Turner Family Keeps Vigil Amid Conflicting Reports : Relatives: Wife, mother plan to leave today for Germany and an anticipated reunion.

Despite conflicting reports on whether Middle East hostage Jesse (Jon) Turner, 44, had actually been freed Monday, his family began to believe what previous experience told them they shouldn’t--that their long ordeal was coming to an end.

Finally, after hours of differing reports, the news was relayed that Turner was safe in Damascus, according to Syrian officials.

It was the news they had waited five years to hear. Turner’s family--his wife, Badr; mother, Estelle Ronneburg; her husband, Eugene, and Joanne, the 4-year-old daughter he has never seen--prepared to leave this morning for a reunion in Wiesbaden, Germany, where freed American hostages are taken for medical care.

“I can’t believe he is free until I see him on television or meet him,” Badr Turner said. “But the United Nations secretary general said so, so I believe it.”

Early in the afternoon, after there were reports that Turner was free, other reports said he was still being held captive.

“That kind of shook us up,” said Turner’s mother.

Joanne Turner, who was born several months after Turner’s kidnapping, is very anxious to see him, Estelle Ronneburg said. Until now the little girl has been told her father was in Beirut “on business,” she said.

The uncertainty of Monday was just the latest in five years of tortuous waiting and watching for Turner’s family.

On Jan. 24, 1987, gunmen posing as police kidnapped Turner and three other professors, Robert Polhill, Alann Steen and Mithileshwar Singh, from the campus of Beirut University College. Turner’s wife, Badr, four months pregnant with their first child, was waiting for him at their nearby apartment.

The four had been the only foreign men then working at the American-affiliated school. Singh, a professor of finance and a legal U.S. resident, and Polhill, a U.S. businessman who taught accounting and business courses, have since been released.

Turner was professor of mathematics and computer science when he joined the school in 1983, leaving behind a teaching position at Cal State San Bernardino.

“He wanted to be on a faster tenure track,” recalled Robert Stein, a math professor who was chairman of the Cal State San Bernardino mathematics department during Turner’s stay there.

“Frankly, I thought it was a strange decision at the time. I remember thinking, ‘Why is hell better than purgatory.’ I guess you have more security in hell.”

When Turner decided to leave for Beirut, most of his colleagues in San Bernardino talked about the danger there, recalls Dan Rinne, a Cal State professor who joined the university the same year as Turner.

“Other people mentioned it, but I didn’t detect any reservations from him,” Rinne recalled. “He was excited about going.”

In fact, Turner flourished in Beirut.

Classes went well, he was popular with the students and in 1987, he married Badr, his second wife, a Lebanese staffer who worked in the natural science department with him.

By all accounts, Turner enjoyed the people, loved the food and before his kidnapping, never even discussed returning to the United States.

“Jon is the kind of guy who could probably get along with anybody at all,” says Polhill, who was held captive with Turner for 2 1/2 years before being released last year. “He’s very adaptable, very flexible.”

He picked up on the language quickly, aided in part by two classes in Arabic and later by marriage to his Lebanese wife. Turner often surprised his Shiite Muslim captors with his grasp of the language, Polhill said.

Before the kidnapping, Turner and his fellow Americans spent much of their time inside the walls of the university, visiting each other at their apartments.

Turner, a lover of classical music, would nevertheless drop by Polhill’s apartment and listen to jazz records, “you know, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington,” Polhill said. “I don’t think that was really his thing, but he would listen.”

Turner was also a voracious reader. “He was always reading,” said Badr Turner. “Either that, or he was talking with the students.”

In captivity, “he must have ready every book we had 10 times,” said Polhill, who, along with Steen, taught Turner how to play bridge.

Politically, Turner disapproved of America’s attitude and actions in the Middle East, Polhill said.

“Like all of us, he recognized that Americans for the most part have a shortsighted view of the Middle East,” said Polhill, who now lives in Arlington, Va.

“They perceive people in the Middle East as our enemies, and they are not. Our policies have driven these people to the point of distraction, where they have been driven to unacceptable, but understandable forms of retaliation.

“Don’t get me wrong. We never sympathized with our captors.”

Turner was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; the family moved to Twin Falls, Ida., in 1952 and finally to Boise in 1955. An only child, Turner was 14 when his parents were divorced. His father, John E. Turner, a director of seed laboratories in Iowa and Idaho, has disappeared and may be dead.

His mother, Ronneburg, an accounting specialist at a Boise bank, has remarried and lives in a tidy, white frame house on a quiet, tree-shaded Boise street.

After graduating in 1965 from Boise High School, Turner served three years in the Navy.

After being honorably discharged, he enrolled at Boise State University in 1968. He received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1970. Three months later, he married his first wife, Ina Clare Turner. He enrolled in the University of Idaho in Moscow in 1971 and earned his master’s degree in philosophy in 1975 and a doctorate in mathematics in 1981. He became a professor at the University of Hawaii that year and later went to Cal State San Bernardino.

At Cal State San Bernardino, Turner taught basic math courses, including a freshman calculus class, and “he gave a wonderful seminar on logic, which was his specialty,” Stein said. “He was a gentle man and a very good mathematician. He was well liked here.”