by Ann Rule
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 sleep,” 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.
Tom didn’t like to see Robin cry. “You should be getting over it by now,” he complained. But Hank had only been dead for twenty-four hours. How could he expect her to get over it so soon? She would never get over it.
“He was hard to figure out,” Robin wrote. “One minute, he’d be rough and mean, and the next he’d be kind and gentle. We talked about the human mind a lot. He said the mind contains a lot of little doors and that you could open and shut them when you wanted to. He said, ‘When I kill someone, I open a door.’ He said someday the doors in his head might all open and let the bad things loose and he might go crazy, but until then he had no guilt feelings.”
Robin read the Bible aloud to Tom until he asked her to stop. It helped her to hear the words aloud. When she began to cry again, Tom got angry and yelled at her.
All along, he assured Robin that he was her protector. She had to remember that he was saving her from the men who were hunting them.
“Why didn’t you just tie Hank up,” she asked. “Then you could have taken me away.”
He explained why he hadn’t done that. “That would have been mean,” Tom said. “[To leave him] In the hot sun with no food or water.”
His reasoning was bizarre, but somehow he made it seem believable. He said he had killed Rusty out of kindness, too, because the dog would never have made it in the wilderness with them. It was far better to eliminate him humanely. “Rusty never knew what hit him.”
Robin was getting mixed up. There was no one but this man beside her, and she wanted so much for him to tell her it had all been a terrible accident. She couldn’t bear to think Hank had died only because Tom wanted her.
They camped out for a second night.
“What will you do if you tire of me?” she asked.
“I don’t see how I could. You’re the only person here.”
They talked about books and movies. He told her he admired Adolf Hitler. She asked him about his family and he said he hated them. She had to be careful about the subjects she brought up. Things could make him so angry in an instant. Gradually, however, Robin’s fear lessened and she prayed, asking God to somehow allow her to get home.
The next day, July 26, they didn’t travel at all. Tom was sick, coughing and pale. He thought he might have pneumonia. He ranged around, checking the area, asking her how far away she could spot him. He wanted to be sure they would see anyone looking for them so they wouldn’t be ambushed. He came back and asked for some paper, and he then sat down to write three notes to friends in which he apologized for the “accident.”
“I’ll probably be dead soon,” he said.
Robin started to cry, and suddenly Brown began to cry, too. “I knew that one of those doors in his head had finally opened,” she wrote. “He told me that if I would mail the letters for him, he would tell me what had really happened. He told me that killing Hank was an accident. When he said that, it was just what I needed to hear. He said he didn’t remember how it happened.”
Seeing Robin coming around to his thinking, Tom pressed on, telling her the sad story of how the woman he loved had rejected him. He said he’d gone to Nebraska to forget her, and he was treated well there. He admitted his name was really Tom, after all. He promised to walk Robin to the river and let her make her way home. He even went so far as to take her there, telling her that he was sick and was better off dying alone in the woods.
“I felt so sorry for him,” Robin wrote. “Deep inside, I knew it was no accident, but I told myself he was telling the truth. I couldn’t just let him die up there. After all, he was nice enough to spare my l
ife and let me go.”
Tom was now all generosity. He offered her the sleeping bag and the water, and he told her sadly that no one would ever believe him about the accident. He had no choices left.
“And you’re sure it was an accident?” Robin asked.
“Yes. I’m sure.”
“If you’re sure,” Robin said, “I’ll go to the police with you and tell them I saw it.”
Tom smiled then, as if this was exactly what he wanted her to say. He led Robin all the way back to the camp she and Hank had set up—how long ago? The days were beginning to blur. She knew she could easily find her way out of the forest from here. Then Tom told her that he was heading back into the woods. “All I ask is one hour.”
Robin’s essay for Jim Byrnes continued, detailing her day with Tom. She wrote that she hated the thought of leaving a sick man all alone deep in the woods. She insisted she would be his alibi. At this point, she’d honestly believed he was a nice person, that he was a victim of a terrible mishap. Her brainwashing was complete. He allowed her to “persuade” him to accept her help. Finally he agreed to go with her so she could explain that she had seen the shooting, that it had all been an accident.
Tom went to where Hank’s body still lay and brought back his wallet. Meekly, he asked if it was all right that he’d taken two dollars out for gas, and Robin said it was. She didn’t want to see Hank dead. The sun was setting by the time they reached Tom’s truck.
They headed for Estacada, and Robin noticed that Tom was driving erratically. He actually was ill and had a high fever, so she told him they should wait until morning to go to the police. They spent the last night in a park, going to Tom’s lawyer’s office to talk to James O’Leary the next morning.
Although Robin had not seen Tom shoot Hank, it seemed now that she had. Tom had explained it to her often enough. “He told me how it was supposed to have happened, what to say, and I believed that story. I heard it so often, I really believed it was true.”
And, according to Dr. Treleaven, she did indeed believe the story she had told the Clackamas County sheriff’s detectives was true. At that time, she had been methodically and thoroughly brainwashed.
Tom Brown was now in jail. Criminal Investigator Paul Keller spoke with him, and he glibly went through the same story he’d told before. The shooting was an accident, and Robin had seen it. That was all there was to it. If the dead man’s wife backed him up, he couldn’t understand why the police were harassing him. Then, on the advice of his lawyer, Tom stopped talking. He had nothing more to say.
As Tom Brown’s trial approached, Steve Keutzer and Bob Hamilton acknowledged that they had some problems with their case. They were absolutely convinced that Brown was a merciless killer, but would a jury believe the victim’s widow? The defense would certainly bring up the undependability of her memory. Was the evidence enough? And would a jury understand the gunshot-residue evidence?
Knowing Brown’s potential for violence, they didn’t want him out on the streets. Could they gamble on a win in court? It might be safer to agree to a plea bargain, allowing him to plead guilty to a lesser charge. That would ensure he was locked up for a little while at least.
The two state attorneys were conferring with Brown’s defense team about the possibility of reducing the murder charge to negligent homicide when a grinning detective walked up. “Don’t agree to anything,” he whispered. “I’ve got somebody you might like to talk to.”
At this point in the case, a colorful witness named Wendell Stokeberry* came forward. He had never been known for his cooperation with the police; Stokeberry had a rap sheet that went so far back that even he wasn’t sure just what he’d done and what he hadn’t done—although if he was pinned down, he could usually sort it out. He was bright and silver-tongued, and he would make one of the best—and one of the most flamboyant—witnesses Hamilton and Keutzer had ever brought into a courtroom.
Wendell Stokeberry was currently a resident of the Clackamas County jail and had recently renewed a friendship with Tom Brown, an old schoolmate from the MacLaren School for Boys. Brown was so positive that he was going to walk free that he had spent hours bragging to Stokeberry about how he had convinced Robin Marcus to go to the police with him.
Jim Byrnes taped Stokeberry’s statement. Stokeberry wanted little in return. He wanted a simple escape charge erased from his record, and he wanted to be sent to an out-of-state prison after he testified. That wasn’t unreasonable; snitches didn’t live long inside the walls. Jim Byrnes knew Stokeberry was risking more than he might gain. Still, he agreed to give information without any promises being made to him. Even with his many walks on the wrong side of the law, Stokeberry felt Tom Brown was too dangerous to be turned loose on society.
“I been knowing this cat since the early sixties, even before we went to MacLaren,” Stokeberry said. “Once we got there, we were in the same cottage. We was good friends. So I get booked into jail here, and there he is. I tell him what I’m in for and he tells me he’s in for first-degree murder and a couple of sex things.”
“Did you ask him any questions?” Byrnes asked.
“Yeah, about the murder charge.”
Tom Brown had explained who the Marcuses were but had not given their names. He just told Wendell Stokeberry he’d met them only the day before the killing. “He said they all went fishing and that they had a big collie with them. He said he shot the guy in the face.”
“Did he say it was an accident?”
“He said, ‘I killed him,’ but that his story to the police was that it was an accident that happened when guns were being exchanged. He said he had used an odd kind of gun. The casing of the bullets was extra long with a heavier powder charge than usual.”
“Did he tell you the reason for killing this man?”
“Later he did. He said he was paid to kill him, and he said the police didn’t have a case against him, because of the girl involved. He says it’s just his word against hers, and he said the girl wasn’t even there. Then he said he just leveled the gun down and blasted the dog. Then he said he got together with the girl for four days. He said he was going to beat the case because the girl was so nervous and the jury wouldn’t believe her. Then he said he was going to kill her, too, as soon as he got out.”
“Did he say why?” Byrnes asked, keeping his voice calm.
“Yeah, because she won’t corroborate the lie he made her tell police in the first place. He told me how he beat the polygraph. He said you just have to tell yourself the same story over and over, and then you get to believe it yourself. Then you have no worry, no stress at all when you take it yourself. Then he showed me how to breathe and all when you take it.”
Stokeberry said that Tom was sure a jury wouldn’t believe Robin because she looked about twenty-four or twenty-five. “She’s a Jezebel type,” he says. “They won’t believe her.”
Tom added that he’d been 8 or 10 feet away from the victim when he shot him. “Tom says powder burns won’t show from that far away, and he’s worried about that now.”
“Did he say why the girl gave the wrong statement?”
“Yeah. He says he convinced her that the police wouldn’t believe her.” Then Brown explained to Stokeberry how he’d worked on the girl’s mind until she believed him.
Jim Byrnes knew there was no way Stokeberry could have known certain details about the case unless Tom Brown had told him. No one beyond Robin and the investigators knew all these details. Wendell Stokeberry was clearly telling the truth.
With the added impact of this witness, Steve Keutzer and Bob Hamilton felt they had more than enough to go ahead with a first-degree murder charge against Tom Brown. There would be no jury. The case was to be heard in front of a judge only—Judge Winston Bradshaw.
Two days before the trial, Tom Brown scraped up enough money for bail and walked out of jail. He had threatened to kill Robin Marcus, so the attorney general’s office put her into a motel under guard until the trial. She w
as petrified with fear even though they assured her that Brown couldn’t find her. She was registered under a fake name and a police officer would always be there to ensure that no one could approach her.
When the time came for trial, the smug defendant wasn’t nearly as confident as he had been. As the eight-day trial progressed, Robin testified for a day and a half. Wendell Stokeberry testified, too, although he drew giggles from the gallery as he swaggered to the witness chair. He adeptly parried defense efforts to discredit him by saying, “If you say I got busted for something, then I guess I must have. My record is ex-ten-sive.”
He might not have been a law-abiding citizen, but he was telling the truth—and it showed.
Prosecutor Bob Hamilton presented expert testimony on the fact that there were no lead particles in the tissues around Hank Marcus’s wounds. Using a long wooden dowel, he demonstrated just how far the killer had to have been away from Hank so that a shot wouldn’t leave gunpowder stippling on his skin. There was no way that it could have happened as Tom Brown said.
Hamilton showed the judge the angle of the wound. Again, it contradicted Brown’s version. Brown had even forgotten which side of the victim’s head the bullet entered.
After hearing his story riddled with errors, Tom Brown insisted on testifying. Now he gave a different version of his recall of the gun exchange, but his efforts were feebly transparent.
Over defense objections, Judge Bradshaw allowed testimony on the mechanisms of brainwashing into the record. This was a major coup for the prosecution. As Dr. Treleaven explained it, the brainwashing of Robin Marcus was a classic example of mind control. Her mind literally became evidence in the case.
As the trial wound down, it was apparent that the attorney general’s prosecutors, Bob Hamilton and Steve Keutzer, had presented a brilliantly organized case—a case that had begun with all the earmarks of a loser.
Judge Bradshaw retired to make his decision. Three days later, he came back with a verdict of guilty. Thomas Leslie Brown was sentenced to life in the Oregon State Penitentiary. His motion for a new trial was denied on July 19, 1977.
