Memoir: Tacoma Police Chief David Brame killed his wife Crystal and himself 20 years ago

At Tacoma Police Department headquarters on South Pine Street, where Chief Avery Moore has held the top job since 2022, portraits line the wall of the chief’s conference room.

The faces of every police chief since the department’s inception in the 19th century stare back. One is missing: David Brame, who left a permanent scar that wounded the department and the city.

I never met Brame. It always feels strange to say that, since I wrote so much about him and know so much about him. The story haunts me.

For me, it started the day after Brame fatally shot his wife, Crystal Judson, then himself, in a Gig Harbor parking lot as the couple’s two young children watched in horror. That was 20 years ago. The passage of time boggles my mind.

April 26, 2003, the day of the shootings, was a Saturday. As it turned out, I was probably the only TNT reporter who didn’t work that day. Everyone else did. Our newsroom staff fanned out across Tacoma and Gig Harbor, reporting the biggest story most of us had ever covered. Tacoma was making bad national news — again.

I didn’t work Saturday because I was the regular Sunday reporter at the time, and editors needed to save one fresh staffer after the first-day flurry of breaking news. When I got to my desk that morning, I found a sticky note left by an editor: My job was to find a woman who said Brame, then a young police officer, had raped her at gunpoint in 1988, 13 years before he became chief.

I had little to go on. I didn’t know the woman’s name. I had a vague tip. That was all. The digital age was in its infancy — reporting wasn’t a matter of typing a name into a search engine and getting an instant answer. I had a pen and a notebook, not a smartphone. Honestly, I don’t remember how I found the woman, but I did, and wrote a story, under the watchful eye of TNT Executive Editor David Zeeck.

We worked until midnight. The story said an internal affairs investigation at the time was inconclusive. The allegations against Brame were “not sustained,” in police jargon. Brame kept his job, and eventually rose in department ranks. It was one of many stories revealing, in hindsight, the dubious rise of a disastrous leader.

Those were wild days in Tacoma. For a while in the early ‘00s it felt like big stories never stopped coming. My crime team colleagues and I, led by editor Randy McCarthy, had covered the 2001 arrest of Gary Ridgway, the Green River killer. In 2002, the Beltway Sniper murders on the East Coast transfixed the nation. We learned the bloody trail left by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo stretched all the way back to Tacoma and the murder of 21-year-old Keenya Cook.

Then came Brame. After the shootings, my TNT colleagues wrote scores of stories, exposing a police department that seemed to wink at domestic violence by employees, and city leaders who found reasons not to intervene before disaster struck. Six months after the shootings, then-Attorney General Christine Gregoire described the department as “culturally corrupt.”

The Brame story dominated our coverage for two years and lingered after that. Between 2003 and 2005, I wrote or co-wrote more than 100 stories about a scandal that ended careers and drowned the city and the police department in waves of recrimination.

Retrospective: 10 years later - Looking back at former Tacoma Police Chief David Brame

I interviewed the woman who said Brame had raped her. My colleague Martha Modeen and I interviewed numerous cops who had been isolated or banished by the chief, who was known for rewarding friends and punishing enemies. Modeen tracked down Crystal Judson’s friends, who revealed details of a crumbling marriage.

We didn’t use the word then, but records revealed that Brame was gaslighting Crystal, physically and emotionally abusing her while claiming to be the victim of her abuse and looping his subordinates into the idea. Meanwhile, he monitored the odometer on her car, checked her weight on the bathroom scale and sent her flowers anonymously, calling himself “a secret admirer.” When Crystal asked who sent the flowers, he accused her of having an affair.

We interviewed one of Brame’s trusted lieutenants: a police captain who recruited Brame into a King County sex club, patronized by local and federal law enforcement officers from the Northwest and Canada, emceed by a veteran Tacoma police officer who was later convicted of child molestation. We learned that Brame had season tickets to The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, which always intrigued me — why was Tacoma’s top cop so into musicals?

I interviewed a Tacoma police officer who said Brame tried to lure her into a threesome with Crystal. It never took place, but Brame tried to engineer it, gaslighting and lying to both women. We interviewed the late Lane Judson, Crystal’s father, who turned his daughter’s death into a crusade against domestic violence. The Crystal Judson Family Justice Center is part of Lane’s legacy as much as Crystal’s.

The stories went on and on. Inevitably, foolish narratives slithered in. One held that the TNT covered up the story at first to protect Brame, not revealing details of his contentious divorce until it was too late.

For the record, that’s false. I was there. The simple reality sounds old-fashioned 20 years later, but it’s the truth: We didn’t know the background. Editors were trying to be careful about an explosive story involving the personal lives of two people. We wanted to make sure we had it right before we published. We wanted to reach out to Crystal and Brame first, even if they didn’t respond. Eventually, we got their answers. Was that enough? I don’t know. I know we tried to do our jobs the right way.

Time has passed, but memories are merciless. I can’t unsee the transcripts I read long ago from the state investigation that followed the shootings. I can’t forget the interviews of the children, who were 8 and 5 at the time. I can’t stop myself from thinking about their piping voices, explaining what they saw in that parking lot.