Ann Rule A Fever In The Heart

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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 Long view, Fernandez invited the old man to look at a tract
of timber twenty miles east of Long view. After they had looked at one
stand of trees, Tony I I Lz suggested they check out another forest
which 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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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