Romance . . . or Rip-Off?

They all agreed that they had a really marvelous time. They said so even after the criminal charges were filed.

There had been romantic drives along the Monterey coast, intimate dinners in candle-lit waterfront restaurants and old-fashioned fox-trots to old-fashioned music.

But now, the paunchy, balding 56-year-old man with a golfer’s tan, who knew his way around those charming places and led like a gentleman on the dance floor, is in jail in nearby Martinez, facing a variety of misdemeanor charges and the combined wrath of four Contra Costa County women who say he wooed them and wronged them, one after the other, stealing their hearts and their money before skipping off. Even the names of friends and colleagues he wanted invited to their wedding were phony, one of the women said in disgust.

‘Wined, Dined, Duped’

“He wined and dined us and duped us,” said Elaine Doehla, a 48-year-old hair stylist, the youngest of the quartet who estimate their losses at about $50,000 in cash, checks and goods. Donald J. Tanner said he married two of the women at different times and the third, Doehla, said they had set a wedding date. “He put me on a pedestal, and romanced me right out of my socks.”

Doehla met Tanner a year ago. She chose to date him from among 200 calls she received from a $4.20 personal ad she placed in a weekly newspaper, at the urging of a client, who told Doehla light-heartedly, “What have you got to lose?”

Now, after almost a year of getting dunning letters about a new rented maroon Ford LTD car that began turning up 10 months after Tanner drove it off, and a year of repaying her father for covering the bounced checks Tanner allegedly deposited in her account, Doehla said she is seeing justice done. Tanner is in jail, where, he said, one of the four women, Barbara Duarte, served him with annulment papers from their September, 1984, marriage in Reno. Until Tanner was arrested, Duarte had told police, she could not locate him to serve the papers.

Women Compiled Data

It was a Concord police detective who arrested Tanner on misdemeanor warrants earlier this month, as police said he scuttled out the back door of the apartment he shared with his ex-wife, the mother of his two sons.

But it was the “sisterhood” of the four women that spurred police into action. The women spent months putting together their own data, which authorities are still investigating, and then “bugging” the police to follow up.

“We’ve based our investigation on the material they brought to us,” said Concord Detective Paul Crain, who is meeting Deputy Dist. Atty. Phyllis Franks today about possible felony charges. “We wouldn’t have known any of these other women were involved till their names were brought to our attention.

“I’ve run into very few where the victims were as adamant about seeing the suspect is prosecuted,” Crain said. “Actually it makes our job a lot easier, especially nowadays when people say they don’t want to get involved.”

Learned of Each Other

And then, he added wryly, “If I were Mr. Tanner, I think I’d rather stay in jail.”

With tentative phone calls--disbelieving, then angry--the women said they gradually learned of one another’s existence. Then they spent months piecing together their parallel stories, Doehla said. They tracked phone records and names on bounced checks--in one case, $1,100 worth from the closed-out account of the wife Tanner hadn’t lived with for six months, checks deposited in Doehla’s account as a show of good faith, Doehla said. “Being in touch was the important part--giving each other the backup.”

They scouted Tanner’s Concord address and telephoned to see whether he was there, so police could serve the warrants. They went to Nevada to check his marriage and divorce records, cross-referenced their phone bills and made multicolored charts of his whereabouts. They even packed a picnic basket, Doehla said, and drove off to a UC Davis graduation ceremony, where they expected Tanner’s son to be receiving a degree, with Tanner, they hoped, in attendance. They saw neither Tanner nor his son there.

Their Fury Grew

And their fury grew along with their paper work.

“He should be on the stage. It must be the same thrill that an actor gets, only it’s not memorized,” said Doehla, whose personal ad listed her as a “pretty, plump redhead.” “He knows all the right little things to do: ‘What are you looking for in a man?’ and that’s what he became.”

“He is probably a genius,” another of the four women said. “Keeping his stories straight, who he told what to, when.”

Tanner, arraigned on five misdemeanor bad check and theft charges, still jailed on a misdemeanor probation violation, denies that he wronged anyone. He said, with a bewildered shake of the head, that he is a man misunderstood, a proud man who tried to hide his embarrassingly spotty employment record, a five-times-married man who has bad luck with lady friends, some of whom couldn’t manage their money and others who didn’t have any to begin with.

‘I’m Being Hung’

“Well, let me put it this way. (One) lady said to me, ‘I’m no good at handling funds, Don, you handle the funds for us,’ ” he said in a jail-house interview. She “gave me her ATM card . . . and said whenever you need money, get it, and now I’m being hung over it.”

What the women see as cooperation in the interest of justice, Tanner sees as a sort of vengeful cabal. When he wouldn’t meet one of them for lunch earlier this year, “She told my kids she’d get even and she’s doing a good job of it. . . . She’s a woman scorned and she’s bringing every bit of this up,” he said angrily.

She has persuaded the other women to press on, “because they’re hurt, they’re mad. . . . Like I say, because of all this publicity and everything, I’m getting set up like a stuck pig.”

But Tanner, too, enjoyed the romantic outings to California’s scenic spots, and he often spent lavishly--his money as well as hers, he said. “Whatever work I had, I spent almost everything I had taking them out. Sure I enjoyed it, or I wouldn’t have done it. I don’t take women out just to, to quote a cliche . . . wine ‘em and dine ‘em, and love ‘em and leave ‘em, no. I have to like a person before I’ll take ‘em out. . . . I like to have companionship. I like TLC, and according to all of them, I give a lot of TLC.”

‘I’m Not a Don Juan’

He shook his head, his spectacle lenses flashing in the subdued jail lighting. “It seems like the women I pick like to go out and have a real good time, but when the money runs out,” he gestured with a good-by wave, “ ‘See you!’ I know that’s exactly what they’re saying (about him)--I know who’s saying it, too.”

Besides--just look at him, he said, opening his arms to reveal a goldenrod-colored jail jump suit adorning an overweight man, one sleeve covering the name “Maryann” tattooed on his bicep. “Do I look like an Adonis? I have balding hair, a pot belly. . . . And I’m not a Don Juan, I’m sorry, I just can’t believe that.”

Tanner and Doehla agree on one thing: The women wanted security. “If I’d had a good job and had money,” he said, “I’d have been married to any of them. I’d have been still living with any of them.”

But the women said they believe that he offered something he didn’t have.

Of the four, Doehla, married for 23 years and who has been divorced and dating for the past eight, is the most public, and she was embarrassed about going to the police at all. “That was the hardest part. I thought, oh, this young cop is gonna go, ‘Oh, look at this foolish old lady,’ but he didn’t.”

‘It Was Wonderful’

It was embarrassing, she said, to think how she had been swept off her feet: The days, the nights, the weekend trips--most often in a car she had on loan from an old boyfriend--were “nonstop.” From their first date, a picnic at a Spyro Gyra concert, “it became every night.”

“It was wonderful,” said Doehla, who, with a sense of whimsy, chose to be interviewed at one of the restaurants where she and Tanner often went together.

“We went to the finest restaurants, San Simeon--oh, it was heaven,” Doehla said. “I was just ecstatic. He was very attentive, very much a gentleman.” In fact, “the only time I got any rest was when I got to work, and then he’d call me every half-hour at work.”

Tanner had his work, too--or so she thought.

The other women said he told them he held a variety of jobs, but to Doehla, “He was a salesman for Mikasa china, and this guy knows his Mikasa china, backward, forward and inside out,” she said. “He should have gone to work for them. He’d go into a restaurant . . . and say, ‘Oh, this is some of mine, what do you think of it, Elaine?’ ”

Calls to Weather Number

Without a car, he did his work by telephone, Doehla thought--until her phone bill arrived after Tanner left. “Sheet after sheet, page after page,” hour upon hour of toll calls--to a San Francisco recorded weather number, she deduced.

It was convincing: “He’d just pick up the phone and ‘de de de de,’ ” said Doehla, poking the air with her index finger. “He had a fight with his (ex) wife one night” as the weather recording evidently whirred on the other end. “He’d pause and you could all but hear her.”

Tanner, a longtime San Francisco cabbie who ticked off a list of the celebrities he has squired around--”I’ve had Melvin Belli in my cab many times; it’s too bad I didn’t get to know him better”--said of the phone calls:

“Sure, I had a job a lot of times during the relationships,” but “they’d start asking me questions and pumping me about certain things and I’d just, I got tired of it, and a little embarrassed about being out of work. They wanted to know, where’s all your money, all of a sudden, where’s this, where’s that?” So he would pick up the phone, and they would leave him alone, he said.

Details in Police Report

Tanner deposited checks in her account, Doehla said--rubber checks, it turns out, on the closed account of his estranged wife, Barbara Duarte, police reports say. It was a day or two after the first check bounced that Tanner left, Doehla said.

(When Doehla finally met Duarte, by calling up the phone number printed on the rejected checks, Duarte’s story sounded familiar to Doehla. Earlier that year, Duarte had reported to Walnut Creek Police that Tanner, after their marriage in 1984, supposedly deposited checks into her bank from what she said was a nonexistent Southern Pacific credit union account, and “he blamed Wells Fargo for losing checks.” Duarte told police she “will be two years getting out of debt because of him.”

(Last August, police charge, Tanner used one of Duarte’s checks to buy $78.70 worth of supplies at an outdoors store, allegedly telling the clerk that he was buying things for their son’s Scouting trip with Troop 382. The store duly gave him the 10% discount for Scouts. A Contra Costa Scouting official said last week there is no Troop 382 in the county.)

A Good Talker

But last August, when Doehla said Tanner proposed, she knew none of that. Tanner said it was Doehla who was “trying to push it (marriage). . . . She and I had an indication we were thinking about getting married, yes, but I would have had to divorce Barbara first.”

They looked at condominiums; “he had those people convinced, on giving them no money, that we were gonna move into that place,” Doehla said. “They even let us pick out our tile and wallpaper and everything with no money--that’s how good a talker this man is.”

They ordered a new car from the dealership where Doehla’s daughter worked, a car that is still sitting on the lot, “a new Oldsmobile, the biggest one they got, every option they make. They put a rush on it, special paint job and all.” Said Tanner: “I ordered a car? News to me.”

Then, Aug. 22, four days before the wedding date, Doehla said Tanner dropped her off at work in the rented LTD.

Never Came Back

He never came back to her. The honeymoon money in $100 and $50 bills that Doehla said she set aside--and that Tanner said he never saw her with--was gone from her purse. The car was missing for 10 months; Tanner said he left it behind the car rental agency two days after he drove off. He said he believes that kids took it joy-riding.

On the day when the wedding was scheduled, “I had to call the country club to cancel the clubhouse for the reception. They didn’t know what I was talking about”--Tanner had made no reservation, Doehla said. And then the checks began coming back. “It took over two weeks for me to find out that these checks, these deposits were made on an account that was no longer in existence.”

Doehla, stung, gave up hoping he would come back and explain himself. She filed a police complaint, closed her bank account, put bars on her windows, and for a time moved back in with with an old boyfriend. “And a year later, I’m still going through this with him.”

Doehla came forward, she said, to help other women not to feel embarrassed if they found themselves in similar straits. Already, she said, two more women have contacted their group, but are too embarrassed to go to the police.

She was worried about public reaction, just as she worried that the police would think that she was a gullible, foolish woman. “But I had to do this. I would never be able to sleep nights thinking some woman had killed herself (over such an incident) or this guy being out on the loose.”