Between 1989, the year of his sentencing, and 1996, when he skipped town, Stanley traveled the country as a salesman for an ear-plug manufacturer and lived in nearby Tennessee. He existed on the edge of poverty as a goodly portion of his paycheck went toward restitution. As Stanley tells it, he lived without electricity for more than six weeks, was evicted seven times and twice had his car repossessed, all because of the restitution requirements. While the authorities at the Tennessee halfway house where he lived a few days per week for three years dubbed him a "model resident," he repeatedly raised the suspicions of the special prosecutor assigned to his case.
There was the year that Stanley paid more in restitution than was reported in his earnings statements, prompting special prosecutor Gerald Gray to accuse Stanley of misleading the court. Citing numerous violations of probation, Gray repeatedly filed court motions for Stanley to serve his prison sentence. Then, in 1995, Stanley faced new charges, including writing a bad check. When he left Tennessee in February 1996 with just $3,300 to his name, his third wife chose to remain in the state with the couple's first child, due in a few months, rather than live on the lam with her fugitive husband.
The teary-eyed departure, he says, was the beginning of a sad and soul-searching journey westward as he tried to rebuild his life. Using a laptop computer and portable printer, he forged a temporary driver's license. In St. Louis he painted his 1993 Hyundai gold, and bleached his dark curly hair bright blond. While on the road one of his molars became abscessed, but he says he so feared being identified that he anesthetized himself with Jack Daniels and yanked out the tooth with a pair of pliers. He says he was stabbed at a truck stop in Kansas City, Kansas during a robbery attempt, receiving a six-inch gash in his torso, but was forced to suffer in silence. "You can't call 911 or the police when you yourself are living underground," Stanley says from jail. Fear and heartache, he adds, dogged his every waking moment.
But in a five-page, single-spaced letter Stanley sent to his wife shortly after he fled, he paints a starkly different account of his life on the run, lashing out at the mother of his child for not leaving with him. "Every single time you look at our child, I want you to remember exactly what YOU and YOU alone did to its biological father," Stanley wrote. "Every day of your life. You deserve that." (Within a few months of sending the letter, Stanley would marry his fourth wife, who would soon be pregnant.)
Besides revealing his gift for manipulation and a tendency to become enraged, the letter shows the tentative but grandiose self-image Stanley worked so hard to construct. "In the new life I have here, (the one I so desperately wanted to share with you) EVERYONE loves me," Stanley's letter continues. "In my home, my female roommate and my new friends all flock around me just to 'touch the flame.'" He goes on to compare himself to biblical figures and promises to throw authorities off his trail by having plastic surgery. "It has always been, and always will be, a mistake to lose faith and underestimate me," Stanley wrote. "God has blessed me with a unique ability to defy reality."
Stanley and his new wife Sheila stumbled upon San Juan Capistrano in November 1996, and decided to stay because she liked the sunny days and mild winters. His weight, once a fit 220 pounds, had ballooned to more than 350 pounds. He had no bank account, no driver's license, no Social Security card and he could only accept cash for the few odd jobs he took on. They lived out of their Hyundai and showered at a nearby beach.
But the city, roughly an hour's drive southeast from Los Angeles, had an added benefit: Its residents tended to be as trusting as they were affluent. They didn't seem to suspect a thing about the man now calling himself Michael Fenne. He explained away his unusual circumstances with a series of tales, including that he had done covert work for the CIA, had appeared in numerous major movies, and had written songs for and performed with some of the most notable country and western and rock acts of the 1970s. He also said he was keeping a low profile because his wife had recently escaped a Mormon cult that was bent on getting her back. Remarkably, many people believed them.
Looking for work, Stanley responded to an ad placed in the local newspaper by Chuck Hauswirth, now 68, the owner of a "tele-business center" that leased furnished office space to people so they wouldn't have to commute to Los Angeles. Hauswirth wanted someone who could teach tenants how to use Microsoft Word and other computer applications. Stanley arranged a barter: In exchange for a modest-size work cubicle, Stanley offered a cut of his fledgling computer repair business, which he called Restec, an anagram of the word "secret." He claimed his clients included the Saudi royal family.
