Chapter 13
Warnings to the Angel Malichi
By mid-July 1998 all four co-conspirators had their respective attorneys, and the Shasta County District Attorney’s Office was putting together their team. But of all these individuals, two men would have more impact on the fate of Todd Garton than any of the others. They were Greg Gaul, senior deputy district attorney, and Russell Swartz, Garton’s defense lawyer.
On first glance these two hardly could have seemed more different. Greg Gaul was a lean man, almost patrician-looking, in his pressed suits and air of calm. Russell Swartz, on the other hand, was a large man, with balding head and expansive gestures. He conjured up the images of a powerful mountain man, television’s Detective Cannon and Friar Tuck all rolled into one. In the courtroom Swartz often eschewed a suit coat and rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, as if to demonstrate he was a man at work. Both men, with such different looks and styles, were equally shrewd, learned in law and knew their way around a courtroom. They both had devoted their lives to the instrumentation of law and were worthy adversaries. Neither one of them was afraid of a difficult case, which the present one with Todd Garton and his co-conspirators was sure to be.
Greg Gaul had a solid foundation in both law enforcement and the judicial branch. He began his career as a crime-prevention specialist for the Redondo Beach Police Department in 1979. In this capacity he presented weekly crime-prevention meetings for neighborhood watch groups and conducted commercial security inspections. From 1980 to 1984 he was an administrative crime analyst, providing daily crime analysis for seven southern California police departments. These duties included identifying suspects for undercover surveillance and a crime-suppression team. One of his analyses led to the arrest of two bank robbers who had pulled off seven bank jobs. Moving up the ladder, he headed the Career Criminal Apprehension Unit from 1984 to 1987. This unit targeted serial criminals who engaged in robberies, burglaries, rapes and homicides in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
A big change came for Greg when he moved to Redding from southern California in 1987. This area was for the most part rural with one medium-size city, Redding. Its residents were mainly white, as opposed to the mixture of races in the urban sprawl of cities near Los Angeles. But that didn’t mean the county was a bucolic landscape without crime. In fact, there was an element of lawlessness that went clear back to the Gold Rush. In some respects, the new gold rush in the area were meth labs, which produced and distributed methamphetamine throughout the West.
In 1987 Gaul joined the judicial branch of law enforcement as a deputy district attorney I. He prosecuted all misdemeanor cases in Anderson, Central Valley and Burney Justice Courts. By 1988 he had moved up to deputy district attorney II. His caseload now included numerous major narcotics felonies following a lengthy undercover drug investigation by the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office. From 1988 through 1990 he was working at the level of deputy district attorney III, where he delved into adult and child sexual assault cases, as well as complex white-collar crime.
In 1991 Greg became senior deputy district attorney for Shasta County. Along with trying major assault and homicide cases, he instituted a sexual assault response team to help in rape cases. By the time the Garton case landed on his desk, he was a veteran of about everything that law enforcement and the judiciary could come up with.
His legal opponent across the aisle in Todd Garton’s defense was no stranger to a courtroom as well. Russell Swartz was born to be a defense lawyer. He had the savvy, the knowledge and the drive to present his client’s case in the best manner possible. By 1998 he had handled some of the most notorious homicide cases in Shasta County history. One of his earliest had been one of its most volatile. It concerned a serial killer named Darrell Rich, of Redding. In 1978 Darrell had gone on an absolute rampage of rape and murder in the area. Among his murder victims were Linda Slavik, twenty-eight, Annette Edwards, nineteen, and Pam Moore, seventeen. But it was his fourth victim that particulary angered residents of the county. Rich raped and murdered an eleven-year-old neighbor, Annette Selix. After raping her, he had taken her to a 105-foot-high bridge in the mountains and had thrown her off. She did not die immediately.
This was a very tough case for Swartz, but he did his best. And unlike many another criminal, Darrell Rich truly did seem remorseful after his rampage. It was as if he’d been mad during the months of terror he had inflicted upon the region. It didn’t matter in the end, the jury found him guilty and he eventually died by lethal injection. But in March 2000, as he was strapped in, awaiting the needles that would stop his heart, his last word was “Peace.”
Perhaps the most interesting direct link between Russell Swartz and Greg Gaul began in the summer of 1998, even as the Garton case began to take shape. At 6:00 P.M. on August 22, 1998, pretty sixteen-year-old Tera Smith went jogging near the Old Oregon Trail, north of Redding, and simply disappeared. Tera was not the runaway type, and soon Redding police and Shasta County sheriff’s deputies were looking for her, but to no avail. It was known that Tera sometimes liked to run near the mountains up by the Shasta Dam. The investigators began to focus on a twenty-nine-year-old instructor of martial arts, Troy Zink. He told them he had given Tera a ride to the corner of Old Alturas Road and the Old Oregon Trail at about six o’clock on August 22. She had jogged away and he hadn’t seen her since. Then he said he went to pray at one of his favorite spots, up near the Shasta Dam. Zink was of particular interest to the police since he had pled guilty to a charge of rape in 1992. When the police searched his residence, they discovered four rifles and three shotguns. They booked him into jail, since he was an ex-felon and should not have had firearms in the house.
In response to this arrest, Zink posted bail and was released. He also hired Russell Swartz to be his attorney. Swartz immediately went on the offensive. He told local reporters that the police were harassing his client simply because they didn’t have any clues about the disappearance of Tera Smith. He said that the firearms in the Zink residence belonged to Zink’s father and grandfather and were used for hunting. Swartz also said, “Zink and his family feel harassed by the police. He disassociated himself with the karate business because of the attention to the case. The authorities are just trying to make it look bad [in connection with Tera Smith]. How many times are you supposed to talk if you tell a person [the police] all you know?”
Interestingly enough, Greg Gaul was heading up the prosecution against Zink. He told a Record Searchlight reporter, “Zink is someone we’re certainly interested in because his actions have caused us to focus a lot of attention on him. He just gave us very minimal information about that last contact with Tera Smith. He knows more information. But he has not provided it.”
The “harassment” against Troy Zink only increased as time wound on. The Smith family, who owned a business called Oasis Fun Center, north of Redding, put up a billboard on their property that read, WHERE’S TERA? ZINK KNOWS. $40,000 REWARD.
When Troy Zink went to trial on the firearm possession, the courtroom was packed with Smith family supporters wearing yellow ribbons. In the end, Judge Bradley Boeckman, the same judge who was going to preside over the Todd Garton case, gave Zink the medium possible sentencing for his crime, which was four years in prison. Russell Swartz said of the decision, “Because of the fact I don’t think he’s guilty of the crime, I don’t think the sentence is fair.” And Swartz called the wearing of yellow ribbons, “game playing.”
Swartz may have lost the battle with his client, but he won the war as far as Troy Zink’s connection to Tera Smith. No charges were ever brought against him for her disappearance. Zink would have suffered a lot more than just four years in prison if he had somehow been connected to kidnapping and possibly murder. If Swartz could do as well with Todd Garton, and get him some lesser charge, it would certainly beat a death penalty conviction.
Even with the notoriety of these other cases, Russell Swartz and Greg Gaul had never seen anything like the Todd Garton murder and conspiracy case. Portions of it were so fantastic and outlandish that it seemed more like a work of fiction than reality. Something indeed out of a Jack Higgins spy novel.
There was so much evidence to compile—so many e-mails and documents to go through that concerned the various co-conspirators—that the paperwork grew into pyramids within the offices of Gaul and Swartz. And, of course, there were other ongoing cases with which they had to contend. By the autumn of 1998 there were thousands of pages of documents and more discovery happening all the time. The cases of Lynn Noyes, Norman Daniels and Dale Gordon were so interlocked with that of Todd Garton that Russell Swartz had to worry about what these other people were saying as well as discovery about his own client. Any deals the others might make were sure to spell trouble for Todd. And as the autumn of 1998 wore on, Greg Gaul was dangling deals before all the others. Only Norman Daniels did not bite. He had adopted a melancholy and fatalistic view on everything developing, almost as if he were doomed to wear the mantle of Hamlet. He told Gaul that he would make no deal, but he would cooperate in the prosecution of Todd Garton nonetheless. It was almost in expiation for his sins. It left him very vulnerable if a jury failed to find Garton guilty of murder. After all, Daniels was the one who actually pulled the trigger on Carole. Without a deal, it was he who could be looking at the death penalty, not Todd, if Todd Garton was found to be innocent. Even with this information Daniels would not budge. He carried the responsibility on his shoulders and moved forward to bring Todd Garton down. There was always somewhat of a noble, yet flawed aspect about Norman Daniels.
It took all summer just to hammer out the charges against Daniels, Gordon and Noyes. In October 1998 Lynn Noyes’s charges were finalized and looked like a carbon copy of Todd Garton’s. Counts 1, 2 and 3 were in connection with the murder of Carole Garton and the unborn baby. And Overt Acts 1–4 concerned the conspiracy to commit murder against Dean Noyes’s. Norman Daniels’s charges were very similar to Garton’s and Noyes’s. And on October 28, 1998, Greg Gaul and the district attorney’s office showed how far they were willing to go in this case. He wrote an official letter that stated in part, The District Attorneys’ Special Circumstances Committee met yesterday regarding Mr. Garton’s case. After a full discussion of the facts and appropriate mitigating/aggravating circumstances, the committee has tentatively decided to seek the death penalty against Mr. Garton.
Even if Daniels was stonewalling about making a deal, the same could not be said of Lynn Noyes and her attorney, and Greg Gaul focused his attention on her. Receiving permission to photograph Todd Garton’s tattoos, he compared them to those on Lynn Noyes. Especially the writing ONE BUT NOT THE SAME on Todd, and ONE on Lynn. He gathered new evidence concerning the silencer found in Gresham and some notes by Lynn.
She certainly did not want to go down in flames with her lover, Todd Garton. Frank O’Connor, her attorney, sought to get a severance and change of venue to Oregon. O’Connor wrote a notice and motion to dismiss for improper venue. The thrust of it was that all of the connections to Lynn Noyes and the conspiracy took place in Oregon. According to O’Connor, Lynn should not be facing trial in Shasta County, California—especially where feelings ran high about the case. He cited the United States Constitution, Article III, Section 2: The trial of all crimes shall be held in the state where the said crimes shall have been committed. And the Sixth Amendment: In all criminal procedures, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district where the crime shall have been committed.
In his rebuttal to this argument, Greg Gaul pointed out that Lynn Noyes was helping Todd Garton, who hatched the plan in Shasta County, California. Garton was the chief conspirator in the plan to kill Noyes’s husband, Dean. Greg argued, “The defendant [Lynn Noyes] was a willing participant in the conspiracy and provided a portion of the means and information necessary to carry out the intended murder of Dean Noyes. There was no direct testimony elicited at the preliminary hearing regarding when or where the defendant gave Garton the key to her residence, the photographs of her husband or intelligence information concerning his activities. However, there was sufficient circumstantial evidence presented to substantiate both that the defendant had discussed with Garton to plan to murder Dean Noyes and that the defendant provided Garton with above-referenced items prior to execution of the plan to kill Dean Noyes.”
Greg Gaul cited evidence of what he already knew about the conspiracy:
1. The defendant (Lynn Noyes) revealed to the detectives that for many years prior to the attempted murder, she and Garton had a romantic/sexual relationship.
2. During discussions with the defendant concerning her request that her husband be killed, Garton told the defendant that he would need a group of people or a team to carry out the murder. The defendant left the specifics to Garton.
Gaul went on to cite five more instances that the plan was hatched in California, not Oregon, and that Lynn Noyes should be tried in Shasta County along with the others. He said, “The above testimony demonstrates that the intent to enter an agreement to kill Dean Noyes was formed by at least three of the conspirators while in the state of California and that the defendant had formed the same intent and was aware of the existence of the conspirators who were participating in the plan.”
The presiding judge reviewed the arguments and came down on the side of the prosecution. Lynn Noyes would stay in Shasta County, California, and she would remain linked with Garton, Daniels and Gordon.
Lynn Noyes realized she had to do something or be dragged down with Todd Garton. On June 21, 1999, after almost a year of mulling over her situation, she signed a plea bargain with the district attorney’s office. The document she signed said in part: I plead guilty to Counts 1 (187 a PC) and 5 (182 a) and admit to the Overt Acts alleged in Count 5, all remaining counts and special allegations to be dismissed with a Harvey-waiver for all purposes. The stipulated sentence will be concurrent terms of 25 years to life in a state prison with the possibility of parole. I waive all my appellate rights. The six page typewritten agreement that I have entered into with the District Attorney is incorporated by reference in this plea agreement. I understand the maximum possible imprisonment is 25 years to life in state prison, the maximum fine is $10,000. I will be required to pay restitution to the full amount necessary to compensate any victims for economic loss.
There was one more important clause that she acknowledged: The state of California has jurisdiction over the conspiracy to kill Dean Noyes.
She also signed off on the acknowledgment: On and between the 1st day of October 1997 and the 30th day of May, 1998, I did willfully and unlawfully conspire together with another person and persons to commit the crime of murder of Dean Noyes. She admitted to providing a photograph of Dean Noyes and the house they lived in, as well as a key to the house.
Lynn Noyes finally signed an agreement stating: Other than what is written in the Plea Agreement part of this form, no other promises have been made to me by anyone to convince me to enter this plea. No one has made any threats to me or anyone close to me. I am entering this plea voluntarily and of my own free will. These convictions are strikes under California’s three strikes law. My conviction of any felony in the future could result in a sentence of up to 25 years to life. This would be on top of the twenty-five years to life she was already serving.
One more stipulation was that she would have to give testimony against Todd Garton when it was time for his trial. Greg Gaul in a later court appearance told her exactly what would happen if she began to lie during testimony:
Gaul—In addition to agreeing to plead guilty on these charges, the purpose of the agreement is to ensure the tryer of fact, in this case the jury, as well as prosecutions against Dale Gordon and Norman Daniels, that the jury would be able to hear your truthful testimony. Correct?
Noyes—Correct.
Gaul—And that the only consideration you were given in exchange for the agreement is that you will answer truthfully all questions asked of you either by the court, the prosecution or the defense, correct? Noyes—Correct.
Gaul—Also you shall not assert any Fifth Amendment privileges, resort to silence or feign any lapse of memory in an attempt to avoid answering questions. Correct? Noyes—Correct.
Gaul—You also understand that if you commit perjury or subornation in these procedures against Todd Garton, Dale Gordon or Norman Daniels, that doing that, you could be punished by death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Do you understand that? Noyes—Yes.
It remained to be seen exactly what Lynn Noyes did understand about her plea agreement. Certainly it was explained to her, both by her own counsel and by the prosecution. But perhaps Lynn Noyes was overwhelmed by the whole experience and frightened of the death penalty which had been on the table against her. She didn’t read the document fully until it was nearly time for Todd Garton’s trial to begin.
Meanwhile, on the same day that Lynn Noyes signed her plea bargain agreement, Dale Gordon signed a similar one. With his plea agreement he was sentenced to ten years in prison, not the twenty-five to life that Noyes would serve. He agreed to a count of attempted murder against Dean Noyes. He had never been part of the plan to murder Carole Garton, and Greg Gaul took that into account. As part of the agreement, he would have to testify against Todd Garton at his trial. This was something that Gordon relished. He hated Garton by now.
Things got even worse for Todd Garton at the end of June 1999. Tracie Jones had been storing items for him that had come from his house on Adobe Road after the murder of Carole. Many of the items were Carole’s clothing and things that had been purchased for the baby. There were baby clothes, a crib, a rocker and cradle stored in the Jones garage. Tracie had not looked at the items for a long period of time. She said, “After Todd was arrested, it was an emotional time. I didn’t go through the stuff, even the baby items, because it was just too hard.”
But by the end of June 1999, she and her husband were ready to take a look at what was stored in boxes and bags. Tracie said, “There were things of Carole’s. A box of shoes. Her wedding dress. My husband had been in the garage looking for something and came across a bag. And he said, ‘Hey, there are some photo albums in there.’ And so I went to see if I could find a picture of Carole. “
Tracie Jones found more than just a photo of Carole in the bag. It contained many of Todd’s pay stubs, work receipts for G and G Fencing and a spiral notebook. In the notebook were cutout newspaper clippings related to the Irish Republican Army. One of the clipping’s headlines read, IRA ATTACK KILLS TWO POLICE OFFICERS. Another had a photo with the caption: At right a British soldier lies on the ground after having been stoned by rioters. It was just the kind of material that had been in Norman Daniels’s package from The Company, the package that Todd Garton had handed to him at midnight on April 28, 1998.
There was also handwritten dialogue in the notebook supposedly between someone called Sean and Carole. But to Tracie’s eye, the handwriting looked like it came from Todd Garton.
Tracie took many of the items to a local copy store and photocopied the contents. She said, “I wasn’t ready yet to let go of a friendship that I’d had for ten years. And I knew I would never see those things again. I wanted to make sense of Carole’s death, and I was hoping that something in there would help me make sense of it.”
Knowing that the items she looked through were important, Tracie Jones took them to the district attorney’s office on July 1, 1999, and handed them over to Detective Steve Grashoff.
By the late summer of 2000, the early stages of setting up the parameters of Todd Garton’s trial began. Everyone knew that it would be a massive undertaking, with dozens of witnesses and mountains of documents. The trial would be in the Honorable Bradley L. Boeckman’s courtroom. Judge Boeckman laid down a schedule of procedure on August 14, 2000, and the planning looked like the order of battle for a major army campaign. These included:
Unresolved Motions—Counsel are to be prepared to discuss and argue the following—
People’s Motions
1. To photograph scars and marks on defendant.
2. For Pre-trial discovery order.
Defendant’s Motions
1. To Prohibit Jury Commissioner from excusing any prospective jurors.
2. To exclude Opinion Testimony of Guilt.
3. To dismiss for lack of jurisdiction.
4. To exclude hearsay.
5. To exclude photographic evidence.
Other matters to be discussed were:
1. Information of wording to be read to jury.
2. Jury instructions—date for submission.
3. Witness lists—date for submission.
Even such minor topics such as special needs for a long table, filing cabinets and one clear row in the gallery, as well as the defendant’s attire in court, were to come under discussion.
Judge Boeckman knew that jurors in a capital punishment case were under extreme pressures outside the normal routines of their lives. For many of them the whole experience was not only disruptive but very stressful as well. He did everything he could to explain the process and lay down the ground rules in the most understandable terms possible. He addressed the prospective jurors with sympathy for those concerns in a conversational tone. He knew that to explain things clearly would go a long way toward ensuring a fair trial in a case that was certain to be a marathon affair.
In his capital-trial initial orientation Judge Boeckman said, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. You have been summoned as prospective jurors for the case of the People of the State of California versus Todd Jesse Garton. The district attorney has accused Mr. Garton of first-degree murder with special circumstances, and is seeking the death penalty. The defendant has pleaded not guilty, and is presumed by law to be innocent unless and until the prosecution proves his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“I want you to have some idea of the nature of the proceedings in which you will be participating should you be selected as a juror. Defendant Garton is accused of a capital crime, which means a crime for which capital punishment, or the death penalty, is sought by the prosecution. Because of the fact that a capital crime is charged in this case, there may be separate phases to the trial proceedings. If the jury were to find the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of first-degree murder in the first phase and find a special circumstance which is charged to be true, there would follow a second phase or trial regarding appropriate penalty to be imposed. In this type of case the jury makes that decision. Choices, under the circumstances I have outlined, would be between the imposition of the penalty of death or a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
“Mr. Garton has entered a plea of not guilty to all charges against him, and he has denied the truth of all special allegations and circumstances alleged in the information. Mr. Garton is presumed innocent until the contrary is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. The trial of this action will require a considerable amount of time. Jury selection will take several weeks. The trial will begin with evidence on approximately Wednesday, October 4, 2000. We will generally be in session Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from nine A.M. to noon and from one-thirty to four-thirty in the afternoon.
“During the time you serve on this jury, there may appear in the newspaper, or on radio or television, reports concerning this case. I do not know if such coverage will occur, but because of this possibility, you are prohibited by order of this court from reading any newspaper articles and from watching or listening to any news program on television or radio concerning this case until you are excused from service on this trial.”
Judge Boeckman may have looked forward to smooth sailing from that point on, but Lynn Noyes was about to disrupt all these well-laid-out plans by her actions in September. On September 18, 2000, she suddenly requested to speak with Greg Gaul, Detective Steve Grashoff and Sergeant Mark VonRader. Once they were together, she told them, “I haven’t been truthful about some things. I had been in denial about a lot of what happened and I wanted to be a little more forthcoming. It was tragic. Very overwhelming just dealing with it. On a personal level I had a hard time going back through it all.”
This threw a monkey wrench into the time schedule laid out for trial. But it was nothing compared to her next move. She attempted to withdraw her plea agreement with the district attorney’s office. Lynn obtained the services of another attorney named Sharpe and sought to change portions of the plea agreement. Incredibly, for over a year she had not taken the time to read the agreement fully. When she finally did, she was astounded that she had agreed to a charge of first-degree murder against Carole Garton. Lynn said, “One of the counts in my deal was a stipulation that I had to plead guilty to murder one. And I wasn’t guilty of murder one. I thought I was only guilty of conspiracy. The paperwork is so long. I reread it and thought, ‘Wow, I’m not guilty of murder one!’”
Because of this sudden change of heart, the news of her change of plea passed on to Todd Garton’s attorney, Russell Swartz, and through him to Todd Garton. It precipitated a very unusual letter to Lynn while she was in jail. A letter that was supposedly written by a person named “Gabriel Michaels,” but the letter had all the earmarks and style of having been written by Todd Garton. The return address was to Russell Swartz’s office, even though he had nothing to do with the writing of the letter. The worst part of this, as far as Lynn was concerned, was that the letter seemed to be threatening not only her, but her family as well. In a panic she turned the letter over to Greg Gaul.
The letter began: Dear Lynn, Malichi, My Angel. Straight to the point. Your love is not lost. No, your love is renewed. Do not hold fascination as to their ship of fools but look to those who have always held the faith.
It went on to say that bad things had been said about her and that stones had been cast against her because she was playing in a den of snakes (the prosecutors and her own attorney, Frank O’Connor). He mentioned how the Bible said to take up the snakes, Mark 16:18: They will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.
But the letter warned that this was only a parable. It warned her that a snake would bite her. She would not recover. She would suffer a life in prison: Look what Frank O [her former attorney, Frank O’Connor] has done for you. Look at promises made by your friend Gregie [Gaul], Steven [Grashoff] and Marky [VonRader]. Now towards the end as you face the abyss, and see your life ending, the truth slaps you in the face like a cold wet storm. You are alone. None of the people know or feel your pain. You cry out for help and help knocks at that door.
The letter went on to say that Frank O’Connor, her former attorney, and Deputy DA Greg Gaul were trying to block the door. He compared them both to serpents who only wanted to bite her. The letter said that on the other side of that door were real friends. Friends who wanted to help her. It promised her love and support if she would take it. She was the only one with the key.
The letter went on to explain that Russell Swartz had written Frank O’Connor a letter that he wished to talk to her, but O’Connor said no. The letter contended that O’Connor was not trying to help her because he was trying to keep her in the dark and “screw her.” It stated that Gaul and O’Connor were friends and that all O’Connor wanted was the plea agreement to stay in place because he was afraid of Gaul.
But now, the letter contended, she had a new lawyer who should reach out to Russell Swartz. It said, Tell Sharpe, you want to give a statement of fact to Swartz. This is your key. It then asked why her old lawyer, a serpent, proclaimed to want to help her when he wouldn’t even reach out his hand to Swartz. It even alleged she had sat down with Greg Gaul without her lawyer present. Was that watching out for her interests? it asked.
The letter stated she had friends, friends who believed that women and children came first. It stated she had a choice: jump into the abyss with Greg Gaul’s connivance, or cross toward the light and help Todd. Do not let the snakes coil and pull you over the side, it implored.
The letter told her to watch the mail. That love came in many forms. It promised her a concordance of the Bible and other things that were on the way. It also promised that the friends of Todd Garton would help her get back to her children. At the end it said, If you do not respond in a week to Swartz by letter, then this is farewell, Malichi, and be lost with the others, banished to eternal darkness.
The letter told her to read Revelation 12:9 and Jude 1:6 in the Bible.
Revelation 12:9 states, The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth and his angels were thrown down with him.
Jude 1:6 states, And the angels who did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling, He has kept in eternal chains in deepest darkness for the judgment of the great day.
Both of these quotes were a warning to his angel Malichi, Lynn Noyes, if she abandoned her proper place in regard to Todd Garton.
Lynn immediately suspected that Todd was the author of the letter. She said, “Who else would it be? There was nobody else that I could help and save myself by helping him. The term ‘Malichi’ and ‘my angel’ were ones he used for me. The reference to friends and help and wanting the truth to come out. Friends meant to me, people who supported Todd. He had mentioned friends and family in connection with The Company. It was alarming because it mentioned my family.”
Afraid that The Company might really exist, and what they might do to her children, Lynn Noyes showed this letter to Greg Gaul. She also sent a short note to Russell Swartz, only a couple of lines. She recalled, “I said that I’d become aware through another party that I should speak with him. I didn’t say I would talk to him. I said I would meet with him. And I think that was pretty much it. Because I believed, from the letter I received—it caused me great concern that people that knew my family, and my children especially, would harm them. I wasn’t in a position where I could do anything for them except pray for them. I took all of this as a threat.”
Russell Swartz had nothing to do with his client perpetrating this new threat toward Lynn Noyes. But that the letter must have come from Todd was highlighted by another letter that apparently came from him soon thereafter. It had a return address of 124 Judith Lane. As Lynn explained, this was a code for Jude 1:24 in the Bible.
Jude 1:24 said. Now to Him who is able to keep you from falling, and to make you stand without blemish in the presence of His glory with rejoicing. Whether Todd Garton viewed himself as the “glorious one” is not clear.
Todd wasn’t the only one sending letters to Lynn Noyes during her incarceration. Letters that were just as bizarre arrived to her from Dale Gordon. Dale was slowly breaking down mentally from the stress of imprisonment. He wrote to Lynn about getting revenge against Todd Garton, the man he blamed for ruining his life. He wrote, If he hadn’t done what he did to Carole, I wouldn’t be sitting here.
Dale said, “Me and Lynn became good friends in jail. She’s a Christian. A good Christian. We wrote Bible verses together. I talked about how much I hated Todd. She told me I needed to forgive him.”
But then Dale admitted, “I am a terrible Christian.”
Dale was having such severe bouts of depression and anxiety that he had to go on medication while in jail. He even said, “For a while I was insane. I was going through a lot of terrible things. I was seeing visions. Hearing voices. I was in the safety cell on two different occasions. A week at a time. I was out of my mind. I was being attacked by the Devil. And God came into the picture. Somebody else in the pod cast spells on me. Sorcery. It’s in the Bible.” Dale Gordon believed the man behind the sorcery was Todd Garton. He compared him to pure evil.
Sitting behind bars himself, Norman Daniels couldn’t have agreed more. Todd Garton had helped him destroy his own life. He wasn’t as psychotic as Dale Gordon, but he struggled through profound bouts of depression. He knew his life of freedom was essentially over. The one last weapon he had was to bring Todd Garton down with him. Todd hid behind the defense that all the others had somehow managed to cook up these schemes without his knowledge or approval. If Daniels had his way, he would tell at Garton’s trial just how implicated he was in the entire scheme.
With Lynn Noyes’s turnaround, followed by its quick reversal, the trial date was off track now. And Russell Swartz asked for an extension of time. On November 14, 2000, he explained to Judge Boeckman that 40 percent of all the discovery he had received had arrived within the last month. This totaled over three thousand pages. Eight hundred pages alone had arrived during the jury-selection process. Swartz said, “The defendant would advise the court that we have been making a diligent effort to process and absorb this additional discovery, but as of this date have not been effectively able to do so. Much of the new discovery is in the form of handwritten letters and the documents are very hard to read and interpret. Since much of this comes from one of the principal witnesses against the defendant and provides important insights into his thinking, it is important that it be carefully analyzed.”
Swartz noted that all this new discovery had changed his defense strategy significantly. He had an investigator working extended hours following up on issues created by the new discovery.