According to People, just days after the 1999 murders, a private investigator named Tom Pryor found an insurance verification card in the Freemans’ driveway. The information on the card pointed Pryor in the direction of a woman who had been living with a known drug dealer named Phil Welch, and eventually to a car sitting in a salvage yard, inside of which he found girls clothing and a rental receipt for the mobile home that Welch lived in.
Pryor told investigators about the insurance card, but they never entered it into evidence. The card would stay in Pryor’s possession until nearly 20 years later, when the District Attorney office and the Oklahoma Bureau of Investigations got in touch with Pryor while investigating the case.
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Investigators believed that Welch and two associates — David Pennington and Ronnie Busick — had murdered the Freemans over a drug debt. They kidnapped the Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible, but would eventually murder them as well.
Busick was the only one of the offenders still alive at the time charges were ready to be filed. He plead guilty on charges of being an accessory to murder in Kathy and Danny Freeman’s murders but denied having anything to do with the disappearance of the two teenage girls (pictured above — Bible on the left, Freeman on the right).
Many attempts have been made over the years to locate the girls, but so far, they have all come up empty.
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