Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

  They would begin at the new Gateway Fitness Center in Gig Harbor, where Randall already taught yoga and Pilates. Gateway was pleased to join with them; they thought highly of Randall already, and they were impressed with John and Turi. Turi was gracious and kind, and John was presenting himself at his most charismatic. To advertise the Isagenix program, the fitness club wanted to put their photos up on the wall at Gateway, but John absolutely refused. He was prepared to be the “brains” behind the venture, but he wanted to be a virtually invisible partner.

  “He was extremely likeable when he wanted to be,” Randall said, but he noted that John wanted little interfacing with potential clients. “He left that up to Turi. He had nothing good to say about the people who called for information, and considered most of them beneath him in intellect and social stature.”

  Whenever John did answer the phone, he turned people off, at best. At worst, he was rude to them.

  Turi tried to point out to John that they were essentially teachers and Isagenix was meant to help others. “You have to be more compassionate, John,” she said softly. “They’re calling for information, and even if you don’t think they’re suited to work with us, you should be kind.”

  Turi had come to a place where she had virtually no life that didn’t include John. Once, the thought of having John by her side must have been as hopeful for her as it had been for Kate Jewell two decades earlier. And, like Kate, Turi had become entrapped. She was forbidden even to go shopping by herself.

  When Turi had visits with her attorney over her divorce settlement from her marriage to Lorne Bentley, John would not go in with her, but he parked outside or sipped coffee at a restaurant across the street, always watching, and he questioned her carefully when they returned to Seascape Hills.

  “They would talk about her property settlement when I was there,” Randall said. “I was somewhat embarrassed, as it was none of my business, but it didn’t seem to bother John.”

  Saying grace before meals was extremely important to Turi Bentley; it was an essential part of her Christian life. It annoyed John, and he kept telling her to shorten her prayers. It finally came to a point where Turi was allowed only to say rapidly, “Thank you for this food,” before John cut her off and started eating. Turi rarely got to have lunch with her daughter Susan as she had in the past. There was a natural food restaurant in tiny Ruston, Washington, a midpoint between Tacoma and Gig Harbor, where Turi and Susan had once loved to eat, then browse through antiques. Now John discouraged these visits so much that Turi felt it wasn’t worth risking his anger to go.

  Her world steadily grew smaller.

  Soon, John had plans to take her hundreds of miles away from her daughters and grandchildren. Convinced that the world was going to come to an end, he wanted to move to their property in northern Idaho as soon as possible.

  Chapter Eleven

  Ironically, Kate Jewell had once considered moving to Gig Harbor. It had been on the short list of her choices as she’d prepared to leave Gold Beach, Oregon, in the fall of 1999. In the end, of course, she moved to Orcas Island. Heading due north from Gig Harbor—by sea and land—she was less than a hundred miles away from John and Turi.

  In 2006, Kate was almost ready to retire from American Airlines. She had carved a good life for herself on Orcas, made friends, bought a little house. American’s base in Seattle had closed in 2002, so she commuted to Los Angeles to fly the Tokyo routes. She stayed at her parents’ house and drove to LAX. By flying three Tokyo legs, with four of them back-to-back, she only had to fly two weeks at a stretch. Then she could go back to Orcas and have a week to catch up with her life there, before she started all over again.

  Her father was having major health problems, so she tried to help her parents during her twenty-four-hour layovers in California. Sadly, her father died on March 30, 2006, while Kate was in Guatemala on an airline ambassador’s mission.

  She still had Mittens, and she adopted a few more homeless cats. Mittens had been through so much with Kate that he demanded special treatment. When she traveled by car, Kate often let Mittens ride shotgun.

  Was she still afraid? Yes—but not to the degree of terror she’d felt seven years before. Sometimes she felt that John knew where she was, those times when the phone rang in the night and no one spoke. She still scanned faces on the ferries to Anacortes and back, and she occasionally did computer searches to see if his name had appeared in news stories. But John Branden seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  Maybe he was dead, but she thought she would know somehow if that were true. She had long since stopped trying to correspond with his daughters or his friends for fear they would have clues to where she was and possibly tell John. He could be so persuasive and convincing that Kate was positive he could talk almost anyone into giving him information about where she was.

  Kate dated some, but she had lost much of her ability to trust that men were who they purported to be. She couldn’t reveal her past, and she didn’t want to lie. She also had a subconscious fear that if she was having coffee or lunch—or whatever—with someone, and if that was the day that John found her, she and her friend would both be dead, especially if she was with a man. Kate had expected to die at John’s hand for so long that she could never really visualize a safe way out.

  Any woman in hiding could identify with her; those who’d never felt that they’d been in mortal danger from a man they’d once loved probably couldn’t understand.

  As much as she worried for her own safety, Kate was still concerned for a woman who might have followed her as John Branden’s obsessive “love” object, and she wanted desperately to warn her. Sometimes Kate thought about the conversation she could have with the nameless woman who might be in terrible trouble living with John, and she planned what she might say that would convince her to get out in time. But it could be any woman, anywhere, and Kate had no way of knowing who she was, although she was positive that, if John was alive, he would have to have a woman to depend on, to blame for all his failures, and to ensure he wasn’t alone.

  And, of course, she was right. Where before it had been Kate who’d sat at a typewriter or computer writing and typing John’s projects, now it was Turi Bentley. He had found another woman who was a caretaker, who was kind and considerate, and, sadly, who had asked herself for a long time if it was she who was making his life so difficult. Like Kate, Turi had kept trying to please John, thinking there was a magic key to making him happy and serene, only to begin to believe that there wasn’t.

  Kate would be financially independent, if not wealthy, with her pension from American Airlines. She enjoyed her garden, and the jewelry she designed and made drew lots of customers. She thought about moving off-island. She missed the Oregon coast but feared it wouldn’t be a safe place for her to live, and now she had new friends she hated to leave behind.

  Her mother would have liked to have Kate move back to the San Diego area, but Kate didn’t want to go back there. There were too many ghosts. And, indeed, she couldn’t really move anywhere until she knew where John Branden was.

  She kept waiting for something to happen.

  By 2006, John had grown more erratic. Turi called Randall Nozawa often to come over and visit, just to lessen the tension a little. The three of them were still trying to get the Isagenix program off the ground, and they did fairly well when they discussed that—and the property in Idaho. John did leave Turi alone occasionally when they were visiting the Priest River property—which he now considered his—in Idaho, but that was because she had no place to go, didn’t have access to a car, and was stuck in the middle of forty acres, thirty miles from the nearest town.

  There was no telephone service until John and Andrew, a young contractor he’d hired, rigged an antenna; even then it still wasn’t dependable. Turi could only use her wireless phone if the weather was cooperating and she found a spot on the property where the signal was strong enough.

  John had started digging water
and sewer lines, attempting to make the Idaho property self-sufficient. He was over sixty now, and even a man forty years younger in perfect physical condition wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the task John had set for himself. He had never been talented at building, and he found that skilled workers wanted more money than he was prepared to pay. He kept querying Andrew about how many services he could put in the PVC pipes he planned to lay. Could he put electrical conduits inside? It was painfully clear he was in way over his head in terms of knowledge and experience. Andrew pointed out to him that even with a crew of men, it would take fifty years to install what John wanted, in order to change the wild land and harness power for easy living.

  John was tackling it almost by himself, although he recruited Randall Nozawa as “slave labor” to work alongside him. Often the former dentist went along with Turi and John to the isolated Idaho property. Good-naturedly, Nozawa grabbed a shovel and dug ditches alongside John.

  “He mentioned that I could have a little house up there,” Randall told friends. “Not for my family—just for me, because he said men needed a private place of their own.”

  Nozawa wasn’t interested, and he wondered how they were going to manage their Isagenix business from this wilderness in Idaho, where even their phones didn’t work most of the time.

  Turi again confided in Nozawa: “I’d be perfectly happy to stay in Gig Harbor, but John wants to live here, and I want him to be happy.”

  And there were times when John Williams seemed to be happy—or at least content—in Idaho. He would walk around the property with Randall Nozawa, pointing out the beauty of nature and the animals who lived on their forty acres. Despite setbacks and unrealistic expectations, John was convinced that this raw land would soon be the ideal place to live.

  Priest River was about fifty-five miles northeast of Spokane, Washington, and forty miles north of Hayden Lake, Idaho, where Richard Butler had set up his Aryan Nations compound, a Nazi-like stronghold that drew racists. The area was also home to survivalists, aging hippies, those who wanted only to live a simple life in a paradisiacal setting, and just plain people. Former names from the headlines lived there, too: Bo Gritz lived in northern Idaho, and Los Angeles Police Department ex-detective Mark Fuhrman, who testified in the O. J. Simpson trial, did, too, commuting to Spokane for his radio show. In many ways, it was almost like the last frontier; those heading farther west into Washington State and Oregon found a lot more “civilization.”

  Most Idahoans hasten to disavow the less savory racist groups in their state. An actress on ER said, “I’m from Idaho—the potato part, not the white supremacist part.”

  Idaho is a beautiful state, and, all things being equal, Turi might have grown accustomed to living there—as long as she could have seen her family regularly. John might have told her that they would keep the Idaho property but not live in it full-time unless he saw that the world as they knew it was coming to an end.

  At any rate, Turi agreed to buy a prefab Lindal cedar home to be put up on the Priest River land. Lindal homes are expensive and attractive. As they waited for it to be delivered in late 2006, John, Andrew, and Randall did manage to get the concrete foundation for the cedar home poured. But bad weather and snow were just around the corner. When all the sections of the prefab arrived, Randall saw to it that they were protected from winter storms, covering them with tarps and other materials to keep them safe.

  In the spring of 2007, they could start putting the house together.

  John couldn’t understand Turi’s desire to be around people, to have friends. He had no friends—except for Randall Nozawa, whom he sometimes described as his best friend. And it was easy to see why he didn’t have any other friends. “He was not easy to like,” Randall said. “His language was terse. The things he said when Turi was in the room were terrible, and he showed her no respect. He was always shutting her up or trying to make her feel bad.”

  In early 2007, John planned a campaign for Isagenix, using Randall as their spokesman at the Gateway Fitness Center. He wanted to feature posters with Randall’s face superimposed on Uncle Sam’s body. He thought it was a brilliant idea, even though it had no relevance whatsoever to Isagenix, and Uncle Sam had been around for more than half a century. In fact, it was an incomprehensible and silly idea. Turi loyally commented that she thought it had possibilities and maybe they should suggest it to the corporate board of Isagenix. Taking his cue from Turi, Randall pretended to be impressed, too. In fact, if this was John’s idea of a brave new world of advertising, it only showed that his mind was failing him.

  For some reason, John thought that Turi and Randall were trying to take credit for the Uncle Sam campaign.

  “That’s my idea,” he exploded, and he began to yell at Randall, calling him out to the garage, where he berated him for trying to steal his ideas. In truth, no one had so much as hinted that Uncle Sam wasn’t John’s idea—and all John’s. Who would want to claim such a tired image? But John was furious. He stalked to the farthest corner of the living room and sat there in the dark.

  “He was pissed off,” the former dentist said. “He was sitting there, pouting.”

  John was growing more and more volatile, and Turi called Randall often now, begging him to come over because he was the only one she knew who could calm John down. The little house on Lost Beach Road wasn’t where Randall wanted to be, but he felt sorry for Turi, and he usually went—sometimes for meals, sometimes just to talk with John. He still held some hope for Isagenix, but John’s moods could wear anyone out.

  “I had to walk on eggshells,” Randall recalled, “and be so careful what I said because you couldn’t tell what might set him off. We had awkward, almost silent, conversations.”

  John was more on edge, and Randall was sometimes afraid to say anything at all for fear of upsetting him, so they simply sat in silence, with both Turi and Randall waiting for a cue from John before they spoke.

  Turi tried once to tell Randall about the man he believed to be her husband. “There are certain things about John…,” she began, whispering. “Things you don’t know—but I can’t tell you—”

  But Randall could sense she wanted to tell him. It never got further than that because John came back into the room and Turi stopped talking.

  There were more port wine bottles hidden around the house, as there had been around the Idaho property before the snow closed in. But John never appeared to be drunk; he was too tightly wound to seem drunk. He was, however, hyperalert.

  There was something desperately wrong with John Branden/Williams’s mind. He had apparently had OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) going back to his days as a superartistic lawn mower, but his bipolarity now zoomed up and down to extremes. Sometimes he felt he could do anything and was excited about all the possibilities that would finally allow him to make big money, but then he would crash into the deepest hollow of depression. Neither Turi nor Randall could predict when he would change gears. None of the mood spikes made him happy. He grew steadily more suspicious and more resentful, and he’d added frank paranoia to the mix in his turbulent mind.

  He was convinced that the world was going to implode very soon. The necessity of procuring a safe hiding place for him and his daughters became an urgent mission. Bizarrely, at the same time, he was still frantically trying to build his fortune with Isagenix.

  Chapter Twelve

  In March 2007, John and Turi left for California, on one of their regular trips. They might have gone to see his daughters, or perhaps they had some business meetings. Maybe they only needed to get away from the steady rain and gray days of the Northwest in winter. It was too cold to start building their cedar home in Priest River, and it probably would be for at least two more months.

  They passed through Oregon twice on this trip—going south and coming back. John preferred 101, the coastal route, and that meant they would have driven through Gold Beach. He called Randall several times from the road—as always from pay phones. The trip seem
ed to be going well, and Nozawa didn’t sense any trouble.

  They were due home on Thursday, March 29. John made his last call of the trip that day from a phone booth on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was less than ten miles from Seascape Hills.

  John said they’d had a very, very nice time in California, and everything was great. He said they were “searching for ways to be even closer,” and he thought they’d made progress.

  “Great!” Randall said.

  But things weren’t great now, apparently, as John continued, “We were doing so well, and then Turi said something as we crossed the bridge—and I’m very angry.”

  Whatever it was that Turi had allegedly said, circumstances would make it difficult for Randall Nozawa to remember. “But I remember thinking that it wasn’t anything very much,” he said. Still, John was going on and on about it.”

  “She ruined it,” John went on. “Everything was fine, and she ruined it.”

  He asked Randall to come over to their house, and Randall said he would try to do that later.

  It was almost midnight when Randall Nozawa got a call from Turi. She told him that she and John were still arguing and she had locked herself in the bedroom. She’d managed to find her cell phone to call him, and she asked Randall to come over as quickly as he could.

  “Oh!” she said suddenly, before she could explain. “He’s coming. I have to hang up—”

  Randall started walking toward Seascape Hills. Because of the damage to his eyes, he had trouble seeing when headlights were aimed directly at him, and he compensated by looking away and judging how far away the cars were. On the way, Turi called him on his cell phone and said the argument was still going and they really needed him to hurry.

  Nozawa picked up his pace. John met him at the front doorstep and told him Turi was inside. He didn’t strike Randall as being in a violent mood. “He seemed more sad than angry,” Randall said later.