Jax Miller - Hell in the Heartland

CONTENTS

Jax Miller is an American author. She wrote her first novel, Freedoms Child, in her twenties while hitchhiking across America, winning the 2016 Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle and earning several CWA Dagger nominations. She has received acclaim from the New York Times, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, and many more. She now works in the true-crime genre, having penned her much-anticipated book and acting as creator, host, and executive producer on the true-crime documentary series Hell in the Heartland on CNNs HLN network. Jax is a lover of film and music, and has a passion for writing screenplays and rock n roll.

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Freedoms Child

If you enjoyed Hell in the Heartland, why not try Jax Millers first novel

Call me what you will: a murderer, a cop killer, a fugitive, a drunk

Theres a lot people dont know about Freedom Oliver. They know she works at the local bar. They know she likes a drink or two.

What they dont know is that Freedom is not her real name. That she has spent the last eighteen years living under Witness Protection, after being arrested for her husbands murder. They dont know that she put her two children up for adoption, a decision that haunts her every day.

Then Freedoms daughter goes missing, and everything changes. Determined to find her, Freedom slips her handlers and heads to Kentucky where her kids were raised. No longer protected by the government, she is tracked by her husbands sadistic family, who are thirsty for revenge. But as she gets closer to the truth, Freedom faces an even more dangerous threat.

She just doesnt know it yet.

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T he sheriff once told me this part of Oklahoma was haunted, that once youre a part of it, you cant ever leave. Here I am, walking along the edge of the Freemans forty-acre property in the middle of the night and hoping not to be shot. Im up against my own crippling anxiety and a backdrop of stars where in the winter of 1999 sat a small trailer that youd never find by accident. In the pitch-black, from a dark and desolate dirt road I look up the hill, imagining how the home would have looked in flames, where inside were thought to be parents Danny and Kathy Freeman, their teenage daughter, Ashley, and Ashleys best friend, Lauria Bible.

God help them all.

Twenty years later, the Freemans and the Bibles remain without answer about what really happened that December night, strangled in the prickly weeds of rumor, rumors that include drugs, police corruption, serial killers, and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ himself. The secrets are out there in the Oklahoma prairies whisper, her taunts. And as imaginary shadows move around me, I learn that while the prairie is playful by day, she plays tricks at night. Somewhere out there, closure might be found after all this time. If Ive said it once, Ive said it a million times: the prairie has her way.

But the stranger-than-fiction story of the Freeman-Bible case has hardly blipped on the radar of true crime, and its hardly made its way out of Oklahoma and the intersection where Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas almost meet to make crosshairs crookedly aimed at the gut of America. The fervors of youth are fading from those who stand today with questions, and those suspected to know where Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible are now are taking the answers to their graves. Time is running out for an untold story, and I wonder who will be left to tell it when those closest to it are no longer here.

The taste of the prairie wind brings me back to being high, and a panic attack begins to spark in my chest. If I dont work this story, Ill have to sit with the unimaginable fear that found me only once I began this case. It is a hereditary monster that took the lives of the women before me in my family, including my mother, who will die from the effects of drugs in the midst of my investigation. Escapism. Fixation. While I get my demons from my mother, I take the diligence of my on-the-spectrum father and spend the next four years with the ghosts of Oklahoma.

Standing at the edge of the Freeman property, I go over (and over and over) what happened in the hours leading up to the fire and silently ask the girls where they went. But they dont answer, and instead, the hills whisper around me like they can smell my fear.

Like I said: the prairie has her way.

S ummer is when I come to Oklahoma to meet the living, but I reserve winters for trying to acquaint myself with the dead; in the season when those I came to write about last lived, when its still. I sometimes hear them better in the silence than from the survivors who still talk about them today. I may never get inside their minds the way I wish I could, or the way they get into mine. But I can at least feel the snow on my skin atop this hill where the trailer once sat, and wrap my fingers around the shoulder of an ax and wonder if our knuckles ache the same. In the lockjaw of winter, when memories of braiding watermelon vines and of blackberry-stained feet are long forgotten, Oklahomans carry on as they always have. Theyre hunters and gatherers by nature, canning and pickling, with freezers full of dove and deer, not just prepared but fortified for winter. They are, by default, a people who can withstand most anything.

Amidst the buzz-cut fields and dead-grass whistle, the white-tailed deer stand on their hind legs and pluck for persimmons sweet orange flesh from the trees, which helps hunters track their paths. The folklorists tell me that cutting into the fruit at autumns first frost is a way to predict the winter ahead. In 1999, the kernels were shaped as knives, foretelling of blade-twist winds (the spoon-shaped seeds mean heavy snow, while the fork-shaped formations forecast only dustings).