Mortal Danger (12 page)

In October, Kate and Mittens started their new life on Orcas Island. Her mother and father stayed for a month but left before Thanksgiving—long enough to realize, along with Kate, that the “cute” summer cottage was drafty and cold in the winter.

She didn’t know anyone, and she was living under an alias—“Chris White.” But then she learned that on this lightly populated island, there was already a Chris White—a male optometrist. So she changed the spelling of her first name and became “Kris White.”

On many days, she felt as though she was in a surreal world. “I didn’t know who to say I was,” she said. “I would
introduce myself as Kris. When I got to know people and was comfortable enough with them to mention my story, I told them my real name was Kate. But it was a really unsettling, confusing situation.”

At American Airlines, Kate kept her real name, as well as her actual Social Security number; she was concerned that the government might not credit her with all the years she’d worked when it came time to collect her Social Security.

“I finally decided that my name was basically all I had left, and I’d be damned if John Branden was going to take that away from me, too. He’d already taken my house, my new career, my mind, my soul, and almost my body!”

After she went to great lengths to explain to American how dangerous it would be for her if John ever managed to find her, they agreed to protect her by putting DNGO [Do Not Give Out] next to all her information. They wouldn’t tell
anyone
that she even worked there, no matter what. That made her feel somewhat safer.

“But it’s hard to get people to understand,” Kate said. “No one really does understand domestic violence unless they’ve experienced it themselves.”

It was a long time before she could fly again. Her new rental had lots of stairs and a very steep driveway, and her leg took a while to heal. Her plans to return to American Airlines and fly out of Seattle didn’t work out at first, because she couldn’t fly with a broken leg. Moreover, her “hardship transfer” request to Seattle hadn’t yet been approved. Since the postmark on John’s last letter in September read “San Francisco,” she didn’t feel safe flying regularly out of there.

When her leg finally was strong enough, Kate was granted her transfer to Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle as a home base.

She was Kris White now to most people on Orcas. A woman living alone with her cat, someone who worked off-island much of the time. She kept in touch with her family, but very carefully. She didn’t want to place them in any danger. When she flew, it meant a long ferry ride and a one-hundred-mile drive to the airport, but she was gainfully employed again.

Sometimes, at night, Kate woke from a sound sleep, frightened by some noise she couldn’t immediately identify. A tree limb cracking in a high wind. Footsteps in the leaves, or just deer looking for food? Something scratching at her door? Her phone ringing, but when she answered, nobody was there. That would be John’s style.

Like a fox, he had gone to earth somewhere. He could be far, far away—or he could be creeping around outside her cottage.

In the daylight, she was quite sure he had no idea where she was. If he did, he would have come forward, sure that he could convince her he was a changed man.

Despite all her rationalizations, Kate Jewell/Kris White still lived in fear.

Weeks passed.

Then months, and finally, a year.

She made new friends, and she sometimes worked with people who wanted to know more about healthy eating.

But she always heard silent footsteps walking just behind her.

Kate still didn’t think that John Branden was dead. He
was alive—somewhere. And she was just as sure that he would be a threat to the next woman who came into his life. Her one regret about disappearing from Gold Beach—and from his life—was that she wouldn’t be able to warn the next woman. Sometimes she had nightmares about that. She felt that John was living in a protected environment, and that his daughter Tamara was helping him, but Kate couldn’t risk calling her. She just prayed that Tamara would do the right thing and turn him in once she accepted how hazardous he was to women.

Buddhists were nonviolent. Maybe that would make the difference, and Tamara would understand that her father had gone beyond normal behavior. He needed to be locked up.

For two years, John’s movements could not be traced, and there was simply an empty spot in the masquerade that was his life when no one seemed to know where he was hiding.

Turid Lee Bentley
was born in Stavanger, Norway, on January 28, 1941, as war was brewing in Europe. She came to America with her mother and father—Liv and Magnus Lee—and her sister, Bodil, and lived her whole life in the Tacoma–Gig Harbor area. She attended Mason Junior High School, and the castlelike Stadium High in Tacoma, and then the brand-new Woodrow Wilson High School, also in Tacoma. She stayed close to friends she made when they were all teenagers. She was a true Scandinavian beauty, slender, with green eyes and thick brown hair, which turned white as she passed middle age.

Almost always called “Turi,” she resembled Kate Jewell in that they both had fine bone structure with similar facial features, although Kate’s coloring was darker. They had other things in common: Both Turi and Kate had a passion for helping others achieve optimum health, and they wanted to change lives for the better as much as they could. Turi and her husband, Lorne Bentley, married when they were quite young. After decades in a marriage and living in a circumscribed region in Washington State, Turi was far more naïve than Kate, who had traveled the world, but she
had a good business head, and she worked as the office manager/bookkeeper in her husband’s building contractor business. In the early days of her marriage, Turi also worked for the
Tacoma News-Tribune
typing classified ads. She was a lightning-fast typist, who typed her children’s school papers.

Turi always worked. Like Kate, she sold Mannatech products. She was also a sales associate for Shaklee products. Money itself meant very little to Turi, but it allowed her to support numerous charities that she believed in—in many diverse areas. When her daughter Susan went through her files, she was amazed to find how much money Turi had given to charities like a crisis pregnancy center, Gospel for Asia, World Vision, and the Reverend David Wilkerson, a country preacher who walked the hazardous streets of New York City, armed only with his Bible and his belief that even the most troubled and threatening dregs of society could be rescued. His book,
The Cross and the Switchblade,
became a classic.

Turi helped people closer to home, too, but she didn’t talk about it. She was always there for friends and even strangers who needed a listening ear, a casserole, a pie, or a place to stay. She attended church regularly for many, many years, but she was sometimes impatient with church politics and pettiness in the congregation. She believed in living her Christianity by helping, in practical and caring ways, those who needed it.

“She would drop everything to listen and lend support to the many God sent her way,” her daughter Susan recalled. “Often those the rest of the world had given up on.
She had that rare gift of seeing the heart where many people got stuck on the exterior trappings.”

Still, Turi had a sense of humor, and she could be feisty, particularly when she stood up for someone else. “She had an incredible faith in God,” Susan said, “but it was a relationship and not a religion, and that makes all the difference in the world.” Quite possibly it was Turi Bentley’s devout faith in God that saw her through life’s pitfalls. As a young woman she’d befriended in Gig Harbor remarked, “[Turi] was ‘sold out for Jesus’!”

Turi Bentley never aimed to get “more stars in her crown”; she simply stepped in where she saw she was needed.

Turi and Kate Jewell never met at Mannatech meetings or sales promotions; the company was huge, and they lived in different states. Turi had sold its products for years, and she, too, sincerely cared about her clients’ health. Even today, those who were close to Turi in 2001—including her family—aren’t sure how or where she met John Williams. In all likelihood, it was through the Mannatech roster of associates who were willing to participate in three-way phone conversations with prospective clients and give personal testimony on the efficacy of the curative powers of Mannatech products.

Lorne and Turi Bentley were listed in 2001. If they were called, they could explain—as laymen only—how Mannatech was effective against bronchitis and prostate cancer. The chances were that Lorne was only a silent partner who wasn’t nearly as involved in the Mannatech “family” as Turi was.

It was a moot question anyway; the Bentleys’ marriage was drawing to a close that year.

At some point, Turi’s children noticed that she was corresponding with a John Williams. Her marriage was over, although there would be a long, drawn-out division of their marital property, which her son, David, oversaw. For the most part, Lorne kept his contracting business assets, and he was awarded their yacht. Turi got the family home they had built near Point Defiance. She eventually sold it and moved to an apartment in Tacoma. She kept up a cheerful front, but she was vulnerable to an intense man who managed to be suave and kind at the same time. John Williams could read who people wanted him to be, and he was adept at putting on whatever mask coincided with their expectations.

Turi and John Williams probably met in Washington or California; he had reasons not to be in Oregon. It’s unlikely that she met him in church. It’s more probable that they met through Mannatech or Shaklee, some business they both believed in. It would have been easy for John to strike up a conversation with Turi there, exchanging business cards, phone numbers.

She was still lovely, with a serene beauty that few women manage to maintain into their sixties. She didn’t feel old, but she no longer felt as if she was the center of anyone’s life, either.

Kate had never heard of Turi Bentley, of course, but she was the nameless, faceless woman Kate had wanted so much to warn and protect. John couldn’t manage alone;
she was sure of that. He needed a woman to hold his hand, to sand the sharp edges off life’s problems—a woman who would devote herself to him. He had explained his demands to Kate in the early days of their affair. And Kate knew he would eventually enslave whatever woman fell for his blandishments and believed his lies.

Kate had attempted to convince his daughters—particularly Tamara—that their father was dangerous. The next woman he became involved with might go through what she had—and quite possibly endure an even worse fate. She never managed to get through to Tamara in person, having been reduced to sending messages through Tamara’s fiancé. Maybe his daughters really
didn’t
know where he was. After that, it became too risky for Kate to even try. She didn’t want John to be able to track her down on the windswept island where she was hiding.

After a few years on Orcas Island, Kate tentatively began to feel a bit out of harm’s way. There was no way to get off-island without the ferries, and new faces in town drew attention. But she would never feel completely secure until she knew John was behind bars. And she dreaded hearing what he might have done, wherever he was.

That is, if he was still alive.

He was. In the first years of the twenty-first century, John Branden emerged from hiding, as shiny and renewed as a snake who’d just shed its tattered outer skin. He was close to sixty now, five years younger than Turi Bentley (although he looked older), and his hair had thinned to baldness with a few “comb-over” strands. But his eyes were
just as bright and hypnotic as ever. As always, he was full of moneymaking ideas and grand plans. He wasn’t John Branden any longer, though; he was John W. Williams. He’d always had his clutch of driver’s licenses and identification cards, and he still did. He had plenty of “paper” to support his image as John Williams. He didn’t call himself a doctor now, except to a very few people close to him, in whom he confided that he was a naturopathic “physician.”

He was simply “Mr. Williams.”

Turi was sixty-one when she met John, and like most older women who are alone, she doubted that there would be another man in her life. Her three children were grown and on their own, and she was a very loving and proud “Grambar” to ten grandchildren. She had too many friends to count, and she was full of joy in her life despite the disappointments she had known.

After meeting John Williams, she began to hope that she might have a second chance at love.

Shortly after the turn of the century, John was living in a cabin in Northern California near Mount Shasta. He may have led Turi to believe that he owned it, along with the meadows surrounding it. In truth, he was the house-sitter. The true owner lived in Switzerland and trusted John to take care of his property. How John met the property owner is anybody’s guess. Without having his permission to do so, John rented out rooms to strangers and kept the rent he collected. He would later brag to a friend in Gig Harbor that he not only had a free place to live but he also had an income of about $800 a month from the rent.

In his phone conversations with Turi, he spoke mysteriously about the six months he’d spent living in a Buddhist
monastery, trying to sort out his life. That was apparently before he moved to Mount Shasta.

Tamara Branden was a Buddhist. Perhaps he’d hidden on her property, which was rife with many of the religious icons and tranquil gardens favored by the religion. Perhaps that was what he meant when he said he’d been in a monastery. At any rate, he had outrun the dogs tracking him in Napa, California, had apparently spent time in some sort of religious retreat, and lived quite comfortably on the Mount Shasta estate.

John Branden-Hennings-Jewell-Howell-Williams preferred pretty women with good figures, and Turi Bentley certainly fit that category. He sought out those who would indulge him, and Turi was kindness and consideration personified, always concerned for others. He cared only that she doted on him. He wasn’t interested in her religious beliefs and was annoyed that she interacted with her family and with so many friends of all ages. Her brilliant smile drew people to her and made them remember her.

Turi was an intelligent woman who had never been a goody-goody. She could be quite bold and witty. She taught her daughters to always speak the truth and face their fears head-on. Because
she
told the truth, she didn’t recognize that John had lied to her from the beginning. She didn’t even know his real name, and it’s possible that he planned his scenarios so she never would.

John convinced Turi to invest in “his” Mount Shasta property. She paid to have the garage attic remodeled into a nice apartment where John could live—while he rented out the entire cabin. The owner was so far away that he didn’t know what was going on. Turi’s financing of the
garage remodel actually enhanced his property, but she and the absent owner were conned.

The very fact that Turi was trying to help John be more self-sufficient financially indicates that she knew he wasn’t wealthy. It didn’t matter to her; they were going to bond together to help people, which was far more important to her.

As always, John could be charming, and he was never more charming than during his courtship of Turi. And of her family.

“He was odd—but nice enough,” David Bentley, Turi’s son, affirmed. David’s children were entranced with John, especially when he showed them how to carve their initials in a tree trunk. Their real grandfather, Lorne, had been too busy most of the time to do things like that.

David Bentley, who lived most of the time in the Virgin Islands, where he had his own business, only met John Williams five or six times. He never met John’s daughters, who lived in California, although John spoke highly of them. He understood that his mother’s fiancé was “some kind of doctor,” but he assumed he was retired, as he didn’t work. He found John to be a nervous man, who admitted that he was “scared of germs and flying.”

John Branden had never before evinced any fear of flying. But he was a wanted man, and after 9/11, airport security had become much tighter than before. He probably didn’t want to try passing through airport security with one of his phony IDs, and he could avoid that simply by pretending to be terrified of flying.

Beyond his phobias, John had good reason to be nervous. In December 2001, the FBI put John William Bran
den’s Wanted poster on their website, noting that a federal judge had issued an Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution arrest warrant for him. He was described as being five feet ten inches tall, weighing 180 pounds, with gray hair and blue eyes. One of his early publicity photos from Mannatech appeared on the poster, and his careers as a holistic healer, clinical nutritionist, and naturopathic doctor, along with his many aliases, were noted.

Special agents visited some of the places he had once lived, talked to his friends from the past, and came away empty-handed.

“He should be considered potentially dangerous,” the online poster warned.

Turi Bentley would have been shocked beyond words to know that the man she loved was wanted for a number of violent crimes. Or that he might have the potential to cause her harm. She considered John a wonderfully kind man who loved her, and who was prepared to work beside her to help those in ill health and who were troubled.

John proposed to Turi over the Christmas holidays in 2001, but it wasn’t an actual marriage proposal. He told her they didn’t need to deal with “all the paperwork” that a legal marriage would bring, since Turi had so many assets in her name. It made him seem even more genuine to her; he obviously wasn’t after her money. His real reason for wanting a fake wedding was probably that he didn’t want to show up on any public records or have to prove his identity to obtain a marriage license. He had been in hiding for
most of the past fifteen years, and he wasn’t about to risk his anonymity and his current complete absence from public records.

“We’ll know we’re married in our hearts,” John assured Turi. “That’s what matters. We don’t need to bother with all the other stuff.”

Turi agreed with him. On January 18, 2002, they had a church “wedding” with all the frills. John rented a tuxedo, Turi wore a lovely dress, and the pastor presided as they said their vows. Turi’s daughter Susan sang. As far as anyone else knew, they were married. It was the only time in her life that Turi had evaded the truth, and John had talked her into it.