In Southeast Oklahoma, a father-son reporting duo’s series on the county sheriff led to an explosive revelation.
Bruce Willingham, fifty-two years a newspaperman, owns and publishes the McCurtain Gazette,
in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, a rolling sweep of timber and lakes that
forms the southeastern corner of the state. McCurtain County is
geographically larger than Rhode Island and less populous than the
average Taylor Swift concert. Thirty-one thousand people live there;
forty-four hundred buy the Gazette, which has been in print since 1905, before statehood. At that time, the paper was known as the Idabel Signal, referring to the county seat. An early masthead proclaimed “INDIAN TERRITORY, CHOCTAW NATION.
Willingham bought the newspaper in 1988, with his wife, Gwen, who gave up a nursing career to become the Gazette’s
accountant. They operate out of a storefront office in downtown Idabel,
between a package-shipping business and a pawnshop. The staff parks out
back, within sight of an old Frisco railway station, and enters through
the “morgue,” where the bound archives are kept. Until recently, no one
had reason to lock the door during the day.
Three days a week (five, before the
pandemic), readers can find the latest on rodeo queens, school cafeteria
menus, hardwood-mill closings, heat advisories. Some headlines: “Large
Cat Sighted in Idabel,” “Two of State’s Three Master Bladesmiths Live
Here,” “Local Singing Group Enjoys Tuesdays.” Anyone who’s been cited
for speeding, charged with a misdemeanor, applied for a marriage
license, or filed for divorce will see his or her name listed in the
“District Court Report.” In Willingham’s clutterbucket of an office, a
hulking microfiche machine sits alongside his desktop computer amid
lunar levels of dust; he uses the machine to unearth and reprint front
pages from long ago. In 2017, he transported readers to 1934 via a
banner headline: “NEGRO SLAYER OF WHITE MAN KILLED.” The area has long been stuck with the nickname Little Dixie.
Gazette
articles can be shorter than recipes, and what they may lack in detail,
context, and occasionally accuracy, they make up for by existing at
all. The paper does more than probe the past or keep tabs on the local
felines. “We’ve investigated county officials a lot,” Willingham, who is sixty-eight, said the other day. The Gazette
exposed a county treasurer who allowed elected officials to avoid
penalties for paying their property taxes late, and a utilities company
that gouged poor customers while lavishing its executives with gifts.
“To most people, it’s Mickey Mouse stuff,” Willingham told me. “But the
problem is, if you let them get away with it, it gets worse and worse
and worse.”
The Willinghams’ oldest son, Chris, and his wife, Angie, work at the Gazette,
too. They moved to Idabel from Oklahoma City in the spring of 2005, not
long after graduating from college. Angie became an editor, and Chris
covered what is known in the daily-news business as cops and courts.
Absurdity often made the front page—a five-m.p.h. police “chase” through
town, a wayward snake. Three times in one year, the paper wrote about
assaults in which the weapon was chicken and dumplings. McCurtain
County, which once led the state in homicides, also produces more
sinister blotter items: a man cashed his dead mother’s Social Security
checks for more than a year; a man killed a woman with a hunting bow and
two arrows; a man raped a woman in front of her baby.
In
a small town, a dogged reporter is inevitably an unpopular one. It
isn’t easy to write about an old friend’s felony drug charge, knowing
that you’re going to see him at church. When Chris was a teen-ager, his
father twice put him in the paper, for the misdemeanors of
stealing beer, with buddies, at a grocery store where one of them
worked, and parking illegally—probably with those same buddies,
definitely with beer—on a back-road bridge, over a good fishing hole.
Chris has a wired earnestness and a voice that carries. Listening to a crime victim’s story, he might boom, “Gollll-ly!”
Among law-enforcement sources, “Chris was respected because he always
asked questions about how the system works, about proper procedure,” an
officer said. Certain cops admired his willingness to pursue
uncomfortable truths even if those truths involved one of their own. “If
I was to do something wrong—on purpose, on accident—Chris Willingham
one hundred per cent would write my butt in the paper, on the front
page, in bold letters,” another officer, who has known him for more than
a decade, told me.
In the summer of
2021, Chris heard that there were morale problems within the McCurtain
County Sheriff’s Office. The sheriff, Kevin Clardy, who has woolly
eyebrows and a mustache, and often wears a cowboy hat, had just started
his second term. The first one had gone smoothly, but now, according to
some colleagues, Clardy appeared to be playing favorites.
The
current discord stemmed from two recent promotions. Clardy had brought
in Larry Hendrix, a former deputy from another county, and, despite what
some considered to be weak investigative skills, elevated him to
undersheriff—second-in-command. Clardy had also hired Alicia Manning,
who had taken up law enforcement only recently, in her forties. Rookies
typically start out on patrol, but Clardy made Manning an investigator.
Then he named her captain, a newly created position, from which she
oversaw the department’s two dozen or so deputies and managed cases
involving violence against women and children. Co-workers were dismayed
to see someone with so little experience rise that quickly to the third
most powerful rank. “Never patrolled one night, never patrolled one day,
in any law-enforcement aspect, anywhere in her life, and you’re gonna
bring her in and stick her in high crimes?” one officer who worked with
her told me.
Chris was sitting on a tip
that Clardy favored Manning because the two were having an affair. Then,
around Thanksgiving, 2021, employees at the county jail, whose board is
chaired by the sheriff, started getting fired, and quitting. The first
to go was the jail’s secretary, who had worked there for twenty-six
years. The jail’s administrator resigned on the spot rather than carry
out the termination; the secretary’s husband, the jail’s longtime
handyman, quit, too. When Chris interviewed Clardy about the unusual
spate of departures, the sheriff pointed out that employment in Oklahoma
is at will. “It is what it is,” he said. In response to a question
about nepotism, involving the temporary promotion of his stepdaughter’s
husband, Clardy revealed that he had been divorced for a few months and
separated for more than a year. Chris asked, “Are you and Alicia having
sex?” Clardy repeatedly said no, insisting, “We’re good friends. Me and
Larry’s good friends, but I’m not having sex with Larry, either.”
Meanwhile, someone had sent Chris
photographs of the department’s evidence room, which resembled a
hoarder’s nest. The mess invited speculation about tainted case
material. In a front-page story, branded “first of a series,” the Gazette
printed the images, along with the news that Hendrix and Manning were
warning deputies to stop all the “backdoor talk.” The sheriff told
staffers that anyone who spoke to the Gazette would be fired.
Manning
has thick, ash-streaked hair, a direct manner, and what seems to be an
unwavering loyalty to Clardy. She offered to help him flush out the
leakers, and told another colleague that she wanted to obtain search
warrants for cell phones belonging to deputies. When Chris heard that
Manning wanted to confiscate his phone, he called the Oklahoma
Press Association—and a lawyer. (Oklahoma has a shield law, passed in
the seventies, which is designed to protect journalists’ sources.) The
lawyer advised Chris to leave his phone behind whenever he went to the
sheriff’s department. Angie was prepared to remotely wipe the device if
Chris ever lost possession of it.
John
Jones, a narcotics detective in his late twenties, cautioned Manning
against abusing her authority. Jones was the sheriff’s most prolific
investigator, regarded as a forthright and talented young officer—a
“velociraptor,” according to one peer. He had documented the presence of
the Sinaloa cartel in McCurtain County, describing meth smuggled from
Mexico in shipments of pencils, and cash laundered through local
casinos. Jones had filed hundreds of cases between 2019 and most of
2021, compared with a couple of dozen by Manning and Hendrix combined.
The Gazette reported that, on December 1st—days after confronting Manning—Jones was bumped down to patrol. The next day, he quit.
Within the week, Hendrix fired the department’s second most productive
investigator, Devin Black. An experienced detective in his late
thirties, Black had just recovered nearly a million dollars’ worth of
stolen tractors and construction equipment, a big deal in a county whose
economy depends on agriculture and tourism. (At Broken Bow Lake, north
of Idabel, newcomers are building hundreds of luxury cabins in
Hochatown, a resort area known as the Hamptons of Dallas-Fort Worth.)
Black said nothing publicly after his departure, but Jones published an
open letter in the Gazette, accusing Hendrix of neglecting the
case of a woman who said that she was raped at gunpoint during a home
invasion. The woman told Jones that she had been restrained with duct
tape during the attack, and that the tape might still be at her house.
Hendrix, Jones wrote, “never followed up or even reached out to the
woman again.” Curtis Fields, a jail employee who had recently been
fired, got a letter of his own published in the Gazette. He
wrote that the sheriff’s “maladministration” was “flat-out embarrassing
to our entire county,” and, worse, put “many cases at risk.”
Around this time, Hendrix was moved over to
run the jail, and Clardy hired Alicia Manning’s older brother, Mike, to
be the new undersheriff. Mike, who had long worked part time as a local
law-enforcement officer, owned IN-Sight Technologies, a contractor that
provided CCTV, security, and I.T. services to the county, including the
sheriff’s department. The Willinghams observed that his new position
created a conflict of interest. In late December, the day after Mike’s
appointment, Chris and Bruce went to ask him about it. Mike said that he
had resigned as IN-Sight’s C.E.O. that very day and, after some
prodding, acknowledged that he had transferred ownership of the
company—to his wife. He assured the Willinghams that IN-Sight’s business
with McCurtain County was “minuscule.” According to records that I
requested from the county clerk, McCurtain County has issued at least
two hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars in purchase orders to the
company since 2016. The county commissioners have authorized at least
eighty thousand dollars in payments to IN-Sight since Mike became
undersheriff.
Mike
urged the Willinghams to focus on more important issues. When he said,
“I’m not here to be a whipping post, because there’s a lot of crime
going on right now,” Chris replied, “Oh, yeah, I agree.” The
undersheriff claimed to have no problem with journalists, saying, “I’m a
constitutional guy.”
State
“sunshine” laws require government officials to do the people’s
business in public: most records must be accessible to anyone who wishes
to see them, and certain meetings must be open to anyone who would like
to attend. Bruce Willingham once wrote, “We are aggressive about
protecting the public’s access to records and meetings, because we have
found that if we don’t insist on both, often no one else will.” The
Center for Public Integrity grades each state on the quality of its
open-government statutes and practices. At last check, Oklahoma, along
with ten other states, got an F.
In
January, 2022, Chris noticed a discrepancy between the number of crimes
listed in the sheriff’s logbook and the correlating reports made
available to him. Whereas he once saw thirty to forty reports per week,
he now saw fewer than twenty. “The ones that I get are like ‘loose
cattle on somebody’s land,’ all very minor stuff,” he told me. He often
didn’t find out about serious crime until it was being prosecuted. In
his next article, he wrote that fifty-three reports were missing,
including information about “a shooting, a rape, an elementary school
teacher being unknowingly given marijuana cookies by a student and a
deputy allegedly shooting out the tires” of a car. The headline was “Sheriff Regularly Breaking Law Now.”
Two
weeks later, the sheriff’s department landed back on page 1 after four
felons climbed through the roof of the jail, descended a radio tower,
and fled—the first escape in twenty-three years. Chris reported that
prisoners had been sneaking out of the jail throughout the winter to
pick up “drugs, cell phones and beer” at a nearby convenience store.
Three of the escapees were still at large
when, late one Saturday night in February, Alyssa Walker-Donaldson, a
former Miss McCurtain County, vanished after leaving a bar in Hochatown.
When the sheriff’s department did not appear to be exacting in its
search, volunteers mounted their own. It was a civilian in a borrowed
Cessna who spotted Walker-Donaldson’s white S.U.V. at the bottom of
Broken Bow Lake. An autopsy showed that she had suffered acute
intoxication by alcohol and drowned in what was described as an
accident. The findings failed to fully explain how Walker-Donaldson, who
was twenty-four, wound up in the water, miles from where she was
supposed to be, near a boat ramp at the end of a winding road. “Even the
U.P.S. man can’t get down there,” Walker-Donaldson’s mother, Carla
Giddens, told me. Giddens wondered why all five buttons on her
daughter’s high-rise jeans were undone, and why her shirt was pushed
above her bra. She told a local TV station, “Nothing was handled right
when it came to her.” Giddens suspected that the sheriff’s disappointing
search could be attributed to the fact that her daughter was Black and
Choctaw. (She has since called for a new investigation.)
Not
long after that, the sheriff’s department responded to a disturbance at
a roadside deli. A deputy, Matt Kasbaum, arrived to find a man hogtied
on the pavement; witnesses, who said that the man had broken a door and
was trying to enter people’s vehicles, had trussed him with cord. “Well,
this is interesting,” Kasbaum remarked. He handcuffed the man, Bobby
Barrick, who was forty-five, then cut loose the cord and placed him in
the back seat of a patrol unit. An E.M.S. crew arrived to examine
Barrick. “He’s doped up hard,” Kasbaum warned. When he opened
the door, Barrick tried to kick his way out, screaming “Help me!” and
“They’re gonna kill me!” As officers subdued him, Barrick lost
consciousness. Several days later, he died at a hospital in Texas.
The
public initially knew little of this because the sheriff refused to
release information, on the ground that Barrick belonged to the Choctaw
Nation and therefore the arrest fell under the jurisdiction of tribal
police. The Willinghams turned to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of
the Press, a nonprofit, headquartered in Washington, D.C., that
provides pro-bono legal services to journalists. (The Reporters
Committee has also assisted The New Yorker.) The organization
had recently assigned a staff attorney to Oklahoma, an indication of how
difficult it is to pry information from public officials there. Its
attorneys helped the Gazette sue for access to case documents;
the paper then reported that Kasbaum had tased Barrick three times on
his bare hip bone. Barrick’s widow filed a lawsuit, alleging that the
taser was not registered with the sheriff’s department and that deputies
had not been trained to use it. The suit also alleged that Kasbaum and
other officers had turned off their lapel cameras during the encounter
and put “significant pressure on Barrick’s back while he was in a
face-down prone position and handcuffed.” Kasbaum, who denied the
allegations, left the force. The Gazette reported that the F.B.I. and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation were looking into the death.
Chris and Angie got married soon after joining the Gazette.
By the time Chris began publishing his series on the sheriff’s
department, they were in their late thirties, with small children, two
dogs, and a house on a golf course. They once had a bluegrass band,
Succotash, in which Angie played Dobro and Chris played everything,
mainly fiddle. He taught music lessons and laid down tracks for clients
at his in-home studio. Angie founded McCurtain Mosaics, working with cut
glass. The couple, who never intended to become journalists, suppressed
the occasional urge to leave the Gazette, knowing that they would be hard to replace. Bruce lamented, “Everybody wants to work in the big city.”
Five days a week, in the newsroom, Chris and Angie sit in high-walled cubicles, just outside Bruce’s office. The Gazette’s
other full-time reporters include Bob West, who is eighty-one and has
worked at the paper for decades. An ardent chronicler of museum events,
local schools, and the weather, West is also known, affectionately, as
the staffer most likely to leave his car running, with the windows down,
in the rain, or to arrive at work with his toothbrush in his shirt
pocket. He once leaned on his keyboard and accidentally deleted the
newspaper’s digital Rolodex. One afternoon in May, he ambled over to
Angie’s desk, where the Willinghams and I were talking, and announced,
“Hail, thunderstorms, damaging winds!” A storm was coming.
Bruce
and Gwen Willingham own commercial real estate, and they rent several
cabins to vacationers in Hochatown. Chris said, “If we didn’t have
tourism to fall back on, we couldn’t run the newspaper. The newspaper loses
money.” An annual subscription costs seventy-one bucks; the rack price
is fifty cents on weekdays, seventy-five on the weekend. During the
pandemic, the Willinghams reduced both the publishing schedule and the
size of the broadsheet, to avoid layoffs. The paper’s receptionist, who
is in her sixties, has worked there since she was a teen-ager; a former
pressman, who also started in his teens, left in his nineties, when his
doctor demanded that he retire. In twenty-five paces, a staffer can
traverse the distance between the newsroom and the printing press—the Gazette
is one of the few American newspapers that still publish on-site, or at
all. Since 2005, more than one in four papers across the country have
closed; according to the Medill School of Journalism, at Northwestern
University, two-thirds of U.S. counties don’t have a daily paper. When
Chris leads tours for elementary-school students, he schedules them for
afternoons when there’s a print run, though he isn’t one to preach about
journalism’s vital role in a democracy. He’s more likely to jiggle one
of the thin metal printing plates, to demonstrate how stagehands mimic
thunder.
As the Walker-Donaldson case unfolded, Chris got a tip that the sheriff
used meth and had been “tweaking” during the search for her. Bruce asked
the county commissioners to require Clardy to submit to a drug test.
Urinalysis wasn’t good enough—the Gazette wanted a
hair-follicle analysis, which has a much wider detection window. The
sheriff peed in a cup. Promptly, prominently, the Gazette reported the results, which were negative, but noted that Clardy had declined the more comprehensive test.
“This has to stop!” the sheriff posted on
the department’s Facebook page. Complaining about “the repeated attacks
on law enforcement,” he wrote, “We have a job to do and that is to
protect people. We can’t cater to the newspaper or social media every
day of the week.” Clardy blamed the Gazette’s reporting on “former employees who were terminated or resigned.”
Locals who were following the coverage and the reactions couldn’t decide what to make of the devolving relationship between the Gazette
and county leadership. Was their tiny newspaper needlessly antagonizing
the sheriff, or was it insisting on accountability in the face of
misconduct? Craig Young, the mayor of Idabel, told me that he generally
found the paper’s reporting to be accurate; he also said that the county
seemed to be doing a capable job of running itself. He just hoped that
nothing would disrupt Idabel’s plans to host an upcoming event that
promises to draw thousands of tourists. On April 8, 2024, a solar
eclipse will arc across the United States, from Dallas, Texas, to
Caribou, Maine. McCurtain County lies in one of the “totality zones.”
According to NASA, between one-forty-five and one-forty-nine that afternoon, Idabel will experience complete darkness.
In
October, 2022, Chris got another explosive tip—about himself. A local
law-enforcement officer sent him audio excerpts of a telephone
conversation with Captain Manning. The officer did not trust Manning,
and had recorded their call. (Oklahoma is a one-party-consent state.)
They discussed office politics and sexual harassment. Manning recalled
that, after she was hired, a detective took bets on which co-worker
would “hit it,” or sleep with her, first. Another colleague gossiped
that she “gave a really good blow job.”
The
conversation turned to Clardy’s drug test. As retribution, Manning said
that she wanted to question Chris in one of her sex-crime
investigations—at a county commissioners’ meeting, “in front of
everybody.” She went on, “We will see if they want to write about that
in the newspaper. That’s just the way I roll. ‘O.K., you don’t wanna
talk about it? Fine. But it’s “public record.” Y’all made mine and
Kevin’s business public record.’ ”
At the
time, Manning was investigating several suspected pedophiles, including
a former high-school math teacher who was accused of demanding nude
photographs in exchange for favorable grades. (The teacher is now
serving thirteen years in prison.) Manning told a TV news station that
“possibly other people in the community” who were in a “position of
power” were involved. On the recorded call, she mentioned pedophilia
defendants by name and referred to Chris as “one of them.” Without
citing evidence, she accused him of trading marijuana for videos of
children.
Chris, stunned, suspected that
Manning was just looking for an excuse to confiscate his phone. But when
he started to lose music students, and his kids’ friends stopped coming
over, he feared that rumors were spreading in the community. A source
warned him that Manning’s accusations could lead to his children being
forensically interviewed, which happens in child-abuse investigations.
He developed such severe anxiety and depression that he rarely went out;
he gave his firearms to a relative in case he felt tempted to harm
himself. Angie was experiencing panic attacks and insomnia. “We were not
managing,” she said.
hat fall, as Chris mulled his options, a
powerful tornado struck Idabel. Bruce and Gwen lost their home. They
stored their salvaged possessions at the Gazette and temporarily moved in with Chris and Angie. In December, the Gazette
announced that Chris planned to sue Manning. On March 6th, he did, in
federal court, alleging “slander and intentional infliction of emotional
distress” in retaliation for his reporting. Clardy was also named as a
defendant, for allowing and encouraging the retaliation to take place.
(Neither he nor Manning would speak with me.)
In
May, both Clardy and Manning answered the civil complaint in court.
Clardy denied the allegations against him. Manning cited protection
under the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which is often used to
indemnify law-enforcement officers from civil action and prosecution.
She denied the allegations and asserted that, if Chris Willingham
suffered severe emotional distress, it fell within the limits of what “a
reasonable person could be expected to endure.”
On the day that Chris filed his lawsuit, the McCurtain County Board of Commissioners held its regular Monday meeting, at 9 A.M.,
in a red brick building behind the jail. Commissioners—there are three
in each of Oklahoma’s seventy-seven counties—oversee budgets and
allocate funding. Their meeting agendas must be public, so that citizens
can scrutinize government operations. Bruce, who has covered
McCurtain’s commissioners for more than forty years, suspected the board
of discussing business not listed on the agenda—a potential
misdemeanor—and decided to try to catch them doing it.
Two
of the three commissioners—Robert Beck and Mark Jennings, the
chairman—were present, along with the board’s executive assistant,
Heather Carter. As they neared the end of the listed agenda, Bruce
slipped a recording device disguised as a pen into a cup holder at the
center of the conference table. “Right in front of ’em,” he bragged. He
left, circling the block for the next several hours as he waited for the
commissioners to clear out. When they did, he went back inside,
pretended to review some old paperwork, and retrieved the recording
device.
That night, after Gwen went to
bed, Bruce listened to the audio, which went on for three hours and
thirty-seven minutes. He heard other county officials enter the room,
one by one—“Like, ‘Now is your time to see the king.’ ”
In
came Sheriff Clardy and Larry Hendrix. Jennings, whose family is in the
timber business, brought up the 2024 race for sheriff. He predicted
numerous candidates, saying, “They don’t have a goddam clue what they’re
getting into, not in this day and age.” It used to be, he said, that a
sheriff could “take a damn Black guy and whup their ass and throw ’em in
the cell.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like that no more,” Clardy said.
“I
know,” Jennings said. “Take ’em down there on Mud Creek and hang ’em up
with a damn rope. But you can’t do that anymore. They got more rights
than we got.”
After a while,
Manning joined the meeting. She arrived to a boisterous greeting from
the men in the room. When she characterized a colleague’s recent comment
about her legs as sexual harassment, Beck replied, “I thought sexual
harassment was only when they held you down and pulled you by the hair.”
They joked about Manning mowing the courthouse lawn in a bikini.
Manning continually steered the conversation to the Gazette.
Jennings suggested procuring a “worn-out tank,” plowing it into the
newspaper’s office, and calling it an accident. The sheriff told him,
“You’ll have to beat my son to it.” (Clardy’s son is a deputy sheriff.)
They laughed.
Manning talked about the
possibility of bumping into Chris Willingham in town: “I’m not worried
about what he’s gonna do to me, I’m worried about what I might do to
him.” A couple of minutes later, Jennings said, “I know where two big
deep holes are here, if you ever need them.”
“I’ve got an excavator,” the sheriff said.
“Well,
these are already pre-dug,” Jennings said. He went on, “I’ve known two
or three hit men. They’re very quiet guys. And would cut no fucking
mercy.”
Bruce had been threatened before, but this
felt different. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, forty-one
journalists in the country were physically assaulted last year. Since
2001, at least thirteen have been killed. That includes Jeff German, a
reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who, last fall, was
stabbed outside his home in Clark County. The county’s former
administrator, Robert Telles, has been charged with his murder. Telles
had been voted out of office after German reported that he contributed
to a hostile workplace and had an inappropriate relationship with an
employee. (Telles denied the reporting and has pleaded not guilty.)
When
Bruce urged Chris to buy more life insurance, Chris demanded to hear
the secret recording. The playback physically sickened him. Bruce took
the tape to the Idabel Police Department. Mark Matloff, the district
attorney, sent it to state officials in Oklahoma City, who began an
investigation.
Chris started wearing an
AirTag tracker in his sock when he played late-night gigs. He carried a
handgun in his car, then stopped—he and Angie worried that an officer
could shoot him and claim self-defense. He talked incessantly about
“disappearing” to another state. At one point, he told his dad, “I
cursed our lives by deciding to move here.”
It was tempting to think that everybody was
watching too much “Ozark.” But one veteran law-enforcement official took
the meeting remarks seriously enough to park outside Chris and Angie’s
house at night, to keep watch. “There’s an undertone of violence in the
whole conversation,” this official told me. “We’re hiring a hit man,
we’re hanging people, we’re driving vehicles into the McCurtain Gazette. These are the people that are running your sheriff’s office.”
On Saturday, April 15th, the newspaper published a front-page article, headlined “County officials discuss killing, burying Gazette reporters.”
The revelation that McCurtain County’s leadership had been caught
talking wistfully about lynching and about the idea of murdering
journalists became global news. “Both the FBI and the Oklahoma Attorney
General’s Office now have the full audio,” the Gazette
reported. (The McCurtain County Board of Commissioners declined to speak
with me. A lawyer for the sheriff’s office wrote, in response to a list
of questions, that “numerous of your alleged facts are inaccurate,
embellished or outright untrue.”)
On the
eve of the story’s publication, Chris and his family had taken refuge in
Hot Springs, Arkansas. They were still there when, that Sunday, Kevin
Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, publicly demanded the resignations of
Clardy, Manning, Hendrix, and Jennings. The next day, protesters rallied
at the McCurtain County commissioners’ meeting. Jennings, the board’s
chairman, resigned two days later. No one else did. The sheriff’s
department responded to the Gazette’s reporting by calling
Bruce’s actions illegal and the audio “altered.” (Chris told me that he
reduced the background noise in the audio file before Bruce took it to
the police.)
People wanted to hear the recording, not just read about it, but the Gazette
had no Web site. No one had posted on the newspaper’s Facebook page
since 2019, when Kiara Wimbley won the Little Miss Owa Chito pageant.
The Willinghams published an oversized QR code on the front page of the
April 20th issue, linking to a Dropbox folder that contained the audio
and Angie’s best attempt at a transcript. They eventually put Chris’s
articles online.
In a rare move, the seventeen-member board
of the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association voted unanimously to suspend the
memberships of Clardy, Manning, and Hendrix. The censure blocked them
from conferences and symbolically ostracized them from Oklahoma’s
seventy-six other sheriffs. “When one goes bad, it has a devastating
effect on everybody,” Ray McNair, the executive director, told me. Craig
Young, Idabel’s mayor, said, “It kind of hurt everyone to realize we’ve
had these kind of leaders in place.”
Young
was among those who hoped that Gentner Drummond, the attorney general,
would depose the sheriff “so we can start to recover.” But, on June
30th, Drummond ended his investigation by informing Governor Stitt that
although the McCurtain County officials’ conversation was “inflammatory”
and “offensive,” it wasn’t criminal. There would be no charges. If
Clardy were to be removed from office, voters would have to do it.
Decades ago, Bruce launched “Call the Editor,” a regular feature on the Gazette’s
opinion page. Readers vent anonymously to the newspaper’s answering
machine, and Bruce publishes some of the transcribed messages. When the
world ran out of answering machines, he grudgingly upgraded to digital,
which requires plugging the fax cable into his computer every afternoon
at five and switching it back the next morning. A caller might refer to
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as “buffoons,” or ask, Why is the Fire
Department charging me a fifty-cent fee? There have been many recent
messages about the sheriff and the commissioners, including direct
addresses to Clardy: “The people aren’t supposed to be scared . . . of
you or others that wear a badge.”
Bruce and Gwen worried that the ongoing stress would drive Chris and Angie away from the Gazette—and
from McCurtain County. Sure enough, they’re moving to Tulsa. Angie told
me, “We’re forty years old. We’ve been doing this half our lives. At
some point, we need to think of our own happiness, and our family’s
welfare.” Bruce protested, but he couldn’t much blame them.
