Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (26 page)

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 continued 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.

Fernandez was waiting at the top, towering over him as he climbed hand over hand. Casteel wasn’t sure if he was in trouble, but Tony had snorted and said only, “You’re a tough old devil—I couldn’t kill you with a club.”

Casteel hoped Fernandez wasn’t about to try.

The two hitched a ride into town on a logging truck and Casteel drove himself two hundred miles to his home, where a doctor found he’d survived the crash with only some torn ligaments.

Later, when John Casteel opened his suitcase to show a friend a map of the Canadian timberland, he found copies of a memorandum of agreement between himself and one of Fernandez’s companies. He had never seen it before, yet it was a deed conveying Casteel’s timberland to Fernandez in consideration of an option on Tony’s Wasco County property,
and
an assignment of the Canadian timber asserting that Casteel had offered $400,000 for it.

John Casteel was a sharp businessman and he immediately set about clouding the title to his three-million-dollar stand of timber so that Fernandez could not take it over. He eventually paid Tony fifteen hundred dollars to release all claims and considered himself lucky to have lost only that much.

It would take a book-length volume to describe the intricacies of Tony Fernandez’s timber dealings. One would suspect that he had some successful incidents where would-be buyers “signed” papers without being aware that they had. There may even have been other “accidents” in the woods that were never reported.

Fernandez’s financial world blew up finally in April of 1962 when he was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of engaging in a multimillion-dollar timber swindle. It was the culmination of a four-year investigation into Fernandez’s business machinations. The incidents involving Belcher and Casteel were cited in the charges along with many others.

Tony Fernandez was convicted of seven counts of interstate fraud and one of conspiracy in Judge William G. East’s Federal District Courtroom in Portland, Oregon, in December 1962. Two months later, he was sentenced to eleven years and eleven months in prison. That April, his remaining property was sold to satisfy judgments against him. Despite appeals, Tony Fernandez remained in the McNeill Island Federal Prison until his parole on January 15, 1970.

Tony was far from idle during his years on the bleak prison island in Puget Sound. In 1968, claiming status as a taxpayer in the state of Washington, he sued Washington’s Secretary of State Lud Kramer and U.S. Representative Julia Butler Hansen for a hundred thousand dollars on the grounds that Ms. Hansen was not qualified to serve in Congress because she was a woman. The suit was capricious, not to mention chauvinistic, and it got nowhere. However, it netted Tony Fernandez more headlines and he liked that.

Six months after he was paroled, Fernandez was awarded a degree from Tacoma Community College’s extension program. He became the first convict in the State of Washington to earn a college degree through an innovative program that allowed prisoners to take courses while they were in the penitentiary.

And so, in 1970, Anthony Fernandez was free—both from prison and from his twenty-three-year marriage. His wife had divorced him in 1965 while he was in prison. Surprisingly, she said she had no ill feelings toward Tony. He had always been a good provider and never mean or abusive. She did mention his wandering eye, however. She just hadn’t wanted to be lied to any longer. It had been a most civilized divorce.
So
civilized, in fact, that when Tony was paroled, he often brought his new girlfriends to visit his ex-wife.

Scattered accounts of Tony Fernandez’s postprison activities boggle the mind. He reported to hometown friends that he was a senior at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, majoring in psychology and ecology. This wasn’t long after his release from prison. As part of his studies, he joined a student tour to Arizona and New Mexico to study Navajo Indian history, culture, and economy. In an article in the Longview
Daily News,
it was also noted that Tony was enrolled simultaneously in an MA and Ph.D. program in a Florida university. (As it happened, all this “college” required its students to do to get a “diploma” was to write a thesis of unspecified length.)

Tony Fernandez’s doctorate had been awarded simply because he had submitted a paper entitled “The Innovated Navajo.” And
voilà!
Tony Fernandez became Dr. Anthony Fernandez.

When he was heard from next,
Dr.
Fernandez reported he was attending the North American College of Acupuncture in Vancouver, British Columbia. Tony is quoted as saying he attended classes in Vancouver three times a week and would be spending fifteen weeks in Hong Kong and sixty days in Peking as part of his training.

It wasn’t that Fernandez believed that acupuncture was particularly important in the Western world. “It is,” he pontificated, “at best, a fad. But I’m going into this with the point of view that it is most likely a psychological tool. And even if I never use it, the experience and knowledge will be a benefit.”

On March 30, 1971—the same month he met Ruth Logg—a small item appeared in the Longview
Daily News.
“Anthony Fernandez, formerly of Longview and a recent Pacific Lutheran University graduate, will open a counseling office complex next month at 8815 S. Tacoma Way. He is also negotiating for property in Kelso on which to construct a family counseling clinic.”

Dr. Fernandez promised to provide a twenty-four-hour answering service and said he had contracted to evaluate welfare recipients for the Tacoma office of the Department of Public Assistance.

On June 10, 1971, “Dr.” Fernandez’s picture appeared in the Wenatchee, Washington,
Daily World
beside an article about his plans to establish a “rehabilitation center” for drug addicts and alcoholics on eighty acres he owned in the rural town of Alstown. He promised that he would build a modern clinic but retain the flavor of the historic old cabins on the eastern Washington property. He assured nearby residents that his patients would not be “turned loose” in the community. He did not mention, of course, that he himself was a parolee from a federal prison.

None of Fernandez’s new endeavors ever got off the ground. He didn’t need them. He had Ruth Logg and the fortune her late husband had left her.

This was the man with whom Ruth fell madly in love. This was her soft-eyed, warm-voiced hero who was going to make the second half of her life a wonderful time of love and companionship. She had never known anyone with no conscience at all; she was naive about the world of the con man. Les had loved her and protected her.

Once married to Ruth, Tony Fernandez was kept busy overseeing her business interests and fortune. He encouraged Kathleen, her older daughter, to move out almost immediately after his marriage to her mother. He told Ruth it would be good for Kathleen to have an apartment of her own. Ruth’s younger daughter, Susan, lived with them but was involved with her own friends.

At first, the Fernandez marriage seemed idyllic. If Ruth’s former friends and relatives didn’t call often, she didn’t notice—she was so caught up in loving Tony.

The marriage turned bitter and disappointing far too soon. While Tony’s first wife had turned a deaf ear to rumors of his infidelities, Ruth could not. She suspected he was seeing other women. It tore her apart.

In May of 1974, when she had been married to Tony for just over two years, Ruth took a trip to Texas—alone. Tony remarked to one of her daughter’s boyfriends, “When she comes back, she’ll have to shape up or ship out.”

While Ruth was gone, Fernandez used Ruth’s Power of Attorney and sold some of her property without her knowledge for $100,000—far less than its actual value.

Only six months before, Ruth and Tony had vacationed at a plush resort in Mazatlan, Mexico, where they had impressed other couples as an “ideal couple.” But that had evidently been the last try on Ruth’s part to make the marriage work. One reason for the end of the perfect romance—and a good reason at that—was the fact that Tony reportedly had another woman he was seriously involved with. She lived in Centralia, Washington. Although Ruth didn’t realize it, he had used
her
money to give the other woman an expensive fur coat and a diamond solitaire. He told the woman that they would be married soon.

While Ruth Fernandez was on her lonely trip in May, Tony also took care of some other pressing business. He took out a $100,000 accidental death insurance policy on Ruth through Mutual of Omaha. There was never any concrete evidence that Ruth signed the application for that policy.

To her everlasting misfortune, Ruth still loved Tony. She still believed she could win back his love and that he would be faithful to her. During the third week of July 1974, she was excited about a camping trip they were going to take together. It would be like another honeymoon. They had rented a fully equipped Winnebago Brave motor home from a local dealer, and also took a four-wheel drive vehicle with them.

On Sunday afternoon, July 26, Ruth and Tony Fernandez stopped at the Mount Si Golf Course restaurant in North Bend, Washington, for cocktails and lunch. They lingered in the picturesque spot for a long time.

Just beyond North Bend, the I-90 freeway and back roads head east swiftly up toward the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. The land drops away steeply at the edges of the byroads. The Fernandez’s campsite was eight miles up the mountain from North Bend.

According to witnesses, both Ruth and Tony had seemed somewhat affected by the drinks they had with lunch. They left, saying they were headed for their campsite. At 4:15 that July afternoon, the Fernandezes visited the Snoqualmie office of the Weyerhauser Lumber Company on a business errand. Employees there recalled that Ruth seemed to be unhappy and a little querulous, while Tony was reflective and quiet. Neither of them, however, seemed to be intoxicated. When they left, they said they were going on up toward Snoqualmie Pass to the place where they were camping.

The first hint that something might be wrong came at 8:30 that Sunday evening. Tony called the waitress at the Mount Si restaurant to ask if she had seen Ruth. She had not. Next, he called the Little Chalet Café in North Bend, asking the staff there if they had seen Ruth. They knew her, but they hadn’t seen her that evening.

At 8:36
P.M.
Tony called the Washington State Patrol station in North Bend, expressing his concern for Ruth’s safety. When the trooper on duty asked him why he was worried, Tony said first that Ruth had left the campsite for a walk in the woods alone and she had not returned. But then he changed his story. He said she had driven in the Winnebago, and he thought she had been heading for their home in Auburn.

“I followed her twenty minutes to half an hour later in my four-wheel drive Scout,” he said. “But I couldn’t find any sign of her.”