Fatal Friends, Deadly Neighbors and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  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.”

  Esme Svenson stressed that the Bramhalls hadn’t been upset in the least on the last night she saw them alive. They’d enjoyed their dinner and then Mr. Bramhall lit the one cigar he allowed himself each evening.

  “How about anyone strange in the neighborhood? Anyone you yourself might have seen?”

  “Well, there was a knock on the door Tuesday afternoon and I went to the door. A strange man was there, asking for Mr. Bramhall. I told him he’d be back around four thirty. I waited for him to say something, but he just stared at me.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Young, early twenties, quite tall, casually dressed, with a mustache and a beard.”

  “Do you know the Addisons next door?”

  “I know the couple and the younger son—the one who rides a motorcycle—but I’d never seen this man before.”

  Esme said she’d cleaned up the kitchen and left, as the elderly couple were watching television in the den. She’d driven home in Olive Bramhall’s Oldsmobile. She’d neither seen nor heard anyone outside as she left. She said the garage door closed and locked automatically, and the only time the light was on there was when someone needed to fetch something, since it was dark out there without the overhead light on—even in the daytime.

  Detective Dick Reed received a second phone call from the Bramhalls’ insurance agent. “I just remembered. Olive Bramhall filed an insurance claim in May sometime for some rare pearl earrings. She thought they’d been stolen by a maid they had back in March.”

  “Would that be Ms. Svenson?”

  “Oh, no. I think it was the woman they had just before her. Mrs. Bramhall felt that the woman was stealing from them and let her go.”

  That was something to ponder. If Esme Svenson had a key to the Bramhall home, the former housekeeper had probably had one, too, and could have had a copy made. The agent thought the fired housekeeper had moved north to Bellingham.

  Detectives Boatman and Baughman talked with Cal Addison next door again, as well as the caretaker and one of the more permanent residents of the Moonie chapter. The Moonies had had a party the evening before and had heard nothing from the Bramhall residence, although they said their relations with the old couple had always been most civil.

  Addison said that he, his wife, and his younger son had been out for most of the evening. The elder son, Rory,* had come home about 5:30 to pick up some clothes and then left their house late with one of his high school friends, Rich Copley.*

  Addison admitted readily that Rory, twenty-three, had had many problems since the death of his mother. His first wife had suffered from manic depression. Tragically, after ten years of fighting the chaotic mental disease, she had despaired, and committed suicide in 1975 by jumping from the top floor of a hotel.

  Rory had been crushed by his mother’s suicide and the brilliant boy had been in and out of mental institutions ever since. Only the day before the double murder of the Addisons’ neighbors, August 2, Rory had been released from jail with the stipulation that he undergo “behavior modification” at Western State Hospital.

  “His probation officer drove him down there,” Cal Addison said, “but I was astounded to get a call from Rory yesterday afternoon about five saying that he hadn’t been admitted. He wanted to come home, but I’d been told by therapists that that wouldn’t be good for him. I said he could come home and get his things, but he’d have to go to the YMCA, or a hotel. He was here when his stepmother and I left to go out for the evening.”

  At 5 P.M. on August 3, Rich Copley came into headquarters to talk with detectives Don Strunk and Paul Eblin. Copley said that he had, indeed, spent the previous evening with his old friend Rory Addison.

  “He called me about seven thirty and said he wanted to go out. I got there at ten minutes to nine and we went to a restaurant in the University District to have a few drinks. I bought him a hamburger and a milk shake because he was almost broke, and he had to pay for a hotel. Then we just drove around until ten thirty when I took him back to his folks’ place.”

  “How did he seem?” Strunk asked. “Nervous or upset or anything like that?”

  Rich Copley shook his head. “Not at all. Rory was in a good mood—better than he’s been for a long time. We waited for some of his clothes to get out of the dryer and then we packed up his things and I took him to the Savoy H
otel, where I helped him check in. It’s a cheap hotel, and he only had about twelve dollars that his dad had given him.”

  Copley said that when he first arrived at Rory’s home, he saw his friend coming from a trash barrel that was located between the Addison home and the Bramhall residence.

  “You were with him all evening?”

  “Absolutely. From ten minutes to nine until about midnight. And he even called me a couple of times before I got there wondering what was taking me so long.”

  The homicide investigators considered the time element. Esme Svenson had seen the Bramhalls alive and well about eight, and Rich Copley came to pick up Rory Addison at ten minutes to nine. At that time, Addison had been cheerful, dressed neatly, and busy cleaning up trash for his family. It hardly seemed possible that he could have committed two such bloody murders, cleaned up, and made several phone calls all in the space of less than an hour.

  Add to that the fact that Rory apparently liked the Bramhalls, who had lived next door to him for seventeen years, ever since he was six years old.

  Paul Eblin and Don Strunk checked the Savoy Hotel and the desk clerk verified that Rory Addison had checked in at midnight on the second, but was no longer there.

  At seven that evening, Rich Copley called again and said he’d heard from Rory and that he was visiting at the apartment of a strictly platonic girlfriend—Sarah Binford.*

  “He seemed fine,” Copley related. The two detectives attempted to find Rory Addison at the Binford apartment, but found no one at home. They left a card, asking for a call.

  They went to the Addison home. They wanted to examine the trousers that Rory was wearing on the night of the murder. They found that the pants were clean and free of any obvious bloodstains. But they realized Rory had been doing his laundry that night, and a cold water wash would have easily obliterated any of the scarlet stains.

  Claire Addison,* Rory’s stepmother, said she had received information from a friend of the Bramhalls. This was a woman who said she’d talked to the couple at 9:30 P.M. on August 2. This would seem to entirely eliminate Rory Addison as a suspect. He was with Rich Copley at the Blue Moon Tavern at that time. Rory’s stepmother gave Don Strunk and Paul Eblin the woman’s phone number.

  Leads continued to come in to police headquarters from citizens who had read about the murders in stories with banner headlines in both of Seattle’s daily papers. One woman reported that she had seen a bearded man carrying what appeared to be a gun walking down the Bramhall driveway on the afternoon of August 2 around 1 P.M.

  But many others had seen Olive and Burle alive hours after that. Had the man with the gun returned later? And had she really seen a gun or could it have been a shovel, rake, or other garden tool?

  Another informant called to say he had been concerned about two men in a white Volvo he had noticed in Windermere. “They were staring up at the Bramhall house,” he said. “Right on that same afternoon of the second.”

  None of the leads was easy to check out. The second tip, however, was dismissed when the two men themselves called in; they were Realtors viewing the vacant property next door.

  Someone—perhaps two someones—had battered the Bramhalls with the five-pound sledgehammer and the fireplace poker. During the postmortem exam, Dr. Reay found that the poker fit exactly into the wounds on Olive Bramhall’s skull.

  Who could have wanted the kindhearted couple dead? The only logical motive would have been a home-invasion robbery. And yet nothing was missing. The cause behind a double homicide remained inexplicable.

  As the days passed, more calls came in to homicide, and there were many new suspects. Detectives traced them to their sources, but none of them panned out.

  And who was the man who’d called 911 to report the murders? He had not come forward. Still, he seemed to be a likely candidate for the “persons of interest” roster.

  The probe turned again to twenty-three-year-old Rory Addison, even though he had been virtually eliminated as a suspect.

  The Seattle investigators called the woman who’d talked to the Bramhalls on the evening they died. Regretfully, she admitted that she had been mistaken about the time.

  “I was going by which show was on television,” she said, “but I was wrong; I talked to Burle and Olive at about eight fifteen—not at nine thirty.”

  That startling information meant Rory Addison’s alibi had evaporated. According to his friend’s and parents’ timetable, he had been alone next door to the victims for almost an hour after their housekeeper left.

  Detectives were determined to talk to him, but they were having trouble locating the tall suspect. One night when the night shift came on for third watch, Craig VandePutte, Gary Fowler, and Dick Reed went to Sarah Binford’s apartment. She wasn’t home.

  Next they checked the Bramhalls’ house again, this time with a search warrant in hand. They found the couple’s wills. Not surprisingly, they had made generous donations to various charities. In their final documents, the childless couple stipulated that everything else they owned would go to their few relatives.

  While opening doors, Dick Reed found a small ball-peen hammer in the kitchen’s broom closet. That was odd. If Burle Bramhall had loaned it out the night he died, what was it doing back in the closet?

  Esme Svenson told Reed that she was absolutely sure that this was the hammer the “mister” had loaned to someone.

  It had no blood on it at all.

  The tips continued to flood the homicide unit’s phones. A woman who lived nearby in exclusive Windermere reported that she had received a threatening phone call several months earlier.

  “I don’t have any idea who it was,” she said. “But I could tell it was a young male. He told me I was evil. It truly frightened me—but he never called again. I finally figured it was some kind of prank.”

  She volunteered to listen to the tape of the 911 call to see if it might be the same voice, but she didn’t recognize it.

  A Seattle transit driver told Dick Reed he had driven a small, dark-complexioned man in “tacky” clothing to the Windermere area on the morning of August 3, and that the man had had a slip of paper with the Bramhall address on it. This was about 8:30. This information was, of course, about the workman from the Millionairs’ Club whom detectives had already cleared.

  Reed received a call from Cal Addison. “Rich Copley told me he picked Rory up and drove him to the Union Gospel Mission on the night of August third.”

  A quick check at the mission showed that Rory had been there the second night after the murders. The mission routinely booted out the sleepers early in the morning, and they spent their days on the street, hopefully looking for work.

  Rory hadn’t returned to the mission. He was keeping one step ahead of detectives.

  The Union Gospel Mission employees assured Dick Reed that they would call the homicide unit if Addison checked back in.

  Rory Addison’s probation officer came into the homicide office, and he was both chagrined and frustrated. “I took Rory down to Western State Hospital on August second,” he said. “We were both sure they would admit him, but they just told him he ‘wasn’t sick enough.’

  “The shrink who talked to Rory said he only needed someone to talk to. And more medication. I saw Rory Thursday morning—the third—about eight A.M., and he seemed normal. I looked at him closely, but he seemed completely rational.”

  His probation officer filled the detectives in on Rory Addison’s background. Despite his breakdown after his mother’s suicide, Rory had managed to succeed in many areas, and his family had high hopes for him. Until he lost his mother, he looked and acted like a winner.

  “He graduated as an honor student from Roosevelt High School,” the probation officer said. “He was active in the debate team there. And he was very popular. He went to Claremont College in California, and then he was accepted at Oxford University in England for European Studies. You have to be really smart and accomplished to get into Oxford.”


  Rory’s life was a string of successes, but that all changed when his mother committed suicide in 1975. He was twenty then.

  “When she died,” the probation officer said, “Rory began to show signs of manic depression himself, along with paranoia.

  “He went back to college in March 1976, and he was doing fairly well. But he hit a depressed cycle a year later. He cut his arm deeply in a suicide attempt. The records show that he had made kind of halfhearted suicide attempts before—but this time he would have died if he hadn’t been discovered in time.”

  Rory had “flipped out” at the hospital and it had taken four men twenty minutes to subdue the six-foot, three-inch student. Terribly concerned, his family had admitted him to Fairfax Hospital, a private institution, and he’d been “very, very sick.”

  Rory Addison was on an emotional seesaw. It was clear that his family and his probation officer had tried their best to pull him off the emotional precipice where he stood.

  “He got dramatically better by July and was able to go back to Claremont,” his probation officer said. “But he cut his arm again in October and almost bled to death. He was in a hospital until Christmas and then he came back to Seattle.”

  Rory’s father and stepmother had tried everything to help him. They arranged for him to receive therapy at the Sound Mental Health facility on Capitol Hill in Seattle. He lived in a halfway house. But he’d been violent there, too, kicking down doors.

  Rory worked sporadically as a roofer, but he got into trouble for stealing pop and candy from a store. When he was confronted, he struck the manager and ended up in jail.

  It was a tragic path for a boy who was in the genius category and had been expected to have a bright future as a lawyer. Rory Addison was put on probation and sent back to the halfway house, but he was picked up for shoplifting in the same store again in June. This time he went to jail for three weeks. Then he was released to another sheltered institution.

  He broke probation again and was returned to jail until August 2. His probation officer had been sure Rory would be admitted to Western State that day on the judge’s order. He needed help badly.