Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  California officers wanted to find Mike and John. Anyone who would kill so ruthlessly could be expected to do so again. State Highway Patrol Lieutenant William Endicott and Tuolumne County Sheriff's Lieutenant Robert Andre headed the search team. They had one thing in their favor; the killers probably assumed that both Tim Luce and Susan Bartolomei were dead. And if they believed their victims were both dead, there was no reason for the killers to leave the Sonora area. The information that Susan was still alive was deliberately withheld from the media.

  Jamestown, known locally as Jimtown, was a picturesque one-block hamlet three miles from Sonora. It was a railroad town back in 1897. It was eleven o'clock in the morning when Constable Ed Chafin arrived in town, after making his customary early morning rounds. He had heard the police radio call regarding two fugitives and had checked passing cars that morning with a little more care than usual. Chafin knew which cars belonged to locals and which belonged to tourists; there weren't that many of the latter lately.

  He spotted a green 1967 Buick parked on Jamestown's main street in front of the hotel. It was unoccupied, and it bore Oregon plates. There was a car parked in front of it, and Chafin pulled in behind it, deliberately nudging its bumper so the Buick could not be driven away. He got out and walked around the car, studying it. Something wasn't right. The girl who had been shot had gasped that her attackers had driven a Mercury.

  And yet…

  He had a feeling. "Sometimes when you've been in law enforcement long enough, that happens," he recalled. "I knew in my gut that I was looking at the getaway car. It was dirty and dusty, but on the trunk I saw two perfect handprints in the dust— from small hands— as if maybe the girl had been forced to lean against the car."

  The car sure looked road-worn and the interior was cluttered. There were broken crackers, crumpled cigarette packs, an old blanket, and a small man's jacket on one seat. Chafin radioed Bob Andre and Bill Endicott to tell them about the car. The color and the plates were right; it was close enough to take a second look.

  The highway patrol officers called for backup to meet them in Jamestown. Trooper Lloyd Berry, who had just delivered emergency blood to the Sonora hospital for Susan Bartolomei, headed for the scene.

  When the lawmen checked the guest register in the local hotel, they realized they weren't looking for crim inal masterminds. The names Mike Ford and John Ford were scrawled on the page. They hadn't even bothered to change the names they had used with their victims.

  "You know them?" Chafin asked the clerk.

  "Nope. They're strangers."

  "What do they look like?"

  He shrugged his shoulders. "Young, messy, wild hippie hair. Both of 'em could do with a shave and a change of clothes— and a night's sleep."

  "Are they upstairs now?"

  "I think so. In rooms 19 and 26."

  Within a matter of minutes, Andre and Endicott had cleared the lobby and the area surrounding the hotel. They were given a master key and they headed up the staircase to the second floor. Trooper Berry, armed with a shotgun, waited at the rear exit of the hotel while other deputies and highway patrolmen, who had sped to Jimtown, surrounded the building. Room 26 was at the top of the stairs while number 19 was near the end of the hall. The lieutenants bypassed number 26 and walked quietly to the more distant room. Endicott carried a shotgun while Andre held a handgun. Andre slipped the key into the lock of room 19, and the door swung open, but only a few inches; it was secured by a chain. Through the crack in the door, they could see a figure sleeping on the bed. Andre pushed his gun through the opening and said, "Put your hands up— come over here and unlock this chain." The man on the bed hardly seemed dangerous. He followed Andre's orders meekly, sliding the chain along its slot and letting it hang free. He was a small man, and young— probably a teenager. He wore only sagging undershorts and he seemed bewildered. He put up no resistance as they instructed him to lie down on the hall floor while they handcuffed him.

  The next stop was room 26. Again the chain lock held. "Kick it open," Endicott ordered urgently. He could see the second suspect lying facedown on the bed, but his hands were hidden under the pillow. If he was only feigning sleep, he would have the opportunity for a clear shot at the officers through the door opening. As the chain snapped, Endicott shouted, "His hands— watch his hands!"

  Andre was beside the bed in an instant, grabbing the man's hands before he had a chance to go for a gun. The second suspect was taller and more muscular than his partner but they hadn't given him a chance to fight back.

  The two had been sleeping soundly. They must have believed that Susan Bartolomei was either dead or so near death that she would never identify them. They were caught only twenty miles from the spot where she was found.

  Lieutenant Andre entered room 19 and emerged with a brown plaid plastic bag— the type used to carry car blankets. He'd found it very heavy when he lifted it and he checked its contents. In the bottom lay two hand weapons; a fully-loaded automatic .22 caliber Ruger, and a Frontier Colt single action .22 caliber pistol, also fully loaded. The drawers in the nightstands in both suspects' rooms had .22 caliber hollow-point bullets rattling around in them. Constable Chafin and Lieutenants Andre and Endicott led the surprised suspects from the hotel to waiting patrol cars. They were transported to the Tuolumne County sheriff's headquarters in Sonora. They didn't look like desperadoes, but they did look nervous as they underwent intensive questioning.

  They finally admitted that they were not Mike and John Ford. Nor were they from Oklahoma as they had told Susan Bartolomei. They were from Ritzville, Washington, a little town of 1,500 residents that sat on a lonely stretch of I-90 west of Spokane. The taller, rather-studious-looking member of the duo gave his name as Thomas Braun. He wore thick, dark-rimmed classes. His slight, wispy-mustached partner said he was Leonard Maine.

  The California authorities checked with the sheriff of Adams County, Washington. Surprisingly, neither suspect had a criminal record. Braun had been employed at a service station in Ritzville while Maine, married and the father of a three-month-old baby, worked in a local cement-mixing plant. The two had left Ritzville on August 17 in Braun's recently purchased Borgward sedan. They were both eighteen years old.

  If they were guilty of killing Tim Luce and raping and shooting Susan Bartolomei, no one who knew them in Ritzville had ever had any reason to expect such violent behavior from them. They seemed to be ordinary guys living ordinary— if boring— lives in a little town that baked hot in the summer and froze in the winter. Sometimes it seemed that if Ritzville wasn't being blasted by sandstorms, it was being pelted by blizzards.

  As the questioning continued, the local officers were joined by John B. Smoot of the California Investigation and Identification Department. Tom Braun admitted to Smoot that he had raped and shot Susan Bartolomei, killed Tim Luce, and killed a woman near Seattle and a middle-aged man in Oregon. The admitted mastermind of the killing spree calmly agreed to help detectives in those states locate the bodies of the victims.

  Leonard Maine confirmed Braun's story. Maine, however, insisted that he had been an unwilling pawn who was terrified of Braun and that he continued on the journey only because Braun would have killed him if he didn't. The men questioning him wondered why— if he feared for his life— Maine hadn't crept out of the hotel in Jamestown and escaped instead of falling asleep with a fully loaded gun in his possession.

  California I.D. men compared the .22 caliber bullets taken from the bodies of Tim Luce and Susan Bartolomei with the bullets in the suspects' Ruger and Frontier Scout and in the drawers in rooms 26 and 19 of the Jamestown Hotel. They all proved to be from the same lot and the same manufacturer. More significant, the tool marks on the casings on the road where Susan was found indicated that the bullets had been fired by the Ruger and the Scout. No other guns could have made those exact markings.

  The lawmen in Tuolumne and Mendocino Counties hoped they had apprehended Maine and Braun in time to prevent other killings
; they hadn't reckoned with the possibility that their cases came at the end of a murder spree. Now the word coming back from Snohomish County, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, seemed to confirm Braun's and Maine's stories: their killing spree had obviously begun in the North.

  Braun and Maine had described a murder up near Cannon Beach, Oregon, that had not yet been discovered. There, they said they had encountered "an old guy" on a logging road where they had detoured to take a look at the Pacific Ocean. Oregon salesman Samuel Ledgerwood, fifty-seven, had apparently had a successful day's fishing and was heading home when he came across the two suspects, who were changing a tire on the side of the road. He pulled over to help them. It was the last act of kindness he would ever perform.

  Within a very short time, Ledgerwood lay dead on the isolated logging road with two .22 caliber slugs in his head. Tom Braun and Leonard Maine had still been driving Deanna Buse's car when Ledgerwood stopped to help them, but now they set it on fire— they didn't need it anymore. They headed toward California in their latest victim's green Buick. Perhaps it was Ledgerwood's newer model Buick that tempted the killers and led to his death. Or perhaps murder just for the hell of it had been their goal all along when they rolled out of Ritzville. They didn't know any of their victims and the victims themselves were different ages, different sexes. The only thing they had in common was that they were there when Braun and Maine roved along roads and freeways.

  Oregon officers had a Missing Report on Sam Ledgerwood, but they hadn't found his body yet. Even as they headed out to the spot Leonard Maine described— a wooded area off a logging road near Cannon Beach— a report came in. A hunter had just discovered the remains of a man in that area, and there were indeed two bullet wounds in his head. It was Ledgerwood.

  Nearby, the Oregon investigators found Deanna Buse's Buick Skylark. The car was a charred hulk, and they could see bullet holes in the gas tank. It's VIN was still quite readable; the clumsy suspects had thought the flames would obliterate all connections to the missing Washington bride, and once again they were wrong.

  With directions relayed from Tuolumne County, Detectives Russ Jubie and Tom Hart of Snohomish County, Washington, left headquarters at 11:00 P.M. on August 22. Deanna Buse had been missing for three days and now, though they dreaded what they might find, they had their first clue to her whereabouts.

  Following the directions that Braun and Maine had given the lawmen, Jubie and Hart headed for the densely wooded area surrounding Echo Lake, eight miles south of Monroe, Washington, then down Highway 202 and east on the Echo Lake Road, where they eventually turned off and traveled half a mile down a gravel road. Finally, they came to a one-way lane leading into the woods. Even in the middle of an August day, the woods were a dark and inky green, shut off from the sun by evergreens that grew so close together it was hard to tell where the branches of one tree ended and another began. Now, at midnight, the woods were absolutely pitch dark.

  Carrying a high-powered light, the officers walked into the morass of brush and fir trees; the only sound was their boots crunching on the forest floor. Some twenty-five yards from the end of the lane, Tom Hart found Deanna Buse.

  It was obvious that the pretty young housewife had not had even the slight chance of survival granted to Susan Bartolomei. Had she been left grievously wounded, there was no way Deanna could have crawled out of the deep woods. She lay on her back, her arms crossed over her chest. She was nude, and her clothes were folded meticulously and left in a neat pile beside her body. From what the detective sergeant could tell in the artificial light, she had been shot beneath her left eye and just below her ear. While Snohomish County detectives began their night-long investigation at the scene, representatives from the sheriff's office undertook the sad task of informing Deanna Buse's relatives that she had been found.

  Dr. Alexander G. Robertson performed the autopsy on Deanna's body the next morning, August 23. He found five "projectile entries" —five entrance wounds from .22 caliber bullets. Several of them would have been instantly fatal. Any assailant who aims for the head of a human being is intent on killing that person. There was only small comfort for her husband and family. Deanna had been forced to remove her clothes out there in the deep woods; folding them neatly may have been a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable. She had not been raped, however; perhaps something had spooked the two men who took her there, or maybe her pleading had dissuaded them.

  Morning papers all over the West Coast headlined the monstrous results of Thomas Braun's and Leonard Maine's flight from Washington to Oregon to California. There was little doubt that the deadly pair would be tried for murder in each of the three states. They were swiftly indicted in California and arrangements were made for their trial for the murder of Tim Luce and the shooting and sexual assault of Susan Bartolomei.

  Miraculously, Susan was still alive. She had made it through intricate brain surgery, although the extent of the damage to her brain wouldn't be known for some time. The brain, which feels no pain, swells tremendously when it is insulted, forcing it against the hard surface of the skull where it is crushed and bruised. If surgeons aren't present to cut the skull away temporarily, the human brain begins to die. Susan had lain unattended for hours with bullets in her brain.

  * * *

  The murder of Tim Luce had inflamed public opinion against the defendants. Because of all the publicity, their California trial was moved to San Jose in a change of venue. This first trial was carried out in two phases; only during the penalty phase did the prosecution bring out the cases of Deanna Buse and Samuel Ledgerwood. Susan Bartolomei, the girl neither defendant ever expected to see alive again, was carried into the court room on a stretcher. There, painfully, slowly, with the use of hand signals, the brave girl proved to be a devastatingly damaging witness against the men who had meant to kill her.

  The San Jose jury found Braun guilty and recommended the death penalty. He was sentenced to the gas chamber and transferred to death row in San Quentin. Maine, who steadfastly insisted he'd been an unwilling accomplice, was found guilty but sentenced to ten years to life. He began that sentence in the prison at Tracy, California, immediately following the trial.

  * * *

  Still more trials lay ahead. In Everett, Washington, the Snohomish County seat, Leonard Maine and Thomas Braun now went on trial for Deanna Buse's murder.

  There were two phases of the trial— one to decide the guilt or innocence of the accused, and one to set the penalty for Braun and Maine should they be found guilty. Testimony from California authorities during the first phase of the trial was restricted to facts pertaining to the youths' arrest in Jamestown.

  Spectators packed the second-floor courtroom each morning as testimony began. This would be the first time that Washington trial watchers would hear the entire story of the murderous duo's trail of death and destruction.

  Judge McCrea issued an order to the news media weeks before the trial. The three-page document drawn in open court on October 8, 1970, decreed that reporters could not disseminate to the public any testimony given in the absence of the jury, judge, court reporter, defendants and counsel for all parties. Cameras and recording devices were banned from the second floor of the Snohomish County Courthouse. Sketches would be allowed, but only if they were "non-inflammatory" in nature.

  Judge Thomas McCrea had good reason to caution newsmen. The Braun-Maine trial was expected to last four to six weeks, so he decided not to sequester the jury. He doubted that the attorneys could choose a representative panel from the pool of potential jurors if they learned they would be separated from their families for such an extended time. Without McCrea's gag rule, jurors who went home each night might hear, and be influenced by, comments and testimony that was off the record.

  At that, selecting a jury whose members were not familiar with some aspect of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine's crimes would prove difficult; the Ritzville pair had cut a swath of violence across three states three years earlier, and that wa
s difficult to forget. Ordinarily, jury selection lasts a day or two. In the Braun-Maine trial, it took almost two weeks before Defense Attorneys Richard Bailey (for Thomas Braun), Samuel Hale (for Leonard Maine), and Prosecutors David Metcalf and Bruce Keithly were all satisfied with a jury of seven men and five women, plus three alternates.

  Judge McCrea instructed the jury, "Don't let sentiment, pity, passion, sway your judgment. You will be judging these men on the axiom of reasonable doubt. You will not be judging them by whim or intuition."

  It was 2:00 P.M. on an uncommonly bright October day when Deputy Prosecutor Metcalf rose to make his opening statement to the jury. As he spoke about the murder of the victim, Deanna Buse, Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine listened to the state's damning statements with no change of expression. Braun wrote constantly on a yellow legal tablet— as he would do throughout the trial. Both wore conservative suits, and their haircuts bore no resemblance to the wild "hippie" locks they had affected at the time of their arrest. If there was one clue to the fact that they had, indeed, been in jail for the past three years, it was their dead-white prison pallor. They looked as if they'd been underground for a long, long time.