FROG HOSPITAL -- September 2, 2015 -- unsubscribe anytime
Fat Tom
By Fred Owens
Fat
Tom was the father of Seth Anderson. Seth was driving the car that
night when his half-brother Eben Berriault leaned out the window with
his gun and shot Scott Kinkele in the back of the head. That was in July
of 2000 on Highway 20 in Skagit County, Washington.
You
can't blame Fat Tom for what Seth did that night, but if you knew him
and you knew Seth, you could see some traits that were passed on from
father to son...
Ballistics. I am not telling this
story in any orderly fashion, but as it comes to me. I made an inquiry
to Lane Dexter of Newhalem, a village way up the Skagit Valley. Lane
works on the Skagit River dams that send hydroelectric power to the
great cities of the Pacific Northwest.
Lane takes
after his father Ralph Dexter who also worked on the dams and kept a
small ranch with horses near the village of Marblemount, also near the
Skagit River dams.
Lane, like his father, is a skilled
marksman and well-versed in ballistics, which is why I asked him about
the crime on Highway 20.
Lane has been my friend since I met him in 1970 when we were both
quite young. He was careful about how he answered my questions about
the shooting. That's why I asked him. Lane is a steady fellow with a
good heart. He helped me to examine this tragic crime in a calm manner.
Seth
was driving drunk at highway speed that night. Eben Berriault was also
drunk and shooting at signs and cars as they wove along the road near
midnight. They pulled up behind Scott Kinkele's car. Eben leaned out the
window and fired his shotgun at Kinkele, killing him instantly.
Kinkele's car made a sickening slow spin across the grass meridian and
came to a halt against the fence on the other side of the road. Seth and
Eben kept going at high speed back to their home in Anacortes.
Eben
was no experienced marksman. He was a convicted felon with no right to
even possess a weapon. He was drunk and he was leaning out the window of
Seth's car and firing at a moving target. Why didn't he miss? How many
times did people say that or think that -- why didn't he miss? It was a
bad luck shot if ever there was one.
Lane disavowed
expertise or particular knowledge of the case. He only said that such an
unlucky shot was possible, and could be fatal. It was more than likely
that Eben would have missed, but he didn't miss and the tragedy
unfolded.
Over and Over Again
How
many times has that scene played in Eben's head as he watched Kinkele's
car make its sickening spin across the grass meridian? Why didn't he
miss? Eben is serving a life sentence in Monroe Prison.
Seth
was driving the car, and that made him culpable. He could have stopped
it but he didn't. But Seth doesn't replay the scene in his mind like
Eben does, over and over again. Seth left his prison cell at Walla Walla
Prison as he left this world. He was found in his cell near to death in
January of 2001, some six months after the murder. But I will tell that
later. Now for Fat Tom, who was Seth Anderson's father.
Fat Tom. Tom Anderson grew up in East Los Angeles, of dubious parentage and casual circumstances. He was a mimic of
Cheech
and Chong and seemed to know their life story personally. He served
time in the Chino Correction Center for Juvenile Delinquents, although
he did not say what crime brought him there. He told prison stories the
way some men tell war stories or college stories.
The
tragic thing about Tom was that he was so damn smart. He was seriously
intelligent. He read books with complete understanding, and he was
verbally adept. But he never had the chance, or never took the chance,
to develop his mind.
He was a very big man. Not tall,
five foot ten inches at most. But wide. A massive chest, legs like tree
trunks, arms strong as marble. He was not fat, but we called him Fat
Tom because of his large big-boned frame.
He had
light-brown curly hair that hung down straggly around his face and to
the back of his neck. He had sparkling blue eyes and a tawny complexion.
He was Irish with a dash of Hawaiian.
Fat
Tom was a provider and hunter. He would dive into a dumpster and come
up with ten pounds of cheese past its due date. Once he came into camp
with a burlap sack full of wild honey and honey combs. He had ripped
apart a rotten log with his bare hands and scooped out the honey. Many
bee stings he got for that, like it was nothing. Once driving late at
night, he struck and killed a deer. He stopped the bus, dressed and
butchered the deer on the spot, working by flashlight. The bus riders
made a camp outside of Carrizo Springs, which is a small town in South
Texas near Uvalde, and ate venison for two days, inviting people from
town to join them. "We're having a feast," Fat Tom said. "Plenty of
venison for every one, come and join us -- and bring beer."
Another
time, Fat Tom went to a farmer's field outside of Rio Grande City to
harvest the honey dew melons. Maybe he asked permission, or may he
didn't, but he brought a pile back to camp, a hundred melons in a heap.
Everybody ate melons.
Fat Tom was a big man and like a
shark -- he had to keep eating every day. His life was chaotic, he had
no plan, but he took care of himself, and honestly, he didn't always
ask.
He drank beer, smoked pot, smoked tobacco, liked to talk, talking all the time, telling jokes, he never got in fights.
If
some guy would give him a hard time, Fat Tom would laugh it off and
talk him down. Not to fight, just to have his bowl of beans and a
bedroll by the campfire, that's what he wanted.
This
was in 1973. Eva Sue had been married to the father of Eben Berriault.
They were living in Berkley, California, but they divorced. Eva Sue went
back to the logging country near Mount Shasta, bringing Eben and his
younger brother Jesse with her, settling in Fall River Mills, a small
town. She soon got restless and got some wild ideas, to live like a
gypsy and go from place to place, to live from day to day. She made a
pack and a bedroll for herself and those two kids and hitched a ride
down to Arizona, right down near the Mexican border, near a town called
Arivaca, going to a hippie camp called California Gulch.
These
border camps like California Gulch never seemed to belong to anybody
back then, good for maniacs, free spirits, mystics and criminals, and
hard to tell the saints from the sinners, but you took your chances, and
if you wanted to be somebody else, you could be somebody else. Nobody
would ask questions, or expect an answer.
Eva Sue met
Fat Tom at California Gulch, but they did not become a couple right off.
Instead they set off on a hippie bus for South Texas to make the peyote
ritual, which is a cactus type of hallucinogenic, guaranteed, upon
consumption, to make loopy people even loopier.
Lots
of things happened on that hippie bus. They all ended up in Michoucan
way down in Mexico and hardly knew how they got there. The bus broke
down. So they all left the bus and went their separate ways. Fat Tom got
arrested by the Mexican Police for being an illegal immigrant. He had
no papers and no money, and no visible means of support. They deported
him back to America. Years later Fat Tom made a funny story out of
that. "I was a wetback in Mexico and they threw me out, ha ha!"
Fat
Tom caught up with Eva Sue again, plus Eben and Jesse -- remember those
boys, 8 and 10 years of age, were riding on this bus along with the
gang -- but Fat Tom and Eva Sue wanted to get off the road and end the
migrant life, so they moved to Montana and got a cabin and lived there
for several years.
Fat Tom did farm and ranch work,
steady enough. Eva took his last name and became Eva Anderson. They had
two children, Seth, born in 1977 and Grace Anderson, born several years
later. You know about Seth and his crime and that is why I am writing
this story.
But let me finish Fat Tom's story. Fat Tom
did not take too well to settled life with a family. Life is very hard
in Montana, especially in the wintertime. He began to drink a lot more
than ever and became less reliable and may have been abusive -- I'm not
sure about that last part and I hope it's not true, but I can see Fat
Tom just kind of giving up on things, like he was never going to make it
in the real world, and Eva Sue got tired of pretending that he would
make it, so she packed up the kids, five of them by now, and two of them
with Fat Tom. She packed up her things and her children and moved to
Wenatchee in Washington state.
I lost track of Fat Tom
after Eva Sue left him. He must have drifted around. Once he came up to
Washington to see Eva Sue and the kids and that's where I saw him for
the last time. He was still trying to make a joke out of everything, but
I was tired of the joke and did not enjoy his company.
He
went back to the old streets of East Los Angeles, down and out,
sleeping in his car, drunk every day and they found him in his car,
dead.
Tom Anderson was a good man in his way and he meant well. He deserves a Requiem.
Like Father, Like Son. Seth
Anderson was like his dad, and I mean that in a good way. Seth was a
provider and a hunter and he wanted to take care of people. He wanted to
love somebody. He wanted to do things that would make his mother proud.
He almost made it, but I will tell how Seth's life ended at age 23 in
the next and last part of this story, coming soon.
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