It was a marathon four-week trial and received more press coverage than most criminal trials. Superior Court Judge George Revelle’s courtroom became a kind of microcosm of the lives of Tony Fernandez and Ruth Logg Fernandez. Ghosts of Fernandez’s past reappeared. John Casteel, the man who had bounced in a Jeep sixty feet down a cliff after Fernandez bailed out, was there. So was William Belcher, who wound up with a head wound in the snowy wilds of Canada. Neither man came right out and accused Tony of violence—they merely related what had happened to them.
Tony’s ex-wife testified—for the defense—saying he was faithful “in his own way” and that he had never thrown his other women in her face during their marriage. She smiled at him as she testified.
After the background of the couple’s meeting, romance, and marriage was presented, both sides called experts in forensic pathology to the stand.
Dr. F. Warren Lovell, Chief Pathologist of Northwest Hospital, testified for Fernandez’s defense. Lovell, who specialized in the study of fatal accidents and designed the autopsy program for the NASA flight project, said that it was likely that, when the Winnebago went over the cliff, Ruth Fernandez’s body became an essentially weightless object, thrown against the motor, which would have yielded on impact. This, Lovell testified would explain why Ruth’s injuries were not more extensive. He also said it was not unusual that her clothing was untorn.
On cross-examination, however, Dr. Lovell conceded that the fatal skull fracture could have been caused by a man taking her by the hair and striking her head on a rock. “But it would be very hard to do,” he added.
Dr. Lovell did not agree with the plaintiffs that the injury to the abdomen was consistent with a blow from a fist. He said that it could have been caused by Ruth’s belly hitting the steering wheel.
Detective Roger Dunn, however, testified that he had examined the steering wheel of the Winnebago and found no damage consistent with a great force pushing against it.
Dr. Gale Wilson, who had been the King County Medical Examiner for forty years before his retirement and who had done over seventeen thousand autopsies, testified that, in his educated opinion, Ruth was not in the motor home when it left the road. He was convinced, rather, that she had died from a blunt instrument applied with great force to her head. Dr. Donald Reay, the current medical examiner, testified that Ruth had died of a skull fracture and that it was possible—but not very likely—that she was in the motor home when it left the road.
The options open to the deciding judge were essentially this:
Ruth Fernandez, distraught and a little intoxicated, drove accidentally off the cliff without even applying the brakes of the motor home. Her body fell out halfway down.
Ruth Fernandez drove deliberately off the cliff and her body was thrown out halfway down.
Someone bludgeoned and beat Ruth Fernandez, pushed the motor home off the cliff and flung Ruth down after it. Or someone carried her body halfway down to make it look as if she had been in an accident.
Someone pushed the Winnebago over and persuaded Ruth to go down to it to help retrieve valuables. That someone then killed her where she was found.
Tony Fernandez himself did not testify in the trial.
Arthur Piehler, the attorney for the Logg sisters, summed up the plaintiff’s case dramatically: “Tony Fernandez did fall in love when he met Ruth in 1971. He fell in love with her house, her five acres, her swimming pool, her stocks, her bonds, and other assets.”
Piehler recalled that medical experts had testified that Ruth would have had broken bones, multiple cuts, lacerations, foreign objects in wounds, and torn clothing had she been in the Winnebago when it crashed. He theorized that Fernandez had somehow crashed the motor home and then persuaded Ruth to walk down the mountainside with him to recover items in it. It would have been easy for him to hit her on the head and in the stomach, and leave her there to die alone.
Piehler contended that Fernandez had forged Ruth’s signature on the one-hundred-thousand-dollar accidental death policy two months and six days before she died. He said Tony had probably become concerned that his wife was considering a divorce. “He could see all his lovely property drifting away from him.” Piehler told the court about the other woman Tony was seeing, the woman who had received the diamonds and furs.
John C. Hoover, Fernandez’s attorney, argued that the couple had been happy and that they had taken a week’s camping trip together. The Winnebago had crashed, he said, only because Ruth had had too much to drink. Hoover insisted that Ruth had been completely content with all the property agreements between herself and her husband. If she had not been satisfied with their arrangement, she had had plenty of time to change it.
In March 1976, Tony Fernandez’s fortune evaporated when Judge Revelle read his oral decision to a packed courtroom, a decision in which he found the defendant without credibility. “I do not believe anything he says,” Revelle began succinctly.
Revelle read his thirty-one-page decision and concluded, “I have examined many possibilities and numerous high probabilities of the cause and method of her death. Each such probability requires the participation of the only person I know who was with her; that’s Anthony Fernandez. One of those methods or probabilities is a method suggested by Mr. Piehler, but I can’t say that’s it. I just know that under the burden of proof here—even stronger than necessary to be found—Anthony Fernandez, I conclude, participated as a principal in the willful and unlawful killing of Ruth Fernandez.”
In his conclusions of law, Judge Revelle said, “Anthony Fernandez, as the slayer of Ruth Fernandez, shall not acquire, in any way, property or receive any benefit as the result of the death of Ruth Fernandez. Anthony Fernandez is deemed to have predeceased the decedent (under the Slayer’s Act) Ruth Fernandez. All property which would have passed to or for the benefit of the defendant, Anthony Fernandez, by the terms of the Will of Ruth Fernandez, or any agreement of the defendant and Ruth Fernandez, under the provisions of RCW 21.16.120 shall be distributed as if the defendant had predeceased Ruth Fernandez.”
With that, Tony lost the financial ball game. But he did not lose his freedom. He had only lost a civil case.
It took another court order to get Fernandez to vacate the home in Auburn. He had lived there since July of 1974 when Ruth died. Tony was ordered not to attempt to remove furniture, appliances, or anything of value that would be part of the estate. Judge Revelle also restrained Fernandez from using credit cards drawn on the estate. Counsel for Sue and Kathy said, “Fernandez has been dissipating everything he can get his hands upon and has spent about $155,000 that was part of the estate.” Even as the trial had progressed, Tony was said to have been involved in a $200,000 land purchase.
Finally, Tony moved from the home that now belonged to Ruth’s daughters. But, in the end, there was little of the estate left for the two orphaned young women. After lawyers’ fees and Tony’s free spending, they obtained less than 10 percent of the money their parents had put aside for their futures.
On June 3, 1976, Fernandez was charged in Lane County, Oregon, with forgery and theft by sale of timber valued at nearly $75,000 and was arrested on a federal parole violation warrant. He was not inside long. Yet another woman besotted with Tony Fernandez put up his bail.
On August 12, 1977, Fernandez was charged with seven felony counts in Thurston County, Washington—second-degree theft, two counts of unlawful issuance of bank checks, and four counts of first-degree theft alleging unlawful sale of timber rights that he claimed were his to a third party. These violations were said to have occurred in Thurston County in the winter of 1976–77. Convicted on all these counts, consecutive sentences could net him fifty-five years in prison.
On September 1, 1977, the charge for which Ruth’s daughters and loved ones had waited so long was made. The King County Prosecutor’s Office charged Anthony Fernandez with first-degree murder in the death of Ruth Fernandez. His trial, scheduled for January 9, 1978—almost four years after Ruth di
ed on the lonely mountainside—was one where the evidence was mostly circumstantial, one of the most difficult cases for a prosecutor to press. It was lengthy, and full of surprises. Tony Fernandez’s mistress, wearing her fur coat, was present at his trial every day.
Tony Fernandez was convicted of Ruth Logg Fernandez’s murder in February 1978, and sentenced to life in prison. And that was exactly what he served.
On Christmas Day 1995, Anthony Fernandez, seventy-three, enjoyed a hearty holiday meal in prison. And then he dropped dead of a massive heart attack.
Who was the real Tony Fernandez? Was he a timber baron, a doctor of psychology, an acupuncturist, a historian of Navajo culture, a master of city government? A lover—a studied con man—or a methodical killer?
It doesn’t matter anymore to Ruth Logg Fernandez. The man who promised to love her forever betrayed her. She lost her hopes for the perfect romance in the darkness on the steep mountainside along Granite Creek Road. She will never see her grandchildren and never know her daughters as mature women.
Perhaps she knows, however, that those daughters saw their quest through to the end and gave her the only gift they could: justice.
Murder and the
Proper Housewife
(from In the Name of Love)
There are myriad motives for murder, and there are almost as many co-conspirators—would-be killers who have virtually nothing in common but who form fatal alliances. Once their goal is accomplished, those who have seen homicide as the answer to their problems usually go their separate ways. I don’t believe I have ever researched an odder partnership than the man and woman who joined up to carry out a hit. Neither was connected with organized crime; neither had much to gain from the murder they joined forces to plan. To this day, I am not sure why they did what they did.
One of them was merely doing a favor for a friend whom she dearly loved; the other fancied himself to be a force larger than life. Somewhere along the line, they both lost touch with reality.
We have all had friends whom we loved so much that we would have risked our money, our serenity, and even our freedom for them. Nancy Brooks* seemed like the last person in the world who would plot to kill another human being. But Nancy felt so sorry for her dearest friend that she did just that. She was quite willing to arrange a murder because she loved her friend.
She came within a millimeter or two of carrying it off.
“Murder and the Proper Housewife” remains in my “Top Twenty” list of memorable cases because it has every element of a good story—so many that it reads like fiction. It is horrifying, suspenseful, crazy, and even humorous on occasion. The would-be killers were bumbling and flawed, people right out of “America’s dumbest criminals,” but in their very clumsiness, they had the capacity to do great harm.
I have always maintained that what real people do to their fellow humans is often so much stranger than anything a fiction writer could think up. That has never been demonstrated more forcibly than in this case. If I had made it up, I could never have sold it because it would seem too far-fetched. But it is all true—as fictional as it may sound. I sat in a courtroom for weeks and watched it play out with my own eyes.
Nancy Brooks was a California housewife in the early 1960s. She married in an era when young wives strove to emulate the perfect television sitcom mother. Their floors were waxed, their children behaved, and they cooked healthy, nutritious meals. Their homes had orange shag carpeting, avocado-colored kitchen appliances, and daisy-print wallpaper.
Nancy and her husband, an engineer, lived in a large apartment with their son and daughter—the perfect 1960s family. One of their neighbors in the apartment house was a divorced woman, Claire Noonan,* whose son, Bennett, was in his late teens. Nancy and Claire became very good friends, and Bennett was also welcome in the Brooks home. He was a rather odd kid, lanky and gawky with stringy dark hair, who was considered a nerd by some of his contemporaries and just plain weird by others. Nancy was sympathetic when Claire confided that her former husband had been abusive to his stepson. Bennett had suffered so much physical abuse that he had problems with his self-worth and his own identity.
Nancy, a registered nurse, recognized that Bennett needed someone to listen to him, and she was kind to him. Her children adored Bennett, who was an accomplished magician. He would entertain them patiently for hours with amazing feats of magic. He had few social contacts with people his own age, however, and Nancy suspected he was lonely. He probably had a crush on Nancy Brooks who was very pretty and only about a dozen years older than he was. Claire was grateful that the Brookses were so kind to her son.
Both families were transitory residents of California, though, and they soon moved thousands of miles apart. Claire married a physician and moved to Memphis, Tennessee; Nancy Brooks’s husband, Cal, got a job in Seattle working for Boeing.
In the mid-1960s the Brookses moved to Bellevue, Washington, a burgeoning bedroom community for Seattle at that time and the best possible place for young Boeing engineers to reside. Neighborhoods with picturesque names like Lake Hills, Robinswood, Phantom Lake, and Bridle Trails sprang up almost overnight. Houses were built close together so that the developers could get the most out of every piece of forest land they had snapped up, and barbecues and kaffeeklatsches were popular social events.
Nancy Brooks had always seen herself as a person who helped others. That was why she had chosen nursing as a career, and that was why she had done her best to help Claire LeClerk Noonan with her problem son, Bennett. It wasn’t long, however, before Nancy found a new best friend in Bellevue. She met Rose Stahl* through an interest they shared: they were both animal lovers, and they entered their dogs in local shows. Nancy and Rose raised show-quality poodles, a breed that requires much grooming and care. The women were the same age, thirty-nine, and they had so much in common that they saw each other almost every day and talked on the phone several times a day.
In California, Claire had had problems with Bennett and Nancy had been a godsend to her. Now, in Washington, Nancy was a sympathetic listener as Rose confided the details of her unhappy marriage. Nancy and Cal Brooks appeared to have a solid marriage, and that made Nancy doubly sorry for Rose.
Rose and Art Stahl hadn’t been married for very long, and they both had children from previous marriages, so they had a combined family of his-and-hers children, plus they had two baby sons together. But theirs was not a happy union. They had marathon fights over how to deal with their children. Rose resented Art’s older children visiting and would not let him discipline her children. Their biggest arguments, however, were over how to spend, or not spend—a $780,000 trust fund that belonged to Art.
At the same time, Art had the best and worst of all possible worlds. On one hand, the fortune he had inherited from his father was enough to keep a man of modest needs comfortable for a long time. On the other, he found himself locked in a marriage that was not only destroying his peace of mind but which caused him constant anxiety. Stahl wanted it to last, if only for the children’s sake, but nothing he did seemed to please his wife.
Although the interest on his trust fund was more than enough to support his family, Art Stahl chose to work. He was a teaching assistant in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Washington. He was a very intelligent man, and he loved to teach. He also enjoyed the ambience of the University of Washington campus.
At age fifty-two, Art was five feet nine and weighed a trim 150 pounds; he was a dapper man with wavy dark hair, a beard, and a mustache that was waxed at the tips. He chose to dip into his near-million-dollar trust fund only sparingly. Rather, he wanted its interest to accumulate. He and Rose had signed a prenuptial agreement stipulating that she had no access to his inheritance; the only people who could touch it were Art and an attorney in New York. Rose fretted over the luxuries they could be enjoying if Art were less stubborn about their living on his teaching salary. She found him unnecessarily stingy.
There were times, of c
ourse, when the Stahl marriage seemed to sail on an even keel. At other times—which were becoming all too frequent—Art Stahl was a beleaguered man. Rose was nothing if not relentless. The children needed money, she needed money for her dog shows, and they needed a nicer house. To preserve even a modicum of peace, Art often gave in to her demands. Whenever he could compromise to glean even a little serenity in his marriage, he tried to do so.
Art Stahl’s biggest sacrifice was to send his own teenage daughter to live in a foster home because Rose couldn’t get along with her. He regretted having to banish his daughter from his home, and he visited her as often as possible. He was torn between his loyalty and love for her and his belief that his two baby boys from his marriage to Rose needed him more.
At Art’s urging, he and Rose spent a lot of time talking to counselors about their problem marriage. He knew that Rose told even the most intimate details of their marriage to her best friend, Nancy Brooks, and got advice from Nancy. Art told his secrets to a journal that he had begun to keep. The more miserable he became, the more he spilled out his pain onto the pages of his journal, which was really a sheaf of loose papers filled with longhand notes.
Nancy Brooks seemed to be a sympathetic woman; Art didn’t mind that Rose confided in her. Sometimes he too talked to Nancy about the problems in his marriage. But he soon regretted it; he found out that anything he told Nancy soon got back to Rose. It was clear that if Nancy had to choose sides, she would stand firmly behind Rose. Art wondered sometimes what kind of exaggerated complaints Rose was telling Nancy.
Nancy Brooks was not an animated woman, and it was hard to tell what she was thinking. Five feet seven and slender, she carried herself rather stiffly. This was not her fault—Nancy had been in a number of car accidents, which had necessitated three surgeries to fuse vertebrae in her back and neck. She was quite pretty—or would have been if she’d smiled more. She had dark hair, cut short and curling around her cheeks, big brown eyes, and a sweet mouth. Despite her physical problems, Nancy was always on the move, doing something for her children or her husband or her friends.