Chapter 6
Colonel Sean and Company
There was even more incentive for Todd Garton to make Carole Garton a target by the winter of 1998. At that point she knew that she was pregnant and had told Todd. She was very excited about the prospect of a baby, and he pretended that he was as well. But, in truth, Todd did not want a baby and couldn’t stand small children. A baby in the house was the last thing he wanted, especially one with Carole.
If Todd did not look forward to a baby, the same thing could not be said for Carole or the rest of her family. Vicki Holman said, “Ever since they were married, I teased her about having a baby. I began almost every phone conversation with, ‘Are we pregnant yet?’ She would laugh and say, ‘No, not yet.’ She was taking the Pill, so she wasn’t going to get pregnant. In 1997 she told me that she was going off the Pill and wanted to have a baby. She said the doctor warned her it could take a year.
“One time she called and I didn’t ask her if she was pregnant. We talked a little while and finally she asked, ‘Aren’t you going to ask me if we’re pregnant yet?’ I screamed and she laughed and we both cried. Our first grandchild was on the way.
“The first thing we did was to send them a video camera so we could have movies of her during the pregnancy. We knew we wouldn’t get to see them much. But we talked often. Todd seemed excited and admitted he was a little scared about having a baby. He had definite ideas about the way things would be. Carole wanted to name the baby Connor, but Todd said his name would be Jesse [for his dad]. His middle name would be James [for Carole’s dad]. He said there would be no nicknames, like J.J.”
Todd might have acted excited about the baby for Vicki’s benefit, but he began spreading vicious lies behind Carole’s back to Dale Gordon, Norman Daniels and Lynn Noyes. He indicated that Carole had been sleeping around and that the baby wasn’t his. (Later, DNA tests would prove that it was.) Gordon remembered, “He always sort of would say, ‘The baby’s not mine. It’s somebody else’s.’ He kind of joked about it and made fun of it.”
Carole, on the other hand, looked forward to having a baby. And so did her employer, Grace Bell. Grace helped Carole set up a room in the insurance agency so that Carole would be able to bring the baby to work. Todd and Norm went in one day and helped Grace move some furniture around, and in front of Grace, Todd pretended to be happy about Carole’s pregnancy. But Grace Bell was appalled when Todd told her he planned to name the child, who was going to be a boy, Jesse James Garton. She said, “It was just like him to do something like that. Give a baby the name of an outlaw.”
Interestingly enough, the baby’s due date, June 14, 1998, was also Carole’s birthday.
Carole wanted to see her parents in person and show them how her pregnancy was progressing. Easter Week, 1998, was coming up and she talked Todd into going with her up to the Portland area. Vicki Holman remembered, “Around the first of April, Carole called on a Friday afternoon and asked if we’d like to have company for the weekend. We were thrilled. They were leaving as soon as she got off work and were driving straight through. It’s about an eight-hour drive. They got here about midnight. She was so beautiful. We spent the whole day talking about the baby and planning our trip down. We wanted to be there for the birth. She said she would like me to be in the delivery room with her. Todd wanted no part of that. We sat together on the sofa and I laid my head on her tummy and felt the baby kick. It was wonderful.”
Carole also went to visit her mom, Virginia, and stepdad, Gary Griffiths. Virginia said, “When Carole became pregnant, she was very excited. She would ask a million questions about what to do about this or that. I told her to take it as it came and to relax. I told her she would know what to do when the time came. I planned on coming down after the baby was born and spend a couple of weeks with her. Krista was planning on coming down before the baby was born at the end of May.”
Todd and Carole also went by the apartment of Carole’s friend Krista while they were visiting in the area. They went out shopping with her and stopped by a store that sold Guinness products from Ireland. Todd bought several items, including a hat that had the name Guinness and its logo on the front. When Krista’s husband came home, he and Krista went to Biddy McGraw’s, an Irish pub, with Todd. Carole was not feeling well and stayed in Krista’s apartment.
While they were at the pub, Todd made a series of phone calls. He told Krista he was trying to contact his old buddy Collin Colebank. In fact, he was trying to reach Lynn Noyes. He eventually contacted her and Lynn remembered, “It was late, after I put my kids to sleep. He said he wanted to see me and he was at this bar. Would it be possible for me to come down and see him. Well, at first I said I didn’t think I was going to be able to leave because it was late in the evening. Dean was home. Todd said he was with Krista and her husband at one point. But her husband left and just Krista was there. She was at the bar with him. If I didn’t come down to visit him, then he would end up going back to her apartment and basically spending the evening with her. I really didn’t want him to do that. I was afraid they would have something intimate at some point during the evening. And I didn’t want that to happen, so I found a reason to leave.”
At that time Lynn had no idea that Carole was even in Portland. Todd had told her that he and Carole were separated and she thought Carole was back in California. There was also no way that Krista and Todd were going to have “something intimate” that night. Krista didn’t like Todd and only put up with him for Carole’s sake. But Todd was very good at manipulating people and knew which buttons to push into making Lynn come see him. By the time Lynn got to Biddy McGraw’s, both Krista and her husband were gone.
What happened next, Lynn recalled, “He was kind of happy. Lightly buzzed. We walked around for a while. Then we drove in my Bronco for a little bit. And there’s a park that’s fairly close to that area, and we stopped there for a while. Initially just to talk. Then at some point we ended up having intercourse in my Bronco.”
Afterward, Lynn told Todd that she liked his Guinness hat. He gave it to her. She took him back to Krista’s neighborhood and let him off a block away. Todd told Carole that he had been visiting a friend. He didn’t say who the friend was. Lynn wore Todd’s hat home and made up some lie to Dean as to where she had been.
When Todd and Carole returned home to California, he turned to Norman Daniels in his quest to get rid of Carole. Todd no longer trusted Dale Gordon after his antics in Oregon during the failed hit on Dean Noyes. He knew that Norm was more trustworthy. All he had to do was somehow con him into the scheme. And the plan Todd came up with was elaborate, complicated and inventive. He knew he still had a possible candidate in Daniels because of his financial woes. As Daniels said later, “After we got back from Oregon, I was still financially distraught. Todd told me I could make $25,000 on a different hit. It was discussed at my mobile home on Gas Point Road. It was in the first week of April.”
For the first time Todd actually mentioned The Company to Daniels. Before that, he had just alluded to some shadowy organization of assassins. Daniels recalled, “He said these people were a collection of assassins, people that have been doing work for the government and personal contracts. He said he and Natalya, who lived in New York, had affiliation with The Company. If I wanted in, he could get ahold of them by various means—e-mail, phone and, I guess, pager. He also handed me a business card. It had the word ‘Patriot’ on it. He told me that was this assassination ring’s code name for him. And it had his one-eight-hundred pager number on it.”
Todd told Daniels he would have to perform one assassination before he was officially allowed to join The Company. He warned him that it would have to be someone he knew and he would have to do it up close and personal. Todd also told him he would have to pass a physical before being allowed to join. A travel nurse would come to his home and take a blood sample and do a physical. (This never occurred.)
Daniels said he was interested in joining The Company. He said later, “I was pretty much dejected about my life and the way things were going. And yet I was unsure if I really could do something like that.”
Todd told Daniels that The Company was headed up by a shadowy individual known as Colonel Sean. This colonel sometimes dealt with Natalya in New York. Daniels recalled, “I was not given a lot of details other than that he was a colonel in the military. I wasn’t given which branch of the military but that he was out of Langley. He had operations of covert stuff. Todd didn’t go into detail and expound on the day-to-day operations of what he did. Just that he was heading an assassin ring.”
As far as contracts went, Daniels said, “Todd said anybody could take a contract out on anybody.” Todd went on to say that if Daniels decided to join, he would receive a package from The Company.
Daniels didn’t say yes or no right away. He left things hanging with the implication that he was interested.
Both Todd and Carole Garton applied for life insurance policies at about this time. The policies amounted to $125,000 each in case of death. Nurse Angie Williams of Corda Medic gave them both exams and they passed. The policies were issued to the Gartons, and now Todd had a financial incentive to have Carole killed.
This incentive was upped by an incident that happened that put Todd Garton into bad financial straits as far as G and G Fencing went. He entered into a contract with a man named Rick Clark to install thirty-three hundred feet of Legend Ranch Rail Fence on Clark’s property. But for some reason the job was botched and Clark sued Todd. This only added fuel to the fire on Todd’s part to get rid of Carole and collect the life insurance money.
Todd Garton decided to bring in Lynn Noyes on the project. Her main role would be to help convince Daniels to go through with it and make sure Daniels would not flake out the way Dale Gordon had. In his terminology Lynn would become an “operator.” And Todd used a new lie to draw Lynn into the scheme. Lynn recalled, “Todd said that Carole was always just kind of in the background of The Company. At one point she had gone to Ireland with him or something. And she had really irritated the person that was a supervisor of his and that she had actually shot somebody in the leg. All he said was that that person’s name was Sean. So, this person, Sean, had a personal vendetta against Carole. He [Todd] sort of knew there was a contract out on her. And that was why somebody would want to kill her. Also, she had done something that was in opposition to this company he was working for and that it was out of his control.”
As to why Carole had shot Sean in the leg, Lynn added, “He said at one point, in the whole (Ireland) movement, there’s a more Catholic side and a more Protestant side. And she had been a traitor to that side [the Catholic side] and was doing something for the Orange [Protestant] movement for money.”
Todd did not tell Lynn at this point that he wanted Carole killed. He let her think that others did. Then he added there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He also said that he had discovered this “contract” by mere chance. Lynn recalled, “At first he thought he was the target. He discovered someone was supposedly following him around and that Carole had taken out a life insurance policy on him. He thought she might have wanted him dead. As far as a reason why, he had gotten really out of shape and they [The Company] were kind of irritated that he wasn’t able to do a lot of jobs that he was supposed to do at the time. But I remember at one point it clearly appeared that it wasn’t Todd. And I remember him saying, ‘I think it’s Carole, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’ It was around then that he told me about the altercation in Ireland between Carole and this Sean person.”
This had supposedly happened sometime in the 1990s. Lynn said, “Carole’s connection with The Company—she helped out when needed. The Company and the Irish Republican Army were just friends and acquaintances that Todd had known. And at that point he’d been involved with both.”
Eventually Todd filled Lynn in on the fact that Norman Daniels was trying to join The Company. He told Lynn that early on he was worried that Daniels might be trying to target him. But as time went on, he said, it became more apparent that Daniels’s target would be Carole.
Even though Daniels was not yet 100 percent sure that he was going to join The Company, all throughout April 1998, he was certainly tilting that way. And in preparation for the chance that he might join, he went with Todd to a gun store in Redding known as Jones Fort. The name was a play on words of a regional town called Fort Jones. Jones Fort was owned by Todd Garton’s good friend Marshall Jones. In an even more strange coincidence, Marshall’s wife, Tracie, was one of Carole’s best friends, and Tracie’s sister, Sara Mann, was Dale Gordon’s girlfriend. Todd often accompanied Marshall to gun shows, where he displayed camouflage gear manufactured by Rancho Safari.
Daniels said of their trip to Jones Fort, “Both Todd and I went there, and Todd did not have enough money to pick up a pistol, so he brought a twenty-gauge woman’s shotgun to offset the price of the pistol. The shotgun was a bird gun. It was Carole’s.
“We looked around at pistols. At an Armando Rossi forty-four magnum. It’s a five-shot revolver handgun. My choice—I wanted a forty-five semiautomatic. Todd suggested the Rossi was a better weapon to own. I just happen to like the forty-five semiautomatic. There are more shots. The kick of the weapon isn’t as great. So when you fire a forty-four, it has more power in it. It will kick your hand back. But Todd said a semiautomatic has a tendency to jam, where a revolver won’t jam.”
In the end, Todd won the argument and talked Daniels into getting the Rossi .44. Marshall agreed to the price of the sale, and it was agreed that Daniels would be the official purchaser. Norman did the initial paperwork so that a fifteen-day background check could be performed on him. No money was exchanged at the time and Daniels was scheduled to pick up the Rossi on April 27, 1998.
Norman Daniels passed the background check, and on April 27 he and Todd went to Jones Fort to pick up the Rossi .44. Todd brought along $150 in cash, and since that wasn’t enough for the total price, he again brought the .20-gauge shotgun as well as part of the deal. Todd told Daniels that The Company had provided the $150. He did not say why they had not provided enough money for the whole deal.
Daniels recalled about the actual exchange, “Both he and Marshall were talking as I was filling out the document for the pistol. When it came time to settle the account, Todd placed both cash and the twenty-gauge shotgun in exchange for the Rossi. Besides receiving the pistol, there was other equipment purchased, such as cleaning equipment, a holster and two boxes of ammo. It was a black nylon right-handed holster. [This was even though Daniels was left-handed.] He bought fifty rounds of silver-tip hollow points. It’s a type of ammunition. The hollow point, it causes the round to mushroom and it can cause a severe wound. Anyway, I handed the money to Marshall Jones. Todd stated to me in front of Marshall Jones that this was money from a job that he owed me, of being in the fencing business.”
Todd was smart enough to know that if the police ever traced the .44 Rossi back from a crime, it would lead straight through the paperwork to Norman Daniels and not him.
Daniels recalled he and Todd went to test-fire the Rossi that very afternoon. Daniels said, “We went to take it out by the Jelly’s Ferry target range and break the barrel in. Just shoot rounds through it and break the barrel in to get it working. A brand-new pistol isn’t as accurate, from what I understand, until several rounds have passed through it.”
Daniels compared firing the gun to breaking in a new car. He said that a car will run better after it has put on a few miles. Todd also practiced with a. 308 rifle while they were at the range. And he tried impressing Daniels with the specifications of this particular rifle. Todd said that the .308 had a floating barrel. Daniels explained, “He said to me this made it more accurate. I didn’t understand the specifics of that, but it’s supposedly more accurate than a stock rifle. The barrel is not anchored to the stock.”
This may only have been more gobbledygook on Todd’s part to try and convince Norman he knew about high-powered sniper rifles.
Dale Gordon also remembered Todd and Norm bringing the .44 Rossi into Garton’s house. He said, “They were in Todd’s house and I remember being in the living room. I saw two people [Todd and Norman] holding the gun. A forty-four Rossi special with a three-inch barrel.”
He also recalled Todd and Norman going down to a field behind the house and firing it back into Bureau of Land Management land. “They took the forty-four special and they went down into the field below the house. I was in the house. There were gunshots. You could hear it. I remember them talking about shooting it.”
Not long after test-firing the pistol, Norman Daniels agreed to join The Company. Todd said that he would be receiving a package from them.
Todd decided to construct the package with no writing on it or in it that could be traced back to him. Instead, he decided to use labeling tape. To this end he went to the OfficeMax store in Redding and purchased a Casio KL 750 E-Z Label Printer. With this device he could do all the lettering on the envelope as well as the instruction sheet to Daniels. Todd also bought two Casio label tape cartridges to be used in the label maker. He bought eight Duracell AA batteries, a Care Mail bubble-lined envelope and a Motorola Express Xtra Pager, which was to be given to Daniels to activate.
Strangely enough, after being so careful not to leave a trace, he paid for all these items with a G and G Fencing check, #6105. The total came to $172.90.
When he returned home, he made up the instructions and outside labeling on the package and sealed the envelope with wax from a jar that Dale Gordon owned. If this wax was discovered later, it would lead back to Gordon, not him. But then he made an impression in the wax with his U.S. Navy SEAL diving-bubble pin.
The end of April 27 brought Todd Garton right to Norman Daniels’s front door with a package in his hand from The Company. At exactly 12:01 A.M., April 28, 1998, Garton handed him the envelope with the inscription NEWBIE RECRUIT, PATRIOT RECRUIT on the front. He was sure that the articles, the photos, the pager and the instructions would be enough to convince Norman Daniels of their authenticity. And eventually he was right. But Daniels did not buy it all right away.
Daniels said later, “When I first got the package and found out who it was [to be killed], I thought he, Todd Garton, wanted his wife dead. He just set it all up. I was sure I’d seen the photo of Carole before. And the articles were just general. He led me to believe she was a part of the IRA. There was a bomb found in a bookstore in Britain and Todd suggested that she had done that. And she [Carole] and Lynn would lead potential victims into a place where they could be assassinated. Carole had changed her affiliation from Green to Orange. Carole was on one side and went to the other. That’s why she was being taken out.
“I thought it might be a hoax, but I quickly disregarded that. Because of all the other information that I received from him. And I was taking him on his word. I was just thinking that he put too much detail to it for it to be a hoax.”
Todd left Norman Daniels’s residence in the early-morning hours of April 28. Garton believed that Daniels would follow through on all the instructions, including the demand that all materials related to the package should be destroyed. However, he would have been appalled at Daniels’s next actions. For the most part Daniels followed through in destroying the evidence. He shredded the photos of Carole and flushed them down his toilet. He also burned the other document and the outside of the envelope in his barbecue pit. But he didn’t watch this closely and not all the material turned into illegible ash. Daniels also kept the wax seal that looked like a ram’s head, but was actually an imprint of Todd Garton’s SEAL diving-bubble pin.
As to why he kept this, Daniels said, “The wax seal was removed from the package the moment I opened it. I put it in the only drawer of my nightstand. I just knew I would need it. If I was ever caught, I would be able to show proof. I just knew to keep the seal and it would help. After that night I knew that something would go wrong. When I opened the package, I objected to the person [to be killed]. I said I couldn’t do this because I was going to get caught. From what I understood, eighty-six percent of all homicides are domestic in nature. That means the victim knew the murderer. So, I had a very bad feeling of what was happening.
“It had been impressed upon me by Todd that I needed to get rid of the stuff so I wouldn’t have any evidence leading back to me. So if any circumstantial comes up and I got my place raided, there would be no evidence. But I kept the wax seal.”
Daniels also inadvertently kept one other piece of “circumstantial.” These were two pages of instructions on how to activate his pager. It concerned his pager cap code, the pager serial number and the phone number for the pager. Daniels activated this pager on the morning of April 28. He called the 800 number and talked to a customer representative; that person activated it for him. Daniels eventually gave this pager number to Todd Garton and Lynn Noyes.
As far as contacting Garton by pager, Daniels said, “First I called the one-eight-hundred number, an operator would answer and they would ask the name or the extension of the person I was trying to page. After giving them the name Patriot, they would then prompt me for the message I would like to leave and they would repeat the message and say, ‘It’s sent.’ ”
Daniels could leave a worded message or a series of numbers. Basically, he used the pager just to contact Todd to call him back, but he could also leave a coded message.
It’s not obvious why Todd told Dale Gordon about the upcoming hit on Carole. Dale was not part of the plan, since Todd didn’t trust him. Perhaps he did so, because he was afraid Norman Daniels might mention something to Dale and he wanted to beat him to the punch. For whatever reason, he gave Dale a synopsis of why he thought Carole was a target. And he added some new twists to the story. Dale recalled, “The reason, some of the things that Todd was telling me, I thought she had enemies. One was The Company. Todd’s CIA friends. There was also a tagger. A person from the CIA that was following him at work. He told me to carry a gun and be careful.”
Another enemy was even more bizarre. Gordon continued, “There was the Clarks. The people Todd and I did a fencing job for. He told me Rick Clark came by his house. He told me he was checking up on him. Todd told me he was in the house. Todd was going to shoot Rick Clark when he walked in the door. Then he was going to get one of my guns, grind the serial numbers off and place it in his [Clark’s] hand. But when Rick Clark was outside, Carole came home, and when she did, that scared him off. It was because of a fencing job that went all wrong. They owed us money. They didn’t want to pay. Todd said he went out to their place one time with his attorney, and Todd and the Clarks got into a fight out there on his property.”
Gordon believed Todd and didn’t even object to his gun being used in a murder. In fact, he followed Todd out to the Clark residence with murder in mind. Gordon said, “We drove out to Clark’s house because we were going to kill him. I had my forty-five. Todd had his three-fifty-seven. But he wasn’t there.”
While this separate vendetta was taking place, Norman Daniels was struggling and sweating over his upcoming assignment to kill Carole Garton. The only relief from this came in the form of an archery tournament on May 3 and May 4 in which he and Todd participated. It was the Western Classic Trail Shoot, one of the largest competitions of its kind in the United States. People came from all over the world to Redding to participate for cash and prizes. In fact, there was a special prize of $50,000 if anyone could hit a one-inch target twice from one hundred yards.
Perhaps Garton wanted to impress Daniels with his archery skills in the shoot—one more reason to make Daniels believe he was a deadly assassin with all types of weapons. It nearly backfired on him, though. By the end of the day, Todd Garton looked more like one of the Three Stooges than Robin Hood.
Charles “Chuck” Hawkins, of Redding, who was on the same team as Garton and Daniels, was an accomplished bowman; he remembered Garton’s antics that day very well. What he recalled certainly did not put Todd Garton in a good light. Hawkins said that even before the shoot, “I loaned Mr. Garton a couple of videos, Pro Sniper and Ultra Sniper. I do a lot of hunting and long-range shooting. And I wanted to learn more about it and to be more accurate for purposes of hunting. When I loaned him the tapes, he came with Norm Daniels.”
Todd showed Daniels an individual in one of the videos—an expert named Carlos Hathcock. Hawkins continued, “Todd told Norm, ‘This is the guy that I was telling you about.’ He was going on, showing Norm this was his mentor or whatever. He acted like he’d trained under him down in southern California. For sniping. He acted like he had been a long-range sniper. Marine sniper. The way he acted was that he had just gotten out [of the marines]. I questioned that. Just the shape he was in. It would be like me saying I just got out of being a marine sniper. I’m way overweight. I don’t fit the part. He was overweight. Probably forty pounds. Didn’t look like a marine sniper to me.
“He wanted me to wear one of the shaggy outfits at the archery shoot. I did. As far as selling the suits, he did a good job. One of the things he was doing was going around hitting up vendors. Trying to push the product. He said that he was interested in buying the Bow Rack [an archery store in Redding] and that he was buying part of the Moore Ranch. A fairly large ranch off Adobe Road.”
This was at a time when Todd and Carole were barely making payments on their rental home on Adobe Road. Carole even had to borrow money from her parents to help buy baby clothes.
Hawkins continued, “Our team, Team Shaggy, was put together about a week before the shoot. I noticed at the shoot he [Todd] put his quiver upside down on the bow. He and Norm both had their quivers on upside down. The feathers were up. When you draw your bow, feathers are normally down. I poked some fun at him. I teased him about it. He got a little hot and didn’t like it. He said that’s the way he did it for turkey hunting, so he could kneel down and shoot so his feathers wouldn’t hit the ground. It didn’t make any sense. I turkey hunt with a bow. My feathers don’t touch the ground. I shoot a longer arrow than him.”
One incident in particular made Charles Hawkins double over with laughter. He said, “Todd was trying to shoot a long ways with a recurve bow. He missed the whole target and hit a truck. We made more fun of him on that one. He kind of had to laugh that one off. He just wasn’t a very good shot. He talked himself as to being a good shot, all these big bucks.
“When you shoot a bow and arrow, you hold your hand open on the bow. You hold so that your thumb and your fingers are open. You wouldn’t put your finger on the arrow itself. That’s a bad habit. When you draw, if you have razor blades on there, or broadheads on there, you can cut your finger. A lot of people cut their finger real bad.” Apparently, Todd put his finger on the arrow and was lucky not to rip it to shreds.
Hawkins said, “I just mainly stayed away from him. I knew he was full of it. Just in general, he had a long line of BS. I didn’t want to listen to it.”
After having made a fool of himself by hitting a pickup truck in the parking lot, instead of the target, the wonder of it was that Todd Garton could still represent himself as a skilled assassin in Norman Daniels’s eyes. But as Charles Hawkins said, “He had a long line of BS.” Somehow this BS worked on Daniels.
At least in this he had the aid of Lynn Noyes, who was doing all she could to keep Daniels on track in the hit of Carole Garton. Todd gave Lynn a general idea of how Daniels received the package from The Company. Lynn said later, “He [Daniels] was delivered a package of pertinent information, pictures, orders of what he was supposed to do, the person he was supposed to kill. The first time that somebody was to be killed, it was to be done a certain way. He had the option of—when he received the package—not opening it. If he, in fact, opened this package, that would mean he would have to go through with what was inside the package, or they and their family would be killed.
“At a point [Todd] said usually for the person that was wanting to get involved in this company, that the first hit had to be somebody close to them. And being that it was Norm Daniels’s first package, that is how it was supposed to be done.”
Lynn believed that Carole would be the target because of stories Todd had told her about Colonel Sean. He said that Carole had gotten into an argument with Sean and shot him in the leg. She had also turned her allegiance from the Catholic cause to the Protestant one. As a substrata to all of this, Lynn believed that Todd was somehow involved in the hit as well. He didn’t want her to believe that, but she knew that he didn’t want the baby that Carole was going to have and he didn’t like children. Lynn had thoughts that somehow he was helping The Company fund the hit on Carole because of this baby.
Lynn said later, “The front that he put up at the time that he was a happy, bubbling father-to-be, he didn’t like doing it. It made him sick, but he did it anyway. He didn’t believe he was the father. He said that they [he and Carole] had been separated off and on. It would have been some sort of immaculate conception because he hadn’t been with her. He gave a couple of different options of who the father would have been. He told me specifically that it was either one of the hotel chains she worked for—the son of one of the people that owned or managed one of the hotels. Or just a local person. A local breeder, actually. Meaning somebody who just likes to get women pregnant and not take any responsibility.
“He even had said that it would be better if she was killed. It would be better if she died from an unfortunate accident.” He also made a curious comment that it would be better for her reputation. Just how having her murdered would be better for her reputation than divorce, he didn’t say. Perhaps he meant it would be better for his reputation.
Todd did not tell her directly that he was setting up the unfortunate accident. But Lynn surmised that this could very well be the case. She didn’t like Carole anyway, and she took no steps to warn her.
Todd told Lynn that she was to be “Norman’s friend.” She was to listen to his concerns and guide him. But most of all she was to prod him to carry out the hit before the deadline of May 20.
Lynn said, “Todd told me that his friend Norman was a single parent who had a son. The mother of the child was very irresponsible and that Norman was really kind of down on his luck and didn’t have a lot of money and he was having problems raising his son. I felt really bad about the fact that this child was living in adverse living conditions. Todd said there were times when Norman had to leave the kid home by himself and he was little at that point. Todd had taken care of him for a few days and it was a sad situation.
“And that really appealed to me. I felt bad for him and I said, ‘Well, is there anything I can do to help this guy with his kid? If he’s a friend of yours, I trust your word on that.’ ”
Todd told her to be friendly with Daniels. Talk to him every chance she could. Listen to his concerns. Try to ease his mind. And help him carry through on the hit. Otherwise, Norm would be the target of an irate bureau.
Lynn did as Todd suggested and recalled her first conversation over the phone with Daniels. “He told me a little about his life, the situation he was in, his child. He said he was just a gas station guy. It kind of progressed from there. It went from his life to talking about The Company. He told me he received a package.” (This is something she already knew through Todd.)
Daniels gave her some details about the contents of the package, but not who the intended victim was at this point (although she already knew this as well). In some ways he thought that Lynn was the one who had paid for the hit. He knew that Lynn did not like Carole. Daniels said later, “It was explained to me by Todd that Lynn Noyes was my profiler. A profiler is someone that is to psychologically evaluate a person and their capability as far as doing something. To watch them and make sure they don’t become wild and unstable.
“I suspected her involvement with The Company. Lynn had stated to me on a few occasions that she really hated Carole Garton. I think, coupled with Todd Garton telling me that anybody could put out a hit on anybody and that her vehemence, this hatred, it was an assumption on my part that she wanted Carole dead.
“[Todd and Lynn] go way back to their teens and they have both worked together before. They were in the IRA when they were in their teens, and that her and Carole had worked together to lure people into situations where they could be assassinated. Todd and Lynn hd been on the run in Ireland. And they slept in a safe house. They were the best of friends. He also said that Lynn worked for The Company and she had tried backing out. Then he stated, ‘Once you’re in, you are in.’ ”
Todd’s luck with all these lies held. If Daniels had asked Lynn only once about Northern Ireland, he would have found out that she had never been there, and certainly had not been a member of the IRA.
As time went on, Garton told Daniels he would need a code name. Todd already had a code name with The Company. He was Patriot. Lynn Noyes was “Josephine.” The code name for her had been lifted from the movie La Femme Nikita. Daniels said, “Todd had said that I’m going to have to come up with a name for my code name. I was throwing stuff out like ‘Hamlet.’ ”
Subconsciously, Daniels had stumbled on the perfect code name for himself. Just like Shakespeare’s tragic character, Daniels fretted and worried about performing a task that he did not want to do. His anguish and torment became a constant factor of his life. He worried that there were Company snipers in the neighborhood who would kill him if he did anything wrong. He also worried that a hit man from The Company would kill him if he waited too long to complete his mission. He wanted help for a way to extricate himself from the predicament he found himself in. But he didn’t know whom he could trust.
Todd Garton did not like Hamlet as a code name. He wanted something more Irish. Something more decisive. Daniels said, “Todd kept suggesting certain names. And ‘Devlin’ was one of them he was really pushing for me. We were coming back from the Visalia archery shoot, and I gave in on his request.
“He said there was a book by Jack Higgins, The Eagle Has Landed. What he told me was that there was this German officer named Sean Devlin, and that he was disguised as a British commando. And he had his German uniform underneath. They were trying to capture Churchill. And this soldier saw this little girl fall into a creek and was drowning. And the soldier pulled off his British uniform. Obviously, the people saw the German uniform as he was stripping that off. He [Todd] said that I fit the character’s persona and that’s why he wanted me to take that name. But Todd plagiarized [sic] the character; because after I read the book, I found out that what he told me and what actually happened in the book were different.”
Had Daniels looked more closely at a lot of situations, he would have found that there often was a discrepancy between what was fact and what Todd Garton presented as fact.
Garton told Daniels that even Carole had a code name from her IRA days. She had been known as “Sirene.” He never explained where this code name came from, but he indicated that Josephine and Sirene had worked together.
Todd Garton wanted the main means of communication between Norman Daniels and Lynn Noyes to be by computer. This would keep things more private than communication being overheard as they talked on the phones. It also allowed one more thing—Todd could set up an account on a computer and make it look as if the messages were coming from someone else in The Company. Norm and Lynn obviously knew his voice, but an e-mail message coming “from The Company” could have been sent by anyone that Todd said it came from.
Todd was particulary inventive in this, and he had an unwitting ally in Dale Gordon, who was living in the Garton residence. Todd could send messages over Dale’s computer. If anything ever went wrong, the messages and text would be traced back to Dale’s computer, not Todd’s.
Dale recalled, “I had a Pentium 166 computer at Todd’s house. Todd and I set up an AOL account with a free disc. I was the one on the phone who set it up. He did some browsing. He talked with people in a chat room. There was some pornography he used it for. Todd’s password was PATR3.”
It seems that Dale logged on using Todd’s screen name at some point. To stop this, Todd came up with a new screen name, PATR553, and a password. The 553 was part of Todd’s social security number. He did not divulge the password to Dale. Todd also came up with an involved reason why he changed his screen name. Dale recalled, “Todd told me he was trying to access the CIA. Their computer system. He had a code memorized in his head, but he was one digit off. When he tried to access it, they sent a spike and it messed up the AOL account. You couldn’t go into it anymore. It was like a virus they sent.”
Todd told Norman Daniels to use the screen name Devlin when communicating with him, Lynn Noyes or The Company. Daniels already had screen names of Normbo for chat rooms and Valkymere for playing Internet computer games. Valkymere was named after the hero in his computer game mode and for use in the Internet game Vampire Tavern. But when Daniels tried to use the screen name Devlin, he discovered that it was already taken. So he tried Devlin 999. This was also taken. Turning the numbers over, he chose Devlin 666, and this was open for him to use. He adopted it. It was an interesting combination. In some circles 666 stands for the “mark of the Beast” and also refers to Satan.
In early May 1998 Daniels received a message via computer from The Company; it was called “a doorway message.” It was an introduction and welcome to The Company. When Daniels opened this message, it read: We would like to start by welcoming you to the family and hope you become an asset to our company of friends and family. The next part of the message was very strange. It was an attachment that depicted a scantily clad woman with Todd Garton’s pager number written backward. The pager number was superimposed over the woman’s midsection.
Daniels saved this doorway message by printing it out as a hard copy. Just like the wax seal from the package, Daniels decided to save this doorway message just in case something went wrong. He would have some “proof” later that The Company existed.
On May 6, 1998, Todd Garton and Norm Daniels sent a reply to the doorway message. Daniels recalled, “Todd authored a message. I was sitting in the front room of his house when he was typing it. He was sending it to The Company to let them know that the doorway worked. The message said, ‘New doorway opened.’ This was to ‘Company T’ at USA.Net from PATR553 at AOL.com. Then there was a message to ‘Confirm with Devlin and Josephine.’ ”
Daniels got an e-mail message from Company T (The Company’s code name) that referred to the movie A Prayer for the Dying. He wasn’t sure what it meant, except it had to do with the Irish Republican Army. Daniels sent out a request for some help in killing Carole Garton. He wanted a more experienced assassin to help him. And he also wanted more time. The request was denied. He received an e-mail message: Window impossible to meet due to weather, work and personal involvement.
As Daniels said later, “I needed time to think. I just knew that it was going to be extremely hard to do.”
Another message came from Company T to Daniels; it said, Your best asset, Patriot. That meant Todd Garton.
Todd had convinced Daniels that the shadowy Colonel Sean was directing him from The Company. Daniels was able to send messages to Colonel Sean at Company T. But, of course, there was no real Colonel Sean. There was only Todd Garton posing as Colonel Sean. Todd e-mailed the return messages to Daniels as if he were Colonel Sean. And Daniels bought it.
At one point Daniels wanted to put Colonel Sean on his computer’s buddy list so they could send instant messages. Sean88 was given to Daniels as Colonel Sean’s screen name. Even though he added this to his buddy list, he never did instant message Colonel Sean while Todd was in the same room as Daniels. Of course, he couldn’t. Todd would have had to be at another computer to do so.
During this period there was no one Norman Daniels wanted to communicate with more than Lynn Noyes. She was his profiler. She was the one to keep him straight on his mission. And Daniels was definitely having trouble in following through on the hit of Carole Garton.
In the beginning Daniels just wanted to check in with Lynn via e-mails and discuss the mission. He was lucky in this regard, since Lynn had just obtained her own personal computer in April 1998. It might have been tough for her if she had to communicate with him using her husband’s computer. Lynn asked Todd if it was okay to communicate with Norm via computer. Todd encouraged it. He told her, “He [Daniels] is really into computers. He’s a techno geek.”
Besides chatting in e-mails to Lynn Noyes about the upcoming operation, Daniels tried getting her interested in an Internet computer game called Vampire Tavern. It was a role-playing game that happened in real time. As Daniels explained, “We went to what was called the Vampire Tavern on the AOL chat room in a public area.”
Lynn Noyes went into even more detail about this. “It was playing a game on a computer that had sexual overtones. There were numbers of people in cyberspace in this area and you went and kind of selected a person, and the object of the game was seduction. The only person I really played with was Norman Daniels.
“I always followed Norm’s lead on what to do. Because there was something I never really understood, that dice were thrown and it was kind of like a point system. The time I spent on it with Norm Daniels, I really didn’t understand or knew how to play it. It was entertainment. There was some enjoyment in it.”
Todd encouraged Lynn to play these games with Daniels. He even popped into the Vampire Tavern once and told them to have fun. But Lynn Noyes was more adept at other seductions than in Vampire Tavern. And as time went on, Norman Daniels was increasingly enamored with her. She led him out of the Vampire Tavern and into cybersex. Her screen name for these episodes was indicative of her wiles. She used the name Pandoora 69. The 69 was self-explanatory. Lynn Noyes was always a very sexual woman. Her tastes and turn-ons ran the gamut from Todd Garton to Natalya.
Daniels said of his cybersex encounters with Lynn, “Instead of talking, you type out descriptive actions. In our first communication we were talking about copulating, having sexual intercourse. You know. Fellatio. Cunnilingus.” He signed himself on as Valkymere, hero of his fantasy in Vampire Tavern. She was Pandoora.
Lynn Noyes’s recollection of cybersex with Daniels was even more detailed. She remembered telling him: I can’t even fathom why you’re so attractive. And your mind is so brilliant. I would gladly give more than take. It’s the story of my life.
They role-played a seduction until Daniels typed, Stepping up behind her, he bends close to her neck. Then he wrote, Valkymere gently places Pandoora on the couch.
Lynn replied, Pandoora mounts him and takes control. She starts a rhythm. She reaches for a dagger on the nightstand. Cuts herself so she won’t climax immediately.
Fully into the vampire motif, Valkymere drank her blood as he became aroused.
At this point Lynn wrote Daniels that she was so turned on she needed to masturbate.
Daniels replied, Can’t type and do it at the same time?
She countered, I only need one hand.
Daniels sent her a smiley face icon to demonstrate that he enjoyed the thought of her masturbating. He told her he wanted more cybersex that same evening.
By early May, Norman Daniels was in the incredible position of falling for Lynn Noyes, the mistress of Todd Garton. The same woman who was prodding him to kill Todd’s wife, Carole. Just how smitten he was can be gauged by the stories and poetry he began to send her.
In one poem he told her that her face was invisible yet clear. He could almost feel her body in his hands. Images of her flowed through his head and he could smell her alluring scent.
He played out his Hamlet role to the degree that he said he was filled with despair of wanting her. Having her was only for an instant. Wanting her lasted lifetimes.
He told Lynn he had written this poem on the fly and he called her “Milady.” Perhaps it was an apt description. Interestingly, Milady in The Three Musketeers was a woman involved with intrigue and murder.
On another day Norman told Lynn that he had gone to an actual tavern and was dancing with a young woman. But he revealed, Do not be jealous my Queen. I did not touch her.
This yearning for Lynn Noyes on Daniels’s part was incredible, especially in the light of how Lynn felt about Todd. Norman might have been less enamored of her if he’d known that Lynn was also sending Todd cybersex messages during this same period. In these encounters with Todd, Lynn asked rhetorically if she was an angel or a devil. The romantic side of her was drawn toward the angelic. The steamy side of her was drawn to the devilish. He replied that she was his angel. His angel, Maliki.
Besides e-mails and phone conversations, Todd also instructed Lynn and Norm to keep in touch with each other via their pagers for important messages. In fact, Todd sent his pager number to Lynn in an e-mail that he’d used in the doorway message to Norm—the one superimposed on the belly of the scantily clad woman. About using her pager with Todd, Lynn said, “Usually I’d page him until he called me. If it was urgent, I’d page ‘Call immediately’ or ‘911.’ I’d leave my phone number to call on the message and to get in touch with Josephine.”
Garton must have become spooked about all the e-mails going back and forth at some point between him and Lynn. He wouldn’t exchange an e-mail with her unless it had the notation of his pager number—in reverse order—in the title.
He also had a new elaborate way of communicating with Norm Daniels. This was by means of using a codebook and book drop. The book drops were an elaborate scheme concocted by Todd to convince Daniels that The Company was taking extra precautions on this mission. Daniels said, “Todd explained to me that The Eagle Has Landed book would contain messages that this company would want to give me other than through e-mails or any other way. It would be encoded by poking under each letter of whatever the code sentence was. Starting in the second chapter. It would always start in the second chapter. As long as you would look for pinholes under each letter, that would be the message.
“It made sense that it would be a subvertive [sic] thing. When you normally looked at the book, you wouldn’t notice pinholes. I would find the book at the west side of the Moose Lodge. There’s a small hole. Todd had taken me there and pointed it out to me. It was a crawl space in the building.”
In a scene right out of a Hardy Boys mystery novel, Daniels was supposed to crawl under the building and retrieve the codebook every so often. There was also an e-mail message for him stating that if Patriot became a liability, then his new book would be A Prayer for the Dying. Daniels was under the impression that someone besides Todd was placing the codebook under the Moose Lodge. He also understood the term “liability” to mean anyone who tried to leave The Company without their permission. Such a person would be hunted down and killed.
As if it weren’t enough that he was pushing Norman Daniels to murder his wife, Todd came up with another criminal scheme in early May 1998. He decided to go up by himself to Gresham, Oregon, and burglarize Dean Noyes’s house. He wanted to find valuable information on Dean. He also wanted to be away from his home on Adobe Road on May 7 through May 9—the days he pushed Daniels to kill Carole. If he was in Gresham, Oregon, with a valid motel receipt, Todd thought it would give him a good alibi to the murder.
Todd checked into his favorite motel, the Hampton Inn, and obtained room 214. This was only a few rooms down from where he had fired through the window screen with a silenced rifle at the street below. Norman Daniels knew about this trip and related, “It was a reccon mission. Pretty much he was going to stake out Dean Noyes. If the opportunity arose to kill him, he would take it.”
But Todd had no intention of killing Dean. And he gave the real reason for his being there to Lynn Noyes. She said, “It was to help orchestrate a break-in at my house. It was actually an idea of mine. As opposed to having Dean killed. Dean was embezzling money from the company he was working for, and I thought if somebody had certain information pertaining to the funds that he was embezzling—how he was doing it and all—if they held that over his head, he might have to come clean to his employers. This would result in him ending up in trouble with the law and then he would be out of the picture for a while. He probably would have served some type of prison term.”
Whether Dean Noyes actually was embezzling or not, Lynn at least thought he was. And the figure of $80,000 came up in regard to this embezzlement. Todd liked this idea, but he changed it around to his advantage and didn’t tell Lynn of the changes. Instead of having Dean go to jail and be out of the picture, Todd wanted to blackmail him. If he couldn’t get insurance money by having Dean killed, then maybe he could squeeze some money out of him. Todd went to the Noyes residence and Lynn let him in while Dean and the children were away. He took some computer disks, a copy machine, a printer, one of Dean’s laptops and a large three-ring binder. Todd also took records of Dean’s bank account.
He took all of this material to the Hampton Inn and contacted Norman Daniels with Dean’s laptop computer. He was miffed that Daniels still hadn’t killed Carole, but he was also excited by having all this material belonging to Dean. Daniels, with his computer skills, could help him. Daniels recalled, “Dean Noyes’s AOL screen name was Dean Noyes 1408. There were five sets of numbers that Todd wanted me to try as Dean’s password.” But Daniels tried this and they couldn’t break into Dean’s AOL account. They didn’t figure out the right combination. But after looking through various documents, they discovered that Noyes’s password wasn’t numerical, rather it was a name—Chows, followed by Toulez.
Daniels recalled, “Todd asked me to search the Internet to see if we would be able to access Dean Noyes’s bank account electronically. He wanted me to set up a fake Internet account and send a message to Noyes. He wanted to set up the account under the name Bladerunner. He wanted me to do it through USA.net. I wasn’t able to do that. My understanding is that I did not have the proper software to access the USA.net’s Web page to log on. I looked for another server so that I could set up the account. Eventually I got an account with Hotmail.com.”
In a new twist on this blackmail scheme, Todd told Daniels he was going to flush Dean Noyes out with the embezzlement scheme so that Dean would come to talk to him in some secluded place. And then he would kill him. But Todd had no intention of really doing this. Basically he wanted to just blackmail Dean. In all these schemes Todd was constantly lying to Norman Daniels and Lynn Noyes.
With the Bladerunner screen name now on Hot mail.com., Daniels set up a password of “a time to die.” This was from the movie Blade Runner. Daniels thought this was an appropriate password concerning Dean Noyes. He still thought Dean was a wife-beating scumbag and deserved to die. Daniels also gave Todd another screen name for the Hotmail. com server. The name he gave him was John Carson.
Garton was so leery by now of having any connection to computers, he phoned Daniels from Oregon and had him type in a message to Dean Noyes. It was supposedly coming from an anonymous person named Bladerunner. The message was: Someone has not been playing nice. Stealing money is a crime. Want to make a deal? It was a none-too-subtle extortion attempt to shake loose money from Dean. In a short reply Dean e-mailed his unknown extortionist that he had no money and couldn’t help him.
Once Garton was back in California, he gave Daniels pictures, business cards and floppy disks that he had stolen from Dean Noyes. Daniels was not sure what he was supposed to do with them. Todd Garton’s reason for giving them to Daniels may have been if things went wrong, Daniels would have these items, not him.
With the embezzlement scheme bubbling along, Todd turned his focus back to the murder of Carole. Time was moving along and he was worried that Daniels might not ever act on his promise to kill her. The last thing Todd wanted was Daniels to flake out and not kill her before the baby was born. Once that happened, it was going to be a lot harder to kill mother and son. He encouraged Daniels to do it soon. He told him he didn’t like going to bed at night knowing that his wife was going to be killed. It would be better for everyone concerned if he just got it over with.
About this time Grace Bell had an interesting conversation with Carole about Todd. Grace expressed her displeasure that Todd thought he could call Carole away from work at any time to have her help him with matters that concerned G and G Fencing. Carole explained to Grace that they were in serious financial trouble on this score and she needed to help him. The lawsuit by Rick Clark was a disaster for the fencing business.
To ratchet up Norman Daniels’s anxiety about The Company, Todd pushed Lynn Noyes ever harder to prod Daniels toward the murder. Lynn said later that Daniels was contacting her daily now. In between cybersex episodes she reminded him about his mission. He replied that he was having a real problem following through. He liked Carole. He was worried about getting caught. He was so pent up with his Hamlet-like hesitations, he took a week off from the Kickin’Mule to try and build up his courage and focus on the operation.
Todd was making Norm once again watch training films to “help” him focus. They included another round of The Jackal, Patriot Games and La Femme Nikita. Learning of these movies from Daniels, Lynn told him that perhaps he should take a scene from out of these movies and adapt it to the murder of Carole Garton. Lynn told Norm he could kill Carole in her vehicle and make it look like a carjacking gone bad. Or kill her in her home and make it look like a robbery. The important thing, she said, was to do it quickly.
Daniels was so upset, he asked Lynn to send a message to The Company saying that he needed more time. He also wanted some money and a car. This was the last thing Todd wanted to hear, and he sent a message back to Daniels from Company T. In essence, it told Daniels to quit wasting time and accomplish his mission.
While all of this was going on, Todd put on a happy face around the house that he couldn’t wait for the baby to arrive. Dale Gordon, who was living there, said, “Todd was treating Carole a little bit nicer. He assisted more around the house. I remember items showing up around the house for the baby. Todd and Carole worked a little bit together. Todd hired Sara [Gordon’s girlfriend] to come down and help clean up. This was to help Carole during the pregnancy.”
Todd knew that Lynn Noyes was his key to making Daniels follow through on the hit. And for some reason Todd deemed it was important that Lynn change her Internet profile to bring it more in line with an operator for The Company. Perhaps he thought Daniels might check up on this profile. Or maybe he just wanted to have Lynn get more in character. He decided to change it without her knowledge.
She originally had written her profile as having hobbies that included dancing and running. But she said, “He asked if I had seen my profile lately. That if possible I should look at it again. He had altered it so it would be more suitable, since I was involved in this company. Because I was part of the family.”
Todd told Lynn that some of her profile information had been changed by The Company. It was in accordance with her doing a good job and their trust in her. She was now deemed to be a “closer” and a “mechanic.” She was told that closer had something to do with the lyrics from the song by the Counting Crows—“A Murder of One.”
Lynn recalled, “It was the situation he was in. If you look at the song lyrics, portions of the song are the fact that I was married to Dean, and it explains itself there.” Lynn remembered that a part of the song said to look outside a window, and that the husband/boyfriend didn’t need to know. Then the lyrics asked if the man kept her safe and warm. Lynn related, “Dean didn’t do that for me. Todd always gave me what Dean didn’t give.”
Todd pointed out with these lyrics that a dead spouse, a murder of one, would allow him and Lynn to be closer together. The term “mechanic” seems to have come from the Charles Bronson movie by the same name. On top of all of this, he also called her a “cleaner.” This came from the movie Pulp Fiction. It also made reference to a scene from La Femme Nikita. A “cleaner” cleaned up someone else’s messes by eliminating individuals. Lynn said, “A cleaner was somebody who came in and cleaned up botched-up jobs.”
To scare both Lynn Noyes and Norman Daniels, Todd began to rely more and more on the specter of the mysterious and dangerous Colonel Sean. That Colonel Sean was pure fiction, Lynn and Norm never had a clue. Todd told them that he recently had noticed a dangerous tagger following him around. This tagger was someone sent by The Company to check up on individuals and report back to Colonel Sean.
Todd also sent more e-mail messages to them from Colonel Sean. In one message to Lynn, Colonel Sean told her to keep tabs on Norman Daniels and report everything she witnessed to Todd. In another e-mail from Colonel Sean, he wrote, Is there something going on that I am not aware of? My boy [Daniels] is getting weird on me. He seems to be in a very dark cloud. You must not push too hard. He will always break when bent. You must be in contact with me if his mood becomes more aggressive.
But Norm Daniels was not aggressive enough for Todd Garton’s liking. Daniels came up with one excuse after another why he couldn’t kill Carole at the present time. He kept badgering Lynn to tell The Company he needed more time. In response Colonel Sean e-mailed Daniels in a series of threatening messages. One said, We need you to deliver this package well and quick without any incident. I’m one inch away from pulling you down and personally handling this situation myself. We are in a crunch. Patriot only trusts you and sometimes Josephine and two others. Unfortunately, none of them [Lynn and the other two] are field operators.
Daniels understood a field operator to be someone who actually went out and killed people.
Another message Daniels received from the fictional Colonel Sean insisted, You have proven nothing to me and I sign the checks. But you may have something going on, because Josephine and Patriot are keeping you in good terms. You better live up to all the expectations I have been told of, or I will personally fly there overnight and see you.
Daniels was very frightened by this message. Todd had told him Colonel Sean was a tough character. If he flew out to northern California, it would probably be to kill him.
As Norm explained, “Todd told me this Sean character didn’t mess around. He would clean me up. I understood that to mean come out and kill me and everybody involved. He said if Sean was to get on an airplane, that he [Todd] would want to meet this Sean guy at the airport when he got off, but not up close. He [Todd] would want to shoot him before he got off the aircraft.”
Colonel Sean also e-mailed Daniels: Your request to meet me in person, denied. I do not meet newbies. They don’t last long enough to bother. Perform to expectations or become a liability.
To give the thumbscrews a last twist, Todd told Daniels he had received a final ultimatum from Colonel Sean about killing Carole Garton. Daniels recalled, “It was told to me by Todd, ‘If you don’t do what you’re told, you or your son could end up either hurt or dead. Or your son could end up kidnapped and used against you to do anything they want.’ ”
That was the final incentive as far as Norman Daniels was concerned. He already partially believed he was a dead man no matter what he did. But the safety of his son concerned him greatly. It was this threat that finally made him decide to act.
Daniels said, “Todd suggested that Saturday would be a good day to do it because everybody would be away from the house and he’d be at a gun show.” There was a gun show at the Anderson Fairgrounds and Todd had a good excuse for being out of the house. It would also not seem strange that Norman was carrying a weapon around because of the gun show. Besides all of this, Dale Gordon and Sara Mann would also be gone. If everything went right, only Carole would be home.
Norman Daniels agreed to act then, on Saturday, May 16. He even spent the night over at the Garton house on Friday, watching videos with Todd, Carole, Dale and Sara. Once again they were videos that concerned hit men and assassins. Carole had no idea that some of the scenes were supposed to steel Daniels’s nerve to murder her.
But even at this late hour, Daniels had one last round of Hamlet-like doubt. He said, “I thought this has got to be a setup. I just had a feeling. I was drinking heavily and thought about calling the police. But I didn’t believe they would believe me. And if The Company found out I did that, I would wind up dead. The amount of information I was given by Todd, it forced the thoughts into submission. If I made a mistake, my son and my family—I worried about that.”
On the night of May 15, 1998, Norman Daniels was afraid of killing Carole Garton. She was someone he liked and also feared, because he had been told what a crack shot she was during her Irish Republican Army days. But as much as he feared her, he feared The Company even more. He screwed up his courage and decided that May 16, 1998, would be the day he would kill her—come hell or high water.