30 years after couple were killed at topless bar, suspect arrested

It was a notorious crime that came during the struggle for control of Seattle's vice industry: The manager of a topless bar and his girlfriend were gunned down inside a South End club.

The club's door was locked from the outside. No one was talking. Police got nowhere on the case.

But now, three decades later, they have witnesses, evidence — and a suspect in custody.

King County sheriff's investigators Tuesday filed first-degree murder charges against James B. Braman Jr., 56, former manager at the Bear Cave, a topless bar that operated near Boeing Field. Braman was arrested Tuesday and is being held in an Oregon jail in lieu of $500,000 bail.

Braman is accused of killing Frank "Sharkey" Hinkley, 45, and his girlfriend, Barbara Rosenfield, 42, who were found inside the Bear Cave, 10440 E. Marginal Way S., in 1975. They had been shot with a .45-caliber handgun.

Hinkley, a former boxer and cab driver who had served time for armed robbery, brought topless dancing to Seattle, opening the city's first topless bar, the Lucky Lady, on Roosevelt Way Northeast, in 1970. It was destroyed in an arson in 1974.

At the time, such attractions were a new scandal in the city, with ongoing reports of lewd-conduct arrests by Seattle police at the clubs and years of legal disputes.

A 1979 Seattle Times article noted that several people in the topless-club industry testified in the early 1970s before federal grand juries investigating racketeering in Seattle, including some of the nine Hinkley associates who were killed or died under suspicious circumstances between 1972 and 1976.

Braman has not been implicated in any of the other killings.

Interest in the deaths faded as other crimes, including the Green River killings, took over public attention.

But in 2003, county "cold-case" detectives began looking at the Bear Cave deaths again. Many police departments have started such units, using new investigative techniques, such as recovery of DNA evidence, to look at old, unsolved crimes.

The charges against Braman provide the first official description of how police think the Bear Cave killings took place, with witnesses who had kept silent for three decades now talking.

"From early in the investigation, it seemed highly probable that someone Hinkley knew and trusted murdered him and Rosenfield," said an affidavit prepared by sheriff's Detective Scott Tompkins.

None of the witnesses was identified in the court filing, Tompkins noted, because they fear retaliation.

"The killer locked the door to the Bear Cave from the outside after the shootings. When Hinkley's body was discovered, his keys were still in his hand. Only a few employees had keys to the Bear Cave," the affidavit continues, with Braman being one of them.

The affidavit includes a description of the killings Braman allegedly gave to a friend who was a University of Washington student.

According to the document, Braman asked if he could borrow the student's truck on the night the killings took place, along with the student's .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol. Braman then dropped off the student at the UW library and left, the affidavit says.

"Several hours later, Braman returned to the library ... when they reached the truck, Braman told the student he had gone to the Bear Cave and shot Hinkley and a woman to death," the filing states.

Braman told the student he'd thrown the .45 away, the affidavit continues; it hasn't been recovered.

"Soon thereafter, the terrified student recounted Braman's admissions to his uncle, a Seattle attorney," the affidavit adds. "The attorney assured the student he would report the matter to police, but he did not." The attorney now has verified the story, the document says.

According to the filing, Braman told another witness, also a Bear Cave manager, about the killings.

The affidavit describes physical evidence that may be related to the deaths. The man who loaned his truck to Braman in 1975 had removed the floor mats from the vehicle the night Braman returned it, keeping them for 30 years and turning them over to detectives last year. The document does not say how the floor mats may be relevant to the case.

In addition, the former student in 2005 gave detectives the remainder of his ammunition for the .45-caliber pistol Braman was said to have borrowed that night. A later FBI examination showed cartridge casings found at the Bear Cave in 1975 and the ammunition provided to detectives in 2005 were ejected from the same .45-caliber pistol.

"The two men to whom Braman admitted killing Hinkley and Rosenfield — the one who was a student at the time and the one who had been a manager at the Bear Cave — do not know each other, have never met each other, and have never discussed Braman or his admissions with each other," Tompkins added.

One witness told police Braman said he killed Hinkley because Hinkley had caught him stealing money from the Bear Cave, and Rosenfield was killed because she was a witness to Hinkley's slaying, according to the affidavit. At the time, police were skeptical of that motive.

A sheriff's spokesman said Tuesday that the investigation is continuing "as to any involvement by others in this crime."

In the 1979 Times article, the theft from the Bear Cave involving Braman was described as involving $800. Other incidents being investigated by a grand jury involved far greater sums, including what was then the biggest bank robbery in state history, more than $78,000 taken in 1972 in Kenmore.

John Lolley, a manager for Hinkley at the Lucky Lady, testified before the grand jury about the robbery two weeks before he was shot nine times and killed in 1972. Lolley had been seeing Hinkley's former wife and lived with a dancer from the Lucky Lady; the dancer later died in a 1974 plane crash.

Other deaths in the topless-club industry that captured public attention at the time included the 1974 killing of another topless-bar owner whose body was found with his hands tied behind his back in Burien, and a Bear Cave dancer whose body was found at Blewett Pass in 1976.

Various law-enforcement agencies investigated the cases for years, but no arrests were made.

The licensed owner of the Bear Cave wasn't even Hinkley, but a former used-car salesman who said he was coerced into putting his name on ownership documents so Hinkley could avoid troubles with the state Liquor Control Board.

"I was stupid enough to go along with what they did," the licensed owner said in the 1979 article.

Braman, who has lived in Toledo, Ore., since 1998, is scheduled for arraignment in King County Superior Court on Tuesday. His family declined to comment.

Peyton Whitely: 206-464-2259 or pwhitely@seattletimes.com