by Robert Scott
“He would just ramble on and on, and I couldn’t follow what he was saying. I would just nod my head. I felt like he was trying to recruit us for whatever trip he was on. He acted like he was some kind of prophet. His conversations were so out there, I would just say, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh.’ But I really didn’t understand what he was talking about.”
Isabelle’s husband, Robert, remembered, “Gabe came over to visit a lot and his demeanor had changed. When I first met him, we had all sat around a table playing cards and drank a few beers. This had been over James Anstey’s house. Gabe and I sat in a hot tub for a short time, and I thought he was hip and cool.
“By late 2009, he was generally panicky and stressy. I wouldn’t say ‘paranoid,’ but ‘anxiety’ was a big word for him. He lost a lot of weight. He started talking about religion a lot and secret odd jobs for the government black ops.
“He said he was getting phone calls all the time to do missions. I had some concerns about these stories. I didn’t really understand why he was telling me these things. It was like he wanted us to join his group or something.
“With religion, he said he would wake up in the morning and receive his orders from Him. I asked him who ‘Him’ was, and he pointed straight up at the sky. So I took it to mean God. A lot of the conversations were his philosophy about how the world should be. It seemed like he was trying to convert us.”
Gabe was becoming very worrisome to all of his family members. His maternal aunt, Laurel Carmack, even wrote down, Gabe is ill and has delusions about himself. He views himself as a prophet.
And Gabe’s maternal grandmother was alarmed by his long, rambling letters to her. They made no sense at all. She feared he had become a religious zealot and conspiracy kook.
Gabe also called Jesse on the phone and started saying he was a prophet of God. His half brother recounted, “He believed God had given him the power to heal and to see the future. In regard to the future, he began saying Mom was not in a good place. And he started giving off a sense of how he had been wronged in his early life by everyone around him. He still loved Mom then, but he felt like she had abandoned him with Danny when he was young.
“He talked a lot about getting her away from Bob Kennelly. He was so manic. I would listen to him talk on the phone and I couldn’t get a word in. I could only follow bits and pieces of what he was saying. None of it made a whole lot of sense, but I would listen, anyway. Many of the conversations had religious overtones. In January, he said he was on a special mission to put all of our family together again.”
More than anything, Gabe seemed to be reaching out for a golden past that may never have existed in his life. It was a past where his mom, Jesse and Gabe’s grandmother could all be together once again without all of the troubles of the outside world closing in. It was a world that didn’t include the chaotic years of his youth, nor did it contain all of the frustrations and false starts in the plans he had dreamt of in his twenties.
A person who saw Gabe around this time was Mike Woods, the man who had trained him at the BMW dealership in Portland and had become friends with him. Woods related, “Gabe stopped in the shop one day in early 2010. He was in the area and said he had to go back down to Coquille soon. He was staying in a nice hotel I knew around here, so I went there and spent some time with him.
“He was a totally different person. He was telling stories about military black ops. He said he was in some kind of group that he would do these deeds for—some kind of group with the government. He had a bunch of marijuana with him, and he was smoking pot and drinking beer. It wasn’t the Gabe I knew.”
When Woods left Gabe’s presence, he said, “I was confused about this whole thing. I didn’t understand how he had become that way. When he was the Gabe I knew, he was truthful and honest. I knew that he had been in ROTC, but this was like out of the movies. He still did have some positive qualities, but he seemed troubled. His speech didn’t flow like it used to. It was like he was struggling.”
In fact, Gabe was struggling a lot, just to maintain even the approximation of a normal life. Whenever Robin got on the phone with Jesse, she would tell him about just how worried she was about Gabe. Gabe’s stories just kept getting wilder and wilder, and he was more sullen and at odds with Bob all the time. Robin didn’t know where all this was headed, but she felt that Gabe needed help.
CHAPTER 15
The local church that Gabe attended should have been a refuge for him and his family. But Gabe was making more and more outlandish comments to people there all the time. These comments would just seem to come out of left field.
Gabe’s remarks to Michael Stockford, LDS branch president in Bandon, took the cake. Stockford had asked Gabe to meet with him because his recent comments were making people in the congregation very uncomfortable. While listening to this, Gabe paced up and down and rambled about things that made no sense to Stockford. Finally the LDS leader asked him to leave.
Gabe was only gone a few minutes, and then returned, claiming, “I am Jesus Christ! There is evil that needs to be taken care of! I can heal people. I can see into the future.”
Gabe was asked to leave once more, which he did.
In late January, Gabe phoned Pamela Hansen. She recalled, “He had some issues with the local leadership in the church. He said they had not handled some things in the correct way. He said I shouldn’t go to church in Bandon anymore.
“When I defended our church leadership, he got very agitated. His thoughts were random and incoherent. It was very hard to follow. Then he said I might not see him for a long time. He said there were enemies looking for him and it had something to do with when he worked in Las Vegas. There was something about a ring of prostitutes. It was not clear. But he did say I would see him again.”
Also in January, Robin’s old live-in boyfriend, John Lindgren, came by Bob Kennelly’s property to make a bid on some work that needed to be done. Gabe had always liked John. John recalled later, “I got a call to come out to Flower Hill to make a bid on a drywall job on Bob Kennelly’s house. I went out and measured it and noticed that Gabe was not the same old Gabe I had known. He was bouncing on his heels and real agitated.
“I shook his hand and gave him a hug and we talked for a little while. He asked, if I got the job, if he could help me, and I said, ‘You bet!’”
While he was there, John noticed that there was real tension between Gabe and Bob Kennelly. They didn’t speak to each other at all. In fact, they were practically glaring at each other. John wasn’t sure what all this was about, but he definitely felt something was wrong.
On top of his troubles with the local branch of the LDS Church, Gabe kept upsetting Isabelle and her husband, Robert. His stepsister recounted, “I hadn’t talked to Robin for a while and I wanted to go over and give Robin some photos. And Gabe told me, ‘No, just leave her alone.’ I didn’t know why he told me that. It just sounded like she and Bob needed their space.”
Robert Hayden knew that Gabe was smoking marijuana. One day, Gabe told him a story about marijuana and Idaho. Robert recalled, “He said that when he was a sheriff’s deputy, he would pull people over, jot it down that they had already been pulled over and then let them go. That way, they could transport marijuana through the state without being pulled over again. It was basically that he was helping people run dope through the state of Idaho.”
After that, Isabelle and her husband invited Gabe, Jessica and Kalea over for a spaghetti dinner at their house. It was a meal they would never forget. Isabelle recalled, “Gabe just sat there and didn’t eat anything. He was a lot scruffier and a lot skinnier than he used to be. He was wearing more raggedy clothes.”
Robert remembered this visit: “The spaghetti dinner was the peak of his preaching to us. After dinner, Gabe sat on the couch with me talking about different opportunities. It was basically about opportunities in ways to make a lot of money fast, but he wasn’t specific about how the money would be made.
“It was kind of scary fo
r us. We’d ask how it was supposed to happen, but all he would answer was ‘You can have it, if you want it.’ Stuff like ‘One hundred twenty thousand dollars by tomorrow morning.’ He kept saying, ‘You can have it, if you want it,’ and then it was very strange. Jessica said the same thing, and so did Kalea.
“While sitting on the couch, he started tearing up and said, ‘I have to stay on this path. And if I don’t stay on this path, I’m gonna fuckin’ break! And it will all be over!’
“And then he added, ‘Robbie, do you ever get the feeling that you could reach over and just rip somebody’s throat out on the spur of the moment? Do you think you could ever lose control like that?’
“I said I didn’t know. And I looked over at my wife, like what’s going on here?”
Gabe’s emotions were all over the place that evening, and so were his rants. When he and his family finally left, Robert turned to his wife and said, “He’s crazy!”
As if the night of the spaghetti dinner wasn’t strange enough, Gabe showed up at Robert and Isabelle’s home on another night, unannounced, between eleven and midnight. Robert Hayden noted later, “It was just out of the blue. We were already in bed, and Gabe came over just to give our daughter a little green scrunchy for her hair.”
A few nights later, Gabe came over to their house very late to borrow a didgeridoo (an Australian Aboriginal musical instrument). Robert noted, “Once again, I could hardly make sense of anything that Gabe was saying. I did know that two of Bob Kennelly’s wives had died, even though they were relatively young. (It may have actually been one wife, but Gabe kept saying there were two deceased ex-wives) . Gabe and I had talked about how weird that was. Among the people I knew, there was some speculation about whether those had been natural causes. I know that Gabe was worried about something bad happening to his mom. He did say that he did not approve of Bob, and he didn’t think Bob was a good fit for his mom.”
CHAPTER 16
Jessica was still the only one in their household making a decent living; but near the end of January, Gabe insisted that they suddenly leave his mother’s house. His delusions about being poisoned were at full throttle. In the middle of the night, he convinced her that they were in danger. They packed up Kalea and went to Medford, Oregon, about 120 miles away. Neither Gabe nor Jessica told Robin or Bob that the family was going. Like so many things that Gabe was now doing, his impromptu trip didn’t seem to have any plans about what they would do once they were actually there. Irrational movement was becoming just as commonplace for him as irrational thought.
Jessica recalled of this trip to Medford, “We drove to Medford because the night before I had been doing the dishes and I felt kinda sick. And I was doing the dishes and I could see them, but I couldn’t see what else was around me. And Gabe looked over at me and said, ‘Do you feel sick?’ And I said yes. And he said, ‘I feel it too. I think we need to leave.’ And I said, ‘I totally agree.’ So we jumped in the truck and took Kalea with us. And we stayed there in Medford.
“The next morning, we talked about it and we felt like Bob was trying to hurt us—to poison us with rat poison by putting it on the dishes. They ate out every day. They would come in to have toast and coffee in the morning, but then they would eat out somewhere. And they’d go out to eat every night. But we’d always fix food there at the house. And I don’t know if Bob put it in the food or on the dishes. We had a feeling he was doing that. We both did.
“And Kalea was a lot more agitated than usual. And Gabe even commented that Kalea was fine all day long. But then I’d come home from work and then all of a sudden she wouldn’t listen to anything. We were in Medford and we hadn’t grabbed anything other than just ourselves and our clothes. And I had to sleep in my contacts because I didn’t have my glasses, and that was kind of painful. I was hurting, and he knew it. He said that we needed to go back so that we could get some stuff to live on.”
The trip to Medford was just the beginning of their sojourn. They soon returned to Bob’s house and quickly gathered some more belongings. Robin and Bob kept asking them what was wrong and where were they going. Neither one would say why the sudden rush or where they were going.
Jessica recalled, “We came back to the house and Gabe told me to go upstairs and start packing. And Kalea came with me, because she always comes with me when I’m around. And Gabe went to the Castle Room and started packing up his clothes and toothbrushes and that sort of stuff. And the whole time, I didn’t know where we were going to go or what we were going to do.
“I knew that I had my job and they were expecting me to be there, and I would be letting Mary Ann down because tax season was coming up. And every day she had been saying, ‘You’re not leaving, are you?’ And every day I’d been telling her, ‘No, I’m not.’ But my family’s safety trumped that job.
“So we packed up as much as we could, and Robin and Bob were there and they just kept walking around and asking, ‘Why?’ Bob usually doesn’t talk to me except about the weather. And I didn’t want to say to Robin, ‘Because I think your boyfriend’s hurting us.’ Because he was standing right there. So I just shrugged my shoulders and we took probably about forty-five minutes to an hour packing up.
“Robin didn’t want us to go. But Gabe told me to drive, and he said, ‘Get in and don’t look back.’ And so we did. We didn’t know where we were going or what we were going to do. But Gabe’s grandmother always liked to see him and was excited about seeing Kalea. So we headed there.”
Perhaps to try and alleviate his growing paranoia and agitation, Gabe decided to visit Lynn Walsh, who resided in Silverton. Once Gabe and his family arrived, his grandmother was very distressed by his appearance and the way he acted. She said later, “My grandson was sick. He was under so much stress. There was fear and anguish in him, and there was concern for his mother. He wanted to bring her up to Silverton because he thought she was unsafe in Bandon.
“He was physically suffering from the condition he was in. He was very thin, and when I put food on his plate, he wouldn’t eat it. I don’t recall him eating anything the whole time he was with me. He began telling me things that weren’t logical. I tried to counteract those things by telling him he wasn’t making sense to me. He said he engaged in secret activities and that he had one more trip to make to China. I was very concerned for him—concerned for his mental health.
“He said his family had fragmented. He said that he had enjoyed family life when he was living with me. He thought if his mom could come up here to Silverton as well, we could all be a family again.”
Gabe also said he needed to protect his mother. He seemed to insinuate that she needed protection from Bob Kennelly. And yet, as time went on, the one person it seemed that she needed protection from was Gabe.
While in Silverton, Gabe showed up one day at the LDS church there with Jessica and Kalea. David Bastian, his old friend from missionary days in Australia, went to that church. David recalled, “It was a Sunday and Gabe came to church with his wife and daughter. There was a break between some Sunday classes and I invited him and his family over for dinner. I was excited to see a friend I hadn’t seen for seven years or so.
“Everything seemed normal, although he was running a little late. When he showed up, he was wearing what he called his ‘thinking cap.’ He sat down on the couch in the living room and we talked. It was soon apparent that Gabe was very different. I don’t know what happened to him. It didn’t feel right. He would get excited about something and his wife would reach over and kind of rub his back to calm him down.
“Then my wife and I thought it was kind of strange because he wanted to meet with me in private. I invited him into my office, and we just sat down on the floor. We talked a little bit, and at that point, Gabe started doing all the talking. He would be all excited one moment, and then angry, and then he’d have tears in his eyes.
“I looked at his face and I didn’t recognize him at all when he was angry. He didn’t look like the Gabe I had known. He w
as not consistently coherent. At one point, he looked over at some Pixar videos I had for my kids, and he said that the people who made those were prophets.
“He started telling me stories about being in black ops. He said he had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar car so he could outrun the police if he had to. He wasn’t very clear, but he said that he was working for some agency, but he couldn’t go into detail. I took it all with a grain of salt, and just let him talk.
“He brought up about working for some company, and someone was stealing money from the agency and he had the inspiration to help the company crack the code of some numbers. It didn’t make a lot of sense. He became more and more agitated while he was there, and that was about two and a half hours. He would take less and less breaks while talking.
“I didn’t have much opportunity to change the direction of the conversation. I felt that he had fallen off the horse or was a couple short of a dozen. I was worried about him when he left and I had a hard time sleeping that night. I was stirring in my bed, and I told my wife, ‘Something’s not right with Gabe.’”
Ray Wetzel, who knew Gabe through the LDS church in Silverton, had been an acquaintance for ten years. Wetzel later said that the Gabe he knew as a young man “was easygoing, polite and positive. He became a friend of my children and spent time at our house. He would come over for dinner and have interesting conversations. He always spoke about his mother with a lot of respect and love.”
That was not the case when Wetzel saw Gabe in 2010. Wetzel recalled, “Gabe was talking about Salt Lake City and that it was going to erupt in riots. Gabe said it was a disaster waiting to happen. You need to get your kids out of there. He based all this allegedly on his background as a police officer. I held up my hand and said, ‘Gabe, my kids are fine.’ When I told him my kids were fine, he calmed down and changed the subject.”