A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  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 fiancée, 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 Longview, a city of twenty thousand in southwestern Washington. The Longview 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 Longview. 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 Longview 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, iron and steel.” The new company also expected to obtain oil rights. Stock valued at $100,000 had been authorized.

  Tony Fernandez maintained a high profile. He drove new Cadillacs. As an honorary deputy sheriff, he was allowed to install a siren in his car. He lived in a big house on the hill above Longview with his wife and four children. He was a Boy Scout leader and a Longview city councilman.

  In April of 1957, Fernandez announced that he was branching out into Canada and that he had purchased a billion board feet of timber—an early land grant by the British Royal family—near Nelson, British Columbia for $1,500,000. He said he was considering setting up a branch office near the Canadian border.

  In reality, Tony’s business empire seemed to have been built on shifting sands. Several huge timber companies brought suit against him, saying that he had logged off areas long after his contracts had expired. He was also accused of selling sections of timber by misrepresentation; he had identified the wrong sections of trees to prospective buyers. They thought they were buying acreage thick with timber when in reality Tony had simply shown them property that he didn’t own. They had signed purchase agreements without checking legal descriptions.

  It wasn’t only the big corporations who were after Tony Fernandez. Several elderly landowners claimed they had been cajoled into signing their names to blank contracts, only to find to their regret that they had signed quit-claim deeds to their timberland.

  Tony Fernandez couldn’t juggle his books forever. By July 1958 the IRS began to look at him with a jaundiced eye. The Internal Revenue Service filed notice of a tax lien of $95,246.31 against him for taxes that he hadn’t paid in 1951,1952, and 1953. The IRS filed what was known as a “jeopardy assessment” against Fernandez’s assets. This amounted to a lien against all his property. It followed two Superior Court memorandums saying that the wheeler dealer logger had to pay two logging firms over half a million dollars as the result of civil suits.

  Still, Tony Fernandez drove his Cadillacs, lived in his nice house, and kept up the facade of a highly successful businessman and a pillar in Longview.

  Individuals who had done business with Fernandez were nothing if not confused. An Oregon man, Bill Belcher, was foggy about a trip he had made to Nelson, British Columbia, with Fernandez in March of 1958. Tony had offered to “fly over” his timber holdings there so Belcher could have a look. But the clouds had been so thick that Belcher couldn’t tell whether he was looking at fir, pine, spruce, hemlock … or tumbleweed. When they attempted to reach the woods later by Jeep, they were forced back by deep snowdrifts.

  While they pondered their predicament, Belcher stepped behind the Jeep to light a cigarette. The next conscious memory he had was of lying beside a railroad track; his head felt as though a train had run over it. He was found by railroad workers who called for medics. Belcher was hospitalized with severe head injuries for ten days.

  Later, he learned that Tony Fernandez had returned to the guest cabin where the two men had been staying. He had told the managers that Belcher had decided to stay up in the woods in a miner’s cabin.

  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police notified Bill Belcher’s family that he had been critically injured. H
is wife left at once for Canada. After assuring herself that he would survive, she followed Belcher’s instructions to retrieve his briefcase in which he had carried important papers and money. She found the briefcase but Belcher could not explain a logging contract that had been tucked inside. There was also a receipt for $40,000 in payment for some land.

  Bill Belcher had no memory whatsoever of what happened to him after he stepped out of Tony Fernandez’s vehicle to have a cigarette alongside a snowy road. However, he was adamant that he would never have bought timber he had not even seen, and he would not have given someone $40,000 for trees hidden in fog.

  While Belcher had lain unconscious, a bank officer in Grants Pass, Oregon, where Belcher had an account, received several phone calls from a man who identified himself as Bill Belcher. The caller directed the banker to 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 Longview, Fernandez invited the old man to look at a tract of timber twenty miles east of Longview. After they had looked at one stand of trees, Tony suggested they check out another forest that 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.

  And so, in 1970, Anthony Fernandez was free—both from prison and from his twenty-three-year marriage. His wife had divorced him in 1965 while he was in prison. Surprisingly, she said she had no ill feelings toward Tony. He had always been a good provider and never mean or abusive. She did mention his wandering eye, however. She just hadn’t wanted to be lied to any longer. It had been a most civilized divorce. So civilized, in fact, that when Tony was paroled, he often brought his new girlfriends to visit his ex-wife.

  Scattered accounts of Tony Fernandez’s post-prison activities boggle the mind. He reported to hometown friends that he was a senior at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, majoring in psychology and ecology. This wasn’t long after his release from prison. As part of his studies, he joined a student tour to Arizona and New Mexico to study Navajo Indian history, culture, and economy. In an article in the Longview Daily News, it was also noted that Tony was enrolled simultaneously in an MA and Ph.D. program in a Florida university. (As it happened, all this “college” required its students to do to get a “diploma” was to write a thesis of unspecified length.)

  Tony Fernandez’s doctorate had been awarded simply because he had submitted a paper entitled “The Innovated Navajo.” And voila! Tony Fernandez became Dr. Anthony Fernandez.

  When he was heard from next, Dr. Fernandez reported he was attending the North American College of Acupuncture in Vancouver, British Columbia. Tony is quoted as saying he attended classes in Vancouver three times a week and would be spending fifteen weeks in Hong Kong and sixty
days in Peking as part of his training.

  It wasn’t that Fernandez believed that acupuncture was particularly important in the western world. “It is,” he pontificated, “at best, a fad. But I’m going into this with the point of view that it is most likely a psychological tool. And even if I never use it, the experience and knowledge will be a benefit.”

  On March 30, 1971—the same month he met Ruth Logg—a small item appeared in the Longview Daily News. “Anthony Fernandez, formerly of Longview and a recent Pacific Lutheran University graduate, will open a counseling office complex next month at 8815 S. Tacoma Way. He is also negotiating for property in Kelso on which to construct a family counseling clinic.”

  Dr. Fernandez promised to provide a twenty-four-hour answering service and said he had contracted to evaluate welfare recipients for the Tacoma office of the Department of Public Assistance.

  On June 10, 1971, “Dr.” Fernandez’s picture appeared in the Wenatchee, Washington, Daily World beside an article about his plans to establish a “rehabilitation center” for drug addicts and alcoholics on eighty acres he owned in the rural town of Alstown. He promised that he would build a modern clinic but retain the flavor of the historic old cabins on the eastern Washington property. He assured nearby residents that his patients would not be “turned loose” in the community. He did not mention, of course, that he himself was a parolee from a federal prison.

  None of Fernandez’s new endeavors ever got off the ground. He didn’t need them. He had Ruth Logg and the fortune her late husband had left her.

  This was the man with whom Ruth fell madly in love. This was her soft-eyed, warm-voiced hero who was going to make the second half of her life a wonderful time of love and companionship. She had never known anyone with no conscience at all; she was naive about the world of the con man. Les had loved her and protected her.

  Once married to Ruth, Tony Fernandez was kept busy overseeing her business interests and fortune. He encouraged Kathleen, her older daughter, to move out almost immediately after his marriage to her mother. He told Ruth it would be good for Kathleen to have an apartment of her own. Ruth’s younger daughter, Susan, lived with them but was involved with her own friends.