Without Pity

by Ann Rule

  Casteel hoped Fernandez wasn’t about to try.

  The two hitched a ride into town on a logging truck and Casteel drove himself two hundred miles to his home, where a doctor found he’d survived the crash with only some torn ligaments.

  Later, when John Casteel opened his suitcase to show a friend a map of the Canadian timberland, he found copies of a memorandum of agreement between himself and one of Fernandez’s companies. He had never seen it before, yet it was a deed conveying Casteel’s timberland to Fernandez in consideration of an option on Tony’s Wasco County property, and an assignment of the Canadian timber asserting that Casteel had offered $400,000 for it.

  John Casteel was a sharp businessman and he immediately set about clouding the title to his three-million-dollar stand of timber so that Fernandez could not take it over. He eventually paid Tony fifteen hundred dollars to release all claims and considered himself lucky to have lost only that much.

  It would take a book-length volume to describe the intricacies of Tony Fernandez’s timber dealings. One would suspect that he had some successful incidents where would-be buyers “signed” papers without being aware that they had. There may even have been other “accidents” in the woods that were never reported.

  Fernandez’s financial world blew up finally in April of 1962 when he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of engaging in a multimillion-dollar timber swindle. It was the culmination of a four-year investigation into Fernandez’s business machinations. The incidents involving Belcher and Casteel were cited in the charges along with many others.

  Tony Fernandez was convicted of seven counts of interstate fraud and one of conspiracy in Judge William G. East’s Federal District Courtroom in Portland, Oregon, in December 1962. Two months later, he was sentenced to eleven years and eleven months in prison. That April, his remaining property was sold to satisfy judgments against him. Despite appeals, Tony Fernandez remained in the McNeill Island Federal Prison until his parole on January 15, 1970.

  Tony was far from idle during his years on the bleak prison island in Puget Sound. In 1968, claiming status as a taxpayer in the state of Washington, he sued Washington’s Secretary of State Lud Kramer and U.S. Representative Julia Butler Hansen for a hundred thousand dollars on the grounds that Ms. Hansen was not qualified to serve in Congress because she was a woman. The suit was capricious, not to mention chauvinistic, and it got nowhere. However, it netted Tony Fernandez more headlines and he liked that.

  Six months after he was paroled, Fernandez was awarded a degree from Tacoma Community College’s extension program. He became the first convict in the State of Washington to earn a college degree through an innovative program that allowed prisoners to take courses while they were in the penitentiary.

  And so, in 1970, Anthony Fernandez was free—both from prison and from his twenty-three-year marriage. His wife had divorced him in 1965 while he was in prison. Surprisingly, she said she had no ill feelings toward Tony. He had always been a good provider and never mean or abusive. She did mention his wandering eye, however. She just hadn’t wanted to be lied to any longer. It had been a most civilized divorce. So civilized, in fact, that when Tony was paroled, he often brought his new girlfriends to visit his ex-wife.

  Scattered accounts of Tony Fernandez’s postprison activities boggle the mind. He reported to hometown friends that he was a senior at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, majoring in psychology and ecology. This wasn’t long after his release from prison. As part of his studies, he joined a student tour to Arizona and New Mexico to study Navajo Indian history, culture, and economy. In an article in the Longview Daily News, it was also noted that Tony was enrolled simultaneously in an MA and Ph.D. program in a Florida university. (As it happened, all this “college” required its students to do to get a “diploma” was to write a thesis of unspecified length.)

  Tony Fernandez’s doctorate had been awarded simply because he had submitted a paper entitled “The Innovated Navajo.” And voilà! Tony Fernandez became Dr. Anthony Fernandez.

  When he was heard from next, Dr. Fernandez reported he was attending the North American College of Acupuncture in Vancouver, British Columbia. Tony is quoted as saying he attended classes in Vancouver three times a week and would be spending fifteen weeks in Hong Kong and sixty days in Peking as part of his training.

  It wasn’t that Fernandez believed that acupuncture was particularly important in the Western world. “It is,” he pontificated, “at best, a fad. But I’m going into this with the point of view that it is most likely a psychological tool. And even if I never use it, the experience and knowledge will be a benefit.”

  On March 30, 1971—the same month he met Ruth Logg—a small item appeared in the Longview Daily News.“Anthony Fernandez, formerly of Longview and a recent Pacific Lutheran University graduate, will open a counseling office complex next month at 8815 S. Tacoma Way. He is also negotiating for property in Kelso on which to construct a family counseling clinic.”

  Dr. Fernandez promised to provide a twenty-four-hour answering service and said he had contracted to evaluate welfare recipients for the Tacoma office of the Department of Public Assistance.

  On June 10, 1971, “Dr.” Fernandez’s picture appeared in the Wenatchee, Washington, Daily World beside an article about his plans to establish a “rehabilitation center” for drug addicts and alcoholics on eighty acres he owned in the rural town of Alstown. He promised that he would build a modern clinic but retain the flavor of the historic old cabins on the eastern Washington property. He assured nearby residents that his patients would not be “turned loose” in the community. He did not mention, of course, that he himself was a parolee from a federal prison.

  None of Fernandez’s new endeavors ever got off the ground. He didn’t need them. He had Ruth Logg and the fortune her late husband had left her.

  This was the man with whom Ruth fell madly in love. This was her soft-eyed, warm-voiced hero who was going to make the second half of her life a wonderful time of love and companionship. She had never known anyone with no conscience at all; she was naive about the world of the con man. Les had loved her and protected her.

  Once married to Ruth, Tony Fernandez was kept busy overseeing her business interests and fortune. He encouraged Kathleen, her older daughter, to move out almost immediately after his marriage to her mother. He told Ruth it would be good for Kathleen to have an apartment of her own. Ruth’s younger daughter, Susan, lived with them but was involved with her own friends.

  At first, the Fernandez marriage seemed idyllic. If Ruth’s former friends and relatives didn’t call often, she didn’t notice—she was so caught up in loving Tony.

  The marriage turned bitter and disappointing far too soon. While Tony’s first wife had turned a deaf ear to rumors of his infidelities, Ruth could not. She suspected he was seeing other women. It tore her apart.

  In May of 1974, when she had been married to Tony for just over two years, Ruth took a trip to Texas—alone. Tony remarked to one of her daughter’s boyfriends, “When she comes back, she’ll have to shape up or ship out.”

  While Ruth was gone, Fernandez used Ruth’s Power of Attorney and sold some of her property without her knowledge for $100,000—far less than its actual value.

  Only six months before, Ruth and Tony had vacationed at a plush resort in Mazatlan, Mexico, where they had impressed other couples as an “ideal couple.” But that had evidently been the last try on Ruth’s part to make the marriage work. One reason for the end of the perfect romance—and a good reason at that—was the fact that Tony reportedly had another woman he was seriously involved with. She lived in Centralia, Washington. Although Ruth didn’t realize it, he had used her money to give the other woman an expensive fur coat and a diamond solitaire. He told the woman that they would be married soon.

  While Ruth Fernandez was on her lonely trip in May, Tony also took care of some other pressing business. He took out a $100,000 accidental death insurance policy on Ruth thro
ugh Mutual of Omaha. There was never any concrete evidence that Ruth signed the application for that policy.

  To her everlasting misfortune, Ruth still loved Tony. She still believed she could win back his love and that he would be faithful to her. During the third week of July 1974, she was excited about a camping trip they were going to take together. It would be like another honeymoon. They had rented a fully equipped Winnebago Brave motor home from a local dealer, and also took a four-wheel drive vehicle with them.

  On Sunday afternoon, July 26, Ruth and Tony Fernandez stopped at the Mount Si Golf Course restaurant in North Bend, Washington, for cocktails and lunch. They lingered in the picturesque spot for a long time.

  Just beyond North Bend, the I-90 freeway and back roads head east swiftly up toward the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. The land drops away steeply at the edges of the byroads. The Fernandez’s campsite was eight miles up the mountain from North Bend.

  According to witnesses, both Ruth and Tony had seemed somewhat affected by the drinks they had with lunch. They left, saying they were headed for their campsite. At 4:15 that July afternoon, the Fernandezes visited the Snoqualmie office of the Weyerhauser Lumber Company on a business errand. Employees there recalled that Ruth seemed to be unhappy and a little querulous, while Tony was reflective and quiet. Neither of them, however, seemed to be intoxicated. When they left, they said they were going on up toward Snoqualmie Pass to the place where they were camping.

  The first hint that something might be wrong came at 8:30 that Sunday evening. Tony called the waitress at the Mount Si restaurant to ask if she had seen Ruth. She had not. Next, he called the Little Chalet Café in North Bend, asking the staff there if they had seen Ruth. They knew her, but they hadn’t seen her that evening.

  At 8:36 P.M. Tony called the Washington State Patrol station in North Bend, expressing his concern for Ruth’s safety. When the trooper on duty asked him why he was worried, Tony said first that Ruth had left the campsite for a walk in the woods alone and she had not returned. But then he changed his story. He said she had driven in the Winnebago, and he thought she had been heading for their home in Auburn.

  “I followed her twenty minutes to half an hour later in my four-wheel drive Scout,” he said. “But I couldn’t find any sign of her.”

  Coincidentally, Susan Logg and her fiancé, Don Stafford, had headed up the Granite Creek Road toward the campsite between 8:30 and 9:30 P.M. that Sunday night. They had passed neither Ruth nor Tony along the way. When they got back to the big house in Auburn at 10:40 P.M., they encountered Tony, who had just emerged from taking a shower. He told them he had no idea where Ruth had gone off to. He figured she would come driving up any time, and there was no use to go looking for her. It was too dark.

  The long night passed with no word at all from Ruth. The next morning, Don Stafford and Tony Fernandez drove back to North Bend and officially reported Ruth as a missing person to the State Patrol. Then they drove up the Martha Lake Road to the Granite Creek Road along the route to the vacated campsite. There was no sign of the Winnebago along the roadway. Suddenly, Stafford spotted some tracks in the dirt shoulder next to the Granite Creek Road. The tracks appeared to disappear over the cliff’s edge. When Stafford pointed them out, Tony Fernandez asked him, “Do you think I should look here?”

  Stafford volunteered to look. He walked to the edge of the precipitous cliff where rock had been blasted out, making it an almost sheer drop. Bracing himself, he looked down. Far, far below, he saw the crumpled mass of metal that had been the Winnebago.

  Before he turned back to give Tony the bad news, Don Stafford forced himself to look along the cliff side between the wrecked camper and the top. About halfway down, he saw a body and he knew it was Ruth Fernandez.

  In a very short time, the sunny mountain road was alive with King County Police and Washington State Patrol troopers. The wreckage was three hundred feet below. The investigators were able to approach it only obliquely by using a logging road farther down the grade. When they finally got to Ruth Fernandez, they confirmed that she was dead, and that she had been for many hours. Rigor mortis was almost complete. She appeared to have suffered massive head injuries. Oddly, her clothing was remarkably untorn for someone who had ridden the hurtling camper off the embankment and then one hundred fifty feet down the hill before she had fallen out.

  Tony Fernandez complained about the hours the police were spending at the scene. It was perfectly obvious what had happened. He muttered to Don Stafford, “They are just creating red tape.” Tony asked Stafford to leave with him. He didn’t want to stay around there any longer, watching from above as the cops worked over his dead wife.

  There were aspects of the accident that puzzled and bothered the investigators. Trooper Don Caughell of the Washington State Patrol’s Fatality Investigative Unit looked with his discerning eye first at the road and then at the shattered motor home. The road had no defects that would make control of a vehicle difficult; there was no breaking away of the shoulder area where the rig had gone over. This indicated to him that the Winnebago had been moving slowly and that no one had stomped on the brakes in a desperate attempt to keep from plunging over. “Why?” he wondered. Why hadn’t Ruth Fernandez tried to save herself?

  Although the motor home itself was thoroughly crumpled, there was no sign inside it to indicate that a body had bounced around during the terrible drop. No blood, no torn flesh, no hair. Ruth Fernandez had been wearing a loosely woven blouse which would have been likely to catch on something during the terrible bucketing down the steep hill. But her blouse had no tears or snags at all.

  Ruth Fernandez’s body was lifted with the use of a carefully balanced litter, from the side of the cliff and taken to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office in Seattle to await autopsy.

  The postmortem examination showed that she had suffered two severe injuries, neither of which was typical of a victim who had ridden a vehicle down a slope for almost two hundred feet. The first wound was caused by some kind of blunt object striking her omentum—the fatty, apronlike membrane that hangs from the stomach and transverse colon in the abdominal cavity. The omentum is rich in blood vessels. Ruth’s second wound—and the fatal wound—was a fractured skull. She had died sometime between 11:30 A.M. on the 26 and 11:30 A.M. on the 27. The best clue to time of death is when the victim has last been seen. As Ruth was known to be alive at 4:30 P.M. on the Sunday she disappeared, the time-of-death period could be cut to nineteen hours.

  According to autopsy findings, she could have lived a maximum of six hours without treatment and a minimum of one hour. Blood alcohol tests indicated that Ruth had been legally intoxicated at the time of her death, that is, she had at least .10 of alcohol in her bloodstream.

  Tony Fernandez was Ruth’s sole heir, and he applied almost immediately for her insurance benefits. Mutual of Omaha declined to cut him a check, however, because there was an ongoing investigation into her death. Indeed, King County Police homicide detectives Ted Forrester and Roger Dunn would spend months in their initial probe of the strange circumstance of Ruth Logg Fernandez’s death. Those months would stretch into years.

  Circumstantial evidence indicated that some outside force had caused Ruth’s Winnebago to plunge over the cliff. Forester and Dunn suspected Tony Fernandez of killing his wife, but they could not prove it.

  What did happen between 4:30 and 8:30 P.M. on July 26, 1974? No one but Tony saw Ruth during that time, and he insisted that she first took a walk in the woods and then decided to drive home alone from their campsite.

  He liked to imply that Ruth had been out of control, hysterical, irrational—a woman who should not have been driving the big Winnebago rig. Tony even suggested obliquely that Ruth might have been suicidal. But was it consistent with human psychology that a healthy, forty-four-year-old woman, slightly intoxicated, perhaps upset at her failing marriage, would deliberately drive herself off a cliff? She had two daughters who needed her, family, friends, a considerable fort
une. If she was so angry at Tony that she wanted to die, would she have done this knowing that it was Tony and Tony alone who would inherit everything she owned?

  Probably not.

  The case dragged on. No criminal charges were filed against Tony Fernandez. Fernandez himself pooh-poohed the theory that he might have killed his wife. He remained in the family home and gave frequent interviews to the media, appearing often on the nightly news television programs. He appeared affable and confident.

  Tony Fernandez was so confident, in fact, that he began to date publicly. He was a grieving widower, yes, but a man got lonely.

  In February of 1976, a year and a half after Ruth Logg Fernandez died, her daughters, Mrs. Kathleen Logg Lea, twenty-two, and Susan Logg, nineteen, brought civil suit against Tony Fernandez, charging that he was not eligible to inherit any of Ruth’s fortune. Under the Slayer’s Act, no one shall inherit benefits resulting from the death of someone whose death they have caused.

  Ruth’s daughters were so frustrated to see Tony Fernandez going blithely on with his life that they felt they had to do something. Ted Forrester and Roger Dunn had explained that they had not yet come up with enough physical evidence to take to the King County Prosecutor’s Office so that criminal charges could be brought. Criminally, guilt must be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. Civilly, however, a judgment can be made on the “preponderance of evidence.” Testimony on “prior bad acts” (of which Tony Fernandez had plenty) could be introduced.

  Ruth’s daughters decided to go for it.

  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.