A Fever In The Heart

by Rule, Ann

  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 Cafe 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.”

  Coincidentally, Susan Logg and her fiancé, Don Stafford, had headed up the Granite Creek Road toward the campsite between 8:30 and 9:30 P.M. that Sunday night. They had passed neither Ruth nor Tony along the way. When they got back to the big house in Auburn at 10:40 P.M., they encountered Tony, who had just emerged from taking a shower. He told them he had no idea where Ruth had gone off to. He figured she would come driving up any time, and there was no use to go looking for her. It was too dark.

  The long night passed with no word at all from Ruth. The next morning, Don Stafford and Tony Fernandez drove back to North Bend and officially reported Ruth as a missing person to the State Patrol. Then they drove up the Martha Lake Road to the Granite Creek Road along the route to the vacated campsite. There was no sign of the Winnebago along the roadway. Suddenly, Stafford spotted some tracks in the dirt shoulder next to the Granite Creek Road. The tracks appeared to disappear over the cliff’s edge. When Stafford pointed them out, Tony Fernandez asked him, “Do you think I should look here?”

  Stafford volunteered to look. He walked to the edge of the precipitous cliff where rock had been blasted out, making it an almost sheer drop. Bracing himself, he looked down. Far, far below, he saw the crumpled mass of metal that had been the Winnebago.

  Before he turned back to give Tony the bad news, Don Stafford forced himself to look along the cliff side between the wrecked camper and the top. About halfway down, he saw a body and he knew it was Ruth Fernandez.

  In a very short time, the sunny mountain road was alive with King County Police and Washington State Patrol troopers. The wreckage was three hundred feet below. The investigators were able to approach it only obliquely by using a logging road farther down the grade. When they finally got to Ruth Fernandez, they confirmed that she was dead, and that she had been for many hours. Rigor mortis was almost complete. She appeared to have suffered massive head injuries. Oddly, her clothing was remarkably untorn for someone who had ridden the hurtling camper off the embankment and then one hundred fifty feet down the hill before she had fallen out.

  Tony Fernandez complained about the hours the police were spending at the scene. It was perfectly obvious what had happened. He muttered to Don Stafford, “They are just creating red tape.” Tony asked Stafford to leave with him. He didn’t want to stay around there any longer, watching from above as the cops worked over his dead wife.

  There were aspects of the accident that puzzled and bothered the investigators. Trooper Don Caughell of the Washington State Patrol’s Fatality Investigative Unit looked with his discerning eye first at the road and then at the shattered motor home. The road had no defects that would make control of a vehicle difficult; there was no breaking away of the shoulder area where the rig had gone over. This indicated to him that the Winnebago had been moving slowly and that no one had stomped on the brakes in a desperate attempt to keep from plunging over. “Why?” he wondered. Why hadn’t Ruth Fernandez tried to save herself?

  Although the motor home itself was thoroughly crumpled, there was no sign inside it to indicate that a body had bounced around during the terrible drop. No blood, no torn flesh, no hair. Ruth Fernandez had been wearing a loosely woven blouse which would have been likely to catch on something during the terrible bucketing down the steep hill. But her blouse had no tears or snags at all.

  Ruth Fernandez’s body was lifted with the use of a carefully balanced litter, from the side of the cliff and taken to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office in Seattle to await autopsy.

  The postmortem examination showed that she had suffered two severe injuries, neither of which was typical of a victim who had ridden a vehicle down a slope for almost two hundred feet. The first wound was caused by some kind of blunt object striking her omentum—the fatty, apronlike membrane that hangs from the stomach and transverse colon in the abdominal cavity. The omentum is rich in blood vessels. Ruth’s second wound—and the fatal wound—was a fractured skull. She had died sometime between 11:30 A.M. on the 26 and 11:30 A.M. on the 27. The best clue to time of death is when the victim has last been seen. As Ruth was known to be alive at 4:30 P.M. on the Sunday she disappeared, the time-of-death period could be cut to nineteen hours.


  According to autopsy findings, she could have lived a maximum of six hours without treatment and a minimum of one hour. Blood alcohol tests indicated that Ruth had been legally intoxicated at the time of her death, that is, she had at least .10 of alcohol in her bloodstream.

  Tony Fernandez was Ruth’s sole heir, and he applied almost immediately for her insurance benefits. Mutual of Omaha declined to cut him a check, however, because there was an ongoing investigation into her death. Indeed, King County Police homicide detectives Ted Forrester and Roger Dunn would spend months in their initial probe of the strange circumstance of Ruth Logg Fernandez’s death. Those months would stretch into years.

  Circumstantial evidence indicated that some outside force had caused Ruth’s Winnebago to plunge over the cliff. Forester and Dunn suspected Tony Fernandez of killing his wife, but they could not prove it.

  What did happen between 4:30 and 8:30 P.M. on July 26, 1974? No one but Tony saw Ruth during that time, and he insisted that she first took a walk in the woods and then decided to drive home alone from their campsite.

  He liked to imply that Ruth had been out of control, hysterical, irrational—a woman who should not have been driving the big Winnebago rig. Tony even suggested obliquely that Ruth might have been suicidal. But was it consistent with human psychology that a healthy, forty-four-year-old woman, slightly intoxicated, perhaps upset at her failing marriage, would deliberately drive herself off a cliff? She had two daughters who needed her, family, friends, and a considerable fortune. If she was so angry with Tony that she wanted to die, would she have done this knowing that it was Tony and Tony alone who would inherit everything she owned?

  Probably not.

  The case dragged on. No criminal charges were filed against Tony Fernandez. Fernandez himself pooh-poohed the theory that he might have killed his wife. He remained in the family home and gave frequent interviews to the media, appearing often on the nightly news television programs. He appeared affable and confident.

  Tony Fernandez was so confident, in fact, that he began to date publicly. He was a grieving widower, yes, but a man got lonely.

  In February of 1976, a year and a half after Ruth Logg Fernandez died, her daughters, Mrs. Kathleen Logg Lea, twenty-two, and Susan Logg, nineteen, brought civil suit against Tony Fernandez, charging that he was not eligible to inherit any of Ruth’s fortune. Under the Slayer’s Act, no one shall inherit benefits resulting from the death of someone whose death they have caused.

  Ruth’s daughters were so frustrated to see Tony Fernandez going blithely on with his life that they felt they had to do something. Ted Forrester and Roger Dunn had explained that they had not yet come up with enough physical evidence to take to the King County Prosecutor’s Office so that criminal charges could be brought. Criminally, guilt must be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt. Civilly, however, a judgment can be made on the “preponderance of evidence.” Testimony on “prior bad acts” (of which Tony Fernandez had plenty) could be introduced.

  Ruth’s daughters decided to go for it. Enraged, Tony Fernandez brought a million-dollar lawsuit against Ted Forrester.

  It was a marathon four-week trial and received more press coverage than most criminal trials. Superior Court Judge George Revelle’s courtroom became a kind of microcosm of the lives of Tony Fernandez and Ruth Logg Fernandez. Ghosts of Fernandez’s past reappeared. John Casteel, the man who had bounced in a Jeep sixty feet down a cliff after Fernandez bailed out, was there. So was William Belcher, who wound up with a head wound in the snowy wilds of Canada. Neither man came right out and accused Tony of violence—they merely related what had happened to them.

  Tony’s ex-wife testified—for the defense—saying he was faithful “in his own way” and that he had never thrown his other women in her face during their marriage. She smiled at him as she testified.

  After the background of the couple’s meeting, romance, and marriage was presented, both sides called experts in forensic pathology to the stand.

  Dr. F. Warren Lovell, Chief Pathologist of Northwest Hospital, testified for Fernandez’s defense. Lovell, who specialized in the study of fatal accidents and designed the autopsy program for the NASA flight project, said that it was likely that, when the Winnebago went over the cliff, Ruth Fernandez’s body became an essentially weightless object, thrown against the motor, which would have yielded on impact. This, Lovell testified would explain why Ruth’s injuries were not more extensive. He also said it was not unusual that her clothing was untorn.

  On cross-examination, however, Dr. Lovell conceded that the fatal skull fracture could have been caused by a man taking her by the hair and striking her head on a rock. “But it would be very hard to do,” he added.

  Dr. Lovell did not agree with the plaintiffs that the injury to the abdomen was consistent with a blow from a fist. He said that it could have been caused by Ruth’s belly hitting the steering wheel.

  Detective Roger Dunn, however, testified that he had examined the steering wheel of the Winnebago and found no damage consistent with a great force pushing against it.

  Dr. Gale Wilson, who had been the King County Medical Examiner for forty years before his retirement and who had done over seventeen thousand autopsies, testified that, in his educated opinion, Ruth was not in the motor home when it left the road. He was convinced, rather, that she had died from a blunt instrument applied with great force to her head. Dr. Donald Reay, the current medical examiner, testified that Ruth had died of a skull fracture and that it was possible—but not very likely—that she was in the motor home when it left the road.

  The options open to the deciding judge were essentially this:

  1. Ruth Fernandez, distraught and a little intoxicated, drove accidentally off the cliff without even applying the brakes of the motor home. Her body fell out halfway down.

  2. Ruth Fernandez drove deliberately off the cliff and her body was thrown out halfway down.

  3. Someone bludgeoned and beat Ruth Fernandez, pushed the motor home off the cliff and flung Ruth down after it. Or someone carried her body halfway down to make it look as if she had been in an accident.

  4. Someone pushed the Winnebago over and persuaded Ruth to go down to it to help retrieve valuables. That someone then killed her where she was found.

  Tony Fernandez himself did not testify in the trial.

  Arthur Piehler, the attorney for the Logg sisters, summed up the plaintiff’s case dramatically: “Tony Fernandez did fall in love when he met Ruth in 1971. He fell in love with her house, her five acres, her swimming pool, her stocks, her bonds, and other assets.”

  Piehler recalled that medical experts had testified that Ruth would have had broken bones, multiple cuts, lacerations, foreign objects in wounds, and torn clothing had she been in the Winnebago when it crashed. He theorized that Fernandez had somehow crashed the motor home and then persuaded Ruth to walk down the mountainside with him to recover items in it. It would have been easy for him to hit her on the head and in the stomach, and leave her there to die alone.

  Piehler contended that Fernandez had forged Ruth’s signature on the one-hundred-thousand-dollar accidental death policy two months and six days before she died. He said Tony had probably become concerned that his wife was considering a divorce. “He could see all his lovely property drifting away from him.” Piehler told the court about the other woman Tony was seeing, the woman who had received the diamonds and furs.

  John C. Hoover, Fernandez’s attorney, argued that the couple had been happy and that they had taken a week’s camping trip together. The Winnebago had crashed, he said, only because Ruth had had too much to drink. Hoover insisted that Ruth had been completely content with all the property agreements between herself and her husband. If she had not been satisfied with their arrangement, she had had plenty of time to change it.

  In March 1976, Tony Fernandez’s fortune evaporated when Judge Revelle read his oral decision to a packed courtroom, a decision in which he found the defendant without
credibility. “I do not believe anything he says,” Revelle began succinctly.

  Revelle read his thirty-one-page decision and concluded, “I have examined many possibilities and numerous high probabilities of the cause and method of her death. Each such probability requires the participation of the only person I know who was with her; that’s Anthony Fernandez. One of those methods or probabilities is a method suggested by Mr. Piehler, but I can’t say that’s it. I just know that under the burden of proof here—even stronger than necessary to be found—Anthony Fernandez, I conclude, participated as a principal in the willful and unlawful killing of Ruth Fernandez.”

  In his conclusions of law, Judge Revelle said, “Anthony Fernandez, as the slayer of Ruth Fernandez, shall not acquire, in any way, property or receive any benefit as the result of the death of Ruth Fernandez. Anthony Fernandez is deemed to have predeceased the decedent (under the Slayer’s Act) Ruth Fernandez. All property which would have passed to or for the benefit of the defendant, Anthony Fernandez, by the terms of the Will of Ruth Fernandez, or any agreement of the defendant and Ruth Fernandez, under the provisions of RCW 21.16.120 shall be distributed as if the defendant had predeceased Ruth Fernandez.”

  With that, Tony lost the financial ball game. But he did not lose his freedom. He had only lost a civil case.

  It took another court order to get Fernandez to vacate the home in Auburn. He had lived there since July of 1974 when Ruth died. Tony was ordered not to attempt to remove furniture, appliances, or anything of value that would be part of the estate. Judge Revelle also restrained Fernandez from using credit cards drawn on the estate.

  Counsel for Sue and Kathy said, “Fernandez has been dissipating everything he can get his hands upon and has spent about $155,000 that was part of the estate.” Even as the trial had progressed, Tony was said to have been involved in a $200,000 land purchase.