Financial Motive Seen in Slaying

BURBANK —  A teenage daughter spent months plotting the slaying of her mother with a 21-year-old boyfriend, who shot and stabbed the mother to death Tuesday, because the daughter expected a six-figure inheritance, police said Wednesday.

Investigators searching for a motive in the killing of Warner Bros. Records executive Dixie Lee Hollier, 42, have found papers in the Burbank apartment of the boyfriend that indicate that he and Hollier’s 18-year-old daughter talked about “how they were going to split up the money,” said Burbank Police Lt. Larry Koch.

“There are documents we have that lead us to believe there was much pre-planning and that the question of assets in the six-figure range was discussed,” Koch said.

He would not say where the money was to come from.

Jeffrey Glenn Ayers of Burbank and Hollier’s daughter, high school senior Amber Merrie Bray, were arrested on suspicion of murder Tuesday after Hollier was repeatedly shot, stabbed and beaten.

Police allege that Bray let an armed Ayers into the family’s home on West Oak Street around 5 a.m. as her mother lay sleeping. Ayers shot Hollier in bed, and when the mother attempted to flee down a hallway, he shot her again and stabbed her with a knife from the home, Koch said.

Police, summoned by neighbors who were awakened by Hollier’s screams, found Ayers crouched over the woman’s body with the knife when they arrived, Koch said.

“We are talking about an attack that took three to four minutes, which is a relatively long time,” he said.

Amber Bray was initially taken into police custody as a witness along with her sister Amy, 15, and brother Benjamin, 5, who were in the house at the time of the killing.

She was arrested a few hours later based on statements she and Ayers made to police, Koch said.

The district attorney’s office plans to file charges against the couple today, a spokesman said.

Prosecutors may maintain that they are liable to the death penalty if convicted, because the drawn-out nature of the killing could be considered torture, Koch said. Committing a murder for financial gain and “lying in wait” to kill also are aggravating circumstances that could make it a capital case, Koch said.

Administrators at Monterey Continuation High School, where Bray had attended 12th grade since mid-October, and Hollier’s co-workers at Warner Bros. continued to express shock over the slaying Wednesday.

If Bray had harbored a deep hatred of her mother, people who came into contact with the family say they never saw evidence of it.

One Warner Bros. colleague who asked to remain anonymous said that Hollier regularly brought Bray and her other daughter and son to studio film screenings. Bray also came by frequently to visit her mother at the office, the colleague said.

“She loved her children very, very much. It seems unfathomable that she was so close to her children and there is the possibility the eldest might be an accessory to her murder.”

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The colleague said that Hollier was known as a caring and warm woman who seemed to handle her challenging career and life as a single mother with cheerful optimism. “No matter how overworked she was, she seemed to have this attitude like it was rolling off her back,” the colleague said.

A Warner Bros. spokesman said Hollier began her career with the company in 1982 as a clerk-typist. In 1987, she became a coordinator of special projects in the international division and three years ago was promoted to manager.

Stricken by news of her death, most of her immediate co-workers did not come to work Wednesday, and the company brought in a crisis counselor to help people who may have known her cope with their grief, the spokesman said.

Bray transferred to Monterey High, a continuation school, from John Burroughs High School due to attendance problems. Dan Mangani, her guidance counselor, said that even though her attendance remained sporadic, Bray was “on track to graduate in June” until just before the Christmas vacation, when she suddenly stopped coming to school.

“The irony of all this is that her attendance had become so poor, we actually dropped her as of [Tuesday] morning,” Mangani said. “She would have had to transfer to an adult school to get her high school equivalency.”

Mangani and officials at the school described Bray as pleasant, intelligent and hard-working. She was not the “partying type” but kept to herself and said little to her teachers or other students, they said.

“I don’t know her very well, and the kids don’t know her very well, because she would only come to school two or three times a week,” Mangani said. “I had a few pep talks with her about coming to school more often, and she always seemed enthusiastic. She never seemed to be troubled, and certainly there was nothing to indicate this kind of tragedy could happen.”

Students questioned by a reporter at the continuation school Wednesday either did not know Bray or only vaguely remembered her.

“I used to always see her sitting or leaning up against the wall in the hallway, waiting for class to start,” said one female student, who asked not to be named. “I never saw her eating. I never saw anybody talking to her.”

But closer to home, some people saw potential signs of trouble.

Olga Sekulic, who has lived two doors away from Dixie Hollier and her family for two years, described the victim as a hard-working single mother with “a good heart” but who had a difficult relationship with Bray.

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The relationship had become so tense that Hollier recently told her that she had prepared her last will and testament, Sekulic said.

“She knew her life was in danger,” Sekulic said. “I saw her just two weeks ago, and she was not at all happy. She was definitely worried about something.”

Sekulic said Hollier was “afraid” of Bray and the two were prone to shouting matches. In October, she alleged, Bray became “enraged” when her mother asked her to go to the store and buy a bottle of aspirin one afternoon.

More recently, Hollier had expressed her disapproval of Ayers, the latest in a string of boyfriends Bray had, she said.

“She did not like him at all, and she didn’t make a secret of it,” she said.

Hollier’s younger daughter has been released to the custody of her and Bray’s father, from whom Hollier was divorced in 1985. An aunt has taken custody of her son, who had a different father who lived out of state, Koch said.

Leff is a Times staff writer and Ryfle is a correspondent.