Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

  “We can’t finish the Idaho project,” John blurted.

  “Why?” Randall asked.

  “Things just aren’t working out.” John appeared to be devastated.

  The two men walked into the kitchen and Randall sat down at the table. John began to pace back and forth, stopping only to open a bottle of port wine. His words came in a steady stream, and they were all grievances about Turi.

  “But he wasn’t angry,” Randall said. “He was just sad—and quiet.”

  They heard Turi unlocking the bedroom door, and John said with an eerie false brightness, “Look, it’s Turi!”

  He still wasn’t angry. The table where Nozawa sat was close to the sliding glass doors, and Turi moved to stand beside him.

  “You need to tell Randall the truth,” Turi said.

  “John got a look on his face like he was a kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” the former dentist said. “Like it wasn’t really a bad thing she was referring to, but, still, he seemed mortified. He kind of stuttered when he said, ‘That’s the kind of thing that guys talk about in private. Guys don’t talk about that in front of people.’”

  Randall Nozawa wondered what Turi Bentley had learned about John during their trip south, and he was almost embarrassed for him.

  None of them moved for what seemed like a long time, then John walked out of the room.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was 7:30 a.m. on Friday, March 30, 2007, when Detective Fred Douglas of the Gig Harbor Police Department was dispatched to the cul-de-sac in front of the little gray-and-white house on Lost Beach Road with a Man Down call. This was an unlikely neighborhood for such a call, and an unusual time—in the early morning hours. Still, there were many retired people living in Seascape Hills, and the person who had collapsed might be a resident who’d had a heart attack or a stroke. Douglas was at the address in four minutes.

  There was no way for Detective Douglas to have prepared himself for what he found when he turned right into the little circular street, where the crocuses, daffodils, and cherry blossoms were just beginning to bloom. He had never worked a homicide in his ten years on the department, and he certainly wasn’t expecting to find one.

  A resident on the street—Ted Sanford, a retired headmaster of a private school—had heard someone calling for help when he’d come out to pick up his morning paper. It was then that he’d seen a terribly injured man, wrapped in a white blanket or a sleeping bag, now stained a mahogany red with dried blood. The injured man was on his feet, but just barely, near the carefully landscaped mound of earth in front of their houses. He was bleeding heavily from his mouth, and there was something wrong with his eyes.

  “He kept saying, ‘Help me…help me!’” Sanford said later. “I ran in my house and called 911, and then I came back out and stayed with him until the police arrived. It was very peculiar—nightmarish.”

  And, indeed, it was. The man’s right eye was gone, and the wound still bled. His other eye appeared to be scarred, and he had injuries in his mouth, too. EMTs were summoned immediately, and he was able to say a few garbled words before he was rushed to the ER at Tacoma General Hospital, where he was admitted in critical condition and taken immediately up to surgery.

  About all Douglas and Police Chief Mike Davis understood was that there had been some kind of domestic disturbance. It was amazing that the injured man could say that much; his eye was missing, his jaw was broken, several of his teeth were knocked out, and his tongue had nearly been shot off. It would take eight hours of surgery to even begin putting his face back together. Whether he would survive or not was up in the air.

  The detectives were able to discern that there were supposed to be two people inside the house itself, but the victim didn’t seem to know if they were dead or alive. Since Gig Harbor has a small police department, they called for an assist from the Pierce County sheriff’s office, its detectives, and its SWAT team.

  Quietly, officers from both departments cleared the street to avoid anyone else being injured if there should be more gunfire. They surrounded the house the injured man had come from. And then they called the phone in the house.

  There was no response.

  For hours, they attempted to raise anyone left in the small gray-and-white home, but the phone rang and rang, shrill but empty. It was the only sound inside.

  There was a vehicle in the garage, suggesting no one had driven away. That, however, didn’t mean that they hadn’t. There might have been another car parked in the steep, short driveway. Neighbors had heard nothing alarming during the previous night, no screams, arguments, or gunshots. They said they hadn’t really known the couple who lived there, but they had known the elderly woman who used to live there. Her name was Liv Lee, and they thought that the female half of the couple was Liv’s daughter.

  Public records indicated that the house was owned by Turid Lee Bentley. That was probably Liv Lee’s daughter.

  With so many hours of nonresponse, there was only one thing left to do—enter the house. It was 10:00 a.m. when the SWAT team went in. They were not met with any resistance. The house was as quiet as death, and they found only death inside.

  “I can remember that scene,” Fred Douglas said, “and I probably will for the rest of my life. It was shocking.”

  There were two people in the house, but they were both dead—the woman shot in the neck and head, and the man in the head. It looked like a murder-suicide.

  The blond woman had to be Turi Bentley-Williams. Was the dead man Randall Nozawa or John Williams?

  The mystery had just begun to uncoil.

  Neighbors had seen enough of the couple who’d lived there to estimate they were both in their sixties, and police were quite sure that the deceased were in that age group. They had to be Turi Bentley and John Williams. The man in surgery had dark hair and looked to be about fifty. That would be Randall Nozawa. Becky Minton, a friend from the Gateway Fitness Center, who had waited outside during the long standoff, agreed tearfully. She told police that Turi and John were married, and were quite a bit older than Randall.

  None of their names would be officially released to the media until families could be notified.

  Becky Minton said Randall had spoken with one of the fitness club members just the night before, and he had told her that John Williams had seemed “disturbed” or “upset” about something, and that he thought he could help.

  Becky couldn’t believe that Turi and John were dead. “They were just back from a trip to California—on the coast—and having a great time. And [they] always had a smile in their voices whenever you talk[ed] with them. I just can’t imagine…”

  As the crime scene investigation began, Detective Todd Karr of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office’s Major Crimes Unit joined the other law officers. They spread out over the property and house, looking for something—anything—that might help them get official identification of the shooter and the victims. As far as the motive for the triple shootings, they would probably have to wait until Randall Nozawa came out of surgery—if he ever did.

  Fred Douglas found a bullet hole in the master bedroom. Ballistics would show that it didn’t match the slugs and casings from the gun used to shoot Randall, Turi, and John, but it did match another of John Williams’s guns found in the house. It must have been fired sometime earlier than the night before.

  Douglas also found damage to the bedroom wall, where it looked as if a knee or an elbow had crashed almost through the drywall. A check of records showed no police calls to the house on Lost Beach Road, so if there had been domestic violence going on there, it had been kept private.

  The wallet closest to the dead man’s body had ID for John Williams, and the investigators believed that they knew who they were dealing with. At least they knew his name.

  Or one of his names.

  When they searched the attic in the house, they found a battered backpack hidden there. It contained many IDs—under several different names and bi
rth dates. They were from Oregon, Florida, California, Washington, and other states. Several were from the British Virgin Islands. They might all have been fake, or there could have been one that was real: John W. Williams, John W. Hennings, John W. Jewell, John W. Branden, John W. Bentley, and John W. Howell. The Social Security cards in the backpack had two different series of numbers on them; two numbers had been transposed in about half of them.

  Who was he. Really? The detectives from Pierce County sent Internet messages to law enforcement departments whose jurisdiction matched the addresses on the IDs. When they heard back from Detective Dave Gardiner in Curry County, Oregon, they knew that the most likely shooter wasn’t John Williams at all; he was almost certainly the man listed on an Oregon driver’s license in the backpack—John William Branden, DOB February 24, 1945, who had been a fugitive from Curry County since 1999. He had felony warrants out on him dating back to mid-1999, first locally and regionally, and eventually a federal warrant. They were all still in force.

  His crimes in Gold Beach, Oregon, had been inflicted on a woman—his common-law wife, apparently.

  And they had been crimes of violence: rape in the first degree, kidnapping in the first degree, attempted murder, attempted sodomy, menacing, and harrassment. His bail had been set at one million dollars.

  He had been a fugitive ever since.

  Ed Troyer, the sheriff’s spokesman for Pierce County, kept a closemouthed stance with the media about that new information, saying only that the deceased suspect had a history of violence with a sheriff’s office. It was not John and Turi with that history, and it wasn’t Pierce County he was talking about; it was Curry County, and it was Kate Jewell whom John Branden had savagely attacked.

  Gardiner told Pierce County detectives that he tried to keep in touch with Kate at least twice a year, and that he had a current address for her. But first, he wanted to call her and break the news of the tragedy in Gig Harbor to her.

  “I believe I owe her that,” he said.

  What had happened to ignite John into causing the bloodbath the police had found was a mystery to the Washington State investigators. Randall Nozawa couldn’t tell them much; he was fighting for his life as his surgery stretched to eight hours.

  And he was blind. He had lost the first eye in the automobile accident three years earlier, and now his remaining eye was gone, shot out at close range.

  One had to wonder if John Branden—whom the newspapers were calling “The Mysterious Mr. Williams”—had deliberately aimed for his “best friend’s” good eye, intending to blind him.

  Those who knew and loved Turi Bentley were overwhelmed with grief. She was the last woman in the world anyone would ever expect to die violently. The shock waves rolled over Gig Harbor and then spread out. Grown women recalled how nice Turi had been to them when they were little girls. Church friends spoke about Turi’s devout faith in God. A young woman who lived in Priest River recalled meeting Turi only once, but she said she had looked forward to living close to her in Idaho.

  Turi’s genetic heritage would have suggested that she would live into her nineties. Losing her at such a relatively young age was a bitter blow to hundreds of people and brought extreme pain to her children and grandchildren.

  Chapter Fourteen

  While most Gig Harbor and Pierce County police investigators were still asleep in the early morning hours of Saturday, March 31, 2007, and while Randall Nozawa was slowly regaining consciousness in one of the bedrooms of John and Turi’s house, Kate Jewell was wide awake at 5:30 a.m. She realized that this day marked the one-year anniversary of her father’s death at the age of eighty-three.

  “I’m lying in bed,” she remembered, “and thinking how much I miss him.”

  As she sometimes did, she talked silently to her father; it was half prayer, half communication with Harold Jewell: Dad, I know you’re in a better place. I often feel you looking out for me. I pray that from where you are you can help me put an end to this. I want to come out of hiding. I need to take my life back.

  It had been almost eight years in a peculiar kind of exile for Kate; she was caught in a space in time, on an island where she was still, essentially, living a lie—not to deceive anyone deliberately, but to survive.

  Always a journal keeper, Kate would write down her thoughts later that morning:

  I think back to last April, a few weeks after my dad’s death. I’d been walking the beach in Florida, thinking about Dad and “talking” with him as I walked along the water’s edge. I recalled hearing Dad say “I love you” just as I looked down to spy a heart-shaped piece of shell. I picked it up, marveled at this gift, and still treasure it today. Maybe when it’s later, I’ll take a walk on one of our gravel beaches and find another sign that Dad’s still with me—possibly a heart-shaped rock.

  My tear-filled lids close and I drift into restless sleep. Suddenly, I’m in my home in Oregon. I see John. He’s chasing me with a knife. He’s going to kill me! I must escape! I run the trackless steps of dreams, going nowhere, terror mounting. I try to wake myself up and find I’m paralyzed. Pain radiates in my chest. Panicked, I try to assess the situation as the pain on my right side subsides and deepens on my left.

  My God, am I having a heart attack? No. I’m too healthy—heck, I swim a mile a day. I have to wake up and get out of this.

  Suddenly, my heart seems to stop as I sense John just outside my bedroom door. My worst fear is realized; he’s found me! But I still can’t move….

  I then sense his anger, its intensity permeating my entire body with red-hot rage. Before I can formulate a thought of what to do, his anger passes, the pain eases, and I can move. I feel intense relief as I’m able to bring myself back to full consciousness.

  And then Kate finishes her entry in her journal. “John is dead. My mind tells me that, and somehow, I know that he is!”

  The dream was so powerful that Kate caught herself obsessing over it all weekend, vacillating between knowing it was true, dismissing it as crazy, believing in her intuition, and questioning her own sanity. She walked on the beach, but she didn’t read newspapers or watch television news broadcasts. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have realized the couple who’d died in Gig Harbor had anything to do with her. Over the weekend, their identities were listed only as “a married couple in their sixties.”

  On Monday, April 2, Kate’s phone rang. She recognized the man’s voice, although she hadn’t talked to him for months. It was Detective Dave Gardiner of the Curry County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon.

  “Are you sitting down?” Gardiner asked.

  “John’s dead, isn’t he?” Kate already knew.

  Dave Gardiner was stunned, and he asked her who had told her.

  “Nobody told me, Dave,” Kate said. “I don’t know how I know, but I do.”

  A torrent of emotions washed over Kate Jewell. She was free at last, but she felt horrible guilt because she hadn’t been able to save a woman named Turi Bentley, a name Gardiner had just told her. Now, when it was too late, she knew the name of the woman who had come after her in John’s life. If she had died on that May night in 1999, John probably would have been caught and locked up, and Turi Bentley would be alive. Or maybe both of them would have been killed.

  John was gone, but she thought about how sad it was that he couldn’t have been the man she’d once admired. They had had the knowledge and opportunity to change so many lives for the good, and he had thrown it all away. He’d often told her that she had “ruined” many things for him, but it was he who had ruined them. His overweening focus on himself had destroyed hopes and dreams that other people had.

  Kate had felt somewhat safer as eight years had passed, and it was shocking to hear that John had been so close, living in Gig Harbor. My God! She had considered moving there when she’d fled from Oregon. All this time, she had pictured John in California or Florida, or even in some other country.

  And Kate was angry—perhaps irrationally angry—with John for dying befo
re she knew what secrets he’d kept from her about his life in Florida. She had always thought that some day she would really know the man behind all the mystery, and that that would help her deal with the decade she’d spend living with him, and the eight years she’d lost hiding from him.

  Now, she wasn’t likely ever to know.

  Local papers in Washington State and the wire services carried the story of “The Mysterious Mr. Williams.” Reporters found Kate, and she agreed to give a few interviews, but her face on the television screen looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She was in shock, knowing her own story with John far too well but unsure about where he had been or what he had done since she’d last seen him. No, she didn’t know Turi Lee Bentley. No, she couldn’t say what his state of mind was in March 2007.

  But she wanted to know, Kate admitted to herself.

  When she talked with Pierce County Homicide Detective Todd Karr, Kate asked to see pictures of John—dead. She dreaded seeing them, but she still had an unreasoning fear that the body they had found on Lost Beach Road wasn’t really John. Not John—who had always been so clever about escaping when his life got too uncomfortable for him. He had studied at the side of one of the greatest con men of all: Bill Thaw. John had once told Kate that nobody ever saw Bill Thaw’s body after he committed suicide in Florida in 1987. There were no records of his burial or cremation. His body had disappeared. John had hinted that Thaw could be living in South America. Maybe John had managed to pull off the same feat, finding someone to stand in for him, to die for him. Maybe John was also on his way to South America.

  Detective Todd Karr advised Kate not to view crime scene or autopsy photos; John had suffered a single head wound, and the stark police photos would be shocking to a layperson, especially someone who had known the deceased in life. He assured her that fingerprints verified that the dead man was, indeed, John Branden-Williams.