Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers

by Ann Rule

I’ll Love You Forever

  (from A Fever in the Heart)

  I learned about this story of ultimate betrayal long after it was too late to save the victim. Ruth Logg’s daughters and other relatives could not save her either, but they prevailed and saw a certain kind of justice done in a landmark court decision.

  This is the kind of nightmare case that speaks to every woman on her own. Each of us can identify with Ruth Logg. Each of us would like to think that we would never fall for the blandishments of a man like Ruth’s “Tony.” And yet, inside, I think we must admit that any woman who hopes to find permanent love risks meeting the perfect liar instead of the perfect lover.

  When I researched this case many years ago, I found Ruth Logg’s “perfect lover” so sinister that I actually changed my usual pen name to a completely different pseudonym so that he wouldn’t be able to find me.

  For this story only, I became a mysterious female author named “Dierdre Fox.” The convicted killer had threatened detectives and their families, and filed numerous million-dollar suits. I didn’t want him to know who I was.

  Although he was a charming, take-charge man who seemed larger than life when he seduced the victim, he was much diminished when I first saw him in a courtroom, on trial for murder. He didn’t look dangerous at that point. Rather, he appeared to be a small, gray man with pale skin and dark circles beneath his eyes. Still, his mistress was there, sitting just behind him, wearing the lavish gifts he had given her, probably using largesse from his victim’s insurance policy. I could see glimpses of the powerful, conniving man he really was beneath his humble-for-the-jury demeanor.

  And when I looked at the police photographs of the dead woman who had adored him and read report after report of his lifetime as a con man, I realized how crafty and dangerous he was. Even today, when I visit the small Washington town where he began his machinations, people remember him and tell me stories I’ve never heard before about even more of his fraudelent schemes.

  Yes, I was right in remaining anonymous when I wrote about him.

  I think you will see why as the story of the man who promised to love Ruth “forever” unfolds.

  When her life was viewed in terms of worldly goods, Ruth Logg had everything. The lovely blond widow had been well provided for by her late husband, Les. She lived alone for several years after Les’s death in her sprawling house in Auburn, Washington. The grounds were impeccably maintained and there was even a huge swimming pool. Ruth’s home was valued in the early seventies at $85,000. Today, it would be worth well over a million dollars. Les Logg’s business holdings had amounted to something over a quarter of a million dollars at the time of his death. Again, that $250,000 would be worth ten times as much in the economy of the nineties. Ruth herself had a good business head. She had moved smoothly into her new place as owner of a business.

  Unlike many women who are suddenly widowed, Ruth Logg was able to manage. Her two pretty teenage daughters, Kathleen and Susan, lived with her and she loved them devotedly. But Ruth was only in her early forties, and she sometimes dreamed of finding a man to share her life. She was lonely and the years ahead often seemed to stretch out bleakly.

  Ruth knew that her girls would soon be moving away to start their own lives, and that was as it should be. She accepted that. But she couldn’t bear the thought of rattling around her huge house alone once Kathleen and Susan were gone. In March of 1971, she put the house on the market. Perhaps she would buy a condominium or take an apartment where she wouldn’t have to worry about yard work. Her personal safety was on her mind too. A woman in a house alone wasn’t as safe as one who lived close to other people in a security building.

  Most single women hold on to a romantic dream that a special man will come along one day and change their lives. Ruth Logg was no exception. She was far too young to give up on love, even though her prospects looked slim. She hated the idea of dating services or Parents Without Partners, or blind dates set up by well-meaning friends. She sometimes wondered why it had to be so difficult to meet someone.

  And then Ruth Logg did meet someone in such an unexpected way. It was a blustery March afternoon when she first encountered the man who would suddenly launch her world in exciting new directions. A sleek luxury car pulled up in front of her home and a compactly muscled, impeccably dressed man emerged and knocked at her door. He had a great voice. He introduced himself as “Dr. Anthony Fernandez.”

  No one would have described Dr. Fernandez as handsome, and yet he had an undeniably charismatic quality. He had wide shoulders and thickly muscled arms and wrists, and he looked at Ruth with warm dark eyes under thick brows. Ruth could sense that he was gentle. His manners were wonderful; he was almost apologetic for interrupting her schedule, but he did want to see her home. Ruth assured him that she would be delighted to show him through the house.

  Dr. Fernandez explained that he was forty-eight years old and divorced. He said he had just opened a family counseling clinic in the Tacoma area and that he was hoping to buy a house within easy commuting distance to his business.

  Ruth Logg was quite taken with Dr. Fernandez, who urged her to call him “Tony.” They talked as she led him through her home and he seemed impressed with the floor plan, the way she had decorated the rooms, and with the lawn and gardens. It wasn’t long before they stopped talking about the house; they discovered that they shared many interests. Dr. Anthony Fernandez asked Ruth Logg if she would join him for dinner and she accepted, a little surprised at herself for agreeing to a date with someone she really didn’t know.

  Tony and Ruth had such a good time on their first evening that they both knew they would see more of each other. More dates followed and Ruth suddenly found herself caught up in a whirlwind courtship. After so many years at the edge of other people’s lives, she found it incredibly exciting to have this fascinating man pursuing her. And Tony Fernandez was pursuing her. At first, Ruth questioned her great good fortune, but then she accepted it. She was, after all, a good-looking woman with a lush figure and a pretty face. She had forgotten that in her years as a widow. Now, Ruth became even prettier with her newfound happiness.

  It never occurred to Ruth that Tony might be interested in her because she was wealthy. In fact, she believed that what she had was chicken feed compared to what he owned; Tony had told her that he was a man with substantial assets. He spoke of timber holdings and real estate, and, of course, he had his counseling practice. He didn’t need her money.

  Ruth didn’t know that the plush car Tony drove was rented, nor did she know much about his life before they met. None of that mattered. Ruth Logg was totally in love with Anthony Fernandez.

  Ruth’s family and friends were not as enthusiastic about Tony. They wanted her to be happy, of course, because she had devoted many years to helping other people, but they were worried. They had checked into Tony’s background, and they soon heard rumors that “Dr.” Fernandez had spent time in prison for fraud. They doubted that Ruth would believe the rumors, so they pleaded with her to check into Fernandez’s background before she considered marriage.

  Ruth only smiled and reassured them that she knew all about Tony. He had told her that he had had a little bit of trouble in the past. He had been honest with her, she said, and his past didn’t matter to her. Ruth’s philosophy was that everyone deserves a second chance. Why should she dredge up unhappy memories? Ruth’s sister was particularly persistent in trying to coax Ruth off her rosy cloud.

  When Tony Fernandez discovered that, he told Ruth’s sister that if she didn’t like his plans with Ruth, then she could just consider herself excluded from their social circle and future family gatherings. Amazingly, Ruth went along with Tony’s decision.

  No one is blinder than someone in the first stages of romance, and Ruth refused to listen to one detrimental word about Tony. By September of 1971, Ruth and Tony were engaged. She gave up all thoughts of selling her house; she and Tony would need it to live in. At his suggestion, Ruth and Tony drew up n
ew wills. Although the will Ruth had drawn up three years earlier had left everything she owned—$250,000 plus her home—to her daughters, her new will left it all to Tony. She was confident that if anything should happen to her, Tony would provide for her girls. In turn, Tony left everything he owned to Ruth in his will.

  What Anthony Fernandez actually owned was debatable. Despite his grandiose boasting to his fiancée, Tony’s assets were negligible. When he met Ruth, he had seventy-five hundred dollars in the bank, a thousand-dollar bond, and some mining claims and real property that would one day sell at a tax sale for less than four thousand dollars. Beyond that, Tony had substantial judgments filed against him. His financial statement would have been written entirely in red ink.

  Despite objections and pleadings from the people who truly loved Ruth Logg, she and Dr. Tony Fernandez flew to Puerto Rico on January 5, 1972, where they were married. She had only known him ten months, but it seemed as if they were meant to be together. They toasted their new life with champagne, and Ruth was blissfully happy. Her honeymoon with her new husband was everything she had hoped. She was confident that, in time, her family would come to see Tony for the wonderful man he was.

  While she had left Tony everything in her will, she didn’t plan on dying for at least four more decades. She had too much to live for now. When Tony casually mentioned that it would be easier for him to help her manage her affairs if he had her Power of Attorney, Ruth didn’t hesitate. They went at once to a notary and Ruth gave her husband the power to sell her property or do any other business in her name.

  In retrospect, it is easy to see that Ruth Logg Fernandez knew pitifully little about this man who was her husband. Even her worried family had no idea.

  It would not have been difficult for Ruth to have found out about Tony’s recent and remote past. Reams of newspaper copy had been published about Tony Fernandez’s checkered career. In his home territory, he had been at first famous—and later infamous.

  In the early 1950s, Tony Fernandez had been an important player in the timber industry of Washington and Oregon. When he was in his twenties, he had made a killing in the logging business. He operated mainly out of Longview, a city of twenty thousand in southwestern Washington. The Longview Daily News frequently carried reports of Fernandez’s new and massive timber buys. Some of his deals involved millions of dollars worth of virgin timber.

  Tony Fernandez was listed as a partner in many companies, and he was considered one of the more solid citizens in Longview. He was headline material: “Fernandez Buys Timber at Dam Site in Oregon” (this was on July 19, 1954, when Tony had purchased 40 million board feet at thirty-two dollars per thousand feet); “Chinook Region Logging Planned” (this was on October 4, 1954, when he had bought eight million board feet); “Fernandez Buys Pacific Timber” (on March 9, 1956, when Tony Fernandez estimated his newest contract would eventually cost $300,000).

  At the time Tony Fernandez was only thirty-one, but he was on a roll and he didn’t stop at timber. On March 22, 1955, the Longview Daily News told of a new mining company being incorporated in Cowlitz County, Washington. Tony Fernandez was its president. The purpose of the company would be “to mine, mill, concentrate, convert, smelt, treat and sell gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, brass, iron and steel.” The new company also expected to obtain oil rights. Stock valued at $100,000 had been authorized.

  Tony Fernandez maintained a high profile. He drove new Cadillacs. As an honorary deputy sheriff, he was allowed to install a siren in his car. He lived in a big house on the hill above Longview with his wife and four children. He was a Boy Scout leader and a Longview city councilman.

  In April of 1957, Fernandez announced that he was branching out into Canada and that he had purchased a billion board feet of timber—an early land grant by the British Royal family—near Nelson, British Columbia for $1,500,000. He said he was considering setting up a branch office near the Canadian border.

  In reality, Tony’s business empire seemed to have been built on shifting sands. Several huge timber companies brought suit against him, saying that he had logged off areas long after his contracts had expired. He was also accused of selling sections of timber by misrepresentation; he had identified the wrong sections of trees to prospective buyers. They thought they were buying acreage thick with timber when in reality Tony had simply shown them property that he didn’t own. They had signed purchase agreements without checking legal descriptions.

  It wasn’t only the big corporations who were after Tony Fernandez. Several elderly landowners claimed they had been cajoled into signing their names to blank contracts, only to find to their regret that they had signed quit-claim deeds to their timberland.

  Tony Fernandez couldn’t juggle his books forever. By July 1958 the IRS began to look at him with a jaundiced eye. The Internal Revenue Service filed notice of a tax lien of $95,246.31 against him for taxes that he hadn’t paid in 1951, 1952, and 1953. The IRS filed what was known as a “jeopardy assessment” against Fernandez’s assets. This amounted to a lien against all his property. It followed two Superior Court memorandums saying that the wheeler-dealer logger had to pay two logging firms over half a million dollars as the result of civil suits.

  Still, Tony Fernandez drove his Cadillacs, lived in his nice house, and kept up the facade of a highly successful businessman and a pillar in Longview.

  Individuals who had done business with Fernandez were nothing if not confused. An Oregon man, Bill Belcher, was foggy about a trip he had made to Nelson, British Columbia, with Fernandez in March of 1958. Tony had offered to “fly over” his timber holdings there so Belcher could have a look. But the clouds had been so thick that Belcher couldn’t tell whether he was looking at fir, pine, spruce, hemlock…or tumbleweed. When they attempted to reach the woods later by Jeep, they were forced back by deep snowdrifts.

  While they pondered their predicament, Belcher stepped behind the Jeep to light a cigarette. The next conscious memory he had was of lying beside a railroad track; his head felt as though a train had run over it. He was found by railroad workers who called for medics. Belcher was hospitalized with severe head injuries for ten days.

  Later, he learned that Tony Fernandez had returned to the guest cabin where the two men had been staying. He had told the managers that Belcher had decided to stay up in the woods in a miner’s cabin.

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police notified Bill Belcher’s family that he had been critically injured. His wife left at once for Canada. After assuring herself that he would survive, she followed Belcher’s instructions to retrieve his briefcase in which he had carried important papers and money. She found the briefcase but Belcher could not explain a logging contract that had been tucked inside. There was also a receipt for $40,000 in payment for some land.

  Bill Belcher had no memory whatsoever of what happened to him after he stepped out of Tony Fernandez’s vehicle to have a cigarette alongside a snowy road. However, he was adamant that he would never have bought timber he had not even seen, and he would not have given someone $40,000 for trees hidden in fog.

  While Belcher had lain unconscious, a bank officer in Grants Pass, Oregon, where Belcher had an account, received several phone calls from a man who identified himself as Bill Belcher. The caller directed the banker to transfer $40,000 to a Gresham, Oregon, bank to the account of the “Fernandez-Belcher deal.”

  Belcher, who had never suffered blackouts, fainting spells, or anything akin to them before his mysterious “attack” behind the Jeep in the snowy Canadian timberland, eventually recovered thirty-six thousand from Tony Fernandez’s company in an out-of-court settlement.

  In 1959 Tony Fernandez faced charges of another kind. He was arrested in March of that year and charged with three counts of carnal knowledge and indecent liberties after a teenage girl alleged that he had forced sex on her two years earlier. After many delays and a change of venue to Clark County, Washington, Fernandez was acquitted of the charges.

  Tony Fernandez c
ontinued to remain active in timber commodities. In the latter part of April 1961, another bizarre incident took place when John Casteel, an elderly Cresswell, Oregon, lumberman, flew over the Canadian timberland with Fernandez. It was almost a replay of what had happened with Bill Belcher. Casteel couldn’t see well enough to judge the quality or kind of timber far beneath him. All the while, Fernandez kept talking, mentioning that the syndicate he represented had recently purchased 1,800 acres in Wasco County, Oregon, for two million dollars. Casteel craned his neck to try to see the trees that Fernandez wanted to sell him, but the plane was much too high and the weather didn’t cooperate.

  After the abortive flight, Fernandez and Casteel stayed in a Spokane hotel and Tony said it would take about $100,000 to protect the rights to the Canadian timber. Casteel said he didn’t have that kind of money to invest in timber at the moment and wasn’t interested. Tony knew, however, that the elderly man had plenty of money; earlier, Casteel had given Tony a three-day option at a price of three million dollars on some timberland Casteel owned.

  When the two returned to Longview, Fernandez invited the old man to look at a tract of timber twenty miles east of Longview. After they had looked at one stand of trees, Tony suggested they check out another forest which grew at the end of a logging road.

  They viewed the trees and Casteel wasn’t very impressed. On the way out of the deep woods, Tony Fernandez had suddenly shouted that he had lost control of the Jeep.

  “When I looked up, I saw Fernandez bailing out,” said Casteel, who proved to be more resilient than Tony had figured. “He was still hanging on to the steering wheel.”

  Casteel himself had had no choice but to ride the out of-control Jeep to the bottom of a sixty-foot grade, “bouncing like a rubber ball” inside the closed cab. To his amazement, he was still alive when the Jeep finally stopped against a tree trunk. He had clambered out of the wrecked Jeep and made his way painfully up the slope.