Mortal Danger

areas. When her daughter Susan went through her files, she was amazed to find how much money Turi had given to charities like a crisis pregnancy center, Gospel for Asia, World Vision, and the Reverend David Wilkerson, a country preacher who walked the hazardous streets of New York City, armed only with his Bible and his belief that even the most troubled and threatening dregs of society could be rescued. His book, The Cross and the Switchblade, became a classic.
    Turi helped people closer to home, too, but she didn’t talk about it. She was always there for friends and even strangers who needed a listening ear, a casserole, a pie, or a place to stay. She attended church regularly for many, many years, but she was sometimes impatient with church politics and pettiness in the congregation. She believed in living her Christianity by helping, in practical and caring ways, those who needed it.
    “She would drop everything to listen and lend support to the many God sent her way,” her daughter Susan recalled. “Often those the rest of the world had given up on.She had that rare gift of seeing the heart where many people got stuck on the exterior trappings.”
    Still, Turi had a sense of humor, and she could be feisty, particularly when she stood up for someone else. “She had an incredible faith in God,” Susan said, “but it was a relationship and not a religion, and that makes all the difference in the world.” Quite possibly it was Turi Bentley’s devout faith in God that saw her through life’s pitfalls. As a young woman she’d befriended in Gig Harbor remarked, “[Turi] was ‘sold out for Jesus’!”
    Turi Bentley never aimed to get “more stars in her crown”; she simply stepped in where she saw she was needed.
    Turi and Kate Jewell never met at Mannatech meetings or sales promotions; the company was huge, and they lived in different states. Turi had sold its products for years, and she, too, sincerely cared about her clients’ health. Even today, those who were close to Turi in 2001—including her family—aren’t sure how or where she met John Williams. In all likelihood, it was through the Mannatech roster of associates who were willing to participate in three-way phone conversations with prospective clients and give personal testimony on the efficacy of the curative powers of Mannatech products.
    Lorne and Turi Bentley were listed in 2001. If they were called, they could explain—as laymen only—how Mannatech was effective against bronchitis and prostate cancer. The chances were that Lorne was only a silent partner who wasn’t nearly as involved in the Mannatech “family” as Turi was.
    It was a moot question anyway; the Bentleys’ marriage was drawing to a close that year.
    At some point, Turi’s children noticed that she was corresponding with a John Williams. Her marriage was over, although there would be a long, drawn-out division of their marital property, which her son, David, oversaw. For the most part, Lorne kept his contracting business assets, and he was awarded their yacht. Turi got the family home they had built near Point Defiance. She eventually sold it and moved to an apartment in Tacoma. She kept up a cheerful front, but she was vulnerable to an intense man who managed to be suave and kind at the same time. John Williams could read who people wanted him to be, and he was adept at putting on whatever mask coincided with their expectations.
    Turi and John Williams probably met in Washington or California; he had reasons not to be in Oregon. It’s unlikely that she met him in church. It’s more probable that they met through Mannatech or Shaklee, some business they both believed in. It would have been easy for John to strike up a conversation with Turi there, exchanging business cards, phone numbers.
    She was still lovely, with a serene beauty that few women manage to maintain into their sixties. She didn’t feel old, but she no longer felt as if she was the center of anyone’s life, either.
     
    Kate had never heard of Turi Bentley, of course, but she was the nameless, faceless woman Kate had wanted so much to warn and protect. John couldn’t manage alone;she was sure of that. He needed a woman to hold his hand, to sand the sharp edges off life’s problems—a woman who would devote herself to him. He had explained his demands to Kate in the early days of their affair. And Kate knew he would eventually enslave whatever woman fell for his blandishments and believed his