All The Pretty Horses

By Gregory Jaynes

The lonely women who had been made foolish and poorer by the gigolo and his lieutenants were listed, sensitively, on the federal indictment only as Victim A, Victim B and so forth. But Victim L was identified there on the page: Helen Brach, the candy heiress who vanished 17 years ago. Where had she gone? Her name was on the ledger with Rub the Lamp, Belgium Waffle, Rainman, Roseau Platiere and Empire -- Thoroughbred horses that had been murdered for the insurance. Brach's body has never been found.

Investigators said last week that Brach had been romanced by a horse trader who defrauded her of hundreds of thousands of dollars and had her killed when she threatened to expose him. The long inquiry into her disappearance broadened when one contact led to another in the silky world of expensive horseflesh, and stories began to emerge of heavily insured animals that were clubbed, electrocuted and burned alive. The man responsible for the death of Brach, according to authorities, was just one part of a big, sorry picture involving prominent horse owners, trainers, riders and veterinarians. In all, 23 people were indicted and 19 charged with killing horses. But it was the Brach angle that snared the most attention.

The case of Helen Brach was legend in Chicago. She had $20 million, and the last time anyone saw her was Feb. 17, 1977. She was 65 and had been a widow since 1970, when her husband, Frank, co-founder of the candy company E.J. Brach & Sons, died at the age of 79. They met in Miami in 1950 at a country club where she ran the hat-check concession. She wasn't very social. She was obsessively attached to her pets; she once chartered a plane home from the Bahamas to tend a mongrel with a bad kidney. She favored wigs. Chicago fed off such stuff as the mystery remained unsolved and theories proliferated. One was that the handyman did it and put the corpse through a meat grinder. Another: that she was an amnesiac living in the South Seas. There were sightings of her everywhere (she disappeared six months before Elvis Presley). A year after she went missing, a spray-painted sign appeared near her 18-room house: RICHARD BAILEY KNOWS WHERE MRS. BRACH'S BODY IS! STOP HIM!

Bailey, a Chicago stable owner, was questioned and released in the 1970s. Last week, Bailey, now 62, was charged with soliciting Brach's murder. An unnamed accomplice was reported to be cooperating with the authorities, who did not say how the widow died or where the body was hidden. The Brach case occupied only a page and a quarter of a lengthy indictment that listed 12 other women whom Bailey allegedly defrauded of half a million dollars over the past 20 years. According to a lawyer for the Brach estate, the widow was seduced into spending at least $300,000 for "virtually worthless" race and show horses.

The thread running through the list of victims in the indictment was loneliness. Brach wasn't reported missing for two weeks, so little did she get around. Bailey, who denied all charges, was described in uncharacteristically soft language by the U.S. Attorney's office as a man who "told each of them he cared for her." He had an eighth-grade education, a tan and rhythm. He met the women through the introduction of an accomplice in horse circles and through ads he took out in personals columns -- 26 since 1989, the latest of them last week. "He was still trolling," said an investigator. Earlier this year, he met and married a 52-year-old Chicago cosmetic surgeon named Annette Hoffman, who had the union annulled nine days later after she grew suspicious. A private detective she hired identified Bailey as a creditless con man. Hoffman told TIME that while Bailey was "exceptionally street smart, very slick," she didn't think he had the intellectual wattage to orchestrate Brach's death. She said she married him in a "weak moment." He never asked for money, but the FBI told her he probably would have. "He got sad and lonely women to pay attention to him," said special agent Bob Long. "It's a story that's thousands of years old."

As the Bailey investigation moved through the horse-show industry, picking up evidence of misrepresentation of pedigrees, hidden impairments, extravagantly inflated prices, the track led to what a prosecutor called the sport's "dirty little secret." Horses were being insured to the forelock, then killed. At some point the probe embraced a ninth-grade dropout, Tim Ray, commonly known as Tommy Burns, who confessed to killing as many as 15 horses at their owners' behest, for a price that averaged $5,000 a hit. The most he ever earned for a killing, he said, was $40,000.

Burns said "these millionaires" he dealt with "threw the horses away like broken toys" when they tired of them. "My motive for killing horses was to make money. For the owners, it was just rotten cheapness at its worst." Of his fee, Burns said, "People get paid less for killing people."

The indictment did not say how much was paid to have Brach murdered. She was declared dead in 1984, and her will was probated. She left the bulk of her millions to causes for the protection of animals.

With reporting by Mark Shuman/Chicago