by John Browne
While I was in Colorado my dad somehow tracked me down and told me over the phone that Northwestern had called and said one of the chosen fellows had opted out of the program and the grant was mine if I could be in Chicago by next Monday. It was Thursday. I was thrilled, called Kennedy and Ryan, and begged their forgiveness. They knew of the program and understood my interest in taking advantage of this special opportunity.
I arrived in Chicago late Sunday night, not knowing a soul. The law school was downtown near beautiful Lake Shore Drive and the federal courthouse. The other person who scored a fellowship was a guy named Jack Welch, from Washington State. He was just barely over five feet tall. Jurors would later laugh at us when we stood next to each other in court.
First we had to pass the Illinois bar exam, known to be one of the most difficult in the United States. I’m a bad test taker and was certain I’d fail. The bar review course was six days a week, six hours a day, and taught by some of the best legal minds in the country. The famous constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe covered constitutional and criminal laws. He was brilliant and inspiring.
Around this time I had one of the more unusual experiences in my life. Remember, after Deborah Beeler’s death I had come to question my opposition to the death penalty. And I was still on the fence. Academically, I could say I was against capital punishment, but really I still wanted to see Debbie’s killer in front of a firing squad.
One night I had a powerful dream. In it Debbie came to me, alive and vivid. She told me that I had to forgive rather than dishonor her death by believing in something she despised. I woke up crying and looking for her. She seemed so real. From that moment forward I vowed to honor her short life by trying to save others from the death penalty.
It was all the more incentive to study my ass off for the bar. I hit the books four or five hours a day. After two months I was burned out, and when all the information got muddled in my brain I kind of gave up. There was a Grateful Dead show the night before the bar exam, and I figured, Why the hell not? A friend made special brownies.
The concert ended at 2:00 AM. The bar exam started at 8:30 AM. But I was so mellowed by the night before, I eased into the three-day exam—and passed.
The administrators of the fellowship program placed Jack and me with the best criminal defense lawyers in Chicago—fabulous attorneys who were successful, demanding, and patient with us. Warren Wolfson handled high-profile organized crime cases, white-collar criminal allegations in federal court, and murder cases in state court. (His wife, Joanne, also a nationally recognized attorney, appeared on the cover of a national magazine with the cover line “I never met a murderer I didn’t like.”) Skip Andrew was very serious and brilliant but difficult to work for. He focused on political defendants, including the Black Panthers. (He was Panthers leader Fred Hampton’s lawyer before the Chicago police murdered Fred.) Sherman Magidson was the funniest of the lot and was extra generous with his time and money. He also wrote scripts for the legal scenes in LA soap operas.
We all worked late hours, every night, at least until nine. We would go out for dinner at local mafia-type restaurants and be treated like kings. Sherman would always pay. He carried rolls of hundred-dollar bills. Jack and I were poor, living on our grant money, $600 per month. All the lawyers padded our income with food and drink, but none quite like Sherman.
In addition to working on office cases for all three lawyers, Jack and I were given our own cases, one at a time, and our mentors walked us through them point by point. Imagine the luxury. Most young lawyers starting out as prosecutors or public defenders must take on fifty files with little or no supervision. I remember asking lots of stupid questions and always getting a kind and patient reply.
The talk of Chicago police and judicial corruption were more than rumors, I came to learn. Sometimes it was funny. The first case I had on my own involved a young black man, a “manager” of women of the night, charged with a petty drug offense. His name was Prince Albert McManus, and he wore a red velvet cape.
This was in the infamous drug court at the criminal courts building at Twenty-Sixth and California, where a testy old judge disposed twenty or thirty cases a day. I wrote a brief for Prince and filed a motion to suppress because of an illegal arrest and search. The judge tossed the brief back at me and said, “We don’t use these things here, boy. Go out in the hall and talk to the district attorney or a cop.”
Stunned, I exited the courtroom with Prince. In the hallway a man said, “Pssst, come here.” He was the arresting officer and said for $500 he would “change” his testimony. What was my ethical response?
“I don’t have $500.”
Prince negotiated directly with the cop, and they reached some kind of understanding. The case was dismissed. Prince laughed at my naïveté but thanked me for my hard work. (He later died in a shoot-out with some Blackstone Ranger gang members.)
I got another glimpse of the corruption when Warren sent me alone to cover some small pretrial matter in a homicide case. I had just started working for him and was pumped about being in a real court for a murder trial. I arrived at 8:30 AM, ready for my case to be called, and waited—and waited. There were a lot of cases on the docket but not that many. Around 11:00 the judge announced a lunch break. I was the only lawyer left in the pews.
I went across the street, had some lunch, then visited my client in the holding cell. He asked what was taking so long, and I told him I didn’t know. He then asked me if I’d paid the bribe. “The what?” He laughed and said to go find a public defender to explain the situation to me. I did and was informed that the judge would not call my case until money was paid to the clerk! All the lawyers did it, or you would get nothing done on your cases. You’d walk up to the clerk and ask for the file on, say, State v. Smith. He’d hand you the court file, you’d pretend to look at it, fold cash up in your hand, and pass the file and the money back to the clerk. In those days if you were a public defender, the cost was three dollars. A private attorney paid five. (I only paid three. They knew I was a poor student.) I went back to the office, and the lawyers all laughed at me because I was in court almost all day before I figured out the system.
On another occasion my naïveté cost Warren $500. It was common knowledge that prosecutors, police, and judges in the city could be bought, but Warren and the others in our office never played the game. Sure, five bucks to a clerk to avoid waiting all day was one thing, but they steered clear of the deeper corruption. And ignorance on my part almost got me fired for unknowingly participating.
In all murder cases in Illinois there were coroners’ inquests that determined the cause and manner of death (murder, suicide, natural causes, etc.). The results were not binding but could influence a prosecutor’s decision to charge murder or manslaughter. The inquest result was up for purchase, but again, our office never participated in that kind of graft.
Warren sent me alone to do an inquest for one of our clients. This was a big deal, a mini-trial of sorts, questioning witnesses and making objections in a potential murder case. After the hearing the detective in the case walked up to me in the hall and gave me a large manila envelope containing all the police reports, the “discovery.” I said, “Uh, thanks,” and was surprised, as I knew it wasn’t required by law at the time that I be provided with the discovery. I went back to the office and was excited to tell Warren this nice cop gave me the entire discovery.
“You asshole,” he said. “You just cost me $500.” He was more concerned about violating our no-graft policy than the money.
I learned a great deal from the kind, generous, and talented attorneys I worked for. I sat second chair in a few trials with Warren. He never lost. And I did a few cases by myself and some with Jack. Jack and I even had a federal case in front of the infamous Judge Julius Hoffman, of Chicago Seven fame. He hated me, my long hair, and my refusal to cater to his judicial arrogance. He was also intimidated by my height. He was a small man with a small-man complex. He sent me home
to change clothes one day because my suit was brown, not black or blue as required. We reached a plea agreement during trial to end the agony.
There were parts of Chicago I loved: the music scene, my neighborhood (the Near North Side), the food, the museums, and the places and events that were just plain unique. The famous People’s Law Office was located near my apartment and full of dedicated radical lawyers. I hung out there often. On Saint Patrick’s Day the Chicago River was dyed green and the judges wore green robes, except for Judge Olson, who wore a Viking helmet. No kidding. I had a preliminary hearing for a murder case in front him on Saint Paddy’s Day, and he wore the helmet all day.
9
I GO TO PRISON
How to put this? I was a child molester. As far as the guards and inmates at the maximum-security penitentiary in Shelton, Washington, knew, that’s what I was in for. Aside from the warden, only my boss and a member of the parole board—both of whom were also posing as prisoners—knew the truth.
My first idea as the newest assistant to the state’s attorney general was to glean all I could about prison life from the inside. Back at Northwestern Law School I’d responded to a post in the placement office. Washington State sought an attorney with experience in corrections to help rewrite its rules of incarceration. I interviewed with my future boss Don Horowitz over the phone—he later confessed he initially returned my call because he thought my name, John Henry, meant I was black and the AG’s office needed diversity.
A couple weeks later, in February 1972, I was on a plane bound for western Washington. From my window I could see Mount Rainier and was happy to be back on my beloved West Coast.
Asked for ideas on how to reform the state’s prisons, I said, “Let’s go to one.”
So in July a representative from the parole board, Don, and I were cuffed, placed in a van, and driven out to Shelton prison, where we planned to spend the week. We got to choose our own fake crimes. I went with child rape because I wanted to experience the most extreme treatment. Prisoners hate pedophiles.
I got in trouble the first night. I had to take a shit, but my toilet was visible from a catwalk in the cellblock. So I unscrewed the lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, to make it dark. A guard ran up screaming. Tampering with the lights was a violation, and I was punished with the loss of outdoor privileges for two days—no notice, no hearing, no due process.
I was one of the few white prisoners in my cellblock and learned quickly that this was not a good thing. The guy in the cell on the right was in for killing two people during a bank holdup gone wrong, and he hated me. A member of the revolutionary civil rights group the George Jackson Brigade occupied the cell on the left. His name was Marx—yes, Marx, not Mark—and he took me under his protection after he learned of my past participation in major civil rights groups in the ’60s. (I later represented him in federal court for probation violation.)
After my punishment for bulb tampering was over I was allowed into the yard three hours a day and tried to remain inconspicuous. I played some basketball, lifted weights, and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. I was a new fish who nobody liked, but many wanted me to be their “boy,” in a sexual sense. With Marx’s help, I avoided that particular problem.
The noise was the worst. If you imagine a large male dormitory at a college open on one side to a hall and everyone playing radios and TVs (all on different stations) as loud as possible—and yelling as loud as possible—you might get some idea of what the noise was like. The correctional officers (they’d hit you if you called them guards) were mostly country boys with little education, not too different from the inmates themselves. And some of the guards were just plain sadistic. You learn who the dangerous guards are very quickly and avoid ever being alone with them. One guard in particular was proud to be called a redneck and carried a sock full of soap bars he used to beat people without leaving obvious marks. Prison is torture.
Back in Olympia after our stay at Shelton we drafted new due process rules to control how and when prison authorities could place inmates in segregation or isolation (“the hole”). Administrators and correctional officers resisted these new rules. So I called up my old law school pal Allen Ressler, who had moved to the state to run a prison legal aid project, and told him to sue us. He did and won. Now our rules were court ordered.
The most resistance came from the administrators and officers at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, an imposing edifice constructed in the late 1800s. It was also home to Washington State’s death chamber, where the state executed people by hanging. The warden, Bobby Rhay, hated me and my long hair—still halfway down my back—and took to calling me John Henry Fucking Browne. He would complain to me in writing on state letterhead and would literally start his correspondence, “Dear John Henry Fucking Browne.”
I had free run of his maximum-security prison and often went to the hole and other segregation cells to look into why and how inmates were so housed. If I determined that procedures were not followed, I had the authority to demand an inmate be released from those cells, and did so often.
I began teaching correctional officers prison law at night for free. I tried to get across to them that due process was simple fairness in procedures that affect people’s lives. After a year or so the officers came around and began to show greater regard for the rights of the men in their charge.
I became sort of a hero to some of the inmates and used my influence to calm ethnic tensions and potentially homicidal conflicts. The black prisoners formed an organization with my help, the Black Prisoners Forum Unlimited. I was the only white person allowed to attend their meetings. I was also involved with an inmate governance council, the RGC (resident governance council), and attended their meetings and carried their grievances to the administrators.
One of the leaders of the RGC was a fellow named Bud doing a two-year stretch for a minor offense. He asked me one day why the parole board kept preventing his release after he met with them. I told him it might have something to do with the tattoo on his forehead that said FUCK OFF. I helped get some volunteer plastic surgeons in to remove the tattoo. He was eventually paroled.
The most unique group in the prison was Lifers with Hope. To his credit, this was Warden Bobby Rhay’s idea, and it was this kind of innovation that got him on the cover of Life magazine. Lifers often cause trouble because they have nothing to look forward to. I convinced many of them to join Rhay’s Lifers with Hope, and the warden and I grew to respect each other. The lifers went to high schools and Rotary clubs and gave talks. Rhay even started a Take a Lifer to Dinner program. No kidding. Citizens would check out a lifer and take him to dinner.
I had a lot of power in this job and helped make some vital changes. It was, however, a quick burnout. Trying to change the prison system was a daunting task.
After two years I left Olympia to accept a job with the King County public defender’s office in Seattle. Almost as soon as I got there, there were stories in the media about young women disappearing in and around the city.
Ted Bundy was about to enter my life.
10
THE KILLER BESIDE ME
The airplane banked, and the passenger window framed the lake below—a mammoth black body of water that seemingly stretched from horizon to horizon. They say the lake is 27 percent salt and that’s what keeps it so still, like an oil slick. Beyond, to the west, lie the salt flats, blank-canvas white, racing out to meet the skyline. And to the east: the toothy Wasatch Range with its hundreds of slot canyons—canyons in which the good people of Utah said that Ted Bundy had stashed the mutilated corpses of their daughters.
I had come to the Beehive State half expecting the usual media frenzy surrounding my client. The Salt Lake Tribune, top of the fold, told a different story that morning, January 17, 1977: RITTER STAYS GILMORE EXECUTION AFTER LAST DITCH APPEAL. The article detailed US district court judge Willis Ritter’s latest deliberations surrounding the death-by-firing-squad execution of thirty-six-year-old Gary Gi
lmore, who six months earlier had murdered two men in nearby Provo and Orem.
I rolled out from Salt Lake International Airport and made my way to State Street, an extra-wide, six-lane boulevard originally made so wide, I later learned, to accommodate the horse-drawn wagons of Brigham Young’s Promised Land, his City of Zion in the wilderness. I drove past countless pawnshops and gun stores. An inch of snow blanketed the sidewalk. I tried to imagine what had drawn Ted to this city, what about it had made it such an appealing place for his secret, violent life. Was it the desolation? The affability of its too-trusting people? All I got for an answer as I wheeled down State Street was Mount Olympus, a bluff of granite rising in front of me and off to the left, as if it guarded the southern end of the Salt Lake Valley. Beyond Olympus sat Utah State Prison, known locally as simply Point of the Mountain.
The prison parking lot was crowded with the clamshells of television satellite antennae. Reporters vamped in front of cameras and jawed on about Gilmore’s fate for the audiences of NBC, CBS, and ABC. No one had been executed for homicide in the United States since 1967, when the Supreme Court decision Furman v. Georgia had deemed capital punishment unconstitutional on the grounds that it was deployed as “cruel and unusual punishment,” in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The moratorium lasted almost a decade until a 1976 Supreme Court ruling, Gregg v. Georgia, restored the practice.
When Gilmore admitted to gunning down two men—a law student working as a gas station attendant and a motel manager—at point-blank range, a jury found him deserving of the death penalty. That put him right in the crosshairs of the State of Utah, which seemed more than willing to exercise its newfound right to end his life. His supposed death wish sped the process along. He refused to make any appeals and fired his lawyers when they tried. He also insisted that he die by firing squad rather than the relatively less barbaric method of electrocution.