‘They wanted her to be successful’: Son of Spokane man slain by daughter testifies as trial begins

Over a year after a Spokane woman admitted to planning and executing her father’s killing, her brother contested claims that their father was abusive toward her.

Alyssa Bradburn, 33, was arrested in June 2024 after telling police she had shot and killed her father, Timothy Bradburn, in their Northwest Spokane home as he returned from his condo in Hawaii, keys still clasped in hand.

Alyssa’s trial for first-degree murder began this week in Spokane County Superior Court.

Spokane County Medical Examiner Veena Singh testified in court that Timothy sustained four bullet wounds.

Alyssa Bradburn told police at the time that she had been planning to kill her father for weeks, court documents say, recording her confession in a journal and practicing aiming a gun with the safety on in the house.

Her father had abused her as a child and shot at her dogs with a BB gun, the documents say she told police.

“He never quite hurt me for a long time. He raped me when I was a baby girl. I blocked up the memory for so long,” she is quoted saying in court documents.

Thursday, Alyssa Bradburn’s older brother Trace Bradburn, 40, faced his sister and a jury and recounted in tearful testimony what he recalled as a “close” and “loving” family history.

Trace said he and his father traveled together for wrestling when he was younger, and his father also supported Alyssa’s “sword-fighting thing that they did together.”

Once he moved out to go to college in Idaho, the Bradburn house slowly became his sister’s, Trace said. Frequent travelers, Timothy and his wife, Garland Bradburn, gave Alyssa the master bedroom, he said.

“They wanted her to be successful and they would do anything they had to help make sure that would happen, whether that’s financial, emotional, whatever kind of support she needed,” he said.

When Trace told his mom in around 2015 that he thought Alyssa should financially contribute around the house if she was going to stay there, he said she left him a voicemail saying, “I tell people I never had a brother” and “I wish you were dead.”

The siblings never had much of an interaction again, he said, outside of posing for photos for their mother as she was fighting cancer, which led to her death in 2019.

After their mother died, Trace said that at one point he and his father had a falling out over Timothy’s constant praise of Alyssa and the jobs she worked, though they would eventually reconcile.

“I got to a point where I feel like I was – I selfishly felt like I had to compare to that,” he said. “And I was having trouble with that.”

Alyssa also accused Trace of raping her when she was 3 or 4 and he was 10 or 11, Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Emily Sullivan said. Trace denied that it had happened, saying that he, others in the neighborhood and his father never, to his knowledge, sexually assaulted Alyssa. He also said that his father had never harmed family pets.

Trace said that his father told him at one point that Alyssa “was having weird memories,” and he was concerned about it.

Alyssa Bradburn is expected to testify Monday.