[CTRL] OC Weekly: News: Who Killed Col. James Sabow?

[Kris Millegan]

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</A> -Cui Bono?-

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Weekly: News: Who Killed Col. James Sabow?</A>
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NEWS | FEATURE      Vol. 5 No. 24 February 18 - 24, 2000
Who Killed Col. James Sabow?
Was Marine Corps Col. James Sabow the victim of a military cover-up?
by Nick Schou

Tuesday, Jan. 22, 1991, began as a particularly busy day at the El Toro
Marine Corps Air Station. Earlier that month, U.S. and allied forces in Saudi
Arabia had begun the bloody air war that turned Operation Desert Shield into
Operation Desert Storm.

El Toro was on high alert, but all was quiet on F Street, a narrow lane of
modest ranch houses for base officers and their families. One of those
officers was Colonel James E. Sabow, a 51-year-old, no-nonsense,
straight-as-a-ramrod Marine Corps jet pilot.

His wife, Sally, a devout Catholic, rose early to dress for church. Normally,
Sabow would already be at work, performing his duties as El Toro’s assistant
chief of staff. But he hadn’t worked for two days, ever since the base’s
commanding officer, General Wayne T. Adams, had temporarily relieved him and
another officer, Chief of Staff Colonel Joseph Underwood, from their
respective commands.

The two officers were charged with bringing extra luggage on training
missions, using those missions to fly themselves on weekend excursions, and
falsifying flight records to conceal their activity. While the Marine Corps
regarded the allegations as career-threatening, Sabow told friends and family
the charges were petty and would amount to nothing more than a slap on the
wrist.

Sheehan outside El Toro:
Still Chasing the CIA

Despite the frenzied activity surrounding Desert Storm, Marine Corps
Inspector General Hollis Davison flew nonstop to El Toro to supervise the
investigation firsthand. By the end of the year, the scandal had spread to
Adams himself, and both he and a disgraced Underwood had retired from the
military.

Sabow wasn’t nearly as lucky.

At 7:30 a.m., Sabow’s daughter, Deirdre, a sophomore at Mater Dei High School
in Santa Ana, left for the day. Sabow made a point of kissing his daughter
goodbye. Deirdre would later recall that he seemed to be in a rather cheerful
mood, given the circumstances.

As Sally prepared to leave for St. John Neumann’s Catholic Church in nearby
Irvine, Sabow was still sitting on the living-room couch in his pajamas,
drinking coffee and watching CNN. The family’s dogs—one of them a notoriously
aggressive German shepherd called Nika—played in the back yard.

At about 8:30 a.m., Sally walked to the front door. As she started to close
it behind her, she heard the telephone ring inside the house. Sabow put the
television on mute and then picked up the phone.

"This is Colonel Sabow," he said.

Sally paused, but there appeared to be no response.

"This is Colonel Sabow," he repeated, now slightly annoyed.

Sally heard him utter the phrase a third time before she shut the door. It
was the last time she saw her husband alive.

Sally returned an hour later. Opening the door, she noticed the television
was still on mute. The family’s two dogs, which had been playing happily in
the back yard, were now locked in the garage. Sabow’s glasses were lying
folded next to the phone.

She walked through her living room and looked outside. Her husband, still
pajama-clad, was lying stiffly on his side in the middle of the back yard,
next to an overturned lawn chair. As she approached him, she could see that
both of his hands were frozen in a haunting grasp, fingers curled neatly
together about five inches from his gaping mouth. His face was swollen and
had turned a chalky blue color. Beneath his lifeless body was his Ithaca
12-gauge shotgun.

"I had worked in hospitals because I was a social worker," said Sally, now a
registered nurse. "I looked at him and thought about trying CPR. Then I
thought, ‘No, he’s dead.’"

She knelt down and silently cradled his head in her hands. Then she noticed
something strange: a pear-sized bulge just above the base of her husband’s
skull. A small pool of blood had poured from his right ear onto the lawn, but
otherwise the scene seemed completely sterile. Besides the small puddle on
the grass, there wasn’t much blood, not even on the shotgun—no telltale
splatter of gore that typically accompanies a self-inflicted shotgun wound to
the head, except for a small trace on his forearm.

"I ran through the house," Sally said. "I think I broke the screen door
because I was shaking so hard. I can remember this like it was this morning."

She ran next door to Underwood’s house. Running into the house, Sally found
Underwood, who was wearing golf clothes, and his bathrobe-clad wife, Jean,
who suffered from a brain tumor and therefore rarely left the house, standing
in their living room.

"Jimmy’s dead! Jimmy’s dead!" she remembers screaming hysterically before she
collapsed in shock on the floor of the Underwoods’ living room.

According to Sally, Jean then blurted, "Joe, this has gone too far."

As Sally remembers it, Underwood said nothing. He calmly walked over to the
Sabows’ back yard, returning a few moments later. "Well," he said finally,
"we’ve got to call General Adams."
According to the Orange County coroner’s report, Sabow perished from a
self-inflicted shotgun blast to the mouth. That finding was included in a
U.S. Navy Criminal Investigations Service (NCIS) crime-scene investigation
that took place at El Toro. Two successive 1991 Navy Judge Advocate General
Manual (JAGMAN) investigations also reached the conclusion that Sabow
committed suicide. Five years later, the Marine Corps’ Office of the
Inspector General (OIG) conducted a separate investigation that the Sabow
family had requested. It, too, found that Sabow killed himself.

At first, it seemed obvious Sabow had committed suicide. He had every reason
to think his military days were over, and his family readily acknowledges
that Sabow felt abandoned by the Marine Corps, which he had served loyally
for three decades and had grown to love. On the other hand, his wife says
Sabow spent the weekend before he died typing up his résumé. And according to
both Sally and retired Marine Corps Colonel Bill Callahan, Sabow’s best
friend, he planned to become a pilot for America West Airlines, where
Callahan already worked.
Dr. John David Sabow, Sabow’s brother and a South Dakota neurologist, had
both the medical background and the tenacity to mount his own investigation.
His increasingly pointed questions about his brother’s death led to a March
9, 1991, meeting with El Toro’s commanding officer and Sabow’s boss, General
Adams. During that meeting, the Sabows have alleged, the military used scare
tactics to prevent them from going to the press with their doubts about the
suicide, referring to the late colonel as "a felon and a crook."

This meeting—and that phrase—eventually produced a lawsuit filed by the Sabow
family in an Orange County federal court in 1996. Three weeks ago, the suit
was thrown out of court by U.S. District Judge Alicemarie Stotler. According
to the lawsuit, Sabow was murdered because he threatened to expose an illegal
covert operation at El Toro involving Sabow’s fellow officers, CIA-sponsored
airlifts to Central and South America, black cargo planes landing in the
middle of the night and drugs.

Just a few weeks before Sabow’s death, his mother had fallen ill in
Minneapolis. The colonel joined his brother at her bedside, and they used the
time to catch up on their lives. Sabow told his brother about the charges
against him and Underwood, dismissing them as "no big deal," Dr. Sabow
recalled.

The last thing Dr. Sabow expected was the telephone call he received Jan. 22.
He was treating a patient at his Rapid City office when he heard the news
from an El Toro base chaplain. His brother had been found dead within the
hour, apparently a suicide.

Had Sabow’s state of mind changed so dramatically in a matter of weeks that,
without warning, he would blow his brains out in his back yard?

"Let me explain that anyone would have some doubts if they knew my brother,"
Sabow said. Those doubts prompted him to call Underwood that afternoon. Had
Underwood or his wife heard the shotgun? According to Sabow, Underwood said
he hadn’t. "No, my wife was having seizures—epileptic seizures—all morning,"
Dr. Sabow said Underwood told him. "She has been totally out."

Two days later, Dr. Sabow flew to Orange County, troubled by doubts about the
suicide.
That evening, a rosary was held for Sabow at El Toro. Both Underwood and Jean
were there. So was Adams, who never introduced himself to Dr. Sabow and
stayed conspicuously away from the family, according to Bill Callahan.

The next day, Callahan escorted Sabow’s body to Arizona for burial. A Marine
Corps honor guard from nearby Fort Huachuca arrived at the service in
full-dress uniforms. But despite the fact that Sabow was third-in-command at
El Toro, the only officer from the base to show up for the funeral was
Underwood, who came without his wife. After the ceremony, Underwood returned
to El Toro.
Along with Callahan, the Sabow family regrouped that evening at Sally’s
sister’s house near Fort Huachuca. Dr. Sabow said he drove to a nearby Kmart,
bought a small tape recorder, and brought it back to the house. One by one,
he recorded every question that entered his brain. "Something stinks in
Denmark," Dr. Sabow remembered announcing at the time. "I began my
investigation right there."

Dr. Sabow had been receiving telephone calls from Eric Lichtblau, a Times
Orange County reporter eager to speak with him. But he wanted to give the
military a final opportunity to open a new investigation into Sabow’s death
before he went public with his doubts.

Dr. Sabow called Adams, El Toro’s base commander, who, Sabow later testified,
grew upset upon learning that Sabow intended to go to the press. "If you do
that," Adams allegedly warned, "it would not be good for Colonel Sabow’s
reputation. It would not be good for his family, and it would definitely not
be good for the Marine Corps."

Adams promised Dr. Sabow that he would arrange an urgent meeting at El Toro
to help assuage the doctor’s doubts. "It was (and still is) my opinion that
to try the Sabow case in the media is not in the best interests of the Marine
Corps or the Sabow family," Adams wrote in an undated letter to Marine Corps
headquarters in Washington, D.C. On March 9, 1991, the meeting took place.
Adams and Colonel Wayne Rich, a judge advocate, were present, as were Burt
Nakasone, a Navy forensics investigator, and Mike Barrett, NCIS supervisor.

Instead of getting concrete answers to his questions about Sabow’s death, Dr.
Sabow testified last month that he was told to file a Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) request. The autopsy report, crime-scene photographs and other
materials weren’t yet available, but both Barrett and Nakasone reminded Dr.
Sabow that it was the Orange County coroner—not the Navy—that had officially
ruled Sabow’s death a suicide.

Dr. Sabow also wanted to know about the charges that had led to the recent
investigation of his brother and Underwood. Dr. Sabow would later testify
that Adams angrily jabbed his finger in the air and called Sabow "a felon and
a crook."

the fruitless March 9, 1991, meeting apparently triggered Dr. Sabow’s sense
of outrage. He filed FOIA requests for the military’s various death
investigations and even got flight records from El Toro. Contrary to a
military investigator’s assertion that "the jets were taking off so
frequently" the morning Sabow died—thereby explaining why nobody heard the
shotgun blast—records indicated only two departures during the estimated time
of Sabow’s death, at 8:35 a.m. and 9:03 a.m.

Dr. Sabow also got a copy of the Orange County coroner’s report. That
report—and the photos that accompanied it—became the core of Dr. Sabow’s
campaign against the Marine Corps.

Informed by Sally of the strange swelling she discovered on the back of the
colonel’s head, Dr. Sabow looked for evidence in the coroner’s report that
might support her observation. While the report documented a "massive
fracture of the skull" caused by the shotgun blast, it didn’t mention any
lump on the rear of his head. However, a report on the death scene by the
NCIS reported that "the posterior surfaces of the head and neck appeared to
be swollen." The swelling was isolated from the head wound caused by the
shotgun, which destroyed much of Sabow’s brain but produced no exit wound
whatsoever.

This mystery was compounded by the fact that the coroner had inexplicably
found a large amount of aspirated blood in Sabow’s lungs. According to Navy
experts, Sabow had somehow taken one or two deep breaths before he died. But
according to Dr. Sabow and other neurologists who have examined the evidence,
this would have been impossible for a man whose brain stem—including the
medulla, which regulates breathing and other bodily functions—had been
vaporized by the shotgun blast.

Furthermore, crime-scene photographs and reports made it clear that almost no
blood had spilled from the body. If the colonel was still alive when he
pulled the trigger, why hadn’t blood spilled everywhere? The only sizable
spray of blood on Sabow’s body had coated a patch of his left forearm and
palm, ending abruptly in a neat line across his skin. To Dr. Sabow, this
seemed to suggest his brother was already lying on the ground on his right
side when the shotgun went off.

The military also found that Sabow had fallen forward and to his side after
the shotgun went off. This meant he would have had to be leaning far forward
over the shotgun when he pulled the trigger. However, Sabow was only 5 feet
10 inches tall, while his shotgun was about a yard long. Dr. Sabow reckoned
that if his brother was seated in the lawn chair at the time of his death (as
claimed by the military), the relatively short colonel would have had to be
leaning back—not forward—in order to fit the barrel deep into his mouth, as
shown by the coroner’s report. So why hadn’t his body been launched backward
by the force of the blast?

There was one last critical point, raised not by the coroner’s report but by
the Navy Department’s investigation: How did Sabow retrieve his shotgun from
the closet, load it, shoot himself in the head—and leave the weapon
completely devoid of his fingerprints? According to the Navy, Sabow’s hands
were oil-free because he had just bathed. The only print on the shotgun
turned out to belong to Sabow’s son, David Nicholas, who had cleaned the
shotgun months earlier. The Navy failed to test the tipped-over lawn chair—or
anything else at the Sabow residence—for fingerprints that might have been
left by Sabow that morning, thereby highlighting the mystery of the
print-free shotgun.

To Dr. Sabow, if not the Marine Corps or the Orange County coroner’s office,
the medical and crime-scene evidence suggested not only that Sabow hadn’t
committed suicide, but also that somebody had struck him violently on the
back of the head with a blunt object, knocking him unconscious. The assailant
then posed Sabow’s body, jammed the shotgun deep into the colonel’s mouth,
pulled the trigger, and wiped the gun clean.

Dr. Sabow provided the medical reports and photographs to several other
doctors, including a team of neurologists and neuroradiologists at the
University of Minnesota School of Medicine, and asked them to review the
evidence. Dr. Kent B. Remley, an assistant professor of radiology and
otolaryngology at the university, wrote that the "direction of the skull
fracture is inconsistent with the effects of a shotgun wound." Remley also
found that the swelling was caused by an external blunt-force instrument.
"The degree of soft tissue swelling in the occipital region on the right
indicated that the blunt force to the head occurred prior to death," he noted.

Jack Feldman, chairman of the department of physiological science at UCLA,
also reviewed the evidence. He summarized his conclusions in a June 20, 1994,
written statement included in a Marine Corps report on Sabow’s death.
"Colonel Sabow was rendered unconscious or immobile by a blow to the head
that fractured the base of the skull, causing bleeding into the pharynx.
Breathing continued after the injury, aspirating blood into the lung. At some
time later, a shotgun was placed in the mouth and triggered (by another
party) causing death and obscuring any evidence of prior injury. . . . I
conclude that the preponderance of evidence does not support the finding that
Colonel James E. Sabow died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

In April 1994, the Sabow family filed a claim against the military at the
Orange County Federal Courthouse. Assigned to the case was U.S. District
Judge Alicemarie Stotler, who promptly dismissed it because, she declared,
families of servicemen have no right to sue the military.
At that point, the case looked lost. The Sabows’ first attorney refused to
appeal but mentioned in passing a case that eerily paralleled their own. Dr.
Sabow would soon discover the lawyer was speaking about the now-defunct,
Washington, D.C.-based Christic Institute and referring to Daniel Sheehan,
the group’s founder and former guiding light. Dr. Sabow was intrigued; he
offered the case to Sheehan, who agreed to handle the appeal. A panel of
federal judges in Sacramento heard Sheehan’s appeal and upheld the lawsuit,
sending the Sabow case back to Stotler for trial.

But the case was delayed for months when the Justice Department’s U.S.
Attorney’s Office, which represented the Marine Corps, challenged Sheehan’s
request to practice law in California. Though Stotler ultimately allowed
Sheehan to proceed, the government’s protest is worth considering because it
begins to address an important question: Who is Dan Sheehan?

In seeking to bar Sheehan from participating in the Sabow trial, the
government’s attorneys noted, "Mr. Sheehan’s application materially
misrepresents his status and omits information required to be submitted as
part of this application." Sheehan had failed to report that the Christic
Institute had been fined more than $1 million by a federal judge in Miami.
According to the government’s motion, the judge fined Sheehan after he
submitted "an affidavit with unknown, nonexistent, deceased sources," using a
"deceptive style used to mask its shortcomings, which ultimately resulted in
two years of vexations and fruitless discovery in furtherance of a frivolous
lawsuit."

The case in question, Avirgan v. Hull, is better known as the Christic
Institute lawsuit. It concerned a still-unresolved May 30, 1984,
assassination attempt against Nicaraguan contra leader Eden Pastora at a
press conference in La Penca, Costa Rica. Tony Avirgan, one of the
journalists injured in the bombing, and his wife, investigative reporter
Martha Honey, began investigating the incident, convinced it was carried out
by Cuban exiles working for the CIA in the Reagan administration’s secret war
against Nicaragua. Their hunch was based on a simple fact: just moments
before the bombing, Pastora, a former Sandinista, had criticized the CIA’s
favored contra wing, the National Democratic Front, or FDN, which had been
set up by former members of ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard.

In 1985, Honey and Avirgan published a book linking the bombing to a group of
Cuban exiles and American civilians operating on behalf of the contras,
including John Hull, a right-wing, larger-than-life American expatriate who
lived on a sprawling ranch along Costa Rica’s northern border with Nicaragua.
Hull’s ranch doubled as a drop-off point for CIA-sponsored flights to and
from, among other locations, El Salvador’s Ilopango Airport, a key link in
the contra-support operation. Hull didn’t appreciate the publicity and sued
the couple for defamation, demanding $1 million in damages.

Honey and Avirgan were clients desperately in need of a lawyer; Sheehan’s
Christic Institute was a crusading nonprofit law firm in need of a
high-profile case. The most intriguing evidence came from Jack Terrell, an
employee of Rob Owen, who reported directly to Oliver North at the White
House National Security Council. Terrell, who later testified in
congressional hearings, told Sheehan he witnessed Hull admitting
responsibility for the bombing during a meeting in Costa Rica with FDN leader
Adolfo Calero.

In Sheehan’s mind, however, that testimony was just one small part of a much
larger puzzle. Sheehan saw the La Penca incident as a perfect vehicle to
expose a covert team he believed was operating on the fringes of the CIA and
the White House, a crew that went all the way back to the Bay of Pigs and the
CIA’s war in Laos. In May 1986, Sheehan filed suit on behalf of Avirgan and
Honey against Hull and several other Reagan administration officials,
charging them with negligence in the bombing injuries suffered by Avirgan.

Named in the lawsuit were more than two dozen defendants, including several
who later turned up as conspirators in the Iran-contra affair, Sheehan is
proud to point out. But he also named a broad array of expatriates,
terrorists and drug dealers.

In the midst of the La Penca lawsuit, a CIA cargo plane was shot down over
Nicaragua in October 1986, quickly thrusting the Iran-contra scandal into
living rooms—and courtrooms—around the world.

Despite the fact that Sheehan had named high-ranking Reagan officials, Judge
James L. King granted Sheehan discovery power, and Sheehan furiously began
collecting additional affidavits. But somewhere in all the excitement, it beca
me unclear what Sheehan’s lawsuit had to do with the La Penca bombing. After
two years of increasingly wild-sounding allegations, King threw the case out
of court. Sheehan appealed King’s ruling, lost, and was ordered to pay the
legal fees for the defendants: $1,034,381.35.

The Christic Institute declared bankruptcy, and Sheehan moved on to other
causes. Avirgan, Honey and several other journalists later reinvestigated the
La Penca bombing and came to the conclusion that the CIA most likely had
nothing to do with it. Instead, they blamed the bombing on a newly discovered
Argentinean who appeared to have ties to the Sandinistas. Honey, now the
peace and security program director for the Institute for Policy Studies, a
Washington, D.C.-based think tank, told the Weekly that Sheehan
single-handedly ruined the La Penca case.

"Sheehan’s a lousy, lousy lawyer," she said. "None of the good legal work was
done by him." Honey stated that she has unsuccessfully tried to get Sheehan
disbarred as an attorney and has even sued him to recover investigative
material and other records from the unsuccessful lawsuit. "After we found out
about the Sandinista connection, we realized we had wasted millions of
dollars and a decade with Sheehan," Honey concluded.

Sheehan still defends the Christic Institute’s lawsuit. In an interview the
day after he lost the Sabow case, he argued that Honey and Avirgan were the
ones who claimed that the CIA was responsible for the bombing, not him.
"[Honey’s] theory has never been proved one way or the other," said Sheehan.
"The attorney general of Nicaragua said that he investigated the entire case
and was completely convinced that the bomber was the same guy we had
identified as being in the meeting with John Hull. Martha changed her mind
about the bombing more than a year after the case lost in court. So how does
this come out to my doing anything wrong?"

The Ronald Reagan Federal Building in downtown Santa Ana is one of Orange
County’s tallest, an ironic testament to a man who talked so often about
limited government. And there is this historical irony: the Sabow case would
pit Sheehan against the ghost of the Reagan administration. Call it La Penca
II. That’s not how Stotler saw it, of course. Though Stotler had thrown out
the Sabows’ claim in 1996, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent it back to
her, and on Jan. 18, 2000, the case began in Stotler’s courtroom on the 10th
floor of the Reagan Building.
By the time Stotler and U.S. Justice Department attorneys had finished their
pretrial slicing and dicing, the Sabow case was limited to one rather
innocuous-sounding question—not "Was Colonel Sabow murdered, and if so, by
whom?" but a far less compelling one: Had Marine Corps officers intentionally
caused severe emotional distress to the Sabow family in the March 9 meeting,
three months after the death?

On that narrow question, Sheehan had impressive evidence—not just the Sabows’
testimony that they felt threatened but a package of official Marine Corps
documents mailed secretly to Dr. Sabow from someone at El Toro. The package
included hand-written notes by Colonel Wayne Rich detailing how he and
Adams—who had proposed the meeting to Dr. Sabow—planned to persuade the
Sabows to abandon their interest in pursuing the investigation into Sabow’s
death. In that memo, Rich suggested that the pair would "try to convince
Sabow’s brother that his brother was a crook and so big a crook that he
[committed suicide]."

As in La Penca, Sheehan took a narrowly defined case and leveraged it into
something grand; as in La Penca, he was ultimately blown out of court. He
started out smoothly enough on the first day of the trial, casually expanding
the narrow case into something a little bigger. In his opening remarks,
Sheehan referred obliquely to "black box" evidence contained in the
lawsuit—none of which the court would allow him to discuss. One of Sheehan’s
briefs shows that the "black box" contained numerous assertions from mostly
anonymous sources that Sabow’s death had something to do with midnight,
covert flights into El Toro rumored to involve drug running —activities that
had allegedly produced a federal drug investigation of the base, Operation
Emerald Clipper.

Because Sally and Dr. Sabow had discussed their suspicions about Sabow’s
death in the March 9 meeting at issue, Sheehan used their time in the witness
box to go through each of the accusations they made at the meeting. The
trial’s early high point: Dr. Sabow’s assertion that he believed "Underwood
had participated in the murder of Colonel Sabow" and that Adams was a
"co-conspirator."

Sheehan was brilliant at crowbarring his little case into a big one, but then
he got derailed—or, more accurately, he derailed himself. Witness Anthony
Verducci—then a Marine Corps captain who performed the original JAGMAN
investigation into Sabow’s death—was supposed to tell the court that his
investigation had no merit because it was based entirely on secondhand
information already collected by the NCIS. Sheehan also would have liked
Verducci to repeat what he had told the Long Beach Press-Telegram one year
ago: that Sabow had been murdered. But this had nothing to do with the March
9 meeting; Stotler prevented Sheehan from asking either question. (Now a
lieutenant colonel stationed at the Marine Corps headquarters in Quantico,
Virginia, Verducci told reporters outside the courtroom only that he believes
"there is a possibility it was a murder.")

Witness testimony that might have shown Marine Corps officers lied to the
Sabows about their official investigation into the death was either excluded
by the court as irrelevant or was obscured by Sheehan’s habit of asking
interminable, speculative and, in some cases, unintelligible questions.
Indeed, toward the end of the six-day trial, the government’s lawyers needed
only to look as if they might object to Sheehan’s questions—to lean forward,
look annoyed or raise a hand—and Stotler would stop him.

The increasingly testy Stotler occasionally challenged Sheehan’s skills as a
lawyer, at one point observing, "Counsel, that is literally the worst
question I have ever heard in my life." When Sheehan repeatedly pressed NCIS
agent Mike Barrett about the quality of the Navy’s original death
investigation, Stotler intervened again. "That has nothing to do with this
case," she told Sheehan. "Do you have any other questions for this witness?"

On the fifth day, the Justice Department asked Stotler to end the trial; the
plaintiffs had called all their witnesses and hadn’t proved a thing, the
government attorneys argued. Stotler said she would consider it; 24 hours
later, on the afternoon of Jan. 27, it was clear that she had had enough. "I
am prepared to grant the defense’s motion. I don’t need to hear any further
testimony at this point," she announced with finality, just moments before
Adams was supposed to take the stand. "It’s pretty apparent that, looking
only at the plaintiff’s testimony, their allegations have not been met by the
evidence."

Sheehan hadn’t just failed to prove a vast conspiracy involving drug running,
covert flights and murder. He had also failed to prove the government acted
maliciously in a death investigation. Well before Stotler finished her
concluding remarks, Dr. Sabow was outside the courtroom. In the hallway, he
confronted Adams, who was leaving the witness room with his lawyer.
"General Adams, you killer!" he snarled.

Adams didn’t even turn around, disappearing around the curve of the building.

"You fucking bastard! You killed him! You bunch of fucking fascists!"

Shaking with anger, Dr. Sabow hadn’t quite finished. He let out one final
roar.

"This is not over yet, you killer!"

After being convicted of misuse of government aircraft as a result of the
investigation that preceded Sabow’s death, Marine Corps General Wayne Adams,
who spent a brief tour in Quantico after leaving El Toro, quickly retired,
taking a job at a private military school—but not before he fired Colonel Joe
Underwood. Underwood paid a $3,000 fine, pleaded guilty to the charges, and
quickly left the Marine Corps and moved to Florida. Neither Underwood nor
Adams was available to be interviewed for this story.

Both men have steadfastly maintained their innocence in the death of Sabow. In
 June 1996, the OIG reviewed the Navy’s original investigation into Sabow’s
death, reaffirming its finding of suicide and officially rebutting the Sabow
family’s allegations that the Marine Corps covered up Sabow’s murder after he
threatened to expose covert operations at El Toro.

The OIG interviewed Adams and Underwood for its report. "Colonel Underwood
denied any knowledge or involvement in covert activities of any kind," the
report stated. "He also denied involvement in or knowledge of unannounced
landings of C-130 aircraft at MCAS El Toro during his assignment there. . . .
During our interview, we specifically asked Colonel Underwood if he had
murdered Colonel Sabow or if he had any knowledge of foul play in the death
of Colonel Sabow. Colonel Underwood denied all allegations that he had
anything to do with the death of Colonel Sabow."

The OIG report also claimed to have found no credible evidence to support any
allegations that Underwood or anyone else at El Toro was involved in covert
operations. This claim was based on interviews with 21 Marine Corps personnel
at El Toro, including Sergeant Randall Robinson. Robinson, a military
policeman (MP), told OIG investigators that one day, he had gone to
Underwood’s office to brief him on an investigation, accompanied by another
MP identified only by her last name, Harries. "During the conversation, the
topic of aircraft landing late at night came up," the OIG report stated.
According to Robinson, Underwood told them, "Keep your ass off the airstrip
at night. Leave those airplanes alone. Don’t go near them. Don’t worry about
them. Don’t go near them."

Robinson also told OIG investigators that because of his often late-night
schedule, "sometimes he would see an aircraft taking off at 4 a.m. He told us
the aircraft were C-130s that were painted black with no markings on the
tail, wings, fuselage, or anywhere else. He stated that, through binoculars,
the crew appeared to have shoulder-length hair and that he assumed they were
civilians. The flights began about four to six months prior to Colonel
Sabow’s death. Mr. Robinson stated that prior to that, he had worked regular
daytime hours and may not have noticed the aircraft since they operated only
at night. He told us that junior troops had told him they saw aircraft
landing at night, parking at the end of the runway and taking off shortly
after they arrived."

OIG investigators interviewed Robinson’s eyewitness to Underwood’s alleged
tirade, Captain Harries. According to the report, Harries hadn’t heard
anything about "any strange aircraft using the airfield late at night under
unusual circumstances" but "stated that Colonel Underwood had placed a number
of unreasonable restrictions on her and the MPs. However," the report
concluded, "she did not remember any incident in his office when she was
ordered to keep MPs away from any aircraft."

While the OIG said it found no evidence to support the conclusion that Sabow
was murdered, Sheehan’s lawsuit contains what purports to be unassailable
direct eyewitness testimony showing that Sabow was murdered. That allegation
is based on the claims of "Mr. X," whom Dr. Sabow identified as an ex-Marine
Corps official, now a law-enforcement officer somewhere in the southwestern
United States. Sheehan refused to identify Mr. X or produce him for
interviews either with military investigators or the media.

In his court brief, Sheehan listed Mr. X’s assertions as Nos. 113-116 of 155
"factual contentions." According to that brief, Mr. X saw "three
civilian-dressed employees of the defendant United States" enter Sabow’s back
yard. The trio "then altered the Sabow death crime scene" by "removing a
blood-spattered wooden club" that lay in the grass. Sheehan alleged two of
the three "then exited the back yard of the Sabow home through the front
gate." The third man "exited the Sabow back yard with the blood-spattered
wooden club, through the back yard of chief of staff Underwood."

Dr. Sabow’s obsession with his brother’s death didn’t end with the dismissal
of his lawsuit. A few years ago, Dr. Sabow broke his leg after collapsing
from exhaustion he says was brought on by his years-long investigation,
resulting in his confinement to a wheelchair. He no longer practices
medicine. He stays at home, does some medical consulting—and ruthlessly
follows a trail of evidence he says leads to only one conclusion: his brother
was murdered, and the U.S. government is covering it up.

No piece of evidence, no inconsistency in testimony is too small to escape
his attention. While his body slows, his mind is exercised by a single
overwhelming obsession: proving his brother was murdered.

Just a simple phone call to touch base with Dr. Sabow can turn into a
marathon monologue in which the doctor piles up the minutiae of evidence into
a mountainous conspiracy that casts its shadow across the republic.

Take, for example, a story that involves one of Sabow’s friends, Lieutenant
Colonel Gary Albin. Fifteen minutes after Sally left for church at 8:30 on
the morning of Jan. 22, Albin showed up at the Sabows’ to return a
flight-test booklet he had borrowed. Albin’s visit occurred at the estimated
time of Sabow’s death—8:45 a.m. When Albin knocked, he heard no answer.
Seeing Sabow’s Corvette parked in the driveway, Albin says, he lingered,
figuring Sabow was taking a shower. After standing on the front porch for 10
minutes, Albin saw Underwood come out of his front door, holding a cup of
coffee.

In Dr. Sabow’s version of the chance meeting, Underwood told Albin that the
Sabows had left to go to the base exchange. To Dr. Sabow, this is revealing
because Underwood told NCIS investigators that he had bumped into Albin while
on his way to have coffee with Sabow. Why, Dr. Sabow asks, would Underwood
say that if he told Albin the couple had already left?

Dr. Sabow says this inconsistency clearly shows that Underwood was lying, and
moreover that the colonel had played some role in his brother’s death. As Dr.
Sabow sees it, Underwood lied to Albin about Colonel Sabow’s whereabouts
because he had to come up with a pretext to get Albin away from the murder
scene.

But there’s a much less ominous explanation for Underwood’s behavior on the
morning of Sabow’s death. It is provided by Albin himself, who retired from
the Marine Corps in 1991. In a recent interview with the Weekly, Albin stated
that Underwood didn’t seem nervous, nor did he appear to be in any kind of
rush when Albin saw him coming out of his house. More important, Albin says,
he remembers Underwood telling him only that Sabow and Sally "might" have
gone to the base exchange—a reasonable guess in Albin’s mind, given that her
car was missing from the driveway.

Albin doesn’t believe Underwood had anything to do with Sabow’s death.
"Knowing Colonel Sabow, I personally think he committed suicide," he
explained. "He was that kind of a Napoleonic-type guy. Even though the
charges against him weren’t so egregious, they would have ended his career in
the military. I think that he felt dejected to a point where he felt
committing suicide would be the manly thing to do."

Sitting in a friend’s house on Balboa Island during a break from the recent
trial, Sally watched as the yachts of the idle rich floated by just yards
from the window. Not once during the interview did her face, hollowed out by
years of grief, crack into a smile. While Dr. Sabow’s obsession with his
brother’s death has all but taken over his life, Sally constantly struggles
to put the past behind her.

After her husband’s death nine years ago, Sally left El Toro and moved to
Arizona. Last year, she completed 12 months of training and got her license
to work as a registered nurse. She said those classes kept her from staying
as involved in the family’s lawsuit as her brother-in-law did. But Sally said
she also lacks the mental energy to keep pursuing events and memories that so
violently turned her world upside-down.

Once a self-described "staunch Republican" and "one of America’s 10 most
patriotic wives," Sally now says she has lost all faith in the system. "I
will never salute the flag again," she declared, shaking her head. "Now I
can’t stand to look at people in uniform. I think the military is a mockery.
They brainwash people. It’s the most pathetic organization in the world."

While Sally says she is saddest for her children, she admits that her own
recovery is still a long way off. "Every day, I wake up and there’s such
pain," she said. "It’s a very quiet, seeping sore. It just goes and goes. . .
. It’s a very secret misery."
Research assistance provided by Marcelo C. Imbert.



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