Fake marine who housed serial killer suspect,allegedly bilked man.
Fake Marine gave serial killer suspect a home. Now he's accused of bilking man of RV park.
Mississippi Clarion Ledger
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CANYON LAKE, Texas — A fake Marine who gave Mississippi native and convicted killer Felix Vail a home is now accused of using a Christian charity to bilk a man of an RV park.
David Thomason portrays himself as a heroic Marine and a generous pastor who aids veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder with his Tree of Light Ministries.
In reality, he is a mail-order minister with no record of serving in the Marines.
A local man here, Bryan Todd Sympson, is now suing Thomason and his wife, saying they tricked him over the past three years into giving their Tree of Light Ministries at least $336,590 in donations, plus an RV park.
“I feel like a fool, but I’m an honest guy,” Sympson said. “I always try to find the good in people.”
After his accountant informed him that he couldn’t deduct his contributions because the charity wasn’t registered, he said he confronted Thomason, who has since registered the charity with the secretary of state’s office.
Sympson’s lawsuit alleges “Thomason does not run, nor has he run, a genuine Christian ministry. Thomason and (his wife) Sheila Thomason used the funds provided by Sympson for personal gain and personal expenses.”
After Sympson stopped donating, Thomason put a notice on Sympson’s door: “Hello, Brother in Christ, Brother in blood and a true brother as a friend. I am respectly (sic) asked (sic) that we sit down and break bread together and cast the Demon out that has fiercly (sic) tried to devide (sic) us.”
When Sympson wouldn’t meet with him, Thomason put up another notice: “You have 72 hours to vacate this property.” A follow-up notice claimed Sympson, who gave Thomason the RV Park, owed him $15,600.
When the Clarion Ledger called trying to contact Thomason for comment, his wife hung up the phone.
Fake Marine takes in $400K from insurance firms
The Clarion Ledger first reported on Thomason in 2013 during its investigation into Felix Vail, a suspected serial killer. Following its coverage, Vail, who had been related to Thomason, was indicted and convicted of murdering his first wife — one of three women he was involved with who died or disappeared.
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One of Thomason's wives had also died under circumstances her family found suspicious.
The Clarion Ledger also found that Thomason had received more than $400,000 in insurance claims over the past two decades. More than half that money came after his house burned down in nearby Canyon Lake in 2007.
The fire marshal ruled the fire suspicious, but no one was prosecuted.An hour and a half later, a neighbor reported Thomason’s house burning.
“The fire marshal said I burned my damn house down,” he said in a taped conversation obtained by the Clarion Ledger. “I was in the f---ing hospital.”
That alibi was contradicted by his friend, Laszlo Andre, who told the Clarion Ledger Thomason was with him that morning of June 12, 2007, and that Thomason left for his house about 10 a.m.
Thomason had insured the house for $235,000, more than twice its assessed value. The tax assessor put the value at less than $109,000.
Thomason had previouslydrawn suspicion in a fire. His first wife, Vicki, said that when he was growing up in Phoenix, Arizona, he was suspected in a school fire.
Something in common: Wives whose deaths were ruled drownings
In 2005, Thomason’s estranged wife, Kathey, drowned in Canyon Lake, allegedly falling off a boat. She couldn't swim and had no life jacket.
In 1962, Vail took out two life insurance policies on his first wife, Mary, just months before her death. Vail told authorities she accidentally fell out of their boat while he was trotline fishing in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Her death was ruled an accidental drowning.
In 2012, at the request of the Clarion Ledger, pathologist Dr. Michael Baden studied her autopsy. He concluded her death was a homicide, pointing to the bruises on the back of her head and a scarf 4 inches into her mouth. A pathologist for the state came to the same conclusion.
In 2016, a jury convicted Vail of murdering her — the oldest conviction in U.S. history involving a serial killer suspect. He is now serving a life sentence in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
In a series of taped conversations with undercover private investigator Gina Frenzel in 2013, Vail talked of suspicion that Thomason had torched his house to collect on insurance.
“I’ve been thinking about the rumor he (Thomason) burned it,” Vail said. “He and I both have enough autonomy that we are held in suspicion by all of our family and friends for being able to think of something and do it without looking at whether it’s legal or not, or permissible by society or not.”
When Thomason was a child, Vail babysat him. Vail later became Thomason’s “uncle-in-law” through marriage.
“He was one of the few people who considered me his mental equal,” Vail said. “In every way, we had mutual respect for each other’s intelligence.”
After the Clarion Ledger began asking questions in Vail's case in the summer of 2012, Vail moved to Canyon Lake, where he lived for several months with Thomason and his new wife.
Although Thomason has told friends in the past that he believes Vail killed his first wife, Thomason insisted in the recent taped conversation obtained by the Clarion Ledger that he knew nothing of Vail committing a crime.
“All he ever showed me was love,” he said. “I didn’t know he was a murderer.”
The Clarion Ledger and Frenzel uncovered allegations of Vail molesting minors, and prosecutors confirmed those allegations.
“If I had known he was a child molester and a murderer, I would have killed him myself,” Thomason is heard saying on the tape.
He said the only reason he gave Vail the property in 2012 was because Vail had “lost everything” in a tornado in Mississippi more than a year earlier.
Parents: Texas authorities should investigate our daughter's death
The Clarion Ledger has uncovered new questions regarding the drowning of Kathey Thomasone.
Three men were reportedly in the boat with her when she drowned.
Responding to the call, then-Comal County Deputy Constable Russell Chaney said he asked one of the three men about the last place he saw her in the water. The man kept on walking.
He said the man finally said, “I’m not answering any questions. The man in the boat will answer your questions.’”
The response stunned him.
“Nobody does that. People are frantic,” he said. “They are begging you to save people. Nobody was asking to save this lady or to look for her. It was cold and calloused.”
One other thing that struck him as strange was how clean the boat was, he said. “Normally, a boat is trashed.”
In this case, “there wasn’t a sandwich,” he said. “There wasn’t a beer can.”
Kathey’s mother, Carol Simon, said her daughter left Thomason because she was scared for her life. Authorities found a Taser in her purse.
They also found a marijuana cigarette and nine narcotic tablets prescribed to Thomason, according to the July 3, 2005, report by the Comal County Sheriff's Office.
A deputy smelled alcohol on the breath of the boat driver but failed to give him a Breathalyzer test or impound the boat.
Instead, the boat driver, who identified himself as Kathey's boyfriend, took her boat, her car and her cell phone with him.
Kathey’s father, Ernest Bias, a former law enforcement officer, has always been bothered by how the case handled.
After the drowning, he examined her boat and found a broken fingernail on the floor. “None of this has made sense to me,” he said.
He still wonders about the connection between Thomason and Vail.
Over the years, Thomason has told friends that he went down into the lake with his scuba gear, trying to locate his wife’s body. He has even said he nearly died trying to find her body and had to be airlifted to the hospital.
Bias said he was there when rescue teams were searching and never saw Thomason, who also didn’t attend the funeral.
Bias and Simon believe Texas authorities should do something they have never done — investigate their daughter’s death.
Simon said, because her daughter couldn’t swim, she wouldn’t have gone out in the boat without a life jacket.
More than a year ago, one of the three men on the boat with her daughter showed up at her home, she said. “He was saying he was involved and was sorry.”
She said he claimed one of the men in the boat slipped drugs into her daughter’s drink, causing her to fall out of the boat into the water.
Afterward, the one who spiked the drink didn’t want the others to report the drowning, Simon quoted the man as saying. The trio didn’t call authorities until after they reached shore.
It became obvious that the man "knew too much from his words," she said. "I believe he had something to do with (the death)."
Her husband, John, said the man “asked if we would forgive him. I told him no.”
One of the men who was in the boat that day has since died. The Clarion Ledger could not reach either of the two remaining men for comment.
Fake Marine claims he fought in Colombia
Thomason said In that recently taped conversation obtained by the Clarion Ledger that he served in the Marine Force Reconnaissance in Colombia in the 1980s.
When the operation ended, “Oliver North pulled me out of formation and shook my hand,” he said. “He pulled me out of formation because I had lost six of my squad. We were one of the eight-man Lotus squads in Colombia. Me and my sergeant, Terry Brown, he shook both of our hands. He pulled us out of formation because we were the only two to survive that day.”
In a June 14 letter, the National Personnel Records Center said it conducted an "extensive search of every records source and alternate records" and found no military records on Thomason.
His first wife, Vicki, said he never served in the military.
Under Texas law, those who misrepresent their military record can be fired from their jobs. Under both state and federal law, those who falsely claim military service in order to defraud can be prosecuted.
Earlier this month, Keith Hudson, a 70-year-old man from Charleston, South Carolina, who never served in military, pleaded guilty to health care fraud after scamming the Department of Veterans Affairs for nearly $200,000 in benefits. He faces up to 10 years in prison.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Erik Hearon, who served as assistant adjutant general for the Mississippi Air National Guard, said those who falsely claim to have served in the military degrade those who honorably served their nation.
He called such fakers "despicable. It may not be popular to tie them to a flag pole and put red ants on them, but that would be my preference.”
Monty Mintz, a Marine veteran who did electrical work for Thomason, said it became obvious to him that Thomason was never in the Marines.
When Sympson asked Thomason how the Marines decided which boot camp that recruits went to, Mintz said Thomason replied the Mason-Dixon line.
"Actually, it's the Mississippi River," Mintz said. "Those east of the Mississippi go to Parris Island. Those west of the Mississippi go to San Diego."
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The Mintz Report
