Mortal Danger (11 page)

John Branden was gone, just as surely as if a spaceship had dropped down to pick him up. The California officers kept searching, continuing their tracking on more than a dozen properties that Bonnie Crichton’s family owned.

They never found him. Either he was dead or he’d found a secure hiding place where law enforcement officers couldn’t locate him. The Crichtons insisted that they knew nothing about any attack on Kate; they’d only been giving a good friend a place to stay. Maybe the authorities believed them, maybe they couldn’t prove otherwise, or maybe the Crichton extended family’s clout in the com
munity stood them in good stead. Bonnie and Joe weren’t charged with harboring a fugitive.

Kate wondered if he had managed to come back into Oregon and was nearer to her than she knew. If a car followed her for more than a few turns, or the phone rang, only to have no one there, or she heard a noise she didn’t recognize at night, her pulse beat rapidly and she felt a familiar fear.

As the summer
passed, Kate tied up the ends of her life in Gold Beach—her life with John Branden. They had been renting their cottage from Bill and Doris with an option to buy, but Kate never wanted to live there again, and heaven only knew where John was. He wasn’t dead; she was sure of that now. Through some third parties—whoever they were—John was communicating with his daughters, his therapist, and his attorney.

It was a hot summer. The garden below the cabin became choked with weeds and went to seed. In the fall, Kate executed a deed in lieu of foreclosure back to Bill and Doris, releasing all her interest in the cottage property. Their attorney drew up a summons in Curry County, addressed to John, asking him to appear and pay the balance of the house contract: $150,000. Legally, it had to appear in the Public Notices section of the local paper four times.

There was only silence from John. The perfect cottage, with its trees, flowers, and a view of the ocean would be returned to Bill and Doris.

In mid-July, the FBI entered the case, and the search expanded.
America’s Most Wanted
producers received let
ters from Dave Gardiner and Kate asking that information on John be broadcast on John Walsh’s show. The producers promised to consider their request.

“But I got the feeling,” she said with some bitterness, “that
America’s Most Wanted
wasn’t very interested in my story because I didn’t die. It would have made for better true-crime television.”

The sense that John was hovering in the background, sending directives to those he still manipulated, often washed over Kate. But she thought that might only be her imagination.

Her father pulled her through. He vowed to stay with her until he was sure she had relocated to the safest possible place, and he carried a gun with him wherever they went. She felt very lucky to have him with her.

Kate realized that John expected her to stay in Gold Beach; he would be shocked when he heard that she wasn’t there any longer. He was undoubtedly planning to return, smooth things over as always, and then convince her to help him get the charges against him reduced.

Kate hadn’t yet decided where she would go, but she knew it had to be someplace isolated for her own safety, and near water for her serenity. She would be leaving dear friends behind and starting over. That is the fate of women who live in fear. She would probably have to change her name when she got to wherever she was going. The first part of her life seemed to lie on the floor like ropes cut off without being tethered to anything.

She believed John was probably someplace in California, but she had no idea where. It was a big state, but even so, she was afraid to move there. She didn’t feel safe in
Oregon. John was so good at tracking her, wherever she was. Kate and her dad headed north in the first week of August 1999. She figured that Orcas Island far up in Washington State might be a place where she could start over. John wouldn’t be likely to look for her there; they’d decided not to move there because of the restrictions imposed by ferry commuting. It would be one of the last places he would choose to live himself.

She talked to a deputy sheriff on Orcas Island, and he told her that no one had ever been murdered there. She took that as a “good sign,” and somehow that made her feel safer, although she knew that was no guarantee for the future.

If she could fly out of Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, she could live in insular obscurity and earn a living, too. They found a little house, which was basically a summer cottage. It wasn’t fancy, but it would do. Kate loved the ambiance of Orcas Island, the serenity of it, and the woods and acres of fields, bounded on all sides by water. Knowing it was too expensive, she rented it anyway, and planned to be living there before winter storms closed in.

She signed her “new” name on the lease:
Chris White.
That seemed suitably common, and it could be either a man or a woman.

Back in Gold Beach, Kate packed up those possessions that were mementoes of her family—her grandmother’s antique secretary and small items that predated John. She held a yard sale for the rest.

The cottage was still full of John’s things. She wanted to put them in storage, but her father stopped her. “Put them in a pile down in the garage,” he said. “You don’t owe him anything. He can arrange to have them picked up if he wants them.”

As they cleared out the cottage room by room, they searched for John’s gun collection. Finally, Harold Jewell opened a wardrobe box in the camper of John’s old truck and found the cache of weapons. It gave them both a chill to see the handguns, shotguns, and rifles there. There were Smith & Wesson .38s, Colt .45s, an Israeli gun, and the AK-47. Why had John found it necessary to own so many guns?

(Eventually, Bill Turner heard from Tamara’s fiancé, Dan, who said he and a friend would be coming up to get John’s stuff, asking Bill to put it in storage in Brookings, Oregon. The old Ford truck also went to Brookings, a small town five miles from the California border.)

As they hurried to leave Gold Beach, Kate’s dad was burning trash, and Kate made a number of trips with papers and other things she didn’t intend to take. She was carrying a high stack of papers when she stepped in a hole and broke her leg. Her father heard the snap of the bone breaking and saw her fall. He thought it was a gunshot; he panicked, because he’d left his gun in the house.

“He thought John had come back and he’d shot me, and he didn’t have a gun to shoot back. That’s how jumpy we both were.”

Now Kate had to hobble up and down the many stairs on crutches. This was not the luckiest summer of her life.
She felt like one of the walking wounded. Although her bruises and cuts had healed, her dentist still believed the nerves to her front teeth had been severed when she’d been hit in the mouth.

John had left so precipitously that he’d failed to take many of the documents and papers he’d hidden from Kate. The court records on the suit brought by the Lakhvirs were among them. For the first time, she learned about the charges that the Middle Eastern couple had brought against John. They were far more serious than he’d told her.

On September 3, three months after Kate barely escaped with her life, she found another letter from John in her post office box. It had been postmarked two days earlier in San Francisco. She stared at it, feeling the heft of it. It was quite thick.

She hadn’t wanted to hear from him ever again. She didn’t want to read it. But she felt compelled to, knowing that he had had time to land on his feet by now, and that his rhetoric would be choreographed to entrap her. What could he possibly have to say to her?

It was nine pages long, printed in the same dark Sharpie ink as his first letter, his capital letters large and flamboyant, the
t
’s and
l
’s crossed with his familiar downward-curved umbrella shape.

He was very confident, his words from the beginning indicating that they were in this together, sharing a deep love, sharing all the blame. His magical thinking had returned to him, and he saw “the Universe” as he chose to see it. He wrote of how much they had both lost, although he ended that thought vaguely: “as a result of
things
…”

He blamed his May 29 “nervous breakdown” on his fear of losing Kate and his need to control everything in his life, including her. “I’ve come to the realization that I created the most extreme situation to realize the extremes of the loving, compassionate side of me that wanted to be there for you, and love and care for you forever. Versus the scared, cruel side of me that survived my past hurtful experiences through control and manipulation. It finally exploded within me. I snapped and lost control. I had no right to do so.”

For pages, he repeated his apologies for manipulating her to his will, and she almost wondered if he
had
had some kind of watershed moment where he finally saw the truth. Then she caught herself. It was an old technique for him:
Mea culpa
and then pleas for forgiveness.

“I saw you run out of the house,” John wrote. “I was in the bathroom, and when I looked in the bathroom mirror, I realized that what was happening was wrong and I had to stop.”

John assured Kate that he didn’t blame her and had no anger for her.
Blame her for what? Calling the sheriff? Going to the hospital? Giving a victim’s statement?

“I acknowledge you,” he wrote on page four, “for all
you gave to me and our relationship. All your love, loyalty, truth, honesty, compassion, and passion. All your hard work, creativity, and wisdom in All we have created together. Please keep doing the work and carry on what we began.”

She had wished for such sentiments for a decade; now they were only ashes.

“Please remember all the neat and beautiful things we did together from Bodega Bay to our last time together at the waterfall with Mittens. From time to time, look at our photo albums and be happy for all we shared…. I have written you so many long letters, but never sent any of them. What I write is for your eyes only. I hope you will honor our private communications.”

He had apologized, explained why he’d acted the way he had, declared his love and admiration for her, boasted that he’d deliberately spared her life, and then attempted sharp tugs on her heartstrings. He was a master of persuasion.

He had, he wrote, only “One Request.” He feared disasters when “Y2K or something similar” happened, and he begged her to give shelter and safety to his daughters in Oregon. He wanted her to remain close to Tamara and Heather, because “they love you.”

And there was another matter. Although he admitted that what he had done to her was wrong, and he accepted responsibility and wanted to “give myself up,” so he could serve “some reasonable time and be provided counseling,” he hadn’t been happy to hear from his attorney that the woman DA who was handling his case would not negotiate. He bemoaned the fact that “local law enforcement and
court want me to spend the rest of my life in the state prison.”

If only he and Kate could have talked, John suggested, and worked with a neutral attorney so they could have negotiated with the state. “That way we could bring this to closure and both go on with our lives.
Without your help,
” he stressed, “any resolve is impossible.”

But, alas, his life was over. It was too late. Most of his “deals” were gone. But he still had the biggest one in action—the sale of urine kits. “I’ve kept in touch with these people in spite of things.”

He wanted to see this endeavor succeed so that all the profits could go to Kate, and she could have a good income for many years. “The State is costing you the loss of earning a living,” he suggested. “Even with me out of the picture, I still love you and want you to be financially secure.”

The implication was clear. If Kate would only plead for him to get a shorter sentence—or no sentence at all—he would see that she would be rewarded financially…with urine kits. How romantic.

Once again, he switched gears, and the next two pages returned to the love letter form:

It was his time-tested clincher:
“Connect With Me.”

Kate felt goose pimples prickling on her arms, even though the day was warm. John believed that she was going to remain in the cottage, that she would come to understand his explanations for his violent behavior, and that she would surely connect with him and plead for a lighter sentence for him at the Curry County district attorney’s office.

He clearly felt he still had the ability to control her, and he thought he was pulling all of her strings in this letter.

Kate folded the pages and slipped them back into the envelope. John seemed convinced that she would stay in the cottage. That was good; she would have a better chance of moving to Orcas Island, and she and her dad could probably leave Gold Beach without John’s knowledge. John might be clever about pretending to be a police investigator, but if he had no idea where to start calling, or hadn’t followed close behind her, it wouldn’t do him any good.

Before she left Oregon, Kate used one of John’s tricks. She wrote letters on Nepalese stationery to her friends and family, and sent them to a friend in Nepal to remail for her. “That way,” she pointed out, “if John showed up looking for me, my friends and relatives could show him the physical evidence that I was far, far, away living in Nepal.”