Mortal Danger and Other True Cases Page 7

  John’s new advisory business didn’t last long, and it wasn’t making much money. He was soon chasing two or three other ideas that he was sure would be wildly successful. Kate signed up to fly more trips as a flight attendant/ purser with American Airlines. She drove to San Francisco and flew into New York City. He didn’t like it, of course, and he grew more and more jealous of any time she spent away from him—particularly when she flew away as a flight attendant.

  On her layovers in New York City, John called Kate as soon as she walked in her room. Then he would call her every ten minutes for several hours to make sure she was still there. If she went to the deli across the street to get something to eat, she had to accomplish that in a twenty-minute time frame. When she occasionally joined the crew for dinner, she knew she would face an inquisition, and when he was angry about something, he called her all night long.

  “Once,” Kate said, “the hotel operator connected him to the wrong room at two a.m. He woke up a man who’d been sound asleep and spoke with what John thought was a black dialect. John went ballistic.”

  She hated to even think it, but being away from John was often a relief. She could breathe again.

  Chapter Four

  Dr. John Branden was insanely jealous of Kate, and more so when she was traveling without him. His possessiveness wasn’t just over other men—it extended to anyone who took her focus away from him. John was even resentful when he felt she chatted too long on the phone with her best friend, Michelle, who lived in San Francisco.

  “He accused us of having a lesbian affair, which was absurd,” Kate said. “But he resented my having anything of interest to talk with her about. He read my mail, and now he started to tape all my phone calls. There wasn’t anything I’d hidden from him, but Michelle was going through a difficult divorce, and the fact that John was taping our calls frightened her. Neither of us knew what he might do with the tapes.”

  There were times when the only peace Kate could find was when she took long walks on the ocean beach. There, with the sound of endless breakers crashing over the rocky outcroppings, and with the clean, almost medicinal smell of salt water clearing her head, she could think. She admitted to herself that their relationship was dissolving. Initially, John’s fanaticism and ravenous ego had been virtually hidden, but just as constant drops of seawater wear away sandy cliffs, John’s jealous clinging to her carved rivulets of doubt into their love affair. The drops were often becoming deluges that sluiced and dissolved the very structure that had once seemed so sound.

  If John was jealous of her best friend, he was tyrannical when it came to other men. Kate was faithful to him—completely faithful—but she had many male friends; over the years she had met a lot of men working for the airline. She was no longer romantically interested in any of them, but John always thought she was.

  Often, he embarrassed her. If a man smiled at her or touched her hand lightly, she saw the flicker of rage darken his eyes and prayed he wouldn’t explode. Usually, he maintained control until they got home, and then the eruption she knew was coming burst through. She had bruises, but he struck her carefully so that they would be hidden by her clothing.

  Kate had such high hopes when John agreed to go to a formal party for American Airlines employees. Their evening started out well enough, and she was proud of him, hoping he would show off his charming side to her friends and coworkers. They made a handsome couple as they posed and smiled for the camera, then headed into the party. Kate wore a red satin strapless gown and a black cape with a high collar, and John wore a black tuxedo and a red bow tie. This time, she thought, everything would be all right.

  And they were having a good time—until a pilot who had been her friend for a long time stopped at their table to talk. He was a tall, very attractive man, and Kate saw John tense up as he approached them. When the pilot touched her bare shoulder and rested his hand there for a moment, Kate knew that it was going to be a long, unpleasant night.

  John insisted the pilot had let his hand slip to Kate’s breast, and he was quietly angry. He sulked for the rest of the evening, but he waited until they got to their hotel room before he detonated the dynamite inside him, accusing Kate of flirting and enjoying the touch of another man. It did no good at all for her to speak rationally to him, and she had bruises blossoming by morning.

  She realized that she couldn’t let John into her American Airlines family; he saw threats to himself in every man in the room. That was the end of the parties she had once enjoyed a great deal.

  It seemed to her that they often worked at cross-purposes. John still attempted to be romantic and gallant, but his timing was all wrong.

  Kate had to fly, however infrequently, to maintain her status with American and to keep her airline benefits for both of them. A cross-country trip with three changes of time zones was exhausting. John didn’t understand that. After he’d been alone for a few days, he thought her home-comings were the perfect time for romance.

  “He’d go out and buy all kinds of deli food and wine, and insist that I eat that salty, fatty stuff and drink the wine,” Kate recalled. “But when I came home from a flight, I was bloated and worn out, and my brain was in another time zone. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t feel like drinking. He wanted to have sex, and I just longed to get some sleep. John was incapable of recognizing signals about what other people wanted. He did what he wanted. Always.”

  Like all couples who spend years together, traits that once seemed endearing to John and Kate no longer did. In the beginning, John had seemed to Kate to be a man completely in control, stable, and understanding—someone who would care for her. But that side of him dwindled more and more as the years passed. For instance, he would never accept blame for anything that was wrong in their lives or in their relationship.

  “He always had an excuse. In the beginning, it was the pressure of his divorce. Sometimes it was that his blood sugar was low, and he said he had no control over his rages because of that. He had many, many ‘biochemical reasons’ for his moods—and I bought them for a long time. But as I got more educated in the effects of nutrition, I doubted his excuses.

  “Whatever went wrong, it was somebody else’s fault,” Kate remembered with a sigh. “More often than not, it was my fault.”

  Kate just tried harder to please him. She had never been married, and he’d been married to Sue for twenty years. She assumed initially that he knew more about marriage than she did, and she followed his lead.

  “John always expected extra attention,” Kate said. “He’d told me that he expected the woman in his life to be completely loyal and committed to him, and I promised him that I would of course be that kind of partner. I just didn’t realize all that included. When we were out in a restaurant, he expected me to break open his rolls and butter them for him—because Sue always had. Finally, I told him to butter his own rolls.”

  But when it came to more important requests, Kate appeased John. “It was much easier not to make waves.”

  If she did, John would blame Kate for not being supportive enough of him, and that meant another skirmish that would always be her fault.

  One day, she would have to wonder if giving in to him might save her life—or at least prolong it—but at this point she had no idea what terror lay ahead.

  But that came later. For years, Kate hoped to marry John. Sometimes, she still did—if only to reconnect with the man she once knew. They had been together for almost a decade. Maybe it wasn’t too late. It was 1998, and Christmas was coming. John bought Kate an engagement ring and asked her to set a date to get married. She was hesitant. “I told him, ‘I will marry you if I can find the John that I fell in love with.’”

  “Okay,” John said quickly. “Then that’s who I’m going to be.”

  She hoped that he meant it. “When John was good, he was really good,” Kate remembered. “When he was bad, he was a little bit worse each time.”

  Over their ten years together, Kate left John several time
s—but never for long. If he couldn’t find her, or get through to her with his blandishments and apologies, he hounded her family, her friends, the people she worked with, calling them at all hours of the day and night, dropping in unexpectedly, demanding to know where she was. She worried about the way he disrupted the lives of people she loved.

  John wouldn’t let her go. He stalked her, phoning her constantly. If he couldn’t find Kate, he called or confronted everyone in her life, making her relatives feel as trapped as she herself did. “He bothered the people I lived with, bothered my family, my friends,” Kate sighed, remembering. “Bother, bother, bother. Call, call, call. He insinuated himself into the lives of everyone I cared about. It got to the point that everyone hated John—except John. He didn’t care about anyone else’s feelings, and he felt he was so much smarter than anyone else. It wasn’t the way to make friends….”

  Whenever he found Kate, he begged her to come home, telling her that he couldn’t live without her. Once, he even showed up at the airport in San Francisco to meet her flight, his smile beaming through the crowds of disembarking passengers. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t thrilled to see him. Once again, she was mortified at John’s behavior and found herself apologizing to all the people he called when he was desperate to find her.

  “I’d finally decide I had to go back,” Kate said. “I was committed to him—when I think of it, I realize I was probably more married than most women who were legally bound to their husbands. We’d been together almost all the time—we were practically joined at the hip, and he was totally lost by himself. People in Gold Beach assumed we were married, and it was easier to say nothing than to explain what was really unexplainable.”

  John’s jealous moods were exacerbated by his drinking, and Kate attended some AA meetings to see if that would help her deal with him. It didn’t. But her eyes were opening about the futility of trying.

  For years, she’d been living with domestic abuse, but she hadn’t recognized it fully. She was classically in denial. Kate remembered only her promises to stay with John, and her conscience overrode the emotional battering, the bruises, the stalking, and his rages, which had grown steadily in frequency with every year they’d been together.

  “I always concluded that we should try one more time, and that we should have therapy to try to make our relationship work.” In the end, it still seemed easier for her to return to their little house in Gold Beach to try to work it out between them. She’d been captured in the cycle of violence that thousands of women come to know all too well. Kate lived with guilt over John. “I felt like I had brought this man into the lives of my family and friends, and it was my duty to go back to see if there was a way I could either make the relationship work—which I sincerely doubted—or amicably end it. We had done so much work together, and it was hard to let go of the dream of helping people.”

  As the year turned over to 1999, Kate felt more hope than she’d felt for the past few years. She even wrote to John’s daughters, Tamara and Heather, to tell them that she felt she and John were going to make it after all. It was a new year and, she thought, a new relationship.

  Kate had never thought of herself as a victim of domestic violence. “Those were cases, I believed, involving poor women who were barefoot and pregnant—uneducated. My parents never fought, and for a long time, I was sure that I was doing something wrong, that it was my fault we had so much trouble. And John certainly reinforced that by blaming things on me.”

  She knew now that he was bipolar, and that he swung wildly between euphoria and depression. But he had promised to change. He even moved to an apartment temporarily, and he began seeing a psychologist. John saw the therapist in person, and the doctor consulted with Kate by phone.

  “Charlie, John’s psychologist, warned me not to get John upset,” Kate said. “He told me to ‘just let it go’ if John began to act in a volatile way. I wasn’t to argue with him, because it would just make it worse. That was pretty much the way I’d always reacted to John’s angry moods, so I took his advice.”

  Kate was afraid to ask Charlie what John was capable of if she should speak up for herself. He hadn’t said that appeasing John was for her own safety, but he’d implied it. For the first three weeks of 1999, everything went well. She hoped the pattern would continue; she didn’t want to throw away a relationship that had inspired ten years of trying.

  Their financial situation was bleak at best. Kate insisted that she had to keep flying. Although John detested the thought, he knew it was necessary.

  “And I was helping John as I always had by typing up his newest plan for success, and discussing just how we could sell it. But we’d be almost finished with his ‘Idea Number 22’ and ready to launch it when John lost interest and he was off to ‘Idea Number 26.’”

  John saw occasional nutrition “patients,” and he had blood studies done by Bonnie Crichton,* a young woman nutritionist who lived in Napa, in northern California, with her husband, Joe,* and their children. John had few friends, but he became close to the Crichtons. As part of his “Doctors’ Practice Builder Plan,” he taught Bonnie how to read blood chemistry, assuring her it would enhance her practice and her income.

  By now, Kate had created a standard written report for blood test results. It provided a comprehensive review for each patient. John suggested to Bonnie that she send him and Kate her patients’ blood test results. Kate would insert the information and send it back to Bonnie so she could share it with her patients.

  John promised Kate he would present her with $250,000, and she would see that she’d done the right thing by staying with him. She didn’t want the money, and she recognized his ebullient offer as a symptom of the manic side of his personality. Still, she hoped against hope that it wasn’t too late for them.

  It was.

  The aberrations in John’s thinking began to seep through his façade like poison. He couldn’t maintain the “new John.” The “heroic figures he admired were disturbing,” Kate said, shaking her head. “He thought Ted Kaczynski was a hero—and he thought the two kids [who] shot up Columbine were brave. He might only have been baiting me, but he seemed serious.”

  January wasn’t over when John had another tantrum, this one the worst Kate had experienced. Kate had met Paula Krogdahl at a swimming pool, and they shared rides. Paula was an assistant district attorney in Curry County. (This, by coincidence, was the same Paula Krogdahl I wrote about in Small Sacrifices. Fifteen years before she met Kate, she’d helped Diane Downs’s daughter, Christie, recover from being shot by her mother, and counseled the girl on how to feel safe when she testified.)

  In the intervening years, Paula had become an expert in domestic violence. She had an uncanny knack for spotting abusive men, and John Branden frightened her. She was discreet, and asked Kate very tentatively if she was in trouble. Kate shook her head. She wasn’t ready to discuss her relationship yet.

  Paula recommended a beauty shop in Gold Beach run by a husband and wife. Kate had such thick hair that she’d had trouble finding a place to style it. On January 20, she had an appointment to have a shampoo, cut, and set. John insisted on going along, but he agreed to wait in the car for her. As it happened, the male owner had the first opening, and he started to wash Kate’s hair. For once, it didn’t hurt to have the snarls combed out, and she relaxed.

  It didn’t occur to her that John was watching every move through the window, and when she came out, he was very quiet.

  “I made the mistake of saying that the guy had given me the best shampoo I’d ever had, and I should never have mentioned that I’d enjoyed it.

  “The shampoo and cut took a long time, and John was fuming. He told me the salon owner was ‘coming on’ to me,” Kate recalled. “He said washing hair was a ‘sensual act.’”

  “I’ll never let you go back there again,” John snarled.

  At first, Kate resisted, saying he was imagining things, but John was adamant.

  They went next to
a Fred Meyer store to get some shopping done, but John wouldn’t let it go, and he hounded Kate to tears in the aisles, berating her for being seductive in the beauty shop. The afternoon was ruined, but it was more than that; their relationship was ruined. She had been waiting, albeit subconsciously, for the other shoe to drop, and now she realized that John had just been hiding the same old suspicions. That effort seemed to have made his rage more vicious.

  Kate had reached the point where she could never go back to a time when she had loved John.

  When they were back at the cottage, she blurted out that she was leaving him. Once again, he pulled out a gun. He threatened to shoot her cat, Mittens, and then her. She looked into his eyes and believed that he didn’t mean it. Just to be sure, she did the only thing she could—become submissive. That usually settled him down, and he didn’t object when she grabbed her kitten and went to sleep on the floor of the room they used as an office, locking the door and barricading it with a dresser. He shot at the door lock but soon gave up trying to get in. He went to sleep on the futon in the living room.

  Kate remained resolute. By the next morning, she knew she had to leave John. He hadn’t changed. Each angry outburst escalated to a more threatening level. She was truly frightened for both of them if they stayed together. Even so, she expected to find that his rage had passed as it usually did overnight. She put on sweats and slippers, and was surprised to find him still “crazy-mad.”

  Kate wasn’t going to back down about their breaking up, and she said quietly, “Don’t worry, I’ll be fair about the money—”

  Before she could say anything more, he had the gun in his hand again and was pinning her with his arm as he held the gun muzzle against her head. Bizarrely, John remembered it was her father’s birthday.

  “This will be my birthday present to your father,” he breathed. “His dead daughter…”