A Bend man faces three charges of second-degree murder following the deaths of a pair of brothers over the March 20 weekend, along with the earlier death of a Bend woman. Bend Police arrested Randall Kilby, 35, on March 21, after cops found two men dead in a house on Granite Drive in southwest Bend. The two men, Jeffrey Taylor, 66, and Benjamin Taylor, 69, lived in the house with Kilby’s mother, authorities said.
On Monday, Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel announced he’d also charged Kilby in the death of the woman, Daphne Banks, 43, who suffered a head injury on Christmas Day at the same location, and who died Jan. 10 at St. Charles Medical Center. At least one of the men killed over the weekend died from hatchet wounds, Hummel said, with the second man’s injuries also consistent with hatchet wounds.
A mother cries for help
Police went to the house on Granite Drive after a neighbor called authorities to report “a woman and a man walked by them, and the woman silently mouthed, ‘help,’ Hummel told reporters Monday. That woman was Kilby’s mother, Hummel said, who, after being a witness to one of the murders, was held against her will by Kilby. At one point she talked her son into going for a walk, Hummel detailed, where she saw the neighbor and asked for help. Later, after Kilby drove his mother around, she was able to run to a neighbor’s house for help.
According to accounts from witnesses, Kilby got into a dispute with one of the brothers before the killings. Kilby has a prior criminal history, including an arrest for multiple hit-and-run crashes and a chase that went from Tumalo to Bend in 2019.
No one had yet been formally charged in the case of Banks, who is thought to have previously been in a relationship with Kilby, Hummel said. At the time of her injury, Kilby and others who lived at the same house on Granite Drive told police that Banks had fallen and hit her head.
Bend Police arrested Kilby on a charge of assault after the incident, but Hummel had not yet formally charged Kilby with a crime. Hummel told reporters Monday that his office had not yet charged Kilby because despite his office working on the case “every day,” they did not have sufficient evidence to convict Kilby of a crime. Without more evidence, and should Kilby have been tried and deemed innocent, laws around double jeopardy would not have allowed him to be tried again—even if more evidence came to light, Hummel said.
“Nobody takes this crime more seriously than me and the team,” Hummel said at his Monday press conference. Still, he said, “we don’t want to go too quickly and don’t want to go too slowly.”
After his arrest over the weekend, Kilby provided more information about Banks’ case, which led to charges in her case too, Hummel said.
