Unseen - The Welch Girls Conspiracy | The Disturbing Case of Lauria & Ashley | UNSEEN

Episode Date: January 23, 2024

“Nobody was looking for the girls, except my family" -- On December 29th, 1999, as high schooler Ashley Freeman turns 16, she invites her best friend Lauria Bible for a fun sleepover, and what would happen to the entire family during that night, would become a 20-year mystery, involving the cartel, local rings, and even the entire police department as a suspect, a mystery that only Lauria's parents would be able to solve: where are the missing girls? External Footage from: "A&E", "Crime Central", "Cold Cases Files", "Cold Ashes", "HLN", "CIN", "Hell In Heartland", "What Happened To Ashley And Lauria", "ID", "Discovery", "Disappeared", "Out Of The Ashes", "Lifetime", "Jupiter", "Vanished With Beth Holloway", "Kesse/Bible". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. It started with a house fire. And then it was a murder. And then it was two girls abducted. You look over and you see there's something up there on that floor.

You could instantly tell it was a body of a man. As far as anybody's saying, there are no suspects. the family feel that there is one really important suspect, and that is the entire Craig County Sheriff's Department. While rumors about the two teenagers kept piling up, a conspiracy involving the police, local drug rings, and the Mexican cartel emerged. Left on their own, the Bible family took it upon themselves

to find the girls and bring down the men responsible for their disappearance. He said, was you not scared to talk to me? And I said, no. I'm a mom and I want to find my child, and I will do whatever it takes. to find her. When they were young, Ashley's family, the Freemans, lived only a mile away from Laura and the Bibles. The two girls met in kindergarten and quickly became friends, a relationship that only

deepened over the years. They made that bond and it continued in high school. As teenagers, Laura was a cheerleader for Ashley's basketball team and the two were closer than ever. One was thinking, the other was thinking. It's kind of like when two people, one can finish the sentence when the other one starts one. On December 29th, mere days after Christmas, Ashley invited Laura over for her 16th birthday, a request her father, Jay, couldn't decline.

I've seen them pull up in the driveway, and she comes running in the house and ask if she could spend a night with Ashley. I said, you need to be home by noon. Her last word was, I love you, daddy, and out the door they went. I didn't think nothing of it. Laura and Ashley had a wonderful night at the Freeman's, eating pizza and ice cream, while watching movies. At a glance, everything seemed fine, but outside of their home, someone was watching. At 6 a.m. the following day,

the police received a call from the neighbors. The Freeman's house was on fire. My neighbor's house across the street is completely engulfed. Okay. Okay. What's the address? Two hours later, a deputy from the Craig County Sheriff's Department

busted into Laura's mother's workplace. His first words were, do you know Ashley Freeman? I said yes. She's my daughter's best friend. In fact, Laura stayed last night with the Freeman's. He said, Lorene, the house is totally gone. Lorraine and Jay rushed to the scene where the county sheriff informed them that the girls were missing. We just want to know where the girls are. You know, it doesn't matter who or what. It's just where can we find them? Lorene joined the medical examiner and helped identify the body of Kathy Freeman, Ashley's mother, discovered in the rubble.

When I saw the county coroner when she come over, 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? As this was happening, Laura's father combed the area on horseback and found empty shotgun shells close to the property. It seemed that this wasn't simply a fire, but that Ashley's mother had been murdered. You know, we call in the OSBI.

They go over and look, collect it for evidence. The OSBI, or Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, had complete authority over the case, and their lead investigator, Steve Nutter, approached Lorraine and Jay at the end of the day. 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. So Jay and I got home probably 12.30, 1 o'clock in the morning. And 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? After a restless night, the Bible's returned to the crime scene in a desperate attempt to find more clues. Lurine thought that maybe the police had missed something

and stepped into the still-fuming ruins of the house. You look over and you see the... there's something up there on that floor. You could instantly tell it was a body of a man. He had no face. No face. I called 911, told him who I was, told him I was at the Freeman's,

and I told him there's another body in this fire. Those experts left a body in the fire. Before Agent Nutter and the OSBI arrived, Lorraine, Jay, and Ashley's uncle, Dwayne Vancell, found more pieces of evidence in the house, Laura's purse, her wallet, and a car insurance card belonging to a stranger. When they had to hand over their findings to Nutter, they were rejected outright.

His comment was, what the hell makes you think that that insurance verification card has anything to do with this investigation? He just turned and walked away. As Lorraine and Jay continued to tear apart the remains of the house, Dwayne ran after Agent Nutter. He told them that he was able to identify the body they had found as being his stepbrother, Danny, Ashley's father, because of a metal plate in his skull. This troubled nutter, who, was convinced Danny killed his wife Kathy and kidnapped the girls. But Dwayne had another theory, one his stepbrother revealed to him merely a week before the fire. Instead of anything ever happens to me, you look at the sheriff's department.

And I said, what are you talking about? And he looked at me and eye. He says, I'm telling you, if I get killed, you look at the sheriff's department. Dwayne went on to explain that one year ago, a deputy killed Danny's son, Shane, in an altercation. Since then, bad blood has grown between the first. Freeman's and the sheriff's department. Nutter was skeptical, but agreed to investigate the sheriff and his deputies. We did investigate the possible involvement of members of the sheriff's department. We administered lie detector tests. They passed those tests indicating that they had never been involved

with that incident. This development had dire consequences. Since Danny's body was found and the sheriff's department had been cleared as suspects, Nutter turned his eyes towards the least expected party, the girls themselves. The narrative with the authorities switched the next day. Now all of a sudden, instead of Danny done it, and he's got the girls abducted, now the authorities are saying the girls did this. Due to their status as suspects, no Amber Alert has ever been ordered for Laura and Ashley.

Nutter told the Bibles that he added them to the National Missing Person Database, but Lorene wasn't sure she could trust him, so she went to the station to verify. One of the police department guys that I know, he said, well, I can just pull it up right down. He looked and he said, Lorraine, those girls are not on him. Even though everybody in town knew neither of the girls was behind the fire, Nutter and the OSBI stuck to their theory. I heard Laura and Ashley did it and they took off and I knew that one for sure was not true. There's no way Laura would have ever stayed away from her mama, you know. I'm a very open-minded person, but that was really far-fetched for me.

Left to their own devices, Lorraine and Jay had no other choice but to pursue the search themselves. Joined by family members, they scoured the county looking for clues and printed their own missing posters. They can say what they want. There was nobody looking for the girls, but my family. We just couldn't sit still and do nothing. We made some posters that could go on the back of semis. Lorraine and I drove hundreds of thousands of miles putting their faces on every window that we could put them on. An entire year went by without any progress.

As Christmas approached, Lorraine readied herself for the Bible's first holiday without their daughter. Laura loved Christmas. Laura was always the one that put up our tree. The first Christmas without her was hard. My aunt and uncle would not take the tree down. We decided we were going to leave the tree up until Laura come home. Because in your mind, she's coming home. During the following year, hope lessened around the Bibles.

But Lorraine couldn't give up. on Laura and Ashley. She was convinced they were still alive somewhere. Your child has disappeared off the face of the earth. Most people, they say, how do you get the courage to continue? Go on. It's because I don't want to be a parent and not know where my child is. Around that time, a number of rumors surfaced about Ashley's father, Danny. Allegedly, he was attempting to collect a large sum of money to sue the sheriff and the deputy responsible for his son's death. To do so, he started selling drugs and growing marijuana a few months before the fire. The rumors 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. But Nutter and the OSBI thought nothing of it. She wanted to consider that it was drug-related and nothing fits correctly. The very last thing that the people who committed to murder would want to do would be abduct the children. Lorene couldn't care less about Nutter's opinion. Instead, she found someone who had contacts at the top of the criminal ladder. By meeting him, she knew she could skip all the local addicts and dealers and directly talked to the man in charge.

He said that we needed to go look over in the Miami area at the Mexican cartel. And I'm a mom and I want to find my child and I will do whatever it takes to find her. Lorene made up her mind. Against her husband and her family's wishes, she would meet with her. With the cartel, Jay's mother tried to convince her to give up that risking her own life wouldn't bring back Laura. She's like, what if they shoot you? And I said, well, if they started shooting at me, I must be close.

In a dark alley in Miami, Lorraine parked her pickup truck at the location of the meeting. For hours, she waited for the man to arrive and get out of his vehicle before slowly approaching him. He said, how do you know I'm not packing? I said, how do you know I'm not packing? And at that point, he said, was you not scared to talk to me? And I said, nope. I need to know if the girls were taken and if Denny was killed because he owed you money.

And he said, two things, ma'am. I don't kill women and I don't kill children. I believed him 100%. Back at Square One, the Bibles kept investigating every tip until a bittersweet revelation emerged. Twelve off-the-record informant said the girls might still be alive, but kept in awful conditions. We were told that there were pictures of the girls bound and gagged, that they were being held. against their will and other things. 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. After the press revealed that Polaroid pictures of the girls had been circulating, an endless amount of tips started pouring in, a situation Nutter and the OSBI were greatly annoyed with. We started receiving leads and tips. I would be notified that the girls had been seen in New Mexico, and in Florida the same day. But there was no way around it. Lorene and Jay had to check all of them.

I searched six dates, and I probably put it on 200,000 miles under my vehicle. This went on throughout most of the early 2000s, with Lorene and Jay on the road, while Agent Nutter combed through the hundreds of tips his service received each week, until a completely unrelated suspect surfaced from Polonski's death row unit in Livingston, Texas. famous serial killer, Tommy Lynn Sells. Sells is connected to more than 12 murder. His transient lifestyle helped him evade law enforcement for almost 15 years, leaving a trail of victims across the country.

Eventually, the OSBI said, hey, we've got this person that's in prison. He's saying he did it. He's stating, I killed Danny and Kathy, and I took the girls. Cell seemed to know a lot about the case, and even proposed to bring Nutter to the bodies of Laura and Ashley. the agent had his doubts concerning the inmate, but after five years without any progress, they had nothing to lose. There was one bone found at the site, and they called a doctor out of the site to look at

and he identified her as animal. I went to the Bible family and told them. Tommy Sells, he played games with us. He didn't do it. Agent Nutter's last move before he was discharged from the case was to go after another serial killer, Oklahoma native Jeremy Jones. We've got a furry young girl. Yeah.

They're pretty with the car. 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. Lorene was right. Jones, too, proved to be a false confession. Following this event and Nutter's withdrawal, no new information surfaced.

The case went completely cold. 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. In December, 2009, as Laura's Christmas tree stood still, weighed down by the hundreds of cards and charms Lorene had received since her disappearance, the tree came crashing down.

After eight, nine, ten years, the tree was so heavy. 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. After all this time, the family had to come to terms with reality. It was a long time before I was really to a point to accept the fact that they probably were not alive anymore. Sorry. Sometimes it just comes out of nowhere. Seven years later, a new sheriff took office in Craig County as he and his staff were moving old evidence crates around. They stumbled upon an unmarked box filled with unaccounted documents

dating back from the end of 1999, mere days after the girl's disappearance. This week, Craig County Sheriff Heath Winfrey revealed that he recently came across new notes and documents set aside and forgotten about by the previous sheriff's administration. New hope for answers when it comes to what happened to Laura and Ashley and where they are now. Tammy Ferrari, a new OSBI agent, was tasked with reopening the case and digging through the box of evidence. When I started reading through that case file, there was a talk about an insurance card that was located at the scene. The insurance card, one of the very first pieces of evidence found by the families, had been lost while transiting between the offices of the OSBI and the old sheriff. By finding its owner,

The police finally concluded that the Polaroids were real. Not only did the owner see them, she was the ex-girlfriend of David Pennington, one of the three men who distributed them. 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. Ronnie Busick and his entourage were part of a drug ring unrelated to the cartel and were extremely dangerous individuals. Lorraine knew the 12 people who were rumored to have seen the Polaroids were probably too scared of him to come forward, but there was no way Ferrari could convince a judge to sign her a warrant with only one witness. So, in a last-ditch effort, Lorraine opened a Facebook page and reappeared on TV. Once again, Lisa Broderick, Laura's cousin, campaigned alongside her. If you could talk to any of those 12 people right now who might have any information, what do you want to say to them?

That's what we've heard over the years is everybody's afraid of these men. And we understand. We do. But we would just ask for you to look at your own children and look at your own grandchildren. And if you know anything, please just tell us. Please help us and find them and bring them home. That's all we want. We just want our girls back. Miraculously, all 12 witnesses, mostly ex-girlfriends and relatives of the three men, all came forward.

Possibly alive for days after they were kidnapped, more than half of the witnesses remember seeing Polaroid photos of the girls tied up, bound and gagged. On the day Busick was to be released from his Kansas jail, Ferrari was waiting for him outside, with an arrest warrant from Oklahoma. As the OSBI interviewed him, he eventually revealed what happened, but was careful not to incriminate himself. Did you take the Polaroid? No. Who took him, Ronnie? I don't know. Are you afraid to admit your part in it?

Are you afraid to admit what you've done? Instead, he puts all the blame on his deceased accomplices, Welch, and Pennington. According to him, they came to collect a drug debt, but Danny resisted, and things quickly turned sour. 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. As a last resort, Buzik proposed giving Ferrari the girl's location in exchange for a plea deal. The authorities would drop the murder, kidnapping, and arson charges in exchange for a guilty plea of accessory to murder and a reduced sentence if the girls were found. The Bibles accepted, and together with the OSBI, they searched the abandoned mine, indicated by Buzik. We just really had hoped that there would be something there, and there just wasn't. Lurine was devastated.

Buzek claimed that Pennington or Welch must have moved the girl. to another location, and somehow, the judge believed him. With his plea deal still standing, he was sentenced to 10 years of prison and 5 years of probation. On May 19, 23, Buzick was released for good behavior after only 38 months behind bars. At Buzik's release hearing, Lurine took the stand and delivered a poignant victim impact statement. On the other side of the courtroom, Buzik was looking down, avoiding Larene's glare. You're telling people that you kill my daughter. Look me in the eye. I think having part of the truth kind of helps, but we still don't have that closure.

Even though they know the truth, the Bibles still cling to the hope of one day seeing Laura again. She's greatly missed, but she's not forgotten. Early on, you hope that the girls would be found alive. Do I hope when you see other people coming home after years? Yes, you want that for your child. But for Lurine, the fight is still going. Last year, she joined her representative and proposed the Lauria and Ashley's Law to Congress. Its mandate is to add accessory to murder to the list of crimes requiring the offender to serve 85% of their prison sentence before being eligible for parole.

The law was approved on June 6, 2023, preventing anyone from pulling off the same trick Buzik played on them after his arrest. Despite all those years of frustration, anger, and grief, Lorene's focus is now to pass on the girl's spirit. She started a scholarship fund in their names, hoping other children from the community could accomplish their dreams and their stead. She thinks this is what the girls should be remembered for, not only for the tragic circumstances surrounding their deaths, but for the positive impact their memory continues to provide. I think the details of what they may have gone through can be very overwhelming. You can get very fixated on that. But that's not who she was.

She was more than just a girl that was abducted, murdered, tortured. She was more than that. Laura, she had plans to go to cosmetology school. I remember about. I can see her being happily content, being married in an old farmhouse, with some kids running around. And Ashley, I think, you know, Ashley loved to hunt. I can just see her taking her own daughter for the first time.

I think they would want you to see them not as victims. I think everyone needs to see them as, you know, your own daughter, your own sister. And they had dreams just like everyone else. 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 aunt lorers. tree on them, it's on the tree. She told me, I will do it. I will help you.