Mortal Danger and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  “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.

  And then she had a worse thought: Maybe John hadn’t just walked in on a murder in progress; maybe John had been the real killer, and this had been part of his “training” with Thaw. Maybe Thaw had walked in on him? Or perhaps it had been an accident or John had been forced to commit murder by the man he idolized.

  John was dead, and she could never ask him what had happened in Florida. But Kate herself had seen murder in his eyes, and he had demonstrated that it had been in his heart as he’d shot Turi and Randall.

  Every day of his life after that night in Florida, he lived in hiding to lesser and greater degrees. Although he never opened up to her, Kate wondered if he confided in the psychiatrists he consulted with. He always boasted after those sessions that he knew so much more than they did that they weren’t capable of helping him. Once, he went to see a female therapist, and he told Kate that he’d told the woman his “secret.”

  “She didn’t show up for their next appointment,” Kate recalled. “He wondered if he’d scared her away by dumping everything out on their first meeting.”

  Kate never really knew who John Branden was deep inside.

  Probably no one did.

  After John’s final crimes appeared in the media—first in the Northwest, and, later, nationally—Kate was stunned to learn that even people who were close to her hadn’t understood the true danger she’d lived with for more than eighteen years.

  “The day after I told my sister, Connie, that John was dead and how he had died, she called me and said, ‘I owe you an apology.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘I never thought that John would actually kill you. I thought he was too much of a wimp.’”

  Her own sister hadn’t totally believed her, even though Kate had tried her best to open up to Connie, to let her see the fear hiding inside her. If her sister hadn’t understood, why would anyone else have understood?

  And then, a month or so later, a retired American Airlines pilot whom Kate had known in San Diego and who currently lived on Orcas Island approached her with another apology. “Kate, a lot of people thought you were just being overly dramatic when they heard your story. I guess we were wrong.”

  Suddenly she understood why too many women won’t talk about abuse or even grasp the fact that they are living in an abusive situation. No one will believe them, so what’s the point of trying to escape? After her story became public, Kate heard from a number of women who had been living with domestic violence, although they admitted they’d always been afraid to talk about it. Studies show that most women attempt to leave eight times before they succeed in breaking patterns of abuse, fear, and guilt.

  “Even worse is the attitude of women who have said to me, ‘I just don’t understand why the woman stays,’” Kate said ruefully. “Their tone suggests that they would never stay in such a situation. To them, I say, ‘Don’t judge me if you haven’t walked in my shoes.’ When you are a woman who gives her heart totally and makes a true commitment to a relationship—to honor that commitment and to remain loyal through good times and bad—it’s almost impossible to believe that the situation will become too bad for you to fix.

  “And there’s also the dream factor. Most relationships are built on having common dreams and goals. I thought John and I shared that—helping people and making a positive impact on the world. I know Turi believed that, too. Letting go of that dream was excruciatingly painful. Sometimes it still is. Accepting that the dream is dead is an exceptionally hard thing to do. Accepting that you can’t fix it is harder.”

  Afterword

  There was something that Kate still needed to do, although many people might not understand it. She had wanted to warn John’s next victim, but she’d never been able to find her. For eight years, she had thought of what she would say to save that woman. Now, she knew her name, but it was too late. She wrote to Turi Bentley anyway, hoping that Turi would somehow be able to hear her.

  And hoping that women in similar danger would get the message and save themselves.

  Here is Kate’s letter:

  Dear Turi,

  Although I’ll never know you, in many ways I feel I do. I know you were a kind and loving person who met a man who was warm, sensitive, tender, communicative, and appeared to be loving and supportive. He was very intelligent and you believed in his view of health and thought that he could reach his full potential with your love and support. You, who truly cared about people and wanted to help them to have better health, and, therefore, better lives, believed that the man you knew as John Williams had a gift. One that you embraced and wanted to help him share with the world.

  I know these things because I too believed in John William Branden and nearly lost my life for doing so. How I wish I could have warned you. Would you have listened? How I wish you would not have challenged him that last night. Maybe if you had just stayed in your room, the outcome could have been different.

  Yet I know how absurd, frustrating, aggravating and crazy-making John’s insanity was. I know what it’s like to look into the face of a man who has professed so very often to love you fully, unconditionally and forever, and then watch his lips form the words, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I also know that you hear those words, look into his eyes and know he won’t. If you can just survive the episode.

  I also know that John could truly mean those words as when he told me, ‘You’re going to die tonight.’ And his eyes said he was dead serious.

  You cannot imagine the sorrow and guilt I’ve felt over your death. When I first heard of your tragic death, I felt guilty that I hadn’t died, for then the authorities might have looked harder at John, you wouldn’t have met him and would still be alive today, enjoying and being enjoyed by your children and grandchildren.

  Your family is what I feel most guilty about. I have no children, no grandchildren. I so often wonder why I’m even still here and pray that I will figure out why, and use the rest of my life to give something good to the world.

  I am heartsick that I could do nothing to change your outcome. I KNEW John WOULD KILL the next woman he was with, and still can’t think of anything more I could have done. But how I wish there could have been something.

  I probably know better than anyone what you went through that night, and the others when you locked yourself in the bedroom. Somewhere—and I think it began with the abuse from his sister (if any of that is true), and accelerated during his relationship with Bill Thaw, John’s dark side evolved into creating his bipolar personality. His drinking, of course, led him deeper and deeper into his anger, paranoia, and psychosis. It wasn’t YOUR job, or mine, to “fix” him, although I know we both tried our best to do so. We both sought to love and be loved, and thought at the outset that we’d found the perfect mate. We both were dead (and almost dead) wrong. I am sorry from the bottom of my soul that I could not help, that you were killed, and can only hope and believe that you are at peace in a better p
lace. If you run into my dad, he can be a great comfort to you, as I truly believe he had a hand in John’s turning the gun on himself. I only wish he could have gotten to John before John shot you and Randall.

  We both know the good times shared with John. We both know the horrible. I ask now for your forgiveness, your understanding, and your insight. I am still on this planet, and like you, want to do something good for others. I would feel honored to accomplish something that you wanted to do in your honor. Please let me know what that might be—and how to begin.

  Sincerely,

  Kate

  If this case seems all too familiar to you, if you are living in a domestic violence situation and need help, please use your own computer or one in a library and go to www.ndvh.com or call 1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or TTY 1-800-787-3224. You are not alone, and there are domestic violence shelters and centers in every state to help you. They will protect your privacy and security.

  Get help now!

  WRITTEN IN BLOOD

  When I was much younger and far more naïve, I believed that almost any criminal could change, could become rehabilitated, and return to the free world without being a danger to anyone else. Counseling, understanding, and kindness could help them change their ways. I didn’t understand the many personality disorders—and even mental illness—that entered into the equation. Men and women with sociopathic, narcissistic, histrionic, and borderline personality disorders seldom change, because they don’t want to change.

  I’ve often said that personality disorders are like rampant ivy: While it may be ripped out of one side of the brain, it’s growing back on the other.

  The people who possess these traits and entrenched reactions are the most important people in their own worlds, and they feel no empathy whatsoever for anyone else. In a way, it’s better to be frankly psychotic—crazy, insane. Those suffering with a psychosis such as paranoia or schizophrenia cannot manage their lives and are often more amenable to treatment than sociopaths, who view themselves as managing very well, indeed.

  Often—not always. Some psychotic individuals who are unwilling to accept treatment with drugs, therapy, or shock treatments, or who disobey their doctors’ recommendations, can be extremely dangerous if they stop their therapy.

  I don’t know just where to place the killer in the following case on the mental-health scale. I do know he was incredibly dangerous, and those who lived around him in a small, quiet town had no idea of his background.

  When the full story came out, a front-running 2008 presidential candidate was caught in the backlash of scandal. When I saw the killer’s latest victims on the evening news, I felt an extra pang of sorrow. They’d had everything going for them and long lives ahead. They’d been newly married and in love.

  And then someone had come knocking on their front door in the early morning darkness of a bleak November day.

  Chapter One

  November 17, 2007, was a Saturday, less than a week before Thanksgiving, and a day that promised to be full of rain. But that was to be expected in western Washington State in November, just as daylight barely lasts seven hours. In the summer, though, the sun shines and it’s light out for eighteen hours. Most natives cheerfully accept the trade-off.

  Graham is a very small town at the end of a multilane highway, and it sits in the shadow of towering and breathtaking Mt. Rainier. It’s horse country. Acres of meadows are fenced in so horses have freedom to run for miles. The hamlet also has easy access to a number of pristine wilderness areas. Like the last case, this, too, took place in Pierce County, but it has a far different ambience from Tacoma or even Gig Harbor. Many of those who live in Graham commute to Seattle and Tacoma to work, but they look forward to coming home to the smell of freshly cut grass and alfalfa.

  The building boom of the new century has spread to Graham, and in 2007, there were several five-acre parcels of land for sale on one side of 70th Avenue East at 305th, a gravel road. There were also new houses in various stages of completion, most of them unoccupied. A few houses along the road had families living in them, and there were also a number of trailers—some luxury double-wide mobile homes and some aged travel trailers, with shacklike structures built around them.

  Local ordinances had not yet laid down all kinds of restrictions about land use and building permits. Basically, it was live and let live in this friendly town where almost everyone did know everyone else. There were some local taverns and, for those who didn’t drink, grocery stores and the post office where they could catch up on the news.

  One thing was certain. No one in Graham, Washington, knew that there was a savage killer living among them.

  The call to 911 at the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department dispatch center came in from a man named Jeff Freitas, who owned some prime acreage in Graham. He had halfway planned to take his neighbor, Brian Mauck, hunting that morning, but when he went by his house at 5:00 a.m., all the lights were out, and he figured Brian and his wife, Bev, were sleeping.

  When Freitas returned from hunting at eleven that Saturday morning, he saw that one of the front panels of his friends’ front door was knocked out. This wasn’t particularly alarming, as he knew that the newly married couple sometimes forgot their house keys and resorted to removing the door section so they could reach in and turn the locks from the inside. Most of the neighbors knew that. Brian kept intending to get extra keys and fix the door solidly, but other things got in the way.

  When Jeff Freitas got to his modern double-wide mobile home nearby, he decided to call Brian and Beverly just to be sure everything was okay. Their habits were fairly predictable, and he usually saw them around their new gray and white ranch-style home with the three-car garage by this time of the morning. And the temperature outside was cold enough that he would have thought Brian would have fixed the door panel right after they got into the house.

  There was no answer to his phone call. He tried both Brian and Bev’s cell phones, and no one answered those either.

  The Maucks’ two vehicles were parked in their driveway, and this wasn’t a neighborhood where people walked to the store. Why didn’t they answer the phone?

  Jeff Freitas told his wife and brother-in-law that he was going to walk down to the Maucks’ house to check on them. Maybe their cell phones’ batteries were dead, and the land line could have gone out, too. But the thought of the missing door panel kept bothering Freitas.

  As he came up to the front door, he could hear a television playing loudly inside. He suddenly felt a dark sense of foreboding. He forced himself to kneel down and look through the space where the door panel should have been.

  He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at, but it appeared that Brian—or maybe Bev—might have fallen asleep on the media room floor, and someone had covered them with a blanket or spread. He wasn’t sure why they’d fallen asleep or what had happened. Probably they’d been out the night before; they usually went out on Friday nights, and maybe they had been tired enough to drift off in front of the TV.

  Still, Freitas somehow knew the real explanation wasn’t going to be good; he just tried to delay finding out why his nerves were jangling. As his eyes adjusted, he saw what might be spilled wine or catsup—his mind darted frantically so he wouldn’t have to face the obvious source—or blood on the carpet.

  Freitas was a logger, forty-two years old, six foot one, and 240 pounds. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, but he didn’t want to go into the house. He backed away and called 911.

  Pierce County Deputies Kent Mundell and Laura Wilson were dispatched at about two in the afternoon and met Detectives Brian Lund and Tom Catey from the Criminal Investigation Division, who arrived soon after. They checked the outside of the house and found no signs of a break-in. Actually, the front door still had a dead bolt in place, so whoever had kicked the door panel could conceivably have done so to reach inside and lock the door, rather than unlocking it. The door section still lay just inside.

  Catey peeked through t
he door, just as Jeff Freitas had. He saw a blue fleece blanket and two blue and white flannel sheets spread out on the floor of the entrance hall and dining area, and he recognized that the dried red liquid at the edges of the bedding was almost certainly blood. In the great room just beyond there were two brown recliners and a matching couch, all placed so that viewers could see the large-screen television set. He thought he could make out a human form lying on the floor of that room, but most of it was blocked from his view by one of the recliners.

  Deputy Laura Wilson walked rapidly around the perimeter of the house, checking for anything that seemed out of place and for other obvious points of entry. She came back shaking her head; she’d found nothing amiss outside the house.

  Jeff Freitas had a key to the Maucks’ residence, and he gave it to the Pierce County deputies.

  It was time to go inside. As Lund and Catey entered the home to assess the scene, they stepped over a woman’s black shoe that rested incongruously on the threshold. They saw more blood—this time blood spatter that had flown onto the walls from the floor of the dining room, leaving a large blank spot that was quite possibly the “phantom image” of a killer. The blood droplets appeared to be high velocity, as if they had come from a gunshot wound. In that case, the shooter and his clothing had probably trapped the blood spatter before it hit the wall.

  Catey and Lund were apprehensive about what they would find farther inside. They saw bare hands and feet, and realized there were probably two bodies in the great room, both covered with blankets. Closer now, they could see a man’s lower body clothed in jeans and with bare feet, and it looked as if a woman lay horizontally on top of his shoulders. Only her feet and one arm protruded from a blanket covering, but the two bodies formed the crude pattern of a cross.