Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors (33 page)

Van Rooy and Eggers found no one in the den or in the adjoining bedroom. Beyond that was a hall with three doors—all closed—along it, and another hall just beyond that.

“Nothing out back,” Solis commented as he joined them.

The three officers checked the closed doors. One was locked, and the other two led to a second bathroom and another bedroom, both empty. Neither showed signs of a struggle or ransacking.

They kicked open the locked door. There was nothing inside but a laundry room. It was eerie moving through the silent house, not knowing if a murder had, indeed, taken place and, if it had, a killer still waited behind one of the myriad doors.

Solis and Eggers crept down the second hall—which led to the foyer—when suddenly Solis stopped short. “There’s a body,” he whispered.

And there was. The two patrol officers gazed down at the form of a small and frail woman with white hair. She was prone on the floor between the kitchen and foyer. A large pool of still-wet blood glistened on the kitchen floor tiles.

The patrolmen moved toward a door leading into the garage. That door, too, was locked, but gave with a sharp kick.

There was an old man lying there, crumpled in death beside a parked Mercedes. A copious amount of blood streamed from his head and ran along the floor for approximately eight feet.

In the seventies, there were no shoulder phones, so Van Rooy ran to his patrol car to call radio dispatch and confirm that the report of two homicides was true. Lieutenant Ivan Beeson, himself a longtime homicide detective sergeant before a recent promotion to the north precinct, left at once to join his men. In the meantime, the dispatcher alerted homicide detective sergeant Craig VandePutte, and detectives Gary Fowler and Dick Reed at home.

It was 2:30
A.M.,
and none of the detectives would sleep anymore that night.

The homicide investigators parked their vehicles in a paved area just outside the Bramhalls’ garage. They were briefed by the officers already at the scene. So far, no one knew who might have attacked the elderly couple. There had been one anonymous call to 911 from a man who would not give his name.

“The den, garage, and kitchen lights were on when we got here,” Van Rooy said. “And the sliding door to the den as well as the front door were open. We haven’t touched a thing, except for the light switch in the living room.”

Sergeant VandePutte took one look at the large house and two separate body sites, and quickly realized they would need more backup. Detective Lieutenant Ernie Bisset and detectives John Boatman and Bill Baughman were also called at home and asked to join the crew in Windermere. They arrived just after 4
A.M.

Gary Fowler photographed the entire home prior to any attempt to remove evidence. The Mercedes was still parked in the garage, but there was space there for a second car, so Dick Reed asked for a check on all vehicles registered to either Burle or Olive Bramhall; it was possible that the killer had left in one of their cars. Word came back from the Department of Motor Vehicles that Olive Bramhall owned a blue 1976 Oldsmobile Omega. A bulletin was put out at once asking all officers on duty in the city and the county to locate that car.

Detectives studied the pitiful bodies. Burle Bramhall was fully clothed in light slacks and a blue sweater, shoes, and socks. His expensive watch was still on his wrist, but his glasses and hearing aid had been knocked off and lay near the Mercedes. A leather case with keys was almost underneath the car.

The old man’s head rested on a board used as a stop for parked vehicles, and it appeared that he had suffered tremendous blows that had literally shattered his skull and knocked his dentures out of his mouth. A half-smoked cigar butt was close by. Was it the victim’s? If so, he had apparently been struck unaware—perhaps by someone he trusted. It was bagged and marked as evidence, along with the glasses and keys on the garage floor.

The garage was neatly arranged, with bins for nails, gardening supplies, and tools hung in place, their outlines drawn on a perforated board that lined one wall.

The tiny body of the old woman was dressed in a multicolored dress, nylons, and white high-heeled shoes. She had fallen from the blows to her head so quickly that her hands were caught underneath her body. She, too, had sustained horrendous head injuries. Her wig and glasses had been knocked off by the force of the blows. The back spatter of her blood was medium velocity—indicating that her killer had probably used a blunt instrument of some kind. It had sprayed and splattered the immaculate kitchen as she fell, and then puddled beneath her.

The elderly victims must have been up and awake when their killer arrived. They were completely dressed, and the television was still on. There were no signs at all of forced entry.

Dr. Donald Reay, the King County medical examiner, arrived at 5
A.M.
He verified that the cause of death was from head wounds—probably from a blunt object. He checked their body temperatures, and estimated lividity and rigor mortis.

“I think they’ve been dead about eight hours,” he commented. “That would mean that they were killed about nine last night.”

As the bodies were removed, Reay said that Burle Bramhall had sustained four blows to the head, almost any one of which would have been fatal to a man of his age. Olive had a wound to the side of her head and one in the back. “It looks like she was hit in the back of the head, fell, and the second wound was administered as she lay on the floor.”

It was beginning to get light, and the patrol officers searched the area around the home. Dale Eggers located a large sledgehammer, weighing approximately five pounds, in a vacant lot next door to the victims’ home.

It was obviously the murder weapon. There were bloodstains, hair, and what appeared to be brain matter evident on the hammer.

Full daylight dawned as the last of the physical evidence was bagged and labeled. Dick Reed removed the trap from the kitchen sink in the event the killer might have washed his hands there. No one knew about DNA thirty years ago, but if he found blood traces there, they could at least check for blood type, and, if it was different from that of the two victims, they might be able to find the third person—or persons—who had been in the house.

This was a terribly ugly way for two kind old people to die, and inexplicable; although the Bramhalls were wealthy, robbery didn’t seem to be the motive. The routine things that thieves take were still in place in the house: televisions, radios, silver, and crystal. Although Olive’s car was gone, there were far easier ways to steal a car than to resort to such carnage.

Moreover, both of the Bramhalls still wore expensive jewelry, worth thousands of dollars. It was possible that there were items of great value that had been taken, but they were certainly not obvious.

And no one had broken in. Why would Burle Bramhall willingly admit the killer? They were not paranoid, but they were cautious and it wasn’t likely they would let a stranger in after dark.

There were some oddities—a piece of ivy resting on a table in the hall, a blank spot where the poker from the fireplace set was missing. And then it too was found in the vacant lot next door.

At 7:10 in the morning, John Boatman and Bill Baughman talked to the neighbors beyond the vacant lot just to the north of the Bramhall house. The Addison* family members were longtime neighbors of the victims. Cal Addison* and his younger son said they had heard nothing during the night. They had seen that the lights were on in the garage, but that wasn’t particularly unusual. As for Mrs. Bramhall’s missing car, Addison said that the couple’s housekeeper usually drove the car and had permission to take it home when she left for the night after serving dinner.

Now the investigators set out to locate the housekeeper.

The home on the other side of the Bramhalls’ house was a mansion that had recently been purchased by the followers of the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon, leader of the Unification Church, or “Moonies,” a religious cult. Not surprisingly, Windermere residents weren’t happy at all to have the “Moonies” in their midst and there had been suits filed against them. None of the neighbors, however, felt that the Bramhalls had had particular difficulties with the oddly dressed Moon followers who came and went from the huge white edifice.

The phone rang in the Bramhall home while the detectives worked and detective Dick Reed answered it. The caller identified himself as the Bramhalls’ insurance agent, and he was aghast as Reed told him that both the elderly people were dead.

“I talked to Burle just last week about an insurance policy, and he told me they’d hired a new housekeeper and that she was the best they’d ever had. I called Burle yesterday afternoon and the housekeeper answered, but she said he was outside doing some gardening and that she didn’t want to call him in, so I just said I’d call today.”

The agent had never seen the housekeeper, and didn’t know her name.

Sergeant VandePutte had found a list of emergency numbers in the home, as well as the guest list for a party the victims were planning. One number appeared to be that of the housekeeper, Esme Svenson,* and he checked the reverse phone directory for an address for the woman. An investigator was sent to find her.

Detective Al Gerdes talked to a Windermere resident who reported a peculiar incident he’d observed; sometime around 11:30
A.M.
on August 2, he’d looked into the Bramhalls’ home and seen a woman he didn’t recognize standing between the living room and the kitchen. He thought she was twenty to twenty-four, with long blond hair falling to the middle of her back.

The day shift of homicide detectives arrived at the crime scene. At nine on the morning after the Bramhalls were killed, a roughly dressed man walked up to the Bramhall house, clutching a piece of paper with the home’s address printed on it. Bewildered by all the activity, he stammered as he explained that he’d come to do some lawn work.

“They sent me out from the Millionair’s Club [a Seattle charity with a deliberately misspelled name that finds jobs for people down on their luck]. I’m supposed to do some cleanup work in the yard.”

The man said he’d never been there before, and detectives believed him. He’d simply drawn the wrong time to show up. They took his name and address, checked with the Millionair’s Club to verify his story, and sent him on his way.

The detectives checked the basement of the Bramhall residence, but it was obvious no one had been there. Cobwebs still hung, undisturbed, but the blood draining from Olive Bramhall’s body
had
leaked through the tiles and then floorboards above and dripped in a macabre pattern over the freezer and on the floor.

At 10:24
A.M.,
Esme Svenson arrived and learned that her employers were both dead. The stunned woman was asked to look through the house to see if anything had been disturbed or was missing. She agreed to do that at once, dabbing her tear-filled eyes with her handkerchief as she moved through all the rooms.

“Everything’s just like it was when I left last night—except for the missing poker by the fireplace.”

Esme Svenson gave a formal statement, saying she was apparently the last person to see the Bramhalls alive.
Except for their murderer.
She explained that she had lived in a room in the house for some time, but that she had recently moved to a friend’s home in the north part of Seattle. She was obviously the young blond woman the neighbor had seen.

“I’ve worked for the mister and missus for three or four months. I come to work about ten in the morning, and usually stay until about eight at night,” she said.

“When did you leave last night?” Gary Fowler asked.

“It was just about ten minutes to eight,” the forty-year-old housekeeper recalled. “I fixed them a nice dinner—steak, salad, and blackberry pie. Then Mr. Bramhall said, like he always does—did, ‘Mrs. Bramhall, do you mind if I have my cigar?’

“They went into the den to watch television while I put the dishes in the dishwasher. They were in a good mood because earlier that day, they picked out the cake and flowers for their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary party.”

Esme Svenson said that the Bramhalls had a burglar alarm that they always turned on just before they went to bed. “You could hear it all over the neighborhood when it went off. And then there’s the security patrol here in Windermere, too.”

The housekeeper said that the Bramhalls usually retired about 11:30, after the evening news.

“Have you ever known the alarm to trip?” Fowler asked.

“Only accidentally. Never because there was really a prowler.”

“Who else has a key to the house?”

“I do, and I think their nephew in Bellevue does. Nobody else.”

Asked to go over the previous day’s events step by step, Esme Svenson thought carefully. “I came to work at ten. Mr. Bramhall was in his robe and didn’t get dressed until afternoon. I remember they got a registered letter from one of their ‘adopted kids.’ The mister worked in the garden awhile, and then we ate about seven. I remember because he always watched the six o’clock news first. They would always have their cocktails together in the den, watch the news, and then come to the table.”

The woman rubbed her forehead, trying to remember anything unusual about the day before. “Oh, yes. There was a knock at the front door about seven forty-five while we were eating. Mr. Bramhall answered, and I could hear some man asking him if he had a ball-peen hammer. He said he had a small one, and came back in the kitchen and got the hammer out of the closet there and gave it to the fellow at the door.”

“Did you see who was at the door?”

“No, I just heard the conversation.”

“Did Mr. Bramhall comment on the incident?”

“Yes. He came back in to the table, and said, ‘That was so-and-so.’ I’m sorry, I think the missus mentioned the name, but I didn’t catch it. But I do remember she said, ‘He’s just been released from a mental institution.’ ”

“Do you have any idea who they were talking about?”

“Well, I heard them talk before about a boy from next door having some mental troubles. I heard Mrs. Bramhall say that his mother used to have some bad times, and that she would come crying to Mrs. Bramhall and that Mrs. Bramhall helped her the best she could. But the lady killed herself after that.”