A Fever in the Heart and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Finally, Tony moved from the home that now belonged to Ruth’s daughters. But, in the end, there was little of the estate left for the two orphaned young women. After lawyers’ fees and Tony’s free spending, they obtained less than 10 percent of the money their parents had put aside for their futures.

  On June 3, 1976, Fernandez was charged in Lane County, Oregon, with forgery and theft by sale of timber valued at nearly $75,000 and was arrested on a federal parole violation warrant. He was not inside long. Yet another woman besotted with Tony Fernandez put up his bail.

  On August 12, 1977, Fernandez was charged with seven felony counts in Thurston County, Washington—second degree theft, two counts of unlawful issuance of bank checks, and four counts of first-degree theft alleging unlawful sale of timber rights that he claimed were his to a third party. These violations were said to have occurred in Thurston County in the winter of 1976-77. Convicted on all these counts, consecutive sentences could net him fifty-five years in prison.

  On September 1, 1977, the charge for which Ruth’s daughters and loved ones had waited so long was made. The King County Prosecutor’s Office charged Anthony Fernandez with first-degree murder in the death of Ruth Fernandez. His trial, scheduled for January 9, 1978—almost four years after Ruth died on the lonely mountainside—was one where the evidence was mostly circumstantial, one of the most difficult cases for a prosecutor to press. It was lengthy, and full of surprises. Tony Fernandez’s mistress, wearing her fur coat, was present at his trial every day.

  Tony Fernandez was convicted of Ruth Logg Fernandez’s murder in February 1978, and sentenced to life in prison. And that was exactly what he served.

  On Christmas Day 1995, Anthony Fernandez, seventy-three, enjoyed a hearty holiday meal in prison. And then he dropped dead of a massive heart attack.

  Who was the real Tony Fernandez? Was he a timber baron, a doctor of psychology, an acupuncturist, a historian of Navajo culture, a master of city government? A lover, a studied conman—or a methodical killer?

  It doesn’t matter anymore to Ruth Logg Fernandez. The man who promised to love her forever—betrayed her. She lost her hopes for the perfect romance in the darkness on the steep mountainside along Granite Creek Road. She will never see her grandchildren and never know her daughters as mature women.

  Perhaps she knows, however, that those daughters saw their quest through to the end and gave her the only gift they could: justice.

  THE END

  ***

  BLACK LEATHER

  The cases that follow next—“Black Leather” and “Mirror Images”—are companion pieces, a close look at the injustice that resulted when those who should have been paying attention looked the other way.

  The first case, which allows a rare insider’s look at the crimes of a sexually aberrant criminal, is ugly; it may be offensive to some readers. Still, it demonstrates more than any other I have written how ridiculously dangerous misplaced trust in a sexual psychopath can be. This case will lead you into the next in the natural order of unnatural behavior—if such a thing is possible.

  Larry Hendricks, the murderer in “Black Leather,” was a sexual psychopath. So are the two killers in the case following this one, they shared one identity between them. Larry Hendricks was two people all by himself: a man with a respectable façade, and a man with a secret life so dark and so sick that his crimes left even experienced Pierce County Washington detectives—who have seen their share of grisly murders—shaking their heads.

  This killer was trusted far beyond limits that anyone might imagine. Trusted by the system that released him into society, he betrayed that trust in a series of unspeakable crimes.

  ***

  It was a little after eight A.M. on Monday, the first of May, 1979, when Sam Brand, a farmer who lives in an isolated, wooded rural area near Roy, Washington, heard someone pounding frantically on his front door. Drop-in visitors at Brand’s farm were a rarity and he was a little ill at ease when he heard the insistent beating on his door.

  He was more alarmed when he opened the door and saw a young man, apparently badly beaten and drenched in blood-some of it dried, some freshly glistening. The man was shouting almost incoherently. In New York City or Detroit or Chicago—and probably even in downtown Seattle—Brand would probably have slammed his door and called police. But this was the country where neighbors helped neighbors and even strangers.

  “Hey, I need some help!” the youth cried.

  Sam Brand opened the door wider, beckoning the boy in. ” Yeah … it sort of looks like you do.”

  “A guy took me out in the woods, and he beat me. And there was another body there already,” the youth blurted. “I shot him. I had to. He was going to kill me too.”

  Brand didn’t doubt that the young man had been beaten. His fair hair was scarlet with blood, one arm dangled awkwardly, and he winced as if every movement caused him pain.

  “He kidnapped me,” the man babbled on. “I was finally able to overpower him and I shot him with all the guns. They’re back there. I just drove until I found someone.”

  Still not convinced that the injured man wasn’t under the influence of hallucinatory drugs, Brand moved to the phone and called to ask that the Pierce County Sheriffs Department and an aide car respond. He offered the stranger something to eat, some coffee, but all he would accept was water.

  The location of the Brand farm was so obscure that only deputies who worked the region were familiar with it. It was deep in the southern end of the county about eight miles east of the crossroads town of McKenna. Deputy Greg Riehl and Rescue Squad Number 15 arrived simultaneously at 8:51 A.M.

  Sam Brand had set a mattress on the ground outside his garage so that the injured man could lie down while three emergency medical technicians worked over him. Riehl noted that fresh blood continued to seep from a wound at the back of the man’s head.

  The victim quickly identified himself as Private Niels Honegger*, twenty-one, and said he was stationed at Fort Lewis. He produced a military ID card with his picture on it.

  Honegger talked so rapidly that the deputy could barely understand him; he repeated over and over that he had had no choice but to shoot. Gently, Riehl asked the young soldier to start from the beginning and try to slow down.

  Honegger said that he had been waiting for a taxi back to the base at about 3:40 that morning when a man driving a black van stopped. At first he had beckoned to Honegger to come over to the van, and then the stranger had pulled a gun and ordered him into the back. The rest of his story was so terrifying that it sounded like it had happened in a nightmare.

  “He put some kind of black leather hood over my head and drove around for hours,” Honegger said. “Then he drove out to some logging road, made me take off all my clothes, and then he handcuffed me and put leg irons on me. He forced me back in the woods. That’s when I saw the body. He said the same thing was going to happen to me.”

  He said the man had been dressed entirely in black leather. Once Honegger was handcuffed, his captor beat him with a billy club. Realizing that he was in the hands of a sadomasochistic crazy man, who was probably planning to subject him to a sexual assault, Honegger said he had feigned unconsciousness while he tried to think of a way out of his predicament.

  The young soldier said he had waited for his chance. When the man in black had bent over to unhook his leg irons, he had been able to break free. The man had several guns.

  “I shot him,” Honegger said. “I shot him with all the guns. Then I beat him with the gun barrel until I was sure he was dead.”

  The paramedics and Riehl stared at the wild-eyed young soldier. Could this be true, or was he in the grip of some delusion?

  Honegger said he had thrown on his clothes, and then he had driven the stranger’s black van until he found a house. “I was so scared I drove right through the gate. Then I found … I couldn’t find a road in so I parked the van and walked down. This man let me in.”

  Riehl advised Niels Honeg
ger of his rights. He had just admitted to shooting a man to death, and it was procedure that he should be read his rights under Miranda. Honegger shook his head impatiently and said he understood all of that and waived his right to counsel. He repeated his story again, and it was exactly as he had told it before.

  More deputies arrived and looked for the area where Honegger said he had left two bodies—one his captor’s, and another that had been there when they drove in at dawn. The woods were so thick on the property, which was owned by the Weyerhauser Lumber Company, that they doubted they could find the location of the attack without help from Honegger.

  “I marked it when I left,” the soldier told them. “I took an empty six-pack out of the van and put it by the road so I could find it again.”

  The medics nodded when asked if Honegger’s condition was stable enough for him to give assistance in searching the area. They drove over the narrow roads in Deputy Riehl’s patrol car until Honegger spotted the six-pack marker he had left.

  “They’re in there,” he said quietly.

  Deputies went over a deadfall fir tree that blocked access to a dirt road that wound up and then disappeared into the woods. When they returned a few minutes later, they looked sick.

  “He’s right,” one said. “There are two bodies back there. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Detectives Walt Stout and Mark French were notified at sheriff’s headquarters in Tacoma and they left at once for the site. They arrived at the Brand farm as Niels Honegger was being loaded into an ambulance for the trip to Madigan Army Hospital. A full statement would have to wait; the young soldier was clearly going into shock.

  Briefed by Riehl, Stout and French accompanied him and the other deputies deep into the woods and the body site. The area was thick with new-growth timber and crisscrossed with logging roads. Each one looked much like the last, and it seemed a miracle that Honegger had been able to find his way out and to the Brand farm.

  It was a brilliantly sunny spring morning—May Day, in fact—and birds sang in the grove of fir trees, an ironic contrast to the grotesque scene the investigators found.

  Detective Walt Stout came upon the first body which lay sprawled in the undergrowth of Oregon grape, sword ferns, and salal. The body was that of an extremely short white male; he was so chubby that he looked oddly like an overgrown infant. But there was nothing childlike about the man’s outfit. He was dressed entirely in black leather: a motorcycle jacket, pants, pull-on boots, gloves, even a billed cap of black leather lay near the body’s head. A black turtleneck sweater completed his grotesque outfit.

  Although he was clothed from head to foot in leather, the dead man’s genitals were exposed. His tight pants had a square of black leather which could be unsnapped at the crotch, not unlike the codpieces worn by men in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Pierce County detectives had heard of this kind of gear, but they had never actually seen it before. The body’s penis and testicles had a kind of “penis ring” or “penis harness” looped around them, a strange rig of black leather thongs.

  The man had been shot many, many times in the head and body and had apparently had his skull cracked by blows from a blunt instrument.

  The investigators found a second body twelve feet away from the first. It was that of an extremely tall and lanky man who was completely nude. His general physique was all they could tell about him. Most of his face and head had been obliterated, probably blown away by a large caliber weapon. The dead man had a second wound to the left groin area which had torn away much flesh from his genitals and his thigh.

  The second body had obviously been in the grove of trees for several days.

  The detectives gazed at an assortment of macabre equipment that lay scattered in the undergrowth. This was gear that could only have been intended for bondage and torture: handcuffs, leg irons, several dogs’ choke chains on black leather leads, and a billy club. Walt Stout and Mark French had no trouble now believing the strange story that Niels Honegger had told.

  This quiet wood had been turned into a torture chamber for someone whose sexual fantasies were apparently fulfilled through sadomasochistic rituals.

  After measuring the scene, the investigators began to pick up and bag items into evidence. There were enough weapons scattered around for a small revolution: a Winchester double-barreled shotgun, a Colt Python .357 revolver, a Smith & Wesson Airweight 9mm revolver, a Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum revolver, another Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum, and a Browning .25 caliber automatic. The body in black leather still wore two gun belts, two holsters, and a handcuff case and ring for the nightstick that dangled from one belt.

  Almost all of the torture gear was bloodstained; the nightstick bore bits of hair and blood, and one of the dogs’ choke chains appeared to have been tightened around the neck of someone who was bleeding profusely.

  Stout and French found a pair of silver-colored opaque sunglasses lying near the leg irons, all of the items blood flecked and resting under a sword fern.

  As the detectives worked, they didn’t talk much. Sadomasochism was something they had learned about in training classes on abnormal psychology, but they could never recall actually seeing anything as grotesque as this. They marveled that the stocky young soldier had ever emerged from this thicket of torture alive.

  When Pierce County Deputy Coroner Casey Stengel arrived, a closer examination was made of the two bodies. The squat, little man in the black leather suit had a smashed nose, bullet wounds to the left ear and temple, and there were also numerous bullet holes in the leather jacket.

  The second victim lay on his back, his legs straight and together, and his arms behind his back as if he had been handcuffed when he died. Marks around his ankles indicated that his legs had been shackled for some time.

  After the bodies were removed to await autopsy, Deputy John McDonald arrived with his K-9 dog, Duke, and worked the entire area to see if there might be more physical evidence hidden in the woods, but nothing more was found.

  Detectives Stout and French left to look at the black 1978 Dodge van that Niels Honegger had driven in his desperate escape. It was still parked on a hill overlooking the Brand residence. Identification Officer Hilding Johnson processed it as the detectives looked on.

  They found a registration slip that showed the vehicle was being leased by a Larry Hendricks at an address on North G. in Tacoma. Johnson photographed the rig inside and out and dusted for latent prints before the trio moved in to check for more evidence.

  Inside the van, Stout and French found a brown leather bag jammed full of ammunition, some live and some spent cartridges. There was also a black leather hood much like the kind that executioners wore in days of old. The hood had snaps on the front where covers for the eyes and mouth could be attached. The blinder attachment and the mouthpiece were nearby. The mouthpiece had a hard rubber protuberance designed to effectively gag the person who wore the hood.

  The hood, which had a label from “The Trading Post” in San Francisco, could be laced tightly up the back and secured at the neck.

  The traveling torture chamber also held a black dildo and a black crotchpiece, probably from the leather pants the short dead man wore.

  There were some “normal” things too, that seemed out of place: empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, and cigar butts.

  ID Officer Johnson moved along with Detectives French and Stout, filming every step of the processing. Then he went to the morgue to fingerprint the near-headless corpse in an attempt to identify the man.

  Detective John Clark was dispatched to Madigan Army Hospital where he would wait until medics gave the okay for him to take a complete statement from Private Niels Honegger.

  In the meantime, Stout and French drove to the apartment house on North G. where the man named Larry Hendricks had lived. They were sure now that Hendricks was the man in the black leather suit. When his clothing was removed in the coroner’s office, his driver’s license was there, and the picture on it matched
. The round, almost childish face was the same. Hendricks was thirty-two years old.

  If they had been expecting to walk into quarters designed by the Marquis de Sade, they were to be surprised. Using keys they found on a ring in the van, they entered an immaculate apartment furnished entirely in exquisite antiques. There was nothing at all that might indicate that the apartment’s occupant was into kinky sex. Rather, it looked like the home of a wealthy interior decorator. There were pieces of perfectly restored furniture, tapestries, paintings, silk rugs, vases, and lamps. The place might well have come right off a page in House Beautiful.

  They looked further, however. There was a black vinyl case on a desk in the two-room apartment. Inside, they found nine one-hundred-dollar bills. And, when they opened a closet door, they found a number of items that suggested they had the right man. Either Larry Hendricks had unusual sexual hang-ups or he owned several dogs. There were three black leather dog collars on choke chains in the closet, but no dog dishes, no dog hair on the plush furniture, nor any other sign that Hendricks had pets.

  The detectives also found a vinyl shoulder weapon case that would fit the Winchester shotgun found at the scene, and a box of .38-caliber ammunition. There were no kinky magazines in the apartment, but there were two issues of Soldier of Fortune, a somewhat militant paramilitary publication for avid gun collectors.

  Tenants had storage lockers in the basement of the building, and Larry Hendricks had kept some of his possessions there. Walt Stout and Mark French found several holsters for handguns—both hip and shoulder type, another billy club, and a box of 16-gauge shotgun shells.

  What a paradox—a man living in delicate luxury in an antique collector’s paradise—but also a man who collected guns and ammunition as if he expected a civil war.