THE DREAMS OF ADA: A True Story of Murder, Obsession, and a Small Town

by Robert Mayer ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1987

A nightmarish miscarriage of justice finds two young Oklahomans, both borderline retards (though Mayer doesn't say as much), still on Death Row for a murder they almost certainly didn't do. Mayer decided to blow up his story into a Midwestern epic and subject the small Oklahoma town of Ada to microscopic inspection. Some will find in his factual overkill a kind of poetry, but there are few of the sweeping lyric touches found in Mailer's The Executioner's Song. The discomforted reader finds the author forced to remain objective in the face of his obvious bias for the accused, and trying to shore up his objectivity by describing every railroad track and grain elevator in sight, as if this patter will keep the reader's eye off the hand up the writer's sleeve. Meanwhile the book's passion is undercut, and the reader robbed of a strong response to a clearly unjust situation. The story: recently married Denice Harraway, a lone young night clerk at a convience food store in Ada, disappeared from work one evening and was not seen again until her bones were found over a year later. Denice was not the first young woman to disappear like this. The police were slow in finding leads, despite searches joined in by townsfolk. One person who saw a girl, apparently Denice, being led from the store by one young man and put into a pickup truck driven by a second young man helped construct ID pictures through which three men were arrested. One youngster, Tommy Ward, became so confused by his grilling that he told of a dream he'd had in which perhaps he'd killed Denice along with two friends. The police then tried to construct a physical reality to support the dream. Among Tommy's details: that Denice had been stabbed to death, raped, then burned to ash in a house that youths then torched. Investigation proved that the house had burned down a year earlier than Tommy said, and that the so-called ringleader had actually had his arm broken by the police the night before the kidnapping and could not possibly have raped anyone with his whole arm in a new cast. The rest of the police work produced equally flimsy evidence, and the recovered skull showed that Denice had been shot, not stabbed. A jury convicted two of the young men, who are now on Death Row. Absorbing, but defeated in part by its larger strivings.

Pub Date: April 1, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION