Husband charged 18 years after wife’s disappearance

SEATTLE — In the small-town dinner-theater mystery, Bruce Hummel had no trouble admitting he was the killer: “I got my revenge,” he told the audience. “Tell that to the sheriff.”

Now he must answer to a real-life murder charge.

Whatcom County Prosecutor Dave McEachran charged the handyman and amateur actor with first-degree murder this week in the disappearance of his wife, Alice Hummel, from their Bellingham home 18 years ago.

McEachran has no body, blood or other physical evidence in the case — only Hummel’s bizarre words and actions since his wife vanished. Detectives say Hummel told his children their mom had abandoned them; he sent them gifts purporting to be from her. Then, in 2004, after being questioned by police, he wrote a rambling, implausible letter acknowledging she had been dead all along.

He also continued to cash her disability benefits from the Alaska Teachers Retirement System — for which he is serving a 27-month federal prison sentence — and led police on a yearslong cat-and-mouse game that ended last year in Westport, a small fishing village on Washington’s coast.

Hummel, 66, blended in there by tutoring children at a low-income housing complex, driving senior citizens to doctor appointments and starring as the killer in a dinner mystery put on by a local theater group, the Grayland Players.

“Oh my gosh, it’s so long coming,” Hummel’s niece, Laura Keithley, said Friday. “It’s a bittersweet moment. I so want some kind of resolution for my aunt.”

Hummel’s lawyer, Whatcom County public defender Jon Komorowski, said he had not spoken with Hummel in a year and could not comment on the charges. Hummel is being transferred to Bellingham from a prison in Minnesota.

In 1990, Bruce and Alice Hummel lived in a house atop Bellingham’s Alabama Hill, after more than a decade teaching in some of the remotest parts of Alaska: Bethel, a hub for dozens of native villages; St. Paul Island, 200 miles into the Bering Sea; Naknek, a salmon fishing outpost.

One day that October, Alice Hummel disappeared. According to charging papers, Hummel told his three children that their mother left to take a job in California, and for the next few years he sent them letters and gifts — from fictitious return addresses — so they would believe she was alive.

One typewritten letter to the youngest daughter, Shanalyn, said her mother “had found another man and he did not want to have any kids around,” McEachran wrote in charging papers.

The children, then ages 13, 17 and 21, had suspicions, he wrote. It seemed strange that their mother would have no contact with them, that she would skip her son Sean’s high school graduation, and that through the 1990s they were unable to find her.

There was one other troubling fact, the charging papers say: Two weeks before Alice Hummel disappeared, Shanalyn told her she had been molested by her father. Alice Hummel promised it would never happen again.

“Alice Hummel disappeared, never to be heard from again, after agreeing to confront her husband, Bruce Hummel, about his molestation of their 13-year-old daughter,” McEachran wrote. “The evidence clearly shows that Bruce Hummel had the motive and opportunity to murder Alice Hummel and in fact did so in October 1990.”

The children did not report their mother missing until August 2001. Bellingham police detectives spent the next six years tracking down Bruce Hummel and contacting state, federal and foreign authorities searching for any trace of Alice Hummel.

Bruce Hummel was living in Billings, Mont., with a new wife. The only sign Alice Hummel was alive was that someone was cashing her disability checks.

During an interview with investigators in 2004, Hummel insisted he had last seen Alice alive when he took her to the airport in October 1990. He denied cashing her checks until confronted with evidence, they wrote in interview reports.

Hummel fled after being questioned by police and made his way to Westport. Police found him there after he registered his van to a post office box; he pleaded guilty last year to stealing the disability payments.

While on the lam, Hummel wrote a letter to investigators claiming his wife slit her wrists in the bathroom of their home. He insisted he disposed of her body by towing it in a makeshift raft out into Bellingham Bay, and that he invented the story that she had run off to keep the children from learning she had killed herself.

“I rowed and bailed for an hour and a half at least but the wind got worse and I had to let her body go,” the letter said. “I was too tired to cry but I remember saying a silent prayer.”

Bellingham Detective Glenn Hutchings said there’s no way Hummel could have handled his wife’s corpse in the way he described; there was no wind on Bellingham Bay that night, and there was no trace of blood in the bathroom when detectives processed it for evidence.

Cadaver-sniffing dogs and ground-penetrating radar also turned up no indication of a body buried on the Bellingham property, McEachran said.

Keithley, now 50 and living in Bellevue, said Bruce Hummel — her father’s brother — tried to molest her in the 1970s, when she lived with Bruce and Alice in Alaska for several months.

For years after Alice disappeared, Bruce Hummel continued to attended the family’s annual reunion picnic on Mercer Island and behaved as if nothing was wrong, she said.

“It was sort of an unspoken thing; our family didn’t talk about it at all,” Keithley said. “But the circumstances of what we heard — that she left without saying goodbye to her own children — we knew she would never have done that. A mother would never go off without saying goodbye to her own children.”