Since I first heard the sad story, I have not rested easily. It rattles around in my mind and comes spitting out as questions whenever I run across somebody who might have been active in the community then and might have an opinion on what happened.

The Ken Wills story and his tragic death in November of 1962 left more questions than answers and has not just bothered me but anybody who was touched by the man.

His death is a reminder once again that we humans are flawed. No matter how we appear to others, lurking somewhere in the background is a dark side we try to hide.

Not that our dark sides are all that dark. They are like those old vinyl records: There is a flip side to all of us.

I was reminded of that while reseaching last month’s story on Bernie Finlay, who came from Onondaga, N.Y., to play for Phil Pesco at Olympic College. Reading about Pesco – as much as a basketball-coaching legend in these parts as Wills – it became clear to me Pesco was a brilliant coach whose flip side was a quirky personality that most would agree was more than a bit odd.

What is strange is Pesco and Wills lived next to each other in Manette and died within weeks of each other, Pesco of a heart attack at 54 and Wills by a bullet from a self-fired pistol he purchased just hours before at Forrie Swan’s Bremerton Sports Shop.

I’m very far from perfect. I’m not sure what my dark side is. That is for others to speculate about. Maybe it’s an obsession to be the best I can be, no matter what it is. Or that I’m a workaholic. Or that I’m supersensitive to the sounds and people around me. So much so that I can get depressed pretty quickly. Or that I feel I have a spiritual journey that has been laid out for me, the unknown ending of which drives me nuts.

Or maybe it’s that I’m a slob, especially when it comes to clothes. Or that I walk around the neighborhood in bare feet; the town hillbilly. Whatever it is, I have never given thought to buying a pistol and shooting myself.

From what I have read and heard, Pesco’s dark side may have played a part in his success as a basketball coach. That plus Olympic College was a farm club for Washington Huskies basketball. Players who could not immediately qualify to get in Washington were farmed off to OC. There weren’t many community colleges around and OC drew the benefit of being closest to the UW.

But Pesco also had the ability to focus singularly on his coaching, to the detriment maybe of other things in his life. Like, his dress. He was a slob, like me. Maybe more so than me. He apparently wore the same clothes a lot, dirty or not. And he might have been a bit of a square when it came to knowing the popular fads and trends of the moment.

Jim Carlson Sr. told of finding Pesco up a ladder at his Manette house painting away in his brown suit. That seems real odd.

And to emphasize a point about bad passes, Carlson said Pesco would rocket a basketball off a player’s shin. It was a pretty effective way of demonstrating the wrong way to throw a pass.

“Leaving the ball on the floor and not playing defense,” Carlson said, were Pesco’s pet peeves.

It appears that Wills was the exact opposite of Pesco. They could have been the Odd Couple. Pesco, the slob. Wills, the perfectionist, a neat freak.

If I were a little smarter, I would make a movie of Wills and Pesco, showing them coaching in the same town at the same time with similar success. Think of the possibilities, and the tragic ending they both suffered at about the same time. Would that make a great movie, or what?

The real mystery to such a movie, though, would be: What was Wills thinking on his first day at his new job at Olympic College when he decided not to show up for a class he was scheduled to teach and, instead, got in his car and went down to Swan’s sports shop and asked to see a gun?

Any discussion of his death has to start there. What was he thinking?

There are two prominant deaths in the Bremerton community which have left more questions than answers. Wills is one. The other is Fred Cohen.

Cohen was an attorney who, I get, was not well-liked. He apparently had a lot of enemies who wouldn’t mind seeing him disappear. And in 1970 he did. Somebody walked up to his house overlooking Port Washington Narrows and blasted him with a shotgun as he arrived home from work.

His killer, if still alive, is still loose. And there is some speculation people in high places prefer it to be that way. This side of the story is Cohen got what he deserved, so leave it alone.

I worked with Bob Cowgill in the late 1960s and never knew that Bob and Fred were classmates at old Bremerton High School until one day in the 1970s Bob sent me a letter asking me to ask around about some of his old buddies. One of them was Fred Cohen.

Even Bob was not surprised somebody blew Fred away. And he hadn’t seen Cohen in years.

Kitsap Sun sports editor Chuck Stark and a friend have beat the bushes, rattled some cages and traveled some distances in an attempt to solve the Cohen murder and put it into book form. No luck so far.

So who killed Fred Cohen?

Why did Ken Wills kill himself?

Two deaths, two mysteries.

I’m curious about both. But the Wills death is a real puzzler. The people who lived here at the time all have different reasons why he might buy a pistol, take it home, sit down, write a note to his wife, and then pull the trigger.

He had cancer; The Bremerton School District forced him to take the job at Olympic College – filling the vacancy left by Pesco’s sudden death – and he didn’t want to coach there; He didn’t want to coach black players.

Having cancer might be motive enough. I doubt it. But it’s possible.

The other two reasons, though, make no sense. You don’t pull the trigger just because you don’t want the job, or don’t want to coach players with different skin color than you.

That doesn’t make sense. I can’t be convinced of that.

And who in the middle of killing himself, writes a note to his wife telling her she can take the gun back to Forrie and get her money back. He even left the receipt.

Maybe Wills’ perfectionist got in his way. But how I don’t know.

Ta Wills – Ken’s wife – still lives in their home in Manette. Things are just about as he left them that terrible day 44 years ago.

Does Ta know?

Maybe.

But I have yet hear her say it.

So it goes. November turns into December, summers come, winters go, and the page on the calender is turned to another year and pretty soon it’s 2006 and the Wills suicide and the Cohen murder remain unsolved mysteries.

Have a great month.

You are loved.