Divers, radar brought in for new search for Welch girls

PICHER — The search for the remains of two teen girls who went missing from the scene of a double homicide in December 1999 was renewed here Tuesday.

Ground-penetrating radar and the Tulsa Police Department dive teams were brought in to assist in an indepth examination of t he last-known location where 16-year-olds Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible were seen alive.

“This is the first time that we've had this,” said Bible's mother, Lorene Bible. “That's technology we didn't have before.”

Since Dec. 31, 1999, when Freeman's parents, Danny and Kathy Freeman, were shot dead and their mobile home outside of Welch burned to the ground, the whereabouts of the two teen girls, who were best friends having a birthday sleepover, have remained a mystery.

A break in the case came in spring 2018, when prosecutors charged Ronnie Dean Busick in the deaths of the Freemans and the two girls, and implicated two other men who are now deceased, Warren Phillip Welch II and David A. Pennington.

Cold case i nvestigators from the Craig County district attorney's office and the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation revealed at that time that they believed the girls were held captive for a number of days after their kidnapping at a trailer home in Picher.

During that time they were reported to have been tortured and raped, before eventually being strangled to death.

The cold case investigators were joined Tuesday by the Tulsa Police Department dive team and investigators from Quapaw Tribe in searching the vacant site where the trailer home once stood and nearby ponds.

Lorene Bible, who has never stopped i nvestigating her daughter's whereabouts, was the first to arrive about 8 a.m. She said she didn't necessarily have her hopes up, but she will never give up the search.

“You never know. It's like a checklist you can check off and say, `You know, the girls aren't there,' and you go to the next place,” Bible said of Tuesday's search.

She said she even pushed to get the throng of media up-close access to see the searchers at work because she believes it could help convince people who have been reluctant to come forward.

“Let's say this turns out to be absolutely nothing. We still want people to know,” Bible said. “There's somebody out there that knows something or there could be four or five people (who) know something that could bring closure.”

Bible noted that the 20-year anniversary of the girls' disappearance is approaching and it would be nice for their remains to be found finally.

“Five years was the worst. Then there was the 10-year, then 15 years. That's no place for a mother and father to be,” she said. “Everybody gets to go to the cemetery and you get to honor your loved ones. I don't have no place.”

The search wrapped up about 4 p.m. after a backhoe was brought i n to explore anomalies three to six-feet deep in the soil identified by radar.

The search is expected to resume Wednesday morning a few blocks away at a large pond created by a mine collapse in 1967, across the street from Picher High School.

Law enforcement officials are set to share their observations from the search on Wednesday afternoon.

Busick is being held in jail as he awaits trial. The victims' families and investigators have pleaded with him to reveal what he knows of the whereabouts of the girls' remains.

As for the other two suspects, Welch died in 2007 at the age of 61. He was described by witnesses in newly filed court documents as the “mastermind” in the killings of Bible and the three Freemans.

Pennington died at the age of 56 in 2015.