Mortal Danger (16 page)

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:

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 before 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.

Dave Gardiner had seen John’s postmortem photos, too. “It was him, all right,” he said. “He was older, and balder, but I recognized him.”

Kate hoped to talk to Randall Nozawa, the only survivor—so far—of the triple shooting in the early morning hours of March 30. For the moment, he was fighting for his
life, and it would be a long time before anyone could talk much to him.

Despite all odds—multiple delicate surgeries, infections, and pneumonia—Randall Nozawa survived. He was totally blind. He’d lost his left eye in 2003 and his right eye on March 30, 2007. His tongue had been bisected by a bullet, but it was eventually reattached. His jaw had been broken, and he’d lost three teeth.

Although he sometimes wished he hadn’t, he kept his memories of that tragic night.

“When John left the room, he seemed so calm that neither Turi nor I was afraid,” Randall said, “but when he came back he had a gun in his hands. He stood by the refrigerator, pointing it at us.”

They still didn’t know if he was serious, but neither Randall nor Turi said anything, staring down at the kitchen table, afraid to speak. But then, John ordered Turi to kneel in front of him, and she complied. But suddenly her mind wasn’t bending to his will any longer. She turned her head toward Randall and said, “He does this to make himself feel like a man.”

“I didn’t know what to say,” Randall said, “and I just kept my head down and kept quiet. I thought maybe this was some ritual they practiced in their marriage. I mean, people have ways that they argue, but I’d never seen this before.”

Randall was more embarrassed than he was frightened. He didn’t want to be this close to someone else’s private
business, but he’d been drawn into it. Turi was kneeling close to the table, and he thought feverishly of some way to save her from John’s icy anger.

“Tell him what happened in Oregon,” Turi said. “Tell him what you did to her—”

Suddenly, John’s gun boomed. Turi fell sideways without a sound.

Randall knew he shouldn’t move from where he sat with his head down. But he
was
able to extend his arm beneath the table far enough to touch Turi’s foot with his hand. He found no pulse there. She was gone without so much as a sigh.

“He shot me next,” Randall said. “When someone is shooting at you, you don’t hear a very loud noise. My ears rang, but I felt no pain at all—so I knew that Turi hadn’t either. I was still looking down when he shot me, and then my sight went completely black. I went under the table—just kind of slid there. I was aware of bone chips and blood in my mouth, and I remember wondering how that happened, because he had shot me in my good eye. Later, I realized I’d been looking down at the table and he was standing over me, so the bullet must have gone in my eye at a downward angle, and it continued that path, splintering my jaw, and knocking out some of my teeth, and then cut my tongue in half before it exited.”

Randall was surprised that he was still alive. He could hear John walking around the kitchen for at least five or ten minutes, but he couldn’t see him any longer. He stayed motionless under the table, barely breathing and hoping John would think he was dead.

And then the gun sounded again, and he heard something or someone hit the floor. He could no longer hear John pacing or breathing.

Randall Nozawa waited a while longer, then stumbled to his feet and went into the bedroom, where he fell unconscious for several hours. When he came to, he found a phone, but he couldn’t get a dial tone or a 911 call to go through. It was probably Turi’s cell phone and the charge had seeped out of it, so it was useless.

He didn’t know if it was day or night, but he somehow managed to find the front door and get to the street. And that’s where Sanford found him.

“I don’t know why I’m alive,” Randall said a year later. “I guess I must have a very hard head.”

He probably does. Thick bone growth is one of the reasons that some humans survive a shot to the head. Old ammunition is another. And once in a while it’s just the angle of fire, when a bullet’s path hits no vital organs or arteries.

Asked if he ever wondered if John Branden-Williams had deliberately shot him in his good eye, Randall paused. “Sometimes, I’ve thought about that,” he admitted. “But then I think he really meant to kill me, so it probably didn’t matter to him where he shot me—just so long as I died. I saw him shoot Turi, and he was also worried about what she had told me, so he couldn’t let me live.”

Somehow, Randall Nozawa did live, although whether he would remained questionable for weeks. As he slowly fought his way back through surgery and infections, he began to feel that he was meant to live—that he still had many things to do with his life.

Even completely blind now, he realized he could find ways he could work with people to find their own way back to health.

Sometimes he pondered on the irony of it. John, the health guru, had destroyed life and hope—but Randall himself felt he was meant to continue the work that John had only espoused in self-absorbed double-talk.

Randall still teaches yoga, Pilates, and physical fitness.

In essence, the
homicide investigation was over, and Pierce County Detective Todd Karr told reporters that. There was a living witness to murder, and the prime suspect was dead by his own hand. There would, of course, be no trial.

The investigators kept John Williams’s
real
identity secret for several days while they investigated possible charges against him in other states. Aside from the Curry County, Oregon, charges still extant in his attack on Kate, and his escape from deputies in Napa, California, they found none. The case was officially closed.

But it wasn’t over for Kate. She was compelled to find out why John had left Florida hurriedly in 1986, and why he had been so hesitant to go back there. During their visit to the Mannatech executives who lived in Jupiter, Florida, John had been jumpy and irritable, and he hadn’t been able to head back to the West Coast quickly enough. During the past eight years, Kate would have been foolhardy to ask questions of John’s friends and associates, because he could have found her. Now, finally, she was able to search for answers.

Many people who had known John in the past failed to return her calls. She wanted to know when and where John had first met Turi, but even Turi’s own family didn’t know for sure. The Gig Harbor and Pierce County police investigators were convinced that Turi had had no idea about John’s criminal background, had known very little about his life before she’d met him, and hadn’t even known his real name. Kate felt that Turi’s last trip with John, through Oregon, had apparently opened her eyes, and she’d wanted no part of him.

John’s parents were dead, but in 2008, Kate read some letters that had been exchanged between John and the elder Brandens back in 1986. His mother begged him to tell them why he’d left, and she assured him that if they just knew the truth, they could help him. His father was ill with what seemed to be colitis—but it was in fact a metastasis of prostate cancer that would kill him within months.

“Dear Jack,” his mother wrote, “we are very much upset, and things cannot continue like this much longer. The best thing for you to do is tell the truth and let us determine how serious these charges are against you. What you are doing is breaking up the whole family, and there is not much more we can take. All things must come to an end, and we could be reaching the breaking point.”

John told his parents that he’d left because Florida health officials had been hounding him, trying to put him out of business—or perhaps even put him in jail—because they’d been trying to get rid of all those practicing alternative medicine. He said they’d been investigating some of the prescriptions he’d written. He assured them there was really nothing to the charges, and told them how much he
loved them, and how happy he and Sue and the girls were in California.

Kate soon found another possible reason why John had left so hurriedly; some of the people she talked to said John had behaved inappropriately with a young female client who might even have been impregnated by him.

But Kate believed it had to be a lot more than either of those reasons. John referred to a “horrible” secret only when he was drunk, although he’d tiptoed around any details and shut up completely when she’d tried to ask questions. He told her that he’d made $30,000 in just one night and that the money was connected with his midnight escape from Florida. He never went further than that, though. How could he have made $30,000 in one night by impregnating a patient? Or by practicing naturopathy? No way. But there was Bill Thaw, whom John had idolized—Thaw, who was a con man’s con man, and maybe a lot more than that. He either committed suicide or disappeared a year after John ran away from Florida. Maybe Thaw had been keeping horrible secrets, too.

When Kate wrote to Dwight and Susan Havener a year after John’s death, she received only a short response. She hadn’t told them that John was dead, but Dwight wrote back to say that they’d heard only “bits and pieces” about John and didn’t care to know more, whatever he was doing in 2008. Kate couldn’t blame him; John had never paid the Haveners the $1,500 he’d owed them, and he hadn’t turned out to be the kind of “associate” they’d hoped for.

Actually, many of his former Mannatech associates may not have known that John is dead and will learn about it for the first time in this book.

Kate wondered where John had been between the middle of June 1999, when he’d escaped from deputies in Napa, California, and 2001 or 2002, when he’d resurfaced in Gig Harbor and Tacoma, Washington. Maybe he’d been in Bill Nichols’s Mount Shasta home or in a monastery all that time? Hardly likely. He certainly managed to land on his feet, especially after he met Turi Bentley.

Kate still hadn’t found out anything about his last days in Florida. She couldn’t locate his older sister, whom John had accused of “turning him in.”
Turning him in for what?

After many false leads, Kate managed to find a phone number for Dr. Stanley Szabo, who had once been John’s closest friend and, because of that, her apartment mate in Solana Beach. Stan had always been grateful to John for helping him out back in the late eighties; in return, according to Randall Nozawa, John had spoken of the now-retired dentist as someone he admired more than any other man. (He had long since stopped extolling the brilliance of Bill Thaw by the time he met Randall.)

After following numerous paths that led to slammed doors or no information, Kate found what she was looking for when she talked to Stan. After some hesitancy, he revealed that John had shown up at his house in Del Ray Beach, Florida, one day, walking in as if he’d only been away for an hour or so, when Szabo hadn’t heard from him in at least two years.

“When was that?” Kate asked.

“Probably early 2001,” Szabo guessed.

Dr. Szabo accompanied John to his hotel room, and they talked for six hours. John said he was “underground,” after an unfortunate incident with Kate.

“I almost killed her,” John said. “We’d been arguing all day, and I packed a ‘getaway bag’ just in case I had to leave in a hurry.”

According to this latest version, John said he was holding a gun to Kate’s head, and she managed to grab the phone and call 911. “I had the gun to her head and was ready to kill her when I heard the sheriff driving down to our house. I just grabbed my bag and ran.”

He had rewritten the whole scenario. Maybe John really didn’t remember the way he’d beaten and raped Kate; more likely, he had made himself sound tougher and portrayed Kate as a shrew, nagging and arguing with him all day until he could no longer control himself.

To Szabo’s amazement, John asked him to leave behind his new family—which included his second wife and two teenagers—and go underground with him. John boasted that he had come upon a wonderful plan for a business that they could operate behind the scenes. The money would be amazing.

“I’ll do all the legwork,” he promised, “and you’ll be the front man.”

This was basically the same organizational plan that John would offer Randall Nozawa a few years later. John was disappointed when Stan Szabo refused his offer to leave his family and live on the edge of society with John Branden.

Kate asked Stan if John had spoken of a new woman in his life in 2001, but Stan couldn’t recall John mentioning any female other than Kate. Maybe John hadn’t met Turi yet. Although Stan Szabo couldn’t recall the exact date that
John had shown up at his house, Kate got the impression that it was before September 11.

Szabo had no idea where John went after their long conversation in John’s hotel room, and he never heard from him again. However, FBI special agents knocked on his door, asking about John. Stan didn’t know if they
knew
John had been in Del Ray Beach, or if it was only a coincidence.

“I just promised John that I loved him like a brother,” Stan Szabo told Kate. “And I did, too. I didn’t think he ever really would have hurt you, and I couldn’t bring myself to turn him in. Besides, I had no way of knowing where he was—other than [that] he was underground.”

The FBI agents didn’t question him again. Stan was suffering from an autoimmune disease that would eventually prove terminal, and he’d had to retire from his dental practice at a relatively young age. He told Kate that Detective Dave Gardiner from Curry County called him and questioned him about John’s whereabouts shortly after Kate was attacked, but he had no idea where John might have been in 1999. Now it was nine years later, and, except for that one visit, he’d never known where John Branden had been.

Kate drew in a breath, wondering if she should ask Stan about what had happened more than two decades earlier to scare John enough to flee from Naples, Florida, in the middle of the night.

“He was ‘training’ with Bill Thaw back then.”

“What do you mean ‘training’?”

Szabo didn’t answer her question directly. At one point,
he said, Bill Thaw, a chiropractor named Kirk Radovich,* and Szabo were working at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami–Dade County, in various capacities. Thaw was working as a counselor or a therapist, although where—or if—he’d gotten his training for that no one knew. “He was one in a million,” Stan Szabo said. “A devil and an angel. He could be humane, considerate, and helpful one minute, and then just the opposite, and could kill you for no reason. He was a classic, brilliant psychopath.”

The retired dentist liked Thaw at times, but he was cautious around him because of his severe mood swings. “I had the most fun with Bill Thaw when he was ‘on.’ But he could turn on a dime, and he was a raging alcoholic.”

This, Kate realized, was the man that John Branden had idolized, the man he had modeled himself after. It sounded as though John had been a “gofer” for Thaw, fascinated by Thaw’s exciting life and charisma and seeking to escape from a humdrum life as a property assessor.

“Thaw had business ideas. When he broke away from Werner Erhard, he began the psi experience with me. We needed an investor with more money than we had, and I introduced Thaw to a man named Allen, who’d made his money in real estate. He was a millionaire. Our proposal was that we would have a presentation with Thaw doing the psi experience, and I would lecture on the nutrition part. Allen would supply the money until we got going. But at the last moment, Allen backed out. Instead, he introduced us to a banker friend of his. The bank loaned us thirty-five thousand dollars with Allen as the cosigner.”

Stan said that he and Bill Thaw went to Miami to launch
their psi experience in style, and they did well for about a year. That was when Dr. Kirk Radovich entered the picture. He attended a psi training session and was impressed.

“Kirk invited Thaw and me to interact with his patients and do individual training in his office.”

Kate waited patiently, hesitant to interrupt Szabo. So far, John didn’t seem to be in the picture at all.

“What did John do?” she finally asked.

“We didn’t know him yet,” Stan said. “I met him when he came to one of my lectures. And he met Bill Thaw, too.”

Once Szabo and Thaw hooked up with Dr. Radovich, they formed a new corporation, with the three of them cutting Allen out. The whole country was intrigued with things like est, psi, love beads, incense, and new “far-out” experiences, and Florida was the ideal place to be with the dynamic Thaw, Radovich’s established practice, and Stan’s well-grounded training and experience in doing hair and blood analysis. He was a dentist, but he had also studied in the field of blood analysis.

“Kirk didn’t really understand the analysis I did,” Stan told Kate. “If a patient asked a question about it, he would run down the hall and get an answer from me—but I was never allowed to actually see the patients. I got tired of that arrangement and went off and did my own lectures.”

Bill Thaw was apparently helping patients with their psychological problems, which was a bleak joke—a sociopath acting as a counselor. “I’ve believed for a long time that we create our own reality,” Szabo told Kate. “Once, I
said to Bill, ‘When
you
participate in a hurtful action against someone, you enjoy it.’ Bill just laughed, and I knew he acknowledged that.”

Stan explained that there was a balloon payment due on the $35,000 loan. He asked Bill what he should do, because he didn’t have the money to pay it. Stan, Bill Thaw, and some “shyster lawyer” met in a Jacksonville hotel room with Dr. Kirk Radovich. Allen, the millionaire, was going to sue all four of them for defaulting on the loan he’d cosigned. Stan got on the phone with Allen and said, “You originally promised to put up the money, and you didn’t. Then you cosigned for this loan. Now it’s only right for you to pay it.”

Bill Thaw grabbed the phone out of his hand and said roughly, “I’m only going to say this once. Pay the note off and be a good boy…or you’re dead.”

There was no question in Stan Szabo’s mind that Thaw meant every word.

John Branden was on the fringe of the pseudo-medical group, learning to do blood analysis from Stan Szabo and learning darker things from Bill Thaw. It was Szabo’s belief that Thaw was involved with organized crime and one step ahead of law enforcement.

“This was when John was living with him?” Kate asked. Finally, they were getting to the “horrible thing” that John mentioned only when he was very drunk. It was a thing that “tortured his soul.”

“Yeah. One day, when Bill Thaw was beating up and torturing this…
person
…, John walked in and witnessed the murder that followed.”

“Murder?”

“Yeah. Now Bill was in trouble. He was under pressure from the mob and from the police. The mob wanted Thaw dead because they didn’t want him to snitch on them if the police picked him up—and they wanted John for the same reason.”

So there it was.

Was this the night John made $30,000? Was the victim the mysterious Allen, whom Bill Thaw had threatened with death? Stan hadn’t said if the victim was male or female; maybe he didn’t know.

Kate tried to grapple with what really happened back in 1986: John had always either minimized or maximized the truth to fit whomever he was talking to. He had told his good friend Stan Szabo that he had witnessed Bill Thaw torturing and killing someone. Kate wondered if that was true.