Practice to Deceive Read online

  When her ex-husband, Jim Douglas, left Whidbey Island and moved to Alaska, Gail and her second husband—Bob O’Neal—raised her two sons.

  * * *

  NOW, AS HE CONTINUED talking with Brenna Douglas, Mark Plumberg saw that if Russ intended to hide anything from his wife, he hadn’t done a very good job of it. Brenna knew all of the passwords on his email accounts. And she said she checked on them regularly.

  Once more, Mark Plumberg asked for the names of Russel’s friends—someone the detective could talk to.

  She shook her head. She didn’t know of any friends who might know much about him. She was quite sure he’d been trying to get into a swingers’ club at an island restaurant.

  “I know they meet on Saturday nights and it’s called a ‘key club.’ ”

  That sounded like something out of the seventies.

  Detective Plumberg looked straight into Brenna’s eyes and held her gaze. She didn’t look away.

  “I’m going to have to ask you some tough questions,” he began.

  Instantly, she became very still and her body was rigid as she folded her hands in her lap.

  “Does anyone in your family have any reason to kill Russel?”

  “No.”

  “Did you have any reason to kill him?”

  “No,” she answered in a flat voice.

  Plumberg moved on to other questions, and she seemed to know he was getting ready to close the interview. Now, where she had been tense, her voice tight, Brenna relaxed, returning to her former casual mien.

  The detective didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t know her—not yet—or anyone she might be close to, either someone she wanted to protect or who might possibly know hidden things about her.

  He closed his notepad and smiled. “You can call me anytime if you remember anything—or if you have questions or need to talk to me.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  * * *

  MIKE BIRCHFIELD TALKED TO Douglas’s sister, Holly Hunziker. She seemed to have been close to Brenna, and she recalled that Brenna had phoned her on the twenty-sixth and asked to bring a birthday present to her. Her niece and nephew had sung “Happy Birthday” to Holly over the phone. Her sister-in-law usually made a point to recognize her birthday, Holly said, because it came hard on the heels of Christmas Day. But this year, it hadn’t worked out as Holly wasn’t going to be home.

  Holly’s opinion of her brother was surprisingly negative. She spoke of the verbal and psychological abuse he had heaped on Brenna, and about the sexual scenarios he also forced on her. Holly, too, mentioned that Russel had had affairs with both women and men.

  “He had weird ideas when it came to sex, and he was always trying to get Brenna to join in.”

  What Holly was saying was much like the information Brenna had given the two detectives the night before, and Birchfield asked Holly if she had firsthand knowledge of her brother’s erotic obsessions, and she admitted that she didn’t; she only knew what Brenna had told her.

  She recalled hearing that a few years earlier, Russel and Brenna had a business for a while where they gave “parties” in other people’s homes where they sold sex toys. Brenna had told her that they had to put on a show, demonstrating the bizarre condoms, bondage items, and phallic substitutes and she hated it. They had soon quit that business.

  Despite Brenna’s apparent distaste for her husband’s alleged proclivities, Holly said Brenna was very jealous. She had tried to keep tabs on him and who he was seeing. She particularly resented Fran, the older woman he was supposed to be dating during their estrangement.

  Mike Birchfield studied Holly. “I have to tell you that I find it strange that all I’ve been hearing about Russel is mostly negative—and he hasn’t been dead more than two days.”

  “Holly looked sheepish,” he wrote in his follow-up report later, “but she didn’t say anything.”

  The Island County investigators knew how Russel Douglas had died, but they were a long way from knowing why. Although his widow and his own sister had said virtually nothing positive about him, what they described didn’t seem bad enough to mark him for murder. And murders without a motive are not easy to solve.

  The Island County investigators learned that Russ and Brenna had dated since they were in high school. Russ went solo to a club where teenagers were allowed and one of his sister’s friends introduced him to Brenna.

  When Holly and their mother, Gail, realized that the couple was getting serious, they were appalled. They seemed to have nothing in common, both had short fuses, and they always seemed to be fighting.

  “It was a horrible, horrible relationship,” Holly remembers. “Brenna didn’t get along with her mother, and she was completely on her own by the time she was twenty-one; she had an apartment, a job, a car.”

  Russ wasn’t sure where he was going, but he did believe in education. Brenna scoffed at higher education, and was adamant that she didn’t want her children to go to college.

  “They might have gone on to better lives separately,” Holly said later. “But they just didn’t belong together.”

  When Brenna became pregnant in 1994, she and Russ talked to Gail about it.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Have the baby,” Brenna said.

  “Good. That’s good,” Gail said, “but don’t get married. You don’t need to get married to have a child. Give yourselves some time.”

  His mother’s advice got through to Russ Douglas enough that they waited about finalizing their union. Gail hoped that they would see what everyone who knew them felt about their chances for a happy marriage.

  “They waited awhile,” Gail said sadly, “but they eventually got married during the late summer of 1995. Their baby, Jack, was one at the time.”

  Brenna regretted all the arguments she had had with her mother, and tried to effect reconciliation. They talked many times a day on the phone, and that made Russ jealous.

  Brenna thought that Gail was controlling Russ.

  And vice versa.

  Gail raised briards, and she offered one of the puppies to Russ and Brenna. Russ was trying to make everyone happy in the vain hope that his wife and his family could get along—and he accepted the active pup, whose breed grows to between seventy-five and a hundred pounds. They are wonderful dogs, but they need daily exercise, exacting training because they can be stubborn, and their luxurious coats have to be brushed at least every other day. Gail used her dogs to herd sheep, an activity that these French sheepdogs were born to perform. Briards love children and they protect their owners’ home and family.

  Of course, it was not a good choice for a couple already dealing with a baby, and Brenna railed at Russ that their dog was way too much for her to handle and clean up after.

  Seeing that the match wasn’t a good one, Gail offered to take the puppy back and keep it until they were ready.

  “I knew they would never be ready, but it seemed like a good way to get the poor pup out of there,” Gail said, “and hopefully, to stop some of their fights. Finally, Russ agreed to let me take the puppy. And, of course, they never asked for it back.”

  Brenna’s favorite pastime was shopping.

  “I would have to call her a shopaholic,” Gail O’Neal said. “She could easily spend a thousand dollars on one trip to Costco. I helped her unload after a visit to the grocery store once, and was surprised to see that she had two large freezers and a refrigerator and I could hardly find room in any of them to store her new purchases! And she still fed her kids junk food all the time.”

  It was more than just the expected bickering between a wife and her mother-in-law. Both Russ and Brenna called Gail O’Neal for advice, and she did her best to remain neutral. She knew her son was immature and sometimes hard to deal with, but so was Brenna—only in a different way.

  When Russel Douglas complained about something—even something as childish as not being able to find his favorite soda pop—his mother told him, “You’re an
adult. You want a Mountain Dew, and your store doesn’t have it. You are grown up—just go find a store that carries it, and get your Mountain Dew yourself.”

  * * *

  WHILE MIKE BIRCHFIELD SEARCHED for a financial reason behind the homicide, Mark Plumberg prepared to find out as much about Douglas as he possibly could. The picture on his driver’s license showed a bland-looking man with an almost shy smile. He certainly didn’t appear to be a sex-obsessed fiend, but then few sex offenders do. He apparently had a good job and was a devoted father to his two small children, supporting them financially and visiting them whenever Brenna allowed him to see them.

  On the evening of December 28, Plumberg and Birchfield executed a search warrant on Russel Douglas’s apartment in Renton. The now-dead man had left a radio on, and the sound of soft jazz in the background made their visit a little eerie.

  The place was sparsely furnished. It was little more than a studio unit, but it did have one bedroom and one bathroom on the second floor of a building with many apartments. It looked like a temporary place where a man might live while he tried to salvage a marriage gone sour—or while he was making plans for a divorce. A bachelor’s apartment in every sense of the term.

  The investigators found a surfboard in its carrying case leaning against a bedroom wall, so Russ obviously hadn’t gone surfing. According to Brenna, Russel had told her that he had a number of errands to run that day after Christmas. One of them was apparently a present for her; she thought it might be a tablecloth she wanted.

  His closet was stuffed with clothing, books, and various papers. There was also a .22 rifle there, and two plastic garbage bags with adult sex toys—nothing very shocking or different than a lot of men had. Outside of those objects, the two detectives found nothing that smacked of pornography or sexual perversion.

  There were two computer cases, but when they looked inside, neither had a computer in it. Among the myriad papers, they found a number of notes that appeared to be in Douglas’s handwriting. An initial glance at them showed they were introspective, written by a man who asked himself questions about how he should be managing his life, a man wondering how he could achieve happiness.

  Mark Plumberg set those aside to study in depth later; they might let him understand who Russel Douglas had been.

  The next morning, Plumberg attended Russel Douglas’s postmortem examination. Dr. Daniel Selove, a forensic pathologist who often travels around Washington State to do autopsies in sparsely populated counties, performed this after-death exploration while Island County Coroner Dr. Robert Bishop stood by.

  There were no surprises. Douglas had died of that single bullet fired into the bridge of his nose, and the slug had plowed into his head, forcing out a large amount of brain matter that dangled grotesquely from his forehead.

  He would have died instantly. When the bullet was removed, Plumberg logged it into evidence, along with plastic bags that held hair and nail clippings, a loose hair from the victim’s lower lip, and anal and oral swabs.

  Even the fragment of blue plastic from his broken sunglasses was saved. If the hair on his lip wasn’t his, it would only be probable evidence. Unless its follicle is attached to a hair, it is impossible to tell anything beyond class and characteristics.

  Plumberg was aware once again that it would surely take a motive or, he hoped, a match to the bullet casing and slug to the gun that fired it. And that gun seemed to be as lost as if it had been flung into Puget Sound.

  Perhaps it had been.

  Douglas’s clothing was bagged and sent to the Washington State Police lab to be tested by criminalists. They found semen on the victim’s underwear, but DNA results weeks later indicated the fluid was his own.

  On New Year’s Eve 2003 Mark Plumberg took the slug and the shell casing, labeled C-1, to Evan Thompson at the Seattle Police Department’s Crime Lab. If possible, they needed to know what brand of gun might have fired it. If they ever found the gun, that could be a vital link between the murder and the murderer. Less likely, the shooter’s DNA might be on the casing, but Plumberg would take the casing to the Washington State Police Lab in Marysville, Washington, to test for that only after Thompson examined the bullet and casing.

  The Seattle criminalist saw immediately that the missing gun was definitely a cheap .380 automatic weapon. The brand of guns that came to his mind were possibly a Llama, a Grendel, or a Bersa.

  Immediately after the tests, Mark Plumberg took possession of the bullet/slug and casing again.

  * * *

  NICOLE LUA AND HER friend Janet Hall were interviewed for a second time. The women who had first noticed the yellow Tracker on their late-afternoon walk the day after Christmas had told Mike Birchfield that they hadn’t seen that either of its doors were open at that time.

  On reflection, they now told Plumberg they believed that they had seen the driver’s door open. If their recall was accurate, that would mean that the shooter was probably still at the scene when they passed by.

  And it was fortunate that they hadn’t approached the vehicle. Perhaps the killer had subsequently shut the door next to the steering wheel, gone around the SUV to search for something on the passenger side, and left that door open when he left.

  If so, what was he—or she—looking for? And had he found and removed it?

  Russel Douglas’s father, Jim, flew down from Juneau, Alaska, and he and other members of his family met with Mike Birchfield on December 30 at Brenna’s house in Langley. Birchfield’s interviews with the Douglas side of the family were private.

  Jim said he and Russel were as close as a father and son could be, considering that Jim lived far away in Alaska. “We would talk on the phone about once a month.”

  Jim Douglas was aware of his son’s bouts with depression; Russ had suffered with periods of sadness for most of his life. He was probably bipolar. When he was up, he was way up—but when he was down, he sometimes threatened suicide.

  “Russel was a loner,” Jim said. “He never seemed to have a lot of friends.”

  “Did he like his job? How about his marriage?” Birchfield asked.

  “Yeah, I think he did like his job. He was really excited about getting his master’s degree in business.”

  As for Russel and Brenna’s marriage, his father acknowledged that they were having trouble, but he didn’t know the specifics beyond arguments over money.

  “You know of any physical abuse?”

  “No—I wasn’t aware of anything like that.”

  Jim Douglas knew that Russ and Brenna had split up for a while, but he had never heard anything about Russel having a girlfriend. He hadn’t known anything about a divorce—but his ex-wife, Gail, said that Brenna told her they were going to start divorce filing as soon as she could get health insurance.

  “Brenna told my ex-wife they were trying to stay friends, but that they were getting a divorce as soon as they could.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about someone being mad at him, or who he might be having trouble with?”

  Douglas shook his head.

  He had sent his son a hundred-dollar check for Christmas, and his bank said that it had been cashed at the Bank of America in Renton on December 23.

  Matthew Douglas, Russel’s brother, was a U.S. Army captain stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. He and his fiancée, Tracy Harvey, had been in Washington State during the Christmas holidays. On the weekend his brother was killed, Matthew and Tracy were in British Columbia, Canada. Now, they, too, were at Brenna’s house to talk to Mike Birchfield.

  Captain Douglas told the detective that he and Russel weren’t close, mostly because Russel kept to himself, especially while they were growing up in Coupeville on Whidbey Island. He agreed that sometimes his brother and his mother, Gail, didn’t get along very well.

  “He resented what he considered very strict rules in our house.”

  Matthew recalled Russel as a good student, a man who had strived to get a superior education. He was also into ph
ysical fitness and worked out three or four days a week.

  When Russ was born, he had severely crossed eyes, and it took several operations to fix the problem. As an adult, his eyes could still seem off kilter when he was tired. That may have had something to do with his overweening desire to succeed.

  “He could be eccentric in his lifestyle and the way he dressed,” Matthew said. “When he began a hobby, he would immediately go to extremes. Like learning to play the guitar or surfing. He wasn’t very good at either, but he spent a lot of his time and money trying.”

  Captain Douglas said he’d never known his brother to have a drug or drinking problem, allowing that if he had, he would be more likely to go to their dad to talk about it.

  “I don’t think Russel liked being married,” Matthew said. “But he was a good father. He and Brenna argued a lot, and she kicked him out of the house last May sometime.”

  “Was he ever abusive to her—or the kids?”

  “No, not that I ever heard of. I knew he had a girlfriend who was a lot older than he was.”

  “He into anything weird—or could he have been gay?”

  Matthew shook his head. “I’d have a hard time believing any of that.”

  * * *

  WHILE BRENNA TOLD DETECTIVES about all of Russ’s faults, she said the opposite to her friends and acquaintances. “Russ was my best friend. How am I going to go on without him?”

  Which was it? Brenna was all over the emotional map.

  Neither Mike Birchfield nor Mark Plumberg had located another witness who had disparaged Russel Douglas the way his estranged wife had. Russel’s brother, who would keep in close touch with Birchfield for months as he hoped to hear that the person who shot Russel had been arrested, would be back and forth about whether Brenna was sincere in her protestations of grief.

  “After staying with Brenna,” Matthew wrote, “and watching her fear and frustration, I ultimately can’t find anything that would have me question her grief as anything other than genuine.”