Family, community and investigator continue search for missing girls

WELCH, Okla. (AP) -- Jay and Lorene Bible refuse to disassemble their Christmas tree because it has become a symbol of hope that they will find their daughter, Lauria.

"We're leaving the tree up for Lauria to take down when she gets home," Mrs. Bible said.

It was a year Dec. 30 when Lauria went to the home of her friend, Ashley Freeman, to celebrate Lauria's 16th birthday.

The following morning, the mobile home in Welch, a community west of Miami in northeastern Oklahoma, had burned down with Ashley's parents, Danny and Kathy Freeman, inside. They had been shot, authorities said.

Steve Nutter, an Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation agent, has been chasing leads across the country and following up on reports of possible sightings since the girls' disappearance.

"It is one of the strangest cases I have ever worked," Nutter said.

Lauria's parents last saw their daughter at 6:30 p.m. that evening, when Bible gave Lauria permission to spend the night at Ashley's house. Lauria left her car at Ashley's home and Mrs.

Freeman took the girls to get a pizza in Vinita, where they met Ashley's boyfriend.

The boyfriend told authorities everyone seemed to be all right when he left the Freeman home around 9:30 p.m.

Welch firefighters responded to a report by a passing motorist of a fire around 5 a.m. They found a badly charred body lying face-down across a bed. The state Medical Examiner's Office in Tulsa identified the remains as those of Mrs. Freeman.

She was fatally shot, and investigators believe the fire was set to hide the shooting. Family members found Freeman's remains a day later. He had multiple gunshot wounds.

A week after the girls disappeared, authorities received an anonymous tip to search the abandoned mine shafts near Picher.

Divers used a pressurized camera to explore the shafts, but there was no sign of the girls.

Susan Woolman, a family friend, and her husband, Roy, received an anonymous tip this past summer that the girls were in a rock quarry near Lake Oologah.

"My husband got a diver, who went down -- he didn't find anything," Mrs. Woolman said. "We called the Rogers County Sheriff's Department, the blocked off the area and sent two and three divers down the next day, but nothing was discovered."

Hundreds of tips or possible sightings have been called in, but they have led nowhere. When the television program, "America's Most Wanted," featured a segment on the girls' disappearance last January, Nutter received 100 calls, many from psychics.

Residents have organized their own searches on horseback and four-wheel vehicles and have placed handbills at convenience stores and posters on tractor-trailer trucks. Billboards carry photographs of the girls and on the Internet, the FBI's Web site and the National Center of Missing and Exploited Children carries information about them.

"It's like they disappeared without a trace," Mrs. Woolman said.

Investigators had hoped that Craig County hunters would have found the girls during the hunting season, but no one has reported anything, Nutter said.

"With every tip or bit of information, we hope there will be a break in the case," he said. "We're up, then when it doesn't develop, we're back where we started.

"It's been frustrating for me personally."

Mrs. Bible said she and her husband have spoken to other parents of missing or murdered children and say the parents have told them they will have a feeling if their child is dead.

"I just don't have that feeling," Mrs. Bible said.

She said she has kept Lauria's room the way it was when she disappeared.

"We keep the door closed," she said. "Sometimes, when I come in from work, it will be cracked a bit, and I know that either her dad or her brother has been in there. It's just so painful."