A Star’s Complex Life and Mysterious Death

On the far side of the island, where few people live, snarls of mango and breadfruit trees have been hacked away to make room for a marina.

A man on the dock pounds his anchor into shape with a hammer, sweating in the damp, tropical afternoon. Schoolchildren hurry down to the water, chattering, laughing, eager for their sailing lesson.

Once in a while, someone glances at the boat in the last berth on the left.

It lilts there on the tide, drapes pulled tightly across tinted windows. Even the simplest details, a surfboard lashed to the bow, a pair of sandals left casually by the cabin door, seem sinister because of the yellow police tape garlanded around the deck.

This is the 55-foot catamaran on which Brian Williams--he called himself Bison Dele near the end of a celebrated basketball career--was last seen in July.

What happened on the boat is a mystery that has police baffled.

This much is known: Brian was a man of varied moods and interests, hardly a typical athlete. The 33-year-old walked away from the NBA in his prime, forsaking millions of dollars, to travel the world. Sailing was a new passion and he had been exploring the South Pacific with his girlfriend and a hired skipper on his boat, the Hakuna Matata--Swahili for “No Worries.”

Midway through the trip, his 35-year-old brother, Kevin, a troubled soul who called himself Miles Dabord, joined them. According to police documents and interviews with investigators, family and friends, the relationship between the men was complex--and tested by Kevin’s frustration at living in the shadow of his successful younger brother. At sea, Kevin reportedly grew moody and was constantly smoking marijuana.

Maybe old tensions flared; maybe the brothers argued about something new. Authorities believe Kevin killed Brian and the others, then dumped the bodies.

The disappearances went unnoticed for weeks, by which time Kevin had moored at Taravao and returned to the United States. He spent a month on the run--posing at least once as his brother--before being found comatose and nearly naked on a Mexican beach two weeks ago.

Whatever happened at sea, local gendarmes and the FBI don’t have an eyewitness. So they have focused on the catamaran, scratching at bloody traces and examining the blue-green hull, finding marks perhaps caused by a stray bullet.

The evidence may tell them when and how the victims disappeared, but they doubt it will explain why.

Equally Complicated

At 6 feet 11, 270 pounds, Brian was agile for his size, talented enough to rank among professional basketball’s better centers. But he was just as well known for reading Nietzsche and Camille Paglia, for being alternately personable and aloof. Once, he suggested his team deal with a losing streak by holding hands and singing “Kumbaya.”

Off-seasons were spent riding his bicycle long distances and running with the bulls in Pamplona. He was an avid pilot. “Planet Earth is my home,” he said in 1996 while playing for the Clippers. “That’s all the home I need. I just wander the Earth. I am king. I don’t need a starting point. I don’t need a destination.”

His brother was equally complicated. Kevin read incessantly but never finished college, bored by schoolwork. He was tall and athletic but slowed by asthma. His entrepreneurial ideas usually failed.

As Brian continued to fund Kevin’s plans, their mother, Patricia Phillips, noticed a disturbing pattern. “This usually occurs after one of his get-rich-quick schemes fails and [Kevin] turns to alcohol to ease his disappointment,” she recently told investigators. “Once [he] cannot afford to live a certain lifestyle, he seeks out his family or, more specifically Brian, to help him back on his feet. Once Brian provides [him] with money, he leaves and is not heard from until his next financial blunder.”

There was something else. Kevin took steroids for his ailment, and Phillips told police: “The medication tends to alter his behavior to an aggressive posture. He is capable of extremely violent behavior when he does not get his way.”

A childhood friend disputes this portrait of Kevin as struggling and bitter. Kevin could be warm and humorous, Paul White said, his troubles a result of him “not being the most disciplined person in the world, of being someone who was impatient with the college process, and of being someone who had an entrepreneurial spirit.”

White added, “Some issues in one’s life haunt a person and affect the way they go about their life.”

Critical Difference

The brothers were so similar, each broad-shouldered, with dark eyes and a heavy brow that made them seem brooding. They shared a love of books. But from early on, there was a critical difference.

Brian began to shine as an athlete in junior high school. When Kevin tried to keep up, the asthma left him gasping, often landing him in the emergency room.

Though he never complained, his mother sensed frustration. “You could just see how it bothered him, just by how he carried himself around the fields and courts where Brian was playing,” she said. “He internalized it too much, I believe, and that’s part of the whole drama between the boys.”

Patricia divorced Eugene Williams, a singer with the early rock ‘n’ roll group the Platters, when the brothers were still toddlers. As teenagers, Kevin and Brian moved in with Eugene, and Brian attracted national attention on the basketball court, averaging 18 points a game for Bishop Gorman High in Las Vegas.

During his junior year, he also proved himself to be more than a typical jock. “We were just kids, but he was so much different,” former teammate Matt Othick said. “He was so much more worldly.”

In the Othick household, where Brian spent several nights a week, the men could usually be found in front of a television set watching basketball. Brian preferred to sit in the kitchen with Othick’s mother, Sandye.

“She’s a painter,” Othick said. “They would end up talking for hours about art and travel.”

After a few years, Brian returned to his mother in California while Kevin remained in Nevada. Kevin worked as a clerk at a wallpaper store and parked cars at a casino. Brian had an impressive senior season at St. Monica High in Santa Monica, earning a scholarship to the University of Maryland.

When he left home, Patricia took a job as a software developer in Palo Alto. Kevin soon joined her, attending junior college by day and training as a computer operator on the graveyard shift.

“In hindsight, his personality was that of a computer geek,” White said. “He was insular.”

Brian, for his part, grew disenchanted at Maryland and transferred. At the University of Arizona, there were dominant performances and inspiring emotional displays, but also lapses on court that caused people to question his commitment.

“He had different interests than a lot of the guys,” said Matt Muehlebach, Arizona’s team captain for the 1990-91 season. “He would make different comments about books he was reading. He was interested in wines and cooking. I remember his apartment was right next to mine and you could see there was some thought put into decoration. Me, I had a big beer sign on the wall.”

When Brian left college early to play for the NBA’s Orlando Magic, team executives hired a private investigator to check his background. Brian once quipped: “They thought I was gay.”

Dependency Issues

Professional basketball meant a $4.6-million contract, money that Brian was eager to share with his family. At first, that seemed like a blessing.

He told his mother to quit her job and finish up on her bachelor’s degree at UCLA. When she mentioned Kevin was taking classes too, he told her: “Well, both of you guys go back to college.”

They rented a house in Santa Monica and, for the summer of 1991, Phillips had her boys back. It was there, Brian found someone new.

Serena Karlan had blue eyes and light-brown hair. Like Brian and Kevin, she was the product of parents who divorced when she was young. Like them, she was philosophical and searching.

“From everything I’ve been able to learn about [Brian] and what I know of Serena, how they both were most interested in following their hearts, I’m sure they looked into each other’s eyes and said ‘I know you,’ ” said her father, Stuart Karlan, an executive who lives in New York.

A friendship blossomed, perhaps a diversion for Brian at a time when Phillips says family life was falling apart. “My one son was suddenly a millionaire, I was suddenly his dependent and my older son was my dependent,” she said. “It just didn’t work out.”

Kevin was taking summer classes at UCLA before starting at Santa Monica College and Phillips did not think he was applying himself. Her nagging led to what she called “a defining argument.”

Kevin, sick of the criticism, announced he was quitting school to return to Palo Alto.

“If I could ever take that back ... I should have respected him as a man and trusted that he could be responsible,” Phillips said. “I spoke to him as if he was still a child.”

Brian, meanwhile, was giving his mother a substantial allowance but stopped communicating regularly with his family. Problems with fainting spells and clinical depression sidelined him and, in October 1992, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. The intention was “to go to the end and back, or to go to the edge and turn around and come back,” he said.

Friends say he seemed to recover quickly, getting back to his lively and daring self, the guy who always wanted to take people flying.

“He said he wanted to get me up in that plane and flip it upside down,” Othick recalled. “I told him there wasn’t a chance I’d go flying with him. I mean, the guy made me nervous driving around Tucson. He’d do whatever he could to scare you, to get a laugh.”

At the same time, he kept in contact with Karlan, who was wending through various jobs, ultimately landing in Minneapolis as a concert assistant for the artist formerly known as Prince. Brian came through town with his team in 1994 and left her a pass to the game. The relationship grew romantic.

“Serena was never boy-crazy, but she most definitely had a crush on [Brian],” her father said. “Her heart was connected to this guy.”

She did not want to be a part-time girlfriend or, worse, a fling. They broke it off, but family members say she carried a torch.

‘His Own Way’

The next five years saw Brian shift from Orlando to the Denver Nuggets and the Clippers, where he performed well but stayed only the 1995-96 season.

Basketball insiders whispered about a bum knee; the team claimed he aggravated the injury sky diving. After sitting out much of the 1996-97 season, he helped the Chicago Bulls to a championship. That team included Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman and then-Coach Phil Jackson, kindred spirits or, at least, colleagues who could deflect attention.

“I wouldn’t say he was a loner, but he did his own thing, went his own way,” said Tex Winter, a former Bulls assistant who followed Jackson to the Lakers. “Phil could relate to him better than most.”

Still, when the season ended, Brian switched to the Detroit Pistons for a seven-year, $45-million deal.

Again, he played well--and was unhappy. A teammate recalls him buying a huge aquarium, putting on a mask and snorkel and sticking his head under water, just to get the sensation of being elsewhere.

At Christmas 1998, with the NBA season halted by a labor dispute, Brian tried to get his family back together, inviting his mother and brother for the holidays. But any goodwill engendered by this visit was lost days later.

Phillips went to Tucson to visit her ailing mother, Ezra Mae Hickmon, and Brian decided to join her. He also paid for his aunt to fly out from North Carolina. Shortly thereafter, Hickmon died.

The problem was, Hickmon was a second mother to Kevin and when he learned everyone else had been by her side, he felt left out.

“He was angry Brian didn’t offer to pay for him to fly down,” Phillips said. “He was angry with me for not letting him know what was happening. He told me, ‘Mom, that’s it.’ ”

It was then Kevin began calling himself Miles Dabord, a nod to jazz legend Miles Davis and his own grandfather. Brian had already taken a new name, Bison Dele, to honor the Native American ancestry and the last known African slave in his lineage. Neither of them made a legal change.

In the months that followed, Brian spoke to his personal assistant, Kevin Porter, about stopping the occasional payments to his older brother.

“This is due to [Kevin’s] consistent pattern of wasteful spending and unadvisable financial ventures,” police say Porter told them. “Brian [is] tired of always bailing [Kevin] out of his problems, and wanted [him] to take a more self-reliant approach to his life.”

Porter denies making those statements and Phillips insisted her sons were connected. “There was never any doubt about their love for each other, they were still bound by the brotherly bond,” she said. “That’s what I assume brought them together in the South Pacific.”

Before that happened, Brian walked away from basketball and $35.5 million remaining on his contract. “I’m trying to find myself,” he said.

A college friend, Ahmad ElHusseini, owned a business delivering water in Beirut. Brian joined him, reportedly investing $1 million before moving on to India and Turkey.

In Australia, he lived in a truck that held two motorcycles and two mattresses. And he pursued a new hobby: sailing.

He also kept in contact with Karlan, who was in New York trying to get started in real estate. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he called and, according to her stepfather, Scott Ohlgren, said: “Come to me, come get out of the dust and the dirt, the fear and the noise.”

The 30-year-old woman came for five weeks of sailing, then left, saying she had bills to pay. As soon as she returned to America, Brian sent her a $50,000 check with a note: “This is what I think of your financial difficulties.”

He wanted her to join him on a longer trip to Honolulu. Karlan was excited yet hesitant about committing. She told her parents she might be back in a few weeks.

A captain and crewman were hired to help on the spacious boat with its angled cabin and wide berths below deck. Every two weeks, Gael Ohlgren received e-mail from her daughter talking about beautiful beaches and expensive hotels.

Karlan wrote, “A life dallying around in sailboats isn’t for me, but [Brian] is talking about maybe going back to the NBA.”

Said Ohlgren: “It sounded as if they were discussing their future.”

In early May, telling family members he wanted to reconnect with his brother, Kevin met the boat in Auckland, New Zealand. Brian did not seem perturbed.

“It wasn’t like, ‘What’s this guy doing here?’ or ‘My freakin’ brother has showed up,’ ” Porter said. “I was thinking everything was cool.”

With another large man on board--Kevin was 6-8, 270 pounds--Brian and Karlan felt crowded and flew ahead to Tahiti. At the same time, the Hakuna Matata took on a more experienced skipper for the sail north, Bertrand Saldo, 32, of New Caledonia.

“He was well known among skippers ... very easygoing, slow-speaking and a very good sailor,” said Patrique Humbert, a fellow sailor. “He was just doing his job. He got caught in a bad story.”

‘He Was Reviving’

In the final weeks of his restless life, Brian appeared to find what he was looking for.

At the end of May, he and Karlan arrived unannounced at the Sofitel Ia Ora, a luxury resort on the island of Moorea, west of Tahiti.

Their thatched-roof bungalow stood beside an azure lagoon where palm trees rustle like wings in the breeze. Each morning began with Brian running along the bleached-white sand and taking a long swim while his girlfriend read or simply lounged. He befriended a staff member, Teva Temaurioraa, a big guy with a ponytail and Polynesian tattoos with whom he played soccer and Frisbee.

One week became two, then three. The resort switched them from bungalow to bungalow, any open spot, because they did not want to leave.

By all accounts, the couple was falling in love. “Big love,” Temaurioraa said. And Brian was hatching a plan. He asked the staff to help him find property on a mountainside above the resort. If he could return to this place in the off-season, the prospect of rejoining the NBA seemed more palatable.

“He was”--Temaurioraa pounded his chest--”reviving.”

Things were not going as well on the Hakuna Matata. The hired crewman, Mark Benson, later told authorities that Kevin was clumsy and in the way. When the boat reached Tahiti, Saldo grumbled to a friend, Jean-Marie Libeau, that “Kevin was a strange guy and he was not easy.”

A more disturbing report came from Saldo’s other friend, Humbert, who told Karlan’s mother, Gael Ohlgren, that Kevin was “a pain in the butt and stoned all the time on that trip. He had even broken some equipment.”

At the Sofitel Ia Ora, however, the staff saw nothing alarming when the boat anchored and the crew came ashore to have drinks with Brian and Karlan.

The couple checked out on June 24, joining the others for the short sail to Papeete, where they stocked up on food and gas.

On July 4, Benson flew back to Australia and the boat’s crew notified authorities of a plan to sail to Hawaii by way of the Marquesas Islands. On July 6 at 6:45 p.m., Karlan called Porter and said: “We’re sailing. Everything’s cool.” She handed the phone to Brian, but the satellite connection went dead.

They would not be heard from again.

On the Run

Because the Hakuna Matata crossed open stretches of water, hopping from port to port, investigators have struggled to reconstruct the first weeks of July. Witnesses give conflicting accounts. Satellite phone records help chart the boat’s path. By July 8, investigators believe, Kevin was alone.

He returned to Papeete and went to the airport to greet his girlfriend, Erica Wiese, who had come from Northern California for a planned vacation. They sailed to the Pearl Resort on Moorea, where the staff recalls them as quiet and aloof. It is not clear what, if anything, Kevin told her.

On July 15, Kevin took her back to Papeete for her flight home, then continued sailing around the island’s east coast. Near the town of Hitiaa, he struck a coral reef and called for help.

The boat ended up in Taravao, registered as the “Aria Bella,” its true name lightly painted over in white. Kevin, also going by an alias, wanted the hulls inspected but the tiny marina did not have the facilities to lift the boat.

“We noticed him because he was so big,” said Marc Norel, manager of the nearby A’O Restaurant. “He was very quiet. He seemed very calm.”

Kevin inquired about selling some wetsuits and witnesses later told police they saw him tossing the suits out. On July 19, he quietly caught a ride to Papeete and flew home.

There, things began to unravel.

In early September, as family members grew concerned because they had not heard from the boat, Kevin was arrested for trying to buy $152,000 in gold from a Phoenix coin dealer by signing “Brian Williams” on a check from his younger brother’s account.

Police were suspicious but could not prove he did not have Brian’s permission to make the purchase. Also, no one knew for sure whether the others were missing or simply at sea. It wasn’t until a week later that Saldo’s friend Humbert, cruising the islands, spotted the sleek catamaran in Taravao.

By then, Kevin was on the run. He called his mother several times, claiming innocence and threatening suicide. Talking to Wiese, he laid out a version of what happened. There had been a fight between the brothers, according to his story, which she relayed to police. When the others tried to break it up, Kevin accidentally punched Karlan and she struck her head, dying instantly. Saldo wanted to notify authorities, but Brian disagreed. Another argument broke out and Brian beat Saldo to death with a wrench.

Then, according to this version, Brian threatened Kevin to keep quiet. Kevin grabbed a gun that was on board and shot his brother. For reasons he did not explain, he tied weights to the bodies and tossed them overboard.

Theories Abound

Weeks later, back on the island of Moorea, Temaurioraa asked: “They’re all dead, right?”

Gazing at the blue, warm ocean, he figured it doesn’t matter how it happened. “In Polynesia, they believe that if you die in paradise, you’re soul stays like that,” he said. “Maybe they are still in paradise.”

The police are not so willing to let the matter go. Nor are they persuaded by what Kevin told Wiese, especially because he later gave a different story, involving pirates, to his friend White.

“Does he lie to protect himself?” said Michel Marotte, chief prosecutor for French Polynesia. “He is not highly credible.”

After interviewing witnesses and checking phone records, police believe the killings were committed on July 7. Theories abound. Maybe he shot them as they went scuba diving or drugged them before throwing them into the water.

The crime scene has been narrowed to an area near Maiao, a small island between the larger islands of Tahiti and Raiatea. But even if police knew precisely where to dive, the bodies have probably been devoured by fish. Forensic tests are pending, and authorities hoped to interrogate Kevin.

Then their top suspect turned up unconscious on a Mexican beach wearing nothing but tube socks. He slipped into a coma after overdosing on insulin and neglecting to take his asthma medication.

On Thursday, his mother requested he be taken off life support. A chaplain read a benediction as family members prayed around the hospital bed as Kevin clung to life. He died late Friday night.

Thousands of miles southwest, the gendarmes had returned to Taravao, climbing back aboard the catamaran. As life returned to normal, locals sitting down to a lunch of poisson cru at the cafe, the search resumed for any small clue that might have been overlooked.

“Now the reconstruction of events brings us closer to determining how they were killed,” prosecutor Marotte said. “Maybe if we get lucky we can get some answers, but does that tell us the whole story?”

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Times staff writers Tim Brown and Mark Heisler contributed to this report. David Wharton reported from Tahiti, and Lance Pugmire reported from California, Colorado and Arizona.