Bombshell: Report: Deputy Prosecutor Accused of Forging Fitzpatrick’s Signature “Relieved of Duties”

IS THE TRUTH ABOUT TO EMERGE?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Sep. 10, 2014) — The Post & Email has been informed by a highly reliable source that Deputy Prosecutor Kevin Martis “Andy” Anderson of the Kitsap County, WA prosecutor’s office has been “relieved of his duties” after approximately a quarter-century in the position.

While the Kitsap County prosecutor’s office failed to respond to two inquiries made by The Post & Email on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively, we know that the information provided to us is accurate.

On Wednesday, an inquiry directed to the Kitsap County public defender’s office did not receive a response, and the Kitsap Sun did not respond to our questions as of press time.

An email sent to Anderson’s former email address at Kitsap County was returned on Wednesday evening as having “failed.”

Anderson stands accused of having forged the name of CDR Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III to a confession letter printed in July 1990 which was traced by NCIS investigator Richard Allen to Anderson’s printer at the time.  Fitzpatrick was court-martialed beginning in 1989 which culminated in a written reprimand in April 1990 placed in his court-martial and service records along with the letter.  Unbeknownst to him then, Fitzpatrick acquired a copy of the forgery after submitting multiple FOIA requests to the U.S. Navy for documents from his court-martial.

Several years ago, The Post & Email contacted Anderson at his office in Kitsap County to discuss the Fitzpatrick court-martial.  To our surprise, Anderson spent approximately an hour with us on an unscheduled telephone call despite our offer to contact him later on his own time.  However, he would not agree to make any statements on the record.  In regard to the forgery of Fitzpatrick’s name, Anderson commented, “If somebody forged it, he did bad.”

Following the court-martial, in which Fitzpatrick was accused of misspending Morale, Welfare and Recreation (MWR) funds on board the U.S.S. MARS, he was passed over for promotion twice and forced into retirement in September 1994.  Fitzpatrick has told The Post & Email on many occasions that the outcome of the court-martial was decided behind closed doors during the fall of 1989 and that the “jury” which heard the “evidence” against him was provided false information.

The MARS’s then-Command Master Chief, Poasa Fa’aita, corroborated Fitzpatrick’s assertion that the commanding admiral of their unit, John Bitoff, carried out a vendetta against several people on the ship, including Fa’aita himself, over friction regarding certain procedures and activities on the ship.

In late 1997, Fitzpatrick spoke with a representative from then-TJAG John Hutson’s office, insisting that an investigation be launched into the forgery of his name on the confession letter.  Under threat of returning him to active duty, court-martialing and throwing him in the brig, Hutson exasperatedly agreed to order the NCIS to open a criminal probe.

At the end of January 1998, members of the NCIS interviewed Kevin Anderson in his office at Kitsap County, where he denied knowing the origin of the letter.  However, almost exactly five years later, in the presence of Port Orchard, WA police detective Beth Deatheradge, Anderson admitted that he had created and printed the letter but not to having signed Fitzpatrick’s name to it.

Fitzpatrick lived in the same neighborhood as Anderson at the time and had urged chief prosecutor Russell Hauge to launch an investigation into his allegation against Anderson from 1990, which Hauge failed to do.  Fitzpatrick has maintained that because Anderson signed his name to the confession document years before, every case Anderson has touched in his capacity as a prosecutor “could be undone.”

After learning that Anderson had told Deatheradge that he was the author of the letter in Fitzpatrick’s file, Fitzpatrick approached the NCIS again to demand that the investigation, abandoned inexplicably in 1998 after Anderson was interviewed, be reopened.  In response, the NCIS sent four agents, all of whom Fitzpatrick claimed were armed, to his door in an unannounced visit on March 3, 2005 to threaten his life if he were to continue to seek an investigation into the forgery.  The agent who spoke to Fitzpatrick was James H. Connolly, the same NCIS agent who interrogated Sgt. Lawrence Gordon Hutchins, III in Iraq over an alleged event occurring at Hamdaniya and on which Hutchins is scheduled to be tried a second time by the U.S. Marine Corps in January after spending seven years in military prisons and having his case overturned by the highest-level military appeals court in June 2013.

Contrary to the statements made in a letter which Connolly hand-delivered from L.J. Beyer, Inspector General of the NCIS in November 2004, the handwriting specialist Fitzpatrick had hired had stated that the signature on the letter was most likely not Fitzpatrick’s.  Beyer also falsely stated that the crimes Fitzpatrick alleged “would not be viable today,” although there is no statute of limitations on criminal activity.

To this day, no one from the Navy will speak or write about the court-martial of Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III.  The Post & Email has been told by a reliable source that JAG Corps students are aware of the case but forbidden to discuss it in the course of their studies.

Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, who was a contemporary of Fitzpatrick’s at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, has failed to answer formal correspondence and emails regarding Fitzpatrick’s claim of forgery.  Members of Congress have similarly remained silent in response to requests from The Post & Email to assist in procuring the original court-martial file containing the fraudulent confession letter.

The Post & Email and Fitzpatrick spent a portion of this year readying a manuscript on the court-martial for publication.  On August 19, Fitzpatrick was sentenced to three years in state prison for convictions on aggravated perjury and extortion through a process in McMinn County, TN similar to that which produced the court-martial conviction 24 years prior:  that of “attainder,” which is a conviction without the benefit of a jury.

While Fitzpatrick’s trial in McMinn County might have had the outward appearance of legitimacy, the grand jury was rigged, the foreman had served illegally, the judge was compromised, and there was no accuser or police report substantiating the charges. Fitzpatrick has long described the military system of justice as lacking constitutional protections expected by civilians.

In 1989, Fitzpatrick was accused by Bitoff, who also acted as prosecutor.  “I brought the accusations and I convened the court-martial,” Bitoff told then-Rep. Norman Dicks in an April 20, 1999 letter.

Lacking an accuser, the McMinn County prosecution assumed that role as well as its own.  During the sentencing, the prosecution obtained a “confession” of sorts from Parole Board investigator Judith Hilton-Coffman:  that she had been “wrong” to write in her pre-sentencing report that Fitzpatrick’s alleged crimes were without a victim, as one had been identified.

The cover-up of the forgery from 1990 now involves scores of Navy officers, including flag officers, current TJAG Nanette DeRenzi, the U.S. Marine Corps, and Obama as putative commander-in-chief.