On the night of December 29, 1999, 16-year-old Lauria Bible asked her father for permission to spend the night at her best friend Ashley Freeman’s home in Welch, Oklahoma, to celebrate Ashley’s 16th birthday. Her father told her to be home by noon. The girls had known each other since kindergarten and were nearly inseparable.
That night was the last time anyone saw them alive.
At dawn on December 30, around 6 a. m. , a massive fire engulfed the Freeman family’s mobile home.
Police found Kathy Freeman’s body in the rubble. She had been shot in the head. Hours later, the Bible family—not investigators—found Danny Freeman’s body at the entrance to a bedroom.
He had also been executed with a gunshot to the head.
The girls were not in the ashes. Tracking dogs followed a scent from the home across the yard to a dirt road, where it vanished. A witness reported seeing a small dark sedan near the home at dawn.
In a small town where methamphetamine abuse was rampant, those leads should have pointed to a killer within weeks. But this was rural Oklahoma, where secrets were kept through fear, and silence had a price.
For 19 years, no one was prosecuted. Two of the three suspects died before ever seeing a courtroom. It took nearly two decades, a mother who drove hundreds of thousands of miles putting up missing-person posters, a box of forgotten notes, and three names everyone in town knew but no one dared to speak.
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Welch sits in Craig County, a remote rural area where dusty dirt roads connect mobile homes, small farms, and plots of land. The county’s entire population was under 15,000. It is part of the tri-state region where Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri meet.
In the late 20th century, the area was known for two things: lead and zinc mining that had stopped, and methamphetamine that was still going strong.
Picher, a mining town not far from Welch, had been the largest lead mining center in America. By the late 1990s, the mines were closed. The land was so contaminated that the federal government had to relocate residents.
What remained were hundreds of abandoned mines—deep, bottomless pits hidden under grass and cracked concrete. Picher would become central to this case, but not yet.
Methamphetamine spread through the area like a plague. It was cheap, easy to make, and destroyed everything it touched. Meth dealers controlled through fear, and in rural areas where there were fewer police than churches, that fear had real power.
The Freeman family lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of Welch. Danny and Kathy Freeman were working-class people living under difficult circumstances familiar to many rural Oklahoma families. Danny had a reputation in the area, and it was not always good.
Rumors circulated that he grew marijuana on his property. That reputation was enough to put his family under scrutiny from the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.
But the relationship between the Freemans and law enforcement did not begin with drugs. It began with blood.
Danny and Kathy had two children: son Shane, born in 1981, and daughter Ashley. On January 8, 1999, 17-year-old Shane stole a pickup truck and a rifle from a neighbor’s home. Deputy David Hays found Shane on the side of the road next to the broken-down truck.
According to Hays’ official account, Shane raised the gun at him, and Hays fired in self-defense. Shane Freeman died at the scene.
The court ruled the shooting justified. The Freeman family did not believe a word of it. A relative said the autopsy showed Shane was shot from behind, contradicting the official story.
Danny told his brother Dwayne that he believed his son was killed, not shot in self-defense. Danny and Kathy began raising money to hire a lawyer and filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Craig County Sheriff’s Office.
Craig County was not a comfortable place for a family suing the police. The sheriff’s office and the county prosecutor refused to release records related to the shooting. Sheriff Jimmy Sutter stated outright that his policy was to deny every request for public records.
No records, no accountability, no transparency.
Because of Danny Freeman’s reputation, Lauria’s parents had forbidden her from going to Ashley’s house for about a year and a half. The girls still saw each other at school and talked on the phone, but the sleepovers they had enjoyed as children had stopped. Then December 1999 arrived, and Ashley’s 16th birthday approached.
Lauria asked her father again.
Jay Bible later recounted that moment many times. The families lived about a mile apart. He knew Danny and Kathy.
Eventually, he agreed, but he told his daughter one thing: “You need to be home by noon.” Lauria promised. Those were the last words Jay Bible ever spoke to his daughter.
—
On December 29, 1999, Ashley and Lauria went out for pizza in Vinita with Ashley’s mother Kathy and a friend. They shopped, laughed, and enjoyed the birthday like any group of teenage girls in any small American town. That night, they returned to the Freeman home.
Danny was there. Kathy was there. The whole family was together in the small mobile home on the empty rural road.
No one knows exactly what happened inside that mobile home in the hours after midnight. What is known is what remained of it at sunrise.
Around 5:30 to 6:00 a. m. on December 30, a driver passing on the rural road near the Freeman home saw a fire.
It was not a small fire. Flames consumed the mobile home, casting an orange-red glow into the dark winter sky. The driver reported it.
The Craig County volunteer fire department and sheriff’s office were called.
Here is a detail worth pausing on. David Hays—the same David Hays who had shot and killed Shane Freeman less than 12 months earlier—was among the first officers to arrive at the scene that morning. The officer who killed the son now stood among the ashes of the home where that boy’s parents lay.
No one in Craig County law enforcement saw a problem with that.
When the fire was extinguished and investigators began searching the debris, they found Kathy Freeman’s body. She had been shot in the head. This was not an accident.
It was murder, and the fire was set to cover it up.
Kathy’s body was taken to the medical examiner’s office in Tulsa. Then investigators did something that still horrifies the Bible family nearly two decades later. They left the crime scene.
The Craig County Sheriff’s Office referred the case to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the crime scene was released.
The problem was that they had not found Danny Freeman. They had not found Ashley. They had not found Lauria.
A woman was murdered with a gunshot to the head, three others were missing, and the scene was released.
Lorene and Jay Bible could not wait any longer. That morning, after authorities left, they went to the burned mobile home themselves. They were looking for their daughter.
Instead, they found Danny Freeman. His body was lying at the entrance to a bedroom, shot in the head, executed. The Bibles found Danny Freeman’s body after professional investigators had missed it.
Two adults were killed, both shot in the head execution-style before the home was burned. But Lorene and Jay were not looking for Danny. They were looking for Lauria, and she was not there.
Neither was Ashley. In the charred debris of the mobile home, there was no trace of the two 16-year-old girls. No bones, no tissue, no teeth, no jewelry.
Nothing.
Tracking dogs were brought to the scene. They picked up a scent from inside the home, across the Freeman yard, to a rural dirt road on the outskirts of Welch. Then the trail disappeared.
The trail ended on the dirt road. That could only mean one thing. Someone put the girls in a car and drove away.
Someone came, killed Ashley’s parents, burned the home, and took the girls.
—
What followed was not an investigation. It was a collapse.
The Craig County Sheriff’s Office referred the case to the OSBI on the first day. In theory, that was the right decision. But in practice, it created a vacuum.
The OSBI took the case but had no permanent presence in Craig County. The crime scene was closed before all evidence was fully collected. No official case file was properly opened in the early days.
While agencies coordinated on paper, Lorene and Jay Bible stood outside the ashes of the Freeman home, realizing that if they wanted to find their daughter, they would have to do it themselves.
Lorene Bible was not an investigator. She was not a lawyer. She was a mother whose 16-year-old daughter had disappeared in one night, and no one could tell her where she was, dead or alive.
She began doing what any mother in such a situation would do if she had the strength. She searched.
Lorene and Jay printed posters. Not a few hundred, not a few thousand. Hundreds of thousands of flyers with pictures of Lauria and Ashley were distributed across the United States, reaching into Canada and Mexico.
The family drove hundreds of thousands of miles, putting up pictures of the girls on every window, every bulletin board, and every gas station they found. They had no budget for an investigation and no legal authority. They had a car, a stack of posters, and a refusal to believe their daughter was gone.
The official case remained open, the police said. But leads emerged slowly, like water dripping from a leaky faucet, and most led nowhere. In the first year, there was no progress, no suspects, no bodies.
Lorene prepared for the first birthday without Lauria and did something no one who knows the story will forget. She refused to take down the Christmas tree. The tree stayed in the home, decorated with lights and ornaments, because Lorene believed Lauria would come home and take it down herself.
It was not a symbol. It was not a gesture for the media. It was a mother holding on to a small piece of her family life because admitting her daughter would not come home meant admitting something she was not ready to admit.
The Christmas tree stood in Lorene Bible’s home year after year. It stood through the case’s first year, third year, and fifth year. It stood until 2006, when it rotted and fell over on its own.
Seven years.
—
In 2001, the television show Unsolved Mysteries aired an episode about the Freeman Bible case. The episode strongly suggested there was a conflict between the Freeman family and the Craig County Sheriff’s Office. The story was told this way: Danny and Kathy Freeman were preparing to sue the police over Shane’s death.
The lawsuit would have revealed the truth about the shooting and threatened the futures of those involved. The motive was clear: silence Danny before the case reached court.
The rumor spread through Craig County like wildfire. Many locals believed the police killed the Freeman family and kidnapped the girls to cover up the crime. Dwayne Freeman, Danny’s brother, publicly pointed fingers at law enforcement.
He said Danny told him he had been threatened by deputies. He believed his brother was killed for daring to demand justice for Shane.
This theory gained traction because it explained everything: the motive, the opportunity, and the strange failure of the investigation. But it did not hold up against the evidence. Everyone connected to the Shane Freeman shooting, including David Hays and his brother Mark Hays, a former Craig County undersheriff, was questioned and given polygraph tests in 2000.
The results indicated they were not involved in the Freeman murders or the girls’ disappearance. They were cleared.
The conspiracy theory collapsed, but nothing replaced it. The case remained open and empty of evidence.
Then in 2002, a name emerged from an unexpected place. Tommy Lynn Sells, the serial killer known as the “Coast to Coast Killer,” was awaiting execution in Texas when he claimed he had killed Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman. Sells said he was passing through Oklahoma after a drug deal, saw the fire, and kidnapped the girls.
The confession shocked people because Sells was a real killer, already convicted of multiple murders across the United States, and his style fit a random violent attack.
For a moment, it seemed the case had reached a resolution. But Sells’ confession did not match the evidence at the crime scene. The details he provided did not align with what investigators knew, and then Sells recanted.
Another dead end, another false hope. For the Bible family, another door opened and then closed.
In 2009, the OSBI revealed a detail they had kept secret for nearly a decade. From the beginning, they had information that a small dark four-door sedan was seen near the Freeman home, heading east on the rural road toward Welch around 5:30 to 6:00 a. m.
on December 30, 1999. A spokesperson said they had to verify the credibility of the information before releasing it. Ten years to verify one piece of information.
Ten years during which the Bible family did not know someone had seen a strange car leaving the crime scene at the time it happened.
—
By the end of the first decade, the Freeman Bible case looked like a cold case in every sense. No suspects, no bodies, no new evidence, no leads leading anywhere. Ashley’s family declared her legally dead in 2010.
The Bible family kept Lauria on the missing persons list. Lorene woke up every morning with the same question. She once said she remembered the first anniversary of the disappearance, telling herself she did not want to be standing there 10 years later without an answer.
Ten years passed, then 15, then 17. No answer came.
In late 2017, nearly 18 years of silence ended when a cardboard box changed everything. Heath Winfrey, the new Craig County sheriff, was reorganizing his office when he found a box of files left over from the previous sheriff’s tenure. The box contained notes and investigation materials related to the Freeman Bible case that no one in Craig County law enforcement knew existed.
No one could determine how long those notes had been in the box. Perhaps five years, perhaps ten, perhaps from the beginning. What mattered was that they had never been added to the official case file, never turned over to the OSBI, and never read by any investigator since they were written.
The notes led to more leads. Their greatest value was in three names: Warren Phillip Welch II, David A. Pennington, and Ronnie Dean Busick.
Three names that, when investigators began asking about them in town, turned out not to be secrets at all. Locals had known them for a long time, but no one dared to speak because knowing those three names meant knowing what they could do to anyone who uttered them.
Warren Phillip Welch II, known to everyone as Phil Welch, was the first and most feared name. He lived in Picher, the abandoned mining town now known more for contamination than ore. He was a major methamphetamine producer and dealer in the area.
Witnesses described him as someone everyone who knew him feared—not healthy fear, but the fear that comes from knowing he was capable of anything and would do it if you angered him. Investigators and witnesses later confirmed that Welch was the mastermind behind what happened to the Freeman family and the girls. He gave the orders and made the decisions.
But Phil Welch died in 2007, ten years before the cardboard box was opened. He was never asked a single question in court, never faced Lorene Bible, and never had to look into the eyes of a jury and explain what he did to two 16-year-old girls in his mobile home in Picher.
David A. Pennington was the second. He was a loyal follower of Phil Welch, the type who followed and executed whatever the boss asked.
When investigators began searching for witnesses in 2017 and 2018, Pennington’s former girlfriend was one of the most important sources. She said Pennington had physically abused her many times and threatened to kill her if she revealed anything about him. She lived in fear for years, and that fear was the reason for her silence.
But Pennington had also died in 2015, two years before the cardboard box was opened. Two of the three suspects died before justice could be served. Only Ronnie Dean Busick remained.
—
Busick was the third man in the group. According to witness testimony, he was not the mastermind and not the one giving orders. He was the driver.
He drove Welch and Pennington to the Freeman home that night and drove them and whatever they brought with them away when they left.
Based on the notes in the cardboard box, new witness statements, and additional interviews, investigators pieced together a picture of what happened on the night of December 29 and into the early hours of December 30, 1999. This picture was recorded in the investigative report and was more horrifying than any theory the public had heard during the previous 18 years.
According to the report, Phil Welch, David Pennington, and Ronnie Busick went to the Freeman mobile home that night to collect a drug debt. The amount was between one and two ounces of methamphetamine. Not a large amount in absolute terms, but large enough in the world of rural Oklahoma meth to justify violence.
Danny Freeman owed the money, or was believed to owe it, and Phil Welch came to collect.
It was not just talk. Welch and Pennington entered the home. Danny and Kathy Freeman were shot in the head execution-style.
It was not an argument that escalated. It was not a chaotic robbery. It was a deliberate, cold, and quick execution.
Then they set the home on fire to cover the crime.
But when the fire started, Welch and Pennington discovered two girls in the home. Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman, two 16-year-olds spending a birthday night together, had seen or heard the murder of Ashley’s parents. Welch and Pennington did not leave them.
They were witnesses and could testify.
According to the statement, the girls were kidnapped from the Freeman home in the early hours of December 30, 1999, and taken to Phil Welch’s mobile home in Picher, not far away but far enough that no one would hear anything. What happened in that mobile home lasted about two weeks. The statement said Welch, Pennington, and Busick claimed they raped and tortured the girls.
The girls were forced to take drugs, were beaten, and after about two weeks, they were killed. Their bodies were thrown into a pit or mine in the Picher area. Or, according to another theory, they were buried in a cellar that was later filled with concrete.
In both accounts, the goal was the same: hide the girls forever.
For 18 years, the plan worked.
Imagine it. Two 16-year-old girls who the night before were celebrating a birthday, eating pizza, laughing, and finishing each other’s sentences, were forced to wake up, watch the murder of their friend’s parents, were locked in a mobile home in an abandoned town, and were tortured by three men for two weeks before being killed and thrown into a hole that might never be found.
Meanwhile, Lorene Bible drove across America putting up posters searching for her daughter. She kept the Christmas tree standing in her living room. She woke up every morning asking herself if today would be the day she found Lauria.
The three men lived free, moving openly, hiding the secret with the fear they had planted throughout the community.
—
In April 2018, nearly 19 years after that night, Ronnie Dean Busick was arrested. He was 66 years old, living quietly as if the past had never existed, as if two 16-year-old girls had never disappeared, as if the mobile home on the rural road in Welch had never burned.
Busick was charged in Craig County District Court with four counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of arson. Bail was set at one million dollars. When the arrest was announced, Sheriff Heath Winfrey held a press conference.
Jay and Lorene Bible stood before the cameras, and for the first time in nearly two decades, their faces showed not just pain but something like hope. Not hope of finding Lauria alive. They had lost that hope long ago.
Hope that someone, at least one of the three, would be held accountable for what happened in the mobile home in Picher.
But Busick was not the mastermind. Phil Welch, the man who gave the orders, had been dead for 11 years. Pennington, the loyal subordinate, had been dead for three years.
Busick was the last link in the chain of crime, and that link was not the most important one. He was the driver, according to the statements. He drove Welch and Pennington to the Freeman home.
He waited outside or in the car while the other two killed Danny and Kathy. He drove the girls to Picher and stayed there, in that mobile home, for the next two weeks while Lauria and Ashley were tortured, raped, and killed. He was not the one holding the knife, but he was in the room.
He knew. He did not call the police. He did not open the door for the girls to escape.
He did nothing. Then he kept the secret for 19 years.
The case moved through the courts for more than two years before it was resolved, and the resolution was not a trial. In July 2020, Ronnie Dean Busick reached a plea deal. He pleaded guilty to being an accomplice to first-degree murder instead of facing a full trial on four murder charges that could have resulted in life in prison.
In exchange, he agreed to help investigators find the remains of Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman.
The agreement had a clear condition: if Busick helped find the remains before sentencing, the punishment would be five years in prison plus five years of probation. If he did not, the punishment would be ten years in prison plus five years of probation.
Busick provided some information and kept repeating the phrase “root cellar.” His stepdaughter confirmed that Busick had prevented any family member from approaching a certain root cellar. In August 2020, investigators searched an abandoned cellar in Picher.
They dug, excavated, and searched. They found no human remains. Busick seemed very surprised the remains were not found.
But Busick also failed a polygraph test when he said he was not at the Freeman home that night. He kept saying he did not remember details, that his memory was fuzzy, that he could not provide more specific information. His lawyer said he genuinely did not remember.
The Bible family said he was lying.
—
On August 31, 2020, Ronnie Dean Busick stood before a judge in a courtroom in Vinita, Oklahoma, for sentencing. He was 68 years old, walking with a cane, wearing orange prison clothes and a mask. He limped to the chair beside his lawyer and glanced at the Bible and Freeman families sitting there, then fixed his gaze on Lorene Bible as she stood and spoke.
Lorene Bible had waited 21 years for this moment. She looked directly into Ronnie Busick’s eyes and told him her truth. She said he would always be remembered as a kidnapper, killer, and evil man.
She said he could have done something to stop it. He could have called the police. He could have confessed, but he did not.
She said he allowed unimaginable things to happen to her daughter and her friend’s daughter. She told Busick, “Lauria was not just a friend for a sleepover. Lauria was our daughter.
Lauria was our blood. You took a daughter from her parents, a sister from her brothers, a niece and cousin from a large family.”
Silence filled the courtroom as Lorene spoke. It was not polite silence. It was because no one could breathe.
Twenty-one years reduced to the voice of a mother standing less than three meters from the man who helped kill her daughter.
The judge sentenced Busick to 10 years in prison and 5 years of probation, with one year under supervision. Busick was given credit for time served since his arrest in April 2018. Investigators stated they would continue searching for the girls’ remains regardless of the sentence.
One investigator said plainly, “We have reason to believe the girls’ remains are in a cellar in Picher.”
Jay Bible, Lauria’s father, stood after the sentencing and said what had been on his mind for 21 years: “The Lord will bring our daughters home one day. We don’t have to worry about Ronnie Busick.” He said it in the quiet voice of a man who had learned to live with pain without surrendering to it.
But the pain was not over. The 10-year sentence was an illusion. In May 2023, less than three years after sentencing, Ronnie Busick was released from prison.
He was 71 years old. His time served since 2018 was credited, good behavior credits were applied, and because the accomplice to murder charge was not on Oklahoma’s list of crimes requiring 85% of the sentence to be served, he was eligible for early release.
The Bible family was not informed. Lorene Bible said that when the agreement was signed, she believed Busick would serve at least 85% of the 10 years, minus two years of pre-trial detention, meaning six to seven additional years in prison. No one told her that the accomplice charge was not on the 85% list.
No one explained that after two and a half years, he would be released.
When news of the release spread, Lorene and a small group of protesters gathered outside the prison from the night before. She wanted to look into Busick’s eyes when he walked out. She stood there all night, but Busick did not come out the front door.
Authorities drove him to a local bus stop before 7 a. m. Without warning, without notice, without informing the victim’s family.
When Lorene realized Busick was gone, he had already disappeared. The accomplice in her daughter’s murder slipped out the back door while she watched the front.
Lorene had a message for Busick. “When he gets out, he needs to be careful because there is a lot of hatred and resentment boiling in the air.”
Ronnie Dean Busick, the only person convicted in the killing of four people, including two 16-year-old girls, spent a total of about two years in prison. Meanwhile, Lorene Bible had been searching for her daughter for 24 years.
—
The reaction was immediate and harsh. Oklahoma State Senator Michael Bergstrom, who had been Lauria Bible’s teacher before her disappearance, called Busick’s release shameful. He said the family now had to endure the injustice of watching a man who confessed to involvement walk out of prison after just over two years, despite never helping law enforcement find the girls’ bodies.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond called the murders horrific but said he had no legal authority to prevent the release. In a letter to the Bible family, Drummond explained that the very law he swore to enforce tied his hands.
The Bible family discovered the truth no one had told them when the plea agreement was signed. The accomplice to murder charge was not on the list of violent crimes requiring 85% of the sentence to be served before parole eligibility under Oklahoma law. Lorene said if they had known, they would never have agreed to the 10-year sentence.
But the anger did not stop at words. It became law. State Representative Steve Bashore, who represented the district including Welch, promised the Bible family he would fight to change the law so this would never happen to another family.
Bashore introduced House Bill 1001, named the Lauria and Ashley Act, on the first day new bills could be filed for the 2025 legislative session.
The bill added accomplice to first-degree murder and second-degree murder to the list of serious crimes requiring convicted offenders to serve at least 85% of their sentence before becoming eligible for parole. It also barred convicted offenders from receiving any sentence reductions below 85%, including good behavior credits and personal hygiene credits—the type Busick had used to shorten his sentence.
Bashore stated plainly before the House: “This law is named after two girls from my district who were in the prime of their youth when they were tortured, raped, and brutally murdered. But the man who confessed to participating in that crime spent less than three years in prison and received sentence reductions for reasons like maintaining personal hygiene.”
The legislative path was not easy. In the first year, the bill passed the House but died in the Senate when it was not brought to a final vote. Lorene Bible and Lisa Broderick had to start over.
In 2025, Bashore reintroduced the bill. This time, with Lorene Bible present in the House chamber, the bill passed 76 to 11. In the Senate, Senator Kristin Thompson carried the bill.
It passed 38 to 5.
On May 6, 2025, Governor Kevin Stitt signed HB 1001 into law. The Lauria and Ashley Act took effect on November 1, 2025.
Lorene Bible stood before the cameras after the signing and repeated what she had been saying in different forms for 25 years. She said, “This law doesn’t help our case, but it helps the families that come after us. Lauria would have stood up for what she believed in, and passing this law is what Lauria would have done.”
She added, “Two hard years, but we just have to persevere and pray and keep going.”
—
The law changed, but Lauria and Ashley have not come home. The search for the girls’ remains has continued for more than two decades, covering multiple locations and ending each time with the same result.
In August 2019, the OSBI and partner agencies searched a mine pond the size of a football field in the Picher area. After two days of searching, the operation yielded nothing. In October 2021, a new search was conducted in a cellar of a house once owned by David Pennington.
Busick kept repeating the word “cellar” in interviews, and his stepdaughter said he prevented anyone from approaching it. Investigators dug but found nothing.
In April 2025, investigators from the Quapaw Nation searched another mine in Picher. Lorene Bible said by that time they had searched five mines out of about 150 in the area. Five out of 150.
Then in March 2026, the largest search yet was conducted. The FBI and OSBI, in cooperation with the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Kansas, Kansas investigators, the Miami Tribe, the Cherokee Nation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Quapaw Nation, and the District 12 Attorney’s Office, searched a rural area near Treece, Kansas, just north of the Oklahoma border near Picher. They focused on a mine shaft 35 feet deep.
The FBI sent 16 agents to inspect materials as they were extracted. A forensic anthropologist was on site. Tulsa police lowered a camera into the shaft several times before digging began.
They dug 40 feet. They recovered garbage, debris, and animal bones. They found no human remains.
The OSBI confirmed the negative result.
Tom Pryor, a private investigator hired by the Bible family in the early years, described Picher in words no one who understands the area would dispute. It is Oklahoma’s Valley of Death. No one knows how many bodies are there with all those mines and pits.
150 abandoned mine shafts, some dozens of meters deep, hidden under grass and cracked concrete in a ghost town emptied by the federal government due to lead contamination. Finding two girls there was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Each shaft was as deep as a 10-story building.
But Lorene did not stop. She never stopped.
—
To keep the memory of Lauria and Ashley alive, Lorene opened a thrift store in Vinita called Bohz New 2 U. After expenses, the profits went directly to a scholarship fund she created in honor of the girls. The fund annually awards two $500 scholarships to students at Bluejacket and Welch High Schools, the schools Lauria and Ashley attended.
In 2020, author Jax Miller published “Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth, and the Case of Two Missing Girls,” a nonfiction book written after she moved to Welch and lived there for four years investigating the case. The book revealed generational poverty, environmental contamination from mining, and the methamphetamine addiction that ate away at the community from within. HLN produced a four-part documentary series about the case.
Lorene Bible traveled to New York for a special screening and said the strongest reaction from the audience was anger.
The Freeman Bible case is not just a story of four lives lost. It exposed deep flaws in the system: the inability of rural law enforcement to confront organized crime, the destruction methamphetamine brought to the community from within, killers who died before trial, and a legal loophole that allowed an accomplice to four murders to walk out of prison after just two years for maintaining personal hygiene.
But it is also a story of extraordinary maternal strength when the system fails. For 25 years, Lorene Bible searched for her daughter. She drove hundreds of thousands of miles.
She hung hundreds of thousands of posters. She kept a Christmas tree until it rotted. She stood before the man who helped kill her child and told him who he was.
She stood outside the prison all night waiting for his release. She fought for two years to change Oklahoma law, and she still wakes up every morning with the same question.
On the night of December 29, 1999, 16-year-old Lauria Bible asked her father for permission to spend the night at her best friend’s house. Her father told her to be home by noon. The girls ate pizza, laughed, and finished each other’s sentences, then went to sleep in the small mobile home on the empty rural road in Welch, Oklahoma.
Lauria never came home. Her remains still lie somewhere in the darkness of 150 abandoned mines in a ghost town even the maps forgot. But her mother has not forgotten.
And she never will.
A cold case that lasted 19 years, a mother who kept the flame of hope alive, a cardboard box that revealed the truth, and justice—late, incomplete, and painful—finally knocked on the door.