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A Comprehensive Timeline of the Murder Cases at the Heart of Netflix's The Innocent Man
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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.
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