Man Gets Life in Slaying of Warners Executive

A Burbank man whose love letters foretold the gruesome killing of his girlfriend’s mother was sentenced in Superior Court on Wednesday to the maximum term of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Jeffrey Glenn Ayers, 23, was found guilty of first-degree murder in February along with his girlfriend, Amber Merrie Bray, 20, in the slaying of Bray’s mother, Dixie Lee Hollier, 42, a Warner Bros. record executive.

According to love letters the couple exchanged in the months before Hollier’s murder, they planned to use Bray’s inheritance to start a life together in Riverside.

“He will be in prison the rest of his life,” said Al MacKenzie, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted both Ayers and Bray. “I think it’s a just result for the case. I’m very gratified.”

A sentencing hearing is scheduled for Bray on May 15 in the same Pasadena courtroom, where she faces the same sentence as her boyfriend, MacKenzie said. Both were convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

Patricia Mulligan, Ayers’ defense attorney, could not be reached for comment.

The murder of Hollier occurred on an early January morning in 1996 when, after months of planning, Ayers entered Hollier’s Burbank home with a gun he had purchased the evening before. With the help of Bray, Ayers woke Hollier and then shot her twice in the head and once in the arm, pistol whipped her and stabbed her two dozen times.

The slaying began in an upstairs bedroom and ended in the foyer.

When police arrived, summoned by a neighbor who reported hearing gunfire, they found Ayers straddling Hollier’s body, a knife in his hand. Ayers confessed.

Mulligan argued during the trial that Ayers was worried his girlfriend might kill herself to escape abuse by her mother. Jurors rejected that argument and found that the couple had murdered for financial gain.

“There was a reasonable expectation that he would benefit financially,” the jury foreman said after the trial. “It wasn’t hard to make the decision.”

In addition to the confession, MacKenzie introduced the couple’s chilling love letters as evidence they plotted the murders of Hollier and Bray’s sister Amy.

“What do you think of this?” began one of Bray’s missives to Ayers. “Someone breaks into the house and kills Amy and mom.

“I come home to discover them, call police (neighbors hear nothing) and it goes on record as an unsolved homicide,” Bray wrote.

“I like it.”

Amy Bray was not injured. She was most likely saved by her mother’s fight to stay alive, delaying the plan, according to Burbank police.

“We didn’t get there soon enough to save Ms. Hollier, but we did get there in time to save Amy,” said Det. Matthew Miranda of the Burbank Police Department.

The letter, one of a handful used by the prosecution, was written two months before Hollier’s murder. Later in the neatly scripted letter, written by the former cheerleader and honor student, Bray notes that the couple could use her $310,000 inheritance to buy a Riverside County house, a sports car and furniture when they started their new lives together.