Before he was gunned down in his home in the family game room near a pool table, 63-year-old San Diego defense lawyer Timothy MacNeil had been dating someone new. His stepdaughter, Brae Hansen, didn’t like that, especially after he missed a birthday lunch to hang out with his new lady.
That anger and rejection may have been just enough to convince Hansen and her brother Nathan Gann to murder their father in cold blood. This is the story of how that all went down, in one of the more disturbing true crime tales of the last 15 years.
At around noon on July 19, 2007, police rushed to the MacNeil’s house in a nice neighborhood in Rolando on Marraco Drive in San Diego, California. Stepdaughter Hansen had just frantically called 911 and said a masked gunman tied her up along with her father, and then shot and killed him in front of her.
When authorities arrived, they found MacNeil face down in a pool of his own blood. He wasn’t wearing pants and there was a zip tie nearby. Detective J.C. Smith told CBS that Hansen had also been zip-tied and she was crying uncontrollably when they arrived. She claimed that she saw her stepfather murdered in front of her eyes and told the police the gunman ran out the back door. Police found the gun and canvassed the neighborhood.
A neighbor named Ernest Torgeson said he heard a “pop, pop, pop, pop” but didn’t think much of it. Eyewitness Christopher Miles said he saw a man jump out of the hedges near the house and run off in broad daylight.
“You could see he was definitely putting a lot of effort into it and he was definitely trying to run away from a situation,” Miles told police. “He immediately started to run directly down [the] path and all the way up the stairs… at that point that’s where I lost track of him.”
Police then found more evidence: A wad of black clothes and a mask stashed in a nearby tree. Police didn’t know it yet, but the “robbery” was actually planned months in advance. Let’s back up just a bit first, though.
The story is perhaps all the more tragic because MacNeil, by all accounts, was a stellar man, a great attorney, and a caring father. His younger brother Rick described him as “a great guy, the best possible big brother I could ever have.”
MacNeil was “a very big joker” who was funny and athletic. He was also a killer in the courtroom, according to his fraternity brother John Keifer, who said MacNeil never lost a case. He also knew how to work a room and could “talk to anybody,” per his daughter Erin MacNeil Ellison. After he split from Ellison’s mother, he met a troubled woman named Doreen. Along with Doreen came two stepchildren: Brae Hansen and Nathan Gann. Gann was 7 when he came to live with MacNeil and Hansen was 5.
Brae Hansen and MacNeil quickly formed a tight bond. Ellison said Hansen quickly took to calling MacNeil “daddy,” and he reciprocated by doing “everything a father does.” Their bond was so close that most of the family was exceptionally worried for Hansen after the murder.
Doreen was suicidal and had abused her children from a young age. Gann got the brunt of it, according to his attorney Ricardo Garcia. “She was physically violent with him, hitting him … with sticks,” Garcia said. “She would, ridicule him. He would be in the bathroom … and [she would] bring his sister in and point out his penis and ridicule him about it in front of his sister.” Gann eventually moved out to live with his grandmother in Arizona.
Later in life, Gann seemed to be getting it together. He was a clean-cut honors student at the University of Arizona. He liked to blog and post wacky videos of himself on YouTube.
“I love the stars, ever since I was a child,” he said on his MySpace page. “Because of them I have always wanted to reach for the stars. My dream goal is to be an astronaut.”
At first, Hansen was simply a victim of the crime, but there were some things that gave authorities pause. When they found Hansen, her hands were crudely zip-tied. She told authorities she called 911 with her tongue. The main detail that troubled Detective J.C. Smith was the fact that she was left alive at all.
“…To be killed…in your own house is a very, a very brutal, violent killing, and to leave a witness to that seemed unusual,” Smith told ABC News. After Hansen was sent home to family, she gave another statement and said that MacNeil called the killer “Nathan,” which of course is the name of her brother. She tried to backtrack, deny, and then went out of her way to say that the killer was absolutely not her brother.
This detail, along with other little points that didn’t quite match up, compelled authorities to arrest her and her brother. This is when one of the more chilling accounts of the murder came from Gann himself, courtesy of his cellmate after Gann was arrested.
Gann said he shot his stepfather “accidentally” in the back because he came home “unexpectedly.” According to the testimony from the cellmate, MacNeil said, “Nathan, why are you killing me? Why are you shooting me? Why are you doing this to me?”
When she was arrested, Hansen “stood right up, turned around, and put her hands behind her back,” Detective Smith said. “It’s typical of someone who knows they’ve been caught.”
She then told the police all about the murder. “I don’t know exactly how this part happened, because it happened so fast,” she told police, “but I think my dad lunged at him and tried to get the gun and I kind of turned away and was just like freaking out majorly.”
Hansen admitted she started the whole thing and she had a “lapse of judgement.” She revealed that they originally considered beating MacNeil to death with a baseball bat or injecting him with poison. She claimed it was all talk though.
“It was just more of going through the motions and I just never believed it was really going to happen,” she said. However, things got very real when Gann showed up with a gun.
“‘You’re gonna tie his hands behind his back, then we’ll kneel him down in the laundry room…'” she told police. “He missed once, I know. [Nathan] hit the side of his face once, I know, and then he fired another shot in the back of his head once, once he was down, because he was twitching.”
Even more damning? A letter Hansen wrote for her family while she was in jail. Prosecutor George Bennett presented it in court:
“She says, ‘It was supposed to be one clean shot, easy shot to the head. No pain, no suffering. That’s the plan.’ She never tried to withdraw from any conspiracy. It just got messy. And those tears and that expression is too late,” Bennett said. “Brae Hansen controlled this thing the way you control a dog on a leash. She had that dog, Nathan Gann, on a leash, holding him back, holding him back, holding him back, and then she let it go.”
After the first trial ended in a hung jury, the state took the unusual step of trying the siblings at the same time. Hansen was sentenced to life in prison without parole, a conviction that was eventually overturned because she was 17 when she was tried. Her new sentence? Twenty-six years to life.
Gann got 25 years to life. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2032 when he’s 44 years old – almost 20 years younger than his stepfather when he was shot in cold blood by his stepson.
Published: Aug 10, 2024 05:51 pm