Portrait of a marriage: Crystal Brame feared her angry, controlling husband

GIG HARBOR, Pierce County — The sweep of the second hand ruled Crystal Brame's life.

How much time to get to the store and back? How long to walk to and from the row of mailboxes down the street from her house on the wooded cul-de-sac across the Narrows Bridge from Tacoma?

And always: When was David coming home?

Was there time to spackle the nick in the wall that their young son made when he knocked the lamp off the table? A frantic Crystal begged neighbors to help; her husband was on his way.

Could she slip next door and buy a few candles or the makings of a scrapbook from her neighbor before she was missed? Attending the parties hosted by the woman was out of the question.

Then, time ceased to be such a tyrant. She had filed for divorce and, after taking the two kids to stay with her parents for a time, returned three weeks ago to the family home after David moved out.

"She was just so excited," said Deanna Robson, another neighbor. Robson had barely seen Crystal since moving into the cul-de-sac last December and, suddenly, here she was, giggling about having Robson's daughter join her two children for slumber parties and squirt-gun fights.

"It's like she was starting a whole new life, almost like she was reliving her childhood. She'd just say, 'It's going to be so great!' " Robson said.

But for Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, his wife Crystal's move to reclaim her life started the clock ticking on his own.

Their divorce, filed in February, grew increasingly ugly. His wife of 11 years accused him of death threats and bizarre controlling behavior, backed by sworn declarations from her family and some friends. Allegations that he had raped another woman 15 years ago — an accusation handled quietly by the department at the time — had resurfaced.

The talk could tarnish, if not ruin, Brame's exemplary 22-year career as a police officer, and maybe cost him custody of his two children.

Then, as if the spring of tension wasn't wound tightly enough already, news of the Brames' divorce was leaked to the media.

Police think it was a chance encounter that brought David Brame and his wife together in the parking lot of the Harbor Plaza shopping center the afternoon of April 26. David had the children that afternoon and was running errands. Crystal had been to a divorce class and was stopping in for a tanning session.

Detectives who reconstructed the days leading up to that fateful meeting say they can account for the movements of the police chief and his estranged wife up until those last two or three minutes, when they talked in her car, while the children waited several feet away in his car.

They don't know what transpired just before David pulled his .45-caliber service weapon and shot Crystal in the back of the head before turning the gun on himself.

David Brame, 44, died two hours later. Crystal Brame had turned 35 two days earlier. She clung to life for a week at Harborview Medical Center where, as recently as Thursday, she showed signs of progress.

But overnight Friday her condition deteriorated dramatically. Tests yesterday morning showed no brain activity. She was declared dead yesterday at 4:40 p.m. — just as her husband was being lowered into his grave at a Lakewood cemetery.

'She would light up a room'

Crystal Brame had spent the past eight years as a stay-at-home mom.

Interviews with friends and neighbors, and sworn statements in the Brames' divorce file, indicate that role was partly dictated by a brooding and jealous husband who tightly controlled her finances, routinely checked the odometer on her car, timed her trips out of the house and weighed her every morning.

But a close friend said Crystal truly enjoyed being a mother and homemaker. She had a sharp eye for decorating and gardening, and spent scores of hours volunteering in her 8-year-old daughter's second-grade class.

She grew up in Tacoma where her father, Lane Judson, worked at Boeing. Crystal, her mother, Patty, and a younger sister, Julie, remained very close. Neighbors said Patty Judson called or visited Crystal almost daily.

Crystal was a popular honor student who studied ballet and modern dance at Mount Tahoma High School, and then went on to the University of Washington.

"She was the kind of person who would light up a room when she walked in," recalled Mary Kay Velikanje, a college roommate. "She was just this itty-bitty thing, and so cute and nice. It was such a relief for me when I met her."

The young women both majored in criminology and attended the occasional class together. They ran in different social circles, but spent more than a few nights together with other girls in their dorm cluster "doing girl talk," Velikanje said.

Crystal, she said, wanted to be a lawyer — a dream that her more-current friends say was renewed in recent months by her experiences in a troubled marriage.

"She thought maybe she'd go back to get a law degree so she could help people like her," said a friend who asked that her name not be used.

Crystal Judson graduated in 1990 with a degree in criminal justice and moved to Pierce County, where she took a job as a legal processing assistant in the district court. It was there that she caught the eye of a young patrol officer named David Brame.

A Tacoma police family

The Brame family was all about the Tacoma Police Department. David's dad, brother and cousin wore TPD blue, and David was determined to do the same.

After graduating from Lincoln High School, where he was a standout basketball player, he earned a bachelor's degree in public administration from the University of Puget Sound, then applied at the Tacoma Police Department.

In early September 1981, David took a battery of psychological tests given all prospective officers. The clinical psychologist recommended at the time that the department not hire him, although the reason why is no longer known.

He was a solidly average student at the police academy, but ranked second in his class in physical tests.

The early red flag from his psych test did nothing to interrupt the arc of what would become one of the department's most meteoric careers.

After being sworn in, David Brame's first assignment was the patrol division, where performance reviews showed him to be a competent officer, albeit a bit timid on the streets and wordy in his reports.

But he seemed to quickly embrace the job. He spent 10 years on patrol; then, in the next eight, rocketed from patrol sergeant to assistant chief. He served as the head of the police union for a time. And in December 2001, he was named chief.

David Brame had married in 1978, a year out of high school. Little is known about that marriage, which ended in divorce a decade later. His ex-wife has declined to talk about their relationship. Brame claimed in his most recent divorce documents that he was devastated when he learned his first wife had an affair.

The same year David's first marriage was ending, a woman he had met through his job accused him of rape, complaining that he forced himself on her after a date and intimidated her with his gun. One fellow officer said Brame admitted the incident, and two internal investigators said they believed the woman.

Tacoma's chief at the time, Ray Fjetland, reviewed the investigation and decided the charges could not be proved.

None of it slowed Brame's rise through the ranks. He earned several awards and commendations for his work, and twice was commended for his even-handed approach to domestic violence situations. In 1982, one of his review officers wrote: "... he seems to have a gift for defusing hostile situations, domestic disputes in particular."

In 1991, in the middle of that rise and after a whirlwind romance, he married Crystal Judson.

Quiet couple, odd incidents

Three years after David and Crystal married, the young couple moved, with their infant daughter, to the gray-shingled rambler on Eagle Creek Lane.

What several neighbors remember is that they were quiet and didn't like dogs — a source of some friction in a neighborhood where a stranger's approach to almost every house is greeted by barking from the other side of the door.

The Brames attended the occasional neighborhood meeting or progressive dinner. One year, according to neighbor Marty Conmy, they were the topic of a little backhanded gossip when the Christmas lights they hung were all red.

Conmy recalled that "the chief," as Brame was commonly called, was respectful but seemed withdrawn. While his police colleagues have said Brame had a lively sense of humor, he didn't seem to bring it home with him.

Brame's entire circle of friends seemed limited to his job. Fellow police have declined to talk about David except to say they were stunned by the shooting and the subsequent revelations about his personal life.

"He protected his perimeter very closely," Conmy said.

Likewise, Conmy and the neighbors on either side of the Brame home — Robson and Debi Case — said Crystal, too, seemed withdrawn.

But her close friend, who would not let her name be used, warned against reading too much into Crystal's aloofness.

"She only allowed people to see what she wanted them to see," the friend said.

Sometimes, they saw more.

Conmy recalled an incident about six years ago when he heard screaming outside and went onto his porch to see Crystal, who apparently was locked out of her house, pounding on the door.

And both Case and Conmy recalled a Brame family garage sale at which Crystal's actions seemed to border on paranoia. Conmy bought a table and chairs from Crystal, who kept looking at her husband, who was standing nearby, while whispering and babbling about the price of the items.

"It was just bizarre," he said.

Case bought a hanging plant from Crystal for $5. Later, Crystal came over and asked that Case not tell anybody the price, saying, 'If my husband finds out, he'll kill me.' "

"How many times do you hear that and just write it off?" Case said last week. "I shudder to think of it now."

'I just want out'

In the early years, when signs of trouble leaked out of the home on Eagle Creek Lane, David Brame turned it back on his wife. Crystal, 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, was abusing the 6-foot, 175-pound trained cop, Brame confided in embarrassment to friends and reported, quietly, to police.

That's how the story went until November, when Crystal got an attorney at the urging of friends and family; she filed for divorce in February.

According to divorce papers and interviews, the marriage had taken a particularly bad turn shortly after Brame was appointed chief of police. In that time, according to court papers and friends, Crystal said Brame became physically abusive and threatened to kill her.

Most neighbors, however, didn't know about the divorce until after David Brame left the house and Crystal returned early last month.

Conmy was stunned the Saturday before Easter when Crystal — who had rarely done more than wave hello — walked up to him and spilled her story.

"Usually she was all kind of hunched up, like to make herself smaller. And she's already a small woman," he recalled. "This day, she walked up and said she was divorcing the chief, that he'd made death threats.

"She said that they (the threats) were continuing — that he'd pushed her into a closet and held a gun to her head."

And there were darker accusations: David, she told him, wanted her to participate in group sex — a story Crystal also told her sister and brother-in-law, and which they retold in sworn affidavits.

"She said she'd had enough," Conmy said.

Crystal told her neighbor she was going to get a restraining order against her estranged husband; if he saw the police chief in the neighborhood, he should call 911.

"She told me, 'All I want is a divorce. People get them all the time,' " Conmy said. " 'I don't want to make trouble. I just want out.' "

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com