I got involved with what became known as the Brame tragedy just a week after it occurred. “48 Hours” had agreed to be the pool camera (meaning we’d provide a copy of whatever we shot to any media entity that asked for it) at the funeral of Crystal Brame, David’s wife. A day after she was buried, I was sitting in the living room of Lane and Patty Judson, Crystal’s parents, listening to their memories of their beautiful daughter.

It was the just the beginning of my long association with the story.

The irony is that, initially – when I’d heard that Tacoma Police Chief David Brame had shot his wife Crystal and himself in front of their two young children on a beautiful Saturday in the idyllic town of Gig Harbor, Washington – I thought the story was over. Both parties were dead, David was clearly in the wrong. What else was there to say?

My initial reaction could hardly have been more wrong-headed. In subsequent weeks, the Brame tragedy kept expanding and growing and nearly brought down the entire city government.

In that first week, I met all the personalities in the story: Crystal’s parents, the couple’s children, the woman raped by Brame, and John Hathaway, a true character come to life. A longtime gadfly in Tacoma, he was the one who originally broke the story and I used him to narrate the hour I produced for “48 Hours.” After that aired, I wasn’t satisfied. There was so much to the story that I decided to write a book and went back to Tacoma time and again in 2003 and 2004 to research what became my first book. I still think it’s a terrific read and I hope you enjoy it.

Paul