Let’s leave Jerry Patterson for now, to return later.

  In the Upper Buffalo Wilderness area on Cave Mountain, in the woods near a Forestry Service road near Kaypark Cemetery, around midmorning on Monday, April 24, 1978, Newton County Sheriff Hurchal Fowler, Game Warden Fred Bell, and Sheriff’s Deputy Ray Watkins, with the assistance of Hurchal’s son, Eddy, and Fred’s friend Ed Burton, arrested Royal Harris, Winston Van Harris, Mark Harris, Suzette Freeman, and Lucy Clark. Suzette’s nine-year-old daughter, Desha, was placed in temporary police custody. (Larry Freeman and Johnny Stablier were also named in the warrant; they had been arrested in Missouri while trying to kidnap Larry’s children three days earlier.) According to the arrest warrant issued by Benton County, the group had another young child with them, a girl under five years old. Wherever the second girl was, she wasn’t there.

  While Hurchal stayed behind to look around their campsite, Ray, Fred, Eddy, and Ed took the four adults, one juvenile, and nine-year-old child to Newton County Jail. Ray then returned to Cave Mountain to rejoin Hurchal. Someone told the Sheriff’s Office at Benton County Jail that they had their suspects, and then someone drove the suspects there—a trip of a little over two hours rolling through the Ozarks from Jasper to Bentonville—where the five detainees were fingerprinted, photographed, booked, locked in separate cells, and each allowed to make one phone call. Neither Royal nor Winston nor Mark nor Lucy exercised their right to make a phone call, because none of them had anyone to call. Suzette Freeman, however, called her lawyer, David Matthews.

  Matthews, in Jerry Patterson’s words, was “a damn good lawyer. He reminded me of Bill Clinton, ’cause he had a hell of a gab.” Matthews would later be elected state representative in 1983 and he represented Benton County in Arkansas’s House of Representatives until 1990. A Democrat, his career was in fact closely connected with that of Clinton, who had been his professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law and would appoint him special justice to the Arkansas Supreme Court in 1991.* At the time of the murder, Matthews was a young lawyer still in his twenties; he had been licensed in 1976 and had been running a private family law practice in his hometown of Lowell, a little town between Rogers and Springdale, for not quite two years.

  Suzette Freeman was already his client; he had represented her not long before in a custody battle over her daughter with her ex-husband, Robert Dardenne. Matthews recalled that sometime in the fall of 1977, Suzette had come to him with “a pretty straightforward case”: She was divorced and had custody of her daughter, Desha, who lived with her and her second husband, Larry, in Rogers. Her ex-husband, who lived down in Baton Rouge, wanted visitation rights, and Suzette told Matthews that “her daughter was terrified terrified terrified of her daddy.” Matthews lost that case, and the judge ordered that Desha’s father was entitled to visitation rights. Matthews vividly recalled that the first handoff happened in the parking lot of his family law office in Lowell: “[Desha] was screaming, kicking, crying, hollering, hitting, begging, ‘Please don’t make me go, please don’t make me go.’ Suzette’s crying and raising Cain and accusing her ex-husband of torturing their daughter. And he literally physically grabbed her and threw her into the back seat of the car.” That histrionic scene in the parking lot of his office was the last time he saw or heard from Suzette Freeman until about six months later on a Monday afternoon in late April, when she called him from the Benton County Jail.

  The following day, Tuesday, April 25, 1978, Matthews drove to meet Freeman in a small conference room in the jail and spoke with her for several hours. He recalled that the urgent concern of the police was where the missing little girl was. Nobody knew, and none of the detainees was talking, including Suzette, at first. “She was not being straightforward with me or anyone else,” Matthews told me. “But the prosecutor was saying, ‘We really, really, really need to know where the child is, what’s going on.’ And I spent several hours talking with her and finally said, ‘I might be able to get you immunity if you tell them what you know.’ And at that time I didn’t know what she knew. She wasn’t telling me, either. But anyway, we negotiated the immunity deal with Gary Kennan, the Benton County prosecuting attorney.”

  The first document in the paper trail of the Harris/Freeman/Clark case is dated April 24, 1978, the day they were arrested and taken back to Benton County, recording the arrests and charges filed against Royal, Winston Van and Mark Harris, Suzette Freeman, and Lucy Clark. The second document is also dated April 24, an appointment of counsel, appointing Tom J. Keith, public defender, to represent Lucy Clark. The third document, a grant of immunity and order to testify giving Suzette Freeman immunity from prosecution in exchange for her testimony in a court of law, is dated April 25, 1978.

  Matthews negotiated the plea deal on Suzette’s behalf with prosecutor Gary Kennan, the judge signed it, and then—he remembered that they were all sitting around a table in a conference room somewhere in the Benton County Jail: him, Suzette, Gary, and a State Police detective (whose name David couldn’t remember)—as the ink of the judge’s signature may have still been drying, Suzette said to him and the other two men, “The child is not alive.”

  David Matthews said that at the time he negotiated the plea deal, he had had no idea whether the child was dead or alive, though the language in the first paragraph of the grant of immunity and order to testify seems to indicate that the Benton County police at the time figured it a high likelihood the missing girl was dead, but they didn’t know for sure: “The Prosecuting Attorney seeks to immunize B. Suzette Freeman from prosecution for any matter divulge[d] by her in the course of her testimony concerning the investigation of the battery and possible homicide of Bethany Alana Clark.”

  Suzette told David Matthews, Gary Kennan, and the State Police detective that Bethany was buried near the area where they had been arrested the day before. I asked David if Suzette had actually gone with the police back to Newton County to show them where the body was buried or if she had just told them where to look. He said he didn’t remember.

  Here we reach the knot of confusion. Ray Watkins remains adamantly certain that Hurchal Fowler found the body on his own on Monday, and about that I myself believe he is correct; it would have been, to say the least, a memorable day. But Suzette was given immunity on Tuesday, when the Benton County police did not know where Bethany Clark was and were desperate to find her. Why did the police in Benton County not know that the body had already been found the day before?

  I held a second and much longer interview with Ray Watkins in October 2023, and the eureka moment hit me in the middle of our conversation. I had called Ray earlier in the day to ask when we could talk, and he had told me to meet him at the hardware store at 5:30. He was closing the store that day, and we could talk after he finished work. After he locked up the store, we sat at a lone wooden picnic table on an interstitial afterthought of lawn between the hardware store’s entrance and its empty parking lot and went over the events of Monday, April 24, 1978, in much more fastidious detail than we had before.

  After making the arrests, “we was probably back here [in Jasper] at nine thirty, ten o’clock,” Ray said. “And I went back probably about eleven o’clock. It was about eleven thirty when I got back over there.”

  “And when you got back up there,” I said, “Hurchal had already found the body.”

  “Yep. He had already found the body.”

  “Okay, and that was about eleven thirty, close to noon. And then you—”

  “And as far as I know, he didn’t have no communication with anybody after that,” Ray added. “Except to our office. And we called the coroner, and the coroner would have come right out and done their investigation.”

  “So he didn’t tell anybody that he’d dug up the body except you and the coroner,” I said. “And I guess the coroner didn’t tell anybody, either. So that’s the reason why the cops in Benton County didn’t know. Nobody had told them.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. “That’s very possible.”

  Back in Jerry Patterson’s living room on the first day of July 2023, Jerry had let his dog in from the backyard, and now she lay curled placidly asleep on the rug between us with damp fur faintly stinking. The sliding glass patio door was open to the humid midsummer’s early-evening air, and we were drinking bottles of Budweiser he’d fetched from the fridge.

  “The deal they cut was,” Jerry said, “‘We’ll give you all the information you want if you’ll waive prosecution of Suzette Freeman.’ Well, how wonderful. They did it.”

  On April 24, Benton County charged Royal, Mark and Winston Van Harris, Suzette Freeman, and Lucy Clark with battery in the second degree, “said to have been committed on or about April 7, 1978.” The charge was for beating Bethany and Matthew David and burning Bethany’s hand, which June Harris had told the Benton County police about. Several days later, once the confusion had cleared up some, it was obvious that the body had been discovered in Newton County and that the murder had almost certainly taken place there—at least the crime of trying to cover it up indisputably had. Jerry Patterson—who was thirty-five at the time and had only recently been elected prosecuting attorney for Arkansas’s 14th Judicial Circuit, comprising the four mostly rural counties of Boone, Baxter, Marion, and Newton—filed charges of first-degree murder against all five defendants in Newton County later that week.

  Over the course of the coming months, Arkansas’s 14th and 19th West (Benton County) Circuits palavered back and forth about it, and the 19th West would drop second-degree battery charges in order for the 14th to focus on the much more serious first-degree murder charges. The defendants were transferred to Boone County Jail in Harrison by the end of the summer.

  Sometime before that was settled—Jerry remembered it as having been in mid-May—Suzette’s lawyer, David Matthews, drove out to Jerry’s office in Jasper to tell him he had to drop the charge against his client Suzette Freeman because of the plea deal Circuit Court Judge Enfield had signed in Benton County on April 25. Jerry remembers it being a tense and contentious meeting. He had mixed feelings toward David Matthews, the man he called “a damn good lawyer” with “a hell of a gab—just a natural politician.” He had a lot of professional respect for him, seasoned with some irritation that Matthews was younger than him and, he could tell, charismatic, well connected, and well positioned to rise in Arkansas politics; Matthews was based much closer to the university and comparatively cosmopolitan Fayetteville than Jerry, who was posted out in the boondocks of the Ozarks. Furthermore, Matthews had him bested, as he had already won this legal proxy battle before he even stepped into Jerry’s office; the language of the grant of immunity and order to testify is clear as day: “The Prosecuting Attorney seeks to immunize B. Suzette K. Freeman from prosecution for any matter divulged by her in the course of her testimony concerning the investigation of the battery and possible homicide of Bethany Alana Clark.” If the words “and possible homicide” had not been included in that sentence, Jerry would have had solid grounds for filing the first-degree murder charge against Suzette. But they were, and there was nothing he could do about it.

  “I wanted to file charges against Suzette Freeman,” Jerry said, “and he comes down here and says, ‘You can’t, because we’ve made a deal. And you’d have never found this child had it not been for her.’ ” Jerry rolled his eyes remembering it. “That’s just—puff, you know.”

  With all the confusion and lack of communication between law enforcement agencies in Newton and Benton counties, Matthews probably still didn’t understand that the body had been discovered before he had negotiated the plea deal with the Benton County prosecutor. (Today, Matthews says he doesn’t remember whether or not he knew it, but he does remember making the trip to Jerry’s office in Jasper to tell him that he had to drop the murder charge against Suzette.)

  Remembering that meeting with Matthews raises Jerry’s hackles even now. He was outraged that one of the defendants in his murder case had escaped justice so easily and incensed at his being hamstrung to do anything about it. For his part, Matthews expressed some regret about his involvement in the case but can’t imagine that he would have done anything differently, considering what he knew at the time and his position as Suzette’s attorney. He was only doing his job. Forty-six years have gone by since then, and both he and Jerry rose up the ladder afterward: Jerry went on to serve as a judge for most of his career, and Matthews went on to hold office in the Arkansas House of Representatives and later served as a justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Both men have now returned to private practice, and still have mostly complimentary things to say about each other.

  “To me, Jerry was a good lawyer, a good guy,” Matthews said. “He was outraged at what had happened, of course. Jerry Patterson really, really hated the fact that—I can’t emphasize that enough—he hated the fact that she got immunity.” Not only that; as the prosecuting attorney, he was now going to have to work with her as a witness.

  Suzette Freeman spent the tail end of April and the month of May in Benton County Jail, and on June 1 she was released “into the custody and care of her father, Leo Jerome Kleinpeter, Sr., who agrees to supervise the Defendant and assist her in appearing in this Court and any other Court in the State of Arkansas. . . . The Defendant may leave the State of Arkansas and return to her home in Grosse Tete, Iberville Parish, Louisiana.”

  A few days before the trial began, Suzette—apparently alone, despite the order of release mandating her father to supervise and assist her in appearing in court—traveled back up to Arkansas to testify as a witness for the state. According to Jerry Patterson:

  I never will forget my first meeting with Suzette Freeman. I immediately did not like her. I could see that she was a manipulator. And that she had abused the system to save her own ass, and everybody else could go to hell in a handbasket as far as she was concerned. I did not like the woman. At all.

  So we’re getting ready to go to trial, and I meet with her. She’s got a motel room in Harrison. She didn’t wanna tell me where she’s at. I said, “Well, how in the hell am I supposed to visit with you to find out what you’re gonna be doing?” And this is after I’d visited with her before. “We’ve got a trial coming up, I need to sit down with you to get a feel for how to present you as a witness.”

  She said she didn’t want me to know where she was at because she was afraid that somebody would be out looking for her and then possibly kill her. She just fed me—she tried to feed me so full of shit.

  And so I said, “All right, you don’t want me to know where you’re at. I’m the prosecuting attorney. If somebody’s gonna kill you, it would be a pretty damn stupid thing for them to do, or even try to do.” I said, “You’re up! You’re under a subpoena. You’ve gotta come to trial tomorrow.”

  “Oh, well, oh, well, that’s why I came up here. I wanted to visit with you.”

  And I said, “Well, tell me where in the hell you’re at!”

  Well, I finally got her to tell me where she was at. It was some motel, some seedy little place, and I . . . damn, I hate that bitch. Brings back a lot of bad memories. Anyway, so she’s saying, “Well, am I gonna have escorts?”

  And I said, “Why would you need an escort?”

  “Protection! I need protection.”

  “Really?” I said. “I don’t think you need protection.” I said, “Hell, you’re gonna be testifying for the state, who’s gonna hurt you?”

  “Well, somebody might be mad because I gave information about Lucy and Winston and Mark and their daddy.”

  I said, “I don’t think so.”

  Oh, well. Here we are, we’re getting our preliminaries the day of trial, I’m in my office getting everything ready, and somebody from the clerk’s office comes up, knocks on my door, and says, “There’s a Mrs. Freeman down here that needs to talk to you.”

  “That’s my witness, Suzette Freeman.”

  “She needs to talk to you.”

  I said, “I talked to her last night.”

  “Well, she needs to talk to you now.”

  So I go down there: Hollywood! She’s got on this damn—some big old hat. Sunglasses about this big. Like some movie star. And of course she’s got on some nice dress and everything. But you could see she’s trying to hide her face.

  And I said, “Well, what is it that you need?”

  She said, “How can I get in there without anybody seeing me?”

  And I said, “What the—?” I said, “Why are you worried?”

  “Well, I just, I’m just apprehensive.” Da da da dee da.

  And I said, “Well, if you feel that badly, there’s a staircase through the clerk’s office that comes out in the courtroom, over at the far end by the bench. You can come in that way.”

  So I go back up there, and she follows me up there. And so she’s sitting there, and we qualify the jury and do our preliminaries. . . . And I felt so damn mad about the deal. I can tell you that before that trial, I didn’t sleep. I bet I didn’t sleep three hours. The little girl, the tragedy about the way she was killed, stuffed her in a damn bucket, the Suzette Freeman shit—it troubled me a lot.

  Anyway, the record will bear out that we worked a plea deal for Dad and the prophet and Winston. The only person that we had that didn’t plead was Lucy. The thing that troubled me about it was, here I am prosecuting this poor girl—and she was . . . she was just a flower girl. She was so timid, so easily manipulated—and it just didn’t seem fair to me to be prosecuting her. But that’s my job, so I did it.