sarahlikewhoa / OCT 7 @ 10:25AM EST
I've been rewatching Unsolved Mysteries and I've noticed that there are quite a few stories where a death is linked a suicide but the family believes it's murder. Now, I completly understand that a good number of these probably are suicide, but there have been a couple mentioned that have me scratching my head thinking, "yeah, that doesn't sound like suicide at all." So I'm curious, are there any listed suicides that you feel aren't?

nina_david / OCT 7 @ 10:38AM EST
Something about the Braams has always rubbed me the wrong way.

mrbadluck14 / OCT 7 @ 11:15AM EST
I hate to be that guy, but the Braams have been my pet case for many years now. A lot of their story doesn't line up, whether you are of the camp that believe that they were driven to kill themselves by a secondary figure or that they're still alive today. Personally, after having reached out to family members through social media and having done an immense amount of research myself, I do believe they are dead and that it was not a suicide.

nina_david / OCT 7 @ 11:30AM EST
u/mrbadluck14 i'd love to hear more. i think a lot of us interested in the case have spoken to both ozymandias and gabriella, have you ever been in touch with rose? she's my white whale for this case, i'd really love to hear her side of things, given that she was a teenager at the time and probably has more insight than we could ever imagine...

mrbadluck14 / OCT 7 @ 11:32AM EST
I have not been in touch with Rose, like most of us it was Ozymandias I found through social media, and he put me in touch with Gabriella after informing me in no uncertain terms that he wasn't interested in further discussion and that he wouldn't provide Rose's information. Of the Braam children, Gabriella's by and large the most helpful and well read on the case, but I really do wish that Rose (the eldest) would speak more on the shadiness of the whole situation.

wing_kink/ OCT 7 @ 11:33AM EST
i'm not caught up on the braams at all and google's sending me down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. can i get a summary?

mrbadluck 14 / OCT 7 @ 11:35AM EST
Sure. I'll try to keep it brief. Here's what you need to know.

The Braams were June and Adrian, both 36-year-old upper middle class suburbanites in the San Diego area. Adrian was a professor of linguistics at UC San Diego, while June worked as a medical researcher for a small pharamecutical company. Between them, they had three children: Ozymandias (3), Gabriella (13) and Rose (16). By and large, according to those familiar with them and Gabriella herself, they were a very normal family. The Braams were active in the neighborhood, friendly enough with their neighbors to occasionally housesit, and were even known to host the occasiona barbecue. However, I've always found it to be of note that the Braams - for all their friendliness - had no actual friends. Their social circle was limited to acquintances and their only living family outside of their children was Adrian's grandmother, who Gabriella tells me was senile.

Whatever their social lives were like, they presented outwardly as fairly normal. All of this changed in the summer of 1997, when June was due to give birth to their fourth child, a son. The boy passed from a reported case of SIDs, and it was a downward spiral from then on.

First, the Braams began selling and ridding themselves of their things. They began with the nursery, dismantling it overnight and telling the children that they were not to mention their brother again. Next was their own bedroom furniture, gone in a blink, sold and donated. Eventually, over the course of two weeks, Gabriella tells me the house was almost entirely stripped of furnishings, save for the beds in the children's bedrooms. The curtains were drawn day and night. June spoke inecssantly of being watched by "the men who took your brother" and Adrian spent the bulk of his time in his study. Gabriella has told me in our frequent conversations that she and Rose were afraid, both of these men and their own parents. They would often state that "Ozymandias will be taken next" and "they prefer boys." It was a constant source of strife within the household. Rose contemplated speaking to a neighbor, but again - it was summer. School was out of session, leaving the girls with a lack of confidants, and the family had no close friends. Only a nearly senile grandmother who they were afraid to upset, for fear that she would speak to their parents. So the girls remained quiet, for three weeks.

On the morning of June 19th, the girls awoke to find a note from their parents. This note's amongst the Braam Papers that you'll find in a 100 page pdf file, if you google around for it. It states 'feed yourselves. we will not be back.' Gabriella and Rose, both in ther initial police report for their missing parents and in subsequent years, have been insistent that the handwriting in the note was not familiar to them as either their mother's or their father's.

The Braams, officially, were a suicide. They took a $85 flight to San Francisco, where they walked the length of the Golden Gate Bridge until they came across a runner. They were dressed casually, though June was noted as wearing a thick sweater that wasn't appropriate for the incredibly warm weather. They seemed in good spirits, and greeted the runner in a manner that the woman later described as kind, asking her how many miles she was planning to log for the day. They then passed the runner the now infamous 'tell our children we are sorry, we did not want to do it' note, with an accompanying set of coordinates for the rest of the Braam papers. They then proceeded to scale the side of the bridge and jump off together.

It is of note that handwriting experts have concluded that neither the handwriting of the note left for the children nor the handwriting on the note they passed the runner matched their own, and also that the handwriting in these notes did not match one another either.

The runner, who to this day has chosen to remain anonymous - which kills me, as I'd love to speak to her - proceeded to panic, but managed to sprint back to her car and drive herself to the nearest police station. It took a little under nine hours for Point A (the coordinates on the note) to lead to Point B and C (the tree where the Braam papers were kept, and the eldest children themselves helping to "crack the case" of the anonymous jumpers by faxing photographs of their parents to the SF police dept after having discovered police presence outside of their home).

The Braam Papers, i.e. what we're all here for, are a mystifying assortment of gibberish, poetry, and journal entries. They are notoriously used as an example of folie a deux, given that they feature writing from both June and Adrian in what is referred to as various states of delusion. They are in Japanese, Hebrew, English, Dutch, Aramaic, and a variety of mix + match style Runes. I cannot even begin to summarize the scope of them, as they are over one hundred papers, all of which can be found on the Internet for your browsing pleasure. What I can tell you is that they are deeply unnerving, at best strange and at worst haunting. They are accusatory. They point out a variety of public officials as having sold children into slavery. The names are often redacted by the writers themselves, blotted out with ink, and these blottings are accompanied by seemingly random dates. They are immensely, woefully detailed. They point out Satanic ritual sacrifice, naming times, dates, and blotted out participants. June admits to having partaken in a variety of bloodlettings, and blames her refusal to sell her newborn to an unnamed cult leader for the infant's death. Adrian, most oftne in Aramaic, writes appeals directly to this leader to return their child. Eventually he begins writing instead to Jesus. In one poem, he refers to this unnamed leader and God himself as one in the same. June, in the margins, claims they are both instead the Devil. It's a really horrible, disturbing affair.

Ultimately, the question I find myself asking is this - were the Braams coeerced? Suicide by coercion, to me, is not suicide at all. Having read the papers, having spoken to Gabriella, I believe they were. People like to turn this very human story into something fantastical, citing aliens and other assorted eccentricities, and given the spoke of the papers I do believe there's room for interpretation... but it's important to remember these were real people, and someone forced their hand, leading them to leave their children behind forever. They deserve justice. We deserve to know who wrote their suicide notes, and who gave these two very ill people a shove toward a terrible end.

bbgr8 / OCT 7 @ 11:40AM EST
tl:dr; insane people kill themselves and y'all decide a great use of your time is reading their crazy ass ramblings and harrassing their kids, great job reddit you really cracked the case.

mrbadluck14/ OCT 7 @ 1:42PM EST
Like I said, this is my pet case and there's more to it than meets the eye. Simple suicide it is not. I have never harassed anyone in my pursuit of the truth. Yes, I contacted Ozymandias but the second he told me not to send him another message, I ceased. And it's of note that I did not directly request Gabriella's information. He gave it to me willingly. She is perhaps the greatest source and researcher of this subject, better than all of us amateur sleuths, for obvious reasons. Keep your judgments to yourself.

un_resolvedhistory / OCT 7 @ 3:12PM EST
oh my god. i'd never heard of the braams or the braam papers. thanks mrbadluck14 for the details, and thanks for ensuring i won't be sleeping tonight. yeesh.