Serial Murder, He Wrote

The slight, silver-haired man sat in front of the shackled killer and asked: “Do you know who I am?”

Charlie Hess watched the prisoner struggle to recognize him. It should have been easy. Hess had recently sent Robert Charles Browne a photo of himself, his 5-foot-6 frame dwarfed by a yellowfin tuna he had caught during a vacation in Baja California. Hess, a volunteer investigator for the local sheriff’s office, and Browne, a convicted killer of a 13-year-old girl, had been exchanging letters for two years. They had swapped fishing stories and griped about their ailments -- Hess’ hip replacement surgery, Browne’s arthritis.

In between the pleasantries, Hess recalled, he was pushing Browne to reveal more about murders he said he carried out -- how, unbeknown to law enforcement, he had killed 48 people over 25 years. Hess had waded through letters from Browne that hinted at the crimes. “I will not hand it to [you] on a golden platter,” Browne wrote.

In June 2004, the letters stopped. Browne had told Hess not to visit him in prison, but after three months of silence, the investigator figured he had no choice. Hess introduced himself. Then he asked Browne why he had stopped writing.

“I ran out of stamps,” the killer said.

*

Hess, 79, first heard about Browne in the spring of 2002. Hess was meeting with the two other volunteers who make up the cold-case unit of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office at one of their twice-a-week coffee breaks at the Old Heidelberg Pastry Shop downtown.

They were an unusual group. Hess was a soft-spoken former FBI and CIA officer who had moved to Colorado Springs after his son-in-law’s murder. Lou Smit was a retired detective who had solved more than 100 homicides and probed the slaying of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey. Scott Fischer was a former newspaper reporter and photographer who had recently stepped down as publisher of the Colorado Springs Gazette.

The three men had spent about a year combing through the files of a dozen open murder cases, chasing leads and updating records. Now the trio, who called themselves the “dinosaurs,” were looking for a new challenge.

All three recalled that Hess posed this question at coffee that day: Why don’t we pick someone who may be a serial killer? Hess said he was thinking of his success over the decades at getting information out of incarcerated crooks.

Fischer, now 60, asked Smit if he had any candidates. The detective immediately came up with Robert Browne.

In 1995, Smit had arrested Browne, a tree farmer living outside Colorado Springs, for the 1991 abduction and killing of Heather Dawn Church. Heather disappeared after she was taken from her bedroom; her skull was found two years later by a hiker in the mountains west of here.

Browne had insisted he had just been burglarizing the Churches’ house, but he pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in prison.

Something had always bothered Smit, 71, about the case. If it was just a burglary, why did Browne kill the teenager and hide her body parts with such skill? And surely it was no coincidence that two of Browne’s neighbors in his hometown of Coushatta, La., had died violently, their killer never found.

“You know, I think he’s a serial killer,” Smit told his partners. “I think we can do a bit more.”

The investigators pulled the file on Heather Church from the department’s archives. They were surprised to find a letter Browne had written to the district attorney from prison, hinting that authorities would never uncover all his crimes.

“The score is you 1, the other team 48,” Browne wrote. He had enclosed a hand-drawn map, highlighting the states where he said he had committed murders. Numbers written on nine states added up to 48. “If you were to drive to the end zone in a white Trans Am, the score could be 9 to 48.”

Browne had refused to elaborate then, but the retirees decided they should contact him. Because he had arrested Browne, Smit knew he would not talk to him. The logical man, given his background, was Hess.

*

A career in law enforcement was the furthest thing from Hess’ mind in 1946 when he got out of the Navy. All he really wanted to do was work as a guide in the fishing camp his parents owned in northern Wisconsin. But his father insisted that he go to college, so Hess earned a degree in philosophy and began teaching high school science and coaching football and basketball in rural Michigan.

In 1952, the FBI was recruiting and offering to pay agents twice what Hess was making, so he applied. While laboring in a remote office in West Texas, Hess watched small-town sheriffs gently coax suspected car thieves and prison escapees into confessing their crimes. Hess recalled one sheriff telling him: “ ‘You know, Charlie, all you have to do is give a guy one good reason to talk to you. And it’s up to you to find that reason.’ ”

Hess left the FBI after 10 years to work as a private investigator. In 1967, he volunteered to work as a civilian advisor in Vietnam. There the CIA recruited Hess to work as a supervisor in Operation Phoenix, a covert program to infiltrate the Viet Cong’s secret civilian network. A photo on his desk shows him giving rifle instruction to a Viet Cong who came over to the U.S. side. Next to it is a framed copy of a stellar evaluation from his CIA superior.

Later, Hess resumed his private investigation business, and then worked as a polygraph examiner for the San Diego Police Department. He retired in 1984 to Baja with his second wife, Jo.

The two built a house on a remote stretch on the Gulf of California. They had lived there seven years when Hess’ youngest daughter, Candy, called them with horrible news: Her husband had been shot to death by teenage robbers who had broken into his brother’s house near Colorado Springs.

Hess and his wife moved here to help his daughter. In 2001, he said, he decided he was “tired of sitting on the couch” and called the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. He remembered that investigators had hunted down his son-in-law’s killers and felt he should do something in return.

The detective who had handled Hess’ son-in-law’s case called him back. How would he like to join a volunteer cold-case squad? Maybe Hess could find justice for others who had also lost a loved one.

*

Getting Robert Browne to open up was a painfully slow process, according to court records, a Sheriff’s Office summary of the case and interviews with Hess and his partners.

Hess typed his introductory letter on May 9, 2002. It crossed in the mail with a letter Browne had just sent from prison, trying to get authorities’ attention once again. Browne answered Hess’ letter the following week, asking whether Hess believed a bad man incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit should stay in jail. Hess replied that he believed people should be imprisoned for the crimes they committed.

“I feel you do have a desire to clear up some pending matters,” Hess wrote. “I, of course, have no ideas as to your goal(s).”

Browne wrote back: “I am dumbfounded that, with the plethora of information provided, someone hasn’t deciphered such a simple and obvious message.... Does this clarify matters? Location: Murky plaza depth -- cool caressing mire. Amount: Seven. Instructions: Drain-dig.... “

Some in the Sheriff’s Office were skeptical that Browne’s rantings would amount to anything. But Hess pressed on, running drafts of his letters past his two partners before sending them. Browne became increasingly specific as Hess opened up about his own life. He kept urging Hess to look into the case of a missing white Trans Am.

In a March 2003 letter, Browne said he had provided Hess with clues to another, easier-to-confirm killing. “I thought long and hard about picking an incident that would not be lost among the many others,” the killer wrote. “A ‘very’ small town seemed to be my best bet.... The town I chose is Flatonia, Texas. They don’t get much smaller.”

Browne alluded to killing a young woman and dumping her body near the central Texas town in 1984. Hess called the local sheriff’s office, which dug through its old files. When a detective called back, the partners gathered around the phone in their cramped office and watched as Hess jotted down notes.

There was an unsolved killing dating from 1984. Melody Bush, 22, had been found dead in a culvert outside of town. “Your details,” the Texas detective told Hess, “match our details.”

It was the first confirmation that Browne was not making things up.

*

In 2004, after he began visiting Browne in prison, Hess said, he knew that he was “compatible” with the prisoner. He and Browne resumed their correspondence, but now they also saw each other occasionally -- about 25 times over the following two years. Hess asked to be left alone with the killer and that guards remove Browne’s shackles.

Hess knew that it was important to show respect and let Browne control the flow of information. “I had to put myself in a frame of mind where I could look at the crimes he’d done in a nonjudgmental way,” Hess said. “Being that we were from a victimized family ourselves, that wasn’t the easiest thing to do. But he made it easier.”

Browne was polite, courteous and did not swear. During the visits at Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Canon City, the two would first chat about fishing and sports. Unable to watch games on television, Browne was desperate for details on his beloved New Orleans Saints. Occasionally, the two would discuss various philosophers’ idea of the common good.

At some point, Hess would steer the conversation to Browne’s crimes.

Browne had written Hess in one of his early letters that he wouldn’t give out information for free -- he expected favors in return. Hess worked with corrections officials to allow a private doctor to examine Browne’s arthritis after he complained about the medical care in prison. The doctor concluded that Browne was being treated correctly.

In exchange, Browne told Hess about three women he said he killed in his hometown of Coushatta, La. Two were Browne’s neighbors in an apartment complex owned by his brother whose deaths had drawn Smit’s suspicions years ago. Louisiana authorities confirmed the killings and said Browne once had been a suspect but was never charged.

To maintain his relationship with the killer, Hess did other favors for Browne -- even if they didn’t immediately lead to more information. Browne wanted to read a sequel to the novel “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” but the prison library didn’t have a copy. Hess sent him one. Hess found an author who would write Browne’s life story, but the killer declined because the “Son of Sam” law prohibits criminals from making money off their crimes.

Hess considered the favors harmless. “Most of the people I talk to who have committed multiple murders are looking for something that can’t be achieved, like getting out of prison,” Hess said. “His requests were reasonable.”

Gradually, a pattern emerged. Browne’s victims included men and women but were predominantly young, petite women he picked up in what he called his “rambles.” The female victims resembled his six ex-wives, all of whom are living and who described Browne as charming and seductive.

Browne described his killings as “opportunities.” Usually he would pick up women while traveling from state to state, have sex with them and then shoot, strangle or stab them. He sometimes dismembered them. He dumped their remains in rivers, ditches or trash bins, sometimes without ever having learned their names.

Browne would make disparaging comments about women, calling one of his victims a “slutty, low-life woman,” according to the Sheriff’s Office report. “Women try to present themselves to be one thing and then always prove to be another,” he told Hess at one point. But Browne was generally opaque about his motives for killing. He said he didn’t know why he was telling Hess about his past.

In his conversations with Hess, Browne declared several subjects off the table. One was his family. The son of a onetime deputy sheriff, Browne was the youngest of nine children reared in a modest home in northern Louisiana. He dropped out of high school and joined the Army, serving seven years before being dishonorably discharged for drug use. Investigators said Browne claimed to have committed his first murder -- breaking the neck of another soldier during a fight over a prostitute -- while stationed in South Korea in 1975.

By March 2005, Hess gleaned enough details from Browne for the department to solve the mystery that the killer had first hinted at: the case of the white Trans Am.

*

In November 1987, Browne worked at the Kwik Stop near Rocio Sperry’s Colorado Springs apartment complex. Although only 15, Sperry was married and had a 2-month-old daughter. Her husband, Joseph, and daughter were on a trip to Florida the night she swung by the convenience store and accepted Browne’s invitation to see a movie, court records show.

Browne told Hess the two went to his apartment, and after they had sex, he strangled her and dismembered her body in his bathtub, according to Sheriff’s Office documents. Then, Browne said, he drove her white Trans Am back to her apartment, where he arranged the unit to look like Sperry had run away.

Joseph Sperry returned home to find a television and some of his wife’s jewelry missing. He also found 10 inches of her hair on the floor. He immediately suspected that someone had abducted his wife and tried to make it look like she had cut her hair to disguise herself and disappeared on her own. Sperry found the Trans Am in a nearby alley.

Sperry begged the police to investigate his wife’s disappearance even though his own family suspected he had killed her. They took the baby from him. Shortly after his wife vanished, Sperry called the police from a pay phone inside the Kwik Stop to complain that detectives were ignoring the case. Browne, Sperry said he has since been told by authorities, was listening from behind the counter.

Hess had been teamed with Det. Jeff Nohr, a meticulous investigator who could help build a legal case against Browne. Nohr tracked down Sperry in Florida to tell him Browne had confessed. “I broke down crying,” Sperry said.

Almost two decades after his wife disappeared, Sperry said, he still had the missing-person’s report. He felt vindicated. He reunited with his daughter, now 19, and the two flew to Colorado Springs. They appeared at a news conference late last month, hours after watching Browne plead guilty to killing Rocio Sperry. Browne was sentenced to a second life term. Then the Sperrys and the Sheriff’s Office stood before the media and unveiled the stunning tabulation of death that Browne claimed.

Authorities released copies of the “murder map,” as well as pictures of the victims in the seven killings the Sheriff’s Office have definitively linked to Browne.

“He could be exaggerating,” Sheriff Terry Maketa said of Browne’s claimed body count. But, for the time being, the department was taking him at his word. Hess said the agency had enough detail to possibly confirm as many as 20 more killings.

Towns across the nine states are looking at decades-old homicides. Some have been unable to match unsolved cases to Browne’s vague descriptions. For example, Browne claimed to have used a Ruger pistol to fatally shoot a couple camping on a beach north of San Francisco in 1986. California officials confirmed Browne had been stopped driving with a Ruger at that time, but they have yet to find an unsolved killing matching his story. The bodies, authorities note, could have washed away.

Hess’ colleagues are amazed at what the retiree was able to accomplish. “He’d be the person who’d try to get the Viet Cong to come over to our side -- and that’s what he did with Robert Browne,” said Smit. “He got him to come over to our side.”

Smit, Fischer and Hess say they are trying to use the tactics that proved successful with Browne to get other incarcerated criminals to admit other, long-unsolved crimes. Hess, now accompanied by Nohr, continues to visit Browne. The two brought the killer a card on his birthday last Halloween, when he turned 53. They hope to get more details on his other slayings.

The three have an unusually warm relationship, Hess said. The key to dealing with Browne, he said, was the willingness to treat him as a human being: “It was one of the things he missed. Communicating with someone from the outside world.”