Mortal Danger

he should do, because he didn’t have the money to pay it. Stan, Bill Thaw, and some “shyster lawyer” met in a Jacksonville hotel room with Dr. Kirk Radovich. Allen, the millionaire, was going to sue all four of them for defaulting on the loan he’d cosigned. Stan got on the phone with Allen and said, “You originally promised to put up the money, and you didn’t. Then you cosigned for this loan. Now it’s only right for you to pay it.”
    Bill Thaw grabbed the phone out of his hand and said roughly, “I’m only going to say this once. Pay the note off and be a good boy…or you’re dead.”
    There was no question in Stan Szabo’s mind that Thaw meant every word.
    John Branden was on the fringe of the pseudo-medical group, learning to do blood analysis from Stan Szabo and learning darker things from Bill Thaw. It was Szabo’s belief that Thaw was involved with organized crime and one step ahead of law enforcement.
    “This was when John was living with him?” Kate asked. Finally, they were getting to the “horrible thing” that John mentioned only when he was very drunk. It was a thing that “tortured his soul.”
    “Yeah. One day, when Bill Thaw was beating up and torturing this… person …, John walked in and witnessed the murder that followed.”
    “Murder?”
    “Yeah. Now Bill was in trouble. He was under pressure from the mob and from the police. The mob wanted Thaw dead because they didn’t want him to snitch on them if the police picked him up—and they wanted John for the same reason.”
    So there it was.
    Was this the night John made $30,000? Was the victim the mysterious Allen, whom Bill Thaw had threatened with death? Stan hadn’t said if the victim was male or female; maybe he didn’t know.
    Kate tried to grapple with what really happened back in 1986: John had always either minimized or maximized the truth to fit whomever he was talking to. He had told his good friend Stan Szabo that he had witnessed Bill Thaw torturing and killing someone. Kate wondered if that was true.
    And then she had a worse thought: Maybe John hadn’t just walked in on a murder in progress; maybe John had been the real killer, and this had been part of his “training” with Thaw. Maybe Thaw had walked in on him ? Or perhaps it had been an accident or John had been forced to commit murder by the man he idolized.
    John was dead, and she could never ask him what had happened in Florida. But Kate herself had seen murder in his eyes, and he had demonstrated that it had been in his heart as he’d shot Turi and Randall.
    Every day of his life after that night in Florida, he lived in hiding to lesser and greater degrees. Although he never opened up to her, Kate wondered if he confided in the psychiatrists he consulted with. He always boasted after those sessions that he knew so much more than they did that they weren’t capable of helping him. Once, he went to see afemale therapist, and he told Kate that he’d told the woman his “secret.”
    “She didn’t show up for their next appointment,” Kate recalled. “He wondered if he’d scared her away by dumping everything out on their first meeting.”
    Kate never really knew who John Branden was deep inside.
    Probably no one did.
     
    After John’s final crimes appeared in the media—first in the Northwest, and, later, nationally—Kate was stunned to learn that even people who were close to her hadn’t understood the true danger she’d lived with for more than eighteen years.
    “The day after I told my sister, Connie, that John was dead and how he had died, she called me and said, ‘I owe you an apology.’ I asked her why, and she said, ‘I never thought that John would actually kill you. I thought he was too much of a wimp.’”
    Her own sister hadn’t totally believed her, even though Kate had tried her best to open up to Connie, to let her see the fear hiding inside her. If her sister hadn’t understood, why would anyone else have understood?
    And then, a month or so later, a retired American Airlines pilot whom Kate had known in San Diego and who currently lived on Orcas Island approached her with another apology. “Kate, a lot of people thought you were just being overly dramatic when they heard your story. I guess we were wrong.”
    Suddenly she understood why too many women won’ttalk about abuse or even grasp the fact that they are living in an abusive situation. No one will believe them, so what’s the point of trying to escape?