Crime Script : Man Who Eluded a Murder Rap Is Now at Center of Ship-Sinking Probe

A convicted con man who went to prison for slaying a West Los Angeles woman after bilking her out of $1 million nearly two decades ago is the center of controversy in a $3.1-million insurance claim on a ship that sank between Seattle and Hawaii.

Thomas Devins, 46, now of South San Francisco, was found guilty in 1970 of embezzling money from Norma Carty Wilson, 56, who had hired him as an investment adviser. He was also convicted of murdering Wilson in Switzerland, but the conviction was later overturned on jurisdictional grounds.

The 1980 book “Trail of the Fox” recounted the case and Orion Pictures is to begin filming early next year a movie about Devins and the man chiefly responsible for putting him behind bars, former Los Angeles County district attorney’s investigator Bill Burnett, 52.

Now, as a result of what authorities suspect is an insurance fraud involving the June sinking of a fish-processing vessel, Devins and Burnett, who recently retired, may meet again in a real-life sequel even before the motion picture is made.

The sinking is being investigated by the Coast Guard, the FBI and Lloyd’s of London, which carried the insurance on the vessel, the West I. Lloyd’s learned of Devins’ background from Burnett and asked him to investigate the sinking. They are now negotiating his fee. Burnett’s help has also been sought by several attorneys who plan to file civil lawsuits in the case.

“When we started looking into the sinking,” said Petty Officer Walter Schmidt, a Coast Guard spokesman in Honolulu, “we did not know Mr. Devins’ background nor of certain possibly incriminating evidence.

“It changed our perspective when we found out certain things about Devins,” Schmidt said, “and now a more full investigation has been conducted. We do not make conclusions on our level, but instead have sent our report to Washington, where our staff will decide whether to hold a hearing or just how to proceed.”

FBI Agent George Fisher, in a telephone interview from Seattle, said, “The case has been referred to us because of the possibility of certain federal law violations and we are investigating those allegations.”

Lloyd’s has resisted paying the insurance claim in the sinking of the 167-foot former Navy tug that had been converted into a fish-processer.

The principal owner of the ship, Land West Productions Inc. of San Francisco, which employed Devins, has filed a bad-faith suit against Lloyd’s.

In the late 1960s murder case, Burnett, despite the skepticism of his superiors, gathered sufficient evidence to convict Devins even though Wilson’s body was never found. However, in 1974, six years after her disappearance in a Swiss forest near Geneva, a hiker discovered a jawbone determined to be hers. The courts later nullified the murder conviction on grounds that California had no jurisdiction over a crime committed in Switzerland.

However, the courts let the embezzlement and theft convictions stand, and Devins served 7 1/2 years before being paroled in 1976 to Boston, where he had a sister. He later moved to Reno, where he went to work for Land West, a development company, which later transferred him to the San Francisco area.

Out of Reach

The current investigation focuses on the June 21, 1986, sinking of the West I about 600 miles from Oahu in 14,000 feet of water, which experts say puts it beyond the reach of salvage efforts.

The vessel reportedly went down at 3:30 a.m, while Devins, a member of the eight-person crew and a representative of the ship’s owners, was standing watch.

Devins has told FBI and Coast Guard investigators that he had made a deal to sell the Seattle-based ship to a Philippine-American group and to deliver it to Hawaii.

His wife, Pamela, contacted at their home, said Devins did not want to be interviewed because he was not feeling well, and was fearful of being misquoted by reporters. She referred all questions to Palo Alto attorney Thomas Nolan, who is representing Devins in any possible criminal and civil litigation that may develop.

“It is absolutely unfair to presume some guilt on the part of Mr. Devins because of past history, which may have resulted in an injustice in the first place,” Nolan said.

Devins Defended

Nolan said Devins has “fully cooperated” not only with law enforcement authorities but with attorneys involved in the civil side of the controversy. “There is just no reason to believe he is guilty of anything wrong in the sinking of the ship,” he said.

Twelve days out of Seattle, the ship sank and the captain and seven crew members, including Devins, abandoned the vessel in lifeboats. Skipper Enrique Calderon, 59, died before the Navy ship Indomitable arrived to rescue the others. Calderon, aboard a raft with Devins and a female crew member, Ann McGuire, 21, of LeSeur, Minn., died just 24 hours before the rescue. Devins said he was buried at sea.

Investigators are known to be focusing on documents dealing with the ship’s purchase, which they suspect led to an inflated value on the insurance policy.

Insurance surveyor Jim Goldade of Seattle said he initially agreed to write only a $1-million policy after inspecting the West I. However, when Devins showed up with papers indicating the buyers were paying $3.1 million for the vessel, Goldade increased the coverage to the purchase price for the 10-day trip from Washington to Hawaii.

Detective’s Eye

The recently retired Burnett said he was relaxing with a boating magazine in his San Fernando Valley home when he came across an article about the controversy over the West I insurance claim.

“Needless to say, the name of Tom Devins jumped out at me,” Burnett said, “and I immediately had a suspicion that it was my old foe.”

“From the first day,” said Burnett, recalling the Wilson murder investigation, “when I was posing as a building inspector at (Devins’) Encino home, I realized he was a formidable guy.”

Burnett, a rookie investigator when assigned to the case, later had a lot of reasons to regard Devins, who also used the name Thomas Utter at the time, as both a challenge and a threat.

“He tried to have me pulled off the case and had my superiors just about convinced that I was just harassing him over a missing persons case,” Burnett recalls. “Then he attacked the D.A.’s office generally and me indirectly by charging that bribes were being solicited to drop the case.”

Lawyer Convicted

No one on the district attorney’s staff was charged with soliciting a bribe, but Devins’ attorney at the time, Jerome Webber, was convicted of taking $35,000 from Devins on the pretense he could buy him out of the case.

An impressive cast of characters took part in the case that finally sent Devins to prison.

The trial judge, Malcolm Lucas, has just been named chief justice of the California Supreme Court.

The prosecutor in the case was Stephen Trott, who went on to become Los Angeles County’s chief deputy district attorney, then U.S. attorney in Los Angeles and is currently the No. 3 man in the Justice Department.

For brief periods, John Howard and Lynn Compton, who went on to prosecute Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, were involved in the case on behalf of the government. Howard retired several years ago after serving briefly as acting district attorney and Compton is an associate justice on the 2nd District Court of Appeal.

Global Trail

In pursuing Devins and trying to find Wilson, dead or alive, Trott and Burnett pursued a trail through New York, Madrid, Genoa, Zurich, Geneva and Lisbon.

The major break in the case came when Burnett tracked down Robert Forget, who had gone along with Devins and Wilson as a “bodyguard” when she was carrying $337,000 in cash, turned state’s evidence. Pleading illness, Forget had left the couple in Tangiers and returned to the United States.

A burly bartender and occasional actor, Forget testified that he was “really getting scared” that he would get blamed for the murder if he did not leave.

Forget testified that Devins told him that he shot Wilson in the head and then hacked up her body with a knife, spreading the remains over the Swiss Alps. It was not until years later that the hiker discovered what tests proved to be Wilson’s jawbone.

Trott, aware that the murder conviction was on shaky ground because of the jurisdictional question, worked hard to get Devins extradited to Switzerland for trial. But in the midst of those efforts, Devins disappeared from prison in California.

Walked Away From Prison

Devins had simply walked away from a minimum-security facility near Susanville in Northern California in March, 1974. Authorities had allowed him to walk unguarded to the mess hall ostensibly to conduct interviews for an article in a prison newspaper.

After the escape, Trott said Devins hooked up with a wealthy young woman he had met while she was visiting another prisoner, and fled, first to France and then to Australia, where he finally was caught and returned to prison in California.

“He never even got any extra time for the escape,” Burnett recalled. “. . . We could never get an explanation why they did not impose his full punishment, which could have kept him in prison into the next century.”