Chapter 11
House of Cards
It didn’t take long for Todd Garton to try and make a claim on his wife’s life insurance policy. He was very much looking forward to claiming the $125,000. Ironically, the claim had to go through the Bell Agency in Anderson. The same agency Carole had worked for with her friends Kenneth and Grace Bell, and where a playroom had been constructed for her and the baby. Kenneth Bell told Todd by telephone he would get the ball rolling when he got home from the East Coast.
On May 26, 1998, Grace Bell spoke with claims specialist Tony Aranda. At some point Todd joined in on a three-way call. Todd spoke with Aranda and gave Carole’s date of birth and other information. He even told Aranda that Carole had been killed by a jealous friend.
Pat Garton, Todd’s mother, went by the Bell Agency that same day and gave Kenneth the original death certificate for Carole. Grace, in turn, gave Pat all of Carole’s plants and personal items that were around the office. Pat said that Todd hadn’t broken down yet, but she expected him to do so at any time. She also told Grace that she was going to clear out the house on Adobe Road for Todd. He had told her to put everything Carole owned out in the yard and let people take whatever they wanted. He said he couldn’t stand looking at it. But Pat said that she knew that was just his “pain” talking. She intended to box up everything of Carole’s and put it in storage until he could deal with it at a later time.
That same day the detectives were busy as well. They searched Norman Daniels’s mobile home again and discovered a box of .44-caliber shells, pictures of Lynn Noyes and burned material in his barbecue pit. The material was not completely burned and it matched the description of the envelope Daniels had received from Colonel Sean. The investigators recovered the wax seal that Daniels had saved. The seal with Garton’s diving-bubble imprint in it. They also seized Daniels’s computer. This item was invaluable. They turned it over to a Redding police computer technician named Jim Arnold, who was an expert in this field.
The next day the investigators executed a search warrant on Todd Garton’s residence and discovered the two life insurance policies—one for Todd and one for Carole. Each of the policies was worth $125,000. The real eye-opener as far as the detectives were concerned was that the policies had been purchased in late March 1998, not even two months previously.
Because of stories Daniels had been telling of black labeling tape with instructions on the envelope, the detectives also searched for a label maker in Todd Garton’s home. Detective Grashoff seemed to remember such an item on a shelf in the Gartons’ master bedroom. But when they searched now, there was no label maker to be found. There was, however, an empty space about the right size on one of the shelves, as if such an item had been removed recently. Detective Grashoff took a photograph of the empty space as a reminder that the item should be tracked down if possible.
Detective Grashoff said later, “The label maker was being searched for due to information received by Norman Daniels.”
The investigators also looked for a photo album that held photos of Carole Garton. They discovered the album and it was of special interest. Daniels had told them that one photo he received in the package from The Company had been of Carole near a creek and small waterfall. There was a similar photo in the album they seized in the Garton residence.
Also seized during the search was the video Patriot Games, which Norman Daniels said Todd had used as a training video for him before the murder. The video not only contained a key character named Sean, but Patriot was supposedly Todd’s code name with The Company. Todd had business cards with the word “Patriot” on them as well.
Evidence kept mounting against Todd’s involvement as Detective Grashoff and Sergeant VonRader interviewed Grace and Kenneth Bell about a life insurance policy Todd recently had taken out on Carole. When they learned that Todd was in the process of trying to collect a $125,000 claim, it magnified their growing suspicions about him. This seemed just too coincidental that he should have instituted the policy in March and Carole was dead by May.
On May 29, 1998, Norman Daniels contacted the investigators by means of an inmate request. When he sat down with Grashoff and VonRader, he had a whole new set of stories to tell, and they were almost more fantastic than what he’d already been telling them. He said that Todd Garton got his orders from an assassination organization called The Company. He also said that Lynn Noyes had been his “profiler” for The Company. She was a go-between and kept him on track as far as the murder was concerned. He told of his trip up to Oregon with Todd and Dale to attempt an assassination on Dean Noyes. This was the first the detectives had heard about the Oregon mission. Norman had dates, places and names all lined up for them. He was still afraid of The Company and wanted police protection. As far as he knew, another operative could be posing as an inmate, just ready to kill him.
Even with all the evidence starting to point in their direction, Todd and Lynn were still not through with their clandestine operations. As she said of this time period, “Things were very up in the air. It was scary. Todd said he was questioned by police. He wasn’t available to talk freely on the phone or computer. I sent him an e-mail message. It said, ‘My loyalty (to you).’ ”
In fact, she wanted to show her loyalty with one more gesture—a new tattoo that would bind her even closer to him. She said, “I was trying to figure out the spelling of something in Gaelic. The word ‘angel.’ That was one of the names he called me off and on. In the tattoo the word ‘angel’ would be written in Gaelic. It had to do with Todd and Ireland. He said he could speak broken Gaelic and it would be something only he would know when he saw it.”
As far as Todd’s concerns about bugged phones and tapped e-mail messages, Lynn said, “He wouldn’t talk over the telephone or computer about Carole’s death. He would be very guarded in what he said. Because of the police involvement. He believed my phone was tapped.”
Lynn, however, still wanted to express her thoughts to him about Carole’s death. She decided she would describe how she felt by using some song lyrics. She said, “I would do this by song lyrics or occasionally a poem.” But Todd was incensed when Lynn got too close to the truth with one poem. She started to recite it over the phone and he hung up on her in anger. Lynn recalled, “It was a poem I had run across and it made me think of Carole. It was a sad poem and I just wanted to read it to him. He hung up. I paged him numerous times. There was a 911 in one of them. One message said, ‘Call Lynn ASAP,’ regarding the poem I had just read. It was double edged. It had another meaning. I thought he misinterpreted it. I mean, I was going through a lot of different emotional cycles. I was in shock. I was sad. Sad at the whole situation. That [poem] was meant for Carole. It was obvious, going down for the memorial service, that she had loved him.”
Todd did not want to hear anything about Carole from Lynn Noyes. Especially on an open phone line or e-mail message. In fact, he ordered Lynn to pick a new screen name for herself, something not already associated with The Company. She thought about it and came up with Cowboy. As she explained, “There was a song that had the word ‘cowboy’ in it. If I remember, it was by the group Devo. In the song called ‘Big Mess.’ ” Lynn related that it spoke of a cowboy on a mission with a gun. He had a picture in his pocket of someone he was supposed to kill. She added, “So that is one of the reasons I chose the word ‘Cowboy.’ That and the fact that his area [around Cottonwood] is kind of cow-boyish.”
As far as Todd’s connection to the song, “Big Mess,” Lynn said, “He just mentioned that it kind of went along with the military. Things associated with The Company.”
Incredibly, with all the police questions swirling around them and Todd’s paranoia, Lynn Noyes was still not through cooking up schemes to have her husband, Dean, murdered. She began the process by taking out a $500,000 life insurance policy on Dean. She even mentioned to Todd that there were now five hundred thousand new reasons to get rid of Dean. She said, “I came up with an idea and I presented it to Todd. One of my friends—her birthday was coming up. And it was Dean’s and my anniversary. We were all going out to celebrate at the Newport Bay Restaurant on the riverfront in downtown Portland. It would take place preferably after dinner when Dean and I were going back to our vehicle.
“Since Todd always portrayed that he’s a great marksman, from a distance he could shoot Dean and then myself. Just so it wouldn’t look too obvious. Just a flesh wound on me. But kill Dean.”
Lynn might have thought twice about this plan if she had known Todd was not quite the marksman that he claimed to be. His consistently missing the paper cup while he fired out of the Hampton Inn window was proof of that. And his missing the target with an arrow at the bow shoot, and hitting a pickup truck instead, was an even more flagrant example of how off the mark he could be.
It was all a moot point anyway. The last thing Todd wanted by now was something to stir up more suspicion. He told her, “Be patient. Wait until all this calms down.”
But it wasn’t calming down. In fact, everything was heating up to the degree that stories were starting to surface about Todd and hitting the front page of the Redding Record Searchlight. One article was titled CHARGE IN KILLING PUZZLES VICTIM’S FAMILY. The article went on to say that certain family members related to Carole Garton wanted to know who benefited financially from Carole’s death. Although it didn’t say so directly, Todd understood this to be coming from Jim and Vicki Holman. In response Todd told a reporter that when the detectives asked him if he had killed his wife, he replied, “It broke me mentally and physically. It’s barbaric. What gain could you get from the death of your wife and child?” He went on to say he only had a $10,000 insurance policy on his wife. He said this amount barely covered her cremation and memorial service.
Grace Bell knew this was a lie. Todd was trying to collect on the $125,000 life insurance policy. This statement that he was only going to collect $10,000 added to her already deep-seated suspicions about his involvement with Carole’s murder. In effect, it turned her into a sleuth along the lines of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. From this point on, Grace Bell started her own private investigation of Todd. She did it by contacting people he knew and those who lived around him. She was even quoted in the newspaper: “We definitely want justice on her behalf. “We need answers because none of this makes any sense.”
The sheriff’s detectives were also looking for answers that went beyond Norman Daniels as the “lone gunman.” They were sure Daniels pulled the trigger, but it was becoming more evident all the time that he might have been coerced into pulling the trigger. With clues leading off into a myriad of directions, they contacted the Gresham Police Department and filled them in on the new angle of Lynn Noyes being involved, especially with a possible intended hit against her husband, Dean. Gresham police officers showed up at Lynn Noyes’s door on June 3, 1998. And just like Norman Daniels before her, she went to an interview room and began concocting an initial mixture of truth and lies.
Lynn said of this first interview, “My intention was to stick with what Todd told me to say. I told them I really didn’t know that much. I didn’t know Norman Daniels except on the computer. That Norman Daniels had used Todd’s identification on his computer. Sometimes he used Todd’s computer.”
She also told the Gresham police that Todd had a lot of animosity toward Daniels because he had killed his wife. Perhaps Daniels was just trying to get back at Todd. As to a question about a box of items she might have sent Todd containing photos of Dean, as well as keys, she said she never sent any photos because Todd already knew what Dean looked like. And she certainly never sent any keys. She told them she was not involved in any way in some plot to kill Dean or Carole Garton.
But at some point Lynn messed up during the interview, either out of nervousness or just plain carelessness. She admitted she knew about a small computerlike object, a label maker. She indicated that she and Todd had thrown it away in the Sacramento River. She did not say what kind of writing might have been on the labels.
The police let Lynn Noyes return home and she knew by now she was very much under suspicion, as was Todd Garton. In fact, the next day Jim Holman, who no longer believed in Todd’s innocence, phoned Grace Bell and asked what was going on. Grace filled him in about the discrepancies in Todd’s statements and the true nature of the life insurance policy taken out on Carole.
In her sleuthing role Grace had a conversation with Todd’s next-door neighbor Chris Lamm, a teenager. Chris told her about Todd, Dale and Norman with guns in the fields. He had been frightened by them. They had been acting “secretive and weird.” Chris also had overheard Todd on a cell phone talking to Lynn Noyes. He stated that these two had a lot of conversations over the past year, and something wasn’t right.
On June 9, 1998, Todd called Carole’s mother, Virginia, to try and stanch all the rumors. But it was as useless as trying to hold back the waters of a dam that’s ready to burst. A woman named Susan Stone told Grace Bell about Todd, Dale and Norman’s obsession with everything military. She also said that Todd had abused Carole’s dog, KD, and that she worried what he would be like with a new baby in the house.
Grace began writing down a list of her suspicions about Todd. She then had a conversation with Julianna Metcalf, Chris Lamm’s mother, on June 12. Metcalf added stories about how odd Todd had been behaving just before Carole was murdered. So did people at the Kickin’ Mule. They told Grace that Norman Daniels had been acting funny a couple of weeks before Carole’s death. They said that Todd and Norman had lunch together every day before Carole’s murder, something they had not done before. This was a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
After her questions at the Kickin’ Mule, Grace had another conversation with Chris Lamm who said that he knew about Lynn and Todd for almost a year. He said that during the summer of 1997 he worked for Todd and was often in his house. He overheard phone conversations that Todd had with Lynn. He also picked up the phone, with Lynn on the other end of the line, asking for Todd. At one point Todd told Lamm, “My life will be very changed next year.” Chris didn’t know at the time how correct this prediction would be.
Grace talked with Julianna Metcalf again as well and Julianna told her that Todd had a terrible temper. Chris would sometimes come home crying because of the way Todd treated him. He yelled at and verbally abused the boy. It got so bad that Chris was afraid of Todd and didn’t know what he might do. He often saw Todd and his friends target practicing out in the woods. Chris told his mother that Todd had some illegal guns stashed in the back of his house. Then on the day of the murder Chris was in Todd’s house and the guns were suddenly gone.
Jim and Vicki Holman were so concerned by now, that Jim phoned Pat Garton that they were going down to witness Norman Daniels’s plea in court, which was coming up soon. Jim said he wanted to speak to Todd. She told him he wasn’t there. Jim then said that he and his wife would like to have Carole and the baby’s remains. Pat became upset and hung up the phone. But within a minute Todd was on the line talking to Jim. Vicki recalled, “Todd called Jim every name in the book. He said how dare Jim think that he was involved. He would never hear from him again. And we certainly weren’t going to get the remains. We wondered how he knew we were suspicious of him. From that point on, I was afraid. Paranoid would probably describe it better. Even cars with California license plates scared me.”
Vicki’s fears were not without foundation. On previous occasions Todd had badgered Dale Gordon into trying to kill people who had irritated him, such as Rick Clark, the man who sued him over the bungled fencing job, and the man who had bought Dale Gordon’s alignment business.
The Shasta County investigators were also following phone number leads that verified what Norman Daniels was saying. They discovered that there were phone calls from Todd Garton’s parents’ house to Norman Daniels’s pager in the hours after the murder. There were also phone calls from Daniels going out to both Lynn Noyes and Todd Garton. A twelve-minute phone call originated from Stephanie Bias’s house to Lynn Noyes at 11:01 A.M., May 17. A one-minute call from a phone booth at a Texaco station occurred at 1:35 P.M. Another call was placed from the same phone booth at 1:44 P.M. to Lynn Noyes. There was a one-minute call from the phone booth at the Hometown Buffet at 3:46 P.M., followed by a fourteen-minute call at 4:15 P.M. All of these phone calls were from Norman Daniels to a woman who indicated that she barely knew him.
Up in Oregon, Detective Kerry Taylor of the Portland Police Department went to the Hampton Inn and recovered the window screen from room 218. He discovered that it had several small bullet holes in it, just as Norman Daniels said. Taylor passed this information on to the Shasta County investigators and Gresham Police Department.
Lynn Noyes had a couple visitors on June 16, and they weren’t just Gresham policemen. They were Detective Grashoff and Sergeant VonRader of the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office, and they had a lot more ammunition in their arsenal as far as allegations against Lynn and Todd went. Norman Daniels had been telling more and more about Lynn’s involvement, and there was physical evidence to back up his claims. Lynn had done fairly well holding up in her interview with the Gresham cops, but the sight of the Shasta County investigators really threw her. She recalled, “I was in my kitchen looking down the staircase. And the doorbell rang. They looked official. I grabbed Dean’s cell phone and I went into my bedroom and called Todd. I was nervous and scared. He said, ‘Well, do you know the police are questioning just about everybody I know? Just remember the “truth.” ’ We discussed that I stick to that.”
Lynn went voluntarily with Detective Grashoff and Sergeant VonRader to the Gresham Police Department and they all sat down in an interview room. The interview lasted for hours. Lynn initially told the detectives she only knew Norman Daniels via the Internet. She said she had never met him in person. She also told them she believed Daniels had some kind of obsession with Carole Garton.
Lynn lied when they asked her if she had ever heard of something called The Company. She said no. Lynn said later, “Todd had said if I revealed anything about it, that my family would be killed and possibly myself. The whole situation—I was scared. It was very overwhelming.”
The two investigators were not letting Lynn off the hook easily. They came armed with a manila envelope full of information. She said, “They had some type of manila folder. And it had to do with phone records that Todd and I talked quite a bit on the phone. I thought, ‘Oh wow, the phone records will reflect that there was definitely some type of relationship going on. They probably know more than what they’re letting on.’
“I was really, really scared. I just started babbling bits and pieces of the truth. There were portions of it that were contrary to what I had already said. I was very selective and guarded. But I was petrified, too.”
At some point one of the detectives pointed at her Celtic cross necklace. She said, “It was identified to me they had seen the same type on Todd. The necklace was of such emotional significance to me. I knew that Todd had a matching one. I mentioned that at one time we were boyfriend and girlfriend. And I admitted that Todd is my best friend in the whole entire world.”
The interview was a marathon that day. It lasted more than six hours. At that point Lynn Noyes’s world was collapsing like a house of cards. Even though the interview had been grueling, she went back for another one the next day with Detective Grashoff and Sergeant VonRader. They wanted to know about her computer involvement with Norman Daniels. They already knew about some of the things he talked about concerning his computer affairs with Lynn. They asked about the game Vampire Tavern and Lynn said, “We started playing this game. We played for . . . I don’t know how many times. I mean, it was a really addictive game.”
But after a while she began to change her statements about the game and her interest in it. She said she didn’t know how to play it very well and she and Norman started to drift off from it into another direction. She told the investigators, “It ended up he and I just got to a chat room, doing what I now know is called cybersex. It was easy for me to do and get the sex into the vampire thing.”
During this tale of cybersex, Lynn mentioned Norman Daniels’s various screen names, Valkymere and Normbo. She also mentioned her own, Pandoora 69.
The discussion turned toward Easter, 1998. She lied and said that she had neither seen Todd nor Carole that week, when, in fact, she had sex with Todd in her Bronco. She told Sergeant VonRader that she had thirty kids over her house that day for an Easter egg hunt. Then she said, “They were in town for Easter, and I didn’t see him. Jeez, they may have been in town several times and I didn’t see them. I know Carole and Todd and Krista and Ryan—they were all really tight and they may have been by there and not seen me.”
Sergeant VonRader said, “Yeah, I got the idea that your feelings were hurt.”
Lynn admitted, “Well, yeah. I never got to see her pregnant. I would have loved to see her pregnant.”
Lynn was still trying to play a game of cat and mouse with the investigators, giving up some of the truth and hiding the rest, while still trying to place all of the blame on a jealous and troubled Norman Daniels. Most of all, she tried to keep hidden her relationship with Todd. She said later, “I very guardedly revealed just portions of our relationship. I remember sitting there and some hotel brochures were shown to me. The hotel brochures were places that I had been with Todd. And I thought, ‘I’ve said very little about the relationship with Todd and I. Well, if they have these records—’ I just panicked.”
Lynn began to blurt out more details about herself and Todd, and this was not wise. Once again the interview was long. It lasted at least four hours. She either gave new information that corroborated what Norman Daniels had already said, or she gave a different version than she had told before. In both cases it made her and Todd look more and more guilty.
When Lynn returned home, she was so concerned about her future that she boxed up her Celtic cross necklace and nipple ring and sent them to Natalya in New York for safekeeping.
It was a wise decision. Detectives soon conducted a search and seizure at her home. Some of the items seized included an address book with Todd Garton’s and Norman Daniels’s names in it. They also seized Lynn Noyes’s computer. Perhaps most damning of all, they seized The Anarchist Cookbook, which held many photos and articles related to snipers and Northern Ireland. This was a direct link to Todd Garton and all the stories that Norman Daniels had been telling about him.
Detective Grashoff and Sergeant VonRader spoke to Dean Noyes about all the alleged attempts on his life. They advised him it might not be safe under his own roof. This news struck Dean Noyes like an earthquake. He grabbed his children and went into hiding. He later would tell a Redding Record Searchlight reporter, “It’s an eye-opening experience. If you don’t have an appreciation for life, you do after this. My opinions have changed drastically as to what anybody is capable of.”
Officer Rich Boyd was a computer forensics investigator for the Gresham Police Department. He was a self-admitted computer nerd. Within the department his office was hardly any larger than a walk-in closet. It was crammed with seized laptops and CPUs that had ties to crimes. His job was to see what information the criminals or alleged criminals might have left behind within the computers. So far, he had helped tie information to crimes as varied as counterfeiting, credit card fraud and a child pornography case. But this alleged tale of conspiracy and murder was the biggest thing ever dropped on his desk. If he could find e-mail messages between Lynn Noyes and Todd Garton relating to the conspiracy, it would go a long way toward their arrests.
Of course he knew they probably hadn’t left damning messages out in plain sight. Many e-mails might have been deleted, but even deleted e-mail messages are not truly gone. As Boyd said, “Finding evidence from a computer is like finding a needle in a haystack the size of Oregon. Passwords may be obscure and it is an art as much as a science to figure out what the passwords might be. Also, e-mail messages may be deleted, but the pointer, or name of a file, is not. It’s about knowing where to look.”
As Rich Boyd wound his way through Lynn Noyes’s computer, he came across screen names for her, such as Pandoora 69, Josephine and Cowboy. He discovered screen names coming from Norman Daniels such as Normbo and Valkymere. Nothing was spelled out in black and white with a message such as Kill Carole Garton, or Kill Dean Noyes. But there were references to a Company T and some individual named Colonel Sean. Also a window of opportunity that ended on May 20.
Jim Arnold of the Redding Police Department was also looking at computers, especially the one seized from Norman Daniels’s residence. By 1998 he had been a policeman for twenty years and an investigator for six years. In this capacity he had investigated the use of computers involved in a crime. As he explained, “A forensic examination is taking a computer, a floppy disk or any computer item and examining it for evidence. Information is stored in several different ways. The most common way is to go to a Windows environment. When you delete a file on a computer, it’s not normally permanently deleted. Usually what happens in what’s called a file application table—it just gets rid of the first letter or number or character of that file. The file can be overwritten, but normally this takes time, and the document is still out there.
“Once you empty the recycle bin on a computer, it takes some forensic tools to find a file. But the file is still on the hard drive until the computer operating system decides to write over the space. To find deleted files we use a program that’s called EnCase. Initially what EnCase does is make a mirror image of the source hard drive. And it takes it sector by sector, copies it into a file on a destination hard drive, taking every bit of information without changing anything. That’s called ‘acquiring the source drive.’
“From there we add it to evidence. It is opened up into a Windows environment of EnCase. What it does is give us a screen almost like the Windows Explorer screen. We can sometimes bring up full Web pages that were written to the original hard drive when they were looked at or written to. Sometimes you only get part of a Web page. When a person goes to the Internet, each Web page that you view is spooled onto a swap file. And most of the time these Web pages are on the hard drive unless they’ve been written over.”
With the computers concerning Norman Daniels, Lynn Noyes and Todd Garton, Arnold discovered material that passed back and forth through AOL, USA.net and Hotmail.com. AOL did not save e-mails to the hard drive. But USA.net and Hotmail.com did because of the way they spooled information. With these two, and by using EnCase, Arnold typed in key words he thought might link these three people together. Through a very long and winding path, he discovered messages and bits of messages concerning the likes of PATR553, Devlin 666, Josephine and Company T. All of these led into a strange and tangled conspiracy.
Lynn Noyes was so worried about her future that she took a flight to Redding on June 19 to talk once more with Detective Grashoff and Sergeant VonRader. And this time she was all but giving Todd Garton up to try and save her own skin. During the interview she confided, “Todd said such things as, ‘Let’s get rid of Carole and Dean.’” According to written reports, she told VonRader, that Todd had always been tied to The Company and they assassinated people for money. She said that she had never wanted either Dean or Carole killed. She also said that Todd had broken into her house and burglarized some files related to Dean.
Sergeant VonRader wasn’t buying her innocent routine. He said to her, “Isn’t it true you gave Todd the key to your house? And not for some burglarized file crap, but for the purpose of him going and killing Dean.”
Lynn answered, “No.”
As a last gasp she said if Todd knew what she was telling them, “He would take me out and kill me in a second.”
Even more than what she told them, it was what she showed them that had disastrous effects not only for Todd, but her as well. Lynn went with the investigators to the Sacramento River and showed them where Todd had thrown the label maker into its waters. Normally, the river through there can be very swift with a large flow of water, especially during May when there are releases from Shasta Dam upstream. On some occasions, an item as large as an automobile can be swept downstream for hundreds of yards or more. On one occasion an entire pickup truck was washed downstream and never recovered. The chances of finding the label maker after a month in the river seemed slim at best.
Detective Grashoff was part of the Shasta County scuba dive team. He said later, “We went there to dive for the label maker machine to see if we could locate it in the river. This was in an area toward the Deschutes Road where it crosses the Sacramento River. We found it [the label maker] approximately ten to fifteen feet from the shoreline. The west shoreline of the Sacramento River.”
This was an amazing bit of good luck. The label maker was one of the few pieces of physical evidence that led straight back to Norman Daniels’s “package” from The Company. It also led the detectives to receipts seized in Todd Garton’s residence. The receipts proved that he had purchased the label maker and other items at a Redding OfficeMax on April 17, 1998, by check # 1605 of G and G Fencing, a business that Todd just happened to own.
In the long run, Lynn Noyes’s last gamble to save herself didn’t work. Things had progressed beyond her control. Norman Daniels and physical evidence both lined up to put her and Todd Garton squarely in the crosshairs of the Shasta County investigators and the Shasta County District Attorney’s Office. And by now these agencies had a lot. It doesn’t take foolproof evidence to arrest someone—it only takes probable cause. And by the end of June 1998, the probable cause against Todd Garton and Lynn Noyes was winding its way from mere rumor to actual documents—signed, sealed and delivered.