Simi Police Release Man Held in Death of Estranged Wife

A Simi Valley man who had been arrested Friday in connection with the slaying of his wife was released Monday at the request of police investigators, who said they wanted more time to evaluate evidence seized at the man’s home.

Herbert Lee Brinkley, 55, was arrested Friday afternoon at his Cole Avenue home and booked on suspicion of murder in the slaying last year of his wife, Dorothy Mae. While Brinkley was held in Ventura County Jail over the weekend, detectives searched his home and vehicles for evidence connecting him to the slaying.

“We recommended that Brinkley be released from custody and that a formal complaint review be delayed” until the new evidence could be evaluated, said Lt. Robert Klamser, chief of the Simi Valley police detectives.

“He’s still a suspect,” Klamser said. “He’s the only suspect.”

After a two-hour meeting Monday with Simi Valley Detective Robert Hopkins, Deputy Dist. Atty. James D. Ellison said there was insufficient evidence to charge Brinkley with murder.

“We were in agreement that he should be released,” Ellison said. “They didn’t ask us to charge him with murder. They informed us of what their intention was, which was to release him.”

Brinkley was released at midday Monday and could not be reached for comment.

The body of Dorothy Mae Brinkley, 44, was discovered in her car in the parking lot of Valley Federal Savings & Loan on Tapo Street in Simi Valley on Jan. 15, 1991. The woman’s face had been bludgeoned and her throat slashed.

A month after his wife’s body was discovered, Brinkley, a communications supervisor for Los Angeles County, offered a $5,000 reward for apprehension of the killer.

There was no evidence of sexual assault or robbery, police said. The victim’s purse contained jewelry, credit cards and $485 in cash.

Police said that the couple had been having marital difficulties and that the woman, who was a legal secretary, had been looking for her own apartment.

Klamser said that Brinkley gave police permission to search his house and that no search warrant was sought.

He said that several hundred items were taken from the house and from Brinkley’s vehicles, but he declined to describe what was seized.

Klamser underscored that his investigators had nothing to be embarrassed about regarding Brinkley’s arrest and abrupt release.

“We anticipated things happening exactly as they are happening,” Klamser said. “We agree this is not the time to charge him.”

Now, he said, it was the mission of his detectives to sort through the evidence.

“There’s a considerable amount that has to be evaluated and that has to take some time,” he said.

The victim’s mother, Dorothy Mae Pabst, 76, of Las Cruces, N.M., said she wasn’t surprised that Brinkley was allowed to walk out of jail.

“It’s awful hard for me to believe he murdered her,” she said in a telephone interview. “He seemed like a real nice guy. Real quiet. I’ve never heard him raise his voice. He was real attentive. Anything she wanted he was willing to do.”

Her image of Brinkley contrasts with a profile of the killer developed by investigators with the help of FBI forensic experts. Investigators concluded that the slaying was committed in a state of rage by an individual who probably knew the victim.

Pabst said that the couple had been married about 10 years, and that it was the second marriage for both of them. Both had children by their first marriages.

The victim’s mother said she visited her daughter during the Christmas holiday period shortly before she was slain.

‘She didn’t give me any indiction that anything was wrong,” she said. “Everything seemed normal.”

Then, she said, she visited Brinkley last December.

“We spent an hour together,” Pabst said. “He was very calm. He said he had talked with police the week before to see if they had any leads, and he said they told him they didn’t.”

Pabst recalled that police searched the couple’s house extensively after the discovery of her daughter’s body. “They even searched the trap in the kitchen sink,” she said.

“I don’t know what they could have been looking for (last weekend) that they didn’t find before,” she said. “Surely, in the year’s time (from the first search) he could have gotten rid of things.”