Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (22 page)

Bill Brand had waited too long to be with Jackie. She had simply decided to take her life off hold and marry a man who loved her and was free to do something about it.

She must have had doubts. After a decade of being bound to Bill she must have wondered if she was doing the right thing. Even as she prepared to marry another man, Jackie gave Bill a silver letter opener inscribed “Somewhere, Someday, Somehow.” Bill interpreted that to mean they would eventually be together.

Maybe she did mean it that way. Maybe she knew how Bill was hurting over her defection from their relationship, and she wanted to ease his pain. But she still went ahead with her wedding.

“The saddest day of my life took place while I was a continent away,” Bill Brand wrote of Jackie’s wedding day. “The marriage wasn’t going to amount to anything from the beginning.”

Despite the fact that she was married to someone else, Bill called Jackie Jessup three times a week. He gloated, “She was in his bed, and I was on his phone talking to her three times a week….”

Jackie’s best stewardess friend was married in late 1969, with Jackie as matron of honor. Bill planned to fly to meet her, but at the last minute his business in Fairbanks “went to hell” and he didn’t go. He reminisced later, “Jackie felt betrayed. That pack (her new family) had been giving her fits, and she badly needed a renewal of hope.”

That was only Bill’s perception, and in retrospect at that. Jackie’s stepchildren liked her, and would always remember her as “a ‘mother’ and our friend.”

Bill considered Jessup a monster and his children “genetic cripples.” They were impediments to his true love for Jackie. He fought constantly to break up her marriage. He urged Jackie to meet him and arranged to fly back to her home on the eastern seaboard to see her. In Bill Brand’s mind Jackie was being driven nearly insane by her marriage and her separation from him. In actuality it was quite the other way around.

If Jackie was upset, it was undoubtedly because she was being pulled in two directions. Now that he could not have her, Bill Brand
would
not let go.

In October, 1973, Bill Brand was forty-eight years old. He was admitted to a Seattle clinic for a procedure designed to prevent a stroke. Tests had shown that his left carotid artery—the artery that carries blood to the brain—was ninety percent occluded (blocked). He had episodes of tingling and numbness in his hand and trouble with one eye. There was the very real possibility that his mental functions might also be compromised by the lack of oxygen to his brain. Delicate surgery removed the fatty plug that blocked the vital artery, and he recovered uneventfully.

In the years to come Brand would have frequent checkups and take a vast array of medications—to help him sleep, to relieve depression, and to control ulcers. He was clearly not a happy man; his ailments were those often triggered by anxiety and depression.

How could he be happy? Jackie was married to someone else, and even though so many years had passed he still struggled to find a way to bring her back to him. He called and wrote and sent tapes, cajoling, pleading.

She still cared about him, as much as she fought it. Time after time Bill’s campaign to draw her back worked. He sent Jackie money to come to Seattle to talk with him in April of 1974. He rented a suite at an expensive hotel; he always got accommodations in the very best hotels. But he recalled later that Jackie’s visit was not as wonderful as he had expected. Bill was convinced he had caught her in an assignation with another man—an airline friend she had known for years. Bill Brand was becoming shockingly paranoid in his thinking, at least when it came to Jackie. There were so many men he suspected of being Jackie’s lovers.

There were not enough hours in the day for Jackie to have had that many lovers.

One day Bill Brand would document his years with the woman he loved so possessively in a missive he called “The Bill and Jackie Letter.”

“The reason that I mention this incident,” he wrote many years later, “is because she displayed a vulgar capability that was so totally foreign to me according to my moral values.”

Bill Brand was so righteous. He saw sin wherever he looked—if Jackie was involved. In reality, he manufactured sin out of whole cloth. Except for her meetings with Bill, Jackie was faithful to her husband.

“The week was memorable,” he wrote of the 1974 visit, “and was the foundation for our being together. There were no hard and fast dates set because things in Fairbanks needed attention but things in Maryland were coming apart pretty fast by then and arrangements in Seattle were in order….”

Bill constantly urged Jackie to leave Jessup as soon as possible and to come to Seattle to live. He would set her up in an apartment and take care of her completely. Then, in time they would be married.

Jackie Jessup was, as the song goes, “Torn Between Two Lovers.” She was thirty-three years old in 1974, and whichever man she chose to be with she fully expected to
stay
with until she died. If she expected to have children of her own, she didn’t have that many years left. Bill clearly wasn’t going to go away unless she did something convincingly decisive. But did she truly
want
him to go away? She loved Jessup—but not with the fiery passion she felt for Bill. She had been in love with Bill for so long that he was part of who
she
was. And now, for the first time, he was promising that he really would marry her. He tugged at her continually, and finally he pulled her free of her husband.

He wrote proudly in “The Bill and Jackie Letter” that he had convinced her to leave Jessup and her stepchildren, and how “relieved” she was when he instructed her to be in Seattle by November, 1975.

Jackie really had no choice at that point. Jud Jessup had finally discovered Jackie’s other love when he found a bunch of cassette tapes with long messages to Jackie from Bill. Not surprisingly, he gathered up his youngsters and left.

“He had gone into a rage and otherwise behaved like a jerk,” Brand wrote happily. “He must have realized long before that his days with her were limited….”

Jackie’s marriage had lasted a little more than seven years. In reality, it never stood a chance. By sheer force of will Bill Brand had not allowed it to succeed.

Bill Brand was gleeful. He had won. He had his Jackie back. She packed her things and shipped them to Seattle.

“Then she got herself on an airplane and headed to Seattle to arrive here late in the day on November 1st. There was a suite ready for us at the hotel. We needed to stay there until we decided just where in the Seattle area it would be that we wanted to live.”

Bill was a bit premature. They would not actually live together for a long time. Bill Brand was still married and living with his family in Fairbanks.

But he had wrenched Jackie free of her marriage, and she was once again waiting for his visits. Now she no longer had her career as a flight attendant to fill her time. Bill could not be with her for Christmas or New Year’s, of course; he had his family. He bought her a ticket to fly to Minneapolis to be with her family.

Bill Brand had become her sole support. Jackie was his mistress. She loved him. She was faithful.

On November 14, 1977, Jackie Jessup moved into the apartment where she would live for the next eight years. It was a lovely three-bedroom unit in Bellevue, Washington, one of Seattle’s posher bedroom communities. She signed the lease and listed her occupation as a “buyer’s assistant” for a Fairbanks, Alaska, corporation. It was, of course, one of Bill Brand’s corporations. In reality, Jackie didn’t work at all.

She was a quiet tenant, and her landlady soon became familiar with the handsome man who often spent time with Jackie. “It was my observation over these years that Jackie was beautifully courted by Bill Brand,” she recalled. “Although I didn’t know the Brands socially, I was never aware of any domestic strife between them. I knew Bill Brand as a very gentle man with a gruff exterior.”

Bill Brand still nursed his paranoid fantasy that Jackie was not true to him. For all his blustery gloating, he felt deep down that his main attraction for Jackie was his wealth. He believed that she wouldn’t stay with him unless he could support her better than any other man. It was a premise that wasn’t even remotely true. He was her “prince,” her perfect man. She adored him. All Jackie sought was honesty and commitment.

The two things Bill would not give her.

Brand later recalled:

The problem was simple enough. Bill Brand wouldn’t make the break with his wife. Even so, he was furiously jealous when he found a rough draft of a letter on one of Jackie’s legal tablets. She had written to a man—a friend of one of her brothers—thanking him for buying her dinner when they met accidentally in the airport. This had been the night she returned from her trip to urge Bill to divorce his wife. In the letter she invited the friend, his wife, and his daughter to stay in her apartment in Bellevue if they ever found themselves passing through Seattle.

“I never mentioned anything about it to her,” Brand wrote in his “Bill and Jackie Letter”—“but it’s another example of her morally loose style of life and her need to have something going on. I have no way of knowing how often he stayed with her, but I do know that she’s spectacular enough in bed that any man would rig more than one Seattle trip to be with her if he was invited.”

Bill Brand saw shadows of sex everywhere. If Jackie went to the beach with a friend and her husband during the time Bill was home in Fairbanks, he imagined kinky threesomes. He even suspected Jackie of having incestuous relationships with a male member of her family. He perceived her hand touching a man’s as she passed a cigarette lighter as an overtly sexual signal.

It was all in Bill’s own distorted perception, but frightening in its intensity. As he wrote out his evaluation of Jackie’s morals, the skewed convolutions of his thinking show in his tangled prose.

There
was
something very wrong. Jackie Jessup had no hint of the rage in her lover. Bill never mentioned his jealousy to her. He never gave her a chance to convince him of her fidelity, of the truth. Jackie didn’t realize Bill considered her “morally loose”; she would have been appalled had she known what was really festering in Bill’s mind.

Bill Brand finally obtained a divorce and came to Jackie at last a single man.

On April 23, 1982, almost a quarter of a century after they first met, Jackie Jessup and Bill Brand were married. When Jackie married Bill she virtually gave up friends, family, and all outside interests. Jackie’s role—a role she accepted gladly—as defined by her bridegroom was to live for Bill, and only for Bill. Their life together, realized after many years of frustration, was supposed to be one long honeymoon; the peak phase of Bill Brand’s ecstasy must never be allowed to settle into a pleasant, comfortable marriage. It must be romance, romance, romance.

A devastatingly impossible goal.

Bill finally moved into the Bellevue apartment he had rented for Jackie so many years earlier. He opened a business, Alaska Marketing Industries, and rented an office on 116th N.E. in Bellevue.

It should have been a happy ending. It was anything but.

Bill wanted to know where Jackie was every minute, and who she was talking to. He resented it if she spent too much time with anyone else—even her own family. She had made scores of friends—but Bill was annoyed when they passed through Seattle and called her. If she did arrange a brief lunch with a girlfriend, he paced and grumbled until she came home again. She always seemed to be on edge during those quick meetings, explaining that she had to hurry home. She was too jumpy to enjoy herself.

Bill’s pervasive jealousy was ridiculous. Jackie loved him; she never cheated on him. The only thing that could have made her leave her marriage to Bill Brand would be her death. She had given up so much to be with him, and she appreciated what he had given up for her. A quarter of a century of longing had finally led to their marriage, and she treasured it above anything else.

Barring an accident, however, Jackie Brand wasn’t likely to precede Bill in death; she was much younger than he was—forty-three to his fifty-nine—and it was Bill who had a number of health problems.