Missing Welch Girls: What we know on the 22nd anniversary of their disappearance

• Dec. 29, 1999 marks the disappearance of Ashley Freeman and Lauria Bible from Welch, Oklahoma.

• In October 2021, a search for remains was revived in Picher based on information from the only-living suspect, Ronnie Busick. The property in question belonged to David Pennington, a suspect along with Phil Welch and Busick in the 1999 arson and shooting deaths of Danny and Kathy Freeman.

• In January 2020, a search crew used an underwater drone and high-tech camera too look down into abandoned mine shafts in Picher.
• Lorene Bible, the mother of Lauria, faces liver failure in 2021 before ultimately getting a transplant. An active participant in the searches for the girls, she had said she feared she would die before getting answers on her daughter’s remains.

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• Ronnie Busick, was sentenced to what essentially is the rest of his life in prison in September 2020. Busick is in poor health, and he is not expected to survive the ten years he was given.
• Craig County District Attorney Matt Ballard and Assistant DA Isaac Shields offered Busick the chance to reduce his sentence to five years as an incentive to allow him to finish his life outside of prison if he could lead investigators to the bodies.
• Busick pointed investigators to a location where houses used to be in what is now the ghost town of Picher. After searching two root cellars for the bodies, investigators came up with nothing, and Busick’s time to speak up ran out. He received the longer sentence. His attorney said he tried his best to remember where the girls’ remains are, but his brain is fried from heavy drug use in his life.

What do you want to know about the missing Welch girls’ case?

• Investigators opened up to reporters about what Busick revealed to them during interviews at the Craig County Jail after his arrest. Busick said he and two now deceased suspects went to the Freeman home in 1999 to collect a drug debt from Ashley’s father. After shooting Danny and Cathy Freeman, the men burned down the Freeman home, but Busick said the girls managed to escape the chaos by running into a nearby field. After making a run for safety, two of the men kidnapped the girls, kept them alive for two weeks and then they were killed.
• Busick claimed he simply watched it all play out from the vehicle he was riding in with the men who did the actual killing.
• At one point, he claimed, the girls were held captive in a basement at a home in Picher.

Cox Media Group