1

DISAPPEARANCE

Half a block from Main Street in Ada, Oklahoma, less than fifty
yards from the railroad tracks, stands a small white building that
looks like a garage. Beside it on a metal pole is a black-and-white
wooden sign, the letters faded, that says: PECAN CRACKER. Ada is,
among other things, pecan country; on the outskirts are commercial
pecan orchards; in the grassy yards of many houses are one or more
pecan trees. In the fall, when the pecans are ripe, the adults
knock them off the trees with long poles. The children gather the
fallen ones from the ground. The nuts not intended for commercial
use are taken to the pecan cracker. There, in the small white
building, the pecans are dumped into the funnel-like tops of
machines.

One by one the hard pecans fall into moving gears. The top set of
gears cracks open the largest pecans. Smaller pecans fall through,
untouched, to another set of gears. These mesh closer and crack
apart the smaller pecans. Still some escape and fall again: to
another set of gears. These gears mesh tighter still; like steel
claws they crack apart even the smallest pecans. Few pecans are too
small, few shells too hard, to be cracked and broken, and to tumble
in pieces into unmarked paper sacks.

Ada (pronounced Aid-a) is a city of about 17,000 people, the
county seat of Pontotoc County, ninety miles southeast of Oklahoma
City. Well-known to crossword-puzzle addicts (“city in Oklahoma,
three letters”), it was named after a dark-haired girl, Ada Reed,
daughter of the town's founder, back when Oklahoma was Indian
Territory. In a rural area of farms, rolling hills, thick
woodlands, it is a small industrial hub.

This is quarter-horse country, where horses bred for quick bursts
of speed are sold at periodic auctions. It is oil country, with
scores of pumps grazing like metal horses in every direction. Oil
money built most of the magnificent mansions on upper-crust Kings
Road. It is also a factory town. The gray turrets of the Evergreen
feed mill tower only a block from Main Street like the
superstructure of a battleship. The Brockway factory, a few blocks
away, forges 1.3 million bottles and jars a day for Coke, Pepsi,
and Gerber Baby Foods, among others. Blue Bell jeans employs 175
local women to sew 45,000 pairs of Wranglers and Rustlers a week.
Ideal cement is produced in the town, as are Solo plastic cups. The
Burlington Northern Railroad track slices diagonally across Main
Street, several freights a day shrieking to a halt in the innards
of the feed mill.

Main Street dead-ends into East Central University, which makes
Ada the modest cultural hub of the area. But Ada is perhaps most of
all a religious town, mainly Baptist, where you can’t buy a mixed
drink without an annual “club” membership. There are fifty churches
in the town (forty-nine Protestant, one Catholic) and four movie
screens.

On Saturday night, April 28, 1984, a few minutes after 8:30, just
a few hours before the town would spring its clocks forward to
daylight saving time, a car and a pickup truck pulled into the
parking lot of McAnally’s, a convenience store that stands almost
alone out on the highway at the eastern end of town. The car was
being driven by Lenny Timmons, twenty-five years old, an X-ray
technician. Beside him was his brother David, seventeen, a high
school student. Both lived in Moore, Oklahoma, ninety miles away.
Driving the pickup truck that pulled in with them was their uncle,
Gene Whelchel, who lived just east of Ada, in a village called Love
Lady. They were planning to play poker that evening, and they
needed some change.

Lenny Timmons cut the engine and the lights of his car. Gene
Whelchel did the same in his pickup. The night was dark already;
the area around the two gas pumps in front of the store was
illuminated by fluorescent lights. So, too, was the inside of the
store, which they could see through the glass double doors, and
through a plate-glass window. An old-model pickup truck was parked
crosswise in front of the store, near an ice machine.

Lenny Timmons, tall and slim, with a neatly trimmed dark beard,
got out of the car and walked toward the store. His brother
remained in the car. Gene Whelchel, in his truck, puffed on a
cigarette. As Timmons entered the store, he passed in the double
doorway a young couple, who were leaving. The woman came out first,
the man right behind her.

David Timmons, waiting in the car, saw the couple emerge from the
store and walk toward the pickup. He noticed the man’s arm around
the woman's waist. Gene Whelchel also glanced their way. They
seemed to him like a pair of young lovers. The couple walked to the
passenger side of the truck. The young man opened the door. The
woman climbed in, and then the man beside her. After a few seconds
the engine started, and the pickup drove off. Gene Whelchel puffed
on his cigarette. David Timmons waited.

The inside of the store was bright to his eyes as Lenny Timmons
entered. The shelves, lined up parallel to the entrance, were
stacked with candy bars, paper products, cold remedies, tampons. In
the glass-enclosed refrigerators were milk, soda pop, juice.
Timmons, needing only change, saw the cash register and the
checkout counter to his left. He approached the counter and waited
for the clerk. There was none in sight. As he waited, he noticed,
idly, an open beer can on the counter, a cigarette burning in an
ashtray. Behind the counter he could see an open school book, a
brown handbag.

A minute passed, perhaps two. The clerk did not appear. Timmons
glanced impatiently among the rows of shelves. Perhaps the clerk
was in the beer cooler, he thought, or in the rest room. He
waited.

Growing more impatient, he went to the front door and opened and
closed it several times. Each time he opened it a buzzer went off,
a signal to the clerk on duty that someone had entered the store.
There was no response.

He looked behind the counter. The drawer of the cash register was
open. The money slots were empty, except for some coins.

Gene Whelchel looked at his watch. It was 8:40. He wondered what
was taking Lenny so long. Then Timmons hurried out of the store,
approached the pickup. He told his uncle, then his brother, that
something was wrong. The three of them entered the store. They
looked around, checked the walk-in cooler, the bathrooms. They
could find no clerk. They were careful not to touch anything. There
was a telephone on a wall of the store. They called the
police.

Ada police headquarters is in the City Hall, a modern one-story
brick building with basement offices, on Townsend Street. A young
officer, Kyle Gibbs, was manning the dispatch unit that night. He
took the call about a robbery at McAnally’s, jotted down the
information. One of the officers on patrol duty was Sergeant Harvey
Phillips, a tall, dark-haired, rugged-looking cop, fifteen years on
the force. Gibbs dispatched Sergeant Phillips to what he assumed
was the scene of the reported robbery—the McAnally's convenience
store out on North Broadway, at the sparsely populated northern
edge of town. Sergeant Phillips folded his long frame into a squad
car, pistol secure in the holster on his hip, and headed out that
way, crossing Main, passing the looming gray feed mill with a red
warning light at its highest point, bumping over the railroad
tracks as he did, passing the stores on Broadway, closed for the
evening, crossing Fourth Street, speeding north toward where
Broadway becomes one of the highways into town. Toward
McAnally’s.

Moments after Sergeant Phillips sped away, Kyle Gibbs had second
thoughts. McAnally’s is a small chain of convenience stores in the
region. There are three in Ada: one out on North Broadway, one out
on East Arlington, one close to downtown at Fourteenth and
Mississippi. The caller hadn't said which one he was calling from.
Gibbs telephoned the store on North Broadway, to make sure he had
sent the patrol car to the right place.

No, the clerk at North Broadway said. There had been no robbery
there. No trouble at all.

The dispatcher hung up. The robbery wouldn't have been downtown.
The caller had said something about a highway. Gibbs radioed new
instructions to Sergeant Phillips, who was just reaching Richardson
Loop and North Broadway. Phillips swung the squad car around,
headed east instead of north. He reached the scene of the
robbery—the McAnally's out on East Arlington Boulevard—about ten
minutes after leaving headquarters, about twice the time a direct
route would have taken.

In a suburban-style house seven miles south of town, surrounded
by two acres of lawn and a swimming pool, Detective Captain Dennis
Smith of the Ada police force was at home with his wife, Sandi.
They were planning to go to bed early, because they had to get up
early the next morning. Though a veteran of eighteen years on the
police force, the detective supplemented his income with a paper
route. Every morning, seven days a week, he and Sandi, who worked
as a building inspector for the city, started their day by driving
around town delivering 650 copies of the Daily Oklahoman, out of
Oklahoma City, the largest newspaper in the state. Sandi would
drive the family car while the detective, a stocky, sturdily built
man, bald almost in the manner of television's Kojak, hurled the
rolled-up newspapers onto the lawns of subscribers. Getting up
early wasn’t fun; tonight, because the clocks would be moved
forward, they would get even less sleep than usual.

Tricia Wolf was at home that night, with her husband, Bud, and
their three young children, in a graying frame house at 804 West
Ninth Street, in a working-class section of town. After supper they
watched television in the small, veneer-paneled living room
dominated by a four-foot-high oil painting of Jesus; the painting
had been done by Bud’s father, C. L. Wolf, an electrician and
amateur artist; it was one of their proudest possessions. The
children—Rhonda, nine; Buddy, six; and Laura Sue,
five&...