Has anyone read Grisham's true-crime book "The Innocent Man"?

[Catch22Dem]

About the 1982 murder of Debra Sue Carter in Ada, OK? What a dark and powerful story of lying corrupt officials, and several innocent men in prison. Unfuckingbelievable! I am 100% convinced that the state of Oklahoma, my home, killed Ron Williamson. He may not have died at the hands of the executioner in McAlester, but the state killed him nonetheless.

What a heartbreaking story. I hope you get a chance to read it. The book was an xmas present from my wife. Gee thanks, honey, now I'm going to obsess over this horrible tale for a long time. :P

[RoyGBiv]

1. Yes ...

I was born in Ada and lived there for 30 years. My mom was friends with one of Ron's sisters. She also knew Ron and, like pretty much everyone who knew him, was terrified of him. Ron was no innocent lamb and, according to several people I know, clearly did rape at least one woman, threatened many, and was extremely violent. He was extremely mentally ill. I feel more sympathy for Ron's family than him. They suffered incredibly both from Ron's behavior and the treatment he received by the city of Ada and the state of Oklahoma.

I also believe the state had a part in killing Williamson, or at least hastened his death somewhat, mostly through neglect. Hard to do as much drinking and as many hard drugs as he did and not permanently damage your body, though. I'm more prone to say Reagan killed him. The man's psychological problems were becoming acute at the same time Reagan was slashing funds for psychiatric assistance programs.

Read _Dreams of Ada_ too, back when it was first published, before they found Donna Haraway's body even. I worked for 2 years at the convenience store from which she was abducted. Creepy. People who lived near the place were certain Ward and Fontenot were the wrong guys. They'd even name the people who they thought did do it, one of whom looked a helluva a lot like Tommy Ward and came into that store several times a week. My grandma taught Karl Fontenot when he was in high school, and I knew him as a kid. He had extreme learning disabilities and was socially inept. Upon hearing of Fontenot's arrest initially, Grandma said she thought he may well have been involved because he would pretty much do anything anyone told him to do if they would at least pretend to be his friend.

I've posted various comments about the book elsewhere, some of which are based on opinions I've modified a bit since. There are glaring errors in the book, things I think make Grisham's talent at writing "non-fiction" suspect. To an extent, it's a novelization of real events. One thing that made my hair stand on end when reading it, strange as this may sound, is that a report my mother wrote is reproduced in part in the book. She was the secretary for one of the psychologists mentioned in the book, and he never wrote his own reports ... just gave her notes from which to create one. He didn't actually work in that capacity, rather for the state as a counselor for vocational rehabilitation. He evaluated Williamson because he knew the family and was trying to help. Grisham should have explored this rather than write him off as a bad psychologist.

Overall, it's a good book that pretty much nails Bill Peterson, the DA. He was a semi-regular customer at a place I managed for several years. Hypocritical asshole about sums it up. (Better be careful, or he'll come across this and try to sue me. Fucker. I still have a bit of evidence of something he'd rather not be made public.) He needed to dig a bit deeper into the Ada PD to get a better picture. A faction of it functions just like he describes, but another faction clearly doesn't. I complained a lot about the place and its police force when I lived there -- and still will on a moment's notice -- but a lot of good cops existed. It wasn't the "Mayberry" kind of cop shop nor town he paints in his narrative.

[Catch22Dem]

5. RoyG, I knew you were a fellow Okie, but DAMN!!!

This must have been a really strange book for you to read? It would be like reading a piece of your own history assuming you're around the same age and can readily recall all the events.

Yeah, I got the same impression from the book that Ron was no angel, but no one deserves the treatment he received at the hands of those sworn to protect us.

[RoyGBiv]

8. Oh, yeah, it was weird ...

As mentioned in another note, reading my mom's words in the book -- her writing style, even in technical report type things, is unmistakable to me -- was really weird. The psychologist for whom she worked used to take me out for ice cream when I was young ... introduced me to the joys of chocolate chip ice cream at Braum's. :-)

Ron is a generation older than me, and I never knew him directly, but I know a lot of the people in the book, some very well. I went to the same church Ron's family attended and remember all this from back then. The church is also somewhat misrepresented in the book. Grisham implies some things about the church that didn't apply in the 70's/80's. The pastor when Williamson was released from jail *was* a jerk, but the previous pastor was a really good guy who tried to help everyone, including Ron and his family.

And, no, Williamson didn't deserve the treatment he received. He needed to be in a mental hospital for a long, long time, not a prison.

[SoonerShankle]

2. I'm currently reading it...

I grew up in Tecumseh, about an hour from Ada. My brother actually attended ECU in the late 80s. So this book brings "home" to me in a very different way. The corruption and absolute certainty of the two cops reminds me so much of some of the small town cops in my own hometown. While I would never bash servants of the public, I will not fail to mention their taking advantage of their power and responsibilities either. As a classroom teacher, I know what it means to have members of the community trust you with something dear to them (in my case, their children -- in the case of these police officers, it was these men's freedom and livelihoods).

Roy, you mention some inaccuracies. I'd like to know more about them to form a clearer picture. And I do believe Haraway's name was Denise rather than Donna, as per the book. Did she go by Donna? I know some people go by names different than that on their birth and death certificates. These were horrible crimes. It's just too bad that so many more lives had to be destroyed before justice was finally attempted.

And Catch, I agree with you that the state bears some responsibility in Ron Williamson's decline and eventual demise. Roy, I also agree with the Reaganomics theory in concept. Unfortunately, the states cannot run at a deficit like the federal government can, so the states just cut, cut, cut...and they cut programs for the most vulnerable first, as usual. Cutting mental health care, underfunding public defense attorney coffers, etc. all contributed in this case. The part of the book describing the defense lawyer and the jailors pumping thorazine into Ron Williamson is chilling. It's almost as if they wanted him to die so everyone's lives could be easier.

And this book scares me to the core. If the police and DA want to convict you, they will regardless of innocence. And that is probably even moreso now with the eroding of habeas corpus/due process in the post 9/11 era.

[RoyGBiv]

3. Inaccuracies and things ...

My initial exposure to the book was in a bookstore after it had been on the best seller list for awhile. I hadn't even known it had been written or what it was about. (I don't get out much. :-) I've read a lot of Grisham's novels and had been something of a fan before the same plot got old. So, when I saw it sitting on the shelf as the latest Grisham book and noticed it was supposedly non-fiction I figured he'd decided to do something different finally, and I picked it up to skim it.

Of course I instantly realized what it was about, was intrigued, and decided to read the first chapter since it was short. And that sets up the context for my finding these errors.

It begins on page one when he essentially describes Ada as though it were Mayberry. Ada is a dangerous little town, crank central of the MidWest. It has its veneer of stereotypical small-town life, but it's a thin one. How he could spend as much time as he did in Ada and come away with the impression painted by that portrait escapes me, yet I think he actually didn't come away with that impression and simply used it as a "plot" device to set up a supposedly serene atmosphere where all these horrible things take place without anyone noticing. Everyone notices them. People lock their doors with two and three deadbolts. People carry guns and shoot each other sometimes. Never knew one woman I'd compare to Aunt Bee, nor even any Barney Fife's. Few of the Ada cops were lovable goofs, even if they were goofs. I mean, you live in Techumseh, which is similar, just not as big. Is it anything like how Grisham describes Ada in the first few pages? Wewoka would seem to be more like the Mayberry stereotype from its size and relation to surrounding towns, but that place can get ya killed. The whole area has a lot of crap going on, and that Grisham didn't notice it seems impossible.

So that's the big error in my mind and made me realize this was a novelization of true events, a true-crime novel, not the "non-fiction" Grisham claims to have written. As a person with historical research training, my mind fixates on how novelizations become perceived as truth, especially when they claim to expose the truth. Grisham did do that to a degree, but he did so using methods not at all unlike what the DA used to convict Williamson. "Ronnie" wasn't a good guy, in no sense an "innocent." He was "not-guilty" of the crime for which he was committed.

I already mentioned the bit about the psychologist who was a family friend. Grisham doesn't explain that relationship properly and uses the individual to whom I refer as a literary foil to advance his story and make a valid point in a unethical, imo, way.

Other errors flow from that, but they're more technical - locations, descriptions of things and a few people, using local legends as documented truth, things I might not have noticed so much had I not become aware so early what the text was doing, i.e. taking very real events and manipulating them so the story flowed well.

[Catch22Dem]

6. Description of Ada

But wasn't the Ada described in the first chapter, the Ada from late 70s and early 80s? Was it (like so many other towns) smaller and quieter back then?

[RoyGBiv]

7. Ada ...

Yeah, he was describing Ada from the 70's and 80's, but the mythical "good old days" never existed in there. There was actually more money and with it vice in Ada during the 70's and early 80's than afterward due to oil and the "gas crisis." Wildcatters were rampant in the 70's. Everyone, it seemed, either had an oil well or drew an income in some fashion from people who did. The population of Ada and the surrounding area was actually a bit higher than it was during the 90's because after the price of oil dropped so dramatically, hundreds of wells were capped, a lot of people went out of business, the glass plant (a major employer) started laying people off (finally closing in the late 80's/early 90's.) At one time a town with about 15,000 permanent residents supported 23 liquor stores. By the early 90's, there were five. Robert Mayer, who wrote _Dreams of Ada_, the book about the Haraway murder to which Grisham refers a lot, made a big deal about there being 51 churches in this town. There was another side to that, which he briefly touched upon by calling Ada a "convenience store culture."

I think this was mentioned in both books, but may just have been in Mayer's book. The Ada Chamber of Commerce, in its infinite wisdom, "advertises" the town with the phrase, "Ada: A Good Place to Hang Around." On cups, t-shirts, and posters is the image of a lynching back in the early 20th century. Dead people, strung up by the neck, in a barn on 12th street next door to what is now a grocery store near the railroad tracks. This is the *best* thing the CoC could think of to show off Ada to outsiders. (It's a bunch of white guys who were hanged, but it was a lynching just the same.) People in Ada are *proud* of that past, and it is felt in the way law enforcement and vice are a part of the culture there even today.

Grisham claims people in Ada didn't used to lock their doors at night. That's pure nonsense. It wouldn't surprise me to learn people from Ada invented the dead-bolt.

[Catch22Dem]

9. Yeah, the lynchings were in Grisham's book

After reading his multiple references to Mayer's book, I decided to try and find it. What's the story on the subjects of that book today? Are they STILL in prison? I know at one point they both received retrials, but were both convicted again. That makes no sense to me. I wondered while I was reading it, why Scheck didn't pick up their case as well. Are his cases death row cases only?

"It wouldn't surprise me to learn people from Ada invented the dead-bolt." HAHAHAHAHA :D

[RoyGBiv]

10. I'm honestly not sure ...

I stopped paying attention at some point because I got so frustrated with it. It's a problematic case, not nearly as cut and dried as either book claims it was. The "dream confession" was a problematic thing that, legally, probably should have thrown both cases out of court entirely, but the problem is that real, physical evidence did exist that put the individuals at the scene of the crime. Mayer completely screws up some geographic and detail stuff in his book, but if you examine court records it becomes clear that Ward, at least, had a pretty clear idea of some details of the crime that no one would have known had they not been involved in some way. These were things he is known to have said, things he even said to Mayer that were reprinted in the book. Remember, the book was published before a body was found, and Mayer's point in the original book was to show how absurd it was to convict someone of a murder when no one could even prove a murder had been committed. He had a point, but they way he went about making that point came back to bite the defendants in the butt. (Similar things were true with Williamson. He had knowledge of the crime circumstances at least that he expressed in court, stuff *not* printed in Grisham's book, that had never been in the press and was not public knowledge. With his own apparent need to make himself famous, he wasn't guarded enough with his comments and let all this out. His own "dream confession" may have been bogus, and he was clearly not the murderer, but without the DNA evidence, it's difficult to say the police were completely incompetent for thinking he was.)

The initial re-trial of Ward and Fontenot, which made sense, separated the two defendants into separate trials. There was enough evidence for a court case, to wit the "confession" if nothing else, so a new trial was the fairest thing. Ward, the alleged trigger man, was convicted again and got life in prison. Fontenot, an accomplice, was convicted and got the death penalty. Then it all went around and around again, and Fontenot got life with no parole while Ward had a possibility of parole. I'm murky on the details of this and am prepared to be corrected. The only thing I do know for certain is that both ended up with reduced sentences but were still convicted of the crime.

Mayer's book, in the end, turned out to be a problem for both of the defendants but particularly Fontenot. Mayer was a distant friend to the Ward family, which is how the book got written in the first place. Stuff showed up in the book that wasn't in the original trial but of course made it into the next. As I mentioned elsewhere, Ward was an attention seeker. He ran off at the mouth often and at volume, and so did his family. Truth be damned. But, better be careful about that if someone suspects you of doing something bad; it'll come back at you. They said things intended to paint Ward as innocent, but they also took a strange tactic of furthering that with the "but if he did it ..." logic, claiming Fontenot was the real bad guy.

Pardon the harshness of this, but Fontenot was just ignorant and had no clue what was going on really except that, as the cops tried to make him believe, his "friend" was in trouble, and whatever he admitted to doing would help his friend. So, he helped his "friend" and in the end got himself put at the center of the fiasco. Not his fault at all, and that's what got me so frustrated. *If* the two of them did it, Ward was the guy most responsible, but Fontenot was the one who ended up being given the harshest sentence.

[Catch22Dem]

11. Thanks! I really appreciate all the background stuff

Makes the whole thing even more interesting.

[RoyGBiv]

4. P.S. ...

Forgot to address this.

Haraway's name was Donna Denice Haraway. She went by Denice. I knew her as Donna for reasons I don't even remember now. My mother lived in an apartment owned by (or close to or something) the Haraway's when I was really young, so that may be it.

Re: Reaganomics

The cuts in state programs were a direct result of Reagan's policies. Many of the programs the states ran were funded federally, and when the feds cut the funds the theoretical intent of Reagan economic vision was that the states would take over the burden. The funding was supposedly to come from the increased state level revenue that would be generated by the economic growth Reagan economic program was supposed to spawn.

Regarding the thing about if the DA wants to convict you, regardless of guilt, is a bit overdone in Grisham's book. He clearly made the valid point that the Pontotoc County DA often got it in his head that people were guilty of *something* and passed on the directive to his underlings, including the cops. They then put an inordinate amount of effort into trying to get that person on *something*. But, for all the times Peterson wanted to put someone in jail because he wanted to, he succeeded in doing that far less than Grisham implies. Those he did manage to trap were by and large people like Williamson, Ward, and Fontenot, all three of whom represent different kinds of examples. Fontenot had a bad life and often found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time hanging with the wrong people. He was, for the most part, an innocent who got railroaded. Ward was a small-time, wanna-be bad boy who craved attention and finally found it, for all the wrong things. Williamson was guilty of a lot of things and a thorn in a lot of people's sides. What happened to him was wrong legally and morally, but not entirely surprising given the circumstances. None of these individuals, in other words, were just calmly walking down the road one day only to find themselves snatched up by a bored police force with nothing better to do.

I personally knew two people whom Peterson wanted to throw away for something because they were a thorn in his side. The problem was they never actually did anything. They were loud-mouths and wouldn't cower to him when they ran across him, but as much as Peterson tried to trap them in something, it never worked because they didn't do anything he could use against them to the extent he wanted. As a minor example, one of these individuals was fairly regularly running close to the line of the law and did things, like giving beer to an underage person, that put him in Peterson's sights. But it was a misdemeanor, and the other things actually broke no laws. He even had cops who knew him and would defy Peterson because they knew damn well the individual wasn't a threat to anyone. So my acquaintance never saw the inside of a jail cell and ended up causing Peterson more harm (heart burn and stress) than Peterson caused him.

[SoonerShankle]

12. thanks for..

the background on Haraway and Peterson. That helps. I always like to keep an open mind when reading nonfiction. Stories are filtered just by their nature -- whether the filter belongs to the person in the story (autobiographical) or the person reporting the story (biographical). It is just always interesting to try to find what kind of filter the story is run through.