Ashlee and Lauria’s friendship began in kindergarten in Welch, Oklahoma. According to Lorene Bible, Ashley’s mother, they developed an instant connection that only grew stronger until high school.
They could have been twins had their physiques been any more similar. While Ashley had blue eyes, Lauria’s were hazel.
In high school, Lauria cheered for Ashley’s basketball team. Lorene stated it was almost as if they shared the same thoughts. They even finished each other’s sentences.
The Fateful Night Both Girls Went Missing
On December 29, 1999, Ashley invited Laurie over for her 16th birthday party. According to Unsolved.com, her father, Jay, would later say, “Lauria, she said to me, ‘Daddy, is it all right if I spend the night with Ashley in the Freemans’ home?’ I said, ‘Well, just make sure you’re home by noon tomorrow.’ And noon tomorrow didn’t happen the way it should’ve.“
They lived only a mile apart, and both parents had known each other for years. From all accounts, it seems they had a wonderful night at the Freemans’, eating pizza and cake. But unbeknownst to them, someone was watching from outside.
At 6 am, the police got a call from the neighbors that the Freemans’ house was on fire. When law enforcement arrived on the scene, the entire house had been burned to cinders. Initially, the investigators only found Kathy Freeman’s body at the house with gunshot wounds to the head.
They also found shotgun shells around the property, leading the authorities to believe unknown individuals executed the parents before they burned the mobile home. The girls were nowhere to be found.
Following some interaction between Steve Nutter of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation and the Bibles, the authorities left. At the time, the OSBI had complete jurisdiction on the scene and determined that nothing else was there.
Jay and Lorene returned to the scene and found the body of Danny Freeman. She immediately dialed 911 and told them that they had left a body in the fire. Unsolved reported her observations, saying, “He did not have anything from the upper teeth; all the way to the top of his head, was totally gone, like he’d been shot in the face.“
They also scoured the scene to find Laura’s purse, wallet, and an insurance card belonging to an unidentified woman.
Upon the OSBI’s arrival, Ashley’s uncle, Dwayne Vancil, also confirmed the identity of Danny, his stepbrother, because of a metal plate in his skull. The Bibles also volunteered their evidence to Nutter, but he dismissed it as irrelevant to the investigation.
At the time, Nutter was convinced Danny had murdered his wife, set the house on fire, and kidnapped the two girls, so this was a wrench in his theory.
Conspiracies Involving the Sheriff’s Department
Dwayne Vancil was convinced the Sheriff’s office had a hand in the fire. This was because Danny had confided in him a week prior to the incident that if anything were to happen to him, the first place to look would be in the police department.
Danny’s suppositions were understandable because his son, Shane, was also killed in a police involved shooting. According to the report, Deputy David Hayes says he confronted Shane on a rural road near Welch, Oklahoma. The teen was allegedly operating a stolen vehicle and pointed a weapon at the deputy.
The deputy shot and killed Shane in self-defense. After that, there was significant bad blood between Danny’s family and the Sheriff’s department. Dwayne voiced his concerns over the possibility of law enforcement involvement in the murders and kidnappings.
In response, both OSBI agents and Sheriff’s deputies tasked to the case submitted to polygraph tests. They all passed. The official conclusion was that the Sheriff’s office was not involved in the murders, and neither did they know about the whereabouts of the two girls.
This resulted in the investigation understandably turning things south for the victim’s families. Accusing the very police departments that are supposed to be handling the investigation of conspiracies tends to take the wind out of a search for two girls. This was especially the case considering the theory was a dead end.
Nutter then shifted the investigation’s focus to the girls as the primary suspects. Because they were suspects, no Amber Alerts were issued for 16-year-olds. Nutter told both the Bibles that he had added the girls’ names to the National Missing Persons database. Lorene confirmed shortly after that he indeed hadn’t.
Independent Investigations after Falling out with the Police
Lorene and Jay Bible were effectively left to their own devices afterwards, continuing the search with the help of friends and family. The investigation was still officially open according to police records, but there was little effort on the local front.
They put up their own missing person posters. Lisa Brodrick, Lauria’s cousin, said they drove hundreds of thousands of miles putting their faces in every window they could think of.
They did not get any leads for the rest of the year, and Lorene prepared herself for the first Christmas without her daughter. She even refused to pull down the Christmas tree after the fire because she believed her daughter would eventually turn up, alive and well.
Information trickled in over time about the actual situation of the Freeman household. Apparently, Danny was accumulating resources to launch a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s department. To do this, he began farming and selling marijuana.
He may have gotten involved with dangerous individuals, owing them drug debts. It was later surmised that these individuals may have been the main culprits behind the fire and abduction.
Lorene decided to follow the lead and meet with an individual with contacts at the top of the criminal chain. This person directed her to the Mexican cartel in Miami. Against all cautions from her husband and family, Lorene made up her mind to meet with the cartel. She famously said when asked what she would do if they tried to harm her, “If they start shooting at me, it means I’m getting close.”
Lorene parked her truck at the meeting location and waited for hours for the contact to identify himself. When he arrived, she got out of the car and slowly approached him.
They had a short interaction where she asked if the girls were taken and if Danny was murdered because he owed them money. The contact reassured her that they do not harm or traffic in women or children. This took them back to square one, but it was a lead that was eliminated.
Recovered Evidence & Witness Testimony
Rumors also began circulating within the criminal underworld about Polaroids of the two girls. Allegedly, the Polaroid photographs showed both the girls bound and gagged with duct tape.
Lorene tried not to focus on these parts of the story because of the psychological trauma that would bring her, choosing to focus on the fact that they were alive. These tips were very confusing, as they indicated that the girls had been seen in New Mexico and Florida on the same day.
While law enforcement shied away, saying the claims were baseless, Lorene and Jay opted to investigate them all. This continued throughout the 2000s, with little headway.
Tommy Lynn Sells, also known as the ‘Coast to Coast’ serial killer, confessed to having killed Bible and Freeman in 2002 while he was on Texas death row. He claimed to have been passing through town following a drug deal, saw the fire, grabbed the girls, and killed them.
The police took him to Oklahoma, where he claimed to have buried the bodies, but the search yielded nothing. He also failed a polygraph about his involvement in their disappearance.
County Sheriff Jimmy Sooter told the media that Sells did not provide any new information to the police about the case. He likely fabricated the story because he was bored or wanted notoriety. He was, in fact, notorious for confessions about people he had killed when he was on death row.
Following Sell’s false confession, the trail went cold for 15 years. Tips still circulated about potential local suspects and the Polaroid, but no substantial progress was made on the case.
A Fresh Team Breaks the Case
Steve Nutter was discharged from the case, and Sheriff Heath Winfrey began his first term in early 2017. By February, they had gotten new leads. As Heath and his team moved old evidence crates, they found a box of overlooked documents dating back to the 1999 investigations.
These included the auto insurance card issued by private investigator Tom Pryor, which Nutter immediately rejected. The card had been initially catalogued in the evidence log, but its significance to the investigation was never appreciated.
The card apparently belonged to a former girlfriend of Warren Welch, a local at the time known to have ties to criminal organizations. Investigators determined this was a direct physical link, which clearly placed the suspect’s social at the Freeman property.
With this information, law enforcement re-ignited their interest in the case, redoing the interviews. Police tracked down people who were connected to Welch and zeroed in on David Pennington and Ronnie Dean Busick.
Both Warren Phillip Welch and David Pennington were deceased at the time, in 2007 and 2015, respectively. This left Ronnie Busick. Multiple witnesses then came forward in the months leading up to Busick’s arrest. They included Phil Welch’s former girlfriend.
She reported coming across the famed Polaroid pictures in Welch’s leather briefcase, months after the kidnapping in 2000. Welch threatened to kill her if she said anything.
Other acquaintances of the three men came forward and told police they had been shown the Polaroids, years after the crime. Apparently, Phil and David were proud of the images. The witnesses only got the courage to approach the police after the deaths of both men.
This new piece of evidence prompted the police to arrest Ronnie Busick in April 2018 on four counts of first-degree murder, two counts of kidnapping, and one count of first-degree arson. He agreed to speak to the Bible family just days after his arrest.
He emphasized that he did not kill anyone, set fire to anything, or kidnap anybody. Bible responded that even though he may not have killed anyone, he still took the girls away from their home and never called anyone to say they needed help.
According to KJRH News, Lorene said, “I’m not out to kill him, I’m not out to harm him, I just want to know what he knows. If he wants to talk to the family he must know something.”
Eventually, in 2020, Ronnie Busick pleaded guilty to being an accessory to first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of the adults, along with the teens. Busick revealed to the police what the two others did concerning the arson and the girls.
Though the girls’ bodies have never been found, it is presumed their bodies were dumped in a pitcher mine pit.
In a weird turn of events, Ronnie Busick was sentenced to 10 years in prison but served only 38 months. He was classified as a level-4 inmate with good behavior, which significantly shortened his sentence. Today, he is free and lives near the Bibles.
In honor of the girls, a House Bill 1001, was pitched and passed in 2025. Laura and Ashley’s law mandates that people convicted of felony accessory murder have to serve at least 85% of their sentence before they become eligible for parole.
Lorene was present in the Oklahoma House of Representatives when the bill was passed. She said, “We know this will not bring Lauria and Ashley back, But we want to prevent this nightmare from happening to any other family that might experience something like this. And unfortunately in this day and age, there will always be another family, one that might not have the energy to pursue justice for 25 years like we have. If we can help them by ensuring someone that admitted to participating in the crime stays in prison on a longer sentence, then that will give us some measure of peace.”
The bill was secured by Representative Steve Bashore for Miami, who was deeply disturbed concerning what happened to the two girls. He told the Oklahoma House of Representatives, “Two girls in my House district in the prime of their lives when they were brutally tortured, raped, and murdered.”
Bashore reiterated, “Yet the person who admitted to participating in these crimes served less than three years in prison and had his prison sentence reduced because of credits earned for things such as maintaining good hygiene. He was then allowed to move less than 20 miles from the mother of one of the girls.”
For more stories on unsolved crimes, explore our articles on Anthonette Cayedito and Jodi Husentruit.
