Jurors take 45 minutes to decide who killed a Tri-Cities mom and dumped her body

A Tri-Cities man has been found guilty in the brutal death of his pregnant girlfriend.

An off-duty Kennewick officer found the beaten body of Brandy Ebanez in the Columbia River nearly three years ago. She was wrapped in garbage bags with two landscaping bricks tied to her feet.

The grisly discovery kicked off an investigation that stretched into Oregon and ended with the arrest of Richard Jacobson, 37, near Portland.

After listening to 28 witnesses over six days, a Benton County jury quickly found Jacobson guilty Wednesday of premeditated first-degree murder after just 45 minutes of deliberation.

The decision followed the final arguments the same day by Deputy Prosecutor Josh Lilly and defense attorney Michael Vander Sys.

Lilly detailed testimony about video, cellphone records, purchases and forensics that painted a picture of a brutal killing and then a plan to dispose of her body and hide his involvement.

Vander Sys urged jurors not to fall prey to deciding his client was guilty and then trying to make the evidence fit that assumption. The defense previously argued that Ebanez ran away from her family.

Several of her family and friends gathered in the courtroom and were overcome with tears as details of her murder were presented.

Jacobson listened to the attorneys, jotting down notes.

A brutal killing

Ebanez and Jacobson had a turbulent relationship that was previously marked by violence. While there was a protection order, he was still living with her and their two daughters.

Two of her friends told jurors that she left her job in the summer of 2022. A neighbor said she regularly heard yelling coming from the apartment between July and September that year but it stopped after Sept. 15.

When the couple’s daughters, ages 9 and 12, arrived home that day, Jacobson told them that he and his mother were arguing.

“At no point did they actually get to talk to their mother,” Lilly told the jury. “They could hear her, yelling, screaming, at times pleading with the defendant, asking him to be let out of the room. Both of the girls told us that Brandy tried to get out of that room, that the defendant physically prevented her.”

At one point, Jacobson came out “ranting and raving about drugs, other men (and) asking whether Brandy was working with police.”

He also searched the entire house for evidence of another man.

Everything was quiet the next morning when the girls left to go to school. One of the girls went to say goodbye to their mom, and didn’t get an answer through the door.

Lilly said this was odd because she usually walked them to the bus stop, and when she didn’t walk with them, she would watch them from the apartment balcony.

When the girls returned home that day, they said Jacobson told them their mother had left. Lilly noted that police would later discover Ebanez’s purse with all of her personal items still inside including her wallet.

Over the next few days, Jacobson was seen on security footage making two trips to Home Depot to buy cleaning supplies, garbage bags and duct tape. He also bought landscaping blocks used to make a planter and a dolly that can be converted into a cart.

Investigators would later find only Home Depot had that particular brand of brick in stock, and Jacobson was one of four people to buy them in that period of time. And he was the only person to only buy two.

When he was arrested, investigators found debris from the bricks in his trunk.

The girls testified that Jacobson spent the next five days cleaning. He also kept the girls at home from school.

“That entire time he’s concocting a story to cover up what really happened,” Lilly said. “He’s trying to remove and destroy the evidence in the apartment.”

While Jacobson’s phone stayed in the apartment, Lilly noted one of his daughter’s phones crossed the Columbia River into Pasco, where prosecutors believe her body was dumped.

The next day, he took his daughters and left for the Portland area.

On Sept. 27, 2022, an off-duty Kennewick police officer spotted Ebanez’s body floating in the Columbia River.

When police searched her apartment, they discovered a large stain that matched her DNA under a bed.

Ebanez was four to five months pregnant when she was killed. The medical examiner testified her face was so bruised that she couldn’t tell where one bruise ended and another one began, Lilly said.

The examiner also testified she was strangled with such force that it broke the bone at the top of her throat.

“This went on for so long that he had to have formed the intent to kill and then carried it out,” Lilly said. “There is only one explanation for beating something this long and this severely. It’s because you decided to kill them.”

Unanswered questions

Vander Sys pointed to various problems in the investigation where evidence had been compromised and questions weren’t answered.

“I want to first discuss what we talked about at the very beginning, which is confirmation bias,” he said. “Confirmation bias is a problem ... because you’re taking the conclusion that you want and using that to find data and information to support that conclusion.”

He started by pointing out issues with the interviews of the two girls. He pointed to evidence showing that the girls were told Jacobson committed the murder.

“What this did is entirely change the subsequent investigation,” he said. “Detective (Kris) Safranek testified based on information that we received we amended the search warrants for the apartment.”

He also said the testimony of the girls changed over the past three years. The girl who initially looked in on her mother told police that she heard Ebanez snoring.

He also pointed out that the suggestion that prosecutors were relying on jurors to make assumptions about Jacobson taking the body to Pasco.

He noted that no one saw him cart the nearly 200-pound woman down the stairs to his car, along with about 80 more pounds of other items to the river.

Vander Sys argued that police didn’t explain how her body managed to move from the Pasco side of the river to the Kennewick side.

This story was originally published June 19, 2025 at 5:00 AM.