The F.B.I. gave the investigation the code name SEPROM—short for “Seattle prosecutor murder
Two weeks after the murder, the Senate confirmed a new U.S. Attorney for western Washington, John McKay. “When I got there, on October 30th, there was still yellow tape around Tom’s office,” McKay recalled. “It was still considered a crime scene. People still wept. From the prosecutors to the secretaries to the administrative staff, it was a traumatized place. It was not just that they lost somebody, but somebody they all knew and liked very much.” McKay had met Wales several times in the company of other A.U.S.A.s, but knew him mainly by reputation. “Most A.U.S.A.s keep a much lower public profile than Tom did,” he said. “However, he was fully entitled to do what he was doing, and he violated no Department of Justice policies.” He added, “I personally would not be in full agreement with his organization”—Washington CeaseFire—“but I fully supported his right to participate and admired him for his community involvement.”
“The only physical evidence left behind is the bullets and shell casings, nothing else. If you are an investigator in that circumstance, you have to look at motive.” The question, then, was who wanted Tom Wales dead. – PROFESSIONAL HITMAN?
This doesn’t appear to be a random act,” Robert Geeslin, the F.B.I. agent who has been in charge of the Wales investigation for the past year, says. “What motivation was behind it? You are going to look at professional life, social life, personal life.” It was easy to determine that Wales remained friendly with his ex-wife, Elizabeth, who, in any event, was in Germany when he was shot. Since his separation, he had dated several women and, at the time of his death, was seeing Marlis DeJongh. “If we weren’t together at night, Tom would e-mail me before he went to bed,” DeJongh told me. “I printed out his e-mail first thing in the morning, and I thought my world was still bliss. Then I went to my office, where one of Tom’s colleagues called and told me what happened. And I just screamed, by myself, for half an hour.”
In July, three months before his death, Wales had been involved in an altercation at a parking garage near his office. According to Eric Redman, Wales drove his car into a limousine and got into a heated dispute with the limousine’s driver, who had asked him for his insurance card and driver’s license. Wales refused to provide these documents and drove from the garage in anger, hitting a truck on his way out. The limo driver called the police, and Wales was charged with a hit-and-run offense, though the charges were dropped a few weeks later. Neither Wales’s romantic life nor the fender bender yielded promising leads in the murder investigation. WHY DID HE REACT THIS WAY? WAS HE UNDER PRESSURE?
Wales’s work on gun control apparently also failed to produce suspects. The fight over the statewide gun-control initiative had taken place four years before his death, and after that he had not been as involved in controversial issues. “It was kind of like proving a negative, ruling out all these possibilities,” Charles Mandigo, the former F.B.I. special agent, said. “We pursued every possible lead. There were some girlfriends; those were all pursued. We reviewed all the cases that he was involved in, and no stone was left unturned. At the same time, we were pursuing what appeared to be a potentially very logical suspect.”
He didn’t move forward as fast as people wanted. People would say, ‘Hey, let’s get this thing moving.’ There was some frustration on agents’ part if a case got assigned to Tom. ‘I got a good prosecutor,’ they’d say, ‘but when is it going to move?’ ” For almost five years, Wales had been focussed on what he called “the helicopter case.” The Seattle area, the home of Boeing and many of its suppliers, has long attracted aviation buffs who try to turn their hobby into a business. The Vietnam War created one such opportunity. During the war, the workhorse helicopter for the United States military was the Bell UH-1 series, better known as the Huey, which came in various configurations, most of them capable of carrying about a dozen troops. After the war, many of the five thousand or so UH-1s that had been used in the war began to circulate on the secondhand market in the United States. Several local entrepreneurs decided to retrofit the surplus military models for civilian use. Such conversions were legal, as long as they were conducted in accordance with safety rules established by the Federal Aviation Administration.
“There wasn’t much you could do commercially with a military model,” Robert Chadwell, a Seattle defense attorney, told me. “You couldn’t carry passengers, but you could with the civilian model. People started renovating the military models, in hopes of getting certification for civilian use. The issues could get very complicated. Could you rebuild a civilian model with military parts? How much of the original helicopter remained, and how much is rebuilt? How do you trace what happened to the original?” In the mid-nineties, Wales, working with his colleague Bob Westinghouse and a special agent from the F.A.A., began conducting an investigation of several helicopter conversions in the Seattle area. Chadwell represented one such operator, and had several contentious dealings with Wales. “Tom’s idea was that the prosecution was all about safety, that these rebuilt helicopters were unsafe,” Chadwell said. “But the investigation didn’t go well for the government. My client had renovated his helicopter under the supervision of F.A.A. people, and really hadn’t done anything wrong, safety-wise.” After a four-year investigation, Chadwell’s client’s company pleaded guilty to an infraction in its record-keeping, a minor federal offense, and paid a small fine.
By 2000, the investigation of the helicopter-conversion industry was winding down, with disappointing results for Wales and the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Only one case remained. In 1997, investigators had searched the premises of a helicopter company owned by two local men, James Anderson and Kim Powell. The firm, called Intrex Helicopter, which was based at Powell’s home, was renovating a single helicopter for civilian use. Still, the stakes were substantial. “A UH-1 that has been reconstituted and for which a certificate to carry passengers has been issued would be a much more valuable helicopter than one that is flying on a certificate that has limited use, by hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Westinghouse told me. (According to a court filing in a related civil case, Anderson and Powell believed that reconfiguring the helicopter would cost six hundred thousand dollars, and that Intrex could sell it for $1.2 million.)
In 2000, Wales obtained an eight-count indictment against Anderson and Powell on charges that included conspiracy to defraud the United States, mail fraud, and making false statements. The government accused the men of falsifying the helicopter’s maintenance records, and submitting them to the F.A.A., as part of an effort to certify the helicopter for civilian use. But the case fell apart the following year, when the prosecution’s expert witness from the F.A.A. decided that he no longer supported the government’s theory. On June 29, 2001, in an act that would be humiliating for any prosecutor, Wales was forced to dismiss the indictment against Anderson and Powell. He said that the expert now believed there was “no inherent safety consideration” in the conversion of the helicopter. (The company pleaded guilty to a “petty offense” and paid a thousand-dollar fine.) “The F.A.A. chief witness went south on him,” Elizabeth Wales says. “Tom felt awful about it.” Marlis DeJongh recalled, “Tom said that in all his years of being a prosecutor it was the most frustrating case that he had ever worked on.”
James Anderson, at the time that the case was dismissed, was a forty-year-old pilot for U.S. Airways, who lived alone in Beaux Arts, a Seattle suburb. On the night of Wales’s murder, Westinghouse told investigators that he thought Anderson should be considered as a suspect. “We were concerned about a number of possibilities, one of which was that the murder might be related to our work, and one subject was the helicopter case,” Westinghouse recalled. For the next several months, he received around-the-clock protection from U.S. marshalsThe F.B.I. has been investigating Anderson during the past six years, but no charges have been brought against him. (Anderson has never agreed to speak to investigators, and he declined to speak to me.) His attorney, Larry Setchell, said, “He is an innocent man and an honest man. Tom Wales was liked by everyone, including us. He did the right thing in our case by dismissing it. We were not mad at him.”
On July 27, 2001, a month after the indictment was dismissed, Anderson filed a motion against the U.S. Attorney’s Office, under an obscure law called the Hyde Amendment. The law, which was enacted in 1997, allows defendants who have been acquitted in federal court to sue the prosecutors in order to recoup their attorneys’ fees and legal expenses, provided they can show that the case was “vexatious, frivolous or in bad faith.” Anderson demanded a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars. On August 3, 2001, Wales’s office filed a response to Anderson’s lawsuit in federal district court. “We are convinced that he brings this motion in large part to discover the identity of additional witnesses that he imagines may have contributed to his indictment,” the brief stated. “During the course of the investigation, the Government received information from at least two persons indicative of defendant Anderson’s violent and retributive nature.” Other government documents pertaining to the case remain under seal, and the identities of the persons referred to in the brief have not been made public. In any event, Anderson’s motion was dismissed, and that ruling was upheld on appeal.
A month later, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington took place, and, soon afterward, Wales again took a public stand for gun control. “Right after 9/11, the idea started to circulate that airline pilots should be allowed to carry weapons,” Trevor Neilson, the former vice-president of Washington CeaseFire, said. “Tom and I both thought it was a bad idea as a matter of public policy, but I thought it was wrong politically to come out against it at this time. The atmosphere was so strong in favor of doing anything to stop terrorism. But Tom disagreed. He thought arming pilots was a terrible idea, and he was going to say so publicly.” On September 25th, Wales participated in a half-hour debate—which was broadcast several times in the Seattle area, on NorthWest Cable News—about whether airline pilots should be allowed to carry guns in the cockpit. Pilots, he said, “are not trained as Green Berets, they are not trained as law enforcement.” He added, paraphrasing Duane Worth, the president of the Air Line Pilots Association, “It simply is not possible for an airline pilot to be Sky King and Wyatt Earp at the same time.” Sixteen days later, Wales was dead. COULD THESE COMMENTS BE MOTIVE FOR MURDER, AS HE MAY HAVE ANNOYED SOMEONE AFTER 9/11 AND ENDED UP BEING KILLED BECAUSE OF HIS STATEMENTS WHICH COULD HAVE OFFENDED SOMEONE?