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Beggar Persevered for Love

Associated Press Writer

This is not a happy love story. It begins with an old man begging on the street and ends with his life ebbing away on a lonely country road.

Still, it is a love story. Between the hardship of his life and the brutality of his last moments, the old man also knew sweetness, hope and a love that lives on, even after death.

Until his beaten body was discovered on a roadside the day after Christmas, most people in this small town knew 90-year-old Nick Alvarado simply as a beggar who pestered them for money.

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But Minnie Fenn, 83, knew him as her sweetheart, a tender and thoughtful man who promised to take care of her forever.

What almost no one knew is that, for years, Nick Alvarado saved some of the crumpled bills and spare change he panhandled, paying bit by bit for a set of gold wedding rings for himself and Minnie.

He carried those rings the day he died, police believe -- but now they’re gone. Finding them might be the key to solving the mystery of who killed Minnie Fenn’s fiance.

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Minnie can’t always remember details. Her soft voice shaking, she says she might be 103, or 203.

But she does remember one thing, always. “I loved him very much,” she said, huddled under a blanket in an easy chair next to Nick’s picture. “I miss him so bad.”

Nick and Minnie met eight years ago at their nursing home. He came by her room and they started talking, and she told him that he could stay for a while. He did, and they soon moved together into their own 265-square-foot apartment with cracked linoleum floors in Centralia, a town of 15,000 between Seattle and Portland, Ore.

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Nick brought Minnie glasses of milk and read her passages from his dog-eared Bible. His favorite was John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

At night, they would fall asleep holding hands.

“He did everything for her, and I mean everything,” neighbor Cathy Johnson said. Nick was spry, while Minnie is frail and uses a walker. He got her out of bed in the mornings, cooked for her and helped her dress.

“It was a relationship you don’t see very much of any more,” Johnson said. “He waited on her hand and foot.”

They quarreled sometimes, though. Nick liked to walk around town for hours, and Minnie hated to be alone. On Christmas night, she cried and begged him not to leave when he decided to walk a few blocks to get coffee.

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Details about Nick’s life before he met Minnie are sketchy. Notes scrawled in his Bible indicate that he was born on Dec. 12, 1912, in Los Angeles. He told people that he was reared in a mission, and he spoke Spanish fluently.

Nick made his way north to Oregon, then Washington, in the early 1960s. He worked as a painter and in a junkyard, and told people that he had once been a boxer. He married in 1974, but his wife died about 10 years later.

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Minnie has two children in Oregon and Colorado who sometimes visit. If Nick had any other family, no one ever knew of them.

In the late 1980s, he began the daily routine that made him familiar around town -- walking for hours, collecting cans and asking for change.

Not everyone in Centralia thought that Nick was a sweet old man. He was the resident panhandler, and he rarely took no for an answer.

“He’d been thrown out of a lot of places,” said Centralia police Det. Jim Barrett, who is investigating Nick’s death.

Pastor Bill Pinneo of the Praise and Worship Center, where Nick’s funeral was held, said he first met Nick when the old man pounded on his back door late one night and asked for money.

“He wouldn’t take food. He just wanted money,” Pinneo recalled. “He didn’t have no friends except for Minnie.”

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During the day, Nick would stake out the bank parking lot or the grocery store, begging money to supplement the couple’s monthly Social Security checks. He would even knock on car windows. He was a regular at the Hub Tavern, where he would drink coffee, gamble on pull-tabs, bum cigarettes and sit for hours.

“I felt sorry for him,” owner Jim Francis said. “People were sometimes not kind to him.”

But coffee wasn’t the only thing that Nick bought. In the summer of 1999, he picked out a set of rings from Harry Ritchie’s Jewelers in the Lewis County Mall and started paying for them on layaway.

“He would literally bring in a bag of money, a brown paper bag,” Barrett said. He paid small, odd amounts, $5 or $7 at a time, then would go panhandle in the mall.

Eventually, he paid off the rings, which totaled about $1,000: a 14-carat gold man’s wedding ring with three small diamonds, and a woman’s two-part engagement and wedding ring, with one primary diamond and several smaller ones.

But he didn’t give them to Minnie, not yet.

“He said he had something for me, but he didn’t tell me what it was,” Minnie said. Police believe that Nick carried the rings with him when he went out for coffee Christmas night. He had shown them to a friend earlier that day.

His body was found early the next morning, battered, bleeding and suffering from exposure, beside a road about a mile from town. His rings and wallet were missing. He died later that day.

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Police say that finding the rings is their best shot at finding whoever left Nick to die. Barrett said he has several leads related to the rings, but no suspects.

Minnie would like to see those rings one day. No matter what happens, she believes that she will see Nick again. “I pray that he’s OK,” she said, “and that I’ll see him one of these times, when my time comes.”

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