Mortal Danger (15 page)

In March 2007,
John and Turi left for California, on one of their regular trips. They might have gone to see his daughters, or perhaps they had some business meetings. Maybe they only needed to get away from the steady rain and gray days of the Northwest in winter. It was too cold to start building their cedar home in Priest River, and it probably would be for at least two more months.

They passed through Oregon twice on this trip—going south and coming back. John preferred 101, the coastal route, and that meant they would have driven through Gold Beach. He called Randall several times from the road—as always from pay phones. The trip seemed to be going well, and Nozawa didn’t sense any trouble.

They were due home on Thursday, March 29. John made his last call of the trip that day from a phone booth on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which was less than ten miles from Seascape Hills.

John said they’d had a very, very nice time in California, and everything was great. He said they were “searching for ways to be even closer,” and he thought they’d made progress.

“Great!” Randall said.

But things weren’t great now, apparently, as John continued, “We were doing so well, and then Turi said something as we crossed the bridge—and I’m very angry.”

Whatever it was that Turi had allegedly said, circumstances would make it difficult for Randall Nozawa to remember. “But I remember thinking that it wasn’t anything very much,” he said. Still, John was going on and on about it.”

“She ruined it,” John went on. “Everything was fine, and she ruined it.”

He asked Randall to come over to their house, and Randall said he would try to do that later.

It was almost midnight when Randall Nozawa got a call from Turi. She told him that she and John were still arguing and she had locked herself in the bedroom. She’d managed to find her cell phone to call him, and she asked Randall to come over as quickly as he could.

“Oh!” she said suddenly, before she could explain. “He’s coming. I have to hang up—”

Randall started walking toward Seascape Hills. Because of the damage to his eyes, he had trouble seeing when headlights were aimed directly at him, and he compensated by looking away and judging how far away the cars were. On the way, Turi called him on his cell phone and said the argument was still going and they really needed him to hurry.

Nozawa picked up his pace. John met him at the front doorstep and told him Turi was inside. He didn’t strike Randall as being in a violent mood. “He seemed more sad than angry,” Randall said later.

“We can’t finish the Idaho project,” John blurted.

“Why?”
Randall asked.

“Things just aren’t working out.” John appeared to be devastated.

The two men walked into the kitchen and Randall sat down at the table. John began to pace back and forth, stopping only to open a bottle of port wine. His words came in a steady stream, and they were all grievances about Turi.

“But he wasn’t angry,” Randall said. “He was just sad—and quiet.”

They heard Turi unlocking the bedroom door, and John said with an eerie false brightness, “Look, it’s Turi!”

He still wasn’t angry. The table where Nozawa sat was close to the sliding glass doors, and Turi moved to stand beside him.

“You need to tell Randall the truth,” Turi said.

“John got a look on his face like he was a kid who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar,” the former dentist said. “Like it wasn’t really a bad thing she was referring to, but, still, he seemed mortified. He kind of stuttered when he said, ‘That’s the kind of thing that guys talk about in private. Guys don’t talk about that in front of people.’”

Randall Nozawa wondered what Turi Bentley had learned about John during their trip south, and he was almost embarrassed for him.

None of them moved for what seemed like a long time, then John walked out of the room.

It was 7:30
a.m. on Friday, March 30, 2007, when Detective Fred Douglas of the Gig Harbor Police Department was dispatched to the cul-de-sac in front of the little gray-and-white house on Lost Beach Road with a Man Down call. This was an unlikely neighborhood for such a call, and an unusual time—in the early morning hours. Still, there were many retired people living in Seascape Hills, and the person who had collapsed might be a resident who’d had a heart attack or a stroke. Douglas was at the address in four minutes.

There was no way for Detective Douglas to have prepared himself for what he found when he turned right into the little circular street, where the crocuses, daffodils, and cherry blossoms were just beginning to bloom. He had never worked a homicide in his ten years on the department, and he certainly wasn’t expecting to find one.

A resident on the street—Ted Sanford, a retired headmaster of a private school—had heard someone calling for help when he’d come out to pick up his morning paper. It was then that he’d seen a terribly injured man, wrapped in a white blanket or a sleeping bag, now stained a mahogany
red with dried blood. The injured man was on his feet, but just barely, near the carefully landscaped mound of earth in front of their houses. He was bleeding heavily from his mouth, and there was something wrong with his eyes.

“He kept saying, ‘Help me…help me!’” Sanford said later. “I ran in my house and called 911, and then I came back out and stayed with him until the police arrived. It was very peculiar—nightmarish.”

And, indeed, it was. The man’s right eye was gone, and the wound still bled. His other eye appeared to be scarred, and he had injuries in his mouth, too. EMTs were summoned immediately, and he was able to say a few garbled words before he was rushed to the ER at Tacoma General Hospital, where he was admitted in critical condition and taken immediately up to surgery.

About all Douglas and Police Chief Mike Davis understood was that there had been some kind of domestic disturbance. It was amazing that the injured man could say that much; his eye was missing, his jaw was broken, several of his teeth were knocked out, and his tongue had nearly been shot off. It would take eight hours of surgery to even begin putting his face back together. Whether he would survive or not was up in the air.

The detectives were able to discern that there were supposed to be two people inside the house itself, but the victim didn’t seem to know if they were dead or alive. Since Gig Harbor has a small police department, they called for an assist from the Pierce County sheriff’s office, its detectives, and its SWAT team.

Quietly, officers from both departments cleared the street to avoid anyone else being injured if there should be
more gunfire. They surrounded the house the injured man had come from. And then they called the phone in the house.

There was no response.

For hours, they attempted to raise anyone left in the small gray-and-white home, but the phone rang and rang, shrill but empty. It was the only sound inside.

There was a vehicle in the garage, suggesting no one had driven away. That, however, didn’t mean that they hadn’t. There might have been another car parked in the steep, short driveway. Neighbors had heard nothing alarming during the previous night, no screams, arguments, or gunshots. They said they hadn’t really known the couple who lived there, but they had known the elderly woman who used to live there. Her name was Liv Lee, and they thought that the female half of the couple was Liv’s daughter.

Public records indicated that the house was owned by Turid Lee Bentley. That was probably Liv Lee’s daughter.

With so many hours of nonresponse, there was only one thing left to do—enter the house. It was 10:00 a.m. when the SWAT team went in. They were not met with any resistance. The house was as quiet as death, and they found only death inside.

“I can remember that scene,” Fred Douglas said, “and I probably will for the rest of my life. It was shocking.”

There were two people in the house, but they were both dead—the woman shot in the neck and head, and the man in the head. It looked like a murder-suicide.

The blond woman had to be Turi Bentley-Williams. Was the dead man Randall Nozawa or John Williams?

The mystery had just begun to uncoil.

Neighbors had seen enough of the couple who’d lived there to estimate they were both in their sixties, and police were quite sure that the deceased were in that age group. They had to be Turi Bentley and John Williams. The man in surgery had dark hair and looked to be about fifty. That would be Randall Nozawa. Becky Minton, a friend from the Gateway Fitness Center, who had waited outside during the long standoff, agreed tearfully. She told police that Turi and John were married, and were quite a bit older than Randall.

None of their names would be officially released to the media until families could be notified.

Becky Minton said Randall had spoken with one of the fitness club members just the night before, and he had told her that John Williams had seemed “disturbed” or “upset” about something, and that he thought he could help.

Becky couldn’t believe that Turi and John were dead. “They were just back from a trip to California—on the coast—and having a great time. And [they] always had a smile in their voices whenever you talk[ed] with them. I just can’t imagine…”

As the crime scene investigation began, Detective Todd Karr of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office’s Major Crimes Unit joined the other law officers. They spread out over the property and house, looking for something—anything—that might help them get official identification of the shooter and the victims. As far as the motive for the triple shootings, they would probably have to wait until Randall Nozawa came out of surgery—if he ever did.

Fred Douglas found a bullet hole in the master bedroom. Ballistics would show that it didn’t match the slugs and casings from the gun used to shoot Randall, Turi, and John, but it did match another of John Williams’s guns found in the house. It must have been fired sometime earlier than the night before.

Douglas also found damage to the bedroom wall, where it looked as if a knee or an elbow had crashed almost through the drywall. A check of records showed no police calls to the house on Lost Beach Road, so if there had been domestic violence going on there, it had been kept private.

The wallet closest to the dead man’s body had ID for John Williams, and the investigators believed that they knew who they were dealing with. At least they knew his name.

Or
one
of his names.

When they searched the attic in the house, they found a battered backpack hidden there. It contained many IDs—under several different names and birth dates. They were from Oregon, Florida, California, Washington, and other states. Several were from the British Virgin Islands. They might all have been fake, or there could have been one that was real: John W. Williams, John W. Hennings, John W. Jewell, John W. Branden, John W. Bentley, and John W. Howell. The Social Security cards in the backpack had two different series of numbers on them; two numbers had been transposed in about half of them.

Who was he.
Really?
The detectives from Pierce County sent Internet messages to law enforcement departments whose jurisdiction matched the addresses on the IDs. When
they heard back from Detective Dave Gardiner in Curry County, Oregon, they knew that the most likely shooter wasn’t John Williams at all; he was almost certainly the man listed on an Oregon driver’s license in the backpack—John William Branden, DOB February 24, 1945, who had been a fugitive from Curry County since 1999. He had felony warrants out on him dating back to mid-1999, first locally and regionally, and eventually a federal warrant. They were all still in force.

His crimes in Gold Beach, Oregon, had been inflicted on a woman—his common-law wife, apparently.

And they had been crimes of violence: rape in the first degree, kidnapping in the first degree, attempted murder, attempted sodomy, menacing, and harrassment. His bail had been set at one million dollars.

He had been a fugitive ever since.

Ed Troyer, the sheriff’s spokesman for Pierce County, kept a closemouthed stance with the media about that new information, saying only that the deceased suspect had a history of violence with a sheriff’s office. It was not John and Turi with that history, and it wasn’t Pierce County he was talking about; it was Curry County, and it was Kate Jewell whom John Branden had savagely attacked.

Gardiner told Pierce County detectives that he tried to keep in touch with Kate at least twice a year, and that he had a current address for her. But first, he wanted to call her and break the news of the tragedy in Gig Harbor to her.

“I believe I owe her that,” he said.

What had happened to ignite John into causing the
bloodbath the police had found was a mystery to the Washington State investigators. Randall Nozawa couldn’t tell them much; he was fighting for his life as his surgery stretched to eight hours.

And he was blind. He had lost the first eye in the automobile accident three years earlier, and now his remaining eye was gone, shot out at close range.

One had to wonder if John Branden—whom the newspapers were calling “The Mysterious Mr. Williams”—had deliberately aimed for his “best friend’s” good eye, intending to blind him.

Those who knew and loved Turi Bentley were overwhelmed with grief. She was the last woman in the world anyone would ever expect to die violently. The shock waves rolled over Gig Harbor and then spread out. Grown women recalled how nice Turi had been to them when they were little girls. Church friends spoke about Turi’s devout faith in God. A young woman who lived in Priest River recalled meeting Turi only once, but she said she had looked forward to living close to her in Idaho.

Turi’s genetic heritage would have suggested that she would live into her nineties. Losing her at such a relatively young age was a bitter blow to hundreds of people and brought extreme pain to her children and grandchildren.