by Henry Cordes
Mary saved her most extensive prose for her daughter, Dr. Audrey Brumback. Every week, without fail, Audrey would get a letter from her mother. Long-form, cursive writing. Thoughtful. Detailed.
The only daughter of the Brumbacks had followed in her father’s footsteps, pursuing a career in child neurology. Dad and daughter would often talk business — updating each other on advancements in their chosen science.
As for mom, Audrey shared her mother’s funny-feisty streak. It was abundant as Audrey years later recounted the weekly ritual they shared. Audrey would go to the mailbox and retrieve the stationery-sized envelope with her mother’s smooth handwriting. Then she would announce to her husband: “Oh, the Mary Brumback letter came today!”
“It was awesome — I’d get one every week,” she’d ruefully recall later. “Fifty-two letters a year ... from my mom.”
This Mother’s Day, though, Audrey Brumback chose a more modern form of communication. Like her brother, she contacted her parents from her home in San Francisco via FaceTime. It was early afternoon. And for an hour and 4 minutes, Roger and Mary talked with their daughter. Audrey caught up on life and the move and weather and Mother’s Day.
At one point, Audrey razzed her mom about giving unsolicited advice to Audrey’s husband. Audrey said she knew the crack would get a laugh — “I’m hilarious,” she quipped — so she grabbed a screenshot of her parents’ reaction to her words. In the photo, Roger pulls away from the iPad, as if to give himself room to bellow. Mary is beet red, mid-laugh at her daughter’s zinger.
It was the last image of the couple alive.
* * *
The Brumbacks weren’t the only ones on the cusp of retirement that gorgeous Mother’s Day. Againdra and Chhanda Bewtra were approaching the twilight of their careers at Creighton. And they, too, were celebrating the holiday as empty nesters. The Bewtras went to a midtown Omaha restaurant to have lunch with their close friends, retired college professor Richard Thill and his wife, Florence.
Chhanda Bewtra, a professor and pathologist who worked alongside Roger Brumback and Bill Hunter at Creighton, and Againdra Bewtra, himself a doctor at Creighton, were a contagiously outgoing couple who constantly talked over each other. Thill and his wife also weren’t bashful. So lunch went long. And then afterwards the couples walked toward their cars.
At the time, Thill was using a walker to get around. The departure from the restaurant was painfully slow. So slow that Againdra ribbed Thill. “Richard!” he said in the accent of his native India. “You are really causing us delays!”
The delay would be fortuitous. In fact, it may have saved the Bewtras’ lives.
After the Bewtras drove away, no more than two minutes from their home near 84th and Pacific Streets, their home security system sent an alert to their cell phones. An alarm had been triggered at 2:16 p.m. Againdra Bewtra soon after pulled into the driveway, not sure if it was a false alarm. Just to be sure, he asked his wife to stay back in the car as he checked it out.
The diminutive man — his driver’s license lists him at a generous 5 feet, 6 inches tall — walked the perimeter of his house. Then he checked the monitor in the home to see which of the sensors had tripped.
Bewtra ultimately found that someone had tried to push in the locked French doors in the back of the house, budging them about two inches. The break-in attempt had been thwarted by the second piece of low-tech security equipment Againdra Bewtra had installed: a large recliner-couch that he had jammed against the inside of the doors. “It would take superhuman strength to move that thing,” Againdra would later say, spreading his hands and arms like a pro wrestler.
The Bewtras didn’t think much of the alarm, declining to report it to police. After all, nothing had been taken.
Turns out, this had not been just a burglar at their back door.
CHAPTER 8: CHANGE OF PLANS
The stranger in the black Mercedes SUV drove east on Pacific Street, surely charged with both adrenaline and frustration. That door that refused to budge had foiled his latest attempt to seek revenge against the people in his past who did him wrong. Bewtra. Bitch had it coming.
Now he didn’t know where he was going exactly. He was only vaguely familiar with Omaha. He’d once lived there for about a year, but that had been a long, long time ago. In the interim, he had made a brief return trip to the city. That visit, some five years earlier, had been one neither he nor most anyone in Omaha would soon forget.
He drove on, still buzzing from the case of beer he’d picked up across the river in Iowa an hour earlier. Every day anymore, he pretty much woke up drunk and never stopped drinking. As he neared 72nd Street, he saw a sign that pierced his foggy brain. “Wingstop,” it said in big green letters. A chicken wing joint.
That suddenly looked good. Borderline morbidly obese at 5-foot-8 and more than 270 pounds, he usually wasn’t one to miss a meal. He’d prefer a Hooters, the restaurant chain that featured three of his favorite things in all the world: wings, beer and scantily clad women. But in a pinch, this would do. He turned into the parking lot and lumbered inside.
Standing below the counter sign which proclaimed Wingstop “the Wing Experts,” he scanned the menu board and placed his order. At 2:26 p.m., he used one of his many overworked credit cards to pay the $7.69 tab.
A half hour later, he was back in the Mercedes, parked right out front. He pulled out his iPhone. The homicidal thoughts, irrationality and desperation that had recently driven him continued to spin in a menacing whirlwind through his head.
Perhaps he could still find a way salvage this trip after all. Opening up the phone’s tiny keyboard, with thick fingers he typed a name into the browser:
r-o-g-e-r b-r-u-m-b-a-c-k.
A Whitepages entry came up, giving the home address for Dr. Roger Brumback. It was near 114th and Shirley Streets. Conveniently, it even wasn’t far away, the map showing it just a few miles west on Pacific Street.
This stop had been a pretty good call. He shifted his car into drive and soon was headed west again, fueled by both the wings and his deadly new purpose.
* * *
Roger and Mary Brumback weren’t expecting Mother’s Day guests. They had just finished that FaceTime call with Audrey. And their house was now littered with signs of the laidback Sunday they’d spent together.
On the kitchen table: a rock propped open a romance novel that Mary had been reading. Omaha’s Sunday newspaper had been pulled apart, its sections akimbo.
Roger had gathered dozens of his old medical books and piled them in his car trunk, ready to donate them to a Des Moines college the next day. It’s just a two-hour trip from Omaha to Des Moines, but Mary had convinced Roger that the couple needed to make a day of it in the Iowa city — shop and dine and do things that semi-retired couples do.
In the meantime, there was work to be done to get the house ready to sell. Wearing a dark shirt, shorts and old leather loafers, Roger was giving the foyer a fresh coat of paint. A ladder — a gallon of paint underneath it — sat in the front hallway. Roger had no idea what was lurking just outside on this sun-splashed, tranquil, 68-degree day.
Someone knocked or rang at the Brumbacks’ door. Roger opened the white wooden main door to find a heavyset man in a blue dress shirt and black slacks standing there.
It’s impossible to know what was in Brumback’s mind at the moment. He may have originally thought it was a door-to-door salesman — someone to politely shoo away. Or a proselytizer, taking his gospel into people’s homes. Or perhaps Brumback immediately recognized this man from his past, a man who was carrying a festering, 12-year-old grudge. Either way, it appears Brumback had little time to think or talk about it. Because the visitor pulled out a Smith & Wesson SD9 semiautomatic pistol.
Brumback and the avenger began struggling over the gun right there on the door’s threshold. The life-and-death battle tripped the gun’s magazine release,
the shiny gold ammunition clip clunking down right in the doorway. But not before the assailant first squeezed off three shots. They rang out into the neighborhood, breaking the Mother’s Day solitude.
One bullet struck Brumback in the lower leg. Another passed through his shoulder and the wooden door behind him before lodging in the drywall above a closet. The other, the fatal one, was an odd, upward-angled shot that ripped through his abdomen and struck his liver and a blood vessel before lodging in his back. Brumback fell back heavily to the wooden floor of the entryway, landing in a near-fetal position.
After hearing shots fired, Mary must have rushed to the entryway, finding her husband on the floor, his assailant standing over him. She, too, soon was struggling with the gunman, her glasses falling to the floor near her dying husband.
With no clip, the gun was now inoperable. So the man turned it to more primitive use, viciously pistol-whipping Mary. He hammered her across the forehead so hard the gun actually broke.
Mary must have been dazed by the head blow, which left a large gash on her forehead. The temporary incapacitation allowed the attacker to turn to other means to finish her off. Familiar, sadistic means.
He went into the kitchen. He first pulled open what turned out to be a junk drawer. Then he found what he’d come looking for in the drawer right next to it. There amid a pile of kitchen utensils he spied the knives. He grabbed two of them, in the process leaving a tiny drop of Mary’s blood on the counter. The little red blot would later help detectives piece together the tale of violence inside the Brumbacks’ home that day.
Knives in hand, the assailant returned to the living room. If Mary had been woozy from the blow to her head, seeing this man now brandishing the blades must have gotten her full attention. Because as a prosecutor would later put it, “She fought with every fiber she had in her.”
With her bare hands, the 65-year-old desperately warded off slash after slash from the knife-wielding killer, enduring what had to be extremely painful wounds. She would suffer more than 20 cuts to her hands and arms.
One slash carved a deep, 3-inch slit completely through her right wrist, the knife coming out the other side. At another point, she held up her left hand to block the knife. The result: Her left thumb was nearly severed — hacked all the way through the joint, attached only by a tendon. Mary’s blood flew all around — on to walls, boxes, tables and furniture, the teardrop-shaped stains later telling the story of Mary’s bitter struggle.
Ultimately, Mary could ward off the assault no more, the assailant able to fight his way in close and subdue her. He plunged the knife repeatedly into the right side of her neck, just below her ear and jaw line. An autopsy would later reveal the blade hit its intended target — severing her carotid artery.
Then the killer walked slowly back over to Roger. The leisurely pace of his stroll would later be forensically revealed by the trail of Mary’s blood that fell off the knife blade to the floor in perfectly round droplets.
Roger in all likelihood was already dead or near-dead as he lay slumped in the entryway. That would later be proven by the clean and orderly knife wounds left in his neck, contrasting to the half-dozen jagged ones left in the neck of his desperately struggling wife. No matter. Just to be sure he’d finished the job — and to leave his familiar, grisly mark — the killer six times plunged the blade into the right side of Roger’s neck, severing his carotid artery.
The killer then walked back to Mary, dropped the knife to the floor and rolled her over to make sure she, too, was dead. He could see his brutal work was done here.
Just like five years earlier, the mystery man’s visit to Omaha had not gone exactly as planned. For the second time, two people were left dead who weren’t his true, intended targets. Nonetheless, with his horrid deeds, he felt he’d again achieved a measure of vengeance, the price to be paid for the sabotaging of his career. In his twisted world view, they had brought this on themselves.
He climbed back into his Mercedes. Pulling out his phone again, he looked up where he could jump on the nearest freeway. He picked up Interstate 80, the cross-country freeway running through the city, and headed east for home.
In the Brumback home, blood silently pooled beneath the butchered couple, leaving a spot on the carpet beneath Mary the size of a manhole cover. Mary’s lifeless body lay just feet away from a small desk that was topped by a smiling 8-by-10 portrait of her beloved husband, his professional mug shot from early Creighton days.
Also atop the desk was a promotional folder for the moving company the Brumbacks had hired to ship their life belongings to their new home in West Virginia. On its front, in large letters:
“Life never stops moving.”
CHAPTER 9: ‘HE’S BACK’
Derek Mois ducked his head and shoulder under a strand of yellow police tape and strode toward the front door of the white, black-shuttered suburban home. The veteran homicide detective didn’t have a lot to go on at this point, only the initial officer’s report that there were two unknown deceased parties inside, an older man and woman.
Mois talked to the uniformed officer standing guard by the door, securing the crime scene. She pointed out across the way to a group of piano movers, one of whom had earlier placed the original 911 call.
On this Tuesday morning May 14 — two days after Mother’s Day — Jason Peterson and his two-man piano-moving crew had come to the house with a work order to haul away a no-longer-needed upright. Peterson had been curious when he got no answer after he repeatedly rang and knocked. And then he got downright suspicious when he pulled open the unlocked door to call out to anyone inside. That’s when he spotted a handgun magazine sitting on the threshold. He immediately told his crew to back off. Then he called the cops.
“I just think there’s something going on in this house,” he told the 911 operator. He was right. The first uniformed officer on the scene found a ghastly spectacle inside.
Mois and his partners all had the same initial thought when the first officer’s findings were called into the homicide bureau: a murder/suicide. They were basing that mostly on the home’s location in this serene, wooded and pricey subdivision, and the fact there were two bodies down, a man and a woman. They’d seen lots of past cases in nice neighborhoods where a lover’s quarrel ended with someone pulling a gun and then violently ending the relationship — as well as two lives. Or sometimes with an older couple like these victims, it was just a case of one or both deciding they were done living. But you never know. Mois was prepared for anything.
In the five years since he’d worked the 2008 Dundee murder case, much had changed for Mois. In fact, it wasn’t at all a given he’d still be working homicide, let alone showing up at this gruesome crime scene.
Mois had actually left homicide in 2009, finally deciding the 24/7 on-call demands and piles of extra hours were putting too much strain on his young family. He’d missed his son’s first Christmas. He’d missed family birthday parties. He’d canceled vacations. There were just too many moments and milestones he would never get back.
He transferred to a unit investigating other major crimes like bank robberies and rapes. Home life was more peaceful. But Mois also found the work just wasn’t the same.
It wasn’t long before Mois was begging the homicide lieutenant to take him back. He missed the challenge. He missed the special unit camaraderie that only those in homicide truly understood. “I knew I had to get back to those guys and those cases,” he’d later say. By 2011, he pounced on an opening and transferred back. This bloody work really does get into your blood. He knew it was part of him now.
Mois’ return to homicide was eased by the fact the unit had a new lieutenant, a mother hen who was big on family-life balance and well-attuned to the needs of her detectives. To ease the personal demands, Lt. Stefanie Fidone had reconstructed the dozen-detective unit to create three teams of four detectives. Most critically with the new set-u
p, only one of the three teams would be on call at any given time. That meant that unless his team was the next one up in rotation, Mois could go to sleep at night or go out to watch his kids’ ball games without fear of suddenly being called away.
Mois and other veteran detectives also came to see the change as far more conducive to successful investigations. With this system, all members of the team became intimate with every detail of their cases, regularly briefing as a group, working as a true team, and sticking with each case to the end. To Mois, it sure beat the scatter-shot way detectives were assigned to cases in the past.
Some detectives would later believe the Dundee investigation had suffered under the old way of business. Frontline investigators weren’t all on the same page and didn’t have the full picture. At best, maybe a sergeant had the details of what detectives collectively knew. There were too many opportunities for information to be lost in translation, never shared or forgotten.
As it happened, Mois’ team was next in line for this May 2013 call. So just as he had with Dundee five years earlier, he would handle the crime scene here. It was a fortuitous coincidence — one that would become particularly meaningful not long after Mois walked through the front door.
Mois had arrived with two other members from his four-detective team: Warner, his old partner dating back to Dundee, and detective Ryan Davis, the team’s newest member. The team’s fourth, Nick Herfordt, stayed back downtown after taking the initial call. He handled the paperwork needed to secure the search warrant so detectives could start combing through the home.
That warrant was now in hand. So while Davis immediately set off to canvas the neighborhood for witnesses, Mois and Warner walked past the ramp the piano movers had set up on the front steps and got their first look inside.
The detectives were careful not to disturb the handgun magazine, which was right on the threshold as they’d been warned. Mois also immediately spotted other things, including a single shell casing lying not far from the clip and a bullet hole in the main door.
