In the early morning of December 30, 1999, a woman's body was found in the burning rubble of a mobile home near Welch, Oklahoma. She was identified as Cathy Freeman, and the body of her husband, Danny, was soon discovered in the debris as well. There was no sign, however, of the Freemans' 16-year-old daughter Ashley or Ashley's best friend, Lauria Bible, who'd spent the night with the Freemans.
Arson was suspected, and authorities announced a couple of days later that the victims had been shot prior to the fire. Whoever had killed the Freemans had apparently also abducted the girls.
A region-wide search for the girls was launched, and numerous tips were investigated, but no sign of them was found. One of the few good leads, an automobile insurance card found near the murder scene, was ignored.
The case was highlighted on America’s Most Wanted, but none of the tips generated by the show panned out. But the Bible and Freeman families, especially Lauria's mother, Lorene, did all they could to prevent the case from going cold. Despite their efforts, the investigation gradually came almost to a standstill.
After 18 years of chasing tips that led nowhere, authorities finally got a break in the case in 2017 when the Craig County sheriff found some long-overlooked materials left by a previous sheriff's administration. The following year, authorities announced during a news conference that 66-year-old Ronald Dean Busick had been arrested and charged in the murders of Danny and Cathy Freeman and the abduction and subsequent murders of Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible. Two other suspects in the case, Warren Philip Welch II and David A. Pennington, had died in 2007 and 2015 respectively.
According to authorities, the three men had gone to the Freeman home around midnight December 30, 1999, to collect a drug-related debt when the girls walked in unexpectedly. Welch was thought to be the leader of the gang and the trigger man who killed Danny and Cathy Freeman, while the other two men set fire to their trailer.
The three men abducted the girls and took them to Welch’s trailer home in Picher, where they tortured and raped them over a period of days before strangling them to death and dumping their bodies in a local mine pit. It was revealed at the time of the news conference that the case could have been solved very early on if authorities had followed up on the auto insurance card found by private investigators just a day or two after the murder of the Freemans, because it would have led them to Welch.
Although Busick got off with a light sentence in a plea deal in which he promised to help find the bodies of the missing girls, they have never been found, and the quest to bring the girls home continues to this day. New searches are undertaken as new leads come to light. Anyone with information that might be relevant to the girls’ whereabouts can contact authorities or contact the Bible family through a Facebook page entitled Find Lauria Bible-BBI.
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