Around midnight on July 31, Dean Goss Jr. and a friend returned home from the Comedy Workshop to find Paula in the hallway, shot, bludgeoned and stabbed to death. Her throat had also been slashed. Once again, there were no signs of robbery.
Dean Goss Sr. had the perfect alibi -- he was in Methodist Hospital recovering from the cyst removal. Dean Jr. couldn't have done it -- he'd been out clubbing. But where was Craig Goss at the time of the killing?
His alibi was weak, so police asked him to take a polygraph. He refused, as did Dean Goss Sr. Once again, and this time despite a $25,000 reward offered by Brawley's family, and public expressions by assistant DA Chuck Rosenthal that the killer's identity was known to him, the case was never made, the murder never solved, the reward never collected.
Goss got lap-band surgery and lost about 150 pounds. He remarried less than a year after Paula's death, but that marriage ended in divorce in 1990. With nowhere else to go, Goss, then in his mid-50s, moved in with his 75-year-old widowed father James.
And weeks later James Goss would die from a gunshot wound as well. A longtime gun owner, James Goss had somehow managed to accidentally shoot himself in the face with a .22-caliber rifle in his car in a mall parking lot. (Oddly enough, it was the very same parking lot that had once housed the 12-years-defunct Dean Goss Dinner Club.) There were no signs of robbery, and the elder Goss was said to be depressed over the death of his wife several years previously. Dean Goss theorized that his father slipped and used the rifle to steady himself, whereupon it went off and killed him. The spent shell was found a week later in a grocery sack in the back seat of the car.
A year later, Dean Goss belatedly attempted to sue the estate of his late wife Paula, saying he was entitled to $350,000 in insurance money. That suit would end in a rout when Paula's estate started asking questions and deposing witnesses that made Dean Goss very uncomfortable, both about himself and his son, Craig, and the toxic atmosphere that pervaded Dean's marriage to Brawley, and the circumstances that just might have led to her savage and untimely demise.
