‘Nobody would find your body.’ Puyallup man charged with killing his girlfriend
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Bruce was first arrested for identity theft and later arrested for first‑degree murder.
- Records showed phones at his house, shared travel to Lake Tapps, and related transactions.
- Droplets in the apartment tested presumptively positive for blood with a reagent.
A Puyallup man has been accused of murdering his 37-year-old girlfriend after the couple took a trip to Ocean Shores earlier this year.
The man, 30-year-old Kendrick Bruce, was arrested Wednesday. He is charged with first-degree murder, removal or concealment of a body and two counts of identity theft. Pleas of not guilty were entered on his behalf in Pierce County Superior Court on Thursday. He is being held at the Pierce County Jail on a $2 million bail pending trial.
The News Tribune previously reported on Bruce’s Wednesday arrest, his second arrest in connection to the case. Bruce’s girlfriend was first reported missing on April 1, according to a news release from the Tacoma Police Department, when a friend asked for a wellness check. Court documents say he allegedly murdered her between March 1 and March 28.
Her body hasn’t been found, according to court documents.
While police officers were investigating, they found probable cause to arrest Bruce for two counts of identity theft, TPD’s news release said. Officers arrested him for identity theft on May 15 — but he was released from custody on Monday, May 18.
TPD said they kept investigating, and on Wednesday, found probable cause to arrest him for murder.
‘If anything happens to me, Kendrick did it’
The alleged murder is the conclusion of a relationship fraught with a history of abuse, court documents say.
Randall Frisbie, the TPD detective assigned to the case, said he spoke to the victim’s adopted father, who said the victim had told him a few months ago that Bruce was abusing her.
“He… reported that [the victim] visited him around Christmas and finally broke down and told him about Kendrick Bruce physically abusing her,” court documents say. “She said that he hit her and hurt her wrist. The injured wrist was wrapped, but he did not think it was done by a doctor or professional.”
In the documents, Frisbie also said the victim’s friends sent him undated photos of her with black eyes. One friend claimed Bruce had choked the victim.
“She also reported that [the victim] told her that Kendrick had choked her unconscious one time and when she woke up, Kendrick was sitting next to her shaking,” Frisbie wrote. “For some reason, she wouldn’t leave him.”
Frisbie said friends described the relationship as “chaotic/dysfunctional,” with Bruce working as a manager at the victim’s workplace. Bruce recently had been fired for theft, the documents said, and was not employed at the time of the alleged murder.
The documents don’t say where they worked or how long Bruce has been unemployed.
Both Bruce and the victim have children with other people, the documents say, with Bruce having lived with the mother of his son at a house in Puyallup at the time of his arrest. The victim did not have custody of her son, documents say, but was allowed to visit him whenever she wanted and was in regular contact with her son’s father.
The father of the victim’s son said no one had seen the victim in person since around March 1, before the trip to Ocean Shores. He said she showed up with “obvious physical marks” that she claimed came from Bruce, along with a grim prediction:
“If anything happens to me, Kendrick did it.”
A month of uncertainty
The victim’s adopted father told police the couple visited him in Ocean Shores on March 4 or March 5 and stayed for about 20 minutes.
“He said they didn’t stay long because it was intense because he didn’t care for Kendrick,” Frisbie wrote. “He said that he believed they stayed in Montesano with an unknown friend for two days before leaving.”
No one saw the victim again.
Friends told Frisbie they would try to call or FaceTime the victim, only to be rejected, documents said.
“Some texts that were sent back stated that she relapsed and has to figure it out,” Frisbie wrote. “Some others were emojis and her friends believe the texts and speech were not consistent with [the victim’s] texts and speech.”
Bruce returned to his home in Puyallup between March 5 and March 8, the documents say, and told the mother of his child that he and the victim had broken up on the trip to Ocean Shores.
The mother of his son told Frisbie that she and Bruce had “an off and on relationship” and were living together at the time.
“He never officially moved out of the residence, but he was not staying there nightly,” Frisbie wrote.
She told Frisbie that when Bruce returned from the Ocean Shores trip, he parked his Jeep Cherokee in the garage, which wasn’t normal for him – and the vehicle was “unusually clean.” During a recent camping trip to Oregon, Bruce allegedly told the mother of his son that he wanted a new phone and phone number, “because Oregon doesn’t have sales tax.”
“She also reported that Bruce hardly leaves the house, won’t try to find a new job, won’t answer the door,” Frisbie wrote. “He also asked her to lie to the police if they showed up.”
A later search of Bruce’s Google account showed that between March 1 and 7 Bruce made several searches — including “how to knock someone out,” “how long does it take a body to stop stinking after death,” “how to clean up blood from carpet,” and “dump removal truck.”
The investigation starts
The father of the victim’s son allegedly had access to the victim’s email account and started looking through it for clues, the documents say. On March 28, he told Frisbie he received an email notification about a Chime transaction for $13.56 at a Puyallup 7-Eleven.
“I was able to retrieve video from that transaction which clearly shows Kendrick Bruce making the transaction and driving his Jeep Grand Cherokee,” Frisbie wrote.
Later that day, someone completed a $150 transaction from the victim’s Cash App account to Bruce, with a note that said, “for k.” The documents say this was the last day the victim’s phone was active.
The victim was officially reported missing a few days later on April 1, court documents say, when a concerned friend in Idaho asked police to check on her. She said she had last heard from the victim through social media on March 23, and it was unusual for the victim to be silent for a week.
Police went to check on the victim and couldn’t find her, documents say. A neighbor told them she had not seen the victim in about a month.
Frisbie said he started investigating on April 2. On April 3, the apartment manager said the locks on the victim’s apartment had been changed, which is against the complex’s policy.
On April 28, Frisbie obtained search warrants for records from the victim’s cell phone, Bruce’s cell phone and the cell phone GPS on Bruce’s Jeep, documents say. When he got the records back, he saw the victim’s phone was at Bruce’s house.
He interviewed Bruce on May 14, documents say, and asked Bruce about the victim’s cell phone.
“We asked if he had her phone. He said that he did not think so. We then asked him why her cell phone GPS location was hitting at his house for weeks. He said he had no idea,” Frisbie said. “He later said that maybe it was left in his Jeep from the trip to Ocean Shores, but he didn’t think so because he didn’t find it when he cleaned his Jeep.”
Frisbie also said all three cell phones visited an area near Lake Tapps on March 11.
“We also asked him why his cell phone, her cell phone, and his Jeep GPS had them all traveling together to Lake Tapps,” Frisbie wrote. “He couldn’t remember going to Lake Tapps.”
After the interview, Frisbie obtained a search warrant of Bruce’s house and found four cell phones — three on a shelf in the garage, and one in a microwave in a closet.
On May 15, police arrested Bruce for two counts of identity theft for the March transactions.
Cadaver dogs, a protection order and a body search
Also on May 15, Frisbie wrote that he brought cadaver dogs — dogs that are trained to smell blood and body decomposition — into Bruce’s garage, which had several vehicles in it. The dogs barked repeatedly when they got to his Jeep, documents say.
“Multiple dogs alerted on the cargo area of the Jeep and the rear door of the Jeep as well as the back seat of the Jeep,” documents say. “It was explained to me that the scent could travel over the back seat and into the passenger compartment, meaning that there may not have been anything on the seats, but the scent traveled there.”
On May 13 — the day before Frisbie’s interview with Bruce — the mother of Bruce’s child filed a petition for a protection order, court documents say. In the request for a protection order, she wrote: “The respondent is in [an] active missing person case against another female that makes me fear for my life and my sons [sic].”
The mother of his child wrote that whenever she and Bruce disagree on something, he sends “aggressive and threatening messages” that threaten to come after her. She said the last threatening text was on April 27.
“I want us to get protection from him so nothing happens to us,” she wrote.
On May 17, Frisbie wrote that he and several other officers went to the area of Lake Tapps that Bruce had visited on March 11 and searched for the victim’s body, but they were unsuccessful.
‘Nobody would find your body’
Bruce was released from jail on May 18 on his own recognizance, court documents say, meaning he left without bail as long as he showed up to his court appearances and obeyed the terms of the release.
Later that day, the mother of his child went to a court hearing and requested to terminate the protection order.
“Petitioner has come in and recanted her prior allegations; she confirms she is not in danger and feels safe and was operating out of emotion and not thought her petition through,” court commissioner Amber Austin wrote. “Petitioner denies a history of [domestic violence] by respondent in her statements today.”
Two days later, Frisbie wrote that he obtained a search warrant to search through the victim’s apartment. When he got there, he found red and brown droplets. Officers used a blood detection reagent to test the droplets, which were “presumptively positive for blood.”
“There were also other positive indications of the presence of blood throughout the apartment that were highlighted and detected by [the reagent],” Frisbie wrote. “Those areas include the living room floor, the hallway to the bathroom and bedrooms, the bathroom floor and inside the bathtub.”
Frisbie noted that a forensics team was continuing to go through the apartment as he was writing the report, which is dated May 20.
Bruce was arrested again later that day, jail records say, and was booked into jail at 2:14 p.m.
It was an arrest the people in the victim’s life had feared. According to the court documents, the victim’s adopted father told Frisbie that Bruce had threatened her:
“Nobody would find your body.”
