Box of sexy lingerie got murderer-dentist caught

By Finn J.D. John
June 1, 2020

Editor's Note: This story is Part 2 of a 2-part series. If you haven't read Part 1 yet, you should probably do that first. Here it is.

I.

Brumfield's journey home was a bit unconventional. One of the sheriff’s deputies, in a burst of enthusiasm, told a newspaper reporter that the suspect would be chained hand and foot to an upper berth on the train ride home; the railroad promptly yanked the Americans’ passes, and they almost had to walk home. Eventually they relented and let them buy passenger tickets, and they rode the whole way to Portland in the smoking car, arriving exhausted.

When they got there, they found murder victim Dennis Russell’s friends spoiling for a fight. It wasn’t a lynch mob, but it wasn’t a Welcome Wagon team either. Brumfield had to wait a week or so in Portland for things to cool down. Finally, in the middle of the night, he was smuggled into Roseburg and put in the jail there.

Meanwhile, up at the farm where he’d been working in Canada, police had found two unposted letters among Brumfield’s belongings. The first they found hidden under his mattress; it was a confession signed “Dennis Russell,” in which “Russell” admitted to having accidentally killed Brumfield in the car fire. Brumfield had written it with a deliberately unsteady hand using a sort of country patois of colloquialism and bad spelling in an obvious attempt to fight the mountain of evidence that it was Russell’s body, not his, that was found in that car. Apparently he had been preparing to mail it to Roseburg.

The other letter he had already mailed, or tried to; it was entrusted to another farmhand, who was going to town for a day or two, with instructions to mail it to Clara Killam of Lake Louise, Alberta. The farmhand took it; but before he left for town, Brumfield was arrested, so the farmhand turned it over to the police instead. In it, according to the Oregonian’s account, “Brumfield expressed great affection for Mrs. Killam, and said that he hoped to get away to Australia soon, and that he would take her along if she cared to go.” He had, it turned out, met Killam while he was on the run when he’d stayed at a hotel where she worked.

Apparently Dr. Brumfield was quite the ladies’ man.

In Portland especially, there was much discussion of the box of silk panties and other ladies’ apparel that had led to Brumfield’s arrest.

“Portland officials have advanced many theories … the most usual one being that he was a mental and moral degenerate of some particular type,” the Oregonian reported coyly in its Aug. 14 issue.

“I have just been informed that Brumfield was quite an amateur female impersonator,” Portland District Attorney Walter Evans gossiped happily to reporters at a press conference on Aug. 13. “This leads me to believe that he is of that type of degeneracy which gets a thrill out of handling women’s wearing apparel, especially of lingerie. The fact that he risked almost certain capture in order to have a box of women’s silk apparel shipped up to Calgary from Seattle shows that he is abnormal in that respect.”

“It is a matter of history,” he went on to opine, “that many of the most vicious murder crimes of history have been committed by men of that type.”

(As a side note, if Walter Evans’ name rings a bell, that may be because he’s one of the city officials who posed for an infamous photo with a pair of hooded Ku Klux Klan members, which appeared in the Portland Evening Telegram that same year.)

The Multnomah County Sheriff, also asked for an opinion on the matter, opined that society had Agatha Christie to thank for Brumfield’s crime — that the dentist had read too many murder mystery novels and they had gotten him to thinking about the chances of killing and getting away with it.

Down in Douglas County, though, the discussion of the panty-box puzzle was much more grounded. Evans’ cross-dresser theory was dismissed out of hand; according to the shopkeeper who had sold it, none of the lingerie in the box was big enough to fit Brumfield. Nor was it small enough to fit the slim, dark-haired woman who had helped Brumfield buy it; and yet it was also too small to fit Mrs. Brumfield. He couldn’t have been buying it for Clara Killam; he had not met her yet. The only conclusion was that he had bought it for yet another woman — Mrs. Norman Whitney, if she existed?

Roseburg authorities were baffled. Was this whole thing a diversion — was Brumfield planning on bugging out and starting a new life in Australia, and just trying to get authorities to concentrate on Canada while he did that? And just how many women was this small-town dentist on intimate terms with, anyway?

Meanwhile, Brumfield was in jail and drifting in and out of a state of total breakdown. First he insisted that his name was Dennis Russell. Then he dropped that, and admitted his identity, but said he remembered nothing from the crash. “I want to see this thing settled up,” he told reporters. “I know I could not have committed such a deed or I would certainly feel some remorse, and I feel none. Oh, if only I could remember — but it is all a blank.”

As denials go, that was pretty squirrely, and it did nothing to loosen anyone’s conviction that he was guilty of the crime.

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As the noose tightened around him, Brumfield’s behavior became very erratic. Sometimes he’d be very cool and collected; other times he’d be roaring and raging. At one point he seems to have tried to commit “suicide by cop” by attacking a deputy nicknamed “Two-Gun Hopkins” with a chair; the deputy whipped out his service revolver, and Brumfield apparently lost his nerve and put the chair down. Later he tried to punch a newspaper reporter who questioned his identity as “Dennis Russell” after he switched back to that story.

Two psychologists interviewed him, and both were convinced that he was in fact crazy. They were, of course, right. But after the crime he had committed, no one wanted to hear that; and when the verdict finally came down, it was, predictably, “guilty.”

Brumfield was promptly sentenced to hang.

Brumfield took the news very well, or seemed to. “So that’s the verdict, is it?” he murmured disdainfully, and held his head high as he was escorted from the room. Behind him, his wife had collapsed, sobbing.

II.

Richard Brumfield never made it to the scaffold. He killed himself in his cell; but it took two tries to do it, and in both cases there are reasons to wonder if he might have had “help.”

The first was just a few days after the trial ended, when the night jailer noticed a puddle of blood running out of his cell; investigating, he found Brumfield lying on his cot in a semi-conscious state, with his throat cut.

As a scene of a suicide attempt, it made as little sense as anything in this case. A hurried search of the cell turned up no weapon. The attempt had been made with an instrument duller than a razor, but sharp enough to cut two inches deep into human flesh. And it had somehow disappeared. If Brumfield had carried it to the toilet or thrown it out the window after slashing his throat with it, there would have been a blood trail, and there wasn’t.

It was a puzzler. The best theory was that he had used his partial dental bridge plate to do it — no doubt having sharpened it on the concrete floor prior to making the cut — and stuck it back in his mouth afterward. This theory was bolstered by the fact that the cut got infected, and he nearly died of blood poisoning from it. But if they ever inspected his bridge plate to see if it had an edge on it, nobody shared that info with the newspapers.

Meanwhile, the usual round of appeals dragged on into the new year. But before they could reach their inevitable conclusion, Brumfield tried again. He was found dead in his cell on Sept. 13, 1922, having managed to hang himself from his bunk using his bedsheets.

So, what's the real story of Richard Brumfield? Even today, it’s a remarkably unsatisfying account. There’s plenty of evidence that Brumfield committed the murder — but there’s also a bunch of evidence that makes no sense at all in that context. Why would a murderer mail a box of sexy panties to the exact place he planned to run away to, the day before an apparently premeditated crime? Was “Mrs. Norman Whitney” a real person, and if so, who was she? Did Brumfield have a second family in Calgary?

Then, too, why would a man who’s contemplating a murder like this use such a small amount of dynamite? Why would he stage the entire pageant on Pacific Highway, the most heavily traveled road in the area? Was there a second man involved in the plot, as the district attorney broadly hinted to reporters? Why was his wife so doggedly insistent that the burned corpse was that of her husband, when it was so obvious to everyone else that it was not? Was she in on it?

And those suicide attempts: How many people, crazy or not, can cut two inches into their own throats with a dull instrument? How many can hang themselves from a bunk bed without help? If he had help, who could have provided it?

It’s possible that all these anomalies can be explained by Brumfield simply being an unhinged homicidal maniac, and yeah, maybe that’s all there was to it. But looking back over the record at all the loose ends hanging off this messy little murder mystery, a person sure has to wonder.

(Sources: Archives of the Portland Morning Oregonian, June 1921 through September 1922; “Dr. Richard Brumfield, Oregon, 1921,” an article by Jason Lucky Morrow published on historicalcrimedetective.com)

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