by Ann Rule
“Rory was clearly disturbed,” his probation officer said flatly. “But they turned him away. I drove him back to Seattle and left him to catch a bus to his dad’s house.”
Rory had had many friends at Roosevelt High School but his obsession with the “demons in his head” and his constant depression had soon turned almost all of them off—except for the most loyal. Friends like Rich Copley and Sarah Binford kept hoping he would get better.
Even in the midst of his recent troubles with the law and mental illness, Rory talked of going on to graduate school. He’d wanted to go to the London School of Economics and the Institute of International Studies in Freiburg, Germany.
But where was he now? Wandering from flophouse to flophouse? A suicide himself? Detectives tried to locate him at the union hall where he sometimes obtained work as a roofer, but no one there had seen him.
At 6:45 P.M. on August 5, detective sergeant Don Cameron received a call from the Union Gospel Mission. Rory Addison had returned. Cameron and Don Strunk responded at once, and met Rory walking toward the elevator. Asked if he would return to headquarters for questioning, he said he wouldn’t mind at all. The rage he’d demonstrated before seemed to be gone.
Advised of his Miranda rights, Rory talked of his activities on the day the Bramhalls were killed.
“I came back from Western State Hospital and took a bus to my house. It was about five P.M. when I got there. I had a sandwich, drank a Coke, and put my dirty clothes into the wash.
“About six, my brother came home,” Rory continued. “I called my friend, Rich Copley, about 7:30 and asked him to pick me up. He didn’t come until about 8:30 or 8:45 so I read Newsweek while I waited. When he got here, I’d just finished dumping the trash from the kitchen.”
The rest of Rory’s account of the deadly evening was exactly the same as Rich Copley had already given.
“How long since you’ve visited the Bramhalls?” sergeant Don Cameron asked.
“I haven’t been in their house for over two years.”
“Did you stop by Tuesday or Wednesday to borrow a hammer?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you kill Olive and Burle Bramhall?” Cameron asked bluntly.
“No. And I’ll take a polygraph any time you’d like.”
Rory Addison was allowed to leave for the moment until an appointment for a lie detector examination could be set up.
Detective Gary Fowler spoke with Sarah Binford. She said he had called her about 12:30 A.M. on the morning of August 3.
“He sounded lonely. He said he was at the Savoy Hotel and wanted me to meet him to have coffee. I didn’t want to go downtown, but I met him the next night. We talked about the murders in a general way, and Rory told me he hadn’t been around when it happened because he’d been out with Rich.”
As funeral services were held for the Bramhalls on August 7, there were whispers among those attending. Some mourners felt that the housekeeper—or one of their housekeepers—had something to do with their murders. Others weren’t so sure. Some rumors were purely imaginative; others possibly had some basis in fact. Seattle homicide detectives attended the funeral, observing those who were there, listening for some clue, however small.
There was still the trouble with the Unification Church. Detective Gary Fowler received a call from the head of the “anti-Moonie” group, who had been out of town at the time of the murders.
“I received threatening phone calls about a year ago that I felt were from the cult members. They said they would blow me up.”
And the Bramhalls had lived right next door to the Moonies.
The housekeeper involvement theory gained more credence when the wife of one of Seattle’s richest and most influential civic leaders said that Olive Bramhall had confided in friends at the beauty parlor where she had her wigs coiffed that her housekeeper had run off with her keys.
This was not Esme Svenson, but the woman who had preceded her.
On August 8, Fowler received a call that ended all conjecture about who had killed the Bramhalls.
The caller was Rory Addison.
“Detective Fowler, I have some information on a homicide,” Rory said. “Can you come and get me? I’m waiting by the monorail terminal.”
Gary Fowler told Rory he would be down to pick him up in a few minutes, and to stay right where he was. Fowler and detective Wayne Dorman grabbed their car keys and ran to the police garage.
Rory Addison waited for them. The lanky young man had a large blue backpack, and a heavy load on his mind. Even before Fowler and Dorman could open the trunk to stow his backpack, he began to talk, his words burbling up under great pressure.
“What do you have for us, Rory?” Gary Fowler asked.
“I killed them—”
Before either detective could interrupt to read Rory his Miranda rights, he kept talking—and confessing.
“Have you looked at the wounds yet?” Rory asked. “When you do, you’ll find Mr. Bramhall was hit once on the right side of the head with a hammer and Mrs. Bramhall three times. I used a sledgehammer, a poker, and a rock. He was lying with his head on a board. His false teeth were out. She was lying between the living room and the kitchen, wasn’t she?”
Legally, what Addison was giving was a res gestae statement—a spontaneous utterance—which is admissible in a court of law. Still, Gary Fowler interrupted the suspect. “Wait until we get to the station. Then we can talk.”
“Yeah. Okay, I understand.”
Addison was ushered into an interview room and told that because of his voluntary admission of guilt, he was under arrest. He took this with equanimity, and listened quietly as his Miranda rights were read and explained to him. He signed the admonishment forms.
“Do you still want to discuss the Bramhall homicides?” Fowler asked.
“Yes. That’s why I’m here.”
Addison dictated two pages of his confession while Fowler wrote. Then he read the pages and signed them.
The bearded genius said he’d started hallucinating about a year and a half or two years after his mother’s suicide. He said he’d heard voices telling him that Burle Bramhall knew about several tragic events in advance but did nothing to stop them. Although none of this was even remotely true, Rory Addison’s mental disorder had convinced him that it was fact.
“Mr. Bramhall knew about a massacre in Brazil,” Rory said. This is a startling statement in light of the Guyana tragedy later in 1978 in which nine hundred followers of the Reverend Jim Jones had killed themselves with poisoned Flavor Aid.
Rory continued. “And he knew about a skiing accident, too, and a boating accident where six people died. I heard his voice one night when I was trying to sleep. He told me he’d been involved in several poisonings.”
Rory Addison said he’d known that he had to do something to stop Bramhall from the evil things he was doing. But, first, he had tried to admit himself to Western State Hospital. Sadly—and tragically—they had turned him away with platitudes and told him to take more medication.
After he was turned down by the mental hospital, Rory said, he’d gone to his father’s house and had something to eat.
“Then I sat down on the couch and decided to kill Burle Bramhall. I went over and asked to borrow a ball-peen hammer.”
But Rory told Detective Fowler that the hammer he’d borrowed seemed too small to do the job, and he’d put it in the bushes between the houses. He then returned home and sat on the couch, he said.
But voices told him he must hurry to kill Mr. Bramhall before there was trouble.
“I went back and I saw the maid leave. I knocked on the door and told Mr. Bramhall that I needed a bigger hammer. He said he had one in the garage. We walked out there and he gave me a sledgehammer that was on the wall. I swung it at him when he turned away, but it hit the overhead door and he turned around, surprised. I swung the hammer again and he went down. I hit him again and his dentures fell out.”
Next, Rory said, he went
into the house where Olive Bramhall waited, unaware that her husband was dead. “I asked her for something to eat, and she turned to go to the kitchen. I hit her with the sledge. She fell and her wig came off.”
Rory said he’d left the Bramhall house and returned home. Compulsively, he had begun to wonder if the victims were alive, and decided to go back. He was waiting for Rich to pick him up but he figured he had time.
“I grabbed a rock from a rockery in front of Burle’s house, and a claw hammer from our basement.
“I thought that Mrs. Bramhall was still breathing so I hit her with the rock and the poker.”
Whether either of the elderly victims was alive or not is moot; they were surely dead when Rory Addison left the second time.
“I rinsed off the weapons I used in the wading pool, and then I went to my house to put my clothes in the washer.”
Then Rory said he called Rich again and sat down to wait. What bloody clothing was left he’d buried in the trash can—a task he had just finished when Rich Copley arrived.
It was an awful story, a combination of insane fantasy and cold-blooded planning.
Under the centuries-old M’Naghten Rule, a killer is considered sane in the eyes of the law if he can differentiate between right and wrong at the time his crime is committed. Most prosecutors stress that if a killer makes preparations to cover his tracks, he knew what he was doing was wrong.
Certainly, the voices that told Rory Addison that the Bramhalls were evil and dangerous were the whispers of a deranged mind; there was no gentler soul on earth than Burle Bramhall, and Olive had done her best to save Rory’s mother when she was so desperately ill.
Yes, he covered his trail. He went out for an evening of drinking and dining even as his victims’ blood was sluiced away in the washer at home. He gave detectives a solid alibi in his first meeting with them.
* * *
Even with his attempts to cover up his crimes, I believe that Rory Addison’s motivation for murder was his paranoid psychosis. Medically and legally, Rory Addison was insane. Although I have written about scores of murder defendants who have claimed to have mental illness, Rory Addison’s case stands out as one where I am convinced he did not know the difference between right and wrong at the time of his crime.
No one—not the detectives who arrested him, nor his parents, or friends, or probably even the public—could deny that the disintegration of Rory Addison’s mind was a tragedy of major proportions. Two innocents died because of it, and a brilliant young scholar’s life of potential service was ended.
Rory Addison was eventually found fit to stand trial, and to participate in his own defense. But he didn’t care about the outcome of the trial. Overwhelmed with remorse for what he had done, he pleaded guilty to two counts of murder in the first degree.
He asked judge Charles Dixon to sentence him to hang. He had tried to kill himself in jail by strangulation and with a broken lightbulb. But Judge Dixon could not sentence him to death; Rory had not been convicted of aggravated murder.
Instead, Rory Addison was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. He would be fifty years old when he completed his two minimum sentences—if he lived that long.
The outlook for a deranged convict in Washington’s penal system can be grim. There are not enough beds, not enough competent psychiatrists, and other prisoners detest the deranged prisoners they call “dings.”
Where, if anywhere, the guilt lies is an open question. Why didn’t the screening psychiatrist at Western State see that the bearded youth before him on August 2 was dangerous and violent, and desperately in need of confinement?
Under Washington State law, mental patients must be judged a threat to themselves or others before they can be admitted to a mental hospital. Apparently, the state’s screening psychiatrist didn’t think Rory Addison fit either category.
He was wrong.
Rory’s father and stepmother, brokenhearted over his egregious crime, vowed to fight for a change in the mental health laws so that no other psychotic will be allowed to act out his sick fantasies. They had done all they possibly could for Rory. Sadly, it was not enough.
The ironic note is that Burle and Olive Bramhall, if they were here to speak, would probably forgive Rory. They fought for the underdog all their lives. All those 783 children Burle saved. The charities they contributed to, the poor they hired. If Rory had come to them, troubled, they would have tried to help, but he didn’t come that way—he came to borrow a hammer.
The Seattle homicide unit did an admirable job of solving the murders of the Bramhalls, and they took a violent man off the street, but they took little pride in it. They, too, wished that time could be turned backward, that somehow Rory could have been stopped, treated, perhaps cured, before the awful events of August 2 ever happened.
I have tried to locate Rory Addison—thirty-four years now since the Bramhalls were murdered. He has disappeared into the mists of time. He may not be alive, and, perhaps improbably, he may be living a normal life. He would be close to fifty-five years old.
I have changed his name in this recall of the terrible night of August 2, 1978, because I don’t think he had any control of his mind at that time.
And no one listened to him when he tried to get help.
* * *
DOUBLE DEATH FOR THE KIND PHILANTHROPISTS
* * *
Olive Bramhall was struck from behind as she walked toward her kitchen to prepare a snack for someone she trusted. She and her husband, Burle Bramhall, were a happy, elderly couple who still enjoyed their lives when they were murdered. (Police file)
Burle Bramhall kept a full supply of tools. He liked to fix things around the estate where he and Olive lived. Unwittingly, he loaned the death weapon to his killer. Detectives found the bare spot on his wall of tools with an outline traced in the pattern of a sledgehammer. (Police file)
The lifelong philanthropist didn’t have a chance against his much younger attacker. His body lay in his garage, next to his Mercedes. (Police file)
Photo of Dick Reed, Seattle homicide detective, who was called out from home to investigate the Bramhalls’ murders.
An aerial shot from a police helicopter of the Bramhalls’ mansion and grounds. They lived there for many happy years, unaware of how close danger was to them. (Police file)
The fireplace and indoor garden in the Bramhall home. The killer used the fireplace poker to murder Olive, and a five-pound sledgehammer to murder Burle. (Police file)
“FIRE!”
Those who set fires deliberately are not necessarily killers. Some of them burn buildings because they are literally addicted to the sight of flames. Their addiction may be sexual in nature, or it may be they have a need to feel power by destroying something. Some need to gloat, knowing that they were the ones who caused sirens to scream in the night, that they were the reason firefighters rushed to respond.
The motivations behind arson are many: greed, revenge, sexual stimulation, profit through insurance. The motive, not infrequently, is a desire to be a “hero.”
Arsonists often insinuate themselves into the crowds that gather to gasp at their conflagrations. That way, they can prolong the thrill they feel.
Some arsonists are merely pragmatic. They are professional fire-starters, highly skilled at what they do, often devising a delayed fire so that they are long gone before the flames actually blossom. They may be doing it for insurance purposes, or in reprisal.
And, of course, there are murderers who use fire to destroy the evidence of what they have done. When they use flames to destroy other human beings, they are extremely dangerous.
All too often, the fire-starter takes victims he doesn’t know—nor does he care about that. He himself has no way of knowing how many he will kill. Once unleashed, fire takes its own path; it can grow to tremendous and deadly proportions, for fire is an unpredictable entity.
Still, arson investigators have something going for them. Even though the arsonist believe
s that flames will destroy evidence, fire is its own evidence. Trained investigators know how to look for their clues in the ashes left behind. What seems like useless rubble to the firebug may actually be a trail incriminating him as surely as if he’d painted bright red arrows to his front door.
Experts have found that most arsonists have limited imaginations. If a certain technique works once, it will be repeated.
Marshal 5, the Seattle Fire Department’s arson investigation unit, had long been a shining example to other departments around the United States. They worked cases differently than police departments do, and I was curious to learn how clues could be left behind—even in an inferno—when I asked for permission to ride with Marshal 5.
The arson team was made up of former firefighters who had truly gone through a baptism of flames. They had all seen the tragedies caused by accelerants and the instruments used to torch them.
While I have to admit it was exciting to follow the sirens and show the pass the fire chief gave me that allowed me into buildings that were “tapped,” meaning fire controlled, but still with little licks of blue, yellow, and orange flame trying to creep back, I quickly found out why firefighters are called “smoke-eaters.”
Marshal 5 was challenged by a series of fires that began in January 1975. They grew in intensity until they exploded in a veritable “towering inferno.” The person who eventually emerged as a suspect appeared to laymen at least to be a most unusual choice. Before they zeroed in on one man, however, the investigators had to look at some of the strangest characters they had ever encountered.
* * *
The University Towers Hotel was located at Forty-fifth Street and Brooklyn Avenue in the University of Washington district. When it was constructed in 1931, it was viewed as very modern and soon became a landmark in Seattle. In 1933, the now long-defunct Seattle Star newspaper called it “One of the Seven Wonders of Seattle.”