting book and a quick read, but missing something. It's basically a book about Tommy Ward and his family.

I read this book before "the Innocent Man" by John Grisham came out. Mayer actually wrote the Dreams of Ada quite a while ago (the 80s I think), but it took Grisham's work of popular non-fiction to draw attention to Mayer's book. (Describing a different wrongful conviction in the SAME SMALL OKLAHOMA TOWN!!) And Mayer's book is an intense book indeed. Mayer describes the disappearance of a young girl, and the wrongful convictions of two Ada outcatsts for her "murder." His writing is very good, and you will NOT get bored.<br /><br />But unlike the "Innocent Man," the accused in Mayer's book are never exonerated. At least one of them still sits on death row today. This book is a disturbing testament to how the presumption of innocence has been lost. How do we find it again? Will these two lost souls EVER have their names cleared?

What a fascinating read. Such a good insight into our legal system and how dichotomous thinking can be the most detrimental thing for all involved.

In 1984, in the “town” of Ada, Oklahoma, Denice Haraway left her job at a convenience store/gas station with a man (they simply looked like a couple). When the people who saw them leave went inside, the clerk (Denice) was no where to be found. It appeared that the place had also been robbed. It was only later that they realized the woman they saw leaving was the clerk. <br /><br />When composite sketches brought Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot to the attention of the police, they were brought in and questioned. When both confessed on camera, that pretty much sealed the deal. It wasn’t long before they recanted – said they thought their confessions (given under pressure) would easily be exposed as lies. But, despite a LOT of inconsistencies in those confessions, the two were arrested and charged. <br /><br />I didn’t know the outcome of this. I may have when I heard about the book, but by the time of reading it now, I didn’t remember. I don’t want to say too much if anyone wants to read the book to see what happened and not find out things ahead of time. Even behind my spoiler tag, I haven’t specifically said, but I expect one might be able to figure it out, so you are warned! <br /><br /><input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="7b06811f-cf36-44a7-9d01-816f4cd63100" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="7b06811f-cf36-44a7-9d01-816f4cd63100">Wow, I couldn’t believe it! Wow, I’m appalled! And to this day… Ugh!</label> There were parts in the book that were a little more dry – sections that included things written by Tommy (he’s not very literate), and other legal details – but overall, it was interesting, particularly once they had the private investigator on the case. And suspenseful during the trials. This was originally published in 1987, but a new edition (with a new afterword) was published in 2006; the 2006 is the one I read.

This story was related to the Innocent Man by John Grisham that I previously reviewed. Its about another set of men that the same prosecutors and detectives decided were guilty of rape and murder despite a lack of evidence AND evidence to the contrary. Like the "confession" in the Innocent man, the detectives convinced two poor men with less than average intelligence that a crime had been committed the way that they apparently believed. Initially the detectives got the two men to implicate a third, but it was literally impossible that the third man was involved in the rape and murder because he had broken his arm in a fight with Ada's finest only two dates before the crime occurred. The detectives were undeterred by that inaccuracy-despite the fact that the third gentlemen was purportedly the aggressor who actually killed the woman. The detectives left the third man in jail claiming he had been arrested on an unrelated charge.<br /><br />The detectives refused to follow up on any other leads. The crime itself was a kidnapping and murder of a convenience story clerk. The detectives literally ignored the string of kidnapping/murders of other convenience story clerks and the evidence that indicated that the defendants could not have done it. In the end, not a SINGLE part of the dream confessions were true..the woman had been shot in the head and left in the woods-not stabbed and left in the field, as the defendants "confessed." Neither the prosecutors nor the detectives cared. <br /><br />There are so many disturbing aspects of this story, I had to wait awhile before I could review it. It scares me that the detectives and prosecution want a certain set of people to be guilty, they ignore the truth and valid evidence and let a SERIAL KILLER roam free. Just like in the Innocent Man, the mob mentality of people who refused to think for themselves prevailed. <br /><br />The main difference between this book and the Innocent Man is that this really is an epic failure of the system. The defendants are still in jail, despite the fact that it is abundantly obvious that neither of the defendants could have committed this crime. The difference? THese defendants were sentenced to life, not to be executed. They dont get the automatic appeals and extra review processes that those on death row get. Who would ever think it's actually better to be sentenced to death, then to life in prison, if you are an innocent man.<br /><br />After I finished the book, I started pondering if the death penalty SHOULD be abolished given all the checks and balances in place. I truly believed that the defendants would walk free if they were afforded more appeals. THere is just too much evidence that they could not have committed this crime. But I guess the greater question I have now is-should it matter how the court system ends a life before you are afforded the appeals that those on death row are afforded? Isnt your life over whether you live it out in prison or are eventually executed after at least a decade, and maybe more, on death row? Shouldnt we have the same checks and balances in place for an innocent man sentenced to life in prison in his twenties? The abuse of power and mob mentality apparently rampant in Ada, Oklahoma ended these men's lives...just in a different way.<br /><br />The Innocent Man left me angry. The Dreams of Ada left me feeling feeling sad and hopeless and like our system really doesnt work.

This case is very close to my heart as I am related to the victim. I can appreciate the detail spent describing the trials that the Ward family has gone through, but it consumes the entire book. Not once did the author even ask to interview the Haraway family and continually portrayed them throughout the book as uncaring and as "high-society" snobs. Why would two men give seperate and similar accounts of what happened to Denice if they were not involved? These two sickos definately deserve to be where they are today.