Mortal Danger by Ann Rule Page A

There were no more $10,000 investors, but there were several who managed to come up with $1,000 to $1,500. Thaw kept all the money for himself and used early applicants to persuade others—until they all realized they had been duped.
    William Michael Thaw and Donald Hassel were convicted of mail fraud. They appealed the conviction, but a higher court denied their arguments.
     
    A decade later, Bill Thaw had relocated to Florida, and John Branden was a young married man. John was four years older than teenaged Sue when they married. He always said he had his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern Florida in Naples, and that he had to scramble to pay his tuition as he worked as a landscape architect to pay his way through. He was a dreamer and was constantly looking for ways to rise above the crowd. For a time, politics seemed like a way to mingle with the movers and shakers, but it wasn’t.
    John told Kate that he had learned to fly small planes when he was a young man living in Florida, and he would sometimes brag that he flew around in Governor Lawton Childs’s private plane when he was active in the Young Democrats organization.
    Somewhere during that period, he met Bill Thaw. By then, Thaw and Werner Erhard had long since parted ways. John explained their breakup to Kate by saying that Bill Thaw felt that Erhard had become “too Hollywood,” having grown far more interested in the commercial side of est than in changing people’s lives.
    Given the rise and fall of Minitronics, it seems unlikely that Thaw was actually turned off by any enterprise that made big money, but he might have learned to be cautious about franchises and moneymaking schemes that ballooned too quickly.
    If John Branden would later dislike having his picture taken, Bill Thaw was adamant about not letting anyone take a photograph of him. Today, it is impossible to find a picture of William Michael Thaw. Something happened to John Branden as he followed his “god,” and he undoubtedly learned from Thaw. As John became more savvy, he became more secretive. His jobs and organizational attachments seemed to be conveniently vague—quite possibly as he intended.
    The Brandens had their two young daughters and seemed to be an average family of the seventies and eighties, at least to the casual observer. John told Kate that he had a thriving nutritional practice in a woman chiropractor’s office in Naples. The way he spoke of his years in Florida, they seemed to be happy and productive.
    And yet, they packed hurriedly and left Florida in 1986. John described their exit to Kate in a mysterious way, saying, “We left under cover of night—there was a contract out on me….”
    Was there? Kate had already seen that John had a need for drama, but she didn’t know if he was testing her or just enjoying telling flamboyant stories.
    “Once,” Kate recalled, “when I first knew John in San Diego, he told me he had to go up to the northern part of the county to meet two guys who worked for the CIA, and he wanted me to go with him. It was all very hush-hush. And then it turned out it was only two guys who were getting him a hardtop for his Suzuki.”
    But Kate would always wonder about his tale of fleeing Florida in the dead of night. When she learned that Bill Thaw committed suicide by gunshot in Palm Beach a yearafter that, Kate began to believe that John had escaped from some ominous threat in Florida.
    Thaw’s body disappeared, according to John, but Kate sometimes worried that he wasn’t really dead at all, only hiding from something that might involve John. “Maybe he’s in South America,” she commented, half seriously. John didn’t reply.
    John revealed that he had used different surnames from time to time—including his ex-wife’s maiden name. He was most voluble when he’d been drinking, but even then Kate noticed that he was censoring what he told her. Still, in their early years together, Kate and John were happy, and she