Victim's friends wonder what led to Kent slaying

Every morning at 9 a.m., Brandy Lambertsen opened the Mail & More store in a Kent-area strip mall and stayed until her 16-year-old daughter came in for her shift in the afternoon.

On Friday about 3 p.m., just when her shift was ending, Lambertsen took a few minutes to talk to her boyfriend on the telephone. They had recently gotten over a rough patch, and now they were back together, making plans.

"We were trying to buy a motor home," said Jeff Lewis, her boyfriend of almost 20 years. "I was on the phone telling her I found one." The next thing Lewis heard was a man's voice on the other end of the line, yelling, "You're not returning my calls. Who are you talking to?"

Then Lewis heard a small scream, and the line went dead.

Lambertsen, 32, was shot and killed by a man who was identified Tuesday by the King County Medical Examiner's Office as Dwayne Butler, 42. Butler then turned the gun on himself.

According to the Medical Examiner's Office, each died from a gunshot wound to the head.

As King County sheriff's detectives continue to investigate the murder-suicide, Lambertsen's family and friends are trying to understand what caused Butler to walk into the store and take two lives. Friends say the two had dated briefly and he had made Lambertsen feel increasingly nervous in the months before her death.

"He must have been stewing or just couldn't take it," Lewis said. "I don't know what he thought."

Lambertsen and Lewis had broken up last summer when she met Butler, according to Lewis.

A customer at the store and a transplant from New York, Butler brought her lunch at work and offered to help the single mother however he could, Lewis said.

She was flattered, but ended the relationship around the holidays, when she reunited with Lewis.

"It wasn't real serious," Lewis said of Lambertsen's relationship with Butler. Shortly after their relationship ended, Butler began calling her, often polite, always persistent, Lewis said.

Once, a few months after she broke it off, Butler allegedly called Lambertsen and said he would kill himself if they didn't get back together, and that he would hurt her, Lewis said.

The next day he apologized, saying he wouldn't bother her again. She never alerted authorities because, that incident aside, Butler seemed normal.

"It didn't seem like he was hiding around corners or anything like that," Lewis explained.

But he did keep calling back every few weeks, even though she no longer answered.

Then, he just stopped.

"Toward the very, very end, within the last two weeks, she had told me that he had moved on, had let her go on her way, and he had gone on his," Lewis said.

Police confirmed that Lambertsen and Butler had dated, but they declined to discuss other details, including allegations of stalking.

"We've never said there's been stalking involved," said sheriff's spokesman John Urquhart. "We believe there was a dating relationship between the two. We're still investigating how extensive that was."

Customers seemed to take to Lambertsen, the mother of two teenage children. She wished everybody a good day and made friends easily, said Jay Lewis, Jeff Lewis' father and the store's owner.

Looking back, he wonders if that led all of them to miss disturbing signals.

"My son asked her over and over, 'Do you think this guy's dangerous?' " he said. "She never saw bad in people. Even though there were signs that this guy could be dangerous, she didn't want to believe it."

Roxana Popescu: 206-464-2112

or rpopescu@seattletimes.com