Practice to Deceive

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 2, 2004, a memorial service for Russel Douglas was held at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Clinton, the small town on the south end of Whidbey Island where the Mukilteo ferry docks.

  Most savvy detectives attend the funerals and memorials held for the victims of the crimes they are working on. Both Mark Plumberg and Mike Birchfield were at the church. As mourners and the curious arrived, Birchfield sat in his car in the church parking lot, while Plumberg parked in the driveway of an apartment complex that was right across the street from the church entrance. They observed people and vehicles, jotting down license numbers.

  It is not at all unusual for killers to go to the funerals of their victims. They may mimic arsonists who mingle with the crowd at buildings they have torched; it is an extra element of the thrills they seek, gloating in their belief that they have fooled everyone. And then again, in some cases, murderers close to the deceased may risk waving red flags if they stay away from memorials and funerals.

  Plumberg observed two white males who drove up in green pickup trucks, one brand-new and one somewhat battered. As he watched, the driver of the older truck retrieved something from the new truck, put it into his vehicle, and drove away.

  Did this mean anything? Birchfield said no. He had seen that the cargo consisted only of fishing poles.

  Birchfield went into the church, while Mark Plumberg stayed outside, taking pictures of vehicles in the parking lot and watching for any activity or emotional outbursts that might be significant.

  As people left St. Peter’s after the memorial service, he walked over to a group of men and asked if they might be Russel Douglas’s coworkers.

  They nodded, but turned away. One man glared at the sheriff’s detective and said, “Yeah—but I don’t want to talk to you!”

  “Why is that?” Plumberg asked.

  “I think it’s really inconsiderate of you to approach us at our friend’s memorial service.”

  “I’m only trying to identify people who may have known Russel so we can do a better job of investigating this homicide.”

  “Well, we still don’t want to talk to you!”

  The man beside him nodded in agreement and they hurriedly got into the same car and drove away. Later, Russ’s coworkers would be more agreeable to the detectives’ questioning.

  Aside from the shock and grief Russel Douglas’s mother, father, stepfather, and brother had displayed when they were told he had been killed, his coworkers were the first people who seemed truly saddened.

  Still, the investigators had met very few of the many people with whom the dead man had interacted. They soon learned that despite his widow’s insistence that he had few friends, that wasn’t true. Not at all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  * * *

  ONE OF THE PEOPLE who was rumored to have been closest to Russel Douglas in recent months was Fran Lester.* Fran was old enough to be his mother, but Brenna and others close to Russel thought he and Fran had had an intimate relationship. Russel apparently told his wife that he had broken off the affair three weeks before Christmas. It might have ended or it might have continued to the day of his death.

  Fran Lester was a genuine person, not some nameless man or woman he was seeing secretly, or a member of a swingers’ group. Mark Plumberg and Mike Birchfield had no trouble finding her address in Tacoma, and they went there after Douglas’s services, arriving about 4:30. She was quite willing to talk with them, and asked only that her friend Cynthia Corning* be allowed to sit in.

  “Cynthia knew Russel, too,” she explained.

  Fran Lester was earthy, frank, and she was clearly a nice woman. She appeared to understand Russel Douglas well, and had wanted the best for him—even if he did succeed in mending the gaping holes in his marriage. She knew her romance with him would run its course, but she was happy while it lasted. Indeed, she said, she was ultimately the one who sent him away weeks before Christmas.

  Fran said that she had met Russel in a cocktail lounge at the resort town of Ocean Shores on the Washington coast. She had been on vacation from her telecommunications job in Tacoma at TESINC and he was there to surf. He was sitting at the bar by himself, and Fran said she had approached him. They hit it off right away.

  “He told me he had children, but they weren’t with him that first weekend,” she added. “He told me that he was divorced. We were having dinner once after we’d been dating for six or eight weeks, and he confessed that he was still married—but that he’d moved out of his house in April 2003. I didn’t meet his kids until about three months ago.

  “We talked that first night until five in the morning. We came to have mutual trust for each other.”

  Once again, Mike Birchfield was asking the questions, while Mark Plumberg took copious notes.

  “Tell us about Russel,” Mike Birchfield asked.

  “He was very shy, very quiet,” Cynthia cut in.

  “But he was open to anything and everything,” Fran finished. “I guess maybe you’ve been to his apartment and seen some of his wild clothes?”

  Russel’s heritage was Scottish, and she recalled that she had told him once that her fantasy was having sex with a man wearing a kilt. Sure enough, the next week he had come to her place wearing a kilt.

  Still, most of Russel’s own fantasies were fairly tame, even unimaginative.

  “He wanted to be naked on the beach,” she said with a shrug. “That’s not really weird.”

  The sex toys in his apartment? Fran dismissed that with a shake of her head. “He and his wife had a business where they sold those things at home parties. And they were the ‘entertainment’ at some of those parties.”

  According to Fran, Russel didn’t have very good relationships with the women in his life. There were the problems with Brenna, of course, and he hadn’t gotten along with his own mother, Gail O’Neal. He told Fran that she was very strict when he was a child, and his early years weren’t happy.

  “He hasn’t even talked to his mother for a year.”

  That, of course, wasn’t true.

  Russ Douglas’s tendency to blame his mother for things she had no control over probably was behind that lie.

  And his perceived problems with his mother may have been why Russel was attracted to Fran. Fran had been both his lover and an older woman who told them that she had “loved him unconditionally.”

  “I think he loved me in the way he could—but not in the way I loved him. He could relax around me, and I loved him even though he had a ‘dark side.’ ”

  “What do you mean by that?” Birchfield asked.

  “Russ had a lot of anxiety and emotional pain. He thought people had betrayed him. He was trying to find himself.”

  “Was he stable?”

  “Russ? No—oh no—but he was trying. He was in therapy for depression. I knew he took some prescription drugs. It might have been Prozac.”

  Just as his father had said, the man Fran Lester was describing sounded bipolar, with the strongest pull toward depression. Indeed, Fran said she’d been stunned when she heard he was dead. Murdered.

  “Frankly, I thought it would have been a suicide. When I thought of his being killed, it was a shock.”

  Russ had been very careful to maintain his privacy when the two first met. He wouldn’t tell Fran his address or even consider giving her a key to his apartment. After a while, they saw each other “four or five” times a week, and exchanged keys.

  “After we broke up, I mailed his key back to him and he mailed the key to my house to me.”

  His lover characterized Douglas as very insecure.

  “He was afraid of most women,” she said. “He developed physically late in life. He was smart enough, but he was naive. People who think sex is a game are very naive.

  “Russel wasn’t really very good at anything,” Fran added with a sigh. “He couldn’t throw darts, dance, play the guitar, or surf. I guess his only real talent was that he had a lot of endurance in bed.” r />
  “But you told me he was insecure,” Mike Birchfield reminded her.

  “Well, he wasn’t insecure during sex.”

  He was not, however, as uninhibited as Brenna Douglas had suggested.

  “Did he ever try to get you into S and M?” Birchfield asked.

  “No! He was very sensitive emotionally. He would never be physically or sexually aggressive. He wouldn’t even do minor playful, physical stuff during sex.”

  Fran’s view of Russel Douglas seemed diametrically opposed to his widow’s. As far as Fran knew, he wasn’t into pornography, swinging, or heavy drinking. She had once offered to get some porno movies, but he turned down her offer.

  She had never seen him intoxicated, but she had suspected that he’d done drugs one night when he kissed her and she had a metallic taste in her mouth.

  Russel had told her that he and Brenna sometimes fought physically, although he was the one who got hit. Brenna could defend herself.

  Fran Lester said that she knew Russel was still sleeping with Brenna. “Every time he got his hair cut.”

  That didn’t seem to bother Fran. Nor was she disturbed about how he spoke of Brenna. She knew he was proud of his wife, and how well she ran their beauty salon, Just B’s.

  As long as he did the books.

  “The worst thing he ever said about her was that she was not good with money,” Fran said. “He said that Brenna was ‘the one’ for him, and he called his kids at least every other day.”

  Birchfield asked a vital question: “Was Russel bisexual?”

  “I don’t think so. He told me about a guy at Gold’s Gym who hit on him. He told the guy that he was ‘taken,’ by a girlfriend. I guess that would be me.

  “I asked him once if he was ever interested in homosexual relations, and he said he’d thought about it—but he hadn’t done it.”

  Russel had also thought about a threesome, but that never happened. Indeed, his most adventurous lovemaking had been with his wife. He told Fran that he and Brenna had “done it” on the ferry, and almost everywhere else, tantalized by the danger of getting caught.

  “Could you trust him?”

  “Yes!” she answered emphatically, but then quickly added, “but I wouldn’t trust him to be faithful.”

  Russel had told Fran once that “some woman” was stalking him, but she had no details about who that woman might be. He hadn’t mentioned anything about a “headhunter” to her.

  Fran Lester pondered Birchfield’s question about what might have gotten Russ into a position of vulnerability.

  “His mouth—his mouth could get him into trouble because he didn’t think about what he said before he said it.”

  Russ Douglas had never had a problem with strangers, she said, because he was a “hermit” who avoided strangers. But she said he was a “whiner” and a “spoiled brat” who sometimes made a big fuss about nothing. Once, he’d even thrown a hissy fit because a store didn’t have the kind of pop he wanted, an incident his mother had also referred to.

  “He was a ‘whiner’?” Birchfield repeated.

  “All men are,” she said with a laugh.

  Fran was not a shrinking violet, either, in what she said or what words she used to say something. Although she loved Russel Douglas, she had grown tired of how spoiled he acted at times. They had tried to preserve the feeling of fun they had on the night they met, but it was hard for her to ignore his pettiness.

  “We broke up on December 6,” she said. “I was upset with him and I did call him a spoiled brat, and I hurt his feelings. That ended our relationship.”

  Fran wasn’t aware that his own mother and sister had often told him the same thing—that she had hit a tender nerve. Of all things, Russ Douglas didn’t want to be seen as a “spoiled brat,” although his very behavior at times showed that he was.

  Fran Lester said she had last heard from Russ on Christmas Eve. He was trying to decide if he should spend Christmas with his wife and children. She told him he had to make up his own mind about that. The Friday after Christmas, she opened a last email from him that he had sent on Christmas Eve.

  “I sent him an answer,” she said. “It’s probably in his computer, but I don’t think he ever got it.”

  The two women with whom Russel Douglas had been involved had given such different opinions. Fran Lester had pooh-poohed the idea that he was ever drawn into swinging with strangers, assuring both detectives he was much too shy and anxious to do that.

  And yet his wife described him as almost maniacally involved in aberrant sex.

  Was it possible he was both personalities? He seemed to be bipolar, but it was doubtful that he was a true Jekyll and Hyde combination.

  Surprisingly, Russ’s mother, Gail, and his sister, Holly, felt no ill will toward Fran Lester. While Russ could be annoying and immature, Brenna was the one who had always seemed to be manipulating in the background.

  Brenna would agree to attend holiday celebrations or family reunions, and invariably back out at the last minute. When she and Russ did attend such functions, Brenna made a point of sitting far apart from the rest of the family.

  “We felt that Brenna was controlling Russ,” Gail said. “He wasn’t the one that was deliberately avoiding us.”

  One Thanksgiving, the family all went to Kalispell, Montana, to Gail’s sister’s home. The next day, Brenna and Russ went shopping and left baby Jack with Gail.

  They were gone long enough for Jack to start getting hungry. Gail warmed a jar of baby food and was feeding it to him when Brenna walked in the door.

  “What are you doing?” Brenna shrieked.

  “He was so hungry—” Gail began.

  Brenna grabbed the baby food jar out of Gail’s hand and threw it into the sink.

  “We never warm his food,” she screamed. “He eats cold food!”

  Baffled, Gail stared at her daughter-in-law. She didn’t know of anyone who didn’t warm their small babies’ food.

  Clearly, Brenna was trying to control Russ and his family. She and his sister, Holly, had been close, but she drew away from Holly after Russ’s murder, and she refused to even discuss the details of the insurance policies he had.

  She derided Russ and his family for thinking education was important. Brenna was by no means dumb, but she hated schools and colleges.

  At another Montana family reunion, Brenna insisted that she and her family wouldn’t stay in the homes relatives had prepared for sleepovers. Instead, she insisted on staying in the RV she and Russ owned, and then she made him park far away from the group.

  That was not a good trip. They were all going to meet at a campground, and someone inadvertently gave Russ the wrong directions. When Gail discovered that, she tried to get in touch with them, but their cell phone was turned off. By retracing the turns along the way, the Douglases finally arrived—but they were forty-five minutes late.

  Brenna was furious. She screamed at Gail.

  “How dare you give me the wrong directions! I know you did it on purpose!”

  Brenna’s diabetic mother had surgery—a gastric by-pass—but complications set in, and she died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism and heart failure.

  “Russ took some of his 401(k) money to pay for his mother-in-law’s funeral,” Gail O’Neal said. “That was why he agreed to buy the second insurance policy on his own life. He told Brenna, ‘I don’t want that to happen to you. I want you taken care of.’ ”

  Brenna’s chaotic emotions and bad business sense weren’t positive influences in Russ’s life, but he was apparently doing his best at the time he was murdered. And his mother thanked his mistress for that.

  “Fran was key to helping my son grow up,” Gail said. “He did act like a self-indulgent kid sometimes, and Fran let him have it. When he whined about his miserable marriage, she told him, ‘Either get a divorce, or get into counseling.’

  “And he was beginning to change and stop feeling so sorry for himself. Before, he would call Brenna and threaten s
uicide if she wouldn’t take him back. Poor ‘Eeyore.’ All of a sudden, I said, ‘Oh my God—Russ has grown up.’

  “He was finally happy, but Brenna wasn’t. He was responsible—he paid child support and he paid spousal support, too. But I don’t think Brenna wanted him back.”

  Initially, Gail tried to help Brenna out of the financial mess her beauty salon books were in, and recommended a CPA who could help her. That annoyed her newly widowed daughter-in-law.

  Two remarks that Brenna Douglas made to Gail still disturb her. She doesn’t know what Brenna was trying to say. At first, Gail couldn’t believe that Brenna had anything at all to do with Russ’s murder, but as the circumstantial evidence piled up, she wondered.

  “I asked her a direct question once. And she was very snotty when she answered me. I asked her: ‘Have you ever thought—when you were working with your friend—Peggy Sue—that Russ was worth more dead to you than alive?’ ”

  Peggy Sue Thomas often worked at Just B’s as a hairdresser; she was Brenna’s landlady, and the two were close friends.

  “She said, ‘Well . . . I might have.’ ”

  Later, Brenna suddenly burst out with an inscrutable remark:

  “If push comes to shove, I have a bomb that will devastate the family . . .”

  What did she mean?

  * * *

  BOTH BRENNA AND FRAN could account for their whereabouts on the afternoon of December 26. And their stories checked out.

  But someone had shot Russ during that time. So far, Detectives Mark Plumberg and Mike Birchfield were as puzzled about the actual killer as they were when they first walked up to the yellow Tracker in the woods.

  They had to spread their net wider and find more people who might have been involved with the dead man. The worst possible outcome of their probe would be that this was a stranger-to-stranger murder, the cold act of someone who had no connection at all to Russel Douglas, someone who simply wanted to feel what it was like to kill someone.

  And that is the kind of homicide that frightens everyone who lives in the area of the crime, and makes people lock their doors and cars when they usually don’t.