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Friday, March 22, 2002

By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

ALTOONA -- Eighty-three-year-old Raymond Bracken -- gentle, friendly, unerringly pleasant -- just wasn't the kind of guy to pack a gun in his meticulously kept house.

"He always told me if he had a problem, he'd call me," neighbor Darrel Rutter said yesterday. "Here, he had a problem and I wasn't there for him."

The problem came sometime around midevening Tuesday -- carrying a knife.

And along a serene city street, in the living room of the house where Bracken and wife Marjory, about 82, lived for more than a half-century, they were stabbed and left to die -- a crime that investigators were at a loss to explain last night.

In this old piece of Altoona, neighbors have been neighbors for 20 years or more. Folks watch out for each other enough that they knew the Brackens' Tuesday and Friday routine of shopping trips, and that 10 p.m. was lights out. So they knew that something was wrong Wednesday afternoon when ever-precise Ray Bracken still hadn't fetched his morning paper from the porch.

When a worried neighbor opened the Brackens' unlocked front door that afternoon and found them dead -- her slumped over on the floor, him lying on his side 10 feet away, the television and living room lights still on -- a stupefied city block struggled to sort things out.

Carbon monoxide? A freak illness?

When Blair County District Attorney David Gorman issued word yesterday afternoon that they had been stabbed to death but said it was too early to guess by whom or why, a dazed neighborhood tried anew to come to grips.

"There have been drug busts in the city. That gets the product off the street and drives up prices," Rutter said. "The only thing we can figure was it was a robbery for drug money."

"Do I think there's a psycho killer out there? No," Gorman said last night. "But anytime there's a double homicide, there should be some concern."

Most of the Brackens' neighbors call their own street of closely spaced frame houses a strip of relative solitude.

"I've lived here 23 years and never been afraid," neighbor Susan Patterson said. "Now, we're watching out. Absolutely."

And in the middle of it all, fitting perfectly, were the more reclusive Marjory Bracken and her outgoing husband, a regular at a local morning coffee klatch, retired from a life of retail sales and brokering insurance.

"They were frail," Rutter said. "They were an easy target."

Gorman would not say if there appeared to have been a break-in and said that, in part because the Brackens had no children and just one local relative, investigators are still trying to determine if anything was taken.

He wouldn't speculate on how many attackers there were or whether anyone was lying in wait when the Brackens returned from their shopping trip, about 3 1/2 hours before they died.

"The investigation's just beginning," Gorman said.