by Ann Rule
Barring an accident, however, Jackie Brand wasn’t likely to precede Bill in death; she was much younger than he was—forty-three to his fifty-nine—and it was Bill who had a number of health problems.
All things being equal, Jackie would outlive Bill. That was a possibility she had considered and found unimportant when she married Bill in 1982. Whatever time they might have together would be worth the pain of widow-hood later.
On February 22, 1985, Bellevue Police Lt. S.M. Bourgette received a phone call from the police dispatcher. They had received a worried call from Regis Caulfield,* Bill Brand’s insurance agent. Caulfield had been alerted by another business associate of Brand’s, Thomas Donley.* Both men had reason to be concerned; they had each received long identical letters from Brand which also contained his last will and testament. Caulfield had only recently tried to talk Brand out of changing his will. Bill had wanted to exclude Jackie completely and leave everything to his daughters instead. Besides that, Bill Brand had taken out an additional half million dollars worth of insurance.
After they received the bizarre letters from Bill Brand both Donley and Caulfield had attempted to phone his apartment, but no one answered. They had then contacted the apartment house manager. The manager went to the Brand apartment and knocked, and finally Bill Brand, his hair tousled, had come to the door. He assured the manager everything was “fine.” The manager hadn’t seen Jackie Brand but reported back that nothing was wrong at the apartment.
Not satisfied, Regis Caulfield had driven to Bellevue. It was nearly 4:30 when he got to the Brands’ apartment house. Both Jackie’s and Bill’s cars, a Plymouth Arrow and a Mercury Cougar, were parked outside. He knocked at their door, but no one answered. He went to the manager’s office and used the phone there. This time Bill’s answering machine picked up his call.
Worried, Caulfield had called the Bellevue Police Department. Both he and Tom Donley had received an odd ten-page typewritten letter, with “Bill and Jackie” scrawled in Brand’s handwriting across the top. It was mimeographed, and it was a scalding exposé chronicling the couple’s twenty-five-year relationship, but mostly decrying Jackie Brand’s lack of morals and her betrayal of Bill. Even to a layman’s perception the letter was sick and full of rage. It was as if Bill Brand had attempted to obliterate Jackie with words, revealing the most intimate things about her to virtual strangers.
But what alarmed Caulfield and Donley were not the slurs on Jackie’s fidelity. The document had ended, “Inas-much as my wife has died with me, I direct that she shall be conclusively deemed not to have survived me.”
Lt. Bourgette and Patrol Officer Dennis Dingfield arrived at the Northside Apartments at 5:30 p.m. on February 22nd. The day had been gloomy and cloudy, and it was almost full dark out.
Regis Caulfield pointed out the Cougar and Plymouth Arrow parked in the lot. “The first time I looked through the window,” Caulfield said, “I saw a glass with some liquor in it—when I came back twenty minutes later, it had been moved. Somebody’s in there.”
Bourgette and Dingfield noted that the Brands’ apartment occupied the entire lower half of the south side of the building. Apprised of the floor plan of the apartment by the manager, they could see light in the kitchen, the dining/living room area, and a back bedroom. And then they saw someone walking around inside. It was a tall man with silver hair.
Dingfield asked the police dispatcher to try to call the apartment and gave both of Brand’s numbers. The phone rang, but the man inside didn’t answer. The second number was the answering machine. The dispatcher left a message that the police were outside and wanted Brand to come to the door. Bourgette, watching, saw the man inside walk to the machine, rewind it, and listen to the message.
But he did not come to the door. The lights inside were turned off now, save for one in the back bedroom and a stove clock light.
Bourgette called for backup and got a key from the manager. He could still see someone walking around inside the apartment, and then the tall man drinking from a glass.
He could not see a woman.
The Bellevue Police thought they might have a hostage situation, and they quickly surrounded the apartment building. Armed officers covered all its perimeters. Hostage negotiators Tom Wray, Cherie Bay, James Kowalczyk, and E.O. Mott, led by Lt. Mark Ericks, were briefed on the situation.
Thomas Donley, still surprised that he had been designated the executor of Bill Brand’s estate, was convinced that Brand’s will meant “There will be no tomorrow.” Caulfield, the insurance agent, knew very little about Bill Brand. He knew only that Brand was married to a second wife, that he was a “self-made, very hardheaded man” whose huge Alaska business empire had collapsed, and that all he had left were real estate holdings. Brand was described by both informants as an awesome drinker.
They waited. Minutes and hours passed. If Jackie Brand was inside, perhaps unable to get past Bill and come out, they didn’t want to rush the apartment and give Brand a chance to carry out the promise in his “will.”
Dennis Dingfield had not taken his eyes off the dimly lighted rooms inside the apartment for even a minute. After hours of observation he spotted the man inside crawling on his hands and knees. He would crawl for a while and then either lie or fall down. He appeared to be injured, or perhaps about to pass out from an overdose of some kind. He no longer looked capable of harming anyone. Bourgette called for an aid car.
At the same time, 2126 hours (9:26 p.m.), the TAG (Tactical Arms Group) team advised over police frequencies that there was a Code 4 at the Brand residence. Code 4 meant that everything was stable. It did not necessarily mean that everything had turned out well.
And then the TAG team went in. The man inside was standing as they went through the door, but only with great difficulty.
It was Bill Brand. He was alive—but extremely intoxicated.
Dennis Dingfield looked beyond the man frozen in the TAG team’s flashlights. Dingfield’s breath caught in his throat. Beyond the man, down the hallway, Dingfield spotted someone else, a woman lying motionless on the carpet. There was a dark red circle spread out around her body.
Too late.
Maybe it had been too late four hours earlier when they first surrounded the apartment building. It would have made the police feel better, somehow, to know that.
Dingfield cuffed Brand and led him to a police car to drive him back to headquarters, where E. O. Mott and Tom Wray were waiting to talk to him.
The investigation at the apartment was handed over to the detectives. Sadly, there was no hurry now.
Detective John Hansen had worked some of the more bizarre homicide cases that had begun to proliferate in Bellevue, the sleepy little town of the 1940s that had become one of Washington State’s largest cities. Hansen was a stubborn, even dogged, instinctive investigator with flashes of brilliance. Tall and husky, with a voice like a bear, Hansen rarely smiled—unless the conversation turned to hunting dogs or his wife and children. In repose his face was handsome, but closed off; no one ever knew what he was really thinking.
Bill and Jackie Brand and John Hansen moved in different worlds, even though they all lived in Bellevue. Hansen was active in his church and spent whatever time he wasn’t on duty with his family.
However, Hansen now began to be intimately acquainted with the tangled story of the Brands’ lives, probably better acquainted than anyone else ever had. He would be the principal investigator assigned to Case No. 85-B-02260.
Hansen had stood outside the Brand apartment since 6:30. One paramedic from the Bellevue Fire Department had been allowed in to confirm that the woman inside was beyond human help, and then the scene had been sealed. As soon as Bill Brand was taken out Hansen and Detective Gary Felt stepped in.
The woman lay facedown on the hallway carpet. She wore a brown plaid skirt, a yellow silk blouse, and a brown corduroy jacket. She was also wearing high heels, stockings, and black gloves. Her makeup was perfect. A brown and tan comforter, which th
e fire department medic had lifted from her body, lay at her feet. A shiny briefcase was there, too.
John Hansen touched the calf of one of the woman’s legs; the flesh was icy and stiff. The victim had been dead a long time. Hours at the very least.
The dead woman looked as though she had been headed for a trip; a camera on a red strap, a key ring, and a large blue purse rested on the floor beside her. A tweed suitcase was further down the hall. A capped container of tea lay where it had dropped from her hand. Her feet pointed toward the front door. She looked as if she had fallen straight backward, felled instantly by someone or something.
She could not have known she was about to die.
Although a layman might wonder why it was necessary to have permission to investigate what almost surely was a murder, the detectives needed a search warrant to move freely around the apartment. Hansen immediately listed his reasons for a search warrant and obtained one via telephone from District Court Judge Brian Gain. With this in hand Hansen and Detective Gary Felt began to search the apartment.
The apartment was impeccably furnished, as if it had been done by a designer—or by someone with natural talent and a loving hand. The living room was done in shades of red and white, with objets d’art, pillows, and paintings all carrying out the same theme.
Someone had apparently been sleeping on the floral and satin striped couch. There was a rumpled quilt there. A glass of scotch, its ice not yet melted, was leaving a ring on the shiny waxed surface of the teak coffee table. Beside the glass there was a cocked handgun. A .357.
Ironically, the walls of the hallway where Jackie Brand lay dead were hung with gentle pictures of children and fields of flowers. All the furnishings were expensive. All the pictures were of flowers and children and, of course, of Bill and Jackie.
Bill had been proud of his affluence and his expensive tastes; he had discussed that in “The Bill and Jackie Letter” that Regis Caulfield and Tom Conley had turned over to the investigative team. The letter would answer many questions, but it would leave more unanswered. Brand had written of the Bellevue apartment and of the time when Jackie first agreed to live there and wait for him to “take care of things in Fairbanks.”
“We found the apartment that suited our needs, leased it, and headed for downtown Seattle to shop for the furniture to furnish it. On one day, we bought for three bedrooms, a devan [sic], patio furniture, and a new car. When we got home, she threw up because we spent so much money.”
Bill Brand seemed to have liked to communicate by writing—of one kind or another. The apartment was littered with notes. Felt and Hansen gazed around the apartment and saw them. They were everywhere. Notes from Bill to Jackie hung from door jambs, and fluttered where they were taped on cabinets. Brand had even taped them to the wall above her body.
They were love notes of a sort. Some of them were requests for sex; others were weird affirmations of Brand’s devotion to the woman who had apparently been his wife for almost three years, his lover for twenty.
One note dated February 11, 1985—ten days earlier—read: “My weekends are great because of you. Monday comes and that means I have to leave you—I hate that. I can barely wait for the next weekend. That tells you what my life is all about. Love is what you and I are all about and that’s what makes us go. I’ll see you this noon. Be kinky—wear it to lunch. Bill.”
The detectives shook their heads. What had he meant? Probably some Frederick’s of Hollywood piece of lingerie he had bought Jackie. If the note had been there ten days, that probably meant that no one but Jackie and Bill ever entered this apartment. They couldn’t imagine that she would have left such an explicit note for someone else to read. She must have felt like a prisoner.
Hansen and Felt moved around the apartment. Hansen noted a scuff on the hallway of the kitchen area, just a slight gouge in the plasterboard, probably a bullet ricochet. He saw an ashtray and a calendar on the dining room table. Bending to read, he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. The last entry on the calendar was penciled neatly into the block for February 21st. Yesterday.
“Jackie passed away at 13:10 hrs.”
There was a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label scotch and an empty bottle of Bulloch scotch in the kitchen, and at the other end of the counter a long row of vitamin bottles next to a pack of Winstons. That must have been Jackie Brand’s choice. A last cigarette, a Winston, was stubbed out in a crystal ashtray, its filter scarlet with fresh lipstick.
Liquor, cigarettes, and vitamins. Everything in this place was a contradiction. Guns, flowers, blood, love notes.
Trying to look at it all rationally and with as little emotion as possible, John Hansen deduced what had probably happened. For whatever grotesque reason, Bill Brand had shot his wife in the back of the head as she was walking ahead of him toward the front door. The cup of tea in her hand indicated she had been totally oblivious to the danger behind her.
After she was dead Brand had apparently calmly jotted down the time of her death on his calendar, as if he were marking some business appointment.
Then he would have hit the scotch, trying, perhaps, to get the courage to shoot himself, too. He had indicated in the letters he sent out that they would both be dead by the time the letters reached their destinations. The .357 Magnum six-shot revolver was cocked and ready there on the coffee table, with three cylinder chambers empty.
Deputy Medical Examiner Corinne Fligner checked for the wounds of entry and exit. She determined that two .357 slugs had struck Jackie’s head; one on the right side had entered between her ear and the top of the head and penetrated her brain. A fatal wound. At the back of the victim’s skull a shot had simply grazed Jackie’s head.
Barring an eyewitness, it is impossible to reconstruct exactly how any homicide occurs—but John Hansen could almost visualize what had happened here.
The location of the wound at the rear of the head—plus the gun debris that surrounded it—indicated that this was the first wound, fired from a short distance away. The shooter would have been just behind Jackie in the hall. This bullet appeared to have deflected off the back of her skull and lodged in the hallway ceiling directly ahead of her.
The direction of fire of the fatal wound was different. Its path went from front to back, right to left and very slightly downward.
When the first shot was fired and it grazed Jackie Brand’s head its force would probably have spun her around to face the man with the gun. Her Bill.
The second bullet was fired from farther away but had pierced her brain, killing her instantly. Would she have had time to form a thought? Had she looked into her killer’s eyes when she spun around?
No one would ever know.
At Bellevue police headquarters Detectives E. O. Mott and Tom Wray observed Bill Brand. His face was flushed, and he appeared intoxicated. He wore a white dress shirt with blue pin stripes, buttoned at the cuffs and tucked into his dark blue slacks. His clothing had clearly cost a great deal; the labels showed the garments had been purchased at Seattle’s best stores. He was shoeless, but he wore dark socks.
Alone with the detectives in the interview room, Brand suddenly began talking about football and the Seattle Seahawks as if nothing unusual had happened at all. More likely, he didn’t want to remember the tableau he had left behind in the apartment he shared with Jackie.
Mott introduced himself and Wray and waited for directions from Lt. Mark Ericks before they proceeded. The guy seemed so drunk, they wondered if they would be able to get any sense out of him. Ericks and John Hansen called from the crime scene to ask that Bill Brand’s hands be “bagged” and that he remain handcuffed until a neutron activation analysis test could be performed to determine if he had indeed fired the .357. They also asked that a nitrate test be done to see what would show up on swabbings of his hands, and that a breathalyzer reading be taken before Wray and Mott proceeded with any questioning.
Gary Felt had advised Brand of his rights under Miranda before he
was driven away from his apartment. However, when Brand suddenly blurted to Mott and Wray that he had shot his “beautiful wife,” both detectives tried again to advise him of his rights to be absolutely sure that he understood.
Brand commented that he understood his rights but said he was quite willing to talk and answer questions. He said he was sorry for shooting his wife. He had shot her, he recalled, about noon the day before. She had been headed for the front door, and he was following her when he shot her twice. She had fallen to the floor, and he had left her there.
“Why did you kill her?” Mott asked quietly.
Brand did not answer directly.
“He only indicated that she was a very beautiful woman and that I wouldn’t understand things about her, nor would I understand things about him,” Mott wrote in his report.
“I got nothing to hide,” Brand blurted. “I murdered my wife. I shot the most beautiful woman in the world.”
And then he had begun to drink scotch.
Bill Brand was still drunk, twice as drunk as required in order to be considered legally drunk in the State of Washington. His blood alcohol was .20; his breathalyzer was .19.
He rambled on about killing his “beautiful wife,” interspersing his memories of Jackie Brand’s murder with a chillingly calm discussion of football. He shook his head back and forth, and his eyes filled with tears. He acknowledged that he was intoxicated and promised he would give a written statement when he sobered up—“tomorrow.”
Brand stared at Detective Tom Wray and blurted that Wray looked just like a Seattle Seahawks football star. Then he sat silent for long minutes, tears welling up and beading at the corners of his eyes. Brand finally looked up at Wray and said, “I murdered my wife about twenty-four hours ago. I just got bombed—Johnnie Walker Red…. I used a .38 or a .357 and shot [pointing his left index finger under his chin]. I loaded five rounds—.38s, I think. There are three left, the gun’s on the table, you know…. Who were those guys who barged into my home?”
