Tag: FBI Most Wanted

On a Hidden Past

Dennis Whiles met Jean Clarke at a YMCA dance near Norden, California, in the early 60s. Jean liked that Dennis was a good dancer, well-spoken (Jean said he sounded like he was always giving elocution lessons), a smart man, and a hard worker. Norden is a ski resort area in the “elbow” of California that borders Nevada. Dennis worked the winters there as a ski instructor (he was a natural on the slopes, it was said) and as a construction worker in the summers. Jean also admired the way Dennis interacted with the two children she’d had from a previous marriage. The pair decided to get hitched in 1964.

There was one thing that bothered Jean about Dennis, and that was that her new hubby was rather tight-lipped about his past and his childhood. What she was able to cobble together was that he had been raised in an orphanage. He said that the story he’d heard was that his mother and father had been killed in a car crash, and he was left. He told Jean that he was as mystified about his past as she was.

However, Jean wasn’t convinced. There were several “lost years” in the story Dennis told. For example, what did he do from the time he left the orphanage in the late 1930s until the early ’60s–a roughly 25 year gap in his timeline? What did he do in the war? Where did he live? Dennis wasn’t forthcoming about those details. He mostly shrugged off questions like those.

And then there was the issue of the passport. Dennis had a social security card and a drivers license, but he had no birth certificate. Without that, the man couldn’t get documentation that would allow the couple to travel overseas. They lived in Hawai’i for a time, but Jean wanted to go to Europe, and there was no way Dennis could join her. And he claimed to not know where or when for sure he was born. All of his was incredibly sketchy to Jean.

Finally, after 20 years of marriage, she’d had enough. She confronted Dennis. She told him that he was a good man and a good dad and a decent husband, but she was done. Then, she gave him an ultimatum: Either tell her the truth about his past, or she would leave him. Dennis hung his head. “I will tell you,” he promised, “but you can’t overreact.” Jean let out a full breath of air. “I promise,” she said. “I just want to know the truth; I have to know the truth.”

And so, Dennis Whiles told her his true story.

It began for him in 1945, at the end of World War 2. You see, Dennis Whiles wasn’t his real name, it was the name he took while crossing the United States after leaving the Army. It was the name of a man he’d worked for a while. And he’d been incarcerated in New Mexico for much of the war, too, he admitted. He told his wife that if she’d’ve paid any attention to the wanted posters at the local post office, that she might’ve seen his photo because he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for years.

Jean was shocked. She couldn’t put the man in front of her with the person described in the story. She was quiet for a moment, and then she asked, “So, who are you, really?”

“My name is George,” he said slipping into an accent. “George Gaertner. I was born in Germany, escaped from a German POW camp in New Mexico at the war’s end, and I never looked back.”

On His Brother’s Keeper

David is a kind man. He and his brother John grew up in the Chicago, Illinois area in the 1950s and ’60s to a working-class family who had immigrant ties to Poland. The family instilled strong academic performance from both boys. David showed promise as writer, and John was something of a math prodigy. From an early age, David learned to be grateful and to show that gratitude for the things he has and the life he leads. He studied at Columbia University and graduated in 1970.

David decided first to teach. He returned to the mid-west after college, landing a teaching gig at a high school in Iowa. He married a woman named Linda, and the pair eventually relocated to New York. There, David got involved in non-profits that targeted at-risk youth. He later became involved in anti-capital punishment groups but also advocated for the victims of violent crimes. Today, David and Linda are both Buddhists and practicing vegetarians.

John chose a different path in life. John went to another Ivy League school–Harvard. He then pursued his math studies at the University of Michigan, completing graduate degrees there including the receiving of a PhD in the late 1960s. Unlike David, John wasn’t great with words. In fact, he was considered to be a “walking brain” according to people who knew him.

By the age of 25, he was a professor at Cal-Berkeley. However, two years later, his lack of social skills had driven him out of teaching. He found himself back home with his parents in suburban Chicago. David tried to reach out to his big brother to see if he could help him learn how to negotiate the ins and outs of being a social person in the world. But John didn’t warm to David’s attempts to reach out. If it didn’t have to do with math, John wasn’t interested. David, being the kind person he is, felt in an odd way that he was the big brother and should be the one to step up to help John in life. But that was not to be.

Finally, John left his parents after staying pretty much in his room at home for two years. He went west, away from people, and isolated himself in the woods. David continued to try to reach out, but John never responded. It was years later that Linda, David’s wife, showed David a letter that had been published in the Washington Post. “This sounds like something your brother would write,” she said. David agreed. He contacted the paper in an effort to try to reach out to John. They referred him to other authorities. And because he then reached out to them, David was able to bring John back from his self-imposed exile in the woods.

And what David brought John to was prison. You see, the letter that Linda showed John in the Post was written by the man the FBI was seeking in connection with a series of bombings across the United States.

Yes, because of the intervention of his brother, Theodore John “Ted” Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was finally captured.