Empty Promises: And Other True Cases

  It ended in a draw. Brown's confession was ruled inadmissible because the judge felt Arnold had been read his rights under Miranda too rapidly for him to understand them. He was made a ward of the court and committed indefinitely to the Parrot Creek Boys' Ranch in Oregon City. He stayed there only eighteen months and then moved back to his family home in Eugene.

  Arnold Brown was slow, but his borderline IQ didn't cause his rage. There was something else— something either genetic or environmental— that contributed to his losing control when he didn't get his way. The treatment he received at Parrot Creek didn't change his basic personality structure at all. Psychiatrists have long agreed that the antisocial personality is probably the most resistant personality disorder to treat. Most children develop a conscience around the age of three and a half. When that doesn't happen, it is next to impossible to acquire a conscience and to develop empathy and compassion for others. The child grows tall; his conscience shrivels.

  Released from the boys' school, Arnold was angry, frustrated, and, worse, possessed by unfulfilled sexual cravings.

  He was a time bomb.

  Arnold applied for admission to the National Guard that summer. He was rejected in his efforts to find a place where he would be "accepted as a man." But he was turned down not so much because of his lack of intellect as because the National Guard interviewers found him lacking in maturity and empathy for others.

  A month later, Arnold strolled toward the Willamette River to go fishing. Five-year-old Summer Rogers lived near the river too. She was a pixyish little girl with dark eyes and pigtails. She wore a bathing suit on this hot summer day. Her mother was fixing supper inside the house, and she told Summer to stay close because they were going to eat in fifteen minutes. The child nodded and ran outside to play.

  Summer's stepfather came home and called her to come in to supper, but she didn't respond. Her parents assumed she had gone next door to her friend's house to play, as she often did; it was still sunny and light out and they weren't worried. They went ahead and ate dinner, saving a plate for her, and then called Summer again. But their voices hung in the air. There was only silence in response. Frightened now, they scoured the neighborhood for Summer, asking everyone they met if they had seen her.

  Arnold Brown walked by as they searched, and Summer's mother asked him if he'd seen her little girl. He shook his head and walked on. By sunset, the parents were frantic. As night fell, they notified the police.

  Summer Rogers was the second five-year-old girl to disappear in the Eugene area that summer. When more young girls were found murdered in the Salem area forty miles north, it began to appear that a serial killer— referred to back then as a mass murderer— was roving in central Oregon. Because Eugene detectives were aware that Brown had stabbed Maria and Jimmy Coleman on the bank of the Willamette three years earlier when he was sixteen, Arnold Brown became their prime suspect in the disappearance of Summer and, tangentially, in the decapitation killing of another child, whose murder was still unsolved.

  They soon found witnesses who had seen Summer walking with Arnold toward the Willamette River. But they didn't find anyone who had seen Summer walking back. They found traces of blood on Arnold's tackle box and on his pants; he explained that it was from his dog, who was in heat. In that era, the samples were too minuscule to test for blood type classification or even to verify that it was human blood, so they had no way to disprove his statement.

  After hours of interrogation, Arnold Brown gave a statement admitting that Summer had accompanied him down to the river. Lane County District Attorney Pat Horton recalled Arnold's version of what happened: "He admitted seeing her fall while she was wading, and hitting her head on a rock. He said she looked dead and he panicked. He thought he would be in a lot of trouble because of his background. After she was dead, he said he simply pushed the body off into the current and watched it drift downriver. But there was never any admission that he caused her death. Basically, he said he had done the wrong thing by pushing the body in the river, but that the girl just slipped, fell, and was killed in front of him. That he wasn't responsible."

  Arnold Brown's story seemed incredible, and Horton wasn't happy with the progression of the case. The Eugene detectives were convinced that Brown had deliberately crushed Summer Rogers's skull with a rock and then disposed of her body in the fast-moving river. But they had no body and no physical evidence to take to court. Many bodies are lost forever in the Willamette. The police realized that they might never find Summer.

  The Willamette River did give up Summer's remains ten weeks later, but the body was so decomposed that it was at first misidentified. Today DNA would be used to identify her small torso, but when Summer died, they retrieved only shreds of clothing and enough blood to type. Even in the year 2000, cause of death of a body that long in a river would be difficult to determine. There was nothing left of the little girl but a decaying torso with ragged bits of a blue-and-white bathing suit clinging to it. The head and extremities were gone forever. Pathologists could not determine cause of death or say for sure if the head, arms, and legs had been cut off or had simply fallen away as the result of decomposition.

  If Arnold Brown's life was frustrating, it was nothing compared to the agony of detectives who were sure that a desperately dangerous man was walking free in their community. There was not enough left of the victim to arrest Arnold; they had only their terrible suspicions. The Oregon investigators kept an eye on Arnold, but they didn't have the manpower to trail him all the time, and his family closed in around him in fierce protection. He was cleared in the murder of the second child after another Eugene resident confessed.

  The Eugene detectives remained angry and bitter. "I could write a book about Arnold Brown," one muttered years later. "We know all about him, and it makes us sick."

  So there it was. Arnold remained free for two years after Summer Rogers died. He was arrested once more on February 16, 1978— but not for murder. He was convicted of stealing $45,000 from the roller rink. He went to the Oregon State Penitentiary with a twenty-year sentence. The prosecution brought up the death of Summer Rogers in the burglary trial, and Circuit Judge Helen Frye gave Arnold the maximum twenty-year sentence.

  Not surprisingly, Arnold Brown's lawyers immediately filed an appeal, the basis of which was the admission of the testimony regarding Summer Rogers's death. Legally, Arnold's attorneys were on sturdy ground; he had never been charged in what was only presumed to be murder. In a convoluted legal tangle, his sentence was struck down in February 1980. He was given a suspended sentence for the roller rink burglary and placed on probation. Once again he walked free.

  Arnold Brown went back to his family and his pet dog. He lived in the old neighborhood where all the crimes he was suspected of had occurred. He often visited the Reillys in Seattle, and their young children adored him.

  But none of his deep-seated problems were gone; they only lay festering. In March of 1981, Arnold began making reports to the police about "people" who were "bugging" him. On March 26 he reported that someone had damaged a boat on his family's property. A day later he claimed that strangers had assaulted him while he walked Queenie. On March 29 he reported that someone had damaged their boat further and had also cut the phone lines to his family's residence.

  The police doubted his claims; they suspected that Arnold himself was doing the damage. But when they asked him if he would take a lie detector test, he refused. They weren't sure why he was getting restive, but it worried them. Was Arnold sending out signals that something bad was going to happen again? Or was he only enjoying the attention he got when he cried wolf?

  Few clever con men have walked away from as many suspicions, charges, and convictions as deftly as Arnold Brown, despite his lack of intellect. The family who loved, protected, and cosseted him from the law and from responsibility did so at unspeakable cost. And now their refusal to allow him to be punished for anything might have led to tragedy in their own family.

 
* * *

  John Boatman, voluminous notes in hand, knocked on the door of the interview room on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building in Seattle and signaled to his sergeant to come out. And then he told Don Cameron about Arnold's background.

  They weren't dealing with a twenty-four-year-old man who just happened to be present in a house on the night his niece was murdered; they were questioning a man whose life had been laced with violence and suspicion for eight years. And most of the incidents had involved harm to children.

  Arnold Brown's family had supported him, believed in him, hired lawyers to get him out of prison. And he had been taken into the Reilly home as a welcome guest. He was allowed to baby-sit for Jannie and Max, and he slept in a bedroom only steps from theirs.

  Now, in the Seattle Police Homicide Unit, Arnold held out his hands so detectives could take fingernail scrapings. Then he was placed under arrest.

  Three hours later he faced Cameron and Nordlund again. He had sent word from his jail cell that he wanted to talk more about Jannie's death. He was ready to give another statement.

  His story of the evening of June 18 began just as it had before. He watched television upstairs until 2:30 A.M. and then went downstairs, where he peeked into the children's room. In this version, though, he admitted that he saw Jannie sleeping in her bed.

  John Nordlund looked at him and said quietly, "I think you are a sick person, and that you killed Jannie. You probably belong in a mental hospital."

  "I probably do."

  "Arnold, where did you kill her?" Nordlund asked quietly.

  "The sewing room."

  "Did you rape her?"

  "Yes."

  Arnold said that he had picked Jannie up from her bed and carried her, still sleeping, into the shop area of the basement where he found a single-braided rope. He then carried her to the sewing room behind his bedroom, but Jannie, who weighed only 66 pounds, began to wake up, stirring slightly.

  "I placed the rope around her neck… Then I pulled."

  As Jannie's breath was cut off, Arnold admitted that he placed his finger in her vagina. Although any forcible penetration of a body orifice for sexual purposes is considered rape by Washington State statute, it was clear that Arnold Brown understood very little about sexual intercourse or the human body. He insisted if his niece's vaginal vault had semen in it, it must have been from her; he thought both males and females produced semen.

  Jannie Reilly had suffered trauma to her vagina, but it was questionable whether she had been raped in the traditional sense of the term.

  "And then what did you do?" Nordlund asked.

  "I carried her outside and lowered her over the fence next door. I think her heart was still beating. I didn't mean to kill her."

  The terrible danger that walked with Arnold Brown had come, finally, to an end. He was returned to jail, while Cameron and Nordlund went to the Reilly home to search for the braided, tasseled rope that Brown had described as the murder weapon. They found the hemp rope lying against the backyard fence on the east side of the property. They took it to Dr. Eisele, who said it fit exactly into the indentations on the dead child's neck.

  Arnold Brown was placed in a cell with an inmate who was in jail for violation of probation on a theft charge. The twenty-one-year-old prisoner asked him the usual question: "What are you in for?"

  Arnold lied and said he was in for manslaughter for hitting a woman with a car. But his cell mate's father had read of Jannie's death and informed his son about the real charges against Arnold Brown. In jails and prisons, there are crimes that prisoners cannot stomach; molestation and cruelty to children top the list. Arnold's cell mate, an expectant father, did not relish sharing a cell with him. He confronted him with what had really happened, pointing out that he was aware of the real charges against him.

  "You did it, didn't you?" he demanded of Arnold.

  Arnold admitted to him that he had strangled his niece— for a reason that was both shocking and unfathomable to a normal man. He said that he had never had sex with a woman and he resented other men who had. The sight of Jannie in her nightclothes had "infuriated" him, reminding him that he had missed out on sexual experience. And so he had placed the rope around her neck and taken what he wanted.

  The other prisoner was filled with revulsion. He saw tears in Arnold's eyes, and asked him why he didn't just go ahead and cry.

  "Tears are there," Arnold said, "but they just don't want to come."

  Once Arnold started to confess to his cell mate, his words bubbled over. He also admitted killing Summer Rogers. He said he was angry at Summer because she wore only a bathing suit that day. That, too, reminded him that he had never had sex.

  "He told me he hit her on the head with a rock and then cut off her head and arms and legs with his fishing knife," Arnold's cell mate told the Seattle detectives. "He said, 'They had to let me go in Oregon due to lack of evidence… thank God.' "

  The informant begged to be moved to another cell; he could not bear to look at Arnold, knowing what he knew. His request was granted. The man had never heard of Summer Rogers and he couldn't have known the details of her death unless Arnold had told him, but when Don Cameron and Danny Melton talked to Arnold about Summer's murder, he denied having any part of it. "She fell on a rock and hurt her head, and she stopped breathing," he insisted stubbornly.

  Melton asked him about his true motivation for killing his niece. "Was it because you have never had sexual intercourse?"

  Arnold nodded. "I get angry when people talk about sex, because I've never had it myself. I don't know why it makes me angry to see kids with hardly any clothes on."

  "How could you see she only had panties and a shirt on?" Melton pressed. "Wasn't she in bed, covered up?"

  "The blankets were kicked off."

  "Did you ejaculate during the time you were choking her with a rope?"

  Arnold shook his head. He didn't want to talk about it.

  "And Summer Rogers? You say you didn't hit Summer?"

  "No. She fell on a rock. I only feel it was my fault because I should have gotten help. And I didn't cut her up. If you give me a lie test, you'll see I didn't!"

  Arnold said he felt sorry and depressed because of what he had done to his niece. He said he couldn't eat. Still, he seemed calm and his voice remained flat and void of emotion.

  Arnold Brown was charged with aggravated murder in the first degree, a capital crime in Washington State. There were many legal battles ahead, and his family stuck by him as always. Even his sister and brother-in-law, Jannie's parents, sent word that they were behind him. Once more, he was forgiven for having committed an unthinkable crime. The family retained Tony Savage, one of Seattle's top-ranked criminal defense attorneys.

  Preliminary hearings began before King County Superior Court Judge Liem Tuai in mid-September 1981. The crux of the defense's argument was that the statements given by Arnold's cell mate, his own oral and written confessions, and his previous criminal history should not be admissible evidence. King County Deputy Prosecutor Rebecca Roe held that all of the above were part and parcel of the case at hand. They showed who Arnold Brown really was and what his obsessions were.

  Judge Tuai ruled that the conviction for the stabbing of the Coleman children would not be admissible during the trial phase, but that Arnold's statements made to his cell mate would be, notably the alleged admission that he had killed Summer Rogers. It took five days to select a jury of eight women and five men. It would be a bifurcated trial: if the jurors found Arnold Brown guilty, there would be a second part of the trial, where they could decide whether he should be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole, or whether he should die by hanging or lethal injection.

  Arnold sat throughout his trial with one hand to his face, which remained vacant of emotion as the prosecution presented devastating evidence against him. The proceedings took only two days: Defense Attorney Tony Savage presented no witnesses. He didn't deny that Brown had killed
Jannie Reilly. He attempted only to remove the premeditation portion of the charges and thus save Arnold Brown from death.

  The jury returned a verdict of guilty. The penalty phase of the trial began. In the second segment, prior bad acts committed by Arnold Brown were admissible. His long record of vicious crimes against children spilled out. Some jurors showed shock as they heard Arnold's history of sexually aberrant offenses. They even heard from some of his victims.

  Maria Coleman, who had survived the thrusts of Arnold's hunting knife, was twenty-one now, but she broke into tears as she described what had happened to her and her younger brother, Jimmy. "We went down to the Willamette River to get some crawdads for Jimmy's show-and-tell at school," she said softly. "My little brother found a hatchet in the river, and I carried it for him when we walked through the woods on the way home."