Ada Wittenmyer: ‘Black Widow’ or mental illness sufferer?
Early on March 28, 1979, Oklahoma attorney Arthur Meyer answers his phone. Ada Wittenmyer is on the line saying she cannot wake her husband, John.
Meyer has been the couple's lawyer for two years.
He calls an ambulance and drives to the Wittenmyers' Osage County ranch southwest of Bartlesville. John Wittenmyer is dead of an apparent heart attack. He is 62.
Ada, who is 33, hands Meyer an envelope containing a will, handwritten by John the previous day. It leaves practically everything to Ada. They had met three years earlier when she answered his ad in a lonely hearts magazine. Two weeks later he became her fourth husband.
Meyer finds nothing out of the ordinary about the will. Osage County deputies give the widow a couple of days to grieve before they stop at the ranch to talk to her about her husband's death. The next day, on April 2, they return to ask more questions.
Ada Wittenmyer has vanished.
My brief connection with the case came a month later when Osage County authorities charged Ada with first-degree murder. At the time, I was a fresh-out-of-college reporter for the Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise.
An autopsy revealed that John Wittenmyer died of arsenic poisoning. That prompted authorities in Ada's home state of Tennessee to exhume the body of her third husband, William Hayes, who had died in 1974.
My story in the Bartlesville paper began like this:
By one account, Ada Wittenmyer was a "typical country gal" who turned the husband she allegedly murdered from a quiet recluse into a refined country gentlemen in the three years they were married.
By another, the 33-year-old Tennessean was "obese" and given to recent bouts of erratic behavior in which she became "incoherent and extremely difficult ... without provocation."
The "country gal" quote came from Dorothy O'Brien, who ran a feed store and antique shop in Bartlesville with her husband, O.C. They had known John Wittenmyer for three decades. O.C. said John became more communicative after marrying Ada, whom O.C. described as "chunky."
"She wouldn't win no beauty prizes, but she wouldn't win any ugly prizes either," he said.
The attorney, Arthur Meyer, told me about Ada's erratic behavior. Meyer described her like this: brown eyes, short-cropped brown hair, 5-foot, 5-inches tall and "on the very stout side."
Meyer said Ada sold some of Wittenmyer's cattle three days before she disappeared. And he revealed he received a letter from her, dated April 14, from Gallatin, Tennessee, which indicated "suicidal tendencies."
Ada's mother, Bertie Crow, also called Meyer from Tennessee to say Ada had phoned long-distance several times but did not give her location.
The trail went cold for a good year. Then Canadian Mounties in a farming community north of Edmonton, Alberta, picked up a woman for shoplifting. When they ran her ID, they discovered it was Ada and that she was wanted for murder in Oklahoma and Tennessee.
The district attorney for Osage County, Larry Stuart, flew to Alberta and interviewed the man Ada had been living with. He was a 60-year-old farmer named Andrew Klak. He had met her through a lonely hearts ad.
Klak was unaware that Ada was accused of killing two husbands, Stuart said.
"We talked with him about 35 minutes and disclosed some of the facts of the case," the district attorney said. "I don't think he ever believed us."
Canada deported Ada to the United States, and Oklahoma got first crack at making a case against her. In 1982, she pleaded no contest in John Wittenmyer's death and got 25 years.
Psychiatrists diagnosed her as paranoid schizophrenic, and she divided her time between prison in Oklahoma City and the state mental institution in Vinita.
She agreed to go to Tennessee and stand trial for the murder of husband #3, William Hayes. She claimed Hayes was a drug addict who forced her to have sex with dogs and other men and sold photos of the acts.
On August 2, 1984, just before the verdict was announced, the judge revealed that Ada was still meeting men through lonely hearts ads. She had recently received a check for $1,050 from another Canadian man. He told a reporter Ada said she would visit him once some "legal problems" were settled.
The jury convicted Ada and gave her a life sentence. She was sent to DeBerry Correctional Institute for special needs inmates in Nashville.
On August 8, women in her unit were returning from dinner when they heard inmate Leona Cockrum screaming. She had just discovered Ada hanging with a sheet wrapped around her neck.
Just 30 minutes earlier, inmate Kathy Wright had spoken to Ada. Ada asked her to gather the other women in the unit’s day room and “pray for my soul,” Wright told a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean newspaper
Ada wrote six suicide letters to her family, the prison, another inmate, and friends. "I've brought shame and disgrace on my family," she wrote in one letter. "God knows they tried to love me, but it's hard to love a mentally ill child that you don't know what's wrong with them. I know God will forgive me and my soul will find peace."
Ada donated her body to a medical school.
What became of her first and second husbands? Her first marriage, to Roger Hensley of Sparta, Tennessee, ended in divorce. Hensley told a reporter he was not surprised Ada killed herself.
Husband Number 2 was Robert Evans, and I could not determine when he married Ada or when – and why – the marriage ended. There was no suggestion that he met the same fate as Number 3 and Number 4.