The Arrest

What happened next feels, even now, twenty years later, like something that belongs to someone else’s story. Except that it is his, and it has been his every day since.

When Clarance first understood what had happened, it did not occur to him that he would be a suspect. He had not been there. He had witnesses who could place him elsewhere. He had phone records. He had a mother who had been with him that morning. The idea that anyone looking at the evidence in good faith would conclude he could be responsible for three murders, including the murder of a ten-year-old child, was incomprehensible to him.

His first instinct was to help. Michelle’s sister was in town, scared, unfamiliar with Tulsa or its legal landscape. The Owasso Police were questioning Michelle. Her family was worried she might be implicated somehow and wanted legal representation during questioning. The family wanted Clarance to help them find an attorney in the Tulsa area.

He called Larry Edwards, the attorney who had recently represented his brother, and left him a message asking him to come to the Owasso Police Department. Edwards either never received the message or chose not to respond to it. Clarance made the decision to drive to the station alone.

He knocked on the glass door. He identified himself to the officer who came. He was trying to help someone navigate a legal situation that had nothing to do with him. He was arrested the moment he identified himself.

He asked what the charge was. They said material witness. He still thought he would be released and at work the next day.

The next morning, when he asked to call his employer, a detective came in for an interrogation instead. The questioning went in circles: the same questions, the same insistence that he was hiding something, the same construction of a narrative that required his involvement regardless of what he said. He answered every question. He explained his timeline. He pointed out, again and again, that he had not been there. None of it moved the needle.

“I’m not confessing to something I didn’t do,” he told them. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

That was when they charged him with three counts of murder.

These are not variations on a consistent account.