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Posted on Tue, Mar. 19, 2002 |
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Tracing a path of deception
Last of three parts
Jack Thomason's family believed that if they could find their missing father's money, they would find him.
"As much as he loved his family and his money, there's no way he would walk off and leave them - especially not his veteran's pension, his Social Security and his trailer park," said Jack's cousin-in-law Odis Martin.
A natural-born hustler and ex-Marine, Windsor "Jack" Thomason was 64 the last time he had a face-to-face conversation with one of his six grown children. Soon after that Christmas 1991 get-together, he vanished.
The children grew suspicious of Jack's new wife, Amanda, whose explanations for her husband's whereabouts seemed wild and inconsistent. His daughters began to call Amanda incessantly, demanding information. They even took long poles to her property in East Texas and stuck them in the earth, probing for a body.
Amanda, for her part, turned the accusations around. Though she declined to be interviewed for this story, Amanda told investigators that she believed that Jack's children had something to do with his leaving town.
The two sides of Jack's family remained at loggerheads for years, each accusing the other. Then, in 1996, Jack's children got what they considered to be a break in the case.
Through a stroke of luck, Jack's daughters found out that Amanda was getting hold of Jack's pensions.
By coincidence, both Jack and one of his granddaughters had once worked for Braniff Airways. In August 1996, the granddaughter received a letter explaining how a federal agency would administer her pension from Braniff, which had gone into receivership. For the first time, the girl's mother, Casey Lester, had a phone number to call that might provide information about Jack's Braniff pension as well.
Sure enough, Casey found that her father's pension payments were being directly deposited at a bank in the Central Texas town of Whitney.
Crying and shouting, "Thank God. He's alive," three of Jack's daughters jumped in a pickup and headed to Whitney to find their father.
They failed.
But they did find a cooperative bank president who revealed that their father's signature was not on the card for the account opened in his name on May 22, 1995, according to Tarrant County Sheriff's Department case notes. Jack's Marine Corps retirement pay was also being directly deposited into the account.
The only people allowed to withdraw money were Gladys Thomason, a name Amanda occasionally used, and her daughter Melonie Jones.
Casey called Tarrant County Sheriff David Williams.
She had complained to Williams before, saying that his detectives had never taken her father's disappearance seriously. In fact, at one point, one detective had declared that Jack was alive without seeing him and closed the case without telling the family.
Now, Casey was calling with a new complaint: possible fraud.
Williams had assigned Detective Robert Moore to the case after promising Casey that the department would do better. Moore had grown accustomed to calls from Jack's children, each time with a new theory or demand. So Casey's call about possible bank fraud didn't really surprise him.
But Moore was caught off-guard when he got a call about the same time from the person he considered the chief suspect in the old man's disappearance: his wife.
Amanda said that she had seen Jack in September 1995 and that he had filed for divorce.
It didn't take Moore long, though, to check the court records and find out that, in fact, Amanda had filed for divorce on May 28, 1996.
"She put in the notice that [Jack] was unable to be located," Moore said.
Even before Amanda's phone call, Moore had decided to ask the feds for help on the pension investigation.
On July 2, 1997, the Department of Defense inspector general launched a fraud investigation into Jack's $750 monthly Marine Corps pension, and estimated its loss to Amanda at $26,551. While the investigation was pending, the Defense Department halted deposits into the Whitney bank account, the case notes say.
Amanda told federal investigators that she had not seen Jack in two years.
Notes from the Defense Department investigation said Amanda "wished he would show up so this problem could be solved. She felt that he was alive, but she had no proof. She felt one of his children ... knew something about the disappearance."
Sheriff's Department investigators had a different take. Moore told Defense Department investigators that he believed that Jack was dead and that Amanda was covering up his death to continue receiving full retirement benefits.
As the Defense Department investigation got under way, federal agents also began to receive tips. One was about property transactions that investigators had thought Jack carried out in the early '90s, including one that gave Amanda the title to his house.
In September 1997, the Kennedale notary who had signed the property transfers, Tylene Leach, called the Defense Department. She admitted that she had forged another notary's signature on a deed that gave her granddaughter a piece of land that Jack had owned. Leach said in a recent interview with the Star-Telegram that she used the other notary's name with her full permission.
She told investigators that Jack gave her the land as compensation for tax work she and her then-husband performed for him, according to Defense Department documents.
The investigators began to focus on whether Leach had actually witnessed Jack sign the land transfers when she notarized them. This was important because she would have been one of the last people to see Jack, aside from Amanda. By the time investigators interviewed Leach, she was no longer a notary and said she did not have her notary log.
Eventually, defense documents show, Leach admitted to investigators that Jack was not present for the signing of a document that gave Amanda power of attorney and other documents Leach notarized.
Leach told the investigators that she notarized the documents because she recognized his signatures. It was her impression that Jack had cancer or AIDS and was too sick to come to her office, the investigator's notes say.
In the Star-Telegram interview, Leach said she knows for a fact that Jack was present for some of the transactions, but that she can't remember which ones. And, she said, the land that was in her granddaughter's name wasn't worth its taxable value. Leach told investigators that her daughter sold her granddaughter's plot for about $1,000, a net of about $500 after paying Jack's back taxes.
"I did not do anything to my knowledge or to my moral self that was in any way illegal or wrong," Leach said. "I would not do anything to cheat anyone out of something that was rightfully theirs."
About the same time that investigators were scrutinizing Leach's role, they got another call. This time it was Brantley Pringle, Amanda's attorney, saying that he recalled speaking with Jack on the telephone in 1994 or 1995.
Pringle said Jack's retirement money was directly deposited into the Whitney bank because Jack was living near there after he left Tarrant County. Most of the money, Pringle told investigators, was being used to pay for Amanda's living expenses and to pay off a mortgage.
Amanda, for her part, told investigators that she believed Jack was living in "old Mexico receiving treatment for AIDS."
Yet according to the agent's notes, there is no known medical record available confirming that Jack had AIDS. Amanda was unable to provide any information regarding any doctor who might have been treating him for AIDS.
Amanda, the agent wrote, "would provide no further information about W.D. Thomason's medical situation, other than to reiterate that she felt he was still alive, but did not know exactly where he was or how to contact him."
In early 1998, federal investigators decided to take a second look at handwriting samples that the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office had determined were Jack's in 1992. These samples appeared to show, at the time, that Jack had left town of his own will.
This time, experts with the Internal Revenue Service Forensic Science Lab in Silver Spring, Md., determined that the signature on the 1993 power of attorney was a "simulation of the true signature and could not be readily associated with any particular writer."
In other words, Moore explained in a recent interview, Jack's signature had been traced.
Nonetheless, on Feb. 17, 1999, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas formally declined to prosecute in the case because there wasn't enough evidence that Jack was dead or that Amanda forged his signature.
At that moment, the fraud case ended.
Thomason's first wife, Carolene, then came back into the picture. She decided that if Jack was actually dead, she deserved widow's benefits from his days in the Marines. She successfully petitioned the Social Security Administration and had Jack declared dead as of Sept. 15, 1992. She received $6,828 in back widow's benefits and began receiving $390 monthly. Pringle, Amanda's attorney, said his client is petitioning the government for widow's benefits as well.
Meanwhile, the Tarrant County missing-person investigation remains open, if not active.
"I firmly believe it was a homicide," Moore said. "I suspected his wife. I think her daughter and son both helped, but I can't prove it. But everything is possible. It's possible he could have died naturally, but she kept him alive on paper to draw his Social Security."
Detective Mike Utley, who inherited the case after Moore left the department, said he will not initiate any further investigation but will follow any fresh leads if they arise.
Although he's curious about Amanda's land in East Texas, he said he's never requested a search warrant for it because Jack disappeared so long ago. And although witnesses say they heard Amanda and her daughter make statements that Jack's dismembered body was in a septic tank, Utley said any biological material in the tank's chemicals for more than a decade would have dissolved.
The battle between Jack's children and Amanda continues.
Amanda is still technically Jack's wife after dropping her effort to divorce him in 1997. She also still holds title to Jack's house, though one of his daughters, Jackie Gerhardt, sued her in probate court last year, hoping that the court would declare Amanda's acquisition of it fraudulent. Amanda has denied the allegations.
All that is left is speculation about Windsor "Jack" Thomason.
His wife says he left town to get away from annoying children.
His children say he was murdered.
And, for many years now, Jack himself has said nothing at all. Jennifer Autrey, (817) 390-7126 jautrey@star-telegram.com
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