Villain actor gets role in court

SEATTLE – In the small-town dinner-theater mystery, Bruce Hummel had no trouble admitting he was the killer: “I got my revenge,” he told the audience. “Tell that to the sheriff.”

Now he must answer to a real-life murder charge.

Whatcom County Prosecutor Dave McEachran charged the handyman and amateur actor with first-degree murder this week in the disappearance of his wife, Alice Hummel, from their Bellingham home 18 years ago.

McEachran has no body, blood or other physical evidence in the case – only Hummel’s bizarre words and actions since his wife vanished. Detectives say Hummel told his children their mom had abandoned them; he sent them gifts purporting to be from her; and only in 2004, after being questioned by police, did he write them a rambling, implausible letter acknowledging she had been dead all along.

He also continued to cash her disability benefits from the Alaska Teachers Retirement System – for which he is serving a 27-month federal prison sentence – and led police on a years-long cat-and-mouse game that ended in Westport, a small fishing village on Washington’s coast, last year.

Hummel, 66, blended in there by tutoring children at a low-income housing complex, driving senior citizens to doctor appointments and starring as the killer in a dinner mystery put on by a local theater group, the Grayland Players.

Hummel’s lawyer, Whatcom County public defender Jon Komorowski, said he had not spoken with Hummel in a year and could not comment on the charges. Hummel is being transferred to Bellingham from a prison in Minnesota.

In 1990, Bruce and Alice Hummel lived in a house atop Bellingham’s Alabama Hill, after more than a decade teaching in some of the remotest parts of Alaska: Bethel, a hub for dozens of native villages; St. Paul Island, 200 miles into the Bering Sea; Naknek, a salmon fishing outpost.

One day that October, Alice Hummel disappeared. According to charging papers, Hummel told his three children that their mother left to take a job in California, and for the next few years he sent them letters and gifts – from fictitious return addresses – so they would believe she was alive.

One typewritten letter to the younger daughter said her mother “had found another man and he did not want to have any kids around,” McEachran wrote in charging papers.

The children, then ages 13, 17 and 21, had suspicions, he wrote. It seemed strange that their mother would have no contact with them, that she would skip her son Sean’s high school graduation, and that through the 1990s they couldn’t locate her.

There was one other troubling fact, the charging papers say: Two weeks before Hummel disappeared, the younger daughter told her she had been molested by her father. Alice Hummel promised it would never happen again.

“Alice Hummel disappeared, never to be heard from again, after agreeing to confront her husband, Bruce Hummel, about his molestation of their 13-year-old daughter,” McEachran wrote. “The evidence clearly shows that Bruce Hummel had the motive and opportunity to murder Alice Hummel and in fact did so in October 1990.”

The children did not report their mother missing until August 2001. Bellingham police detectives spent the next six years tracking down Bruce Hummel and contacting state, federal and foreign authorities searching for any trace of Alice Hummel.

Bruce Hummel was living in Billings with a new wife. The only sign Alice Hummel was alive was that someone was cashing her disability checks.

During an interview with investigators in 2004, Hummel insisted he had last seen Alice alive when he took her to the airport in October 1990. He denied cashing her checks until confronted with evidence, they wrote in interview reports.