The publisher’s blurb reads “S-Town meets I’ll Be Gone in the Dark,” referencing two outstanding true crime hits of the past couple of years (the first a podcast and the second a nonfiction book about a woman’s obsessive search for the identity of the Golden State Killer). I loved both of those, so I was happy to receive a copy of Jax Miller’s true crime account of this case titled Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth, and the Case of Two Missing Girls (from Berkley Publishing and NetGalley in return for my honest review).

I had heard about this crime on at least two of my regular true crime podcasts that I can remember: Generation Why and Crime Junkie. Both times I felt like there must have been more to the story, and I felt like Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible, the two teenage girls who went missing after the trailer home of Ashley’s family was set on fire with her parents’ dead bodies inside. It seemed like they had led sad lives in a classic poor town in rural Oklahoma in the 1990s and were probably dead.

The case of the missing girls has been a mystery that would have been long forgotten if it were not for the efforts of the two families involved, as they have worked for decades to keep pushing for information. Tragically, the police seemed uninterested when the crime first happened in 1999, finding the body of Kathy Freeman during a very cursory look at the after-fire rubble. They pretty much identified her husband Danny Freeman as a suspect in the abduction of  their daughter and her friend Lauria, and there was somewhat of a manhunt for less than a day. They released the burned-out trailer back to the family, who promptly went in, stepped onto Danny’s dead body, and announced that the police hadn’t done any investigating, and they hired their own detectives.  

Author Jax Miller became obsessed with the mystery and made many trips to Oklahoma over the years, beginning in 2015, and has written a detailed account of her investigation, including covering the rumors of police collusion, drug debts, and revenge that covered the area.

I really felt like I needed a shower as I read her stories of police negligence, and what looked like clear cases of corruption. The whole area has been ravaged by methamphetamine addiction, and there have been tons of crimes, up to and including murder, that may or may not be related to this case.  

I was a bit disappointed by this book (probably because I had expectations of something as good as either S-Town or I’ll Be Gone In The Dark) but it may just be a question of writing style. The author has made her telling of the story very personal, inserting a great amount of detail about her own struggles (addiction and anxiety in particular) into her narrative covering the girls’ stories. I would have preferred a more straightforward journalistic style, although I give her points for her honest and integrity as she shared her efforts and persisted long after many would have given up.

It’s a sad story, and the level of despair that permeates the story is just about overwhelming (and wasn’t evident in the podcasts, but definitely rings true in the book). It contributed to my already rampant geographical bigotry, adding rural Oklahoma to the list of places I hope to NEVER visit. Three stars (and yes, I am a notoriously easy grader).