Casefile Revisited: Lauria Bible & Ashley Freeman

*** Content warnings: Child victims *** Oklahoma teenager Ashley Freeman celebrated her sixteenth birthday by inviting her best friend, Lauria Bible, over for a sleepover. It was a pleasant yet uneventful evening, until the following morning of December 30 1999, when neighbours noticed that the Freemans’ house was engulfed in flames. Emergency services quickly arrived at the scene, where they found the charred remains of Ashley’s mother, Kathy. She had also been shot in the head. The fire was ruled to be arson, but where were Lauria, Ashley or Ashley’s father, Danny? Casefile Revisited features newly re-recorded versions of classic episodes, revisiting the stories with enhanced production, fresh narration, and updated research where possible. --- Narration – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/ Research & writing – Anonymous Host https://www.instagram.com/caseys.snaps/ Additional writing - Elsha McGill Production & music – Mike Migas http://mikemigas.com/ Audio editing – Anthony Telfer Sign up for Casefile Premium: Apple Premium https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/casefile-true-crime/id998568017?ign-itscg=30200S&ign-itsct=casefile_podcastsSpotify Premium https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/9gSwcv7USsbPatreon https://www.patreon.com/casefileFor all credits and sources, please visit https://casefilepodcast.com/casefile-archives-5-lauria-bible-ashley-freeman Lauria Bible & Ashley Freeman episode was originally released in January 2016. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  From journalist Olivia LaVoix, the creator of the hidden investigative series The Bakersfield Three, comes the new Case File Presents series, Ada. In 2011, the body of a woman was discovered in a California vineyard. For more than a decade, she was known only as Jane Doe. Then detectives finally discovered her name. But identifying her was only the beginning. Listen to Ada wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 1:04Speaker 02

  I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked, and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run IT.

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• 2:03Speaker 00

  As we enter Case Files’ 10th year, we’ve created a new run of special bonus content: Case File Archives, a series of releases revisiting the earliest years of the show, along with previously unreleased premium episodes. This is completely additional content and will not replace new episodes. We’ll still be back on March 7 with brand-new cases, and we’ll be releasing the same number of new episodes this year as we did last year. Case File Archives is simply a way to mark the 10th year, revisit some older episodes, and to offer previously subscriber-exclusive episodes to the wider audience for the first time.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  For the re-release episodes, we have fully edited, polished, rerecorded, and freshly produced them from start to finish to match our current production standards. They are not full rewrites. Our aim isn’t to reshape the cases or alter the original storytelling, but to preserve them as they were first told, while giving them the level of production they didn’t have back in 2016. Where appropriate, updates have been added, but the core structure remains faithful to the originals. Because of this, these episodes may sound a little different to our recent work. Today’s re-release is Laura Bible and Ashley Freeman, the third Case File episode ever produced.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  On December 30, 1999, a fire tore through a home in Welch, Oklahoma. Inside, police found the body of Ashley Freeman’s mother, Kathy. But Ashley, her best friend Laura Bible, and Ashley’s father Danny were nowhere to be found. Investigators soon confirmed the fire was deliberate and that Kathy hadn’t died in the blaze. She’d been killed before the house was set alight. What followed was an investigation filled with missed opportunities and years of unanswered questions. Originally released in January 2016, the case has seen a significant development since then,

• 4:16Speaker 00

  which has been included in this re-release version.

• 4:35Speaker 00

  Our episodes deal with serious and often distressing incidents. If you feel at any time you need support, please contact your local crisis centre. For suggested phone numbers for confidential support and for a more detailed list of content warnings, please see the show notes for this episode on your app or on our website.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  On Wednesday, December 29, 1999, Oklahoma teenager Ashley Freeman invited her best friend Laura Bible over for a sleepover to celebrate her 16th birthday. The Freemans lived in a trailer on a rural property in the small town of Welch in Craig County. Ashley's parents, Danny and Kathy Freeman, were also home that evening. It was a relatively uneventful, albeit enjoyable, night. The girls ate cake and watched TV, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  But just before 6 o'clock the next morning, a passing neighbour reported that the Freeman house was on fire. Emergency services rushed to the scene and found one body among the ashes. But where were the others?

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Laura Bible and Ashley Freeman both grew up in Veneta, a town in Craig County, Oklahoma, that had a population of around 6,500 people. They first met in kindergarten, where they formed an instant bond and became inseparable straight away. As time went by, their bond only got stronger. They were best friends, about as close as friends could get. They shared the same thoughts and finished one another's sentences.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Laura and Ashley attended the same schools and spent every minute of their time together. That was until 1995, when Ashley's parents announced that the Freemans were moving to Welch, a small town about thirty-two kilometres or twenty miles north of Veneta. Welch was a rural area with a population of about six hundred people. The Freemans moved into a trailer on a forty-acre property in an isolated, quiet spot.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  It was a testing time for Laura and Ashley, but they remained close, speaking on the phone at least once a week and seeing each other as often as they could. They were typical teenage girls with a shared interest in hair, makeup, shopping and clothes. Both were excellent students who were in the top ten percent of their classes. Laura was a cheerleader with a deep love for animals, while Ashley was more of the athletic type. She played in her high school basketball team and had a passion for hunting, having shot her first deer around the age of twelve. Ashley had a part-time job at a local convenience store and was trying to save up to buy a car once she turned sixteen.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  But while Ashley succeeded in her personal life, not everything was great for her at home.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  Ashley's mother, Kathy Freeman, was described as a loving and caring person. She was a hard worker and the main breadwinner for the family. However, Ashley's father, Danny, was known to have a violent temper. After the family moved to Welch, there were reports that both Ashley and her older brother Shane started clashing with their father. In 1998, Shane ran away from home and Danny rang the local sheriff's office to report him missing. The police located Shane shortly after. He explained that he'd run away because his dad had whipped him for being disobedient. Shane's injuries were significant enough that he was bleeding through his underwear

• 8:52Speaker 00

  and Danny Freeman was subsequently charged with assault. A court date was set for the following year, but four months later, something happened that irrevocably changed the Freeman household.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Seventeen-year-old Shane had started to develop a taste for theft. On January 8, 1999, he stole his neighbour's vehicle as well as a gun. Deputy David Hayes from the Craig County Sheriff's Department later spotted the stolen vehicle on the side of the road. He approached the vehicle and saw Shane Freeman inside. According to Deputy Hayes, Shane got out and pointed a gun at him. Deputy Hayes pulled out his own firearm and screamed at Shane to drop the weapon. When Shane refused to do so, Deputy Hayes claimed he was forced to fire to protect himself.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  Shane Freeman died instantly.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  An investigation by the county district attorney found that Deputy Hayes was acting in self-defence and that the shooting was justified. It was a devastating blow for the Freeman family and Ashley struggled to come to terms with the death of her big brother.

• 10:11Speaker 00

  The Freemans also had grave doubts about Deputy Hayes' version of events. They refused to accept that he'd acted in self-defence, believing it was a cold-blooded murder. Refusing to be quiet about it, the Freeman family started posting signs around town declaring "Justice for Shane". This started a feud between the Freemans and the local sheriff's office. About a month after Shane's death, Danny Freeman was arrested after he was caught driving around trying to find out where Deputy Hayes lived. In response, deputies started sitting outside of the Freeman house in their patrol cars.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  Tensions were high, with Danny yet to face court on the assault charges against his son.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Danny was ultimately acquitted of the charges, but regardless, it had been a tragic and stressful year for Ashley. She was supported by Laura Bible, who played a huge part in helping Ashley come to terms with the loss of her brother. By the time Ashley's 16th birthday rolled around on December 29, 1999, she didn't feel like having a big celebration. Instead, she just wanted to spend the day with her mother Kathy, and of course, her best friend Laura. The three went into town and spent the day shopping before having dinner at a local pizzeria. Afterwards, Ashley asked Laura to sleep over so they could eat birthday cake and ice cream together.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  At around 7pm, they drove back to Laura's house to ask permission from her parents. Laura's parents said it was fine, as long as she was back in time for her dentist appointment the following morning. Laura, who already had her driver's licence and her own car, happily agreed. She took her purse with her, which contained about $200 in cash. It was a low-key evening. The girls ate cake and watched a hunting show on TV with Cathy and Danny. Ashley's boyfriend Jeremy stopped by to give Ashley her birthday present and then left at around 9.30pm.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  He didn't notice anything out of the ordinary. It was a normal, quiet night with the Freemans and Laura just sitting around and chatting happily. Just before 6 o'clock the next morning of Thursday, December 30, a neighbour called emergency services to report that the Freeman house was on fire. It was still dark at this time, before sunrise. Volunteer firefighters rushed to the scene and found the house ablaze. Once they managed to extinguish the flames, officers from the Craig County Sheriff's Department determined the fire was arson and declared the area to be a crime scene.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  At around 7:30 AM, Laura's mother, Lorene Bible, was at work when she received a phone call from her son saying that the Freeman's house was on fire. After Lorene got off the phone, a deputy arrived almost straight away to break the news that only one body had been recovered from the fire. Beyond that, there wasn't much else he was able to tell her. Lorene immediately called her husband and they both rushed to the scene. Upon their arrival, they were shocked to see that the area had been cordoned off, but most of the deputies on site appeared to be just standing around.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  No one was searching through the debris, or looked like they were doing much of anything. The Bibles questioned the deputies about this, and they explained that they were waiting for an agent from the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, known as the OSBI, to arrive before the investigation could begin. The OSBI is the state law enforcement agency for Oklahoma, which acts independently of the local county departments. Because of everything that had happened between the Freeman family following Shane's death, the Craig County Sheriff's Department had deemed that investigating the fire themselves would be a conflict of interest.

• 14:38Speaker 00

  Agent Steve Nutter from the OSBI eventually arrived at the scene and took over the investigation. By 5:30 PM, the officers had collected all of the evidence and concluded their investigation of the crime scene. The body that had already been located was identified as Kathy Freeman, yet strangely, the police had been unable to find the remains of Danny, Ashley, or Laura. They told the Bibles they were 100% certain that there were no other bodies in the house. The Bibles were concerned. As far as they could see, the search had concentrated entirely on the house itself.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  No one had searched the rest of the Freeman's forty-acre property. Laura's father organised a few of the local rangers who searched the property on horseback. But there was no trace of Danny or the girls.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  This raised some serious alarm bells. Four people had gone to sleep in the Freeman house the night before, but only one was accounted for. So where were Danny, Laura and Ashley?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Laura Bibles' parents were taken back to the police station where they were interviewed extensively by OSBI agents. A million things were running through their minds as they considered all the possible scenarios. The prevailing theory was that Danny had killed his wife and then abducted Ashley and Laura. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense. Otherwise, what else could it be? But there was a problem with this theory. Both Danny and Cathy's cars were still parked in the driveway and the Freemans didn't own any other vehicles. Laura's car was there as well, with the keys still in the ignition.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Given the remote location, this raised the question of how Danny could have gotten away with the two teenagers, if he was indeed the perpetrator. Lorene Bibles informed the OSBI agents that Danny had a history of drug use and had perhaps been involved in some small-time drug dealing. This presented another possible scenario. Could it have been a drug deal gone bad? This would explain why all three vehicles were still there.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  The police didn't think it had been a random attack. The location was too remote, making it highly unlikely that someone would stumble across the Freeman's trailer by accident. The possibility that Laura and Ashley could be responsible was quickly deemed unimaginable. There was simply no way they could have done it.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  Early the next morning of December 31, Agent Steve Nuttah received some shocking news. Kathy Freeman didn't die from the fire. She died from a shotgun blast to the head. Her time of death was estimated to have been around 5am on Thursday, December 30. It was also confirmed that the fire had been deliberately lit as an accelerant had been used.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  Not long after receiving this information, the police received their first tip-off. Someone called in to report that they had seen Danny Freeman in a white Ford truck with Laura and Ashley at around 7am. This supported the initial theory that Danny had murdered Kathy before abducting the two teenagers, but it didn't explain why all the cars were still in the driveway.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  Furthermore, it was also revealed that through Ashley's job at the convenience store, she had managed to save $4,000 for a car she hoped to buy. She kept the cash hidden in a Tupperware container in the freezer of her house, but a search revealed that the money was gone. While this pointed to a potential robbery, Laura's purse was still at the scene with $200 cash inside.

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Whichever way you looked at it, nothing seemed to add up.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Early on the morning of December 31, the Bibles returned to the Freeman property. Under the assumption that Danny had fled with the girls, the police had cleared the crime scene and released it to the Freeman family, leaving them free to look around.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Laura's parents were desperate for answers and hoped that by revisiting the scene, they might notice something the police had missed. They needed to know where their daughter was and were convinced the scene would hold some answers.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  They found an answer all right, a very big answer. Not long after arriving at the Freeman property and sifting through the wreckage of the burnt trailer, the Bibles found the burnt body of Danny Freeman. This was a major problem. There was already friction between the Freeman family and the local sheriff's department, enough so that the sheriff's department had deemed investigating the crime a conflict of interest and called in the OSBI. Somehow though, both organisations had managed to miss Danny's body, which took the Bibles all of about five minutes to find upon sifting through the scene.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Somebody had failed miserably.

• 20:39Speaker 00

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• 22:21Speaker 01

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• 22:49Speaker 02

  I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag and drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run IT.

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• 24:05Speaker 00

  The Bibles called the sheriffs again and they returned to establish another crime scene. The OSBI was also called back. The Bibles were told to leave because it was an active crime scene, but they refused. Loreen raised a good point when she said: "We let you do your job yesterday, and look how well you did."

• 24:30Speaker 00

  Knowing that their daughter's body could very well be there as well, the Bibles weren't going anywhere.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  It was determined that Danny Freeman had also been killed with a shotgun blast to the head. His charred body was found in the bedroom near where Cathy was found, but there was no shotgun in the room, ruling out the possibility of a murder-suicide.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  The Bibles were frantic. If the police had missed Danny's body, there was every chance they had missed Laura and Ashley as well. An extensive search was carried out of the scene, but investigators were absolutely certain there were no other bodies on sight, and there was still no trace of the two teenagers.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  The Bibles' grisly discovery put an end to the theory that Danny had murdered his wife and abducted the girls. And obviously, the tip-off the police received earlier was a false lead. But, it did raise the question: Could Laura and Ashley be responsible after all?

• 25:37Speaker 00

  It seemed impossible. These were two loving, caring girls who were good at school and had no history of violence. Nevertheless, it was a possibility the police had to consider. But if there was any truth to it, it still didn't explain how the pair had got away. With all the cars in the driveway and Laura's purse found at the scene with her money and ID inside, nothing added up. It seemed highly unlikely that the two teenagers would murder Danny and Cathy and then run off into the woods, unless, of course, they had acted in self-defense.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  It was theorized that Danny and Cathy could have gotten into an argument and Danny had shot Cathy. Ashley could have then stepped in to defend her mother by shooting Danny. After all, she was an avid hunter who owned her own guns. Ashley was also one of the very few people who knew about the four thousand dollars cash in the freezer.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  As crazy as it seems, it had to be considered. And if Ashley hadn't taken the money, then who did? Whoever it was, they had to know it was there in the first place. As the investigation continued, police learnt that Danny had a large collection of rifles and shotguns. Around fourteen firearms were recovered at the scene, but police wouldn't say whether or not the murder weapon was among them.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, some members of the Freeman family had a theory of their own. They were convinced that the local sheriff's department was responsible, finally putting an end to the bitter feud they'd been having with the Freemans since Shane's death. According to one of Danny's relatives, he'd had a conversation with Danny shortly before his death, in which Danny had said, "If anything ever happens to me, look at the sheriff's department." He'd been completely serious at the time, pointing a finger in his relative's face. While it was entirely possible that Danny had just been letting off steam during a heated discussion when he made this remark,

• 27:57Speaker 00

  it emerged that the Freemans were actually trying to save enough money to file a wrongful death suit in relation to Shane's shooting.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Wrongful death suits had to be filed within a year of the event occurring. With the one-year anniversary of Shane's death fast approaching, at the time of their deaths, Cathy and Danny had just one week to come up with the money before they'd been eligible to file the suit. Danny's relatives said that local deputies were trying to threaten and intimidate Danny from going ahead with the case. It was his belief that local deputies had killed Danny and Cathy and buried the girls somewhere.

• 28:41Speaker 00

  It was a pretty far reach. Wrongful death suits are nothing new to police departments, and Shane's death had already been ruled justifiable by the district attorney. But with members of the Freeman family refusing to let this theory go, the OSBI stepped in and subjected local deputies to a lie detector test. All of them passed.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Agent Steve Nutter stated, "All cleared themselves as a result of those examinations." "The overall conclusion of our efforts was that the sheriff's office had nothing to do with the murders of Danny and Cathy, and did not know the whereabouts of the two missing girls."

• 29:27Speaker 00

  But the information that Danny Freeman was trying to come up with money fast did raise some eyebrows. An autopsy was performed on Danny Freeman, and it was revealed that he had a fracture on his right collarbone, indicating there could have been a fierce struggle before he was killed. As mentioned earlier, Danny was believed to be involved in drugs, and maybe a little dealing. Could he have gotten in over his head, looking for a big payday to get enough money together for the lawsuit, only to have the big deal go horribly wrong? The OSBI didn't think so. According to Agent Nutter, nothing suggested a drug-related crime,

• 30:11Speaker 00

  and if it had been drug-related, he thought the very last thing anyone would want to do was abduct the two teenagers. While investigators are privy to information that we aren't, it was a pretty incredible comment to make. If it was a drug deal gone wrong, why wouldn't the person or persons responsible for shooting two people in the head and burning their house down be capable of abducting Laura and Ashley? There could be several reasons why the perpetrator might want to take the sixteen-year-old girls. On New Year's Day of 2000, the local community banded together and over 500 people performed a large search of the Freeman property.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  But the search turned up nothing. It was as though Laura and Ashley had disappeared off the face of the earth.

• 31:08Speaker 00

  On Friday, January 7, a memorial service was held for Danny and Cathy Freeman, with over 400 people in attendance. The investigation continued, but the police had nothing: no witnesses, no leads, and no real suspects. Eighteen months went by before they got their first solid lead.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  A couple of inmates at the local county jail reported that they had seen Ashley Freeman and Laura Bible at a farmhouse in Ottawa County on New Year's Eve of 1999, the day after they went missing. And it wasn't any old house. It was a house well-known to police. It belonged to a family who were known manufacturers of methamphetamine. According to the inmates, Ashley and Laura were drugged, raped, and tortured at the house, and apparently, someone had filmed it. One of the inmates said he saw the tape.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Police immediately applied for a search warrant, and on July 26, 2001, they raided the house. The only thing they found was evidence of drug manufacture, but they did also find a spot of blood. A sample was taken to the lab, but the lab was busy, and the Bible family were told they wouldn't have the results back for a year. As if Laura and Ashley's loved ones hadn't suffered enough, they now had to wait for a whole year to discover if the story the inmates had given was true.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  The results finally came back. It wasn't a match to Ashley or Laura's blood. No trace of the girls was found in the house, sending the police straight back to square one.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  Like a lot of cases that garner significant media attention, the investigation into the Freeman Bible case was hindered by bogus tip-offs and unsubstantiated sightings. These calls only got worse after a $50,000 reward was offered in exchange for information leading to an arrest. Police even received calls placing Ashley and Laura on opposite sides of the country on the same day. Investigators decided to look into other crimes that had been committed around the same time as the Freeman Bible case, both in Oklahoma and in neighboring states, to see if any similar offences were committed. And they found one case that stuck out.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  In the early morning hours of December 31, 1999, a 35-year-old man broke into a trailer in Del Rio, Texas, after being kicked out of a bar. He launched a brutal attack on two young girls, 13-year-old Kayleen Harris and her friend, 10-year-old Crystal Sells. Kayleen was sexually assaulted and stabbed 16 times while Crystal had her throat slit. Kayleen died from her injuries, but miraculously, Crystal survived. She managed to go to a neighbour's house and call for help, and her attacker was arrested soon after. The man was identified as Tommy Lynn Sells,

• 34:38Speaker 00

  a drifter who was ultimately suspected of being involved in upwards of 20 murders across the United States. He was sentenced to death for Kayleen's murder and put on death row in Texas. The attack on Kayleen and Crystal had occurred the morning after the Freeman murders, 716 miles away, roughly a 10-and-a-half-hour drive. Agent Nutter and the new Craig County Sheriff, Jimmy Suter, made their way to Texas to interview Sells. At first, he gave them nothing, but after about six hours of interrogation, Sells confessed to having killed Laura Bible and Ashley Freeman.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  He claimed he'd buried them at Red River, on the border of Oklahoma and Texas.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Police took Sells to the site, and he pointed out where he thought the bodies were buried. But, there was a problem. The site looked completely different to what Sells had described, and no remains were found. Sells also lacked any intimate knowledge of the case, and only repeated what had already been published in the paper.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  Sells had a bit of a habit of confessing to murders, while on death row, he confessed to over seventy.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  Despite conclusively linking him to at least twenty cases, the police thought he was playing the system by confessing to a whole heap of crimes that he didn’t commit. It could have been that he was trying to gain notoriety, or perhaps, he just liked the attention. There wasn’t much else to do on death row after all, and confessing to killing Ashley and Alora did get him a day out of his cell. As crazy as it sounds, there are a number of reasons why people make false confessions. And given Tommy Lynn Sells was already on death row, he really had nothing to lose.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  It became pretty clear to the police that Sells had nothing to do with the Freeman Bible case, and he was executed on April 3, 2014, without ever being charged in relation to the crime. But, Sells wasn’t the only one who confessed.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Back in December 2000, 26-year-old Jeremy Bryan Jones was wanted on two separate rape charges in Oklahoma. He fled to Alabama, where he managed to steal the identity of a mayor named John Paul Chapman. Not long after this, Jones got himself into trouble again, and was arrested and fingerprinted. The prints were sent to the OSBI, and incredibly, their system failed to match Jones’s prints to his real identity. A new profile was created for him under his new Chapman identity, and he was never extradited back to Oklahoma to face the rape charges.

• 37:44Speaker 00

  On September eighteen, two thousand four, a forty-three-year-old woman named Lisa Nichols was raped and shot dead inside her trailer in Turnerville, Alabama. Her trailer was then set on fire. Jeremy Jones was arrested after it was revealed that his vehicle was seen out the front of Lisa's trailer on the night she was murdered. Jones admitted to killing Lisa, but that wasn't all. He also confessed to thirteen other murders committed across six states. Police could only find enough evidence to charge Jones with three of those crimes, and he was subsequently sentenced to death.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  While on death row in July two thousand five, Jones confessed to four more murders, those of Laura Bible and Danny, Kathy, and Ashley Freeman. What interested police was that on the night Danny and Kathy were killed, Jeremy Jones had been arrested for public intoxication only sixteen kilometers, or ten miles, from the Freeman home. Agent Nutter and Sheriff Suter interviewed Jones. At first, he denied any knowledge of the crime, even though he had already confessed to it. But as time went on, he started to admit involvement.

• 39:07Speaker 00

  Jones claimed that Danny Freeman owed him money for drugs, so he shot him, before shooting Kathy and setting their house on fire. He said he didn't realize that Ashley and Laura were there until they ran out of the house upon hearing the gunshots. According to Jones, the girls asked him for help, so he told them to get in his truck. From there, he tied them up, killed them, and dumped their bodies in a Kansas mineshaft.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  Unlike Tommy Lynn Sells's confession, Jones knew some things about the case that got investigators' attention. He knew the exact accelerant that was used to start the fire, as well as the type of shotgun that was used to commit the murders, information that had never been released to the public. Police immediately set up a search of the Kansas mine where Jones claimed to have dumped the girl's bodies. But there were issues. There were over 100 underground mines in the area, as well as water tunnels, and anything that got dumped in would float away. Regardless, the area was searched extensively over several days,

• 40:22Speaker 00

  including the use of underwater camera equipment. But no trace of Laura or Ashley was found.

• 40:30Speaker 00

  When Jones found out the police had come up empty in the search, he retracted his confession. He said he made it all up in order to get special privileges, including extra phone calls, visitations, and special meals. Police had another look at Jones's arrest for public intoxication. It turned out he was arrested at 4am on December 30, 1999. Kathy and Danny Freeman had been killed at 5am, meaning Jones was already in custody at the time.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Ten years after the murders, in 2010, the OSBI released a new piece of information to the public for the first time. They revealed that on the day of the crime, two suspicious vehicles were seen in the area. The first was a dark four-door sedan, which was seen travelling east on a rural road towards Welch between 5.30 and 6am. The OSBI explained they hadn't released this detail at the time because it was only a vague description and they decided to keep the information within law enforcement circles. This was a potentially detrimental decision. Had they released it earlier,

• 41:52Speaker 00

  someone might have seen it or known someone who drove a similar car. After 10 years, it seemed highly unlikely that anyone would remember anything about that car.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  The second vehicle seen leaving the area around the time of the crime was a dark-coloured heavy-duty pickup truck heading north towards Kansas. The OSBI said this information had only come about recently as the result of an interview. How reliable that information was 10 years after the fact was anyone’s guess.

• 42:29Speaker 00

  The case remained open, and leads continued to be followed up all over the country, but still there was no trace of Laura and Ashley. Whatever had happened to them, it seemed highly unlikely that two well-behaved teenagers would be able to commit such a horrible crime and then vanish without a trace, taking none of their belongings with them.

• 42:52Speaker 00

  It’s far more likely they were also victims of whoever killed Danny and Cathy. But if that was the case, then why weren’t they shot dead and left in the house too? Why were they taken? Who took the $4,000 that Ashley had hidden in the freezer, and how did they know it was there? In the decade since Ashley and Laura vanished, Ashley’s relatives had her declared legally dead. That was a step the Bible family wouldn’t take, refusing to give up hope that Laura might still be alive.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  Every night, Lorraine Bible left the back porch light on, just in case Laura came home.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Back when Casefile first covered the Freeman-Bible case in 2016, our episode ended there.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  But it turned out, the story was far from over.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Case file will be back shortly. Thank you for supporting us by listening to this episode sponsors.

• 44:09Speaker 00

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• 45:31Speaker 02

  I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked, and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  This is a new way to run IT. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets, and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Go to serval.com/tickets. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash tickets.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  Thank you for listening to this episode's ads. By supporting our sponsors, you support Casefile to continue to deliver quality content.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  In 2017, the newly appointed Craig County Sheriff Heath Winfrey came across a box of notes and documents related to the Freeman Bible case that had been pushed aside by the previous administration. Inside, he found something that immediately caught his attention. In the days following the fire at the Freeman home, two private investigators had combed the property at the request of the Freeman family and found a car insurance verification card in the driveway that belonged to a woman named Susan Bailey, not her real name. The private investigators told the police about the card, and although they never took it as evidence, OSBI agents did go to interview Susan.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Susan claimed to have no idea why her insurance card was found at the crime scene. She said she'd never met Danny or Kathy Freeman, nor had she ever been anywhere near their home. At the time, Susan had a boyfriend named Philip Welch, a known manufacturer and dealer of methamphetamine. He sometimes used Susan's car. Susan said that Welch knew of Danny Freeman, but did not associate with him.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Further documents inside the evidence box revealed that a year after the murders, in January 2001, OSBI agent Steve Nuttner interviewed a woman named Tracy Ford, not her real name. Tracy told police that just months after the Freemans were killed, Philip Welch broke up with Susan and began a relationship with her instead.

• 48:27Speaker 00

  The two lived together in a trailer in Pitcher, a small town roughly twenty-five miles northeast of the Freemans. There, Walsh often spent time with two of his associates, David Pennington and Ronnie Busek. According to Tracy, the three men said they had killed Danny and Kathy Freeman because Danny owed money for drugs, and they had abducted and killed the two girls. Philip Walsh even kept one of the reward posters on the wall in their house. Later on, Tracy said she found a leather briefcase belonging to Walsh, which contained several Polaroid photographs of two teenage girls lying on Walsh's bed.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  She recognized it from his old bedspread. The girls were both bound and gagged with duct tape, and it was clear they were being held against their will. In one photo, Philip Walsh was lying alongside them. In another, the girls were duct taped to chairs. Tracy recognized the girls from the missing person poster in their house, Laura Bible and Ashley Freeman.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  Tracy said she confronted Walsh about the Polaroids, and he warned that if she ever told anyone, she would end up in a pit in Pitcher, like those two girls.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Philip Walsh was interviewed two years after Tracy's claims, but why nothing further came of this line of inquiry is unknown. The box of documents found in 2017 was handed over to an investigator for the district attorney and an OSBI agent who were now jointly leading the investigation into the Freeman-Bible case. They began speaking to various associates of Philip Walsh, David Pennington, and Ronnie Busek. At least twelve witnesses backed up the claims made by Tracy Ford, saying they too had seen the Polaroids of Laura and Ashley. One witness described the girls as looking emaciated.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Another said Ronnie Busek admitted that the trio had taken the girls to a trailer in Pitcher, where they had tortured and raped them for several days. Tracy's son said that Philip Walsh and David Pennington had shown him the photos and said they had strangled the two girls to death. At one point, Tracy and her son had gone to live with a friend to escape Walsh's physical abuse.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  The friend told the police that Walsh had called constantly, saying he was involved with the Freeman case, and threatening to kill her and her children and throw them into the pit with the missing girls. According to Tracy's friend, it was Walsh who had pulled the trigger on Danny and Cathy before instructing Pennington and Busek to start the fire, a claim that was backed by several others.

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Multiple people said that Walsh was the mastermind behind the crimes, while Pennington and Busek had been involved to varying levels. Witnesses either hadn't come forward out of fear or because they thought it was such common knowledge that police already knew.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  An ex-girlfriend of Pennington's named Leanne, not her real name, said that during the course of their relationship, Pennington had often bragged that he and at least two other men had killed the Freemans over a bad drug deal. He allegedly told Leanne that Laura and Ashley had walked into the room at the time and that the men had decided to "take the girls and have fun with them."

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Leanne said that Pennington had talked about Laura and Ashley all the time. He said their bodies were in a pit somewhere and warned Leanne that if she ever told anyone or tried to leave him, she would end up in the pit too.

• 52:28Speaker 00

  She eventually became so terrified of him that she'd gone into hiding.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  It turned out that the two private investigators who had initially found Susan Bailey's insurance card at the crime scene just days after the murders had interviewed a number of these witnesses in the early days of the investigation, including Philip Walsh. They'd even later tracked down Susan Bailey's car at a salvage yard and found documents inside that linked the car to Walsh. They had tried to hand over the information they'd uncovered to the Craig County Sheriff's Department, but the office had refused to take it.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  One of the private investigators had since passed away and the information he'd gathered had subsequently been destroyed. However, the other PI still had a copy of Susan Bailey's insurance card and handed it over to the new investigation team. He said he'd stopped looking into the case years ago after a member of law enforcement told him he was interfering and had threatened to cancel his private investigator licence if he didn't stop. For the current investigators, there was only one thing left to do, and that was to interview the three men in question: Phil Welch, David Pennington, and Ronnie Busek. But, there was a big problem.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Phil Welch died in 2007, and David Pennington died in 2015. Ronnie Busek was the only surviving member of the trio. The 65-year-old was called in for questioning three times throughout 2017. While he admitted to knowing Pennington, he initially denied having any association with Philip Welch. That was until police revealed that witnesses had linked the three of them to the Freeman Bible case. Busek then admitted that the three men were pretty tight back in those days, although he said he never liked Welch as he was shady and had a bad temper.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Busek initially said he only knew about the murders from the news, but when pushed, he conceded that Philip Welch was likely responsible because he was "cold-blooded" and "mean enough to do it". He also admitted that David Pennington might have been involved, saying he had been acting suspicious and sheepish around the time. Busek knew that Susan Bailey's insurance card had been found at the scene. He claimed Pennington had told him about it, and that this had added to his suspicions against the two men.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  At first, Busek said nothing when the investigators accused him of being at the Freemans on the night of the crimes. Then, he switched back and forth between outright denying his involvement and claiming he couldn't remember anything. He said witnesses were lying about his involvement, but offered no explanation as to why they would be motivated to do so. During his third interrogation, one of the agents asked Busek what was keeping him from telling the truth. Surely, they said, this whole situation must have been eating at him for the past seventeen years.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  "You're scared of what your sister would think about you if you told the truth. That's what it is, right?" the agent posited. Busek's response was simple. "Well, yeah." Although he nodded along when the agent said it would be a relief to get it off his chest, he stopped short of admitting to anything.

• 56:18Speaker 00

  On April 23, 2018, almost eighteen and a half years after the crimes, Ronnie Busek was arrested and charged with four counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of first-degree arson. Upon his arrest, he said he was willing to talk to Laura and Ashley's families. Laura's mother, Lorraine, went to meet with Busek one-on-one. She told him that she didn't come to harass or upset him, but as a mother, trying to find her child. Busek replied: "I wish I could tell you. I wish I could tell you where your daughter is. I don't know. I don't know anything."

• 57:03Speaker 00

  He said something similar to Ashley's uncle when he asked where his niece was. "I wish I could," Busek replied. "I don't have a clue."

• 57:18Speaker 00

  In 2019, a jury found Ronnie Busek competent to stand trial. But in July 2020, he accepted a plea deal. In exchange for just 10 years behind bars, Busek pleaded guilty to the lesser crimes of being an accessory to first-degree murder in the deaths of Danny and Cathy Freeman, the arson of their home, and the abduction and presumed murders of Laura and Ashley. As part of the plea deal, he agreed to assist investigators in finding the girls’ remains. If the recovery was successful, Busek’s sentence would be reduced to just five years.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  According to Busek, Welch and Pennington had held Laura and Ashley captive for about two weeks, during which they were raped and tortured before eventually being killed. He claimed not to know how they were killed or where their remains were disposed of. Around the time of the murders, Busek said that Pennington had mentioned something about filling in an old root cellar at his former property in Picha. In August 2020, searches were conducted of the property in question, but no sign of Laura or Ashley’s remains were found. Those on site described Busek as looking genuinely surprised. His lawyer said that Welch and Pennington

• 58:43Speaker 00

  had never told Busek what they did with the girls, and any information he had provided was merely a guess.

• 58:51Speaker 00

  In the lead-up to Busek’s sentencing, Lorraine Bible provided an emotional victim impact statement that spoke of the pain her family had endured for the past two decades. “Twenty years, eight months, and one day ago, on December 30, 1999, you made a choice,” Lorraine wrote. “You chose to go with two other men and changed the course of so many lives, including your own. You are one of three men responsible for taking two innocent girls’ lives. You could have done something to stop it. You could have called and reported that you were a part of something awful, but you did not.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Instead, you continued to be a part of the unthinkable things our girls endured before you were a part of ending their lives. You had a choice.”

• 59:46Speaker 00

  They were young and beautiful, but you know that. They were innocent, but you and your other buddies took that from them. They did nothing to you. They did not owe you or anyone else anything. Their lives were only just about to begin. You took that. They didn't have a choice. Our lives changed. The pain you have brought to us is indescribable. It's unfair. Because of your choices, we don't sleep. We don't have a single day that we aren't searching. We don't walk into a crowd, first without looking for her,

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  and then wondering if every person in the crowd could cause us more harm. We don't allow our other children to go to sleepovers, have playdates, or trust anyone to be near them. We have nightmares. We mourn every single day, and will continue to do so until the day we can bring the girls home, and then we will mourn in another way. We don't have a choice.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Ronnie Busek was subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison, followed by five years probation with credit for time already served.

• 1:01:07Speaker 00

  Further searches were conducted, but all were fruitless.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  In May 2023, after serving just 38 months of his sentence, it was announced that Ronnie Busek was being released early for good behavior.

• 1:01:23Speaker 00

  Laura and Ashley's loved ones were furious. Had they known this was possible, they never would have agreed to the plea deal. The decision caused such an uproar that in May 2025, the governor of Oklahoma passed a new bill requiring felons convicted of accessory to murder to serve at least 85% of their sentence before being eligible for parole. This legislation is known as Laura and Ashley's Law.

• 1:01:52Speaker 00

  As of January 2026, the remains of Laura Bible and Ashley Freeman have never been recovered, nor have the Polaroids depicting their torture. Laura's mother, Lorraine Bible, continues to advocate for further searches. Like many others, she believes Ronnie Busek knows where the remains of her daughter are located. When Busek was released from prison, Lorraine stood outside waiting for him. While she didn't wish him any harm and forgave him on a fundamental level, she wanted him to know that she would always be watching and questioning his every move. "I want him to know that I'm here," she told reporters.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  "And I'm not going anywhere."

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that slows companies down. Onboarding, password resets, access to applications, my laptop stopped working. While employees wait for help, their real work is put on hold. IT desperately wants to automate this work, and that's why they need Serval. You just tell Serval what you want to automate in plain English, and it's built. No drag-and-drop workflows, no expensive consultants. Employees get unblocked, and IT teams go from drowning in tickets to building what actually matters. With Serval, IT becomes the AI engine powering the entire company. This is a new way to run IT. We guarantee you'll automate 50% of all tickets,

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  and we'll prove it to you in a free four-week pilot. Go to serval.com/tickets. That's S-E-R-V-A-L dot com slash tickets.