Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

  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."

  They had run into the woods, but they came back to where the woman had abandoned her car and run for help. Their plan to find someone else to shoot ended when they saw a police car approaching with the colored beacons on its light bar circling.

  "Jim hit the gas pedal," Tom had told the deputy. "I told him to turn off at Clackamas. I knew we could make a standoff because there was only one cop. We hit a truck, slid sideways, and flipped. I was in the backseat, aiming out the back window, and let the cop have it. The next thing I knew I was out in the weeds."

  Luckily, Tom's shot missed the officer— but the two wild teenagers weren't done. They were going to show the world.

  Next, Tom ran along a log boom and approached a man, demanding his car keys. The man said he didn't have any. Then Tom had gone to a nearby house and threatened a girl there. Panicked, she ran across the street to the house where the nineteen-year-old shooting victim lived. "I ran to the girl's house. There were windows in every room and I figured if a cop came after me, I could pick him off."

  It was at that point that Tom Brown shot the man in the stomach, and commandeered a pickup truck to make his escape. "But there wasn't enough room in the cab to aim my rifle— that's when you got me," he finished, evidently proud of his shooting spree. He believed he had shot at least two people. In truth, he had critically injured just one man, who eventually recovered.

  Tom Brown was sentenced to the MacLaren School for Boys, Oregon's reform school. The man who liked to shoot birds and cubs and deer out of season— the "wasteful master" —had started his violent career fourteen years before he met Robin and Hank Marcus.

  Upon his release from the MacLaren School, and after an interim period of petty crimes, Tom Brown committed a crime that sounded like a rehearsal for what he'd done to the Marcuses. He had been going with a woman who had two young children, and she'd rejected him. He kidnapped her and her children at gunpoint and took them into the mountains, where he kept them overnight.

  After he released his hostages, Tom told police: "I was going to have her one way or another. I would have burned down her house, used a gun, whatever it took, so no one else would ever have her either."

  That Milwaukee, Oregon, case never went to trial. The woman victim refused to file charges, grateful for her life and afraid of reprisal from Tom Brown.

  After that kidnapping incident, Brown had gone to Nebraska, where he worked on a farm. His boss allowed him to use a red GMC pickup truck. One day in early summer, Tom said he was going into town. He just kept on going all the way to Oregon, however, taking the truck and his employer's rifles with him.

  Brown's Nebraska boss was considerably disappointed in the man he'd trusted. He filed a stolen car report, and that warrant out of Nebraska was still in force. Several other friends in the Clackamas County area were also disappointed when they had cashed checks for Brown and they came back bouncing.

  This was the man Hank and Robin had met in the woods. Although he was now indicted for murder, it might be months, even years, before Tom Brown could be arrested and brought to trial. Bob Hamilton and Steve Keutzer went ahead and built the foundation of their case. They would be ready whenever Brown resurfaced.

  And then, surprisingly, Tom Brown himself strolled into the Clackamas County sheriff's office one day. He said he'd heard there was a murder warrant out for him and he "wanted to get it all straightened out." He didn't seem worried or even mildly upset. He looked, indeed, for all the world like a man who had an ace up his sleeve. He was booked into jail to await trial.

  The Oregon State Police Crime Lab's study of gunshot residue turned out to be a godsend for Keutzer and Hamilton. It gave them solid physical evidence they badly needed. Laser evaluation of the two tiny exemplars of the tissue from Hank Marcus's wounds revealed no gunpowder residue at all. That meant that Hank could not have died the way Tom Brown said he did. He said they were exchanging rifles when the gun went off. For this to be true, the rifle would have been so close to Hank's face that his wound would be near-contact and gunshot residue would certainly have been present. The crime lab tests proved that Tom Brown must have been standing at least a foot and a half away from Hank when the gun went off, and probably even farther away.

  Secondly, if the shooting happened the way Brown described it, the trajectory of the bullet would have been at an upward angle. It was not; autopsy findings indicated that the wound was almost horizontal, with a variation of only an inch or so from a straight, flat path.

  Unfortunately, Rusty was long buried in a mass grave, and they would never be able to find out whether the bullet had entered the dog head-on, as Brown said, or from the rear, as Robin claimed.

  There were no bullets to test, only fragments. Bob Hamilton spent two weeks trying to find similar ammunition for the near-antique 1932 rifle and finally came up with a precious few from a gun buff. Their makeup matched the fragments found in Hank's neck.

  Robin Marcus's polygraph tests had gone from "failed" to "inconclusive" to the point where she passed cleanly. After profound brainwashing, psychiatrists explain that memory returns slowly, but it does come back. Finally, Robin knew exactly what had really happened. But how would a judge or jury react to the information that it had required a series of polygraph tests to elicit the truth from Robin? And even if she did make a believable witness, she had not actually seen the killing; she had only heard the gunshot that killed her husband.

  Jim Byrnes, one of the attorney general's criminal investigators, was given the task of obtaining the seventh, and final, statement from Robin Marcus. Byrnes was the chief of detectives of the Marion County sheriff's office when he was asked to
join the A.G.'s staff. He was a highly skilled interrogator, and if anyone could gain Robin's trust, it would be Jim. He knew he would have to spend days with her as he explained why it was essential she give just one more statement.

  Finally he hit on the right approach. "Robin, I won't ask you to give me a statement," he said. "I want you to write it out yourself. Take as much time as you want. You write exactly what happened, everything you remember, and when you're ready, call me."

  Robin had not been in control of her own life for a long time. And Byrnes believed that, for a time, she had actually allowed Tom Brown to take over the thought patterns in her very brain. By letting her write her own statement, he was allowing her to ask herself the questions and to pick the time when she was willing to hand her statement over to Jim Byrnes. She liked him— he had daughters close to her age. She wanted to trust him, but it was hard for her to trust anyone anymore.

  Byrnes had guessed right. Robin Marcus wrote an eighteen-page statement from her own memory and it was one of the most frightening and incredible statements Jim Byrnes, Bob Hamilton, and Steve Keutzer had ever read. Robin Marcus had forgotten nothing. The truth had been locked up in her subconscious mind and now came spilling forth. Her statement detailed exactly how her husband's savage killer had brainwashed her, causing her to forget her ordeal.

  Robin wrote how she begged Tom to leave her in the woods after he killed Hank and Rusty, but he answered, "If I leave you here, it won't be alive."

  Then he forced her to drag Rusty off the trail and wipe the dog's blood off her hands with dirt and ferns. She thought Rusty might still be alive because his feet were still moving, and she wanted to take care of him. But Tom told her, "Those are his reflexes. I never have to shoot anything more than once. I don't like to see anything suffer."

  Tom told Robin it wouldn't do her any good to run. His gun could shoot 500 yards. She didn't know anything about guns, and she believed him. She pleaded with him not to kill her, but all he did was smile that same odd grin. He then explained he couldn't trust her and had to tie her hands. Then he led her to her husband's body.

  "Don't look. You wouldn't want to see him," he warned, leaving her tied a short distance away. He returned with Hank's watch. "Now," he ordered. "You're not allowed to cry. I'm going to tell you a story. You'll have your time to cry, but I'll tell you when it's time."

  He washed any residual blood off her hands with a bottle of water and then took a swig of water as he began his story.

  "You and your husband were dumb to believe I was a logger who worked up here. You can see my truck's from Nebraska. I've killed five or six people, and I'm wanted for murder in several states. My name is Kent, not Tom, and I'm a hit man for the Organization, but I've killed one man too many, and now they're after me. I had to kill your husband because I wanted to take you into the mountains to live with me. I need companionship.

  "If they come after us, you are to run in one direction and I'll run in another so I'm the one who'll be killed."

  He explained that he had been watching her and thought she was fit enough to make a mountain woman. She stared at him, dumbfounded. He was like someone from another planet to her. She could barely believe what he was telling her. "Now, now," Tom said, "you can cry."

  Finally, Robin let her sobs out, crying brokenheartedly. When she was empty of tears, she tried everything she could think of to convince him that he didn't want her. She told him she was really a city girl who couldn't last on the mountain trails. She told him she was sick; she would be a drag on him. She even told him she was a "slut who gets it on with everyone," hoping this would turn him off and make him afraid she might infect him with something. But he only kept smiling that fixed grin. "I was so afraid to be up there with him," she wrote. "He tried to comfort me and hug me, but I wouldn't let him."

  Then Tom instructed her to gather her belongings and some food and follow him. He allowed her to take her Bible. She pleaded with him to let her leave a note for her family, but he said they couldn't leave a trail.

  Laden down, they headed into the woods. When the trees closed off behind them Tom had her change into army pants so that she would be camouflaged from the "hit men who are after us." She went into the bushes to hide herself from him as she changed. Strangely, Tom dumped articles along the trail as they went. At first, she thought he was being careless, but then, when he cut through the brush, she knew he was leaving a false trail. They went down a steep rocky bank to the river's edge, and headed upriver. "If you see an airplane or a helicopter, duck," he warned, "that will mean they've found us."

  Robin wrote, "He was bossy and always telling me to hurry. He told me only to step on rocks— never mud, sand, moss, or bark or anything else that would leave footprints. He said we were going way over to the other side of the mountain, and if anyone did come across us, I was to keep quiet and pose as his wife."

  Robin recalled that a small plane flew overhead and they'd hidden. Then they cut over to the smaller tributary of the river. She asked Tom if they had brought her grandmother or their friend along, would he have killed them too? He said, "Yes, but I don't really like killing. We do it only if we have a good reason."

  He didn't look like a hired assassin, she thought; he was slightly built and his swaggering seemed to be an act, but he certainly talked like a member of a sinister organization. And he had the cruelest eyes she'd ever seen, deep-set and full of hate. After hours of crashing through the brush, Tom told her they could take a rest. He lay on the sleeping bag while she went into the water to cool off.

  "I went in the water in my bikini with my back to him. I wasn't even thinking of sex, so I figured he wasn't either. All of a sudden, I felt him staring at me. He ordered me to come over to him. I got out of the water with my hair over my cleavage, and then he told me to take my top off. I begged him to wait a few days. I said, 'You've just murdered my husband. Please don't do this.' "

  Tom took the knife from his belt and put it on the ground next to him, and said, "Remember what I told you?"

  She took off her top, but left her long black hair covering her nakedness.

  "Now take off the bottoms and pull your hair back," he ordered. Trembling, she was forced to stand naked in front of him.

  Tom expected romance because he had chosen her to be his woman, his companion in the woods, but Robin broke into tears of fear and embarrassment. Her terror didn't bother him at all. He forced himself on her and raped her.

  When he finished, he allowed her to get dressed. Robin begged Tom again to just leave her in the woods, telling him that she would somehow find her way out. But he refused.

  They continued along the river, climbing over logs and rocks. Tom grudgingly helped Robin over difficult spots when she couldn't keep up with him. That night they made camp and ate. Robin felt like gagging on her food, but she knew she had to keep up her strength. Tom bragged to her that he could have killed Hank with a knife or with his bare hands since he was trained in hand-to-hand combat. "But of course, a gun is much less messy and painless," he finished, "if you know how to use it."

  Robin told him she'd been ill and that Hank had considerately avoided having sex with her. Tom shrugged and said, "I was going to kill him last night, but I thought I'd be a sport and give you one more night together."

  Tom explained to Robin that he was trying to protect her. After all, he hadn't killed Hank in front of her. "I tried to make it easy for you."

  "How did you kill Hank?" she asked.

  "I just pointed at something and gave him the binoculars, and I stepped back and fired."

  As Robin's long, handwritten statement continued, a reader could track the points where her mind had gradually began to bend under the combination of grief, fear, guilt, and the persuasive words of her captor. She submitted to more sex acts, things Hank had never asked her to do. She learned to turn her mind off and not think about what he was doing to her. She just wanted to get it over with, and now she no longer fought him. "I cried myself to sle
ep," she wrote. "I've never felt so alone before. The next morning I woke up, forgetting that it wasn't Hank beside me but the man who had killed him. It was a nightmare. I didn't want to believe he was a murderer, though, because he was the only person on earth I had to talk to."

  The brainwashing process intensified. The world Robin knew was far behind her, and she was so frightened. All the time, Tom talked on and on and on. The second day wasn't as bad for her; she began to get used to plunging mindlessly through the woods. Whenever they rested, she read her Bible and prayed.

  "I used to be religious myself," Tom commented, "but God gave up on me a long time ago."

  Robin assured him that God didn't give up on anyone, not even him.

  Tom shook his head. "I've killed too many people— a lot in the army and five or six for the Organization. That's all I know how to do."

  Tom embellished his story of Mafia connections. He told Robin he had been betrayed by a girlfriend who was in the Organization, and Robin believed him. She knew he could kill, and she believed now that he was an expert in survival. Now he was letting her see the pain he had known in his life. It was important for her to see him as something other than a murderous monster.