Man murders his sister and her husband to cover up incestuous relationship

A man, who was carrying on a sexual relationship with his sister, killed her and her husband to cover up their incestuous relationship.

Ryan Wyngarden and his little sister Gail had sex multiple times, which Ryan claims was consensual. Then, when Gail got married to Rick Brink, Ryan, afraid that his sister will tell her new husband of their dark secret, killed both of them.

Their dead bodies were found at their home in Park Township, Michigan, on November 23, 1987. Rick, 28, was found in the driveway, sitting in the driver’s seat of his Chevy Blazer with two gunshot wounds to the head. Inside the house, police found Gail, 22, lying on the couple’s waterbed, dead from three gunshots to her head.

It would take over 24 years for the truth to come out.

Meanwhile, the behavior of Gail’s older brother Ryan Wyngarden began to raise to suspicions. According to his sister Cheryl Murphree, days after the murder he said, “Sometimes I wonder if I could’ve done it.” On a different occasion, he told his sister Lynn that he wanted to apologize to Gail because "he felt like he raped her." Another time, he allegedly made reference to owning a .22 caliber pistol, the same kind of gun used to shoot Gail and Rick Brink.

No one was arrested at the time of the Brink’s 1987 murders, but in 2009, the Ottawa County Sheriff's Office created a cold case team to look into unsolved crimes. In 2011, Detectives Venus Repper and David Blakely began looking into the death of the Brinks.

Ryan Wyngarden’s alibi at the time of his sister and brother-in-law’s murder was that he was doing laundry with his new girlfriend, Pam Maracchini. They later married, and they were still together at the time of the reinvestigation. The detectives noticed a discrepancy in their interview transcripts and decided to re-interview Pam in January 2013, and what she told them would break the case wide open.

Pam Wyngarden told detectives that before their bodies were discovered, Ryan had taken her to see Rick and Gail’s dead bodies. He said he killed them because he was jealous of the Brink’s happiness and success and worried that Gail would tell her husband about their terrible family secret that Ryan and Gail had had sexual relations. Ryan would later testify that it was “consensual.” Prosecutors would say it was molestation.

Ryan Wyngarden was arrested on first-degree murder charges and went to trial for the murder of his sister and her husband in March 2014. Under oath, he described three sexual encounters with his sister Gail, the first when he was 12 and Gail was 9, the last when he was 15 and she was 12. In the final sexual episode, he claimed they touched genitals, but protested that "my sister did not lose her virginity to me," according to the Daily News.

On March 28, 2014, the jury found Ryan Wyngarden guiltyof two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of Rick and Gail Brink. It took only four hours of deliberation.

Upon hearing the verdict, his own sister, Cheryl Murphree, said, "We're done. We finally got him.” 

Less than a month later, Judge Jon Hulsing handed him two life sentences without parole.

The murder of Gail and Rick Brink will be reexamined in Oxygen's new series "A Wedding and A Murder," which airs Sundays.

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