‘The Lady’ And The Tramp

Betty, Yettaw's fourth and current wife, believes he was compelled by God, but also wanted to interview Suu Kyi for a book he is writing about how people recover from trauma. ("If they let her go, he'd never get to see her," Betty says.) Ex-wife Yvonne says the Burma trip was about business: her ex-husband and Suu Kyi, she heard incorrectly, had coauthored a book together. And a close friend of Yettaw's—who requested anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the family's situation—says that John uncovered Burmese (and Chinese) state secrets that compelled him to act. "If they knew, they'd kill him," the friend says ominously. Brian and Carley, his 20-year-old daughter, say their father was going to warn Suu Kyi that her life was in danger following a tip-off from God—an account that roughly matches Yettaw's testimony that "terrorists" were going to assassinate her and blame the government.

The facts of Yettaw's life are also murky, even to his family. After years of his erratic behavior and unsatisfying explanations, they have come to accept him the way he is—bighearted but unsteady. This is what they've been told (although aside from Yettaw's birthplace and his military records, little can be independently verified): he and a twin sister were born in a Detroit housing project in 1955—the youngest of five siblings and the only ones to survive into adulthood (an older sister died in a swimming accident, a brother committed suicide in a mental hospital and another sister was born with severe handicaps and died in an institution). As a 7- or 8-year-old, he has told family, he was molested by a volunteer "big brother" after his father left home, before his mother's drinking cost her custody. Sent to live with relatives in California, Yettaw ran away from home at 16 and lived in his car until he was old enough to join the Army in 1973. His family believes that Yettaw did a combat stint somewhere in Asia during the Vietnam War; he told them that his time there brought on bouts of PTSD. The military's National Personnel Records Center, however, says that he spent 10 months in Germany before being discharged in 1974 after little more than a year of service.

Back in the United States, an unplanned pregnancy led to a quickie marriage at 20, a divorce two years later and a decade of drinking, according to Yvonne. Yettaw married again in his mid-20s, only to divorce seven years later. He met Yvonne, the mother of six of his seven children, at a church singles event shortly after his conversion to Mormonism in his early 30s. Yettaw liked the church's belief in conversions for the dead because he wanted to reunite with his whole family in the afterlife, she says. Around the same time, he experienced the first in a series of visions: a dream that his father, whom Yettaw had not heard from since John was 2, was in Falcon, Mo. Remarkably, he was in fact living in Falcon, and John soon moved Yvonne and his children nearby. Things looked up for a while. But over the next few years, personal tragedies pulled Yettaw's life in strange new directions, and ultimately toward Burma.

After a house fire and a messy divorce from Yvonne, Yettaw found himself living in a trailer on his property, where a veritable Noah's Ark of trash began to accumulate on the lawn: two broken-down cars, two derelict trucks, two rusted satellite dishes and a pair of portable basketball hoops that still stand in the tall, tick-infested grass. Debt began to snowball, as Yettaw pursued increasingly impractical dreams. He started driving a USA Tours bus in part to ferry soldiers from their homes to nearby Fort Leonard Wood, began work on a 6,000-square-foot turreted home and started putting up drifters in a local hotel.

A darker side also emerged. He put his thumb through a man's eye during a fight in a bar parking lot, say Brian and Yvonne, and, according to police records, spat in the face of a woman who accused him of taking her car. (Although no charges were filed, Yettaw admitted to the spitting, and the woman won a restraining order against him.) In 1997 he graduated cum laude from Drury University with a triple major in psychology, criminal justice and biology, only to be forced from a doctoral program at the Springfield, Mo.–based Forest Institute's School of Professional Psychology in 2007. According to family, he was "blacklisted" for exploding at a professor during a field trip to an area mental hospital. (Forest officials declined to comment, citing privacy regulations.) Determined to get back on track, he was set to speak with school officials at the institute on the very day a far worse crisis engulfed the family.

Before dawn on Aug. 2, 2007, 17-year-old Clint Yettaw was speeding on his Yamaha 650—a bike his father got him for his birthday the previous summer. Clint hit a deer at such a fatal velocity, according to police, that he split the animal in two. Yettaw blamed himself for failing to act on a premonition of Clint's death a few weeks earlier. He buried his son in the front yard, in a plain grave surrounded by cinder blocks. It was a pivotal event for Yettaw, who soon decided he needed a break. "He was like, 'Get me away from here'," says Betty.

In May 2008, he and Brian headed to Asia for a six-month tour, where Yettaw's fascination with Suu Kyi began. After Brian returned to school in early September, Yettaw headed to Mae Sot, a relaxed and slightly untidy Thai town known for drugs, human trafficking and other shady activities. Located on the Moei River across from the Burmese town of Myawaddy, Mae Sot is filled with agents of the Burmese military who mix in with the general population. "There's all kinds of intrigue going on," says Aung Zaw, editor of The Irrawaddy, an expatriate Burmese magazine published in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand.