Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers

by Ann Rule

  Brand confided to Wray that he had kept drinking because that was the only way he could sleep. He had slept on the couch, waking up every three hours or so and drinking more.

  “I can’t believe I really messed things up. She didn’t deserve this….”

  Bill Brand was coming down from his alcoholic binge, and he began to confront the horror of what he had done.

  None of the detectives yet knew why.

  Back at the Brands’ apartment Hansen and Felt, along with Ericks, Oliver, and a police photographer, worked until almost four in the morning gathering evidence.

  Gary Felt found a single spent bullet lying on the ceiling light trim, just beyond where it had passed through the wall. They had to saw a square of plasterboard free to get at that one. Ericks discovered a small lead fragment on the hallway carpet. They knew that Brand had blown a .19 on the breathalyzer—that he had been legally intoxicated when he was arrested. But had he been intoxicated thirty-three hours earlier when Jackie Brand died?

  The tenant who lived in the apartment above the Brands told Hansen and Felt that she had heard a “thud-like sound, like someone had dropped something heavy” the day before, confirming that Jackie had been dead more than twenty-four hours when police entered her home.

  John Hansen realized he would have to work this case backwards. He knew who the murderer was; the killer had been waiting for the police. And the evidence they had gathered during the long night after Bill Brand was arrested only served to confirm what had happened. The question was why. Why on earth had Bill Brand shot his “beautiful wife” in the back of the head?

  Some of the answers began to come in from a dozen or more people who had received “The Bill and Jackie Letter.” With each passing day that monstrous document showed up in more and more mailboxes across the country. Bill Brand had spewed out his jealousy and suspicion, so long repressed, in the ugly letter, and then he had sent it to everyone he could think of that Jackie had known—her family, her friends, even men he suspected had cuckolded him. It was not enough that he had killed Jackie; he had wanted to destroy her image, too. He had tried to wipe away every trace of the real, loving woman. Most of those who received the letter were horrified and sickened. Some were disgusted. Some—who had barely known Jackie Brand—were merely bewildered.

  In talking with her relatives and friends, John Hansen found nothing to substantiate Jackie’s alleged infidelities. Rather, friends who had received the letter gave statements that were just the opposite. Whenever they had come to Seattle and tried to spend some time with Jackie, her ex-stewardess friends said, she was always looking at her watch, anxious to get back to Bill. On the very rare occasions when they did meet Bill he was pleasant enough, but disinterested, obviously bored with their company.

  “Jackie told me Bill unplugged their phone—so they wouldn’t be bothered by outsiders,” one woman remarked.

  Bill had cloistered Jackie, keeping her just for himself, but she hadn’t seemed to mind it. Hansen didn’t find one witness who could remember that Jackie ever complained about her husband’s suffocating affection. She still loved him. Nor could Hansen find anyone who believed Jackie had cheated on Bill Brand.

  Two of Jackie’s girlfriends had spoken to her a day or so before she died, and she had told them that Bill was going to fly to Alaska on the 21st—and that she would be taking him to the airport. That made sense. The suitcase found next to Jackie’s body was packed with men’s clothing.

  Hansen read “The Bill and Jackie Letter” again and again. It was apparent, even with Brand’s exaggerations, that the two had been a part of each other’s lives for a long, long time.

  They had, indeed, finally been married. Happy ever after.

  It wasn’t going to be easy for Hansen to ferret out what had gone wrong. Sobered up in jail, Bill Brand declined to talk. He would only say—as if John Hansen could give him some answers—“I’d just like to understand why it all happened.”

  Hansen was silent, and the room seemed to hum with tension. If anyone should know why it happened, it was the man in jail coveralls, the man who had known Jackie for almost three decades. But Bill Brand just shook his head as if he, too, was bewildered. Perhaps he was. Perhaps he was beginning to try to save his own skin.

  Finally Brand sighed and said, “I’ll be able to sort it all out in a few hours.” And then he said he wanted an attorney. John Hansen ended the interview.

  As John Hansen interviewed Jackie’s friends and Bill Brand’s business associates he was told that Brand had once been extremely wealthy in Fairbanks. At some point, however, his fortune had begun to slide. He had suffered severe business reversals in the late seventies when high interest rates began to cripple the construction business. Bill Brand had finally been forced to file for three separate bankruptcies—a personal bankruptcy due to his guarantees to his bank and supplier debts on behalf of his companies, and two business bankruptcies. Along with his own financial disaster, Brand’s first wife sacrificed most of her holdings to settle Brand’s debts.

  From 1977 on, Bill Brand had suffered continual financial reverses. His vast fortune dwindled. The Alaskan oil pipeline had gone on line in 1975, and Brand had counted on a natural gas pipeline to follow. It never happened, though, and interest rates kept climbing.

  Amid the ashes of what had once been a thriving business Bill divorced his first wife, moved to Seattle, married Jackie, and began a business that was scarcely more than a front to conceal his growing desperation. He had begun with high hopes that he could earn a good living again by helping Washington businesses that wanted to branch out into Alaska. He still had savvy; he still had contacts. But the only real money Brand had coming in was from leases he held in Alaska.

  Jackie had no idea how bad things were. Bill had always showered her with jewelry and presents, and he worried that she would leave him if she found out how close he was to financial disaster. So he didn’t tell her. Even though he wasn’t doing any business at all, he left their apartment each day, carrying a briefcase. At the office he phoned friends or read magazines. Sometimes he chatted with people in neighboring offices. In truth, Bill simply marked time until he could rush home to Jackie.

  If only he had confided in her, she would have understood.

  Jackie knew they were living off his prior investments, but Bill had always had so much money, she assumed he had a stake that would see them through any hard times.

  But failure bred failure. Bill Brand, stressed to the breaking point by his business losses, by the fact that he had almost reached the limit on his many credit cards, by his overriding fear that he would lose Jackie, became impotent.

  Although she had seldom confided in anyone about her marriage, Jackie did mention Bill’s sexual problems to one of her two Seattle friends. She also said it was no big deal. “I like so many other things about my Bill that it really does not matter to me.”

  One friend told John Hansen that Jackie Brand had always struck her as a woman so straight and puritanical that she was “almost sexless,” and that she couldn’t imagine Jackie in the role of the harlot Brand described in his final letter. No, she assured Hansen, a husband who could no longer make love wouldn’t have been the end of the world for Jackie. Not at all.

  But it had been for Brand. He had consulted sex therapists, trying to regain his potency. Hansen found a desk planner in Brand’s office that went back two years, and its pages were full of coded notations about business meetings and about sex. He had listed both his failures and his successes. Bill Brand had been obsessed with his sexual performance. Perhaps in an attempt to prove himself, he had been unfaithful to Jackie, even during the times in his marriage when he had accused her of cheating on him.

  Bill Brand’s sexual notations and the derogatory notes about Jackie were all written in red ink. Every sexual encounter, however brief, had been noted in Brand’s books. There were also a number of references to pornographic movies Brand had seen, right down to the titles and the date
s he had viewed them.

  Along with all of this Hansen read through medical records that showed that Bill Brand had consulted physicians more and more frequently, worried about his eyes, his lungs, his heart, his blood pressure. The business and sexual performance strain Brand felt had quite clearly converted into physical symptoms. Beyond that, there was the very real possibility that Brand was falling apart physically. He overindulged in everything; that had worked when he was younger, but he was almost sixty, and his body was failing him.

  It was easier now for Hansen to see what had gone wrong. Bill Brand had feared he was losing those things that he perceived Jackie wanted from him—money and sexual performance. He was no longer the vigorous young man she remembered from 1958.

  Brand had been gripped in a nightmarish midlife crisis blown all out of proportion. Despite all the years they had been involved with each other, Brand clearly hadn’t known Jackie at all. He didn’t know his wife well enough to trust her with his pain. And she obviously had known virtually nothing about what was going on in his head.

  Something had to happen, some explosion, some end to it.

  And tragically, something had.

  John Hansen met another of Jackie’s friends a week after Jackie died. This friend had known Jackie, she said, since they grew up together in Minnesota. She said she had not approved when Jackie married Bill. He had been overly possessive, and rude and overbearing toward her family and friends.

  “I realized I could not enjoy Jackie’s company when Bill was around. I resorted to meeting her for lunch or talking with her on the phone. But if you called and left a message for her with him, he wouldn’t pass it on.”

  Jackie had called her friend at 5:00 p.m. on either the 19th or 20th of February to say that Bill was flying to Fairbanks on Thursday for business and wouldn’t be back until Sunday. Jackie had invited her friend over to the Bellevue apartment for dinner, but the woman said she had other plans. They had agreed to meet at a restaurant for lunch the following week.

  Instead of having dinner with Jackie Brand in her apartment on February 22, the friend had received “The Bill and Jackie Letter” by Priority Mail and read it with growing horror.

  Two of Jackie’s other friends said that they had always felt that Bill treated his wife tenderly. One friend had last seen Jackie only six days before she died. During this last meeting she had been a little surprised when Jackie commented, “I would like to have had somebody more handsome, but you know, Bill is so good to me.”

  It had been almost as if Jackie was trying to convince herself that she had made the right choice when she committed her life to Bill Brand.

  This friend received the letter on the 22nd, too. “When I read it I knew instinctively that Jackie was dead; I immediately called their house, starting at 6:25. I left messages on the tape machine, but never got an answer….”

  February 21, 1985, had been Bill Brand’s cutoff day. He had told Jackie he would be flying to Fairbanks. He bought a ticket, but he never really expected to fly to Alaska that day. He had hoped against improbable hope that he would make a deal, extend a lease, do something so that Jackie wouldn’t know they were flat broke. If nothing happened by the 21st, they would both have to die. To Bill Brand it was that simple.

  Nothing happened. All Brand’s money was gone. He couldn’t even charge a meal on a credit card. Jackie didn’t know. He had lived a lie for so long that Bill was able on this one last day to paste a serene look on his face so that she wouldn’t know. He mailed his hate-filled letters, a dozen or more of them.

  There was no turning back now.

  When Thursday morning came they both dressed. Jackie packed Bill’s bag, stubbed out her cigarette, grabbed a cup of tea for the ride to the airport, and walked down the hall ahead of Bill on her way to drive him to SeaTac Airport.

  Bill raised the gun. He fired. Jackie spun around, a look of pain and shock on her face, and Bill thought for one crazy second that she might be having one of her headaches. She had terrible headaches. He fired again.

  And Jackie died. She never knew that Bill had no more money. For a man who had failed at so many things, Bill Brand had managed to succeed in this one tragic effort. This one useless, senseless act of cruelty.

  Bill’s note to his executor was succinct. He wrote that he had supported Jackie since November 1, 1975.

  It was Brand money that purchased all the furniture and appliances that are in the apartment. That includes a Maytag washer and dryer and a Sears freezer…. Also, I brought to the marriage a Unigard policy…. At the time we were married, I made my wife beneficiary, but on the 12th of December, I signed the enclosed change of beneficiary statement….

  I should make clear to you…that my wife never adopted the Jessup children which will severely limit any claims they might think they have for any of her possessions….

  Bill had never accepted Jackie’s stepchildren. He saw them, too, as interlopers, and he wanted to be sure they got nothing. He wanted his body cremated and sent to relatives. He left Jackie’s remains to her family.

  Bill Brand would have preferred that Jackie’s family received nothing more. But John Hansen made a decision to give the victim’s family the few pieces of gold jewelry that the medical examiner had removed from her body. That was all they would have left of her—that and the despicably savage letter from Bill.

  It was over.

  But of course, it really wasn’t. Bill Brand had had the courage to kill the woman he claimed to love beyond life itself, but he had not had the courage to commit suicide.

  John Henry Browne, his defense attorney, had Bill Brand examined by a psychiatrist to see if he had been, under the law, responsible for his actions on February 21, 1985.

  Brand’s diagnosis was that he was in the grip of a major clinical depression and that his responses were indicative of a narcissistic personality disorder. The former was understandable, given the circumstances; the latter had probably been a part of Bill Brand his whole life. The narcissist focuses always on himself. He is not crazy, either legally or medically; he simply cannot empathize with other human beings. He expects special favors and views those around him as extensions of himself—his to summon or to send away at will. Jackie’s main job was to admire Bill and offer him unconditional support. As all narcissists do, Bill alternately overidealized and devalued her.

  Jackie made Bill whole. He owned her, and he could not let her find out that he was a failure. “Unconsciously,” his examiner wrote, “his need to kill her represented his need to protect himself from her harsh judgment. His life…was dominated by her attentions and approval, from which he sustained his major—if not his sole—emotional support.”

  No one would ever say that Jackie had not done her best to make Bill Brand happy. She shut herself away from everyone but Bill. It wasn’t enough. Nothing ever could have been.

  Bill Brand had a profound personality disorder, and he was depressed—but he was not crazy. His examiner, a physician from the University of Washington School of Medicine, determined that Bill Brand had indeed been aware of his actions when he shot his wife in the head, and that he had had the ability to distinguish right from wrong. He could not hope to plead innocent by reason of insanity.

  Bill Brand was convicted of second-degree murder in King County Superior Court Judge Jim Bates’s courtroom in February, 1986. Sentencing was delayed as Defense Attorney John Henry Browne argued that medical tests had revealed a degree of brain damage. It was a defense that might have worked six or eight years later, when medical experts understood how devastating steroids could be to both the physical and mental health of men who took them. Bill Brand, panicked by impotence, had been taking steroids. He had also been taking Halcyon pills to sleep. The synergesic (cumulative) effect of combining those drugs—not to mention his excessive use of alcohol and other medications he was taking—might well have heightened the paranoia he felt over losing Jackie.

  It would have been an interesting courtroom battle
. Crimes committed while someone is under the influence of so-called recreational drugs and/or alcohol do not usually go unpunished. A “diminished capacity” defense doesn’t usually work because the defendant has chosen to render himself less than capable. Might an insanity plea have convinced a jury, given the new information that has come out on steroids? Perhaps. But then there was the whole quarter of a century of background of Bill Brand’s possessive hold over Jackie—a thread going back to the days when he was young and alert and vigorous.

  At any rate, John Henry Browne, who is one of Seattle’s most sought-after defense attorneys, did not yet have the final decision on the negative effects of steroids to argue with in 1986.

  In the late summer of 1986 Bill Brand was sentenced to thirteen years in prison. Due to his increasingly poor health and diminishing mental capacity his sentence was appealed, and he was released on October 11, 1991. He was suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, better known as emphysema.

  In the summer of 1993 Bill Brand, now sixty-eight, was admitted to the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Seattle. He died there at ten minutes past eleven in the evening on July 16th. Brand’s death certificate listed him as a widower, and he was indeed that. Jackie had been dead for eight years.

  Jackie had told him long before that they would ultimately be together. And they were—but for such a bitterly short time.

  “Somewhere, Someday, Somehow” had come and gone.