A SLEEPOVER NIGHTMARE
THE 16-YEAR-OLD FRIENDS DISAPPEARED AMID A FIERY CRIME SCENE IN 1999. POLICE SAY THEY WERE KILLED – AND HAVE VOWED TO BRING THEM HOME TO THEIR FAMILIES
Best friends since primary school, Lauria Bible and Ashley Freeman were always inseparable. Even after Ashley’s family moved [21km] away from Lauria’s neighbourhood in rural Craig County, Oklahoma, the two spent as much time together as possible. They shared a love of sports and the outdoors: Lauria was a school cheerleader and raised pigs and lambs for livestock shows; Ashley, a star athlete who also enjoyed hunting and fishing.
So when Ashley turned 16 on December 29, 1999, she and Lauria, who’d marked the same milestone eight months earlier, naturally wanted to celebrate together, with cake and a sleepover at Ashley’s. “Lauria didn’t go there very often, but it was Ashley’s birthday, and she wanted Lauria to come to her house,” says Lauria’s mum, Lorene. “You’d never think something was going to happen.”
But something did. The next morning, Lorene got a call from her son Brad, then 18, telling her of a fire at the Freeman home. Unable to reach the Freemans or her daughter, Lorene raced there herself to find the home in ashes. The bodies of Ashley’s parents, Kathy and Danny, were found in the rubble; both had been fatally shot before a fire was intentionally set. What investigators didn’t find was any trace of Lauria or Ashley.
For the next 19 years, Lorene held out hope for answers about her daughter, even keeping up the family Christmas tree that Lauria had decorated. “People would give us angels and things to hang on it,” she says. Some of those answers finally came in July 2020, when Ronnie Busick, now 69, pleaded guilty to being an accessory to the murders of Kathy and Danny. Investigators determined that Ashley and Lauria had been abducted by the killers the night of the fire – and were murdered days later. But Busick insisted he didn’t know the location of the girls’ bodies.
Now, as the case is featured on a new episode of People Magazine Investigates, Lorene, 61, says she will never rest until she finds her daughter’s remains. “I decided I was going to be Lauria’s voice,” Lorene says. “That’s what keeps me going.”
The 1999 disappearance of Ashley and Lauria rocked their rural community. The Craig County sheriff brought in the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation; Danny Freeman’s family even hired a private investigator, Tom Pryor. But it
“I want someone to come forward and say, ‘Here’s where you’re going to find them’”
— LORENE
wasn’t until 2013, when Craig County investigator Gary Stansill joined with OSBI agent Tammy Ferrari and focused on an overlooked clue found by Pryor, that the investigation got a jump start.
Pryor had located a vehicle insurance card in the Freemans’ driveway and traced it to a car driven the night of the murders by Phil Welch, a local drug dealer. Pryor later found the car at a salvage lot with girls’ clothing and duct tape inside.
As Stansill and Ferrari began asking locals about Welch, it turned out many had suspected the truth all along: that Welch and associates David Pennington and Busick had gone to the Freeman home that night to collect a drug debt from Danny – then Danny and Kathy were killed and the girls abducted as they tried to flee. “So many people were fearful of Phil,” says Ferrari. Of the three men, only Busick is still alive, and he insists he had no part in the kidnapping and murder of the girls. But Stansill says he still hopes to find the last piece of the puzzle: the girls’ remains.
“I just don’t believe God would have directed me this far to come up empty-handed now,” he says. “Everyone has prayed for this case to be closed.”
No-one more often than Lorene, who often visits the memorial created for Ashley and Lauria. “Your kids go spend the night with friends, you never think they may never come home again,” she says of the tragedy. “But you can’t blame yourself. Bad things happen to good people.”