Town note
The Newwith Rubber Company operated in Barrington until its plant burned down in the 1940s and nobody rebuilt it.
about 0:04:31The story
Barrington, Rhode Island, is a small, wealthy town of 16,015 people on the far eastern panhandle of the state, where the median household income is $103,937 and the median home costs $524,000. It was the last dry town in Rhode Island, holding out until 2011. Into this comfortable place, in about 1988, moved Ernest and Alice Brendel. Ernest was 52, a lawyer specialising in trademarks, patents and international licensing who had been assistant general counsel at Joseph E. Seagram's in New York; Alice was 46 and worked as a librarian, latterly at Brown University in Providence. They had met in the 1970s through the Brown University Alumni Club in New York, married in Alice's hometown of Redding, Pennsylvania, and lived in Manhattan before moving to Providence and then to a white colonial farmhouse in Barrington, two blocks from the school their eight-year-old daughter Emily attended.
His house there caught fire twice in one week, his doctoral preliminary exams were postponed three times because of the fires and he failed them, and he turned to the commodities market instead. Friends described him as a devoted father of two who taught Sunday school and coached soccer, gracious and compassionate. In Barrington he worked as a freelance commodities adviser. The Brendels trusted him enough to name themselves Emily's emergency contacts at the House of Little People daycare, and Ernest invested with him.
The investments went badly. He still lent him $2,000 for computer equipment. Ernest put in $15,000, which shrank to about $3,100, and closed the account again. He asked politely for the loan and half his money back.
His computers were repossessed, his wife Susan had told him she wanted a divorce, and he was barred by court order from the family home after Susan said he had told her he had paid $5,000 to have her killed, plus $1,000 extra to make it look like an accident. On September 19 he bought a Bear Devastator crossbow with six arrows and six bullet-tip points. He stayed out all night and came home at 11 a.m. wet, muddy, scraped and with bent glasses, then washed his clothes with bleach.
On Friday, September 20, Alice Brendel was last seen riding the bus home from Providence, and Emily was collected from the Barrington YMCA. A man had telephoned Primrose Hill School to say Emily should walk home; the school sent her to the YMCA instead. He used one of Ernest's credit cards at the local mall that day. The next night he drove Ernest's red Toyota to the house of Ernest's sister, Christine Scriabini, during a dinner party, and told her and her husband Alexander that both families had been kidnapped by the mafia for a $300,000 ransom, producing Ernest's licence, business cards and bank card and some of Alice's rings as proof. He asked them for $75,000 and said he could raise the rest.
On September 23 police found the Brendel house empty and its garage recently washed. He had also forged a $1,500 cheque in Alice's name and mailed the regulators a letter, typed on the Brendels' computer from cut-and-pasted fragments, withdrawing the complaint. At 4 a.m. he told a sergeant the bodies were not buried where police were looking, then asked for a lawyer and said nothing more.
On November 7, 1991, a woman walking her dogs near St Andrew's Middle School found two depressions in the bushes with white powder on them. All three bodies were in one grave. Ernest had died of arrow wounds to the chest, with further wounds to his buttocks, legs and back; Alice had been strangled with a knotted cloth; Emily's cause of death could not be established. He testified for six days.