Cold Case Files - Cold Ashes

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

A house fire claims the lives of a family in rural Oklahoma, and foul play is suspected. Two teenage girls were not found among the charred rubble, and one of their mothers began a decades-long crusade to find out what had happened. Check out our great sponsors! ZocDoc: Go to Zocdoc.com/ccf and download the Zocdoc app for FREE! Cold Case Files is sponsored by BetterHelp! Learn more and save 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com/coldcase   SimpliSafe: Go to simplisafe.com/coldcase and claim a free indoor security camera plus 20% off your order with Interactive Monitoring! Progressive: Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 27 million drivers who trust Progressive!

An A&E original podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. Laura was always the one that put up our tree. Laura loved Christmas. That year, she claimed it was the best one she'd done to date. January come and most people take down their tree, we decided we were going to leave the tree up

till Laura come home. And then you find out your child has disappeared off the face of the earth. It's like she was never here. I said, I'm one of these that I'm going to find her no matter what I have to do to find her, whether she be alive or whether she be dead, but she's coming home.

So you can help us or you can get back. There are 120,000 unsolved murders in America. Each one is a cold case. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's December 30th, 1999 in Welch, Oklahoma, and Lorene Bible is waiting for her children to arrive at her workplace in Veneta at 9 a.m. so they can pick up their dad at his job and go to the dentist. Her daughter, Lorea, spent the night with her best friend, Ashley Freeman, to celebrate Ashley's 16th birthday. At 8.40 a.m., Lorene's son calls to tell her that there is a fire at the Freeman's house. A few hours earlier, a local who was driving to work spotted the flames at the

Freeman's home and called the Welch Volunteer Fire Department. After hearing from her son, Lorene waits for more news about the fire. One of the county deputies walked into the place I worked and said, Lorene, I need to talk to you. So we go back to the office, and his first words were, do you know Ashley Freeman? I said, yes, she's my daughter's best friend. In fact, Laura stayed again last night with the Freemans. But the house caught on fire, and my son's on his way there to help. I could just tell by his demeanor that something was wrong. He said,

Lorraine, the house is totally gone. Ashley Freeman's uncle, Danny, was also informed about the fire at his brother's house. I was about 25 minutes away at the doctor's office, and they come and got me, and so the sheriff's department on the phone. When I got on the scene, the undersheriff come over and got me. He walked me up to the house. He said that they had found a body laying across the bed, and they thought it was female. My husband Jay and I were married in July of 1978. And in 1980, we had our first son, which is Bradley, and then we had Laura.

She started walking when she was nine months old, talking by the time she was a year and a half. By two, she could put full sentences together and talk an adult conversation with you. So she talked all the time. No matter what she's doing, she'd talk up a storm. Luria had last seen her cousin Lisa at their grandparents' house on Christmas Day.

And Lisa had no idea that it would be the last normal holiday season that they would have as a family. One of my favorite memories, we went to Colorado one year and she was serenading everyone in the car. Later, once we got to Colorado, she goes across the road, climbs up on the side of this mountain with her boombox and starts blasting Reba McEntire music. All you could hear was her voice over the top of the whole valley,

as loud as you can possibly imagine. She loved being out with the farm animals. She loved being a cheerleader. And she was always right in the middle of everything that there was to do. Luria and Ashley had been close for years. The families had lived within a mile of each other when the kids were growing up, and the bond between the best friends only grew as they went to high school. Ashley was kind of like a blooming flower.

She was very happy, outgoing, had lots of friends, very athletic, very much an outdoors person. She would hunt and fish with her dad. What made Ashley special is how much she genuinely cared about everyone and really everything. When Lorene hears about the fire, she drops everything and immediately calls her husband to tell him they need to go to the Freemans.

The flames had consumed the house, leaving piles of smoldering debris and ash. When Ashley's uncle Dwayne arrives, he's approached by an undersheriff. He walked me up there and he showed me the body that was laying across the bed that was badly burnt. It was very difficult to recognize. They thought it was female. They thought it was Kathy. That was the first time for me to see a charred human body. And the visual of it and the odor of it stays with you, has stayed with me for 20 years now.

The officers assume that the victim is Kathy Freeman, Ashley's mother. Lorene and J. Bible arrive, but they are stopped at the driveway because Craig County deputies have cordoned off the scene. The next 10 hours was standing 1,000 yards down the Freeman's driveway, not being allowed to go up. When I saw the county coroner when she come over, I asked her, because I knew her personally, I said, is that Kathy? And she said, I can't tell you 100%,

but I know that the woman has a ring on her left hand, and she has more children. I said, that's Kathy. So where are Danny? Where are the two girls? By 4.30, it's starting to get dark. By 5 o'clock, it is pitch black, cold. The investigators say they're 100% sure

there's nothing else here. So at 5 o'clock, they released the Freeman's house scene over to the families. The fatal fire is big news in the small town of Welch, Oklahoma, and rumors begin to spread. A tip comes in from someone who claims they saw Danny Freeman driving with Luria and Ashley in the car. They're still missing, so those closest to the girls wonder if there's any truth to those rumors. I knew Kathy more than I knew Danny. Kathy was just a mom, helped raising her two kids and doing the best she could. Danny was like all the dads. He went off to work.

There was things about him I wish I'd known back then. He had a black powder gun go off in his face and he had to have some metal plates put in and due to that sometimes when he would get mad he would go too far. We did notice just a little bit of difference in his personality. He was a little bit quick-tempered at times so I'm standing there looking at Kathy's body, I'm instantly thinking, did Danny do this? District Attorney Investigator Gary Stansel recalls the questions the sightings raised. Did Danny kill Kathy and then force to take the girls because they're witnesses? Did Danny take the girls and do something with them? After hours at the scene,

Lorene and Jay are no closer to finding their daughter, so they make their way home. Jay and I got home probably 12 30, one o'clock in the morning. Laura's room is right across from ours. You know your child isn't in her room where she should be. Is she freezing to death? Is she hungry? Does she have clothes? You think to yourself, how can you eat if your child's not? How can I sleep if I don't know where my child is? Determined to find answers, they returned to the burnt remains of the Freemans' home the following morning. By the next morning, Jay and I go to the Freemans'. When you walk into it, so everything's kind of wet,

and you smell the burn. The floors had all fell all the way to the ground. And you're looking around and you say, how can they say the girls couldn't be here when the refrigerators, the deep freezes, the tables, the chairs fell down. How do you know the girls aren't underneath any of this stuff? And then you look over and you see there's something

up there on that floor. Jay climbs up on the floor, and then he helps me up. On there, when we looked, you could instantly tell it was a body of a man. He had no face, no face. The next morning, I immediately drove back out to the farm. And as I pull in, Jay is motioning for me to come up in the burnt house.

So I get up there where Jay's pointing, and I see what looks like a charred body laying there. And I see shiny metallic material in the forehead. Well, I instantly knew that was Danny. In a horrifying turn of events, Jay and Lorene find Danny Freeman's body hours after investigators had released the scene. But Luria and Ashley are still missing. Your heart sinks into your stomach. It's something that you don't want to believe, but it's right there in front of you.

You know you have to. And then your mind immediately has to go to the girls. We've got to find the girls. It's a really bad feeling to see Danny laying there and then not knowing where his daughter's at and her friend. The county boys showed up. They were telling us we needed to get away from the scene. What made me mad was they did not find Danny. We found Danny, we found Kathy, and I said, you better tell him he needs to stop and he needs to shut up. Yesterday was your day. Today, I'm in charge. So you can help us or you can get back. At that point, we decided that we were going to look through everything.

Let's do the living room. Let's do the kitchen. Because Danny was here. The girls should be here too. And then you get back to the bedroom that the girls would have slept in. We didn't find them. Lorene bravely searches through the charred contents of the house for her daughter's remains. But Lorene isn't there.

Lorene does find her daughter's purse, though. Lorene had taken it with her so she could use her Christmas money to buy Ashley something for her 16th birthday. As the search for Lorene and Ashley continues, the investigators discover something huge in the case. Kathy and Danny Freeman were not killed by the fire. They had each been killed by a single gunshot wound. Postmortems conducted at the medical examiner's office revealed that Danny and Kathy had each received a wound to the back of the head that was consistent with a shotgun blast. And the medical examiner had been able to recover some shotgun pellets from the victims.

The tragedy is now a homicide investigation, and two teenage girls remain missing. I knew there was no way. With her car still there and her purse in the house, Laura didn't leave there willingly. We did a grid search within a 10-mile radius of the Freeman property. We announced it over the radios. Anybody that would like to come out and help us, they were more than welcome.

Eager to help find the missing girls, hundreds of people from Welch joined the search, including Luria and Ashley's friend, Sheena. I was a friend and a classmate to Laura and Ashley. We felt the need to just be there and to search and to look and to help. I remember it being colder and searching and walking and a song coming to my head way beyond the blue. I remember just thinking, keep singing this song and I'm going to find him. It's going to lead me to them.

You know, you would do anything in that moment just to find them. We have to find the girls because whoever killed Danny and Kathy could do anything to those two girls. I can just remember all the people that were there that showed up for two young girls because they loved each other. They loved our community. I mean, it was several miles. We had way over a hundred volunteers show up. We had volunteers show up from other states. And unfortunately, it did nothing. We didn't find anything that we were looking for. Once the grid search is completed, investigators have no choice but to escalate the girls from being

missing to abducted. With a homicide investigation going on at the same time, the FBI and the Craig County Sheriff's Office work together to try and find out what happened in the Freeman's house. Two volunteer searchers stumble upon something that could be important. They introduced themselves as Joe Duggan and Tom Pryor, two private investigators who want to offer their services for just one dollar, the minimum amount required for them to work on the family's behalf. The private investigators are hired immediately, and they've already found something that could lead to the missing girls. Joe went over and picked up something about 50 feet up the driveway and said, what's this?

I looked at it and I said, it was the insurance verification. The owner of the insurance verification card was neither Kathy nor Danny. And as far as anyone knew, the owner had no connection to the family. It's been four days since the fire, and the private investigators are interviewing the owner of the insurance card. She tells them that she has no idea how her documents ended up at the scene. But she also tells them that she's not the only person who uses the car where the document could have been. Her boyfriend, Phil Welch, drives it too. The private investigators take the insurance card to the authorities, and they don't get the reception they had hoped for. Joe presented the insurance verification

card to the agent. His comment was, what the hell makes you think that that insurance verification card has anything to do with this investigation? And Tom Pryor says, what the hell makes you think that it doesn't? He just turned and walked away. Adding to the difficulty of the investigation, a conflict between the Freeman family and the sheriff's office leads some to believe that the detectives could drag their feet in solving the case. Oklahoma journalist Sheila Stogsdale recalls the reason why. This case has always been front and center with me.

I've been a reporter for probably 25 years. The worst-kept secret in Craig County was that the Freemans and the Craig County sheriffs were at odds. Everyone knew it. Ashley's older brother, Shane, had been burglarizing houses in the area, and he had tried to evade the police. He was spotted in the northwest corner of Craig County

by a sheriff's deputy. He told Shane to get out of his truck. Shane did get out of the truck. The deputy ordered Shane to the ground three times on the loudspeaker. Shane never get out of the truck. The deputy ordered Shane to the ground three times on the loudspeaker. Shane never did go to the ground. Shane made an inappropriate movement and the deputy shot and Shane was killed. Danny was obviously very grief-stricken. He lost his son. There was a lot of bad blood between the Sheriff's Department and the Freeman family. There was a lot of bad blood between the sheriff's department and the Freeman family. There was accusations that the sheriff's department was following Danny.

There was accusations that Danny was making threats to some of the deputies. There was always that in the background, that it was related to the sheriff's office. The sheriff's department was accused of blotching this investigation. Lorene Bible isn't dissuaded by the allegations, and she continues to rally the community in an effort to locate Lorea and Ashley. This is what we want to do. We want to bring the community, anybody, anywhere together. We're going to do a chili stew, have people bring in items for auction, and we're going to do a chili stew, have people bring in items for auction, and we're going to do a fundraiser.

The community rallied around these two families. These small communities raised $50,000 for a reward for locating the girls. It amazed me the amount of people that did come out, and you can't repay that kind of kindness and dedication. While the community continues to support the Bible and Freeman families, many believe that Danny Freeman's alleged illegal activity is at the root of the case. Rumors swirled that Danny grew and supplied marijuana, and he could have been targeted in retaliation for a drug debt. The rumors that were happening was that Danny owed a drug debt but didn't pay the money to the people that he was supposed to,

so they had called collecting the money. It was probably a year after the girls disappeared. One of the informants that had come forward to the FBI, he had called Jayden and I, and he said he told them that we needed to go look over in the Miami area at the Mexican cartel. And I'm a mom and I wanna find my child and I will do whatever it takes to find her.

I sent word back through this person, I want to meet him. You tell him when he wants to see me, I'll be there. Then you get a phone call that states, you want to meet Mr. So-and-so, you be here, be in this area at this time. And then you get your dots in a row, and you go and you meet. I have a mother-in-law, Jay's mom, Dixie,

scared to death for us, and she's like, what if they shoot you? And I said, mother-in-law, Jay's mom, Dixie, scared to death for us and she's like, what if they shoot you? And I said, well, if they start shooting at me, I must be close. It's now been 11 months since Luria and Ashley disappeared following a fire at the Freeman's house. And Lorene Bible vows to do anything to find her daughter, even if it means meeting with a ranking member of a drug cartel. Lorene met with the underbelly of society. She was fearless. She's remarkable. She's truly a remarkable woman. Any fear she may have meeting with a dangerous cartel member is outweighed by the fear of not knowing where her daughter is. So she goes to speak with the cartel member on a dark night without any backup. He just says, I hear you want to talk to me.

And I said, I need to know if the girls were taken. And he said, two things, ma'am. I don't kill women and I don't kill children. I believed him 100%. Leeds dry up and by Christmas of 2000, the case has gone cold. I'm Lola Blanc. And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And we're the hosts of Trust Me, Cults, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation. Right here on Podcast One. Join us this month as we explore the world of conspiracy theories. We'll interview experts about how conspiracies start.

Dive into the psychology of how they spread. And learn how you can help stop the spread of false information. Join us for Conspiracy Month right here on Trust Me. Get new episodes every Wednesday on Podcast One, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The families hold a memorial service for Luria and Ashley. The first Christmas without her was hard. My aunt and uncle would not take the tree down. So the tree stayed up. Because in your mind,

she's coming home. So we weren't going to take the tree down until after she'd come home. Almost five more years go by until police in Mobile, Alabama, arrest a man with Oklahoma ties, a man named Jeremy Jones. Jeremy Jones gets arrested in Mobile, Alabama on a charge of rape and murder of a woman named Lisa Nichols. He starts confessing to other crimes, other murders, a whole series of murders.

When he's finished talking, Jones has confessed to killing 13 people across five states, including the murders at the Freeman House in 1999. The details he provides make him a viable suspect. Jones tells the investigators he had been sent to kill Danny and Kathy because Danny owed a large sum of money to a drug dealer in Miami, Oklahoma. He said that he had driven along the dirt roads in Welch and came across the long driveway that had the Freeman's name on a mailbox at the entrance.

Jones said that he had killed them both in the bedroom and left one body on the bed and the other beneath it, exactly how the bodies were found in the charred remains. A few weeks later, the investigators on the homicide case traveled to Alabama to speak directly with Jones. He alleges that after he killed Danny and Kathy,

he set fire to the residence and Ashley and Laura come running out of the residence. He says he takes them to an area near Galena, Kansas, kills them, and throws them down a mine shaft. It was a big search. They did locate the mine shaft, but they didn't find any evidence of the girls being in that mine shaft.

Suddenly, Jones recants his confession and says that he wasn't involved at all. It's hard to get in someone's head like this. Why did he confess to something that he did or didn't do? You don't know. Never did I think Jeremy Jones did it. There would have been a group of people that had to take those girls off that property.

In October 2005, Jones is convicted for the murder of Lisa Nichols. But investigators can't connect him to Luria and Ashley's abduction or the murders. So the case goes cold once again. Lurine keeps her promise to leave things as they were until Luria comes home. But time keeps moving on. After the Jeremy Jones, you know, you're waiting for the next tip, the next time somebody says something, then it gets real quiet again. After eight, nine, ten years, the tree was so heavy that it fell over and broke.

At that point, I couldn't put up a tree because Laura was always the one that put up our tree. In September 2011, almost 12 years after the fire that revealed two murders and two abductions, investigator Gary Stancil reviews the case. I knew the case had grown cold. So I contacted my boss and I said, I would love to look at this case. He said, yes. So in 2011, I actually started working and the case file was so huge. I mean, I had to go back and read this thing two or three times. So many names and so much

information. It's just mind boggling. Surely in all of this information, the suspect is in these reports somewhere, somehow. In February 2013, Gary Stansel joins forces with Special Agent Tammy Ferrari from the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigation in an attempt to get justice for Danny and Kathy Freeman and the missing girls. So me and Gary actually got together and decided that we were going to work the case together. We got approval on that. Stansel and Ferrari re-interview witnesses from the initial investigation, and one person is mentioned over and over. So there was a individual by the name of Phil Welch. Initially, when I started reading through that case file, there was a talk about an insurance card that was located at

the scene. So this insurance card had a female's name on it. She was interviewed early on, and she had talked about her boyfriend, which was Phil Welch, did know the Freemans, and he often drove her car. The case file shows that detectives had questioned Welch after the insurance card was found. Whenever they did talk to Phil Welch, he had brought up the name of David Pennington, talked about David being a friend of his, talked about David cooking meth, David was a kingpin, and then Ronnie Busick's name's coming up. And these three ran together. They were from the Chautauqua area, and they were known to smoke meth.

They were known to make meth. They were known to sell meth. There were some reports in regards to those people. They're individuals that had actually been interviewed that said these people were involved. For whatever reason, it seems as though no one followed up on those leads. It's put down to the sheer amount of information that was collected at the time by a number of law enforcement agencies, and those on the cold case investigation believe it was simply overlooked during the initial inquiry. Stansel and Ferrari want to interview the individuals who had provided information

over 13 years earlier, but they can't seem to track them down. While the investigators continue to search for connections between the alleged meth dealers and the murder and abduction case, Lorene Bible continues her search for Lorea and Ashley. It's December 2015. 16 years have passed since the teenage best friends were last seen alive. And Lorene is advised to use the internet to spread the word about the case. My niece Lisa had a friend say, hey, social media is up and running now. You guys need to have the website so that people can send you tips. So she helped my niece get the website up and running.

And that's when we started getting tips. We received a tip from someone who knew someone, who heard something. We were told that there were pictures of the girls bound and gagged, Polaroids of them that had been taken, that they were being held against their will and other things had happened. Rumor had it there was pictures of them

and this was done to them. You don't really focus on that part because if you do, then you'll stop. The horrifying possibility that the girls had been held captive and that there was photographic evidence is too much for Lorene to think about. So she puts it to the back of her mind and tells Stancil about the tip. In February 2016, Stancil tracks down one of David Pennington's girlfriends to see if the pictures exist.

I get information about a woman who actually lived with David Pennington and found out where she lived and went to interview her. I said, do you ever hear them talk about anything about these missing girls? And she said, yes. I overheard them talking about their involvement with the missing girls and that they actually insinuated that they had molested them. Then she makes a statement to me that I didn't ask,

but she volunteered the statement. The other guy used to brag that he took pictures of girls tied up. I guess all three of them, you know, the last of them. A few months later, Stancil and Ferrari interview another of Phil Welch's girlfriends from the time of the murders and abductions. And when we asked about details of these pictures, they were without a doubt believed that it was Laura and Ashley. They said that the girls in the pictures, they were bound, they were gagged. One of our witnesses was able to tell us that she

saw a bedspread that she knew because she dated Phil. She was able to tell us then, without a doubt, that that was Phil's house where she saw the girls. So we start looking at the three of them. We find out that Phil Welch is already deceased. David Pennington is deceased. But Ronnie Busick, we found out that he was still alive. People told us that he was pure evil, that he was the devil. There was people that were just terrified of him.

It's February 2017, 17 years and two months after Luria and Ashley went missing. Stancil and Ferrari head to the Kansas jail to interview Ronnie Busick while he's incarcerated on a separate charge. With the other two prime suspects dead, Busick might be their last hope of finally solving this case. The investigators begin by carefully asking Busick if he knew Phil Welch. After a while, Busick eventually admits that they used to hang out and cook meth together. Eventually, the investigators get around

to Ashley and Luria. And though Busick is interviewed a number of times, he continues to deny any involvement in the 1999 murder and abduction case. Stansel and Ferrari decide that they have enough information to file charges against Busick. And on the day he is supposed to walk out of prison in April 2018, Pencil and Ferrari decide that they have enough information to file charges against Busick. And on the day he is supposed to walk out of prison in April 2018, they arrive with a lengthy arrest warrant to keep him behind bars. Busick is charged with two counts of kidnapping and four counts of murder.

On the day that we went to Kansas, it was during that interview that finally Busick made some admissions. He said, well, if I was there, I would have stayed in the car. Okay, fine. Tell me what happened. Well, we went there to collect the drug debt. During several interviews, Busek gives investigators his version of what happened on that cold December night in 1999. From everything that we can understand, David, Phil, and Ronnie went out there to Danny and Kathy's house. Danny is ultimately shot during this, and then Kathy is shot. The girls end up escaping out of another door

and run to the back of the house, and they're hiding. Once the suspects see them, the suspects ended up catching them. They were taken to Phil Welch's house in Pitcher, Oklahoma, and ended up being kept there for two weeks, where they were tortured, they were drugged, and then ultimately killed and disposed of. Ronnie Busick claims he stayed in the car while Phil Welch and David Pennington went into the Freeman's house. Luria and Ashley's families agree to offer Busick immunity if he provides investigators with the location of the girls.

With the trial looming, Busick pleads guilty to his part in the awful crimes. Prosecutors agree to drop the original charges of first-degree murder and kidnapping if he agrees to help find the girls' remains. He's given us some places to go and check. He's told us, you might check a root cellar. He took him out there, okay, show us the area. We did a dig out there and we didn't find anything. On August 31st, 2020, Ronnie Busick is sentenced to 10 years in prison and five years of probation for accessory to murder. You have to go back and think about that opportunity that was missed. It was on January 3rd, four days after the murders, Phil Welch's name surfaced.

I think maybe the authorities could have found the girls with that early lead. I had dreams of it being her wedding day, and I was standing at the front of the church watching her walk down the aisle, and when her dad lifted her veil, she had no face. I think having part of the truth kind of helps to know, but we still don't have that closure. The search for Lorena Bible and Ashley Freeman goes on, and Lorene Bible continues to demonstrate The search for Luria Bible and Ashley Freeman goes on,

and Lorene Bible continues to demonstrate just how powerful a mother's love can be in the face of unimaginable heartache. We have a memorial set up at Pitzer where the trailer was that the girls were held into. We've turned it into a memorial site. But that's not who she was. She was more than just a girl that was abducted, murdered, tortured.

She was more than that. I have three grandchildren now, and they all say, Nana, well, you have no tree. According to my granddaughter, she's going to help put up the tree. And she wants to put her daddy's and her Aunt Laura's tree ornaments on the tree. She told me, I will do it. I will help you.

. Cold Case Files is hosted by Paula Borrows. It's produced by the Law and Crime Network and written by Eileen McFarlane and Emily G. Thompson. Our composer is Blake Maples. For A&E, our senior producer is John Thrasher and our supervising producer is McKamey Lynn. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz, Maite Cueva, and Peter Tarshis. This podcast is based on A&E's Emmy-winning TV series, Cold Case Files. For more Cold Case Files, visit aetv.com. I'm Lola Blanc.

And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And we're the hosts of Trust Me, Colts, Extreme Belief, and Manipulation. Right here on Podcast One. Join us this month as we explore the world of conspiracy theories. We'll interview experts about how conspiracies start. Dive into the psychology of how they spread. And learn how you can help stop the spread of false information. Join us for Conspiracy Month right here on Trust Me.

Get new episodes every Wednesday on Podcast One, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.