(3 of 6) Disappearance of John Iverson
Neuro...@aol.com
(C) 1994 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Not one word of this article may be reprinted without the written
permission of the publisher.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
PART 3 OF 6
TAS Journal
Special Report
The Strange Life and
Bizarre Disappearance of
John Iverson
Weber told law enforcement officials that once he realized he
was wanted in connection with Iverson's kidnapping, he went on the
lam in the hope that their ongoing investigation would uncover
Iverson's whereabouts. In the months that followed, he said he had
travelled to California three times: twice to visit his 30-year-old
daughter, who was suffering from leukemia, and the last time, on
March 8, for her cremation. He was, he says, at his home in Las
Vegas the rest of the time he was wanted, until his wife convinced
him to face the charges. By the time he turned himself in, America's
Most Wanted was hot on his trail, having contacted Iverson's brother
and other family members just a short while before about doing a
segment on the well-known crimestopper show. They dropped the
story the minute Weber was taken into custody.
The fact that Iverson failed to materialize turned out to be
good luck for Weber. There was no body, no weapon, no other
witnesses except Munro, and nothing to hold him beyond her
statement. That quickly disintegrated when she flunked a lie
detector test police gave her to determine if she'd been truthful in
her description of the events that night. Munro blames the outcome
of the test on a bad reaction to medication she was taking at the
time, specifically a combination of Prozac and Valium prescribed for
her in the days immediately following Iverson's disappearance. She
was asked by law enforcement authorities to stop taking the pills a
day or two before the test was administered, she says, and had a
withdrawal reaction during the exam. "I tried to tell [the tester]
during the test that I was having a flashback; I can see [Weber]
coming at me."
It's worth noting that, though lie detector tests are not
infallible, and can be thrown off by a variety of factors, efforts are
made at the start of every test to establish a baseline reading based
on the subject's current physiology and mood; all answers are then
referenced to the baseline. In any event, Munro was asked by
Mohave County authorities to return for a second test, but refused to
be tested by the same examiner. Instead, she hired a private,
certified examiner in California to conduct the test in her new
hometown. The second test showed her to be truthful. But with no
control over what questions were asked or how they were delivered,
the DA viewed those results as unreliable as well.
Weber was released in June, 1991 and rejoined his wife in Las
Vegas. That summer, the charges against him were dropped without
prejudice, meaning that new charges may be brought should
Iverson's body or other evidence be found. He has since relocated to
another city.
More Questions Than Answers?
Weber's statement went into much detail, describing an Iverson
easily recognized by his friends: a trash-talking anarchist capable of
downing two pints of whiskey in a three-hour visit to Weber's home.
But it raises many questions as well.
To wit: Why would Weber, recognizing that he was wanted
unjustly in connection with the kidnapping, let the obviously
unpredictable Iverson out of his sight? Why would a person with
ordinary common sense who was in that kind of trouble agree to
wait five whole days before seeing an attorney?
How could Weber and Iverson, who was not known for his
patience under any circumstance, run around the desert picking up
BBs emitted at 12,000 rounds per minute from the infamous gun?
Why did Weber say in his statement that he had never been to
Iverson's shop, and that all meetings had taken place at his home,
when Iverson's last employee clearly remembered meeting Weber at
the shop at least once when he came to take measurements on a
prototype loudspeaker Iverson was working on prior to his
disappearance?
And then there's that nagging detail, seemingly irrelevant,
about Weber's van. Remember the van? When it was finally picked
up by police in Las Vegas, on Weber's own tip, it had been sitting for
several days in a local parking lot.
By coincidence, that happened to be the parking lot of a gun
shop. But not just your ordinary gun shop catering to run-of-the-mill
hunters. Called "The Survival Store," it sells automatic rifles from as
many countries as most folks can name. Brochures distributed in the
racks advertise the shop's indoor shooting range and junkets to the
desert so you can "fire your favorite machine gun." (The law has
been unable to establish any connection between Weber and the
store.)
Even before her problems with the lie detector test, Munro's
version also raises at least one issue. Note that she told police that as
Weber led her down the hall toward the kitchen, she escaped
through a side door and into another room with egress to the
driveway. But anyone who's ever played cops and robbers as a kid
can only wonder: If Weber really had a gun trained on her and
wanted to command her to another room, wouldn't he have been
standing behind her instead of leading her down the hallway?
Munro's explanation is that Peg, the couple's black Lab, stayed
between her and Weber the whole time, and wouldn't let Weber
move around her.
Munro also moved to liquidate her assets and get out of town
with an expediency that angered and puzzled John's family. Shortly
after the disappearance, the house on Palo Verde and her commercial
property were placed on the block; the motor home, after the police
had chopped out the carpet, went immediately for repair and was
subsequently sold. Within two months of Iverson's vanishing, Munro
had relocated to a town in California I have been asked not to
disclose.
By that time, she says she was at the end of her emotional
rope, and suggests that her allergic reaction to the Prozac had turned
her into a frightened recluse trapped in her own home. Finally, her
sister came and rescued her. "My family wanted me out of there and
I stayed two months... If I'd ended up staying I would have really
been in the loony bin," she says.
But Iverson's brother, aunt, and cousin, all of whom keep
homes in Havasu, or were there just prior to or following the
disappearance, harbor suspicions about Munro's story. They question
whether Weber would have raised a gun to Iverson over back
invoices, and they doubt whether he would been any match in a
confrontation with the powerfully muscular Iverson, who measured
the same height at 5'8", but weighed about 50 pounds more.
Members of Iverson's family also told me they found it odd that
Munro, a woman who'd just lost her mate under the worst of
circumstances and was periodically breaking into hysterics, showed
so much interest in settling up who-owned-what and liquidating her
assets during a time when finding out what really happened to John
ought to have been her first priority.
One episode early on involved a discussion she'd had with Doug
Iverson, with whom she squared off quickly. Doug had just flown in
from Seattle to Lake Havasu, on the Sunday following the Friday
disappearance, to assist in the police efforts. John's mother had
passed away about two years before, leaving behind an estate, and
despite the family's concern over John's welfare, Munro made it a
point to ask Doug what her missing mate was entitled to. "Someone
who's grieving and can't function all of sudden functions perfectly
over money?" says John's cousin, Patty Rahmen. "Doug just lost it. He
said, 'You will never get your hands on that. Never. Just put it out of
your mind.' "
At this writing neither Iverson nor any new evidence against
Weber has surfaced. But the case is still open and active, according to
the Lake Havasu police. And in a case where alibis conflict and
nothing adds up, all parties are suspect-including Iverson himself,
whose wild past and wagging tongue have led more than a few to
believe he may have staged his own kidnapping.
High End Renegade
Born in Seattle on January 14, 1948, John Gordon Iverson began
showing remarkable intelligence early. According to his family, he
was verbally sounding out the words on bus advertisements at two
years old, having taught himself to read with the aid of children's
blocks. Within a few years, he began to show his father's interest in
all things electronic. "Our parents used to say that John wasn't born
with an umbilical cord, but with an extension cord," says his brother
Doug.
Al Iverson, John's father, himself an enigma, was a strong role
model for John through most of his adult life as they continued to
live and work together.
John was known to tell people that his father was a native
German who had fought in Hitler's army before emigrating to North
America. It was an explanation to visitors who came to their office
and listening room in Anaheim in the early 1970s and were shocked
by the sight of a full-size Nazi flag on the wall. But while some who
knew them both say Al clearly helped foster John's outspoken
intolerance toward minorities, the truth is probably more tame.
According to John's aunt Jo, Al Iverson was born in Sweden and
moved as a small child with his parents to a farm outside of Calgary,
Alberta. He grew up and went to school for accounting, but taught
himself electrical engineering by experimenting in a home workshop.
During World War II, he was turned down by the Canadian air force
for visual impairment, but ended up supporting the Allied effort by
working as an engineer for Boeing Aircraft in Vancouver. While the
war was still on, says Fenn, Boeing took advantage of relaxed
immigration rules to transfer him and his new wife, Betty, to Seattle.
John was born a short while later.
Eventually, Al moved his family to Garden Grove, California
and with the dawn of television, opened a TV sales and repair shop.
Al was both a loner and a driven workaholic; two terms that would
later be used to describe John. While his wife enjoyed socializing, Al
despised it, emerging from his lab just long enough to greet her
visitors before excusing himself to return to the next pressing
experiment.
While John was in his late teens, Betty left Al for a well-to-do
Seattle businessman, giving John the option of staying in California or
moving with her and his younger brother back to Washington. He
chose to stay with his father, and his bitterness over the split lasted
up to his father's death in 1981, when John refused to allow his
mother to attend the funeral.
The bad blood also carried over to John's relationship with
Doug, whom he is said to have felt jealousy toward for living a life of
privilege in Seattle while he and his father continued to struggle
financially. And while John's estrangement with his mother lasted
until his father's death, it was not until his mother's death in 1988
that a reconciliation was sparked in earnest with his only sibling-one
that was abruptly cut short by his disappearance. Doug feels great
pain over the loss, and has dedicated himself to finding John or the
truth about what happened to him.
As a boy, Iverson showed an affinity for model rockets and
worked constantly on a variety of homebrew electronics projects. But
his life before joining the audio industry remains mostly a mystery.
According to his brother's sketchy information, John graduated high
school and began attending a local college. While there in the late
1960s, he worked simultaneously as a technician at a military
contractor, possibly Hughes Aircraft. Hughes, Doug Iverson says,
offered him an opportunity to attend MIT at company expense in
return for two years of guaranteed employment for each year at
school. John may have gone to Massachusetts to check out the school,
but that's about as close as he got to MIT. Not a man well-suited to
indentured servitude, and concerned about his father's recurring
heart trouble, Iverson elected to stay in California. (MIT has no
record of his attendance, and a personnel check with Hughes was
inconclusive.)
As for John's suggestion to some that he'd been thrown out of
MIT, an apparent seed can be found elsewhere. Kathy Munro was
told by John about an episode at "some local college" where he was,
she says, temporarily suspended for grabbing the collar of a
professor he disagreed with.
John sometimes told a story, unverified, about working on a
school project he built while still at Hughes that got him into hot
water with the government for the first time. It was a missile
guidance system, built for a model rocket, which supposedly used
what was then relatively unproven heat-seeking technology. The
story goes that when he and his father took it out to the desert near
29 Palms to test it, its trajectory toward the sun was deflected by the
plume of a passing jet from a nearby military base, which it
proceeded to follow. No damage was done, but the Iversons were
taken into custody while collecting their gear. John was subsequently
given the option of going to jail, going to Vietnam, or going to White
Sands National Laboratory to work for NASA on the Apollo program.
He supposedly chose the latter, and worked on navigation systems
for the lunar module.
...continued...
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - -
(C) 1994 THE ABSOLUTE SOUND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Not one word of this article may be reprinted without the written
permission of the publisher.