Kenny Hale has a story to tell that some people might regret hearing, and that he himself finds painful to share. A story about tragic endings and unanswered questions and a 4-year-old girl left dead in a pool of her mother’s blood.
“It gets kinda hard to go back and relive the story,” Hale told The Daily Beast. “But as long as I got air in my lungs and am able to tell their story.… I’ll keep telling their story until I can’t tell it no more.”
Their story is that of his daughter, Adrienne Hale, and her mother, Kenny’s ex-girlfriend, Helene Anderson. It begins and ends in a quiet neighborhood in East Bremerton, Washington, where Anderson, who went by “Nikki” with close friends and family, was living with Adrienne and her 7-month-old son, Marcus, when the unthinkable happened on Jan. 30, 1986.
Anderson and Hale were co-parenting Adrienne, and by all accounts, doing a wonderful job of it, even if their own relationship had fizzled out. The 27-year-old mother was engaged to be married after beginning a new relationship with the father of baby Marcus, and she had spent that whole week preparing to move to San Diego, where he was stationed for the U.S. Navy.
Hale had stopped by to say goodnight to his daughter that Wednesday.
It was a school night for her, so when she asked to stay over at his house, he said no, but promised he’d see her the next day. When he knocked on the door Thursday night, though, nobody answered.
“And as I turned to walk towards my car, I heard a sound coming from the other side of the door, and it was Marcus,” he said. Alarmed by the sound of the baby crying, he pushed his way in after finding the door unlocked.
“When I stepped in, I tripped, and when I reached down, it was Adrienne’s leg that I grabbed,” he said, adding that his “heart dropped” when he realized his daughter’s leg was stiff.
Hale, who police have said had an alibi for that night and has been cleared in the investigation, rushed to a neighbor’s for help, with baby Marcus in tow, returning moments later to investigate the scene. As soon as they switched the light on, Hale said, he saw his daughter sprawled out on the floor.
“I immediately just started giving Adrienne CPR because I didn’t know how long [she’d been there]. I’m blowing and seeing her chest kind of move and I’m saying in my head, ‘What happened? What happened? What happened?’”
The reality of the situation didn’t start to sink in until the cops placed him in a squad car, Hale said. He watched the house where he’d hugged his daughter good night just 24 hours earlier erupt with flashing lights, sirens, and police activity.
“I’m still saying to myself, ‘This is a nightmare. Somebody pinch me. This can’t be real. This has to be a dream; somebody wake me up.’ But nobody ever woke me up.”
Anderson had suffered devastating blows to the back of her head, but both she and her daughter died—just feet apart—of strangulation. Police have also said Anderson was sexually assaulted.
One main theory by investigators, then and today, is that Adrienne was awakened by the sounds of her mother being attacked, and when she went into the living room to investigate, the killer set his sights on her to eliminate any witnesses. That’s according to Bremerton Police Detective Martin Garland, who has been overseeing the investigation since the case was reopened recently.
Defensive wounds found on Anderson’s body suggest she fought like a “hellcat” to protect her kids, Garland told The Daily Beast. But the sequence of events is still a mystery.
“It’s a toughie, because they died so closely together in time that there’s no way for us to know who died first,” he added.
Anderson may have been killed before the assailant pounced on her 4-year-old. Or, more horrifically, she may have been “still at a point of consciousness” and “able to see what was happening” as the murderer choked the life out of Adrienne, Garland continued.
Marcus, Anderson’s 7-month-old son, was not only the sole survivor of the savage attack, but also the lone witness.
“This person realized that Marcus just wouldn’t be able to identify him,” Garland said of the killer’s apparent decision to spare the baby.
Marcus, who is 36 years old today and living in Mississippi with his father, Otha Tucker, Anderson’s former fiancé, could not be reached for comment for this story. Tucker—who did not respond to a request for comment—was cleared as a suspect in the early days of the investigation; police were able to verify that he was on post at the naval base in San Diego at the time of the killings.
Eerily, while Marcus was left unharmed during the murders, investigators believe he was scooped up into the arms of whoever killed his mother.
“It looks like our bad guy, either during or after the homicides, picked up the baby and put the baby in that pack-and-play area. You think about just how crazy that is, you know, that this person has just murdered your sister and murdered your mother, and now is taking the time to pick you up and put you into an area where I guess he’s thinking that you won’t be as likely to get harmed or hurt?”
The brutality inflicted upon the young mother and her daughter is still hard to comprehend, Garland said.
When you strangle somebody, he explained, it means “you’ve got minutes to think about what you’re doing and to stop.”
“But this person not only did that once, but did it twice, to two different people, one of which was a 4-year-old little girl,” he said.
The viciousness unleashed on the family’s matriarch was equally baffling. Anderson was a hard-working single mom widely liked in the neighborhood, and does not appear to have been involved in any disputes at the time.
Attempts to reach several of her siblings for this story were unsuccessful. Hale said Anderson’s “mom passed away not knowing who murdered her daughter and granddaughter.”
Although the early days of the investigation operated on the assumption that the motive was some kind of domestic matter, considering Anderson’s planned move, no evidence ever corroborated that theory.
Hale was ultimately ruled out as a suspect.
“He was THE suspect, for sure, at the beginning of the case, and I would say for at least a month,” Garland told The Daily Beast.
“After that, I think that he remained a person of interest or a suspect until pretty recently”—when DNA evidence cleared him, the detective said. Hale also had an alibi that put him elsewhere at the time of the murders, Garland noted.
Hale told The Daily Beast that he had eagerly cooperated with Bremerton police detectives after discovering Anderson and his daughter’s bodies, naively thinking he could help them.
When his sister suggested he should get a lawyer, he said, “I told her she was crazy and she was nuts, but I took her advice.”
Things took a sudden turn and “it just became one nightmare after another” when police began eyeing him for the murders, he recalled. He had voluntarily agreed to take a lie detector test, but the lawyer he hired at his sister’s behest pulled him out halfway through, warning him he was in too fragile a state of mind, he said.
“After I walked out of the police department that day, I didn’t hear anything from the Bremerton Police Department until like 10 years later,” Hale said.
The Daily Beast could not immediately confirm whether any detectives reached out to Hale in the years following the murders. Attempts to reach two of Garland’s predecessors on the case were unsuccessful.
It left “a bitter taste in my heart and in my way of thinking about the Bremerton police department,” Hale said.
Garland could not say whether Hale had been contacted by detectives in the years right after the murder. But he acknowledged that “all the leads kind of got followed up in the first six to eight months, and it kind of went into cold status after that” until it was reopened in the early 1990s.
He said “there has been a considerable amount of work done” over the years.
But the detective went on to say he’d come to view Hale as a victim in the murders—not just because he lost loved ones, but also because he was left with an “air of suspicion” due to early scrutiny.
“I think he’s dealt with that all of his life, with this hanging over his head,” Garland said.
For his part, Hale has said he believes more than one person was involved in the murders.
Garland appeared to acknowledge that as a possibility. But, he said, “all the DNA that we’ve collected from [people interviewed early on] … as well as a bunch of other folks along the way, none of it has led to anything that we think is involved with the crime.”
Complicating things for investigators: the DNA that they do have is not a complete enough sample to simply run through databases.
“We have DNA that we are not legally able to compare to the CODIS database, so we’re forced to do one-on-one comparisons with it,” Garland said, referring to the forensic criminal database that stores DNA from convicted offenders and crime scenes across the country.
Investigators have been tight-lipped about the source of the DNA. In previous interviews, Garland noted that it was not clear if the sexual assault against Anderson had been “completed.” Meanwhile, a drop of blood was found on Adrienne’s nightgown that belonged to neither her nor her mother, the Kitsap Sun reported amid renewed efforts to solve the case in 2010.
And despite the bloody mess found at the scene and clear signs of a violent struggle, Anderson’s neighbors never reported hearing anything suspicious.
Two neighbors from down the block later told investigators they heard “a single scream and nothing more” that night, but they didn’t think anything of it, Garland said.
Anderson’s immediate neighbor in the duplex where she lived, Pamela Gater, said she didn’t hear any noise at all until the next day.
“I never heard any screaming, I never heard any doors slamming, I never heard anything like that,” Gater told The Daily Beast, noting that she could usually hear the goings-on at Anderson’s place quite clearly.
She said that she’d been at home the next day—when Anderson’s baby, Marcus, was left unattended in the home while his mother and sister lay lifeless on the floor. But she didn’t think anything when she heard him crying at times.
“I heard the baby crying, but … you know, I’m assuming maybe he’s wet, or he’s hungry, or anything … that’s what babies do, so it wasn’t nothing out of the ordinary,” she said. Gater added that she had an ear infection at the time that may have affected her hearing.
Gater told The Daily Beast she had been visiting Anderson in her home some hours before the killings took place the previous night, and assumed the young mother had left for work the next day. But then, she continued, police officers knocked on her door and asked her to identify Anderson and Adrienne. She said she didn’t realize they meant they wanted her to look at dead bodies until they had cracked open Anderson’s front door for her to look inside.
“I could see Helene on the floor and I looked down and saw [Adrienne] right there by the door,” she said. “She had beautiful hair. But it was red blood all around where her head was laying. … There was blood everywhere.” (Garland said police could not confirm that Gater was asked to identify the bodies.)
Gater had only positive things to say about Anderson, who she described as “beautiful, inside and out,” and devoted to her children.
“I want to help…. I wish I knew more about her, you know, who she dealt with, but I didn’t. And I feel bad for that,” she said.
Despite the nightmarish circumstances of the murders, the case may also have been hampered by a lack of media attention in the community.
“I don’t think it was very well publicized at the time, and it went cold kind of quickly,” Garland said.
Beyond a handful of early articles, the double homicide barely made a blip in local news coverage. The world’s attention was laser-focused on the space shuttle Challenger explosion that had been witnessed on live TV just two days earlier.
In addition, Garland said, he feared that maybe the killings “fell off the pages of the newspaper rather quickly” at that time because “Nikki wasn’t a white, blonde haired cheerleader” type that tends to get more media coverage, but a single mom and a woman of color.
Hale admitted that he had at one point “just figured that nobody cared and nobody was concerned ‘cause it wasn’t their child and it wasn’t their family member.”
“Sometimes you can’t help but bring in the color barrier,” he said. “Sometimes I look back and say, what if that had been a white 4-year-old child? Would they have put a little more extra effort behind the investigation?”
After the first several weeks, the case fell off the radar entirely for years, until it was reopened in 1993, only for that renewed effort to fall flat, according to the Kitsap Sun. Detectives picked it up again four more times, in 2003, 2009, and 2019.
Former Bremerton Detective John Neal, one of those tasked with injecting new life into the case, was left so frustrated by being unable to solve it in 2003 that he left a written plea in the case file for future investigators. He begged them to help bring justice to the “mother and daughter” who were “never afforded the chance to live their lives to the fullest,” the Kitsap Sun reported.
Attempts to reach Neal for this story were unsuccessful.
When they recalled the most gut-wrenching parts of the story, both Hale and Garland’s voices went flat, as if the memory of such unfathomable violence still had a paralytic effect.
“She was a gift from God,” Hale said of his daughter. “You know, you hear stories about people far more advanced [than their age] and Adrienne was one of those individuals.… Her smile and her little personality, just the way she conducted herself. As I’m talking to you now, I look at my wall and my wall is filled with pictures of Adrienne and my [other] daughter now.”
“I look at that little wave and I look at that smile [in the photos] and just think: This is not the way she should’ve left this world,” he said.
The hardest part to process, even decades later, is how close the toddler may have come to escaping that night: The crime scene suggested “Adrienne had made a run for the front door,” Detective Garland said.
“She was just inside the front door” with “the comforter from her bed right next to her,” he added.
She was still wearing her pajamas, the detective explained, apparently roused from her sleep by the “pure terror” unfolding in the living room.
“Whatever she witnessed or heard made her sprint for the door, and she was caught just before she was able to get out of the house. … She was just that close.”
