Questions Haunt Friends of Suspects in Mother’s Slaying

She was a onetime honors student and high school cheerleader who attended church youth group meetings and berated friends who smoked cigarettes. He was an amiable high school dropout who drifted from job to job and outlined money-making schemes on a computer. She worried about her weight. He called himself G.O.D., a nickname from the Dungeons and Dragons-type fantasy games he often played.

To the teenagers and twentysomethings who knew them, outward appearances such as these made Amber Merrie Bray and Jeffrey Glenn Ayers an unlikely couple. Many doubted the relationship, which blossomed among the cliques and coffee shops of downtown Burbank last fall, would last. Yet none imagined it would end so tragically, with the young lovers charged in the cruel slaying of Bray’s mother.

As the two await arraignment nearly two weeks after the killing, friends of the couple are scouring their past encounters and conversations with the pair, searching for clues or a foreshadowing event, anything that could illuminate what remains for them a baffling slaying.

The facts, as laid out by police, are straightforward enough.

The mother, Warner Bros. Records manager Dixie Lee Hollier, 42, was shot, stabbed and beaten to death on Jan. 16 in her Burbank home. She was attacked before dawn in her bedroom and attempted to flee down a hallway after the first bullet was fired. Police say they found Ayers, 21, straddling her body, arms raised in mid-strike. Nearby lay the kitchen knife that had been used to cut Hollier’s throat and sever her windpipe.

Later, police would allege that before attacking Hollier, Ayers had paused to rifle through her purse, taking cash and an ATM card.

Initially, Bray, 18, the eldest of Hollier’s three children, was questioned as a witness along with her siblings, ages 15 and 5. All were in the family’s West Oak Street duplex during the minutes-long assault, and at least one of them called 911 for help, police said.

Within hours, however, Bray was placed under arrest for complicity in her mother’s death. Prosecutors allege that as part of a prearranged plan, she purposely left the front door unlocked that morning so that Ayers could enter.

He was allegedly armed with a gun he had bought the day before at a location authorities refused to disclose. A search of Ayers’ apartment turned up documents showing that he and Bray had spent two months plotting to kill Hollier so that Bray could collect her inheritance, which consisted largely of a $300,000 life insurance policy, authorities said.

But the police account does not satisfy the abundance of questions being raised by friends and family of the accused.

Was financial gain truly the motivation? If Bray was really so unhappy at home with her mother, why didn’t she move out? And if the pair truly had a plan, then why did it go so terribly awry?

“Based on how G.O.D. played games, it would seem a little sloppy,” said Richard Stiles, 26, a friend who knew Ayers from science-fiction and historical role-playing games. “I think he did it for her, whether it was love or not.”

The last time Stiles saw Jeffrey Ayers was Jan. 6, 10 days before Hollier’s death. Ayers had come over to Stiles’ apartment to watch “Tank Girl” and “Judge Dredd” on video. But he declined to stay for a role-playing session based on the Star Wars series. It was Bray’s 18th birthday and Ayers had promised to take her out to dinner, according to Stiles.

His regular “gaming” buddies had been seeing less of Ayers--who called himself G.O.D., short for Games of Deception--since he had started seriously dating Bray in late September or early October. The pretty, blond high school senior, whom Ayers had met in downtown Burbank through mutual friends, was his first real girlfriend and by most accounts, Ayers had fallen hard for her.

“Until she came into his life, he always said being with a girlfriend was stupid, a waste of your time. Finding out he had a girlfriend baffled all of us,” said Dennis Morin, 23.

Before, Ayers had had plenty of time to hang out at the Media City Center video arcade, drink coffee at Norm’s and Taco Bell, or direct long games of Shadow Run at The Last Grenadier, a Burbank shop that sells role-playing supplies. After a shoulder injury kept him from pursuing a dream to join the National Guard or the Marines, he worked at a McDonald’s for a few months, then tried telemarketing, according to friends.

But he lived rent-free with his mother and had not seemed much interested in working since his grandmother’s death last year left him a small inheritance of his own, friends said. He talked about making money through various business ventures. His latest scheme was to invest in a series of 900-number telephone lines, said Ken Nolls, 20.

“He was always sending away for brochures that showed you how to make money quick,” Nolls said.

At the same time, friends describe Ayers as uncommonly generous. When they were low on money, he bought meals and groceries. One friend, Pam Minnick, 20, recalled the night he treated her, her boyfriend and Bray to dinner at the Black Angus Restaurant.

“He was like the friendliest guy in the world. He was sweet and he was funny,” Minnick said.

“He is the last person I would ever think to do this,” said Stiles. “He was not the type to fight and he never messed with anybody. The only thing I can think of is he snapped.”

Most observers say Ayers and Bray seemed playful and happy together. Basking in the new glow of the relationship, they asked friends to take their photograph. Yet Minnick said she was surprised when, after the pair had been dating only a few months, Bray told her that she and Ayers were already talking about getting married.

“She had a list of everyone who would be at the wedding and her bridesmaids. We were laughing about it because she had 100 people to invite and Jeff only had a few,” she said. “They talked about getting jobs, getting an apartment together, and as soon as she turned 18, getting married.”

Bray’s attorney, Joy Wilensky, has instructed Bray’s relatives--who initially denied that Bray and Ayers were romantically involved--to stop talking publicly about the case. Immediately after the killing, Bray’s father and aunt defended her, saying that any disagreements with her mother were typical teenage complaints. They were at a loss to explain her link to the crime.

Wilensky maintains that accounts of the killing are replete with “half-truths” and that there could be more than one explanation for the police-collected evidence.

Teenagers who knew Bray from school say they never heard her complain much about anything. Like any adolescent, she bristled at the curfew her mother imposed, fought with her younger sister, and got irritated when she had to baby-sit her little brother.

The most striking thing about her was how reserved she was, classmates and teachers said. During her freshman year at John Burroughs Senior High, she was picked for the cheerleading team. Somewhat overweight at the time, she didn’t fit in with the other girls on the squad, said Jennifer Ervin, 17.

“She didn’t have very many friends, but it didn’t seem to bother her,” said Jennifer, who attended both Burroughs and this year, Monterey Continuation High School with Bray.

Her parents separated when Bray was 3 years old and divorced when she was 7. Her father, a former jazz musician named Tom Bray, subsequently moved to Las Vegas. Because he lived out of state, Bray did not see him often, but they maintained contact by phone, said Sonya Chang, 42, a friend of Hollier’s.

Other classmates said that while she was at Burroughs, Bray was known as an exceptionally bright student, “the type of girl you always copied your Spanish homework off of,” in the words of one. She did well in her honors-level classes even after she started regularly cutting school last year.

Due to her chronic truancy, Bray was transferred in mid-October to Monterey Continuation, an alternative school for students with academic or attendance problems. There, she continued the same low-profile, high-performance pattern of behavior she had earlier exhibited at Burroughs, according to school officials. By Christmas break, her attendance at Monterey had become sporadic and she would have been expelled from school on the same day she was arrested.

None of her friends know why Bray skipped school so much, whether she was bored, lonely or both. She did not drink or do drugs and was known as a virulent antismoker.

Her closest friends tended to be older and formed two seemingly disparate circles. One group came from the evangelical church her family attended, Toluca Lake Trinity Foursquare. The other was the “gaming” crowd around Ayers that hung out on San Fernando Boulevard.

When Hollier’s family buried her on Wednesday, it was the church group that showed up to offer sympathy.

In the days since, alternatives to the police version of the crime have been advanced by both sides. Ayers’ friends want to believe that Bray pushed him to kill her mother. People who worked with Dixie Hollier said they believe that in an angry moment, Bray may indeed have told Ayers that she wished her mother were dead, but never intended to have him take her literally.

“We had no reason to believe she had these kind of feelings for her mother, so it’s rather easy and plausible to believe she is innocent,” Chang said.

The police say that their case against Bray and Ayers will become much clearer in the weeks ahead. But it may have been Msgr. Patrick Reilly, the Catholic priest who presided at Hollier’s funeral, who had the clearest perspective on the deeper mystery behind the taking of Hollier’s life.

“We could travel the world, talk to all the saints and sinners,” Reilly said, “and they would not be able to explain.”