Town note
Before the gold rush only a few outsiders had come to the region besides the native people.
about 0:04:32The story
Dr Brian Drake was a chiropractor in Bonners Ferry, a small town in far northern Idaho. He and his wife Jennifer married in 1999 and had four children; after ten years in Austin, Texas, they moved to Idaho in 2012 to be near her family. In 2014 Drake opened an office on South Main Street, initially one day a week, later adding a second day and offices in Sandpoint and Hayden.
On 12 March 2020 Drake finished with his last patients and called his wife. At about 7:26 p.m. he told her someone had just shot him through the window. She got no response, hung up and called 911. A second call came seconds later from a neighbour across South Main Street and U.S. Highway 95, who had heard the shot and seen a man in a hood and dark clothing running away.
Police kicked in the locked door and found Drake dead on the floor. A single bullet had come through the double-pane glass of the closed window and struck him in the back; the autopsy indicated he was probably sitting. It was the first murder in Bonners Ferry since the early 1960s.
Surveillance footage showed a hooded figure leaving the Kootenai River Inn, avoiding cameras, walking along South Main Street and returning around the time of the killing. Two witnesses identified him, but after search warrants on his hotel room, truck and phone he turned out to be a visitor with no involvement and was cleared.
He took him outside and reported a gas leak. A fire chief found the gas fitting only finger tight, and a gas company representative said it must have been loosened deliberately.
He owned a white Toyota Tundra, and the clips, despite inconsistent time stamps, appeared to show it leaving Mellet's house shortly before the shooting, circling the area twice, driving between the buildings outside Drake's window and stopping for several seconds. After about five minutes the truck left Mellet's house by a route that avoided the crime scene.
On 6 May 2020 police put the footage to him. Asked why he was in the alley behind his office, he said he had driven there to defecate. On 27 August 2020 they asked him to bring his wife's gun, a smaller calibre than the murder weapon, to the sheriff's office as a pretext. The interrogation began at 2:49 p.m. and he denied everything. He said he had inadvertently killed Drake while trying to scare him by firing a revolver through the window, and that he wanted to frighten him into closing his office because Drake had taken more than 30 of his patients. Afterwards he went with police to the bank of the Kootenai River and threw a rock where he said he had thrown the gun, which was never found. A few days later he said he had staged the gas leak intending to kill himself.
On 12 February 2021 the district court heard a motion to dismiss on the ground that there was no admissible evidence.
His side counterclaimed that she knew others, including herself, had a motive because of Drake's life insurance, and alleged that Drake had been a philanderer addicted to pornography and alcohol who had sexually abused her and other women. Her lawyers called the allegations libellous, fabricated and malicious. In 2023 the family put up billboards offering a $10,000 reward and launched justiceforbriandrake.com.