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worked out as Holly wasn’t going to be home.
    Holly’s opinion of her brother was surprisingly negative. She spoke of the verbal and psychological abuse he had heaped on Brenna, and about the sexual scenarios he also forced on her. Holly, too, mentioned that Russel had had affairs with both women and men.
    “He had weird ideas when it came to sex, and he was always trying to get Brenna to join in.”
    What Holly was saying was much like the information Brenna had given the two detectives the night before, and Birchfield asked Holly if she had firsthand knowledge of her brother’s erotic obsessions, and she admitted that she didn’t; she only knew what Brenna had told her.
    She recalled hearing that a few years earlier, Russel and Brenna had a business for a while where they gave “parties” in other people’s homes where they sold sex toys. Brenna had told her that they had to put on a show, demonstrating the bizarre condoms, bondage items, and phallic substitutes and she hated it. They had soon quit that business.
    Despite Brenna’s apparent distaste for her husband’s alleged proclivities, Holly said Brenna was very jealous. She had tried to keep tabs on him and who he was seeing. She particularly resented Fran, the older woman he was supposed to be dating during their estrangement.
    Mike Birchfield studied Holly. “I have to tell you that I find it strange that all I’ve been hearing about Russel is mostly negative—and he hasn’t been dead more than two days.”
    “Holly looked sheepish,” he wrote in his follow-up report later, “but she didn’t say anything.”
    The Island County investigators knew how Russel Douglas had died, but they were a long way from knowing why. Although his widow and his own sister had said virtually nothing positive about him, what they described didn’t seem bad enough to mark him for murder. And murders without a motive are not easy to solve.
    The Island County investigators learned that Russ and Brenna had dated since they were in high school. Russ went solo to a club where teenagers were allowed and one of his sister’s friends introduced him to Brenna.
    When Holly and their mother, Gail, realized that the couple was getting serious, they were appalled. They seemed to have nothing in common, both had short fuses, and they always seemed to be fighting.
    “It was a horrible, horrible relationship,” Holly remembers. “Brenna didn’t get along with her mother, and she was completely on her own by the time she was twenty-one; she had an apartment, a job, a car.”
    Russ wasn’t sure where he was going, but he did believe in education. Brenna scoffed at higher education, and was adamant that she didn’t want her children to go to college.
    “They might have gone on to better lives separately, ” Holly said later. “But they just didn’t belong together.”
    When Brenna became pregnant in 1994, she and Russ talked to Gail about it.
    “What are you going to do?” she asked.
    “Have the baby,” Brenna said.
    “Good. That’s good,” Gail said, “but don’t get married. You don’t need to get married to have a child. Give yourselves some time.”
    His mother’s advice got through to Russ Douglas enough that they waited about finalizing their union. Gail hoped that they would see what everyone who knew them felt about their chances for a happy marriage.
    “They waited awhile,” Gail said sadly, “but they eventually got married during the late summer of 1995. Their baby, Jack, was one at the time.”
    Brenna regretted all the arguments she had had with her mother, and tried to effect reconciliation. They talked many times a day on the phone, and that made Russ jealous.
    Brenna thought that Gail was controlling Russ.
    And vice versa.
    Gail raised briards, and she offered one of the puppies to Russ and Brenna. Russ was trying to make everyone happy in the vain hope that his wife and his family could get along—and he accepted the active pup, whose breed grows