A Fever in the Heart: And Other True Cases (43 page)

When her life was viewed in terms of worldly goods, Ruth Logg had everything. The lovely blond widow had been well provided for by her late husband, Les. She lived alone for several years after Less death in her sprawling house in Auburn, Washington. The grounds were impeccably maintained and there was even a huge swimming pool. Ruth's home was valued in the early seventies at $85,000. Today, it would be worth well over a million dollars. Les Logg's business holdings had amounted to something over a quarter of a million dollars at the time of his death.

Again, that $250,000 would be worth ten times as much in the economy of the nineties. Ruth herself had a good business head. She had moved smoothly into her new place as owner of a business. Unlike many women who are suddenly widowed, Ruth Logg was able to manage. Her two pretty teenage daughters, Kathleen and Susan, lived with her and she loved them devotedly. But Ruth was only in her early forties, and she sometimes dreamed of finding a man to share her life. She was lonely and the years ahead often seemed to stretch out bleakly. Ruth knew that her girls would soon be moving away to start their own lives, and that was as it should be. She accepted that. But she couldn't bear the thought of rattling around her huge house alone once Kathleen and Susan were gone.

In March of 1971, she put the house on the market. Perhaps she would buy a condominium or take an apartment where she wouldn't have to worry about yard work. Her personal safety was on her mind too. A woman in a house alone wasn't as safe as one who lived close to other people in a security building. Most single women hold on to a romantic dream that a special man will come along one day and change their lives. Ruth Logg was no exception. She was far too young to give up on love, even though her prospects looked slim. She hated the idea of dating services or Parents Without Partners, or blind dates set up by well-meaning friends.

She sometimes wondered why it had to be so difficult to meet someone.

And then Ruth Logg did meet someone in such an unexpected way. It was a blustery March afternoon when she first encountered the man who would suddenly launch her world in exciting new directions. A sleek luxury car pulled up in front of her home and a compactly muscled, impeccably dressed man emerged and knocked at her door. He had a great voice. He introduced himself as "Dr. Anthony Fernandez." No one would have described Dr. Fernandez as handsome, and yet he had an undeniably charismatic quality. He had wide shoulders and thickly muscled arms and wrists, and he looked at Ruth with warm dark eyes under thick brows.

Ruth could sense that he was gentle. His manners were wonderful, he was almost apologetic for interrupting her schedule, but he did want to see her home. Ruth assured him that she would be delighted to show him through the house. Dr. Fernandez explained that he was forty-eight years old and divorced. He said he had just opened a family counseling clinic in the Tacoma area and that he was hoping to buy a house within easy commuting distance to his business. Ruth Logg was quite taken with Dr. Fernandez, who urged her to call him "Tony." They talked as she led him through her home and he seemed impressed with the floor plan, the way she had decorated the rooms, and with the lawn and gardens. It wasn't long before they stopped talking about the house, they discovered that they shared many interests. Dr. Anthony Fernandez asked Ruth Logg if she would join him for dinner and she accepted, a little surprised at herself for agreeing to a date with someone she really didn't know. Tony and Ruth had such a good time on their first evening that they both knew they would see more of each other. More dates followed and Ruth suddenly found herself caught up in a whirlwind courtship. After so many years at the edge of other people's lives, she found it incredibly exciting to have this fascinating man pursuing her. And Tony Fernandez was pursuing her. At first, Ruth questioned her great good fortune, but then she accepted it. She was, after all, a good-looking woman with a lush figure and a pretty face. She had forgotten that in her years as a widow. Now, Ruth became even prettier with her newfound happiness. It never occurred to Ruth that Tony might be interested in her because she was wealthy. In fact, she believed that what she had was chicken feed compared to what he owned, Tony had told her that he was a man with substantial assets.

He spoke of timber holdings and real estate, and, of course, he had his counseling practice. He didn't need her money. Ruth didn't know that the plush car Tony drove was rented, nor did she know much about his life before they met. None of that mattered. Ruth Logg was totally in love with Anthony Fernandez.

Ruth's family and friends were not as enthusiastic about Tony.

They wanted her to be happy, of course, because she had devoted so many years helping other people, but they were worried. They had checked into Tony's background, and they soon heard rumors that "Dr." Fernandez had spent time in prison for fraud. They doubted that Ruth would believe the rumors, so they pleaded with her to check into Fernandez's background before she considered marriage. Ruth only smiled and reassured them that she knew all about Tony.

He had told her that he had had a little bit of trouble in the past. He had been honest with her, she said, and his past didn't matter to her.

Ruth's philosophy was that everyone deserves a second chance. Why should she dredge up unhappy memories? Ruth's sister was particularly persistent in trying to coax Ruth off her rosy cloud. When Tony Fernandez discovered that, he told Ruth's sister that if she didn't like his plans with Ruth, then she could just consider herself excluded from their social circle and future family gatherings. Amazingly, Ruth went along with Tony's decision.

No one is blinder than someone in the first stages of romance, and Ruth refused to listen to one detrimental word about Tony. By September of 1971, Ruth and Tony were engaged. She gave up all thoughts of selling her house, she and Tony would need it to live in. At his suggestion Ruth and Tony drew up new wills. Although the will Ruth had drawn up three years earlier had left everything she owned$250,000 plus her home to her daughters, her new will left it all to Tony. She was confident that if anything should happen to her, Tony would provide for her girls. In turn, Tony left everything he owned to Ruth in his Will. What Anthony Fernandez actually owned was debatable. Despite his grandiose boasting to his fiancee, Tony's assets were negligible. When he met Ruth, he had seventy-five hundred dollars in the bank, a thousand-dollar bond, and some mining claims and real property that would one day sell at a tax sale for less than four thousand dollars. Beyond that, Tony had substantial judgments filed against him.

His financial statement would have been written entirely in red ink.

Despite objections and pleadings from the people who truly loved Ruth Logg, she and Dr. Tony Fernandez flew to Puerto Rico on January 5, 1972, where they were married. She had only known him ten months, but it seemed as if they were meant to be together. They toasted their new life with champagne, and Ruth was blissfully happy. Her honeymoon with her new husband was everything she had hoped. She was confident that, in time, her family would come to see Tony for the wonderful man he was.

While she had left Tony everything in her will, she didn't plan on dying for at least four more decades. She had too much to live for now. When Tony casually mentioned that it would be easier for him to help her manage her affairs if he had her Power of Attorney, Ruth didn't hesitate. They went at once to a notary and Ruth gave her husband the power to sell her property or do any other business in her name. In retrospect, it is easy to see that Ruth Logg Fernandez knew pitifully little about this man who was her husband. Even her worried family had no idea. It would not have been difficult for Ruth to have found out about Tony's recent and remote past. Reams of newspaper copy had been published about Tony Fernandez's checkered career. In his home territory, he had been at first famous and later infamous. in the early 1950s, Tony Fernandez had been an important player in the timber industry of Washington and Oregon. When he was in his twenties, he had made a killing in the logging business. He operated mainly out of Long view, a city of twenty thousand in southwestern Washington. The Long view Daily News frequently carried reports of Fernandez's new and massive timber buys. Some of his deals involved millions of dollars worth of virgin timber. Tony Fernandez was listed as a partner in many companies, and he was considered one of the more solid citizens in Long view. He was headline material: "Fernandez Buys Timber at Dam Site in Oregon" (this was on July 19, 1954, when Tony had purchased 40 million board feet at thirty-two dollars per thousand feet), "Chinook Region Logging Planned" (this was on October 4, 1954, when he had bought eight million board feet), "Fernandez Buys Pacific Timber" (on March 9, 1956, when Tony Fernandez estimated his newest contract would eventually cost $300,000). At the time Tony Fernandez was only thirty-one, but he was on a roll and he didn't stop at timber. On March 22, 1955, the Long view Daily News told of a new mining company being incorporated in Cowlitz County, Washington. Tony Fernandez was its president. The purpose of the company would be "to mine, mill, concentrate, convert, smelt, treat and sell gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc, brass, transfer $40,000 to a Gresham, Oregon, bank to the account of the "Fernandez-Belcher deal."

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 Long view, Fernandez invited the old man to look at a tract of timber twenty miles east of Long view. After they had looked at one stand of trees, Tony I I Lz 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.