Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  John resented time spent on anyone but him, and he liked his privacy. It was against his nature to make friends with anyone unless he had something to gain from it. Although he boasted of wanting to help others, he didn’t mean it, and he could not for the life of him understand why Turi bothered with some people when she didn’t get favors or business in return.

  It would have been increasingly difficult for him to keep up his friendly, “Mr. Wonderful” façade. Kate had seen that he could read people very well and was quite willing to dazzle them for as long as it took, but he could only pretend to be magnanimous for a limited time.

  Once he felt secure with Turi Bentley and had her pledge of complete devotion, it would have been safer and more convenient to have her all to himself, outside of any sphere of influence from others. Despite his lies about owning the cabin on Mount Shasta, John really had no property at all—but Turi did. And, though he denied it, that certainly appealed to him; he needed a woman to stand between him and difficulties he didn’t care to deal with, but he also required a sound financial base so he could be free to be the entrepreneur he’d always aspired to be. His mind worked feverishly now—even more than before, consumed with what he believed were brilliant and innovative ideas.

  Turi had some investments gathering interest from her divorce settlement. John soon told her of his dreams for retirement—to have a homestead in a virtual wilderness where they could live in privacy and peace. And, in case of war or a natural disaster, they would always have some place to run to. Turi thought he meant they would have a stress-free vacation property, and she agreed to look for land with him. They drove 650 miles to Montana to view acreage for sale, but there was nothing there that seemed right to John.

  He was enthusiastic about a compound of homes near Priest River, Idaho. It was planned for four families, with twenty-two to forty acres of land apiece. At the time they made an offer, there was only one family living there full-time. It was very isolated, and there were few road signs. Locals learned to find their way by looking for landmarks like general stores, taverns, barns, and particular clumps of trees.

  A long driveway led into the area of land parcels for sale, with the brush and trees growing thicker as it wound into the wilderness. The first spread they came to was owned by a female park ranger, who kept a number of horses on her land. Two more unoccupied, ranchlike homes were next, and then—at the very end of the road—they came to exactly what John was looking for.

  The price was something Turi could afford, particularly when they were offered forty acres instead of twenty. This land in northern Idaho, long the bastion for survivalists in America, fascinated John Williams, who had always wanted to find someplace where he and his daughters could find safety in the event of some cataclysmic event. One of his requests in his letter to Kate—when he’d been on the run—was that she give shelter to his daughters in Gold Beach, Oregon, in case of a Y2K disaster. In the intervening three years, he had grown even more paranoid.

  Married to Turi—even though it wasn’t legal yet—and with the Priest River property, he hoped to build an impenetrable fortress.

  Turi was less than enthused, but if John wanted to live in Idaho, she was willing to at least give it a try.

  Chapter Ten

  By 2004 John Branden-Williams had seized on another moneymaking idea. He and Turi became associates of a company called Isagenix. It was a multilevel marketing corporation very similar to Mannatech. He, of course, couldn’t go back to Mannatech, and if Turi signed up as an Isagenix associate, she would have to give up her longtime relationship with Mannatech. Some of the more zealous associates there would feel she had betrayed their company.

  John explained to those he considered smart enough to understand that Isagenix was a “nutritional cellular cleansing program” that would remove toxins and body fat. It was an herbal cleansing formula, and he believed it would revolutionize naturopathic medicine, and be something he could proselytize in health clubs. He couldn’t spearhead Isagenix himself; he was still a wanted man, and he sure didn’t want to put his photograph on ads for Isagenix. He needed someone to join with him in this new venture, someone who could be the public “face” of their branch of Isagenix.

  Turi and John had eaten at a small restaurant down in the harbor, where they’d met the proprietor, Debra Nozawa, a woman who was committed to the benefits of nutrition and herbs, just as they were. Debra soon arranged for them to meet her husband, Dr. Randall Nozawa, a retired dentist, who was forty-six at the time.

  Randall Nozawa had suffered more than his share of bad luck in his life. In 2003, a year earlier, he’d been in an automobile accident that had ended his dental career. He’d been run off the road by a car full of teenagers, and a tree branch had taken out one of his eyes, damaged the other, and become stuck in his brain. After delicate surgery, he’d recovered, but he’d no longer been able to see well enough to practice dentistry: After eleven years in practice, he had to retire in 2004. He couldn’t drive, either, but, ironically, Randall was in perfect physical shape—he’d always been a body fitness devotee—and he soon started teaching Pilates and yoga at the Gateway Fitness Center in Gig Harbor, walking to work or anywhere around town he needed to go. He was very popular there with both the staff and those who came to work out at Gateway.

  Despite his injuries, Nozawa was a walking advertisement for fitness and good health, and he, too, believed that nutrition was the key. He wanted to find a profession where he could do some good for people, and he was remarkably optimistic.

  John Williams and Randall Nozawa first met in October 2004, and Randall was one of the few people John seemed to consider a friend. He often told Randall, “Smart people like us need to stick together.”

  Randall was intrigued with the concept of Isagenix. It was based on what he considered sound premises, and it seemed almost an answer to a prayer. He had two young daughters and a wife, and he was doing everything he could to provide for them. His marriage was going through a rough patch, and he had nowhere to stay. Turi offered to pay for an apartment for him until he and Debra worked things out.

  Believing that John had two PhDs in nutrition, Randall was flattered that John found him worthy as a potential partner. Yet he, too, found John eccentric. “He had a fiery temper that had to be held in check, as if he was a child,” Nozawa recalled. “In and out in the snap of a finger.”

  Wherever he had gained his knowledge, there was little question that John Williams was a genius. He knew everything about nutrition and how to evaluate blood draws. He promised to teach Randall what he had learned in his many years of college. Randall could deal with John’s moods. “Lots of people who are very smart have their peculiar ways.”

  John trusted Randall, and now he could play the role of mentor. He clearly wanted to be Bill Thaw to the younger man. John didn’t talk about Thaw now. Rather, he extolled the brilliance of another dentist friend, this one in Florida: Now, it was Dr. Stanley Szabo, whom he called his mentor. Szabo may well have been one of the first to teach John body chemistry and nutrition.

  John Williams confided in Nozawa—or at least Randall thought he did. John had created a whole new background, and he was convincing at first as he spoke of his earlier years. Randall had gone to the University of Oregon, and John said he had, too. Randall had no reason to doubt John, who named some of the outstanding buildings on the Eugene campus and seemed very familiar with the layout of the university. John said he’d joined the Peace Corps after leaving the university.

  “He told me he was from the San Francisco Bay area,” Randall Nozawa recalled. “And that he’d worked there for thirty years in his own clinic. Eventually, he sold his nutrition business in San Francisco. I believed him for a long time, and then sometimes I wondered, because the dates and the math didn’t quite match up.”

  Of course it was a lie about any San Francisco clinic, and a lie about being in the Peace Corps, and a lie about attending the University of Oregon. John was adept at makin
g up convincing new backgrounds for himself.

  John mentioned his ex-wife, Sue, and his daughters, but he said very little about them. “He said that he’d left his wife because he just didn’t want to be married anymore.”

  Where John had told Kate that he’d never been with any woman except for his wife and herself, he bragged to Randall Nozawa about many, many seductions, saying, “I was always finding naked women in my office at the end of the day, and I had to look around the parking lot to see if jealous husbands and boyfriends were lurking.”

  This skinny, balding man seemed anything but a love god, but John explained the simple reason women were so drawn to him. “I got to screw a lot of women,” he bragged, “because it all came down to the personal thing. I just let ’em talk. I listen, and they think you’re a great guy.”

  John sometimes spoke of a woman he’d been with for a long time. He never called her by name to Randall, but he said she was a stewardess, adding, “All stewardesses are whores.”

  He seemed ambivalent when he described her. “This was a true ‘ten.’ But then, after a night of great sex, she’s standing over me, with an expression of disdain on her face.”

  This nameless woman—who was really Kate—had, according to John, betrayed him and caused him all kinds of grief. “She was having an affair with the police chief in this town we lived in and they drummed up phony charges against me.”

  His hatred for the flight attendant was all-consuming, and he apparently blamed her for everything that was wrong with his life. Randall could understand John’s loathing if it was true that she’d been unfaithful and then conspired with the police chief. That was really rubbing his nose in it.

  John told Randall about being in a monastery for six months. Had he been hiding out from the charges trumped up by his cheating mistress and her lover? John didn’t explain just why he’d been in the monastery, or in what time frame that had occurred. But he did marvel at the wisdom and almost psychic intuition that he said some of the monks had had.

  “When I left,” John said, “one monk looked at me and said, ‘Don’t do it.’”

  “Don’t do what?” Randall asked. “What did he mean?”

  “Wow, those guys can get in your head!” John said, still not spelling it out. “He told me, ‘It’s not worth it.’”

  Randall found little mystery about what John had been contemplating—he’d wanted to kill the woman who’d betrayed him in Oregon. And somehow “the monk” had known that. If, indeed, there had been a monk. The whole scenario of the monastery might well have emerged from John Branden/Williams’s fertile imagination, no more true than his stories about San Francisco.

  John and Turi lived in Tacoma when they were first together. Turi’s mother, Liv Lee, had resided in a house in Seascape Hills, a retirement community in Gig Harbor, for fifteen years, but it became apparent in the early nineties that she could no longer live alone safely. Turi found an assisted-living facility in Tacoma. Together with her daughters, she helped her mother move. That left the house on Lost Beach Road in Seascape Hills vacant. It didn’t sell, and that worried Liv.

  Turi missed Gig Harbor—she had so many friends there—and really wanted to move back. The house was very nice, worth close to half a million dollars as the housing market boomed in Washington State. Any property with a view of the water was desirable, and this gray-and-white house was much larger inside than it appeared to be from the street. It had two bedrooms, two luxurious bathrooms, an expansive modern kitchen, a large living room with a fireplace, and a backyard that opened onto a greenbelt. The only flaw, as far as John was concerned, was that Liv’s house was very close to neighbors on either side—probably not more than a dozen feet away from them. But he and Turi could drive into the garage and enter their home from there, so there was no need for him to interact with any neighbor on their street.

  They could step through the sliding glass doors in the kitchen, sit on their deck at the rear of their home on warm evenings, and hear the wind in the tall fir trees. It was the reasonable move for them to make. Turi soon made friends with people who lived in Seascape Hills, but John remained aloof and discouraged Turi from getting too friendly with the neighbors.

  They did go to the Gateway Fitness Center to study yoga with Randall Nozawa, but John didn’t mingle. Randall was a frequent visitor in their home. He lived only a few blocks away and would often walk down to see John and Turi when they invited him.

  Turi was relieved when Randall visited, because he seemed to calm John down when he was agitated. It became a habit for her to call Randall when she saw trouble coming with John, whose emotions ran up and down the spectrum from depression to ebullience, from rage to joy.

  Randall was happy to help her out, but he soon saw that Turi lived in John’s shadow. This lovely, kind woman seemed cowed by her husband! Nozawa was shocked at the way John treated her. He used demeaning swear words in front of her and called Turi derogatory names. He seemed to want to have complete control over her, and her boundaries grew more and more confining.

  “John had no friends,” Randall said. “He had a very unlikable attitude, an aloofness that turned people off.”

  Randall worried about Turi. “She wasn’t allowed to talk. He kept such a tight lid on her that when John left the room, she would whisper quickly to me, trying to get a few thoughts out before he came back. It was a burst of words, as much as she could say.”

  John scarcely let anyone talk, as he constantly monopolized the conversation. He was worse than ever about that. Of course, Turi’s daughters saw that, too. Once he had their mother under his control, he dropped his charming mask. He was arrogant and insufferable, with an opinion on everything, and as far as he was concerned, his opinion was always the right one.

  “He was totally nonsupportive of Turi,” Nozawa said with a sigh. “She was there to handle the computer, to look up what John wanted, and keep the books. And if John wanted access to the computer, she had to get up and let him use it—no matter what she was working on.”

  Randall Nozawa probably knew John Williams as well as anyone else did, and he grew used to John’s neurotic compulsions. Most of them revolved around his need to be in command of his own life—as well as other people’s.

  “He was obsessive about cleaning,” Randall said. “He did the cooking and he washed the dishes to be sure that the food was to his liking and that the kitchen was up to his standard of cleanliness. When I was there for meals, he would start wiping the table while I was still sitting there. He’d come back to wipe the table three or four times before he was satisfied.”

  John also made the beds, because he didn’t think Turi did it correctly. And he did all the shopping. None of this made Turi feel confident or capable.

  “He made long, precise lists of what he wanted to buy,” Randall recalled. “He told me that he couldn’t go shopping without a list. One time, we drove all the way to Port Orchard—thirty miles—to shop at Wal-Mart. When we got there, he realized he didn’t have his list with him, and said we couldn’t go shopping.”

  Randall suggested that they could probably reconstruct the list, but John was adamant—they would just have to go home. He couldn’t possibly remember all the items that were on the list, and he didn’t want to waste time. To Randall’s consternation, they turned around and went back to Gig Harbor without buying anything.

  John’s was the worst obsessive-compulsive disorder he had ever witnessed.

  When John did have his list, he was a speed shopper. He wouldn’t look at anything that wasn’t on the list, and he forbade whoever was with him to be distracted by anything that wasn’t on his list—even if there were tempting sales.

  “He would speed-walk through the store, checking off things on his list,” Randall remembered. “He told me that looking at other items interfered with his ‘chain of thought,’ because he had a ‘sequential mind.’ I guess he meant he had an ‘A-B-C’ kind of mind.”

  Randall knew that John drank port w
ine to help him “tolerate life when he got depressed.” He hid the wine bottles from Turi in their house in Seascape Hills, and, later, when they began to clear the property in Idaho. It kept him calmer, although Randall Nozawa never saw him drunk. He wouldn’t characterize him as an alcoholic. John apparently knew he could lose whatever control he had if he drank too much.

  John and Turi drove to California two or three times a year. Turi did all the driving, one of the few times when John handed her the reins. Why they went to California wasn’t clear; perhaps they visited his daughters, or they might have gone on Mannatech or Isagenix business. John distrusted cell phones, preferring to stop at pay phones—especially in Oregon. When Randall asked him why he used only pay phones on the road, he replied inscrutably, “I want to stay safe.”

  He never said what it was that he feared. It makes sense that he wouldn’t have wanted to drive—especially in Oregon—because he must have known there were still felony warrants out for him there. His fear of cell phones verged on paranoia. Did he really expect that police channels might pick up his conversations? Turi didn’t know his real name or much about his past—at least until almost the end of their relationship—but she accepted his peculiar aversion to cell phones.

  She frequently told Nozawa that she only wanted John to be happy, and she kept trying to find ways to bring that about—even though he could be “difficult” at times.

  Randall also learned to live with John’s neuroses. He was still enthusiastic about the possibilities inherent in Isagenix. He, John, and Turi had many discussions about the best way to begin their sales campaigns. It was agreed that Randall would be the face of Isagenix, and Turi would do all the bookkeeping and correspondence, and talk to prospective clients and associates. John would continue to fine-tune the way they sold Isagenix products and come up with ideas as only he could.