Mortal Danger and Other True Cases Read online

  “He threatened again to kill Mittens and me,” Kate said, “and I believed he meant it. I grabbed Mittens and jumped in my car. As I was backing out of the garage, he was ranting at me and trying to jump in my car.”

  A heavy rain sluiced over her windows, too much for the wipers, and Kate squinted to see the road. Mittens was in the backseat. Somehow, just as they turned onto the highway, the cat managed to put his paw on the window button, and the side window lowered all the way down. Kate reached out to grab Mittens before he could jump out. She caught him by the scruff of the neck and hauled him back in the car, fortunately without having an accident.

  When she got to a public phone, she called the Domestic Violence hotline and spoke to a counselor at Oasis, the shelter for women fleeing abuse in Curry County. Paula Krogdahl had told Kate about Oasis, but Kate had never thought she would be calling there for help.

  The counselor told Kate to park at the hospital, and she would meet her there. Like most domestic violence shelters, Oasis had no facilities for pets. Kate knew a woman named Ursula Elliott, who fed homeless cats down at the jetty, and she agreed to watch Mittens while Kate was hiding at Oasis.

  (Women in sudden need of a safe haven can take their children, but many stay in dangerous situations because they can’t bear to leave the animals they love. Today, there are good Samaritans who provide temporary homes for dogs and cats of families in trouble, but there is a need for more.)

  Kate stayed at Oasis for four days. She learned later that John had called a cab to look for her, and the first place the cabbie had taken him to was Oasis. She wondered how he’d known where it was, and she learned that the local paper had unthinkingly printed the address and a photograph of the shelter when it opened. Fortunately, her car was parked behind the hospital and not at the shelter, so John thought she wasn’t there.

  On January 21, 1999, Kate filed a formal complaint against John alleging domestic violence, and she asked the judge for a restraining order. She asked the Court questions about the efficacy of such an order and realized it would not protect her in California or New York or anywhere her American Airlines layovers took her. In fact, the judge couldn’t give her any answers that would make her feel safer with a restraining order. She withdrew her request.

  After four days, she agreed to go back to the cottage, but only if John removed all his guns from the premises. He went along with that, and stored them with a friend who had an auto-repair business in town. She confirmed that they were safely locked away there.

  A long time later, she learned that John retrieved his weapons only two weeks later.

  Kate had gained stunning knowledge about domestic violence at Oasis, and she was grateful the center existed. But she had also learned how little women can do to protect themselves. She felt somewhat safer, because John wouldn’t be in Gold Beach much—he was working on yet another “major venture” down in San Diego. He had joined with a dentist there in selling vitamin supplements. He’d told Kate that he was putting together a training program for potential sales reps and that the first session would net him at least five thousand dollars.

  He rented a small apartment in Coronado, assuring her that this would be a new start for them. But Kate no longer believed it.

  Chapter Five

  The watershed point of a relationship comes at different times for different people. In the spring of 1999, Kate Jewell reached the point of no return. “I realized that I had to leave him if I hoped to keep some little shred of me alive.” She wondered if anyone would even believe that she was serious about leaving. She had promised to leave John so many times before.

  They were halfway separated now. The millennium was approaching, and the last few years of the twentieth century were creeping by. Kate would mark her fiftieth birthday in April. If she was ever going to retake possession of her own personality, the part that was truly her, it was time. She could support herself if she returned to flying full-time, and she could live with friends in San Francisco.

  Kate tried to follow John’s counselor’s directives. Charlie, John’s therapist, had advised her to keep John calm, to see that they had enough income to pay their basic expenses, and to quell the feeling of foreboding that sometimes caught her unawares. That sense of danger got worse after she saw a television movie about the Ira Einhorn case in Philadelphia. She saw too many close parallels between Einhorn and John. Einhorn had been so like the younger John—a charismatic and convincing counterculture activist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. When Einhorn’s girlfriend, Holly Maddux, disappeared suddenly in 1977, her family and friends lived in dread; Holly hadn’t been able to get away from Ira, either. She had stayed, believing things would change for the better.

  Some months after Holly vanished, her mummified body was discovered in a steamer trunk in a roof closet connected to Einhorn’s apartment. He glibly denied knowing anything about her death, but he jumped bail and left the United States in 1981 just before he was to go on trial for first-degree murder. Einhorn was convicted of Holly Maddux’s death in absentia in 1993.

  (In 1993, no one knew where Einhorn was; only later, in 1997, would he be found living the good life with his Swedish wife in France. After much negotiation, he was extradited to America in 2001. Despite the pitiful finale of Holly’s life, he had become almost a fascinating antihero. Kate could visualize John skating just as free as Einhorn, using his charm to draw supporters to him.)

  One of Einhorn’s judges summed him up in a way that Kate Jewell recognized: “…He is an intellectual dilettante who preyed on the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting, and inexperienced….”

  And that was Dr. John Branden, a man Kate now saw revealed as a hater of women, who thought he was so much smarter than the masses who believed his lies and his embroidery of the truth. She believed that she could be as easily sacrificed as Holly Maddux had been.

  On April 24, Kate wrote her will, and she wrote a letter to her landlords and friends Bill and Doris. “If you are reading this, I am gone,” it began. “I do not want to die, yet must write how I am feeling. I have had a sense of death for the past few days…. In six days, I will be 50. In 3 days, John will come. I hope I make it to my 50th birthday.

  “After all the violence I have experienced with John—physical, mental and emotional—I still hope and try to believe that somehow if I stay with him, we can bring something valuable to the world…. I believe [the work] can help the world accept responsibility and know how to respond to health concerns. Unfortunately, I also think it tends to drive someone to the point of insanity.”

  She was, of course, writing about John. She wrote of a nightmare John had had the night before, and of how upset he’d been when he’d called her to tell her about it. “…‘This man attacked me at my car and strangled me with piano wire.’ I believe this man is John, in his sub or unconscious. The loving side of him is warning me about the vicious, angry side of him. If that angry side comes out while he is here, I fear my death.”

  John was telling a number of their mutual friends how angry he was at Kate and how he blamed her for all of his troubles. “I guess slowly but surely the violence has destroyed my feelings for him,” she wrote. “I have desperately wanted to believe (and still do) that somehow we can make this work.”

  But she knew they couldn’t, and she wrote about her lost dreams. “I have always wanted to share my life with one special man. I have long sensed that my true soul mate died in Vietnam before I even had a chance to meet him. I have a tiny sense that if somehow I survive this with John, there may be someone to live the rest of my life with in PEACE and SAFETY…God willing.”

  Kate wrote out messages to the most important people in her life—family and friends. Good-bye messages. These were clearly not suicide notes but the desperate words of a woman who was quite sure she would soon be killed by the lover she had tried to trust.

  It was too late for her to realize her hopes to have children, but she begged Bill and Doris to tak
e care of her beloved Mittens if she died.

  Her birthday passed without an overt fight with John, but something odd happened. They’d hiked to a secret place their landlord, Bill Turner, had shown them—some rocks that rested over a waterfall between the high spots of Cape Sebastian. It was very complicated to get to. They’d had to hike through the forest, hack through brush, and then wade through a creek.

  On this day, Kate had no energy at all, and her stomach felt queasy. She actually fell asleep on the trail while John was using the machete to cut brush. At the waterfall, Kate fell asleep again on the rocks.

  They were scheduled to meet Bill and Doris for a picnic at a place where Bill had carved an ocean view through the trees and placed a picnic table. Kate felt too ill to move, and John said he had to pick something up at their cottage and that she should wait for him. He never came back for her, but she finally felt well enough to drag herself to the picnic spot, where she found Bill and Doris, who were very worried about her.

  “I was afraid John did something to you when we saw him coming up the trail without you, swinging that machete,” Doris said, with real relief in her voice. “He said he’d chopped you up with the machete and thrown you over the cliff.”

  John grinned, signifying it was only a joke. They all laughed, but weakly. After they ate, Bill offered to give Kate a ride to the cottage, and he put his arm around her to help her into the truck because she was too weak to step up.

  “I caught hell for that later,” Kate recalled. “John said Bill was coming on to me. But that was so absurd. Later, Doris told me that she thought John probably had poisoned me, but just didn’t use enough.”

  Kate had the same suspicions. They were all jumpy. Kate wondered if her own apprehension was catching, or if Bill and Doris could see John’s dangerousness.

  Kate had received a package for her landmark birthday from her best friend, Michelle. It arrived early, and she forced herself not to open it when John brought it home along with the other mail from their post office box. She found out later that Michelle had shopped very carefully, trying to find something that matched Kate’s taste.

  “But I never saw her gift,” Kate recalled. “The package was empty. Michelle sent me a sketch of it; it was a lovely amethyst and silver necklace, with matching earrings that she’d ordered from Bangkok. I was pretty sure I knew what had happened to it. John was always jealous of the time I spent talking to Michelle on the phone, and I think he just threw my present away, although he denied it, saying he had no idea what I was talking about.”

  Kate Jewell laughed when she said it, but even the most obtuse listener could have caught the tinge of anxiety in her voice as she described some of the “gaslighting” techniques John used to throw her off balance emotionally. “I got to the point where I either had to take a trip or sign up for a stay in the loony bin.”

  The tension between John and Kate grew. Her days were laced with trepidation about what he might do next. Even though he was in San Diego, eight hundred miles away, she felt his presence in the cottage and half-expected him to pull one of his surprise visits. Five months earlier, he’d been extremely upset that she’d filed domestic violence charges against him when he’d threatened to shoot her on her father’s birthday, and he was still angry over that. She’d thought she knew him completely, but she was no longer sure what he might do if his emotions tilted too far.

  Kate needed to get away, if only for a short time. Ironically, their lovely cottage, which had seemed like a safe haven from the world, was now menacing. Kate unfolded a map of Oregon on her kitchen counter and looked for some kind of sign that would show her a spot she should seek for a time-out. She scanned the southern Oregon coastline and found nothing promising. Then she looked north. Just east of Astoria, she saw a small town: Jewell, Oregon. Her own name.

  She had her sign.

  “I thought that I would go to Jewell to see if I could find me. ’Cause I wasn’t happy. I had looked inside myself and I wasn’t there anymore. I felt like John had sucked my soul out. I was empty, frightened, miserable, and lost.”

  That was a massive understatement.

  Kate told Bill and Doris where she was going, and she promised to check in with them every day by phone. She didn’t plan to tell John where she was headed, knowing full well that he was likely to track her down wherever it might be. She would tell him only that he could call their landlords, and they would let him know she was fine.

  “I just meandered up the coast on 101,” she said. “I took the ‘cape route’ north, and I walked every beach, and followed every trail I wanted to. I was gone a week, but I checked in every night with Bill and Doris.”

  Heading north, she stayed in a “funky little cottage” in Oceanside and used the only pay phone in the two-block town for checking in. But the connection was bad, and the message was garbled. Misunderstanding, Bill played it for John—and John picked up “Oceanside.”

  Kate had already moved on when the manager of the cabins received a call from a man identifying himself as the “Oregon state police.” The officer asked the manager if Kate Jewell had been there, who she was traveling with, and if she’d left any drugs or alcohol behind in the room. He also asked which direction she’d been traveling in.

  It wasn’t the Oregon state police; it was John Branden, tracking her, trying to control her.

  “I found that little spot in the road called Jewell,” Kate said. “There was the Jewell School and the Jewell Elk Preserve—with not an elk in sight—and that was about all.”

  During her walks on the beaches along the way, Kate had finally allowed herself to recognize that a decade of her life was gone, and a sea change was washing over her. Whatever she and John had had together was finished and couldn’t be resurrected. If only she could convince John of that. It was taking such a long time to peel him from her life.

  She got back to Gold Beach on Monday, May 24. John was due to return the next day. She called him from the road and was vastly relieved when he appeared to have come to the same conclusion that she had. Staying together was too painful for both of them. They were through. He didn’t accuse her as he usually did. He sounded only a little sad.

  She would be free of him, after all.

  “I thought I had finally achieved what I had been working for years to accomplish—a friendly separation. And he said it first, just the way I’d hoped it would happen. John actually said, ‘I can’t take this anymore, you can’t take it anymore—so let’s just end it.’ He wasn’t angry, and I thought we both felt relief that it was over. I think he even said, ‘Let’s be friends.’ I promised to be at home in the cabin if he came up from San Diego.”

  She felt happy and calm for the first time in years. They could work together without recriminations. They could still help people with health problems but let go of the anguish of a doomed love affair.

  The next few days were fine. John respected Kate’s space, and he was “wonderful” to her. She didn’t totally trust him, because she knew how quickly his mood could change. They lived platonically, talking calmly about their plans. Kate still hoped to have a work relationship with John, and a friendship. Seeing the “good John” for those days at the end of May, it all seemed possible. They blazed a shortcut trail to the fire road that led to the beach—John with a weed whacker and Kate with a machete.

  They had planted a large garden on the lower terrace of their rental property, and on Saturday, May 29, John was busy cleaning up brush and weeds on the upper level of the property. Whether either of them would be there to harvest the garden was anyone’s guess, but it seemed important to both of them to do the yard work.

  Kate was idly watching soap opera videos in midafternoon without paying much attention to them. She felt guilty because John was working so hard and she was being lazy. When he walked in, she sensed he was annoyed with her, probably because she had taken a break from weeding. She changed the subject and unwittingly picked the wrong topic. She told him that she planne
d to volunteer at Oasis, and he was instantly angry. Of course he would be, she understood too late. That was where she had gone for help in January after he’d threatened her life. She had been put off her guard because John had been so understanding and reasonable for several days.

  She apologized for not helping him more in the yard, and he nodded. They were back to having a pleasant conversation, and she breathed an inward sigh of relief.

  Kate started outside to help with the yard work. Grabbing a machete from the garage on the lower level of the cabin, she headed down below the garden path to trim back the salmonberries. She concentrated on the task before her, and they didn’t talk for most of the afternoon. John was cutting a path to the beach with a weed whacker, and it made so much noise they would have had to shout. After a long while, Kate heard the machine’s engine cut off. Now there was only the sound of the waves far below and the last buzzing of insects and chirping of birds as the sun lowered on the western horizon.

  At sunset, Kate headed uphill toward the garden, and she stopped at the faucet there to water the drooping vegetables. John yelled down at her, “Oh—I thought you’d been killed.”

  Maybe he was making a sick joke, but it was the second time he’d talked about her dying violently in a week.

  Kate watered their garden, turned off the hose, and climbed up the sandy trail to where John was sitting in a lawn chair near their huge pink rhododendron. She saw smoke rising from the fire he’d built in the pit there.

  It was a lovely evening, and she was tired. At this point, Kate had no sense of foreboding at all. But then John leaned back in his chair, and it tipped completely over backwards. She looked at his face and the clumsy way he was trying to get to his feet and right the blue plastic chair, and she felt a chill. Now Kate saw there was a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of Chardonnay, three-quarters empty, sitting on the picnic table next to their cabin. She’d seen John drink two large cans of beer during the afternoon. He was very drunk.