The Murder of Debbie Carter

• Dec. 7, 1982 — 21-year-old Debra "Debbie" Sue Carter drives home, where she lives alone, after working a late night shift as a waitress at the Coachlight bar and restaurant in Ada. An unknown assailant knocks on her door and proceeds to force their way in, raping and strangling Debbie with her own belt and the cord of an electrical blanket.
• Dec. 8, 1982 — The following morning, Debbie is found dead by her friend. No suspects are pursued for quite some time, but the lead detective on the case, Dennis Smith, insinuates that the police know who did it, but they just don't have evidence.
• March 1983 — Ron Williamson, a rapist with multiple past arrests who also happens to live nearby Debbie's apartment, is interviewed by police investigators: Dennis Smith, Gary Rogers, Mike Baskin, and Chris Ross. According to an eye witness named Glen Gore, Williamson was reportedly at the Coachlight the night of Debbie's death, and was seen harassing her before she left.
• June 1983 — Dennis Fritz, Williamson's close friend, is interviewed by police in connection to the murder, but no arrests are made.

Arrests and Convictions in the Debbie Carter Case

• Spring 1987 — The police ask Debbie's mother, Peggy, if she'll sign off on allowing them to exhume her daughter's body. The police say it's because they're re-examining a bloody palm print that was found on the wall of Debbie's apartment the morning after she was killed.
• May 8, 1987 — Ron Williamson is arrested after telling the police that he had a dream of going to Debbie's door, breaking in, raping, and killing her.
• September 1987 — Ricky Jo Simmons confesses to her rape and murder, but the police refuse to accept his confession.
• Spring 1988 — The day before the prosecution would have had to drop the charges against Fritz, an inmate that he was paired with in prison years earlier comes forward and says she heard him confess to the murder. The "jailhouse snitch" gives a two hour taped interview including details about Debbie's murder she allegedly heard from Fritz.
• April 1988 — During Fritz's trial, an analyst testifies that 11 pubic hairs and two head hairs from the crime scene are "consistent" with Fritz's hair. "This means they match," the analyst explains [3]. He also presents highly misleading findings about the semen they examined from the scene.
• April 12, 1988 — Fritz is convicted and sentenced to life in prison (he comes within one vote of receiving the death penalty.) Given how many years had passed between the murder and his trial, Fritz could no longer recall his whereabouts on that night. The district attorney argues that while Williamson masterminded the murder, Fritz was along for the ride.
• April 27, 1988 — Williamson's trial starts, which includes testimony from a woman named Andrea who claims that he broke into her house years before and raped her (she lived near Debbie at the time, too).
• April 28, 1988 — The jury sentences Williamson to the death penalty. The district attorney, Bill Peterson, makes the case that Williamson got into a fight with Debbie at the bar the night of her death, corroborated by eyewitness Glen Gore. However, Williamson refutes this by saying he has an alibi; he says he was home the entire night, and that his mom can vouch for his whereabouts. His mother had a receipt from renting movies they watched that night, and also an entry in her journal since she kept fastidious notes in her journal about her daily life. Despite submitting both to the police, the journal and receipt ended up going mysteriously missing.

Justice For Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz

• 1994 — Ron Williamson gives an interview in prison five years after his conviction, saying that he thinks Ricky Jo Simmons committed the crime. The jail psychologist initially dismisses this as an alter ego of Williamson (he suffered from mental health problems). Although it's later proven that Simmons didn't kill Debbie, Williamson never wavers in asserting his innocence.
• 1994 to 1999 — Fritz tries to appeal his sentencing multiple times, but is denied. He later contacts the Innocence Project [4] for help, which puts him on the radar of author John Grisham (who went on to write The Innocent Man about the case). During these years it is discovered that the physical evidence from the crime is going to be tested due to appeals filed by Williamson's legal team, so Fritz files an injunction to ensure the evidence will not be consumed until the cases are joined and proper DNA testing is conducted.
• Spring 1999 — New DNA evidence comes to light, suggesting Fritz and Williamson didn't actually kill Debbie Carter. It turns out that the FBI spent decades overestimating the importance of hair in cases like this. For example, the analyst who testified in Fritz's trial about the hair — it's impossible to say definitively that strands of hair "match" because there's not enough empirical data regarding the frequency of specific class characteristics in human hair. On top of that, DNA testing reveals neither Fritz or Williamson are a match for the sperm found at the crime scene.
• April 15, 1999 — Both Williamson and Fritz are set free and exonerated of their crimes. Williamson was within 5 days of being executed.
• 2003 — Williamson and Fritz sue the City of Ada and win a settlement of $500,000, but note that both felt many residents of the town still believed them to be guilty despite their freedom. They were also scared that the prosecutor, Bill Peterson, and members of the Ada police force would try to bring them to trial again.
• 2009 — Williamson, who continued to suffer from psychiatric problems, dies in his nursing home of cirrhosis [5] at the age of 51. Fritz is still alive, but now lives in a nursing home due to a traumatic brain injury he received after getting into a near-fatal car accident. He regularly spends time with his loving daughter, Elizabeth Clinton, who visits him as much as she can.

Who Actually Killed Debbie Carter?

• 2000 — Glen Gore, the state's eye witness for Williamson and Fritz's trials, becomes the main suspect when it's discovered that his semen matches what was found at the crime scene (he was serving time for unrelated felonies during Williamson and Fritz's appeal trial). Gore had gone to school with Carter in Ada for all 12 years, but they weren't in the same group of friends. He also had a history of harassing Carter over the years, a fact that Carter's sisters told police (and which the police proceeded to ignore), and it was in fact him who had been arguing with Carter at the Coachlight the night of her death, not Williamson (who wasn't even there, seeing as he was home with his mother). Gore happened to find out he was a suspect while working in his prison's work release program, and proceeded to steal an officer's car and escape. He was later apprehended, and the case moved forward with a trial.
• June 24, 2003 — He was the last person seen with Carter, and despite being interviewed by the police the night after her death, they never bothered to take his fingerprints, saliva, or hair samples. When the new trial for Gore begins and the DNA is finally proven to be a match, the jury finds him guilty. He is convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
• August 2005 — Gore's death sentence is overturned.
• June 21, 2006 — A second trial for Gore is held, and this time he's sentenced to life without parole by Judge Tom Landrith, since the jury couldn't come to a unanimous decision about sentencing him to death (one woman didn't believe in the death penalty).

The Murder of Denice Haraway

• April 28, 1984 — Ada resident Denice Haraway disappears from her night shift as a cashier at McAnally's gas station and convenience store. Witnesses in the parking lot — an older man and his nephew, who were stopping by to pick up change for a poker game — say they saw her being forced into a grey pickup truck by another man. An APB is put out.
• May 1984 — A clerk at a store down the road, Karen Wise, tells police that she saw two suspicious men come into her store earlier the same night Haraway was abducted, and a newspaper publishes the composite sketches of the men based off of Wise's description. Rumours start swirling about a number of Ada men who resemble the sketches, including Billy Charley and Tommy Ward.

The Confessions of Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot

• Oct 12, 1984 — Ward is first brought into the police station under false pretences. The investigators, who are the same men who looked into the Carter murder, claim they just wanted him to look at photos of suspects for them, since he's an Ada native, but instead end up interrogating him about Haraway's disappearance. He denies killing her and having any involvement, but the police continue to hammer details about her death into him.
• Oct 18, 1984 — Again, Ward is interrogated for hours (he's brought in at around 10 AM, forced to stay until 6 PM), and even given a polygraph test. At the end of the day is when the police record Ward's "bogus confession," as his defence team later argues, which is full of details about Haraway's death that the police had given him. He also implicates Odell Titsworth, a Native American man who gets in frequent trouble with the police, as well as Karl Fontenot.
• Oct 19, 1984 — Fontenot (who has a learning disability) is interrogated, and like Ward, is forced to remain in the police station for hours upon hours. He eventually confesses that he, Ward, and Tittsworth killed Haraway so she wouldn't tell the cops about their botched robbery of the convenience store. He says they got high beforehand, and that Titsworth was the mastermind behind it all. Both Fontenot and Ward say Tittsworth stabbed Haraway over and over again, and that Titsworth held her down while Ward raped her. Following this confession the police go to Titsworth's home to arrest him, but realise he'd been in the hospital with a broken arm during the killing, and there's no way he would've been able to do the things they accused him of. They declined to arrest him [6].
• September 1985 — Fontenot and Ward are 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 are discovered in a forest 30 miles east of Ada by a hunter passing through. After an examination, it's established that she was shot in the head, and that 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 has been revealed, Ward appeals to be retried in a different county (in an attempt to escape the opinions of Ada residents), but this time prosecutor Bill Peterson convinces 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.

So, Who Really Killed Denice Haraway? And Where Are Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot Now?

The real killer(s) of Denice Haraway, whoever they are, are still out there, if you subscribe to the belief that Ward and Fontenot did not commit the crime. Two other key suspects in Haraway's murder are brought up over the course of the documentary — Billy Charlie and Floyd Degraw (who is now in jail for an unrelated crime) — but no legal action ever moves forward with either of them. If you watch The Innocent Man all the way through, though, it's hard to believe that either Ward or Fontenot could still be in prison given the glaring lack of evidence.

Fontenot, who's in the midst of trying to appeal his sentencing, was advised not to comment on the documentary, but Ward — who's still in prison, too — sat down for a number of interviews with the documentary team. Ward explains that although admitting guilt and regret over her murder to the appeals committee would increase his chances of release, he would rather stay in jail than confess to something he didn't do (again).

For the most part, it seems like the pair were the victims of the same corrupt police practices that originally landed Dennis Fritz and Ron Williamson in prison, especially the case built against them by Bill Peterson and the amount of evidence the district attorney withheld from the jury (he alleges it was not done on purpose). According to Grisham, their conviction was "all about winning," not about the truth, nabbing the real killer, or what was right. As it stands now, the state is set to review Ward's latest post-conviction filing at some point in 2019 (reminder: he's been in prison for 34 years at this point). Fontenot is still awaiting a response to his federal appeal.