Exum Case - Prequel to Part I
Patty
For Carolyn Exum, keeping up appearance meant everything - even murder
Sunday, April 1, 2001
The Oregonian
The late-night movie was over.
The kids were asleep.
Carolyn Exum spoke softly to her husband of 16 years. Then she led him down the beige
carpeted steps to the garage office.
Bill Exum sat in a brown vinyl-covered kitchen chair.
Carolyn scanned the shadows of the cluttered garage, where she had left Allen Browning
minutes before. He crept up behind Bill, his fist clenched around an aluminum rod.
Allen looked at Carolyn, hesitated and shook his head no. But she glared at him and
motioned for Allen to strike.
Allen drew in a gasp and dropped the rod hard against Bill's skull.
"Who hit me?" Allen heard Bill bellow as Bill whirled around in surprise and stood up, his
5-foot-11-inch, 280-pound frame towering over his attacker.
"Oh, it's you," Bill said, confused to see the man his wife had asked him to minister
through their church.
Allen tried to hit Bill again, but the club flew out of his hand, bouncing off the wall
with a sickening clank.
Carolyn grabbed it off the floor.
Bill's face melted into relief as he motioned for his wife to give him the weapon so he
could defend himself.
But she handed it back to Allen.
Carolyn's friends remember her as a typical suburban mom, perhaps a little vain,
compulsively checking her reflection in the rear-view mirror as a pile of boys in white
karate uniforms giggled in the back seat.
On a usual trip she would have pulled her silver minivan out of the driveway, away from
the split-level beige house with pale blue trim she shared with her husband and their four
towheaded children, Kyle, 13; Geoff, 11; Breanna, 8; and Trevor, 6.
With vanity license plates announcing the family name "EXUM," Carolyn rolled down the
winding street of Southeast Tibbetts Court, bordered by spicy-smelling pines and lined
with basketball hoops and 15-cent Kool-Aid stands.
Their $167,000 house was far nicer than the two-tone 1970s ramblers most of the neighbors
owned.
In December 1997, Carolyn turned south onto 182nd Avenue, passing the ball fields of
Centennial Middle School, where Bill, 37, a former Sandy Union High School football hero,
coached their sons' Little League and football teams.
Within minutes, Carolyn parked in front of a strip-mall martial arts studio, where her
three sons were enrolled in karate lessons. She checked her complexion again. A blemish
would have rattled her.
Once inside, she saw a vaguely familiar man looking at her.
But Allen Browning, taking a beginner's karate class, remembered Carolyn right away.
She was the dainty dishwater blonde he first had noticed in the locker-lined hallways of
seventh grade in 1977. The girl who wore angora sweaters softer than kittens and always
made sure her pocket combs matched her pastel painter's pants. She looked the way cotton
candy smells.
He reached out a hand to reintroduce himself.
Allen hadn't changed much. Contact lenses replaced the brown, blocky frames he wore in
high school. But he still battled pimples and an inferiority complex about his
5-foot-7-inch, 140-pound frame. A crop of spiked, chestnut hair overpowered his
hollow-cheeked face.
He was never brave enough to approach Carolyn before they graduated from Sandy Union High
School in 1982.
While her sons swatted their skinny arms in front of karate studio mirrors, Carolyn and
Allen sat on the floor and got acquainted.
The martial arts teacher remembers that Allen soon showed up at the studio even when he
didn't have class. His red and silver 1988 Dodge Dakota pickup roared into the parking
lot, stereo blaring country hits by Alabama.
And when Allen was in class, other parents said he would show off for Carolyn like a
lovesick teen, cranking up his bravado against his bewildered sparring partners, some as
young as 12.
He finally worked up the nerve to ask her to lunch and couldn't believe it when she said
yes.
Farewell to the high school nerd. Goodbye to the guy whose name was misspelled in the
yearbook.
Finally, he had a spot at the popular table.
For the first half of her life, Carolyn's strict Catholic father had told her what to do.
Since her marriage at age 19, Bill had.
Now 34, her friends said Carolyn wanted to call her own shots. She kept up a dutiful
presence each Sunday next to her handsome, broad-shouldered husband at the Mount Hood
Christian Center.
But Carolyn complained to friends that Bill didn't "like opinionated women."
Bill, she told them, didn't like her to wear heavy makeup, or to buy sleeveless blouses
and skirts cut even slightly above the knee.
Bill controlled the checkbook, lording over her the $1,003 a week he earned as a
supervisor in the computer department of a Portland trucking firm.
A friend remembers Carolyn seething when Bill decided they couldn't afford the $30 acrylic
fingernails she wanted.
Bill had everything he'd ever wanted, she told friends. When was it going to be her turn?
Divorce wasn't an option. She had an image to uphold. She was a church Missionettes
leader, responsible for teaching young girls, by example, Bible-based guidelines for
Christian living.
Everyone would think less of her if she broke her marriage vows. She might even be
ostracized by the congregation her world revolved around.
But, if she were a widow . . .
Allen was waiting in her driveway one summer day in 1998 when Carolyn pulled in at noon
after dismissing the roomful of 4-year-olds she led at the church preschool.
He reached to embrace her as she stepped out of her van. She shoved him away, looking to
see if anyone was watching.
If anyone asked, Carolyn told Allen she would say he was a "new Christian" she and Bill
were ministering.
A sinner who needed saving.
She led him in the front door, up the foyer steps into the living room, decorated country
charm-style. An oak hutch stood in the corner, showcasing a set of dishes painted with
prairie roses.
They made out on the pink and green floral sofa as Carolyn's family smiled from pictures
on the living room wall.
They'd been romantic since May 1998, just five months after meeting at the martial arts
studio. Sometimes Carolyn sneaked Allen into her house late at night as her family slept.
She'd let him in through the back patio door and take him to the laundry room, where they
would fool around next to the humming clothes dryer. Her children remember her saying she
was folding their school clothes.
Carolyn looked for ways to legitimately introduce Allen into her world. She told him to
attend her church. She invited him over to visit with Bill and the kids, telling them to
be nice because Allen was going through a divorce and needed spiritual support.
But Breanna remembers telling her mother: "I don't like the way Allen looks at you."
Once, Breanna said, she hopped on her bike, trying to keep up with her mother's minivan,
to make sure she really was picking up sandwiches at a nearby Subway, not sneaking away.
Bill, a commander for the Royal Rangers boys' group at church, was known for sharing his
faith. He told his wife he'd try to help Allen. But the children remember their parents
fighting because Carolyn was spending so much time with the man Bill sometimes called a
"pencil-necked geek."
It bothered him so much, they said, that he popped Tums antacids as if they were candy.
But a Christian in need is a Christian in need.
On Aug. 19, 1998, Carolyn and Allen traveled 45 minutes along scenic Oregon 99 to Newberg.
They bought a picnic lunch and, at Carolyn's demand, drove around until they found a
cemetery.
They made love facing a row of granite tombstones. It wasn't the setting Allen would have
chosen for their first time. But he'd climb the snowy cap of Mount Hood barefoot if
Carolyn asked.
Their romance was only three months old, but it was moving forward with a speed that made
Allen heady, like he was living in a Garth Brooks ballad.
He was in love.
He didn't try to hide the affair from his wife of six years, Tracie, and their 5-year-old
son, Dylan.
Allen scrawled syrupy notes on letterhead from his $500-a-week job as a salesman at a
copper and brass wholesale company.
"I will do whatever it takes. I will live without Dylan . . . but I will not live without
you," he wrote.
Carolyn tested her power over Allen. Once, a friend remembers her telling him the fake
diamond stud he wore in his ear was too big for his head.
He never wore it again.
She told him to take off his wedding ring, even though he was still married.
He did, and left his wife.
Lugging his possessions, including stacks of martial arts videos and violent paperback
action novels, Allen moved back in with his parents in Sandy. His mother, Linda, remembers
him proudly pointing out Carolyn's picture in his senior yearbook.
Carolyn often urged him to stay with her instead of going back to work, knowing his boss
had warned him about his long lunch breaks and unexplained absences.
When he was fired Nov. 25, 1998, it looked as though Allen might do anything Carolyn
asked.
Anything.
Carolyn and Allen strolled along the quaint main street of Hood River.
Carolyn had told Bill she was attending a weekend conference on Attention Deficit
Disorder, a problem afflicting some of her church preschoolers.
Instead, she and Allen drove 50 miles along the Columbia River Gorge to the town nesting
in the shadow of Mount Hood. Allen had rented a room at a bed and breakfast overlooking
apple and pear orchards.
It was the first week of December 1998. Their affair was seven months old, and Carolyn and
Allen were talking about marriage.
A sales clerk remembers them walking hand-in-hand into a canopied jewelry store on Hood
River's main street, one block west of an old-fashioned Ace Hardware that sold red Radio
Flyer wagons and wooden toboggans.
They said they needed a wedding band.
The sales clerk said that Carolyn seemed indifferent as Allen excitedly flipped through
several glossy catalogs. His eyes fell on an $850 ring called "Flame's Dance." It sounded
like the theme of a senior prom. The white and yellow gold band could be customized with
seven diamonds, representing Carolyn's four children, his son and the two children they
hoped to have together.
Carolyn already had a wedding dress. A receipt shows she had ordered the size 8, white
fauxsatin gown from J.C. Penney and picked it up at the store's Gresham catalog center
Nov. 23, 1998.
Back at the bed and breakfast, Allen told Carolyn she should give the children the
holidays with their father and leave Bill after New Year's.
He remembers her interrupting his breathless declarations of love with questions:
"How do you cut brake lines on a car?"
"How can you start a fire in a space heater so it looks like an accident?"
"Wouldn't it be nice if Bill passed away?"
In late February 1999 Allen demanded to know where the relationship was going.
Carolyn promised they'd be together, but he had to be patient and work with her.
"Soon, I do know it will be soon," she wrote in a letter. "Every day I wake I believe that
today will be the day. Every night when I go to sleep, I'm disappointed that it wasn't.
"Yet my heart remains true and my prayers stay fast. For my God, our God, has promised the
desires of my heart. And that is you."
Allen remembers her showing him a list of possible side effects from her thyroid
medication, including heart arrhythmia.
Would it bring on a heart attack?
Allen didn't know. But he asked, for what seemed like the hundredth time, why not just
leave Bill and be done with it?
If she left Bill, Carolyn told Allen, she'd be broke and might even lose the kids. But if
he died, there would be enough insurance money to support Allen and their new blended
family for five years. They could buy an expensive Victorian-style house like they'd seen
in a Robert Kincaid painting.
Carolyn called Allen a few days later. She said she had crushed nine pills, blended them
into a milkshake and served it to Bill.
Nothing happened, she said, disappointed.
As the weeks passed, Allen became more enmeshed in Carolyn's dark plan.
Allen had often told her that he couldn't stand the thought of her with another man. Now
she told him that Bill was becoming sexually aggressive.
Allen remembers her baiting him, saying he must not be much of a man if he wouldn't step
in to keep Bill at bay.
Instead, he gave Carolyn the metal club he kept in his truck for protection. He called it
his "fishwhacker," and he had inscribed the word on it with a magic marker.
She could keep it in the laundry room, he said, and use it to protect herself.
Carolyn tried again. "If I told you everything, you'd become extremely angry," Allen
remembers her saying.
But he wasn't angry. He was scared. Of where these conversations were leading. Of losing
Carolyn.
She told him that if he wouldn't help her, they would never be together.
Nobody would ever have to know. All he had to do was knock Bill out. She would get the
kids out and start a fire. Police would think it was an accident, that Bill died of smoke
inhalation.
Allen grudgingly relented. But the first time he tried it in February 1999 he was shaking
when he arrived at her back patio door that night after dark.
"I just can't do it," he cried.
Then he left.
Carolyn asked Allen to come to her house a few weeks later while the kids and Bill were at
ball practice.
It was March 20, 1999, two days before his 35th birthday. Carolyn gave him a titanium
wristwatch she'd special-ordered at the Gresham Fred Meyer.
Allen knew the watch cost $239 and was far nicer than the cheap plastic Casio that Bill
wore.
After he unwrapped the gift, Carolyn told Allen that Bill was planning a vacation to
Washington, D.C., for spring break, but she didn't want to go.
Bill, she said, would want to have sex with her.
Allen told her that Bill couldn't force her to go.
What kind of man won't defend a woman's honor, Carolyn demanded. If he really loved her,
he'd come back later that night.
Same plan as before.
Night enveloped Southeast Tibbetts Court.
"Just leave him," Allen says he whispered urgently as Carolyn quietly slid open the back
patio door.
Allen heard Bill upstairs, laughing at a late-night TV show.
Again Carolyn accused Allen of not caring if Bill forced her to "submit to him."
Are you going to do it or not? he says she asked him. She promised they could make love
afterward.
"Let's get it over with," he said.
Allen remembers grabbing his fishwhacker out of Carolyn's clothes-strewn laundry room as
she hurried him to the garage.
Carolyn headed upstairs to lure her husband into the trap.
She cooed suggestively into his ear.
Do you want to go downstairs?
Sex would be more fun, she whispered, if she tied him up.
Carolyn grabbed strips of a blue bathroom towel she'd cut earlier that day and led Bill
down the carpeted steps to a garage office.
Allen watched Carolyn tie Bill to the chair and blindfold him. He remembers feeling
trapped. He was going to lose her if he didn't do what she said. He sprang from the
shadows and struck.
But after Allen hit him once, Bill managed to break free, the flimsy chair dangling from
his heavy frame.
Bill tore one arm free and ripped off his blindfold.
Allen hit Bill as hard as he could, four or five times.
But even after Bill had slumped to the floor, Carolyn pushed Allen back toward him.
"He has to die," she hissed. "He has to die."
Allen let the fishwhacker fall again and again.
He stopped, looked at what he'd done and started to cry.
Bill lay in a lake of red. A gurgling struggle for life drenched the tiny room.
Then stopped.
"Oh, my God," Allen choked. "I've committed murder.
"I'm going to prison."
"No you're not," he remembers her snapping.
Not a reassurance.
A command.
She checked to make sure Bill was dead.
It was just after midnight on March 21, 1999.
Carolyn spotted Allen's glasses on the floor, knocked from his face during the struggle.
She handed them back and wiped Bill's blood from Allen's forehead with her fingertips.
She surveyed the small garage office, one thin wall from where her children slept.
Blood was everywhere, from the ceiling to her own smiling photo, hanging above Bill's
desk.
He had nailed it there, next to a pink poster Carolyn had made him for Valentine's Day.
Scarlet spatters mocked the words written there.
"My heart belongs to Bill."
