Kill Or Be Killed

The news of Carole’s death hit her mother, father, stepmother and stepfather like a thunderbolt. That it came in the middle of the night gave it an even greater aspect of a nightmare. Vicki Holman recalled, “The week after Carole died was the worst in all our lives. It started about four-thirty A.M. On May seventeenth we were awakened by the phone, and my husband answered it in a bit of a fog. He listened awhile and dropped the phone crying. I took the phone and asked who it was. He said he was detective somebody from the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office. He was sorry to tell us that Carole and the baby were deceased. She had been shot in the home. He explained that they didn’t know who had done it and that they had questioned Todd for several hours and released him. He said that Todd had asked him to call us.

“When I got control of myself, the first words out of my mouth were, ‘Has Todd been arrested? Oh, I’m sorry. You said he had been released.’ To this day I don’t know why I said it. Intuition, I guess. The rest of the day and the next, we tried in vain to get ahold of Todd. We learned from his mother Sunday night that one of Todd’s friends had been arrested, but they didn’t know the details. She said that Todd was too upset to talk to anyone.”

Virginia Griffiths had also been hammered by the tragic news of the murder of her daughter and the baby. She had to spread the terrible news to all of Carole’s brothers. The fact that one of Todd’s friends had killed Carole was just as incomprehensible to Virginia as it had been to Vicki. She never thought that Carole had any enemies, much less someone who would want to murder her.

When Todd finally did contact Carole’s relatives, he had very strict guidelines about the upcoming memorial service in Anderson. Vicki remembered, “He wanted all of us to arrive in Anderson together and check in at the AmeriHost hotel. He said the owner was a friend of his and he had gotten us a deal on the rooms. He said do not talk to anyone, do not read the paper or watch TV. He wanted all of us to meet in one room, and he would be there at eight P.M. on May nineteenth and he would explain everything. We followed his instructions to the T.”

Both the Holmans and the Griffiths arrived in the Anderson area on Tuesday, May 19, the same day Carole’s body was released by the coroner’s office. Just as planned, Todd showed up at the AmeriHost hotel at 8:00 P.M., and Vicki recalled, “There were Jim and I, Carole’s mother and her husband, Gary, and Carole’s brothers, Scott, Mike, Donny and Donny’s girlfriend, Irina. Todd showed up right on time. He brought two people with him that none of us knew. They were Dale Gordon and Sara Mann. Todd explained that they were at his home when he came home and found Carole. Todd stood leaning against a wall and, in a very calm and unemotional way, gave us details of coming home, getting angry about the dogs being in the house, looking for Carole and finding her under covers on the floor of the bedroom. He spoke of doing CPR and doing a tracheotomy. He said there was a cash box under the bed with five thousand dollars in it that was stolen. When asked about that, he said it was money they had saved for the baby. The more he talked, the more I felt something was not right about the story. I kept quiet. He didn’t like when anyone asked questions.

“He told us that he had received a call from Norman Daniels after he was arrested and that he had said he did it because he was jealous of Carole and Todd’s relationship. I wondered why he didn’t kill Todd if that was the reason. Later in the conversation, Todd said he thought the DA was just looking to hang someone, so he arrested Daniels. That didn’t make sense because he already told us that Daniels had told him he did it.”

In fact, Norman Daniels may have foiled Todd’s plans of lying about a cash box, stolen money and an elusive, unknown burglar who had killed Carole. The “jealousy story” threw a monkey wrench into this scheme, even though Todd was still trying to make it fly and make it seem like Daniels had only confessed out of confusion and fear.

Vicki said, “Todd was with us about an hour, and then he said he had to go. He did bring a newspaper article, which ran after Todd said that he went to the newspaper reporter and told her she had it all wrong.” (The article he brought was an early version of the murder.) “As we were saying our goodbyes, he looked at me and said, ‘You’re not all right, are you?’ I thought it was the strangest question anyone had ever asked me.”

Todd had a lunch for everyone at the Old Town Eatery the next day. His parents were there, as was Dale Gordon, Sara Mann and all of Carole’s relatives. Vicki recalled, “Sara was very upset and cried most of the time we were there. During the meal Todd left. Later, I think I knew why.”

Todd left for a very special reason. He was meeting Lynn Noyes at the local airport. As Lynn flew down from Oregon, she chatted with the male passenger who sat next to her. He was a man from the Redding area, and when Todd picked her up, he said he knew the man. Lynn recalled, “Todd asked how the flight was. He said the gentleman on the flight next to me was from Cottonwood. He asked if I knew the person that was sitting next to me on the plane was an undercover police officer. (This has never been confirmed.) When we were back in his vehicle, he patted me down to see if I had some kind of wire on me.”

Satisfied that Lynn was not wearing a wire, he took her to meet his parents and Carole’s relatives. There was already friction developing between the various relatives. By now Vicki was very suspicious of Todd. Virginia and Gary wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. It was unthinkable that he was somehow involved in Carole’s murder. But as Vicki said later, “It must have shown in my face, because I hadn’t said anything to anyone. But I just knew that Todd was not telling us the truth. Jim wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I just knew that something wasn’t right.”

It must have shown so much in Vicki’s face that Gary Griffiths took her aside and told her to lighten up with Todd. His thinking was that Todd was now a widower and had suffered enough without undo suspicion thrown upon him.

After lunch Virginia asked to see the house where Todd and Carole had lived. They all caravanned out to the residence on Adobe Road. Virginia said, “Todd offered to show us the inside of the house, even though there was still yellow tape around. None of us wanted to go inside, of course.”

Vicki remembered, “Todd seemed to be having a good time showing us around. We went over to the park and stood around him while he recalled Carole walking the dog and other stories. Not once did he shed a tear or get choked up. After a while he took us to the Moose Lodge, where the memorial service was going to be. That is when he showed us a handout he made up with the help of Carole’s mom. I asked about the poetry on it and he glared at me and refused to answer.”

This handout was just as extraordinary as Todd’s comments in the Record Searchlight about his murdered wife. It began by stating, In Loving Memory of Carole Anne Garton 1969 to 1998. It contained a photo of Carole holding a puppy in the upper left-hand corner. Below it were lines of poetry that Carole had written. They were ironic in the extreme. They seemed to be accusatory of Todd. The lines read:

This glass heart has been broken 100 times and put back together . . . with glue of my tears.

When you said goodby and dropped it again something happened because this time it won’t mend.

You said it hurts too much to stay with me
and watching up close is like watching me bleed
You said I need to heal what’s broke inside me
can’t you see what’s healing you is killing me.

All my tears are grinding into sand
all my dreams have washed out to sea.
But this time I swear you won’t win
when you come back, I won’t come back again.

Why love hurts and anger feels so good
I’ll not understand as long as I live
You can’t ignore what you want to be true
whatever happens, I’ll be in love with you.

Now this glass heart has been shattered again
and the pieces cut through my kin
But like that heart, I see right through
you don’t deserve a love that’s true.

On the rest of the page Todd said that most people knew Carole as a friend, a writer, a mother-to-be. But that they didn’t know the artist in her. He said, “Those graced enough to have heard her perform were blessed with a gift that will never be matched.”

Todd also spoke of Carole as a painter and that her talent there was natural and beautiful. He said he would cherish every painting she ever made. At the end of the piece he recounted her life and mentioned all the friends and family she left behind who would miss her.

The poem by Carole particulary struck home with Vicki Holman. It was like an accusation against Todd from the grave. She said, “In retrospect I could see how true the words were.”

Whether Todd gave one of these handouts to Lynn Noyes isn’t recorded. But she was now very much of the group awaiting the memorial service. Lynn said, “The first night I stayed at Todd’s parents’ house. On one of the sofas. He slept on the opposite one. We had an intimate moment. Some foreplay. A kiss. A hug. There was a little bit of self-gratification by Todd. He did it in my presence.”

As far as how to act around the others, Todd told her to act normally. Lynn remembered, “He said just be normal, friendly and roll with whatever conversation is going on. Because he told a number of people that Carole and I were very close.”

By the morning of May 21, Vicki Holman was so upset by Todd’s strange behavior, she had a talk with her husband and they agreed to go speak with someone at the district attorney’s office about their concerns. She said, “Early the next morning, Jim and I talked with Donny and he also felt something wasn’t right. We decided we needed to talk with the DA. Don called them and they said they were anxious to talk to us. Virginia and Gary refused to go. Scott, Carole’s oldest brother, declined to go, too. So Jim and I, Don, Irina and Mike went to meet with McGregor Scott and a female assistant DA and several detectives. McGregor Scott told us that Norman Daniels had confessed about shooting Carole, but that he said that Todd had planned the whole thing. They said some of it sounded pretty far-fetched, but they would be investigating Norman’s story. They told us they had a tape of a phone conversation between Daniels and Todd that was suspicious. They split us up and each one went with a detective. I don’t know about the others, but I was asked how long Carole and Todd had been married, what I knew about their relationship, when we had seen them last, when I had talked to Carole last and how long they had been trying to have a baby. I found out later that Todd had told them that they had been trying to get pregnant for ten years. That was a lie.

“The detective asked me how we learned of Carole’s death. He asked if Todd called us or tried to communicate with us before we got to Anderson. He wanted to know everything that happened after we got there, and exactly what Todd had told us.

“After the interviews we met back at the conference room and they told us that Todd had been downstairs being questioned. When he learned that we were there, he demanded to be let upstairs to see us. But they wouldn’t let him. They asked that we not talk to anyone about what they had told us, including Todd. They would be in touch, and if we had anything more to add, please contact them.”

Todd was indeed downstairs at the DA’s office, and he had taken Carole’s friend Krista along with him. It’s not apparent if she was with him while he was being grilled, but he certainly filled her in on what happened soon thereafter. Grace Bell had a telephone conversation with Krista soon after this meeting, and Krista was very upset. According to Grace, “Krista said she was with Todd and had gone with him to the interview with the police. She said he came out of it saying, ‘They think I did it.’ She said her reaction was that she wanted to get away from there. She felt afraid and unsafe. Her husband arrived about that time and said she needed to stay for Carole’s memorial service. She said she did not want to but did it anyway. She said Lynn [came by] and she was relieved to have someone for Todd to interact with and not her.”

Vicki was also upset by what she had just heard at the DA’s office. She recalled, “No one knew what to think at this point. It was really frightening. We all went back to our motel and I don’t remember anything more about that day.”

Around this time Vicki seemed to recall that Todd offered to give Carole and the baby’s ashes to them for transportation back to Oregon. But both Vicki and Carole’s dad thought the proper place for Carole was with Todd. They would regret not taking him up on the offer at the time. The issue of Carole’s and the baby’s ashes would become a nightmare for them later.

May 22, 1998, was the day of the actual memorial service at the Moose Lodge in Anderson, and everyone who was there would come away with slightly different reactions about what they had witnessed. One thing they all agreed upon was that Todd was in control of the proceedings. In fact, he ran the whole affair like a master of ceremonies. Vicki remembered, “We had asked about a minister, but he said there would be no minister. He wasn’t going to have someone who didn’t know her speak about her. I know that both Jim and I were in a daze throughout the memorial service. I remember at one point Todd’s brother came over and introduced himself and told us how much everyone loved Carole. Everyone said the same thing. I don’t know how we got through the day.”

Collin Colebank and his wife, Marty, were also there and Collin remembered the scene vividly. He said, “The whole service was emotionally charged. No one gave a eulogy except Todd. He wanted to direct it all. He told what a powerful woman Carole was. Krista was very emotional. She was a train wreck. She seemed both tearful and angry at the same time. People were crying all around.”

Grace Bell was not there at the time, but she got secondhand reports and commented, “The memorial service was bizarre. Todd was controlling and hamming it up. I didn’t hear about any grief on his part. It was all about him. Later I went to the dictionary and looked up narcissistic disorder. Lynn Noyes sat across from the family. I wondered to myself, ‘Who is this woman?’ Apparently, Todd was making eyes at her the whole time.”

Later on, Krista would tell Grace Bell how Carole had felt about Lynn Noyes. According to Grace, “Krista said that it took a lot of balls for Todd to have her there. Krista said Carole had mentioned Lynn as the ‘other woman.’ She was not comfortable with Todd continuing to be in touch with Lynn.”

The memorial service was an eye-opener for Lynn Noyes as well. But for very different reasons. She said, “Todd was acting numb. Nonemotional. Just kind of cold; well, not cold but in between. He was nothing like he usually was around me. I learned that Carole wasn’t the mean, nasty person that Todd had told me that she was. That in a nutshell she did care for him as much as I did.”

Collin and Marty Colebank were astounded that Lynn Noyes was at the memorial service. They knew that Carole had never liked Lynn and certainly didn’t like her hanging around Todd. Collin said later, “My direct response to seeing Lynn there was, ‘What the hell is she doing here?’ I didn’t regard her as anyone who belonged at a memorial service for Carole. And she was going out of her way to be nice to people at a funeral. For one thing, she walked up to Marty and was very bubbly and happy to make her reacquaintance. I think she said, ‘Hi, Marty, do you remember me?’ And Marty didn’t care for her in any way, shape or form. So she simply said, ‘Yes. I know exactly who you are!’”

Tracie Jones also noted Lynn Noyes’s presence at the memorial service. She said later, “Todd introduced her as a friend. He had told me that he had dated Lynn before Carole. At the service she sat up front near Todd. He gave the eulogy, but afterward they sat together. She was staying close by him. Sitting next to him in a comforting manner.”

Vicki Holman recalled, “As soon as the memorial service was over, the Moose ladies served a lunch and Todd seemed to be having a wonderful time. He talked about how he and Carole had spent so much time at the Moose Lodge. Then Todd brought Lynn to the table and she sat across from us. He introduced her as Carole’s friend from Portland and said that she had been teaching Carole Lamaze exercises. He said Carole and Lynn spent hours on the phone talking about babies.”

Jim and Vicki were so weirded out by Todd’s excessive behavior that they wanted to leave right away, but they stuck it out for form’s sake. But what happened when they actually got back to the motel room was one more in a series of altercations between Vicki and Todd. He knew on some level that she didn’t trust him. He mainly blamed her for the trip to the DA’s office. Todd talked to Carole’s mother, Virginia, and told her how unsupportive Jim and Vicki were. Virginia, still believing that Todd was innocent, was not pleased about this latest disturbance. After all, he was the widower of a wife who had supposedly been murdered by his friend. It was not a happy scene that afternoon at the AmeriHost.

According to Vicki, “Todd had already talked to Virginia and asked her to get our key so that some of his friends [Collin and Marty] could use our room that night, since it was already paid for. We were thinking of leaving anyway. I hesitated for a moment, and Gary took the key out of my hand. I just wanted to get out of there at that point. So I let it go. We left about three P.M. and drove straight home.”

Even with this latest scheme of turning one set of relatives against another, Todd was not yet through with his antics for the day. He, Lynn, Collin and Marty, Sara Mann, Dale Gordon, Krista and her husband, Ryan, and Gary Griffiths all used the swimming pool and hot tub at the motel. Todd was constantly talking and apparently having a good time, hardly the embodiment of a grieving husband.

Collin remembered, “Lynn was all over Todd. She was not there to grieve for Carole. She was there to move in on Todd because, obviously, he was available now. There was a time when Todd was in the pool, actually sitting on the side, and she was between his legs. They were together like a couple. I would say he was a willing participant. He definitely wasn’t resisting. It wasn’t the body language of a grieving husband.”

Gary Griffiths was so offended by Todd’s stories and behavior with Lynn that he left and went back to his room. He told Virginia, “He’s [Todd’s] full of shit.” And he mentioned what he had seen and heard. Todd may have fooled Virginia and Gary for a while, but now they, too, had doubts about his innocence in the murder of Carole.

Todd and Lynn raised even more eyebrows when they stayed in the same hotel room that night. There were two separate beds, but Lynn did not stay in hers for long. She admitted later that she climbed into Todd’s bed and they had sex.

Even with all this strange behavior, Todd was not through taking people by his house on Adobe Road, despite the fact that yellow police tape still adorned its exterior. At some point he took Collin and Marty there, and Collin could not remember exactly when this was, because of the hectic schedule. But he seemed to recall that it happened after the memorial service. Collin said, “It had been a couple of years since we had seen each other. We were catching up a lot in a very condensed period of time. It looked like Todd had a couple of businesses going. Had friends around town. Had a comfortable house on the edge of the country. I was happy for him—except for somebody having just killed his wife. But basically Todd was happy about where he was in life. He said that it was nice and peaceful and quiet on the edge of the BLM land. Lots of free, open space. It was a peaceful homestead.

“We went into an outbuilding on the property. It was like a garage with some couches in it. Like an artist’s space or party room. We just went in there and kicked back on the couch and had some drinks and relaxed. He told the story of how somebody broke into his house. The police were holding his best friend in jail for the murder. He didn’t believe his friend did it.”

Collin and Marty knew that everyone reacted differently after a tragedy, but the impression they got from Todd was that he didn’t miss his wife very much. He basically seemed happy and relaxed and enjoying himself.

Collin and Marty left on May 23, as did all of the rest of Carole’s relatives. But there was one person still very much in evidence with Todd: Lynn Noyes. She finally had him all to herself. He took her to the house on Adobe Road and they met his neighbor and talked to him for a while and walked around the property. Afterward they went shopping in Redding at a couple of malls, and Todd bought some clothes. Lynn shopped as well, and got a very unusual item. It was a nipple ring. They went to a tattoo parlor and Lynn had the nipple on her left breast pierced. It was Todd’s idea. She wanted to do it for him. She knew that it would not please Dean. She didn’t care—Todd was the one she wanted. It would be one more reminder of him, like the tattoo ONE and the self-inflicted scar on her thigh of a heart and a very faint letter T.

With such contempt for Dean, it was curious what both of them decided to do next. Lynn and Todd cooked up a scheme where Dean would be induced into moving down to the Redding area. They would dangle the bait in front of him that he could come and work for Todd at G and G Fencing. Whether this was to get him in the area to be assassinated, or just so Lynn could be closer to Todd, neither one elaborated on later. Though Lynn did mention that Dean “might have an accident while he was on the job,” this scheme never really got off the ground.

Another scheme of Todd’s actually did begin to take place. Lynn wanted to move to the Redding area near Todd, and he went to a real estate office that dealt with house rentals in the area. He obtained some forms just in case Lynn did make the move.

Lynn said, “It was to kind of lay the foundation if I was to move to California. The Redding area. To get a fresh start and be closer to Todd. There was some kind of rental deposit.”

Todd desperately wanted to take care of one last thing while Lynn was in the area. It was to destroy the label maker that was still in his home on Adobe Road. It didn’t matter that there was yellow police tape all around the house barring everyone from going inside. The label maker and tapes that went in it were the few physical items that could tie him to Norman Daniels. This was the label maker he had used to construct the message on the package Daniels had received from The Company at 12:01 A.M., April 28.

Lynn recalled, “He had forgotten something very important. He said it was something that was incriminating and he had to get rid of it because it was one of the few things that could tie him physically to this case. We went to his house. I followed him through a window into the living room, the kitchen and, maybe two or three steps, into a bedroom area. He got a package of tapes, a stack of magnets and it looked like a little portable computer. [It was the label maker.] They were cassette-type tapes that were interchangeable with his little computer thing he had.

“We went back to the vehicle. We were just driving down a paved road. On the side there was some dried grass, wheat, I don’t know. A couple of sporadic houses on one side of the road and on the other side there were trees. He said he needed to get rid of the little computer machine that had the tapes. There was one tape inside the machine, and when we were driving, I took the tape out and I was looking at it. He said, ‘You don’t need to read the tape.’ He took the tape and he was driving with his arm and trying to pull part of the tape out.

“At some portion [of the road] we stopped. There was kind of a gravel embankment that dipped down. He had taken the tape out because there was writing on the tape. Then he was kind of unraveling it. When we got out of the vehicle, we went down by the river. We went down and there were some Mexican males down there. I don’t know what they were doing.

“We went off to the side. To the Sacramento River. There was kind of an overpass bridge and we walked right down underneath the bridge to the water’s edge. He broke a piece of black [tape] off and put it in the water. Then we went back to the vehicle. He was in the back of his truck and he had a little kind of, like, hunter’s pack that had materials that you could light things on fire. And he burned a portion of tape that had writing on it. After he burned that portion of the tape, the ashes from it and the computer [label maker], we went back to the river and threw all of these in the river.

“The other two tapes weren’t ever used. They were still in the vehicle, and after we left the river, we stopped at a Toys ‘R’ Us because we were going over to the senior Jones house for a birthday party. There was a bunch of garbage in the vehicle and I put the two remaining cassette tapes with miscellaneous stuff, and threw them in the trash.”

After this expedition Todd and Lynn went to the birthday party and celebrated with the others, as if they had not been on an evidence-destroying mission in an off-limits crime scene. Tracie Jones recalled, “He and Lynn had gone shopping. He said that they had gone to a Toys ‘R’ Us because it was one of Carole’s favorite places. They bought toys for the kids. At the birthday party they were sitting next to each other. Enjoying the boys opening the presents.

“Then he told me that she was thinking about moving down here. That her husband was in trouble with embezzlement in Oregon and that she and the children were thinking of moving to Redding.” Just how much Todd told Tracie about the embezzlement is not clear. One thing he did not tell her was that he had tried to blackmail Dean in conjunction with this embezzlement scenario.

For the most part Lynn was happy that Carole was dead and Norman Daniels had taken the fall. She seemed closer than ever in having Todd all to herself. The police were still asking questions, but as far as she knew, everything would soon die down and Norman Daniels would take the blame for everything.