The Murder of Fiona Ward

 

Fiona and Barlow with doves

      I met Fiona Ward about 20 years ago when I was signing books on a Sunday afternoon at the Silver Dollar City bookshop.  She told me she had lost her old Chocolate Labrador and wanted to get a new pup.  Back then I raised old style hunting Labs, and had a litter of chocolate puppies. 

      Fiona was the wife of a Joplin Missouri lawyer.  My outdoor magazine was fairly new back then and I made a deal with her to give her a puppy for help finding advertisers and subscribers for my magazines.

      I wrote an outdoor column for several newspapers and the Joplin Globe, locally owned then, used my column as they had for probably 15 years.  Today, owned by an out of state newspaper company, it is a shell of what it once was, controlled by some incompetent editors for years now, as the owners looked to cut costs by hiring inept people who worked cheap.  

      But then,  that is not  really part of the story, except for the  fact that  the Globe does not necessarily print now what does not favor the owners financially and seldom does the truth do that.

      Fiona knew lots of people in Joplin, and sold many ads for me in a short time.  She also distributed lots of sample magazines.  Because of her we increased the number of readers in Southwest Missouri by a lot.  She loved to hunt and fish but had not done much of it.  

 

     Rather than pay her for what she had done over and above the cost of the Lab puppy I gave her, I took her on hunting and fishing trips on occasion.  I called up her first, second and third wild gobblers one spring and the next fall, and helped her train her Lab pup by taking her on a duck hunt or two.

      But all that is not a big part of this story either. I talked Fiona into taking her kids to a church on Sunday, and they were all baptized in an Oklahoma river soon after. Her son and daughter were great kids, and Fiona was a fine mother.  At times she would take her son with  us on one of the hunting or fishing trips I took her on. 

      My advice about going to church was something I regret. Fiona chose the wrong church!  There was a man there who told everyone he was a recovering drug addict, trying to turn his life around.  The man was a worthless parasite.  He had Fiona fooled, and soon had her smoking marijuana, and taking care of his young daughter and calling her his girlfriend. At the time, she was a widow, so that was her business and no one elses.  I felt awful guilty for telling her to go to church, but there was little I could do.

      Lets go back a ways…Her husband had been a very successful, well-to-do lawyer who passed away from lung cancer shortly before she started going to church.  She told me that he made a lot of money defending people who sold drugs.  She said those people he defended were not good or innocent people, but theyhad lots of money because of their drug dealing or other criminal enterprises.  She told me that her husband and the prosecutor and a judge there in Joplin would get together to find a way to really milk them.  All three shared in the profit, a lot of money under the table and charges always dismissed as a result. The drug sellers who had the money went free, and the ones who didn’t went to jail! As a result her husband, a judge and a prosecutor were doing well because of it. But they had another way of making money.

       Fiona had been her husband’s secretary and I went in his office only once.  He seemed like such an amiable nice fellow.  I liked him.  The office was plush and large and what Fiona began to tell me was unbelievable.  Her husband got throat and lung cancer, though he never used cigarettes. He smoked marijuana at night obsessively. Fiona and her kids had to stay out of his closed bedroom because of the smoke, where he watched television until the marijuana he took put him to sleep.  He was experiencing pain from the cancer, and it was making him abusive. 

 

      One day he grabbed his son by the throat and choked him and the next day at school, teachers saw the bruises.  He then was ordered out of the home, and Fiona filed for a divorce.  By the time her husband died he had ran up 80,000 dollars in credit card debt that Fiona could never pay.

      Before he died, she was on a float trip with me when she told me something that astounded me.  She said that for several years her husband had been sending her to Bentonville Arkansas with boxes in the trunk holding at least 20 thousand dollars in cash and sometimes more.  She would drive to a Wal-Mart property not far from their main offices, park the car and wait.  In minutes, two Hispanic brothers would show up with a key to the car trunk, open it, take the money and put drugs in its place.   Fiona said it was not marijuana, that her husband got that in Joplin.  It was likely meth or cocaine, but she never knew.  Her husband always sent her because he said if she was caught it would be easy to get her off any charges.  He said the two brothers brought the drugs from Mexico, and both worked for Walmart in Bentonville.

      When she would arrive home, one of her husbands associates would get the drugs and they would go to that prosecutor, the judge and some other lawyers, not to use, but to distribute.  That was the other  way they made money!  I begged her to give me the names, but she said I would write something about them and then it would get us killed.

      With the huge credit card debt, Fiona went to work for the city of Joplin and no longer worked for me.  I thought she was about to marry the dope-user from church, but a few months after I last talked to her one of her  friends called me to say she had been killed in an accident.  I was told that she had broke up with her boyfriend and had sworn off drugs that he was trying to get her to use.

The story was that he had called Fiona one Sunday afternoon to tell her he was going to kill himself.

  

      Let me say here that I rode all over with Fiona for two years and never once did she ever not fasten her seat belt, and never did she allow me to not fasten mine, even in my own vehicle!  That Sunday night they found her pickup at the base of a steep, rocky incline on just off a lonely stretch of highway.  Fiona had been thrown out, they said, from her rolling vehicle, found a distance from it with fatal head injuries.  I knew Fiona had been murdered when I was told she was not wearing a seat belt.  There isn’t much else to say.  But few worthless people on earth ever pay for what they are and what they do while living their short lives on earth.  I’ll bet Fiona never sees those kind of people in heaven. Long ago I promised her I wouldn’t ever tell this story. I keep my promises, except for this one time. I believe she will forgive me because I haven’t.