Finances may have pressured Bryant
Published: March 23, 2002
By PAT FORGEY
Of the News-Register
The Bryant family was running out of money.
A fresh look at the family's finances, aided with new information from relatives, indicates that when Robert Bryant took the lives of his four children, his wife, Janet, and himself, he may have faced looming financial difficulty.
The family had already filed for bankruptcy once, in California in January 2000, in an effort to get out from under debts that were mounting while his landscaping business faltered.
Members made a bold move to start a new life in Oregon last summer, arriving with a plan and setting out to implement it. They bought a nice piece of land on Pheasant Hill Lane from former Yamhill County Commissioner Dennis Goecks, with Goecks carrying the contract, and set about to find and finance a house.
From Homes America's McMinnville office, they found an appropriate and reasonably priced model.
It was basic, but the Bryants didn't plan to be in it long. Robert Bryant's long-term plan was to build his family a nice home on his own - something he had done before in his native Sacramento area.
After coming out of bankruptcy in California, the Bryant family moved to Oregon seeking to start over. And at first, things looked good.
Robert Bryant was hardworking and personable. And he knew landscape maintenance, having spent more than two decades in the business.
He arrived in Yamhill County in June 2001, and quickly found work mowing lawns, fixing sprinkler systems and caring for shrubs.
When he went to Homes America, he listed business income of more than $7,000 a month.
"I can't emphasize enough, that was verified," said Vern Skoog, Homes America's general manager in McMinnville. The finance company wanted to see check stubs, receipts, bank statements and the like, he said, and Bryant provided it all.
That might not have painted a full picture of Bryant's finances, however.
Local landscapers expressed doubts that someone could so quickly break into a business in which so many property owners are under long-term contracts for lawn care.
"I just started my fourth year, and I'm not making half that," said Ken Bales of McMinnville's All Seasons Lawn Maintenance.
In any event, that figure is for gross income, before expenses.
In California, Bryant told the federal bankruptcy court that he was also making about $7,000 a month. However, he listed expenses of more than $4,000 a month.
Bryant faced additional hurdles as well.
He came from an area where landscapers work year-round. But in the rainy Willamette Valley, the work declines in the fall and winter, as lawns go dormant and sodden flower beds are too muddy to be worked.
Bryant first visited the area in the winter of 2000-01, searching for property.
But 2000 was a drought year, so the winter was abnormally warm and dry. Many lawns needed mowing all year, keeping landscapers active through the winter months.
That didn't happen in the wet winter just passed.
Janet Bryant's sister, Sharon Roe, fears the winter before may have given her brother-in-law an incorrect picture of how much work would be available.
It took months for the loan on the Homes America house to go through, in part because of the recent bankruptcy.
During that time, more and more financial records were requested. Skoog said Bryant provided them promptly and they continued to demonstrate strong income.
"Of course, when we were doing that, we were talking September and October, and we had the weather to maintain that kind of business," Skoog said.
At the same time, Bryant's Landscape & Maintenance was challenging a host of existing landscape outfits in a field with a limited amount of business.
"It's hard to break into it," said Rob Stephenson of McMinnville's Cascadia Landscaping. "There's a lot of competition."
His company has more than 20 years in the local landscape business. Based on that, he would be surprised to see any newcomer do $7,000 a month in business, he said.
Landscapers try to get 12-month contracts to guarantee stable income. Bryant had at least some contracts, but those are typically harder to get than one-time jobs. And the one-time jobs would have provided a distorted picture of his income.
One other thing could have made Bryant's Oregon income look better than it really was.
He had sold his landscaping business in California, but customers he had under contract there continued to pay him, Roe said.
He then turned over that money to the new owner, of course, but it may have artificially inflated the size of his bank account for a while, she said.
California problems
The Bryant family may already have been living on the financial edge prior to coming to Oregon in any event.
The bankruptcy the previous year erased the family's unsecured debt, mostly credit card debt. But it did little to help its underlying financial situation, said Michael Burkart, a bankruptcy trustee.
Burkart retained his copies of the bankruptcy records, which are public documents, and reviewed them at the request of the News-Register.
At the time of the filing, Bryant reported $7,049 in monthly income and $4,068 in monthly expenses. Add in house payments of $1,325, and smaller amounts for house insurance, health insurance and car payments, and the Bryant's monthly expenses even after leaving bankruptcy would have run $8,055.
"You do the simple arithmetic, and they're under water by $1,000 a month," he said.
None of the Bryant's expenses seemed unreasonable, he said. They covered food, utilities, insurance - nothing that could be considered a luxury.
After the bankruptcy, most of the expenses other than credit card debt remained. The house payments, car payments and other necessities continued to total more that Bryant was making.
"They've got something inherently wrong here," Burkart said.
An Internal Revenue Service lien of $3,250, which Burkart said was not unusual to see when a small business fails, was not erased by the bankruptcy. One noncredit-card debt remained as well.
When the Bryant's filed bankruptcy, they owed $11,464 to Steve and Brenda Maranville, from whom they had bought their house.
That's a debt that he didn't have to pay, said Burkart, and not one in a thousand bankruptcy filers would do so. Robert Bryant, however, had an uncommon sense of responsibility.
When they sold him the house, Bryant told them they were taking a risk. But Steve Maranville recalled, "He told me, 'I'll never let you down,' and he didn't."
"He could have skipped out, no problem," Maranville said.
The money runs out
When the Bryants moved to Oregon, they sold their house in California for $269,000. They owed only $153,000 on it, so it should have netted them a substantial sum.
After they covered real estate charges, and paid debts and moving costs, the remainder was what they had to establish themselves in Oregon. As expenses mounted, the amount dwindled.
First came the $16,000 down on the property. Then Homes America's mortgage lender expressed concern about how much debt they had, so they paid off loans on their vehicles to remove those payments from their monthly finances.
Eighteen months earlier, at the time of the bankruptcy, the Bryants owed $7,715 on one vehicle and $11,629 on the other. So they still had substantial obligations there.
Setting up the new home was expensive as well. They had expenses for paving, excavation work, gravel, well-drilling, septic and water systems, power hookup and the like.
Skoog estimated the site work costs at $30,000 or more. And in a somewhat unusual move, Bryant didn't finance that expense through the mortgage.
"I can tell you this, he forked out a lot of money on his own," Skoog said. "His cash reserves had to be dwindling."
By December, with little income and savings depleting, a distressed Bryant told his wife that they'd be out of money in two months, Roe said. She learned that directly from her sister, she said.
It was two months after that that Bryant loaded two Mossberg shotguns, killed his four children and his wife of 17 years, then knelt in the living room and took his own life with a final blast.
