Mortal Danger Read online

  Detractors called Mannatech’s supplements “sugar pills” and viewed Sam Caster as a filmflam man. Supporters raved about the benefits of Mannatech and were outraged by doubters. Health care is perhaps more important to the consumer than any other “business,” and return customers were anxious to relate their success stories to their friends.

  John sold the idea to Kate, leaving out any of the criticism of Mannatech. It was, he said, a natural for them: They were both sincerely interested in nutritional supplements and the way diet could affect life and health. Kate, however, wasn’t that impressed with Mannatech. A few years earlier, she had attended one of their functions. She’d been impressed with their products, but she felt that they were overpriced.

  John was so forceful in his arguments, pointing out the positive side of their joining a rising star corporation, that she finally capitulated.

  They agreed to sign up after attending Mannatech functions, although they hadn’t been pressured to join the sales force. The company believed in first defining to future sales staff how their products worked, so the first contact most future salespeople and instructors had with Mannatech was to learn about its products, purchase, and evaluate them. Only later were likely candidates wooed to join Mannatech. John and Kate were hired as “consultants”—not salespeople. It was important that the many products Mannatech sold were adequately explained, and John and Kate had the background to do that.

  The upper-echelon Mannatech staff in Texas was very taken with John and Kate. John seemed so enthusiastic and was clearly well versed in all aspects of nutrition. As always, he made a terrific first impression. He explained that he could not see himself as a salesman or even just a consultant for Mannatech; he was, after all, a doctor and felt he should be accorded a different—and higher—position in the company.

  They agreed.

  Kate had come to realize that John looked down upon flight attendants in general. He often remarked that they had a “flight-attendant mentality” that didn’t demand much brainpower. He could be tactless, explaining that while she was quite capable of doing the “grunt work” in their enterprises, he owned the “intellectual content” of all the work they did together. John always had multiple endeavors in the air, juggling them like plates on sticks. He pressed Kate to finish a project, yet by the time she had, he was already pursuing the next goal. The finished project was then filed with others that had never sold because John was continually moving on to the next idea and the one after that.

  Mannatech was only one arm of his ambitious plans. Even though he was sometimes unkind in his zeal, Kate tried to believe that they were a team, working together. “During one of our ‘brainstorming’ sessions,” Kate said, “where we were discussing how to present a particular Mannatech product, I figured out the scientific connection that would work before John did. I couldn’t understand why he seemed angry at me, rather than happy that we had the answer we were looking for.”

  A long time later, she smiled sadly at how naïve she was then.

  John hated Kate’s airline job, and he coined crude terms for what she did. He told her that men were looking at her crotch when she sat on the jump seat for takeoff and landing. “You’re just a flying cunt-hole,” he said.

  When he was in his mindlessly jealous mode, he accused Kate of sleeping with every pilot she flew with—even with every gay male flight attendant! In August 1998, when he was once again intoxicated, he grabbed a gun from his collection and ordered her to put on her flight-attendant’s uniform, and then he forced her to have sex with him. It was a humiliating experience, and she promised him that if he ever threatened her with a gun or his fist again, she would call the police and have him charged with assault.

  He didn’t seem to believe her, but she was resolute.

  Their perfect, symbiotic relationship was shredding rapidly. Emotionally, John kept Kate continually off balance. It was becoming difficult for her to differentiate between the “good John” and the “cruel John.”

  “He could be so adoring—almost worshipful, so kind,” she said, “but the other John sometimes seemed so angry that I was afraid he might be capable of killing me.”

  And then she shook her head at the very thought. Of course he wouldn’t kill her; he loved her more than any man ever had. No man would kill someone he truly loved.

  “John kept coming up with the ideas, and then I did 90 percent of the work, writing up the educational material,” Kate said. “That became a pattern for us. We made an audiotape for Mannatech called ‘Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About,’ drawing on the Bonnie Raitt song that Mannatech had permission to use. That got us launched with the company.”

  John and Kate attended Mannatech conventions and sold the tape and other educational brochures and booklets they’d created to help associates sell the products with correct information. At the same time, they produced a CD-ROM with Ed DeMarco, Kate’s brother-in-law. They called it “Your Own Diet.” The company liked it so much that they remarketed it as “The Mannatech Optimal Health Plan.”

  Although they left Mannatech for a year or so, they returned to the company in 1996.

  Signing on with serious commitment meant that they would be gone from home more. At this point, the company saw John and Kate as perfect candidates to represent Mannatech on a speaking tour around America. They were attractive, extremely personable, and intelligent.

  John was an excellent salesman. He told Kate that he could be whatever or whoever someone needed him to be just to “close a sale.”

  Dwight and Susan Havener held top positions in Mannatech in the southeastern states, and they invited Kate and John to visit them in Jupiter, Florida, just north of Palm Beach. John seemed to have no qualms about returning to Florida, but he flatly refused to go without Kate.

  In many ways, it turned out to be a great trip. The Haveners had a wonderful estate on the water with its own guest cabin that was nicer than most people’s homes. Jupiter drew many millionaires. Burt Reynolds had his home and theater there, and it was heady to be guests in such a posh environment.

  At first, the visit went well, and Susan Havener particularly liked John. She was amazed by his knowledge and his charisma.

  “John convinced the Haveners that we were the greatest thing since sliced bread,” Kate remembered. “Their business was already booming, and he assured them it would ‘explode’ with us joining their organization.”

  But John bruised this first impression by going too far, too fast. He was full of ideas on how to improve Mannatech, most of them criticism about the current corporate structure. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the company was already a huge success the way it was currently functioning. Why should they want to change it? Kate felt embarrassed as she saw their hosts exchange glances, obviously irritated with John’s grandiose plans for changes in Mannatech.

  It was clear he had walked in with an ego almost beyond comprehension and wanted to start at the top. Even so, aside from his unsought critique, the Haveners could see that John might well be an asset as a consultant/ lecturer. His charm might have a tendency to tarnish on very long acquaintance, but on one-night stands around the United States and Canada, he would be very imposing.

  The Haveners had some vitally important meetings set in New Jersey, and they asked John to accompany them on a driving trip there. They were taken aback when he flatly refused to go.

  “He wouldn’t go,” Kate said. “It was almost impossible to make him realize that, for the moment at least, he wasn’t the boss.”

  Beyond dismissing Mannatech’s business structure as not nearly as profitable as it could be if they followed his suggestions, John insisted that the Haveners owed him $1,500. Kate was mortified.

  Despite that, Dwight and Susan Havener continued to believe that Kate and John would be an asset to Mannatech. They were sent on a lecture tour extolling the benefits of the company’s four main products, particularly Ambrotose, the lead product, “a glyconutritional dietary supple
ment ingredient consisting of monosaccharides, or sugar molecules,” according to Mannatech.

  Critics doubted that Ambrotose had any health benefits, because they believed the human body lacked the kind of enzymes needed to break down the plant fibers in the highly touted supplement.

  The differing opinions ended in a stalemate year after year, and a decade later, ABC’s 20/20 aired a show on the controversy.

  But John and Kate both felt it had benefits. And if it wasn’t as much of a cure-all as some believed, it didn’t harm anyone outside the pocketbook or if substituted for more accepted medical care in the treatment of life-threatening diseases. Mannatech continued to insist that its representatives refrain from promises that their products targeted and cured particular illnesses.

  The couple from Oregon was a hit. Each of them was the very picture of health, vivacious and encouraging, and they didn’t employ any hard-sell tactics. They didn’t have to. Despite their private disagreements, they believed in what they were doing. One of the things that had originally attracted Kate to John was his desire to make people’s lives better. That drove her, too.

  John and Kate lectured together. As they left the West Coast to begin their first speaking tour, they had had six weeks to prepare. John was the experienced speaker, and Kate asked him to tell her how he wanted to handle their presentation. He put her off continually. Only when they were on their flight to Georgia, where they would begin their series, did he hand her an outline of what he wanted her to say.

  When Kate, using her airline passes, flew as a passenger with John, he seemed very comfortable with flying and showed no fear. “The only thing that upset him,” she would remember sardonically, “was when we couldn’t get seats together. If I sat next to a good-looking stranger, John was convinced he was making moves on me or that I was flirting.”

  With so little preparation on their first venture, Kate was very nervous. Fortunately, the audience was kind and receptive, and complimented her after she spoke. She felt confident, but later, in their hotel room, John belittled her and berated her for “screwing up.” She could see he resented even her small success. First she was mortified, then furious.

  As long as she was with him, he remained calm and confident. He had told her in the beginning that his wife had always been there for him, and that he would expect that of her, too. And she’d promised to stand beside him. However, she hadn’t realized how dependent he would be on her. Sometimes, he was almost like a child who needed to hold his mother’s hand. But in front of an audience, he could be a magnanimous and totally competent performer who held a roomful of people in thrall.

  “There came a trip,” Kate recalled, “when everything went wrong. We’d recently returned from the Canadian tour, and I had my ‘speaking outfit’ dry-cleaned. I picked it up, threw it in my suitcase, and we left to fly to Lansing, Michigan. The morning of the presentation, I put on the outfit only to discover it had shrunk considerably!”

  There wasn’t time to buy anything else, so Kate slid the pants down to her hip bones so they reached her ankles. This didn’t leave even a full inch for her tunic top to cover the waistband of her slacks.

  She got on stage feeling ridiculous, knowing she had to maintain perfect posture, as she had no room for error lest her bare stomach show.

  “I was so nervous. I decided just to ‘zen’ the situation,” Kate said, “so I simply spoke from my heart. Apparently I connected with the audience, who were most complimentary to me, but a couple of people added almost as an afterthought, ‘You were good, too, Dr. John….’

  “That was the last time I was allowed to take the stage.”

  She still loved him, but try as she might, Kate could not avoid seeing emerging aspects of John’s personality that continued to disturb her. She’d known from the beginning that he had a strong ego; back then, it had been part of his charm, but it wasn’t so much any longer.

  Why did he have to build his ego by sacrificing hers?

  They stayed with Mannatech for five years after returning to the company, and they didn’t mind the sporadic traveling. They went home to Gold Beach when they could. It was much like the kind of book tour I do as an author—a different city every night. They began their first Mannatech tour in Florida and Georgia, crossed Canada in five days, and headed east to Michigan, where their tour ended. Kate and John flew from city to city most of the time and stayed in nice hotels when they landed. Many of the Mannatech presentations had a festive—almost partylike—air.

  Still, Kate often longed for their quiet cabin in the woods in Oregon. It was a place where she felt serenity and safety, where even the wild deer and their fawns felt little fear. She flew her two-day trip for American once a year and remained on the active roster.

  John loved Oregon, too, and they were able to stay in Gold Beach most of the time. They were getting by financially, but Kate could have made more if she’d flown full-time. John wouldn’t hear of that. He was restless. Kate had long since accepted that it didn’t matter what he was doing; he grew bored easily and began to formulate plans for new enterprises. He was like a butterfly—lighting on a firm base, then launching himself too soon into the air and flitting on to the next perch.

  Kate only knew him from his San Diego days. It was almost as if he’d had no life before then. What had happened to him earlier remained a mystery. Every so often she wondered about the real reasons he and his family had fled from Florida. He didn’t want to talk about it, so she let it go. The only time he referred to that last night, even obliquely, was when he’d been drinking. Even then, he never gave specific details.

  “There were times,” she mused, “when I thought he might even have been involved in some kind of crime. But that seemed ridiculous, and I blamed my own imagination.”

  There were things about John that were odd, beginning with the story he had told her about meeting with CIA agents when he’d only been buying a convertible top, and on to the midnineties, when he occasionally behaved as if he’d been in a spy movie. There was the time he had donned a disguise to avoid being served with the suit for improper sexual advances. He also had a kind of code he used when he wrote letters, apparently for no particular reason. He used Kate’s last name—Jewell—intermittently. He sometimes alluded to being involved with important political figures in Florida, but, again, gave her no names or details.

  “Every night,” Kate recalled, “John had to lock the door and then rattle the doorknob exactly seven times to make sure it was really locked. That drove me nuts.”

  Maybe he was a frustrated secret agent, she thought. No, it was just one of John’s idiosyncrasies. Kate was far more disturbed when John hit her for the first time, after they’d had an almost innocuous argument in a campground on one of their trips. Later, he berated himself. He swore he’d never meant to hurt her, to leave marks and bruises on her.

  And she forgave him.

  John seemed more horrified than she herself was that he’d hit her.

  But it happened several times, usually when he’d had too much to drink.

  Their lives were far from the idyllic match that John had once painted for her. Kate accepted the fact that John would probably never be happy unless he was recognized and financially rewarded for his “intellectual capacity,” and all the “wonderful ideas” he came up with. John believed that his intelligence was far superior to most people’s, and he assumed others should be grateful to bask in his presence. It wasn’t a stance that endeared him to others. John had told her as much about his idol, Bill Thaw, and she recognized that John was identifying with his dead hero more all the time.

  “It seemed that every time we reached a solid jumping-off place for one of John’s grand ideas, he changed his mind—and he was off on something else,” Kate said. “We lasted the longest with Mannatech.”

  Always investigating many possibilities, John chose one new career after another. One of his ideas was to teach other doctors and dentists how to build their practices. He and K
ate could continue to work side by side, utilizing the strong points each possessed. He’d made a success of his San Diego clinic in less than a year, and he was positive he had the know-how to point out mistakes doctors were making without realizing it.

  Resurrecting flagging clinics was challenging enough for John for a while. When he took on a new client, he spent hours talking and questioning what it was the doctor hoped to achieve. Again, it was Kate’s job to write and type—to whip the client’s expectations and John’s advice into a cohesive portfolio. She was an excellent writer, far more talented than John was.

  Occasionally John told her he couldn’t succeed without her, but he would obliterate that compliment the next day by saying he could hire a two-dollar-an-hour typist to do what she did. (She often wondered where he could find anyone who would actually accept such meager pay.)

  Sometimes, she grew weary, and a little resentful. “It would be two a.m. and I’d be typing away, and John and the clinic owner would be shooting the bull. Sometimes, I thought I was doing all the work.”

  And, in truth, she was. John enjoyed pontificating and playing the expert, and sometimes he tended to view Kate as only his secretary. She, too, was good with people; any good flight attendant has to be. They were to have been almost-equal partners, and she would have enjoyed joining the conversations with their clients.

  Still, John could not stand to share the spotlight. He pointed out that he was the only one who could read each new client and respond in a way that convinced them he could multiply their income with his wisdom and experience. He believed that the “good old boy” routine was the best way to do that.