‘Beauty and the chief.’ How a secret romance ended former Seattle Police Chief Diaz’s career

Chief Adrian Diaz, wearing a black cowboy hat, beamed from atop a blue roan horse named Blucher. He was at the Seattle police barn, being interviewed by a TV journalist.

“You learn a lotta lessons on a horse?” asked the journalist, Jamie Tompkins of FOX 13 in Seattle.

“You learn a lotta lessons,” Diaz said. “They’re always trying to search for peace.”

In the two years since that interview, there has been little peace for Diaz.

Friendship blossomed between Diaz and Tompkins on that late summer day back in 2022, which developed into a romance, according to an investigation released Tuesday by the Office of Inspector General. Ten months after that horseback interview, he hired Tompkins be his chief of staff, a position he created, at a salary of $163,900. Diaz did not post the job or interview other candidates.

Once an up-and-comer at Seattle Police, Diaz, appointed by Mayor Bruce Harrell, would soon fall from grace. It began with a rumor that Tompkins was his paramour, which Diaz dismissed as tawdry gossip, a conspiracy ginned up by his detractors.

Within a year of Tompkins’ hire, Harrell demoted Diaz and replaced him with former King County Sheriff Sue Rahr. Harrell fired Diaz on Tuesday.

Diaz has maintained that his relationship with Tompkins was platonic. He even came out as gay in a radio interview, implying that his sexuality made the relationship with Tompkins, a woman, impossible.

City-commissioned investigators would later conclude there had been an affair. They uncovered a love letter, a lynchpin they say proves Diaz and Tompkins were more than friends.

It was a Papyrus card, with an Ewok on the front – a teddy bear-like creature – fitting, given Diaz's love of Disney. Inside, Tompkins wrote, “You woke me up. Like a prince in one of your Disney movies. I hope I always know your kiss.”

By not disclosing their relationship, Diaz had violated city policy – and also the trust of the Seattle police force – a seismic blow to a department reeling from years of missteps and controversies.

KUOW was the first to report this story. Journalists Ashley Hiruko and Isolde Raftery spent close to two years talking to roughly 30 sources, obtaining official records to uncover the truth behind the blue wall. This is the exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of how Diaz’s four-year tenure as Seattle’s top cop came undone.

Quashing narratives

Seattle cops are notorious gossips – they’d be the first to admit it. They are professional investigators, after all, usually of the darkest underbellies, and watercooler chatter can take the edge off.

The rumor about Diaz’s affair hit at a low time in Seattle Police history. Homicides were at an all-time high, and cops were leaving in the hundreds, many disillusioned after the city council pledged to defund them.

In spring 2023, Diaz had been permanent chief for three months when downtown cops started noticing Diaz coming and going from the West Precinct garage, but not entering the precinct, which made them curious. They soon heard whispers that Diaz was taking a woman to late-night dinners at a nearby Mexican restaurant and an Italian restaurant in Belltown. They knew he visited this woman regularly at her apartment, because she lived in a high-rise luxury apartment across the street from their precinct.

Security camera footage provided to KUOW showed Diaz and Tompkins together at police headquarters late on New Year's Eve. In the photo, Diaz holds the door for Tompkins as she leaves the building.

Diaz admitted to the city investigators that he went to Tompkins’ place roughly 20 times before she was hired. He said he helped her with household chores.

“I just help out wherever I can if I have the time, I have the knowledge, like, I just do that,” he told the investigator.

But Diaz denied they were romantically involved, insisting through his personal attorney Ted Buck that he and Tompkins were merely friends.

“Are they romantic friends? No, they're not,” Buck said in July 2023. “Has Adrian helped her put dimmer switches on some of her electrical outlets because that's what he does? Yeah, that's the kind of friendship they have.”

This quote, published in a KUOW story, ricocheted around the department. It became a joke – and caused deep concern that Diaz was too distracted to lead an embattled department.

Diaz would later admit to an investigator that he had created cover stories when he visited Tompkins. Asked why he did this, Diaz replied, according to the investigator, “Why do they need to know where I’m at and what I’m doing?”

KUOW editor Isolde Raftery heard the rumor from a source in early May 2023, two weeks before Tompkins was to start her first day as chief of staff.

Raftery decided to investigate, not because of the affair itself, but because of the possible violation of a city rule that says supervisors and subordinates must disclose personal relationships. It was more than just a policy violation she was interested in, however – she’d heard of Diaz overstepping in small ways, and wondered if he was the kind of bureaucrat who took advantage of the taxpayer dime, who didn’t believe the rules applied to him.

Those early days of reporting proved to be a giant dead end: Raftery never saw Tompkins or Diaz during late-night stakeouts of the Belltown apartment, and public records officers told her the text messages and camera footage she had requested would take up to a year to release.

So Raftery enlisted reporter Ashley Hiruko, who specialized in getting records quickly and building large source networks.

Hiruko’s first task: Call officers from the West Precinct who might have seen something. She found their personal cell phone numbers on a paid database and reached out to 58 cops.

Raftery and Hiruko also called members of Diaz’s security detail – who stayed mum. According to the Office of Inspector General investigator, the security detail worried Diaz would punish them for speaking with the press.

“I noticed how nervous and scared all of the members of the security detail were to participate in the investigation,” the investigator wrote.

A member of Diaz’s security detail said, according to the report, “Every time someone would say something or there was an investigation done about it, or someone’s lawyer said they wanted to depose me, [Diaz would] pull me in his office and he’d sit me down, and he would ask me about it for, I mean, like 45 minutes, an hour. I mean it was very clear to me, like, if I open my mouth, I’m fucked.”

Ultimately, the security detail officers were compelled to provide evidence.

One member of Diaz’s detail said the former chief joked that people around Tompkins’ apartment knew his name “because of how loud [Tompkins] was during their sexual activity,” according to the report.

On another occasion, according to the report, Diaz and Tompkins were in the car with security detail, joking about Diaz “seeing a doctor to prescribe him sexual enhancement medication.”

The security detail also found the damning Ewok card the day after Tompkins started on the job.

They didn’t show anyone the card. They said nothing, worried that it would get back to their boss, and that he would make their working lives miserable. They also didn’t trust the system to investigate.

“It was obvious,” the report said, “that information from [human resources] was flowing to the chief, which seemed troubling given that Mr. Diaz was a potential subject of those investigations.”

Diaz’s security team told the investigator that Diaz became paranoid and thought he was being followed. He asked them to sweep his office for bugs; they found none.

All the while, they would drive Diaz to Tompkins’ apartment, once to let her dog out.

Other reporters in Seattle were aware of the gossip surrounding Diaz and Tompkins, but few investigated.

There was one exception in those early reporting days: Matt Markovich, a veteran Seattle broadcast reporter, who approached Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess at a Starbucks and mentioned what he was hearing.

Markovich knew Tompkins, a former colleague, and counted her as a friend. He would later apologize to her, worried that in talking to Burgess, he may have inadvertently fueled suspicions.

Markovich decided to pull back because he knew Tompkins too well. It became clear to Hiruko and Raftery, after hearing from other journalists in town, that KUOW was going at this story alone.

Diaz on defense

Diaz branded himself as a progressive cop who pushed for sensitivity training and community policing. He had also been described as kind, a good boss, and a doting father. But that image fell away when he became permanent chief. His strong reaction to the speculation showcased the stark change.

Diaz openly accused his command staff of leaking the rumor to reporters.

He yelled at his communication staffers, sources said, and allegedly threatened that he’d write them up.

Diaz was on edge, too, because he believed West Precinct cops were surveilling Tompkins.

According to the report, the concierge at her building told her that uniformed officers had come by around midnight, asking if she lived there.

“When she informed Mr. Diaz that this caused her concern, he came to her building on several occasions to attempt countersurveillance,” the report says. “She said Mr. Diaz spent some time at the dog run” – a fenced yard for resident dogs – “for the purpose of countersurveillance.”

Diaz also contacted the FBI and U.S. Department of Homeland Security, concerned that his officers were watching Tompkins. He wanted to know if anything could be done about it. Both agencies declined to help.

He even reached out to Wayne Barnett of the city Ethics and Elections office to say there was no relationship to report. Barnett later said he thought to himself, “Why are we talking about this?”

Related: Seattle Police chief's alleged relationship with employee prompts inquiries, roils department

Diaz had loyalists on staff who reported intelligence back to him. When Raftery talked to Brian Maxey, Seattle Police’s chief operating officer, Maxey told her that he would report everything they had discussed back to Chief Diaz. Maxey spoke so carefully, and with such unusual reverence for his boss that she wondered if Diaz was in the room, listening in.

In July, even though Diaz had not discovered the source of the leak, he emailed the department, announcing Tompkins as his chief of staff.

Shortly after, the rumor made it to social media.

“The Adrian Diaz Affair,” a conservative Facebook page blasted in a July 4 post. It featured side-by-side photos of Diaz and Tompkins and generated more than a hundred comments, many of them snarky.

“Beauty and the chief… Somebody call Disney,” one person wrote.

The next day, three people filed anonymous complaints with the city’s Office of Police Accountability department.

One complaint appeared to have been written by someone with insider knowledge. They wrote that Diaz took unusual steps to hire Tompkins – such as asking his driver to conduct her background check instead of the department’s backgrounding unit.

The accusations regarding Tompkins were not the only ones plaguing Diaz. In a two-year span, more than 40 complaints were lodged against him – some frivolous, some not.

There was the complaint accusing him of misusing city resources by having his security detail procure beef jerky for him in eastern Washington.

The same complaint alleged that Diaz’s detail drove him to Portland to catch a flight to a University of Washington Huskies game.

The allegations consistently painted Diaz as a chief who exploited his power.

Pivoting to records

In July 2023, Raftery and Hiruko knocked on a front door on Beacon Hill. They were looking for Kevin Tompkins, who had filed for divorce from Jamie Tompkins in February 2023, around the time affair rumors sparked.

Inside the house, dogs barked, which seemed promising – they knew the Tompkins had dogs. A friendly man opened the door: Yes, he was Kevin, he said, but no, he had never been married to a woman named Jamie.

Wrong guy.

Although confused by the visit, this Kevin was tickled to meet journalists from his local NPR station. The interaction was a reprieve from the litany of unreturned phone calls and hang-ups the pair had come to expect.

Ultimately, 30 or so people connected to the police department agreed to talk, funneling the journalists information and documents by payphone and encrypted apps – and at back booths of diners and bars.

These sources would not go on record because police policy prevented them from talking with reporters. It wasn’t lost on Hiruko and Raftery that these Seattle Police employees were risking their jobs. Sources cried on the phone, and in one interview with Hiruko, a high-ranking officer shook as she spoke, fearing her career could be upended if she was found out.

Hiruko and Raftery relied on these sources to give them official records, that could help them track the Diaz and Tompkins relationship, such as calendars, emails, photos, expense reports, which they would then vet. They had asked for these records through official channels, but the backlog for receiving them was six months to a year – and many of their requests were being rejected or further delayed.

Hiruko and Raftery found it painstaking to piece the story together. For example, several people said they had heard Diaz and Tompkins went to Las Vegas in December 2022, before she was hired. Raftery and Hiruko were able to confirm through records that they were both in Sin City on the same days – but found no proof that they were there together.

Ted Buck, Diaz’s attorney, said Diaz was there with his wife. When asked to produce proof of his wife’s plane ticket, Buck didn’t respond.

As they dug in, Buck tried to stop the story.

In a Zoom meeting with KUOW, he made a breathless plea: “I don't want to see the chief’s good name drug through this when there’s no basis for these rumors.”

As summer came to an end, Hiruko and Raftery finally had their breakthrough: They confirmed that the Office of Police Accountability had launched a preliminary investigation into the internal complaints about the Diaz-Tompkins relationship. KUOW published its first story about the conduct of the chief on Sept. 5, 2023. It focused on Diaz’s response to the rumor, what sources called an “overreaction” from the man in charge.

The fallout

The day after the story published, Seattle Police fired Durand Dace, a low-level temporary employee in the media affairs unit. Dace had been accused by department brass of rumor mongering and was accused of pushing the rumors – even though he was hired a month after they began.

Dace admitted to his manager that he had discussed the rumor with colleagues. He said he felt badly about it and apologized to Tompkins by phone. The two had worked together at FOX 13.

Dace said he had been scapegoated.

“I remain staunchly adamant that I was made to be the fall guy, and sternly maintain that I am not the primary source of this rumor as it spread throughout the department," Dace said in a statement to KUOW in September 2023.

After being fired, Dace struggled to find employment in his field.

KUOW got blowback as well, from both detractors and supporters of Diaz.

The Stranger, Seattle’s alt-weekly, remarked on KUOW’s story in its typical sardonic style.

“Gasp: KUOW ran with the story about Seattle Police Department officers spreading rumors of Police Chief Adrian Diaz having an affair with a staffer he promoted,” they wrote, suggesting that KUOW had fallen for right-wing fueled gossip.

From the right, Brandi Kruse, a conservative media personality – and friend of Tompkins’ – piled on.

“Did KUOW, a leftist NPR station, stop to think for one second why ANY officer would leak information to them of all outlets?” Kruse wrote on X. “Could it be because those sources knew the info was more likely to be reported without corroboration because the reporters desperately want it to be true?”

Records would later show that Kruse had vowed to Tompkins that she would stop the rumors.

“I have huge police following,” Kruse said. “I’ll smack it down.”

At a press conference, Deputy Mayor Burgess complained about the reporting to a KUOW reporter who wasn’t involved – saying the story was beneath KUOW and that he would complain to Hiruko and Raftery’s bosses.

There was also an unsettling anonymous email that came through, falsely claiming that Hiruko had followed Tompkins to a wedding. It insinuated that someone, likely Hiruko, had also attempted to assault Diaz.

Hiruko and Raftery wound up dismissing the email as a distraction, but not before noting that it included details only people at the highest levels of Seattle police could know. They wondered if someone at Seattle Police was trying to derail them.

Pressure mounts

Investigating the alleged affair fell to the city’s watchdog agencies – the Office of Police Accountability and the Office of the Inspector General.

But as the months passed, no investigating seemed to be happening.

Then the lawsuits started arriving, one after another, and the concerns about Diaz’s conduct increased exponentially.

Deanna Nollette, a Seattle Police veteran of 27 years, sued the department and the chief in January 2024. She accused Diaz of sexism and discrimination, saying he offered men more training and travel opportunities. Eric Greening, a top Seattle cop of 30 years, also sued the department, accusing Diaz of discrimination.

Four female officers filed a tort claim in April 2024, naming Diaz specifically, and accusing him of predatory behavior and enabling sexism. One officer said Diaz complimented how she dressed, and offered to do handiwork at her place, which she declined.

Buck, Diaz’s personal attorney, defended the chief, saying, “The reality is a modern big city chief will always be the target of disgruntled, dissatisfied claimants,” Buck wrote to KUOW in April.

It’s standard for the police department not to comment because of the pending litigation. But in this case, the police department’s media unit, now headed by Jamie Tompkins, fought back.

“The department will not respond to the personal attacks,” the statement began, but instead of stopping there, it continued, deriding the women’s complaints as “individual perceptions of victimhood.”

The statement was so out of character that The Seattle Times editorial board weighed in.

“Words matter,” the editorial board wrote on May 5. “This was never so apparent as in the Seattle Police Department’s oblivious response to a claim filed by several women employees claiming sexual harassment and discrimination.”

Mayor Bruce Harrell responded, too. He wrote to city council members, announcing an investigation into sexism allegations. We “will give these claims the close attention they deserve,” Harrell wrote.

The Seattle Times applauded Harrell and added a warning: “To avoid future missteps, it is obvious the police department must be brought under tighter control.”

Throughout, Diaz had defenders.

Community activists, with ties to Seattle Police, Rev. Harriet Walden, Victoria Beach, and Carmen Martinez held a press conference, calling the brewing scandal a mutiny.

They said the cops suing Diaz were “serial complainers” – that their accusations were fueled by racism. They said “all hell” would break loose if Diaz were fired.

Their threats fell flat. Five days later, the Office of Inspector General notified the mayor that they had opened a full investigation into the affair allegations.

The next day, May 29, Diaz was demoted.

“Gay Latino man”

On that day, standing alongside Mayor Harrell in Seattle City Hall, surrounded by cameras, Diaz announced he would step down as police chief.

Diaz cried, dabbing his face with a tissue.

The mayor said Diaz would pivot to a “special assignment” and remain on the payroll. He gave a poignant speech thanking Diaz, which sounded more like a bon voyage to a dear friend than a rebuke.

Harrell said the lawsuits had become a distraction, and that he and Diaz agreed a change in the department’s culture could "be better served with him stepping aside."

Sue Rahr, a former King County Sheriff, would take over as interim chief.

Hiruko had expected the news. The night before, her phone blew up with text messages saying that Diaz was packing up his office. But a bigger bombshell would drop in coming days: Diaz would go on Jason Rantz’s conservative talk show on KTTH radio to confront the allegations directly. Dressed in a fitted blazer and dark-rimmed glasses, Diaz spoke compellingly.

“I haven’t had the opportunity to be able to tell my story,” Diaz said, choking up. “It’s a story I’ve struggled with over the last four years. I’m a gay Latino man.”

He’d been married to a woman for 16 years and had three kids.

Diaz listed the obstacles that prevented him from coming out sooner – Covid, protests for civil rights on Capitol Hill in 2020, being made interim chief.

“Then the accusations started coming,” Diaz said. “In my head I’m like, it’s clear that these aren’t true, and no one gave me an opportunity.”

Diaz told Mayor Harrell he was gay in February. Diaz told his security detail, according to the report, “Let's just say whatever I told the mayor, there's no way he's going to be able to get rid of me."

What Diaz didn’t know was that his security detail had evidence of a relationship between Diaz and Tompkins: A Papyrus birthday card with an Ewok on front.

When presented with the card, Diaz said he didn’t recognize it, the report said. “He also considered whether someone could have written the card as a joke, or to frame him.”

Investigators asked Tompkins for a handwriting sample, which handwriting analysis said “showed evidence of disguise.” Looking at other records with her handwriting, they said it was “highly probable” that Tompkins wrote the card.

The city put Tompkins on paid administrative leave in October, alleging dishonesty. She resigned on Nov. 6.

Investigation outcomes

Still in Seattle, still employed by the police department, and still making a chief’s salary of $338,000 a year, Diaz was still pissed.

In October, he filed a $10 million tort claim against Mayor Harrell and Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess -- who had defended him vociferously.

Diaz claimed he was “wrongfully discharged and discriminated, harassed, and retaliated against” when he came out as gay to them.

Jamie Housen, spokesperson for the mayor's office, denied the claims made in the tort.

The mayor put Diaz on paid leave just before Halloween, and fired him this week.

Two days after Diaz was fired, Raftery spoke with the person who submitted the main complaint about the affair.

“It became very evident very quickly that Diaz believed he could do whatever. He silenced dissent and ruled through fear,” he said. He asked to maintain his anonymity, still worried that Diaz might find a way to retaliate.

“This all trickled down to the patrol level,” he continued. He said that officers saw Diaz giving the appearance of acting unethically, which crushed morale. “That turns into slowdowns on shifts, a lack of proactivity, and, ultimately, the city’s worse off for all this.”

As the department broke ties with Diaz, it also separated, more quietly, from the mounted patrol unit. Each of its six horses would need a new home – including Blucher, the horse Diaz rode when he met Jamie Tompkins.

Like Blucher, Diaz’s future is up in the air.