A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (45 page)

Enraged, Tony Fernandez brought a million-dollar lawsuit against Ted Forrester. 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: 1.

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. 2. Ruth Fernandez drove deliberately off the cliff and her body was thrown out halfway down. 3. 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. 4. 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 plaintiffs 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, l 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, Washingtonseconddegree 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 o. . nve years m 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, 1978almost four years after Ruth died 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 lovera studied conman 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. Black Leather The cases that follow next' black Leather" and "Mirror Images' are companion pieces, a close look at the injustice that resulted when those who should have been paying attention looked the other way. The first case, which allows a rare insider's look at the crimes of a sexually aberrant criminal, is ugly, it may be offensive to some readers. Still, it demonstrates more than any other I have written how ridiculously dangerous misplaced trust in a sexual psychopath can be. This case will lead you into the next in the natural order of unnatural behavior if such a thing is possible. Larry Hendricks, the murderer in "Black Leather, " was a sexual psychopath. So are the two killers in the case following this one. They shared one identity between them, Larry Hendricks was two people all by himself, a man with a respectable facade and a secret life so dark and so sick that his crimes left even experienced Pierce County, Washington, detectives, who have seen their share of grisly murders, shaking their heads. This killer was trusted far beyond limits that anyone might imagine, trusted by the system that released him into societ, and he betrayed that trust in a series of unspeakable crimc,s. It was a little after eight A.M. on Monday, the first of May, 1979, when Sam Brand, a farmer who lives in an isolated, wooded rural area near Roy, Washington, heard someone pounding frantically on his front door. Drop-in visitors at Brand's farm were a rarity and he was a little ill at ease when he heard the insistent beating on his door. He was more alarmed when he opened the door and saw a young man, apparently badly beaten and drenched in blood some of it dried, some freshly glistening. The man was shouting almost incoherently. In New York City or Detroit or Chicago and probably even in downtown Seattle brand would probably have slammed his door and called police. But this was the country where neighbors helped neighbors and even strangers. "Hey, I need some help!" the youth cried.

Sam Brand opened the door wider, beckoning the boy in. "Yeah. .

. it sort of looks like you do."

"A guy took me out in the woods, and he beat me. And there was another body there already," the youth blurted. "I shot him. I had to. He was going to kill me too." Brand didn't doubt that the young man had been beaten. His fair hair was scarlet with blood, one arm dangled awkwardly, and he winced as if every movement caused him pain. "He kidnaped me," the man babbled on. "I was finally able to overpower him and I shot him with all the guns. They're back there. I just drove until I found someone." Still not convinced that the injured man wasn't under the inruence of hallucinatory drugs, Brand moved to the phone and called to ask that the Pierce County Sheriffs Department and an aide car respond.

He offered the stranger something to eat, some coffee, but all he would accept was water. The location of the Brand farm was so obscure that only deputies who worked the region were familiar with it. It was deep in the southern end of the county about eight miles east of the crossroads town of Mckenna. Deputy Greg Riehl and Rescue Squad Number 15

arrived simultaneously at 8:51 A.M. Sam Brand had set a mattress on the ground outside his garage so that the injured man could lie down while three emergency medical technicians worked over him. Riehl noted that fresh blood continued to seep from a wound at the back of the man's head. The victim quickly identified himself as Private Niels Honegger,*

twenty-one, and said he was stationed at Fort Lewis. He produced a military ID card with his picture on it. Honegger talked so rapidly that the deputy could barely understand him, he repeated over and over that he had had no choice but to shoot. Gently, Riehl asked the young soldier to start from the beginning and try to slow down. Honegger said that he had been waiting for a taxi back to the base at about 3:40 that morning when a man driving a black van stopped. At first he had beckoned to Honegger to come over to the van, and then the stranger had pulled a gun and ordered him into the back. The rest of his story was so terrifying that it sounded like it had happened in a nightmare. "He put some kind of black leather hood over my head and drove around for hours," Honegger said. "Then he drove out to some logging road, made me take off all my clothes, and then he handcuffed me and put leg irons on me. He forced me back in the woods. That's when I saw the body. He said the same thing was going to happen to me." Black Leather He said the man had been dressed entirely in black leather. Once Honegger was handcuffed, his captor beat him with a billy club. Realizing that he was in the hands of a sadomasochistic crazy man, who was probably planning to subject him to a sexual assault, Honegger said he had feigned unconsciousness while he tried to think of a way out of his predicament. The young soldier said he had waited for his chance. When the man in black had bent over to unhook his leg irons, he had been able to break free. The man had several guns. "I shot him," Honegger said. "I shot him with all the guns. Then I beat him with the gun barrel until I was sure he was dead."