Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (24 page)

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?”

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 dates 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.