A Comprehensive Timeline of the Murder Cases at the Heart of Netflix's The Innocent Man
:extract_cover():upscale()/2018/12/13/147/n/1922283/1eecd5205c13161c6e3e06.82103311_.jpg)
Netflix begins its latest stab at the true-crime documentary genre, The Innocent Man, with a telling quote from memoirist Anaïs Nin: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." The line rings true over and over again as the series progresses, bringing to light new, painful truths about the cases of two murdered women from Ada, OK: Debbie Carter, a waitress at a bar, and Denice Haraway, a convenience store clerk.
The brutal killings, which took place a few years apart in the 1980s, shocked the residents of the small town and eventually gained national attention when John Grisham's sole nonfiction book, The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, focused on the police investigation's glaring mishandling of both cases. Now Grisham has worked with director Clay Tweel to bring the stories to light via a docuseries, diving deep into the controversial sentencing of two sets of men (one pair were released after it was proven they didn't kill Carter, while the other men still languish in prison for Haraway's death).
If you want a clearer look at Netflix's six-part documentary series about the murders that shook Ada, or a comprehensive timeline of what happened, read on.
The Murder of Debbie Carter
- Dec. 7, 1982 — 21-year-old Debra "Debbie" Sue Carter drove home, where she lived alone, after working a late-night shift as a waitress at the Coachlight bar and restaurant in Ada. An unknown assailant knocked on her door and proceeded to force their way in, raping and strangling Carter with her own belt and the cord of an electrical blanket.
- Dec. 8, 1982 — The following morning, Carter was found dead by her friend. No suspects were pursued for quite some time, but the lead detective on the case, Dennis Smith, insinuated that the police knew who did it, but they just didn't have evidence.
- March 1983 — Ron Williamson, a man with multiple past arrests who happened to live nearby Carter's apartment, was interviewed by police investigators: Dennis Smith, Gary Rogers, Mike Baskin, and Chris Ross. According to an eyewitness named Glen Gore, Williamson was reportedly at the Coachlight the night of Carter's death and was seen harassing her before she left.
- June 1983 — Dennis Fritz, Williamson's close friend, was interviewed by police in connection to the murder, but no arrests were made.
Arrests and Convictions in the Debbie Carter Case
- Spring 1987 — The police asked Carter's mother, Peggy, if she'd sign off on allowing them to exhume her daughter's body. The police said it was because they were reexamining a bloody palm print that was found on the wall of Carter's apartment the morning after she was killed.
- May 8, 1987 — Williamson was arrested after telling the police that he had a dream of going to Carter's door, breaking in, and raping and killing her.
- September 1987 — Ricky Jo Simmons confessed to her rape and murder, but the police refused to accept his confession.
- Spring 1988 — The day before the prosecution would have had to drop the charges against Fritz, an inmate who he was paired with in prison years earlier came forward and said she heard him confess to the murder. The "jailhouse snitch" gave a two-hour taped interview including details about Carter's murder she allegedly heard from Fritz.
- April 1988 — During Fritz's trial, an analyst testified that 11 pubic hairs and two head hairs from the crime scene were "consistent" with Fritz's hair. "This means they match," the analyst explained. He also presented highly misleading findings about the semen they examined from the scene.
- April 12, 1988 — Fritz was convicted and sentenced to life in prison (he came within one vote of receiving the death penalty). Given how many years had passed between the murder and his trial, Fritz could no longer recall his whereabouts on that night. The district attorney argued that while Williamson masterminded the murder, Fritz was along for the ride.
- April 27, 1988 — Williamson's trial started, which included testimony from a woman named Andrea who claimed he broke into her house years before and raped her (she lived near Carter at the time, too).
- April 28, 1988 — The jury sentenced Williamson to the death penalty. The district attorney, Bill Peterson, made the case that Williamson got into a fight with Carter at the bar the night of her death, corroborated by eyewitness Gore. However, Williamson refuted this by saying he had an alibi; he said he was home the entire night and that his mom could vouch for his whereabouts. His mother had a receipt from renting movies they watched that night and also an entry in her journal since she kept fastidious notes about her daily life. Despite submitting both to the police, the journal and receipt ended up going mysteriously missing.
Justice For Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz
- 1994 — Williamson gave an interview in prison five years after his conviction, saying he thought Simmons committed the crime. The jail psychologist initially dismissed this as an alter ego of Williamson (he suffered from mental health problems). Although it was later proven that Simmons didn't kill Carter, Williamson never wavered in asserting his innocence.
- 1994 to 1999 — Fritz tried to appeal his sentencing multiple times but was denied. He later contacted the Innocence Project for help, which put him on the radar of author John Grisham (who went on to write The Innocent Man about the case). During these years, it was discovered that the physical evidence from the crime was going to be tested due to appeals filed by Williamson's legal team, so Fritz filed an injunction to ensure the evidence would not be consumed until the cases were joined and proper DNA testing was conducted.
- Spring 1999 — New DNA evidence came to light, suggesting Fritz and Williamson didn't actually kill Carter. It turns out the FBI spent decades overestimating the importance of hair in cases like this. For example, the analyst who testified in Fritz's trial about the hair — it's impossible to say definitively that strands of hair "match" because there's not enough empirical data regarding the frequency of specific class characteristics in human hair. On top of that, DNA testing revealed neither Fritz nor Williamson was a match for the sperm found at the crime scene.
- April 15, 1999 — Both Williamson and Fritz were set free and exonerated of their crimes. Williamson was within five days of being executed.
- 2003 — Williamson and Fritz sued the City of Ada and won a settlement of $500,000, but both felt many residents of the town still believed them to be guilty despite their freedom. They were also scared that the prosecutor, Peterson, and members of the Ada police force would try to bring them to trial again.
- 2009 — Williamson, who continued to suffer from psychiatric problems, died in his nursing home of cirrhosis at the age of 51. Fritz is still alive but now lives in a nursing home due to a traumatic brain injury he received after getting into a near-fatal car accident. He regularly spends time with his daughter, Elizabeth Clinton, who visits him as much as she can.
Who Actually Killed Debbie Carter?
- 2000 — Gore, the state's eyewitness for Williamson's and Fritz's trials, became the main suspect when it was discovered that his semen matched what was found at the crime scene (he was serving time for unrelated felonies during Williamson and Fritz's appeal trial). Gore had gone to school with Carter in Ada for all 12 years, but they weren't in the same group of friends. He also had a history of harassing Carter over the years, a fact that Carter's sisters told police (and which the police proceeded to ignore), and it was in fact him who had been arguing with Carter at the Coachlight the night of her death, not Williamson (who wasn't even there, seeing as he was home with his mother). Gore happened to find out he was a suspect while working in his prison's work release program and proceeded to steal an officer's car and escape. He was later apprehended, and the case moved forward with a trial.
- June 24, 2003 — He was the last person seen with Carter, and despite being interviewed by the police the night after her death, they never bothered to take his fingerprints, saliva, or hair samples. When the new trial for Gore began and the DNA was finally proven to be a match, the jury found him guilty. He was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
- August 2005 — Gore's death sentence was overturned.
- June 21, 2006 — A second trial for Gore was held, and this time he was sentenced to life without parole by Judge Tom Landrith, since the jury couldn't come to a unanimous decision about sentencing him to death (one woman didn't believe in the death penalty).
The Murder of Denice Haraway
- April 28, 1984 — Ada resident Denice Haraway disappeared from her night shift as a cashier at McAnally's gas station and convenience store. Witnesses in the parking lot — an older man and his nephew, who were stopping by to pick up change for a poker game — said they saw her being forced into a gray pickup truck by another man. An APB was put out.
- May 1984 — A clerk at a store down the road, Karen Wise, told police that she saw two suspicious men come into her store earlier the same night Haraway was abducted, and a newspaper published the composite sketches of the men based on Wise's description. Rumors started swirling about a number of Ada men who resembled the sketches, including Billy Charley and Tommy Ward.
The Confessions of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot
- Oct. 12, 1984 — Ward was first brought into the police station under false pretenses. The investigators, who were the same men who looked into the Carter murder, claimed they just wanted him to look at photos of suspects for them, since he was an Ada native, but instead ended up interrogating him about Haraway's disappearance. He denied killing her and having any involvement, but the police continued to hammer details about her death into him.
- Oct. 18, 1984 — Again, Ward was interrogated for hours (he was brought in around 10 a.m. and forced to stay until 6 p.m.) and even given a polygraph test. At the end of the day, the police recorded Ward's "bogus confession," as his defense team later argued, which was full of details about Haraway's death that the police had given him. He also implicated Odell Titsworth, a man who got in frequent trouble with the police, as well as Karl Fontenot.
- Oct. 19, 1984 — Fontenot (who has a learning disability) was interrogated and, like Ward, was forced to remain in the police station for hours upon hours. He eventually confessed that he, Ward, and Titsworth killed Haraway so she wouldn't tell the cops about their botched robbery of the convenience store. He said they got high beforehand and that Titsworth was the mastermind behind it all. Both Fontenot and Ward said Titsworth stabbed Haraway over and over again and that Titsworth held her down while Ward raped her. Following this confession, the police went to Titsworth's home to arrest him but realized he'd been in the hospital with a broken arm during the killing, and there was no way he would've been able to do the things they accused him of. They declined to arrest him.
- September 1985 — Fontenot and Ward were sentenced to life in prison for robbery, rape, and murder despite Haraway's body never being found.
- Jan. 20, 1986 — Almost five months after their sentencing, Haraway's skeleton and pieces of her bloodied clothing and shoes were discovered in a forest 30 miles east of Ada by a hunter passing through. After an examination, it was established that she was shot in the head and she was wearing an entirely different outfit than the one Ward and Fontenot described (there were no signs of stab wounds on her remains whatsoever).
- 1989 — Because the true nature of Haraway's murder had been revealed, Ward appealed to be retried in a different county (in an attempt to escape the opinions of Ada residents), but this time prosecutor Peterson convinced the jury that Ward simply remembered incorrectly and that they'd killed her with a gun rather than a knife. Ward and Fontenot remain in prison.
So, Who Really Killed Denice Haraway? And Where Are Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot Now?
The real killer(s) of Haraway, whoever they are, are still out there, if you subscribe to the belief that Ward and Fontenot did not commit the crime. Two other key suspects in Haraway's murder are brought up over the course of the documentary — Billy Charlie and Floyd Degraw (who is now in jail for an unrelated crime) — but no legal action ever moved forward with either of them. If you watch The Innocent Man all the way through, though, it's hard to believe that either Ward or Fontenot could still be in prison given the glaring lack of evidence.
Fontenot, who's in the midst of trying to appeal his sentencing, was advised not to comment on the documentary, but Ward — who's still in prison, too — sat down for a number of interviews with the documentary team. Ward explained that although admitting guilt and regret over her murder to the appeals committee would increase his chances of release, he would rather stay in jail than confess to something he didn't do (again).
For the most part, it seems like the pair were the victims of the same corrupt police practices that originally landed Fritz and Williamson in prison, especially the case built against them by Peterson and the amount of evidence the district attorney withheld from the jury (he alleged it was not done on purpose). According to Grisham, their conviction was "all about winning," not about the truth, nabbing the real killer, or what was right. As it stands now, the state is set to review Ward's latest postconviction filing at some point in 2019 (reminder: he's been in prison for 34 years at this point). Fontenot is still awaiting a response to his federal appeal.