A Thanksgiving Murder-Suicide: From Abuse to Murder

One Thanksgiving, at a secluded park in Montgomery County, Maryland, police discovered a terrible scene: the bodies of a mother and her three children. After a search, they found the body of the killer, her former husband, in the woods.

This was just one of several domestic violence killings in the area that year. (I covered one in The American Dream Shattered and covered a later one in A Murder-Suicide in Frederick County, Maryland.)

Unity Park is a community park within the Historic Unity District, a part of the town of Brookeville. You wouldn’t expect to find a mother and her three children murdered in this rural park, near a place called “the Sunshine Store.”

The Murders

On the late afternoon of Nov. 22, 2007, flight attendant Gail Louise Pumphrey took her children to this small park. The youngest was 6-year-old Brandon. The other children were David (12 years old) and Megan (10 years old).

She was taking her kids so they could visit their father, David Peter Brockdorff, a self-employed electrician who lived in Frederick, Maryland at the time. Gail had filed for divorce two years before, with the divorce becoming official in January of 2007. She and Brockdorff often fought over custody.

Unity Park is close to the boundaries shared by Montgomery County and Howard County. The park consists of just 1.5 acres of land, and it’s so remote that no one nearby heard the gunfire. Instead, they were…