Missing Pearl

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During the fall and winter of 1991, police searched all over New England for a woman who had disappeared from her home in Maine.

Police were not sure whether she had run away or had met with foul play.

One year later, investigators found a clue, a clue that had been right under their noses from the very beginning.

Portland, Maine, the largest city in the state and at one time its capital.

It's a deepwater port on Casco Bay, an inlet to the Atlantic Ocean.

which explains its role as a major fishing center.

Pearl Smith worked as a fish packer.

Every day, she boxed crates of fish for shipment around the country.

It was hard work with little pay.

After work, she was a frequent customer at a bar near the docks, as was Bill Bruns, a man 13 years her senior.

Bruns was a trucker.

His job was hauling fish from Maine to Montreal.

The two had a lot in common.

They liked to drink, and they were unlucky in love.

Pearl had been divorced five times, and Bill's third marriage had just ended.

They fell in love and were married in the summer of 1986.

Their relationship appeared to be close.

They met for lunch each day at this restaurant on the docks.

But on August 13, 1991, Pearl's daughter called police to report her mother missing.

She said Pearl failed to show up for a family gathering she had been looking forward to.

My mother was very loving, very caring, everybody's best friend.

South Portland detective Linda Bacher was assigned to the investigation.

At the Bruns home, she noticed that none of Pearl's clothing, jewelry, and personal items were missing.

And her prized possession, a black Cadillac with vanity plates reading, Pearl B,

was still in the garage.

Pearl really loved her Cadillac, and she very rarely went anywhere with it without it.

And that was one of the things that Elaine was very concerned about, that her mother left, but left her Cadillac behind.

The car being left behind in the garage said to me that my mother never left the home.

If my mother had left the home, she would have been in the car.

Bill Bruns told police that he and Pearl had an argument, and afterwards, he left for Chinese food.

When he returned home, Pearl was gone.

But he said he wasn't worried, since she would occasionally leave with no explanation.

It was not unusual for Pearl to leave home

for two, three, four, even seven days at a time.

She would go and stay with friends in Old Orchard or with family members.

But with her car still in the garage, how did she leave?

Police called the airline's bus and taxi services, and there was no evidence that Pearl Bruns had left town.

Bill Bruns told police that his wife probably ran off with another man, and the police chief agreed.

He said, Ah, she was an alcoholic, she'd been married six or seven times, she probably ran off with one of her ex-husbands.

I said, Well, what about her current husband?

Could he be involved?

He goes, Nah, I've known him for 20 years, couldn't be him.

Days passed, and then weeks, and Pearl Bruns' family feared they would never see her again.

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In the port city of Portland, Maine, police continued their search for 48-year-old Pearl Bruns.

Prosecutors were suspicious of Pearl's husband since he hadn't reported her missing.

Mr.

Bruns' behavior in this case was peculiar.

If you came home one day and found your wife was gone without any explanation,

What would you do?

What would any of us do?

Bruns did nothing.

It was Pearl's daughter from a previous marriage who called police.

I knew that my mother would have been in contact with me, so there was no doubt in my mind that my mother was no longer alive.

My mother was the type of person that would have gone to great lengths just to be able to contact me or my daughter.

Pearl's suitcase was found partially packed on her bed with high velocity impact blood spatter on it, consistent with the striking blow to the head.

The blood that was on the suitcase, there was a high velocity blood spatter, low velocity, but also smears of blood on the suitcase, indicating that the blood came either from a cast off of some kind or possibly during a struggle,

somebody struck with

a weapon of some kind.

In the days before her disappearance, Pearl Brun spent an increasing amount of time in her favorite bar.

She told friends that she and Bill were fighting mostly about money and that she was depressed.

Once news of Pearl's disappearance hit the local media, tips poured into the police.

One of Pearl's friends said he thought he saw her walking along the docks late at night, but none of the tips panned out.

The case stalled until six weeks later, when a hiker on the Appalachian Trail, 200 miles away in New Hampshire, found Pearl Brunz's purse.

But the pocketbook was found right near where the body of another murdered woman had been found a year or two before that, in the exact same area.

And that woman's murder to this day has never been solved.

All of my mother's identification and everything was in the the purse.

They described jewelry to me and stuff that was in the purse that was definitely my mother's.

A search of the area uncovered nothing more, but police now listed the case as a possible homicide.

So I was thinking it might be possible that my mother's body was somewhere out there also.

It was laid there in open view with her personal belongings, driver's license, jewelry, and money inside the pocketbook with blood splatter on the outside of the pocketbook.

Somebody wanted us to find that pocketbook.

Meanwhile, Detective Barker went back to the Bruns home to question Bill Bruns further.

When she entered the Bruns home, she noticed something new.

I remarked to Bill Bruns, gee, Bill, you've got new carpet.

And he denied that.

He said, no, no, no, this is the same carpet.

And I said, well, you've had the carpet cleaned.

And he said, no, no, I didn't have it cleaned.

He said, I just sprinkled it with this rug refreshener and vacuumed it.

And I was really astounded because it was sparkling clean.

Neighbors said they saw Bill Bruns struggling to get a carpet steam cleaner into his house.

Why would Bruns lie to police about shampooing his carpet?

Pearl's daughter confronted her stepfather with her suspicions.

I sat down with Bill one day at the kitchen table and I spoke with him and I told him, you know, Bill, you're the last one that saw my mother.

You're the only one that would know what happened to her.

And he just kind of sat there and looked at me and never said a word.

Police used cadaver dogs to search the Bruns home.

The dogs are trained with a chemical formula called pseudocorpse, which mimics the smell of decaying flesh.

Trained dogs will lie down when they detect the smell of a body.

When Dr.

Edward David led his dog Ray through the home, the dog headed immediately to the basement.

I could tell by the dog's attitude, by that I mean the position of the tail, the ears, that the dog was scenting.

And

the dog then circled around the crawl space several times, and then near the entrance to the crawl space, the dog lay down.

Detectives began to excavate the area identified by the dog, confident that the mystery of Pearl Bruns' disappearance had finally been solved.

But to their astonishment, they found nothing.

After months of searching for Pearl Bruns, the only clue to her disappearance was her purse found along a hiking trail 200 miles away in New Hampshire.

A cadaver dog identified the scent of human remains in Pearl Bruns' basement, but the excavation turned up nothing.

A serious serious setback for investigators.

At some point during these kinds of investigations, you do reach a conclusion just based on common sense, things aren't right.

This lady's dead.

And we've got to prove what happened and who did it.

There was speculation that Pearl's body may have been dumped at sea.

Or somewhere along the highway, Bill Bruns traveled every week on his trucking route.

Bill drove refrigerated trucks.

He hauled fish from Maine to Canada.

In some of our minds, we thought, how perfect.

What a perfect way to get rid of a body.

You've got a refrigerated truck to stick it in.

You haul it with the fish.

There's plenty of blood anyway.

But you've got to remember, too, that with Bill's connections to fishermen on the dock and so on,

that Mrs.

Bruns could have been taken out to sea and dumped overboard in somebody's fishing boat.

Bill Bruns continued to maintain that his wife had run off with an ex-husband.

But one of Pearl's friends revealed information that contradicted that.

She said,

There's one thing I want you to know.

She says, if anything should ever happen to me, you tell them that Bill did it.

And I said, Pearl, what are you talking about?

And then I just forgot about it.

So police got another warrant to search the bruns house.

This time, they used a chemical reagent, luminol.

When luminol is sprayed on an area where blood has been cleaned up with water and detergents, it glows or fluoresces.

When it was applied inside the brun's home, the luminol told a horrifying tale.

Cast-off blood spatter was evident on the walls and floor.

Bloody footprints led towards the bathroom.

Areas of the rug and linoleum floor showed where large amounts of blood had been spilled and later cleaned up.

On the steps leading down to the basement,

more blood.

Each step indicated that a bloody object had been dragged downstairs.

At the bottom of the stairs, some four feet across,

was a large blood stain.

Most alarming was a bloodstain found in a 38 by 25 foot dirt crawl space.

On the dirt floor was the blood pattern of a human body, the same height as Pearl Bruns.

It was clear that large amounts of blood had been spilled and cleaned inside the bruns home, contradicting contradicting Bill's story that his wife had simply left.

Detective Harriman confronted Bill Bruns with the Luminol evidence.

And we asked Bill, what would you think, Bill?

Who would you suspect would do

or cause foul play to your wife?

He said, I would suspect the husband.

You've been sitting here lying.

Bill Bruns continued to maintain his innocence,

but when asked to take a lie detector test, he refused.

Police were not sure what to do next.

They had already excavated the basement floor once and had come up empty-handed.

For the next nine months, the investigation stalled

until police learned of a new forensic tool, one they hoped would lead them to Pearl Bruns' body.

Despite three separate searches and a prior excavation of the Bruns basement, police were still convinced that the basement held the key to Pearl Bruns' disappearance.

We couldn't give up on the fact that there may be evidence down there, but to dig this entire basement by hand was virtually impossible.

Detective Harriman then learned about a new forensic tool called ground-penetrating radar.

He called Harding ESE, a local environmental engineering firm who had the equipment.

13 months after Pearl Bruns' disappearance, the Bruns basement was searched with the radar.

The GPR unit sends high-frequency radio waves into the ground.

When the signals hit an obstruction, a buried storage tank for instance, the signal is reflected back up to the unit.

But looking for a body created problems.

Human body, obviously made up of primarily water, fatty tissues, flesh, bone, did not

conduct radio wave energy very well.

There was an area of whiteout on the record.

There was nothing to see,

meaning that something absorbed the energy.

What it was, we don't know until we dig it up.

As Bill Bruns returned home from work, investigators began to excavate his basement once more.

We dig just a few shovelfuls, and it's at that point in time that I strike the plastic bag buried approximately two feet below the surface, which turned out to be the head encased in a plastic bag.

It was a badly decomposed human body, wrapped in two large garbage bags and tied with rope and tape.

The individual was wearing a wristwatch with Pearl's name engraved on the face

and had pink shoelaces like the ones Pearl was last seen wearing.

The stench of decomposition was overwhelming, and police walked upstairs to confront Bill Bruns for the last time.

Bill is sitting upstairs in his home in the kitchen area.

He's eating a plate of spaghetti for supper at around 6 o'clock in the evening.

We walk through the door, advise Bill, you're under arrest, Bill, for the murder of your wife.

When they unearthed the body, you know, you could smell the stench for miles.

And he's upstairs in the house eating spaghetti.

And when they come up to arrest him, he asked if he could finish his dinner before they took him away.

So it just kind of shows, you know, what a sick individual he was.

Bill Bruns was arrested and charged with murder.

X-rays showed three fractures to the left side of Pearl's face, but the skin was not torn, an indication that Pearl was struck with a fist.

What do you think you're doing?

Getting out of it.

You're not going anyplace.

Prosecutors believe that on August 11th, Bill and Pearl argued about about money, and the fight became physical.

He struck her three times with enough force that the cast-off blood spatter landed on Pearl's suitcase, on the wall, and on the floor.

As she lay on the floor, Pearl bled to death.

Bill then packed the body into plastic bags and carried her to the basement.

The luminol revealed the path clearly and shows where her body lay as he dug the grave.

The cadaver dog was correct about the body in the basement, and the location he identified was only a few feet away from the actual burial spot.

Police believe that in an attempt to throw off the investigation, Bill Bruns took Pearl's purse and left it 200 miles away on a hiking trail in New Hampshire.

Bill Bruns pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Without developments in forensic science, such as luminol, ground-penetrating radar, which were used to great effect in this case, I think it is highly likely that Bill Bruns would have gotten away with murder.

Ironically, during the autopsy on Pearl Bruns' body, the pathologist found that she had terminal cancer and would have lived only another six months.

If he had just been patient, my mother would have died of natural causes anyway, and he wouldn't be sitting in jail now.

And I just see it as my mother getting the last laugh on him because, like I said, if he had just been patient, she would have died on her own.