Without Pity: Ann Rule's Most Dangerous Killers (44 page)

It was obvious that Brown lacked gallantry, but it was easy to imagine that Robin Marcus, lost in the woods, in deep shock after seeing her husband killed,
might
have chosen to stay with the only other human being around.

She told the investigators she had witnessed the accidental shooting. And then, she said, Brown told her that he was afraid no one would ever believe him—not with his record. He was panicking and determined to head up and over the mountain. He said he knew the woods; she didn’t. She decided, Brown said, to go with him rather than wander around in the wilderness where she probably would have died of fatigue or starvation or as prey for a bear or a cougar.

Brown acknowledged that he had dragged the collie’s carcass off the trail and that he’d rolled Hank’s body off the bank and then covered both bodies with sword ferns to deter the ravages of animals. That stamped him as a novice in the woods, the detectives thought. A few ferns wouldn’t keep animals away, but they might hide the bodies from a human hiker.

So Tom Brown took off into the deep woods, with Robin trailing behind. He said he spent the next three days trying to calm himself down, and he finally decided the best thing to do was to turn himself in. Robin promised him that she would stand by him, and tell the cops she was a witness to her husband’s death. “Then we headed back to Oregon City.”

On July 29, a polygraph expert from the Oregon State Police gave Tom Brown a lie detector test. All the tracings of his body’s reactions indicated that he was telling the truth. The victim’s own wife was supporting Brown’s story, all the evidence had been turned over by Brown himself, and he passed the polygraph test. It was tragic that the young husband should have died on his first wedding anniversary, but it clearly wasn’t a homicide.

Tom Brown vacated the motel room and disappeared. There was no reason to require him to stay around.

The postmortem examination of Hank Marcus confirmed that he had died of a single gunshot wound to the head with the bullet entering the right cheek and traveling out the left side of his neck. The path of the bullet had been almost horizontal, indicating that he was standing next to someone of similar height when he was shot. Unfortunately, because of the extreme decomposition of the tissue, there was no way to determine if there had been any blotching or stippling of powder burns around the wound. That eliminated their chance to establish how far the shooter had been from the victim.

However, because the Oregon State Crime Lab was doing a special study on lead traces in bullet wounds, two fragments of Hank Marcus’s tissue—each no more than an inch or so in diameter—were excised from the site of the entrance and exit wounds so they could be examined under a scanning electron microscope equipped with a laser beam.

Because of an oversight, Rusty’s body was buried before the direction of the wound to the dog’s head could be determined. And he wasn’t buried in a single grave, but in a mass grave at the city dump with several other dogs.

Hank Marcus was buried, too, and Robin and their families tried to pick up the loose threads of their lives.

Everyone thought Robin was going through normal, predictable grief. In truth, Robin Marcus was suffering through her own private hell, something far beyond normal grief. There was something just below the surface of her mind that kept bubbling up, no matter how hard she tried to keep it submerged. As the days passed, it grew stronger and stronger.

Her memory was playing games with her. It was very odd. She could remember everything about preparations for their trip, remember the day they spent before they met Tom, and even recall how she’d been afraid of him at first. But the three days after Hank and Rusty were shot were all a blur. For the life of her, she could not pull those memories into focus.

She liked Tom. She
thought
she liked Tom. She could remember riding to the sheriff’s office with Mr. O’Leary, Tom’s attorney, and telling him Tom was a nice person. They asked her a lot of questions in the Clackamas County sheriff’s office about why she’d gone up into the woods with Tom. Could she have escaped from him? She said yes—yes, she could have. She could have left when they got to Mr. O’Leary’s office, but she promised Tom she would stick by him and tell them about how he’d shot Hank accidentally. The gunshot haunted her. She kept hearing the
boom
in her head and seeing Hank’s blood. And it frightened her. But she couldn’t bring the actual shooting back. When she talked to the detectives, she believed she had seen it. But now she could not remember it.

Although she didn’t realize it, Robin Marcus was beginning to come down from the intensive brainwashing she had undergone for three days after Hank’s death. Whenever she began to go over the events in her mind the way Tom told her they happened, a very clear picture kept getting in the way—a picture that warred with Tom’s words. She kept seeing his smile as he told her that he had shot Hank as well as Rusty. Why
did
he smile? It was such an odd smile, like the grimace on a devil’s mask. But then she recalled that Tom had smiled when he was talking with detectives, too. Even though tears were running down his face when he told them about the accident, he’d had that same peculiar grin on his face. Maybe that’s just the way he was.

As the days passed, Robin began to remember what had happened more and more clearly. She’d told the detectives what Tom wanted them to hear; she’d even told her family and Hank’s that his death had been an accident. And she had believed it herself. Now she no longer did; her memory was coming back.

On August 2, Robin and her parents appeared at the sheriff’s office again. “I want to tell you what really happened,” Robin blurted. “It wasn’t an accident. Tom Brown killed Hank.”

She seemed so positive about what she was saying that the detectives immediately ushered her into an interview room where she gave a second statement. There were to be five more statements as her memory fought its way to the surface.

Robin explained that she had gone with Tom after Hank was killed, but only out of fear for her life. Tom had not been her savior in the woods. He had raped her again and again. She still didn’t understand how but Tom had somehow managed to convince her that she was there when Hank died, that the killing had been an accident, and that she should return to town with him to verify his story. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world.

This new version was hard to swallow, and the detectives interviewing her looked at each other doubtfully. Robin Marcus was given a polygraph exam—and failed.

Indeed, Robin Marcus would fail more lie detector tests, but the investigators came to believe her even though they couldn’t say why. She agreed to talk with a psychiatrist in the hope that it would help her explore which memories were real and which had been planted there by Tom Brown.

The forensic psychiatrist talked with Robin at length and reported his findings. He explained that Tom Brown had played such tricks with her mind that it would be a long time before she would be able to remember exactly what had happened. She wasn’t lying; she had been very skillfully brainwashed.

At this point, the Clackamas County sheriff’s office didn’t have much of a case to take into court. Conflicting statements. Conflicting polygraphs. Nothing tangible to work with. Worse, Tom Brown was gone. He was a drifter; he could be anywhere. He might never be found.

The case, however, was taken to a grand jury, which would decide if the death of Hank Marcus had been a murder or an accident. The case remained there for some months. In the interim, Brown’s lawyer, James O’Leary, ran for district attorney of Clackamas County and won. Even if the grand jury decided that Brown should be charged, there was no way O’Leary could prosecute a case in which he had originally been the defendant’s lawyer.

The grand jury ultimately agreed that Tom Brown should be tried for the murder of Hank Marcus. An indictment charging Thomas Brown with murder, forgery, and car theft was handed down by the grand jury in late December, five months after Hank Marcus died; it was not going to be an easy case to prosecute. (The latter two charges were from another state, and both crimes had occurred before the events of July 24.)

James A. Redden, Oregon’s attorney general, maintained a special Criminal Justice Division. It was manned by assistant attorneys general and investigators who were available to help county D.A.s prosecute cases if they requested assistance. Small counties often had complicated cases that required more manpower than they had on staff. Most of the attorney general’s lawyers and several of the investigators had years of experience in criminal investigation. The investigators were once the cream of the detectives in the departments from which they were recruited.

Assistant Attorney General Stephen Keutzer was from the Lane County district attorney’s office in Eugene, and Assistant Attorney General Robert Hamilton had once been on staff in the Marion County D.A.’s office in Salem. Between them, they had a great deal of experience in prosecuting homicide cases. Now they responded to Clackamas County’s request for help in the investigation and prosecution of Tom Brown.

Robin Marcus’s many statements suggested that she might be a good candidate for Sodium Amytal (truth serum) and the grand jury requested an examination by Dr. J. H. Treleaven, head of the Psychiatric Security Unit of Oregon State Hospital, to see if the drug might unveil hidden areas in her mind.

Treleaven’s conclusion was that the young widow would probably reveal nothing more under truth serum. He determined that she had been subjected to classic brainwashing during the time she was held captive after her husband’s murder. All the elements were there: psychic shock, isolation, programming, the promise of reward and, for Robin, the need to alleviate her guilt that she had been responsible for Hank’s death.

The shock of hearing her husband was dead and seeing her dog shot before her eyes would have been profound. The wilderness of the Mount Hood National Forest was as isolated as a place could get. And over the three days Robin was held captive, Brown systematically programmed her to believe whatever he told her about the “accident.” Robin’s promised reward was that she might escape with her life. Perhaps more important to her, she wanted to believe it had all been accidental. That would relieve her of the burden of knowing Hank had died because this stranger desired her sexually and was willing to kill to get her. In her mind, she would have felt responsible for the death of the man she loved more than anyone on earth.

Robin Marcus was, after all, only sixteen years old. She was suggestible and pliable. Before her ordeal, she had been an exceptionally trusting person. She was deeply religious, and she had only her Bible for protection against the stalking killer.

Now Keutzer and Hamilton and their team of investigators would start from the beginning, reviewing all the evidence on the case, the conflicting statements, and the circumstances of the killing. Optimally, a homicide case is easier to prepare when the prosecution team has been at the crime scene within hours of the event, just as the time element in solving a murder is so vital. The more time that passes after a killing takes place, the less likely investigators are to solve it.

Hank Marcus’s family was distraught, crying for justice. Robin Marcus only wanted to forget. What she had experienced was so disturbing that she could not bear to go over it again. She was distraught that she had been asked so many questions, and forced to relive her terror so many times. She was jittery at the thought of testifying before a jury.

Robin had been hammered with questions and linked to the leads of lie detectors so often because her original statement was in direct opposition to what she had later told the Clackamas County detectives. They had no choice but to keep questioning her. Predictably, she was not the most cooperative witness a prosecuting team could hope for.

One of the first things the team from the attorney general’s office did was to review the past record of Thomas Brown. When he said he had a long criminal history, he hadn’t been exaggerating. Brown had an incredible background of violence—seemingly for its own sake. He had first come to the attention of Oregon lawmen when he was barely sixteen years old, after a wild shooting incident. The Clackamas County sheriff’s office had been called after a young man was critically wounded by a gunshot while he was standing in the window of his own home. Witnesses had identified the gunman as Tom Brown, who was arrested almost immediately by a deputy who saw Brown as he was getting out of a pickup truck with a rifle in his hand.

With Brown in custody, the deputy raced to the house of the victim, who was only nineteen. He was still standing, but his hand was pressed tight over his stomach in a vain attempt to hold back the blood that gushed out between his fingers. The wounded man was taken to the hospital while Brown was questioned.

“Did you shoot him?”

“Yeah,” Tom said. “I wanted his car, and I was willing to kill to get it.”

Tom said that he and a friend had decided at school that day that they needed some money. Brown borrowed a rifle and five bullets from a friend, picked up the sixth at home, and the teenagers headed for a gas station near a junior high but “there were too many people there for a single-shot weapon,” the cocky kid explained.

Then they headed for Canby, Oregon. They only had a little gas, so they ran a woman motorist off the road, demanding money when they ran up to the car. The quick-thinking woman quickly locked her doors, but the two teenagers fired anyway. “The expression changed on her face,” Tom said, smiling at the memory. “We thought we’d hit her.”