Tom Wales Fought for Gun Control. Maybe He Died for It.

A community college graduation on a warm june afternoon, the kind where everybody sits in folding chairs in the gym and dads with bobbing video cameras squint down from the bleachers. The commencement speaker, a Seattle prosecutor and gun control activist, walks diffidently to the podium. He’s a tall, slight man in spectacles. In his blue suit, he looks ready to try a tax fraud case.

Hardly anybody expects that when Tom Wales finishes talking they’ll either feel like hugging him and saying thank you for saying that to my child. Or they’ll feel like punching him in the mouth.

Wales knew that’s what they’d think. He knew some people would listen, and some would get mad. He didn’t care. Because when they were mad, it meant they were alive. As he tells the graduates: “John Lennon said, before he was shot and killed outside the Dakota Apartments in New York, ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.’

“Find something you believe in passionately and get into it,” Wales says. “Get outraged. Take a stand . . . . Be present in your own life.”

Then Wales takes on the National Rifle Assn., the death penalty, the disproportionate number of black people in prison, the country’s “foolish” mandatory minimum sentences, and President Bush’s inaction on global warming. Whoa. There’s some tentative applause and a lot of exchanged glances. This is Edmonds, a conservative suburban outpost north of Seattle, on the political fault line that runs north, south, east and west of the liberal-minded city where Wales had also served two terms as chairman of the city planning commission and hoped to run for city attorney or county prosecutor, and maybe even Congress someday.

“Disagree with me? Go ahead. Please do,” Wales says, as if inviting the lady who comes up afterward to tell him it’s the worst graduation speech she ever heard. (Somebody else tells him it was the best.) “Go through that door and come battle me on these issues,” he says. “Life is not a dress rehearsal, ladies and gentlemen. It’s the main event. Don’t waste your time on the stage. We’re all forgiven many sins in our lives, but the most difficult to forgive, in my view, is wasting the gift of life on this planet.”

Four months later, on a frosty October night, Tom Wales says his last lines on the stage, to a 911 dispatcher, after someone stands outside the window of his house, sees Wales at the computer and pumps bullets through the glass. A neighbor sees a man walk quickly from the area and drive away.

The shooter left behind the first nationally known gun control leader killed by bullets in the last two decades of the handgun debate. Wales, 49, had spent more than 15 years with the gun control group Washington CeaseFire. He was preparing to raise funds for further legislation requiring background checks for buyers at gun shows in the state. It would have been a significant step. Legislatures in Western states have been among the most formidable opponents of gun control, although voters in Oregon and Colorado have passed statewide initiatives requiring such checks.

Three months after the murder, with a $25,000 reward posted by the federal government, a joint federal-local task force does not seem close to finding the killer. Was it a defendant Wales once sent to prison? A gun owner angered by Wales’ frequent diatribes against the NRA? Someone about to be indicted for a federal crime? Someone who had a personal grudge?

“We’ve called this an assassination. This was just a very targeted, non-random act,” says Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, who bucked conservative Washington law enforcement tradition by appearing at gun control events at Wales’ side. The police chief broke down recently when shown a picture of himself next to Wales, planting daffodils at a Seattle park in September in memory of a University of Washington pathologist slain with a handgun two years ago. “The murder of a federal prosecutor is unbelievably unique,” Kerlikowske says. “We have to ensure that every prosecutor knows that we’re going to do whatever it takes, everything possible, to solve this, and to protect them.”

The murder made people who knew Wales anxious. Some leaders of Washington CeaseFire dropped out of sight for a time, operating on cell phones out of friends’ houses. Especially unsettling were phone calls to the CeaseFire office and messages sent over the Internet. “You all ought to be hung for high treason,” one caller said. “Somebody musta thought it was ‘time to start shooting the bastards,’ ” a written message said. “Seems like a good start to me.”

Yet another message said, “This bag of guts was either dispatched, eliminated, or culled. Good riddance, and may his soul rot in whichever circle of hell is reserved for government scumbags.”

A message addressed to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who oversees all U.S. attorneys’ offices, such as the one Wales worked in for 18 years, said: “When you appoint a replacement for this nitwit jerk, please appoint an attorney who . . . . will uphold the Constitution of the United States instead of LYING and VIOLATING his Oath to do so.”

Elizabeth Wales, Wales’ wife of 27 years until their divorce in 2000, now draws the curtains at night in her Seattle condominium. “As a society, we have every reason to be kinder, more gentle, caring, less brutal. But I have a conviction that this society in America is violent. And when it comes to your doorstep . . . . “ She is unable to finish the sentence.

To comfort herself, she remembers how Wales used to take her out in the family boat, way past the lights, where he’d cut the engine and let the boat glide, silent and dark. Look up at the stars, Bizzie, he’d say. Except don’t think they’re stars. Imagine they’re pinpricks, and think about the vast light that must be behind them, shining through. Think about that light, Bizzie.

to understand the politics of gun control in washington state, you might begin by driving southeast from Elizabeth Wales’ condo to the office of independent gun owner lobbyist Al Woodbridge in Sumner, Wash. It’s a mere 35 miles, but it’s two different planets.

The first is the city that gave birth to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, a hip town where lawyers carry REI backpacks and beliefs tend toward the predictably liberal: passionate about the environment, committed on human rights and diversity, suspicious of companies that get too big (unless they market software), nervous about guns.

The second--Sumner--is at the foot of Mt. Rainier, and it’s a lazy town with a single main street full of kitsch shops. Woodbridge works in a small law office here because, in what he contends was a setup, the federal government effectively shut down his gun shop and convicted him of possessing machine gun parts 18 years ago.

“There should be a reasonable solution to everything,” says Woodbridge, a man with an intense gaze and a long gray beard. “But once you step on the Constitution, that’s when the reasonability stops and I just tell you no. I don’t tell you hell no. I just tell you that it can’t be done.”

The West has far more Sumners than Seattles. Many folks have rifles in the back of their pickup trucks, or gun cases in their living rooms, or handguns they pack when going into the woods, home to bears and cougars. It rankles when the guys with the REI backpacks in Seattle start talking about registering guns or filing reports just to buy one from a neighbor.

The modest gun control laws on the books can be linked to a Democratic governor and Democrats in the Legislature, who only this fall narrowly regained control of the Legislature. They were elected mostly by the citizens of the Seattle metropolitan area, who account for 3 million of the state’s 5.9 million population.

The freedom to buy weapons at gun shows and the absence of laws that would hold owners liable for not locking up their weapons can be traced to the citizens of Sumner and hundreds of similar communities, as well as to the resources of the NRA, which claims 100,000 members in the state, and to activists such as Woodbridge and Alan Gottlieb. The latter, a direct-mail marvel of the far right, claims to raise as much as $24 million a year for causes such as private property rights and gun owners. Gottlieb, of Bellevue, Wash., is founder and director of the Second Amendment Foundation and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, which each claim more than half a million members nationally. Last year, the foundation had $6.9 million in revenues and assets, and Gottlieb’s American Political Action Committee in the 2000 election disbursed $117,849 to mostly Republican candidates, including $39,686 spent on direct mailings attacking Al Gore (who arguably lost Arkansas, West Virginia and Tennessee--any one of which would have given him the election--on the gun issue).

Some say Wales’ determination to control guns started in his days at the prestigious Milton Academy, when his roommate, Joseph Kennedy, lost his father, Robert F. Kennedy, to an assassin’s bullet.

Wales’ son, Thomas Crane Wales VII, now studying for his PhD in history at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, believes his father also was influenced by a 1995 incident while Tom was a student at Garfield High School in Seattle. A 15-year-old freshman ran through the school firing a stolen handgun, injuring two students. “I think it was the first shooting inside Seattle public schools,” he says. “Pop came to speak at the school after that. He came, I think, with a bunch of other law enforcement people. He reassured people that the school would be safe, and not to be paranoid or afraid.”

Wales joined CeaseFire in the 1990s. It had begun in 1983 as the first state gun control organization in the country and within two years had lobbied successfully for a state law requiring a criminal and mental health history background check on all handgun purchases made through licensed dealers and for a five-day waiting period for delivery. That was five years before approval of the Brady Act, which set a federal waiting period for new buyers of handguns.

In the ‘90s, Wales was among those who pushed for CeaseFire to have a full-time executive director and to create a state political action committee, which became the only one in the nation to rate, endorse and contribute to candidates based on their gun control views.

“Tom really was the driving force behind professionalizing the organization,” says Bruce Gryniewski, hired as the first executive director. Wales’ forte was fund-raising. He had a large network of lawyer friends, along with contacts in the business and land development communities through his work on the planning commission. About the time of the Garfield High shooting, Wales had raised $40,000 for opinion polling on the issue of gun violence. Not surprisingly, it showed Washington residents had little appetite for handgun registration. Yet it also suggested that even outside of the Seattle political fault line, residents substantially supported firearm safety issues, including trigger locks and safety training for gun owners.

That was the genesis of the single most important campaign CeaseFire ever attempted, a ballot initiative in 1997 to require trigger locks on weapons, training for gun owners and background checks for gun buyers. It was the first statewide gun control initiative in the nation since California voters turned down a registration initiative in 1982

. Wales was co-chair of the campaign and was instrumental in raising the $1.2 million to support it. Much of that money came from what Joe Waldron, a director of the Washington Arms Collectors and chairman of the campaign against the ballot initiative, calls “the wealthy Seattle elitist crowd,” including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his father, a well-known Seattle attorney.

In the views of Waldron and Gottlieb, the initiative raised thorny questions. What kind of safety training would be required, for example? Because there weren’t enough instructors in the state to train all the gun owners, would people turn into criminals while waiting in line for a class? How about the call for checking medical records of gun buyers to see if they suffered from mental problems. Did people really want medical records opened up to government bureaucrats?

Waldron, a stocky man with a ruddy face and a shock of white hair, still holds his military demeanor from 28 years in the Marine Corps, most recently as chief of the Marine air targeting cell at Central Air Force Headquarters during the Gulf War. “I joined the Marine Corps in 1963 because it was a gun club,” he says. “I believe that the shooting sports as originally promoted by the U.S. government in 1903 pushed marksmanship training as a means of military readiness of the country, and that has been true pretty much through this century.”

To Waldron, gun ownership may determine the survival of the republic. “In the final analysis, we can talk about smart bombs and things like this, but let’s go back to the Gulf War, which everyone thinks was won in the air,” he says. “However, I also know that the Iraqis did not withdraw from Kuwait until a man on the ground went in and chased them out with a rifle in his hands.”

As the election neared, polls found some two-thirds of the state supported the initiative. Wales, who already had support from the League of Women Voters, church groups and the medical community, began working on the state’s three big law enforcement organizations. Although they eventually refused to endorse, they appeared likely to remain neutral--a victory of sorts because the public tends to look to the police for guidance on gun issues.

The NRA was alarmed. Fearing the initiative could lead to stricter handgun regulation across the West, the organization moved much of its Washington, D.C., operation to Washington state in the weeks before the election and sent then-vice president Charlton Heston barnstorming around the state doing fund-raisers. With the NRA pouring an estimated $2.2 million into the campaign, financing an advertising onslaught in the final weeks, the initiative failed, losing nearly everywhere except Seattle.

To many who knew him, Wales was much more than a gun control advocate. He had climbed nearly every major mountain in the Cascade and Olympic ranges. He baked artisan breads, prosecuted savings and loan frauds and headed a national commission on federal sentencing guidelines. He would drive his daughter to soccer practice three times a week and wait for her in the car with his legal briefs and cell phone. He was immersed in the business of laying an intricately patterned hardwood floor in the family house he kept after his wife left him.

Young Tom Wales remembers when, at age 15, he and his uncle, Rick Wales, and father climbed Mt. Adams. A sudden snowstorm stranded the trio on an exposed ridge. They pitched their tent and hunkered down. “And then this tremendous wind began,” Tom says. “When it finally broke upon the tent, it was like being stuck inside a sandwich bag that someone was shaking around powerfully. It took the roof of the tent and blew it in our faces, so we were virtually choking inside. I panicked. We’re in the midst of this howling snowstorm, it’s completely, totally black outside, and there’s these chunks of volcanic rock kind of sandblasting against the side of the tent, and I thought we were going to die for sure.

“But my dad charged outside and somehow managed to heave big boulders up around in a circle around the tent . . . . He came back inside, and this was while all this pandemonium continued, and he kind of put his arm on my back, and when he did that, I knew we’d be OK.”

Rick Wales says his brother was always doing that: charging ahead. When they were 10, he says, Tom challenged five bullies who were stealing a balloon from another child. All five turned on Tom, one holding him while the others pelted him with snowballs.

“I remember very clearly walking our bikes up this hill, and he said, ‘Well, Ricky, now I guess we know what it’s like to get beaten up.’ But I hadn’t been beaten up. He sort of had this sense that life’s resume had these checkpoints on it, and getting beaten up was one of them, and he managed to get it checked off for both of us.”

Amy, his daughter, says that when she was very young, most children’s books in the house were boys’ adventure stories intended for her brother. “My father would take down these books, and before he would read them to me, he would have gone to a room and changed every ‘he’ to ‘she,’ and every description or name--if it was Paul, it became Paula. To me, from an early age, it wasn’t like I was learning about all these masculine male protagonists. I was learning about wonderful heroic women. He was just making sure that I knew I was his equal.”

Elizabeth, after much soul-searching, came out as a lesbian and decided to leave the marriage. Wales was adamant that the children, despite their anger, not be allowed to push her out of their lives, Amy says. The four of them would go on together, he said, just in a new direction. Not that it wasn’t the hardest thing that ever happened to him, his daughter says. “I hadn’t really seen my father cry, and I remember right after they told me they were splitting up, he took me out on the front porch and we cried together. Never in my mind have I doubted his strength and wisdom, but he was also strong enough and wise enough to let himself cry in front of his children.”

Friends say it took several years for Wales to get over Elizabeth’s departure. For the last year or so, he had been in a new relationship with a 50-year-old ultramarathon runner, Marlis DeJongh, who owns a court-reporting business in Seattle. A mutual friend introduced them, and they gradually became close. DeJongh brings out photographs of them celebrating a climb near the top of an Olympic peak with a flask of single-malt scotch.

The only furniture in DeJongh’s new condo is a leather sofa Wales helped her pick out. Buy the best thing you can afford, he told her, even if it’s the only thing you have. Wales would arrive at her house with grocery bags, grab a pad and write out the menu for the evening (one recent night’s offering: filet mignon; pasta with fresh tomato sauce, basil and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese; puree of peas and watercress; salad with apples, walnuts and Gorgonzola; hazelnut/ almond torte with melon), then start cooking.

DeJongh was also one of a long list of people who got Wales’ lovingly baked, much maligned holiday fruitcakes. He took no end of abuse about them until a few years ago, when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed his fruitcake recipe. Wales sent out an e-mail to everyone who had ever been a grudging recipient. “A doorstop no more,” it proclaimed in the subject line.

Wales had a habit of suddenly interrupting his work to fire off a heartwarming e-mail. On Oct. 2, his former brother-in-law, Eric Redman, got an e-mail from Wales about a Robert Fayrfax CD Redman had given him. “Listening to Fayrfax, on my new computer at home, I’m reminded by the music to tell you how much I love you and value our friendship--and, in ways more real than familial, our kinship. Tom.”

DeJongh would get e-mails during the day, fondly recalling the night before, suggesting lunch. “I’m sitting here thinking how powerful you are, how great a life force you have within you, and how lucky I am to have you as a friend, and a lover. Way lucky. I’d guess only one of you is born about every 400 years; that’s my guess, anyway.”

One recent night, she was watching a video of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”--one of Wales’ favorite movies. He had seen it eight times. He never would admit that he identified with the sad-hearted warrior, the one who falls victim to his enemy’s hate in the end. “He was too humble,” DeJongh says. Wales believed one of the great romantic lines in cinema came from the movie, something the warrior tells his lover when he’s dying. DeJongh can recite it by heart. “I would rather be a ghost drifting by your side, a condemned soul, than to enter heaven without you. Because of your love, I’ll never be a lonely spirit.”

So DeJongh sits in her own quiet hell, on the leather sofa Wales picked out, and tells herself she finally found the world’s most perfect man, and then she lost him.

Wales’ last major push for CeaseFire began just over a year ago. After defeat of the 1997 ballot initiative, the organization went to work on state legislation that would hold parents criminally responsible if a child got their guns and injured someone. The so-called Whitney Graves bill is named for an 8-year-old Marysville, Wash., girl accidentally shot to death by a 10-year-old friend. A total of 17 states now have such child access laws. Even Gottlieb broke ranks with the NRA to support the bill.

But one dependable reality of Washington politics is the demise of the Whitney Graves bill each year in the House Judiciary Committee, co-chaired by pro-gun-rights Rep. Michael J. Carrell of Lakewood. One year, CeaseFire got the bill introduced in a different committee, chaired by a legislator whose daughter died in a street crime. Carrell had it referred back to Judiciary and killed it.

But the shooting deaths of 12 students and a teacher in 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado turned the gun control debate in Washington in a new direction. The guns had been purchased at a gun show. CeaseFire joined several other states to begin pressing for background checks at gun shows similar to those required at gun shops.

Oregon and Colorado passed such initiatives in 2000, but Wales and Gryniewski, still smarting from the 1997 defeat, wanted to try the Legislature before taking on another ballot initiative. They didn’t expect what happened next. “We were the next state to fall on this issue, and the NRA started getting scared,” Gryniewski says. The NRA’s Western lobbyist in Sacramento, Brian Judy, called him in December 2000 and said, “ ‘Let’s get together and talk about gun shows,’ ” Gryniewski says. It was an offer without precedent: the NRA would sit down with a gun control organization and negotiate legislation that placed limits on handgun purchases.

The talks were tentative at first. Judy, who declined to be interviewed for this article, would fly into Seattle-Tacoma airport. Wales and Gryniewski would meet him for dinner at the nearby 13 Coins. The purpose was to try to narrow down the points of disagreement. What kind of checks would be done? Would they be handled by local police or the state patrol? What kind of records would be kept of the checks? Would they be instant checks? How long should a check take before a sale goes through? Could the gun still be delivered before the end of the weekend? And last, what’s the definition of a gun show? Does it include flea markets? Sporting events?

The weekly meetings continued for a month or so, until word of them leaked out and the process took a major turn. State political leaders and others joined in the negotiations. Carrell and Democratic counterpart Chris Hurst chaired the sessions. Lobbyists for the major police unions joined in, as did Woodbridge. Waldron was there, too, irritated that anyone was talking about a gun show loophole. For one thing, licensed firearms dealers have to do background checks no matter where they’re doing business, and such groups as Washington Arms Collectors, which promotes major gun shows all over the state, do their own background checks. CeaseFire wasn’t satisfied. WAC’s background checks weren’t as comprehensive as they would have liked, and gun shows not sponsored by WAC often required no background checks of unlicensed dealers.

Waldron says his side searched for ways to satisfy the gun control advocates. “We kept crawling out on that limb,” he says. “But CeaseFire never gave us any indication, OK, this is what we’ll go with, this is what’s acceptable to us. Everything was always a problem, or it was, ‘Well, we’ll have to go back and see if our board authorizes that.’ Well, what incentive is there for me to negotiate if I can never meet your standard?”

Gryniewski has a different view. “Tom was an incredibly skilled negotiator,” he recalls. “Because of his experience in the courtroom, he knew how to ask questions, he knew how to probe. He was great at getting information. Also, he was an incredibly dynamic public speaker.”

The talks broke down in April, each side blaming the other. Waldron says Wales warned him that if gun owners didn’t go along with the gun show language that CeaseFire was proposing, the group would go to the voters with an even stricter ballot initiative. “He ended that by saying, ‘That’s not a threat, that’s a reality,’ Waldron says. “Well, no. That’s a threat.”

CeaseFire quickly followed through, as did Wales, who was poised to do what he does best: raise money. CeaseFire hoped for a substantial donation from Americans for Gun Safety to run a gun show initiative.

And then came that October night.

A sad irony of Wales’ death is that he may be better situated in death to win passage of gun control legislation than he ever was in life--an irony not lost on either side of the debate. His murder brought a flood of donations, to CeaseFire and to an endowment his family set up for causes to which he was committed. With more than $400,000 raised so far, CeaseFire hopes to guarantee the organization’s operations permanently, freeing up regular contributions for direct political applications. Woodbridge finds CeaseFire’s actions distasteful. “I realize most of those guys think I’m a bad guy,” he says, “but I would never raise money from the body of a friend of mine.”

A month after the killing, the November elections changed the Statehouse, with Democrats picking up a narrow majority, likely ending Carrell’s lock on gun legislation and raising CeaseFire’s hopes that it can win the background check issue.

the only certainty in tom Wales’ death is the tragic validation of his concern about handguns. To those who are certain the murderer must have been a crazed gun owner, let it be known there exists no shortage of other theories.

To begin with, Wales had a weird encounter in July in the parking garage of his office. He backed out of his parking space and accidentally hit a limousine. As the limo driver, Fred Coleman, tells it, “I said, ‘Excuse me, I need your license and insurance information.’ He said, ‘Well, there’s no mark there, and he rubbed it off.’ And I said, ‘I’m going to have to account for it to my company.’ He told me to [bug] off.” Wales drove off, nicking a newspaper delivery truck on the way out. Coleman called the police, who wound up charging Wales with two counts of hit and run.

In Wales’ view, Coleman was being so argumentative that he was afraid to give him his license. Besides, there was no damage. The case was dismissed when the limousine company declined to seek damages. After the murder, Coleman was among the first interviews police conducted. “I had no idea who he was until the police came down here and asked me some questions about the incident,” Coleman says. “I happen to have a .380 [.38-caliber handgun] and they took it in, but they said it was the wrong brand of gun.” Sources familiar with the investigation say Coleman has been ruled out as a suspect. As for other possibilities, FBI agents and a Justice Department organized crime prosecutor from Washington, D.C., are going over dozens of white-collar crime cases that Wales prosecuted.

In one, investigators have looked at a defendant who claims he was the victim of an irresponsible prosecution by Wales and another in a case involving military helicopter parts illegally installed on civilian helicopters by a company that then sold the aircraft to the U.S. Forest Service. The company that sold the helicopters paid fines to settle the case and charges against the two defendants were dismissed. Nonetheless, the case left bad blood. One defendant filed papers in court claiming the charges were unfair and saying they had ruined his life. Prosecutors urged the court to keep secret the identity of witnesses who could prove the allegations, saying they had evidence of the “violent and retributive nature” of one defendant.

FBI agents interviewed a Snohomish County man who claims he met several times with Wales in the weeks before his death about purported wrongdoing by a variety of local government officials in western Washington. But they were never able to corroborate his story.

In the end, gun advocates say they had far more to lose than gain from Wales’ death. The Tyranny Response Team, considered the far right of the gun owner movement, contended in an op-ed piece that the murder was “way too sloppy” for a skilled gun advocate. “Five shots fired, only two hits at very close range. Anyone who could actually shoot would have done it with a single head shot, not a ‘spray and pray’ tactic,” says TRT representative Kevin Schmadeka. “Then the shooter walked to his car, which was parked in plain view on the main road . . . . I assure you, ‘gun people’ are generally up to speed on combat tactics and know better than that. Not to mention the fact that someone who was concerned about gun control would not have used a gun. A baseball bat . . . would have been every bit as effective, a lot quieter, and with no negative political fallout.”

Which leaves police back where they started.

“We will solve this case,” Kerlikowske has pledged, though he won’t say how. The family knows better than to keep asking. For their part, they’ve decided to keep the old family house on Hayes Street and finish the wood floor Wales was working on. Get the kitchen done, finally. Hope that someday they can go to that house and think of something besides the killer who lurked outside, waiting to take the man whose light burned by the window.