Marilyn Brenneman, barrier-breaking prosecutor, ‘leaves a tremendous legacy’

Marilyn Brenneman, the tough-as-nails former King County prosecutor who handled some of the office’s most challenging cases over a pioneering 30-year career, has died. She was 74.

“She was fearless,” said former Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg, who credited her for being a “role model for dozens of young women who saw her work and wanted to be like her.”

Satterberg — who served three terms as prosecuting attorney and was the chief deputy to his predecessor, Norm Maleng — credited Brenneman with spearheading a sort of renaissance in his office, which had traditionally been a bastion of mostly white, mostly male crime fighters.

“Most of the heavy hitters were guys,” Satterberg said. “Then along came Marilyn.” Today, women outnumber men 160 to 114 among the office’s senior and deputy prosecuting attorneys.

“She leaves a tremendous legacy,” Satterberg said.

Among the cases Brenneman brought to trial: arsonist Martin Pang, who set the warehouse fire that led to the deaths of four Seattle firefighters in 1995; purported mobster Frank Colacurcio and his son, whose roles in the “Strippergate” campaign-contribution scandal led to the demise of their strip-club operation; and several particularly heinous domestic-violence killings.

Each case presented major obstacles, which longtime friend and current King County Superior Court Judge Kristin Richardson said drew Brenneman to the cases in the first place.

“She would take cases that nobody else wanted or thought could be prosecuted,” said Richardson, who worked with Brenneman at the prosecutor’s office. “She taught me how to work a circumstantial case, which became my particular interest.”

Richardson said Brenneman had legendary abilities to read difficult cases and come up with innovative ways to approach the investigation, evidence and prosecution. It helped, Richardson said, that her former colleague often worked only a single case at a time — often one others thought was a lost cause or too tough to crack.

“She was something of a savant,” Richardson said.

Brenneman’s courtroom pursuit of Martin Sherer in the 10-year-old disappearance of his wife exemplified her tenacity: The first-degree murder conviction she won in 2000 made Sherer one of only a handful of people in state history to be successfully prosecuted even though the victim’s body had not been found.

Weaving together circumstantial evidence, Brenneman portrayed Sherer as a violent, possessive husband who transformed his once-bubbly wife into a broken young woman.

In another case, Brenneman’s belief that Joel Zellmer had drowned his 3-year-old stepdaughter in a backyard pool in 2003 to collect insurance money led her on a seven-year pursuit for justice, ending in a conviction in 2010.

“It was a challenging case for a number of reasons, and the killer likely never would have been brought to justice but for Marilyn’s dogged determination to have the matter fully investigated by the police, and her insistence that this murderer be held to account,” recalled David Seaver, a former King County prosecutor who was Brenneman’s co-counsel on the case and is now a prosecutor in Hawaii.

“The investigation and prosecution of Mr. Zellmer sort of embodied Marilyn’s career: taking on the hard cases that could be tempting to decline pursuing due to their challenges, honoring the victims and others affected by serious crimes, and presenting the evidence to the jury in a masterful fashion.”

Seattle attorney John Carver, another former colleague, described Brenneman as a “warrior” working on behalf of the public who “was not only a tireless advocate for justice and for crime victims, but also a wonderful role model for younger attorneys, especially young women.”

“I saw for myself how many young women prosecutors really admired Marilyn as someone who could be a tough-as-nails prosecutor, and simultaneously a lovely person who was able to maintain the proper work-life balance,” Carver said.

Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Jim Whisman, who works in the office’s criminal division, said Brenneman “was smart, fearless and dogged,” and “an example to all of us.”

Brenneman grew up in Georgia and first showed an interest in law in high school. In 1980, she joined the King County prosecutor’s office, which is where she met her husband, Phillip Brenneman, who worked as an attorney in the office’s civil division. The couple were married 36 years before he died in 2019. They had five children.

Brenneman’s sense of fairness and justice led her to prosecute a Seattle police homicide detective for a theft in 2000, a fateful decision that would eventually lead to sweeping police reforms, civilian oversight of police discipline and a federal investigation of the police department.

Brenneman was assigned to prosecute longtime detective Earl “Sonny” Davis Jr., who had been accused of taking $10,000 in cash in 1996 from the apartment of a Black man, Bodegard Mitchell, who had been killed by officers. Davis later returned the money to the crime scene.

The theft was common knowledge among the squad’s detectives, but it went unreported or investigated for more than two years before another detective mentioned it in passing to a prosecutor, who relayed the story to Maleng, who assigned Brenneman to the case.

“She did not make any friends among police for taking that case, but it was the right thing and she knew it,” Richardson, the judge, recalled.

Brenneman tried the case twice, obtaining hung juries both times.

Publicity and scandal resulting from the theft led to the formation of a blue-ribbon task force that eventually created the civilian-run Office of Police Accountability, two additional police-accountability task forces and, in 2011, a federal investigation into the SPD that resulted in court oversight that continues today.