Empty Promises

by Ann Rule

"Each piece of this trial is part of a puzzle," Prosecutor Metcalf told the jury. "On Tuesday, August 22, Deanna Buse was found nude in the vicinity of Echo Lake. She had been shot five times in the head; there were four .22 caliber bullets in her brain and one beneath her body. The state will prove that Thomas Eugene Braun and Leonard Eugene Maine are guilty of this killing." Metcalf outlined the testimony he would present to the jury as the trial moved ahead. Most of this information was new and unfamiliar to those present in the courtroom, including the media. The prosecutors and the Snohomish County Sheriff's investigators had deliberately guarded the facts in the Buse case against the day when Braun and Maine would answer to them in court. In doing so, they had managed to avoid a change of venue.

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  If there are such things as ghosts, there were ghosts in that brightly lit courtroom. Timothy Luce, Susan Bartolomei, and Samuel Ledgerwood had never known Deanna Buse, but they had all faced the same terror in the last moments of their lives. Only Susan had lived to speak of it.

  True to his opening statement, Prosecutor Metcalf presented dozens of witnesses who retraced the fatal journey of Braun and Maine.

  First, Denny Buse described his wife's last day on earth. The young husband was dismissed as a witness after he identified pictures of Deanna and their Buick Skylark. As Buse left the courtroom that day, the prose cution submitted pictures of the victim taken as she lay dead on the ground near Echo Lake. The defendants' attorneys, Bailey and Hale, argued vociferously that several of them should be kept from the jury because they were "inflammatory." The pictures, showing the nude victim with her eyes closed and visible bullet wounds to her head, were admitted by Judge McCrea with a few reservations. Hale next argued that "in the interests of good taste" the pictures should be cropped so that the victim's pubic area would not be shown.

  This motion was denied, and the pictures were shown. Braun and Maine were allowed to see the pictures, and the courtroom quieted as they glanced at the startling photos. Neither defendant showed any emotion.

  Jurors and spectators then experienced an eerie sensation as they watched a seven-minute movie. The showing of the film in the darkened courtroom was prefaced by testimony from Chief Criminal Deputy Ross Jubie, who told of receiving word through the Seattle Police Department that two suspects in Tuolumne County, California, had confessed knowledge of Deanna Buse's murder. Jubie testified about a telephone conversation he had with Leonard Maine. During that call, Maine had described to him what had happened to the missing woman.

  After finishing her shopping in Redmond, Washington, the young wife had headed for her mother's home in Monroe along Route 202. Braun and Maine, driving the Borgward, had pulled up beside her and signaled to her that she had a tire that was about to blow out. According to Maine, Mrs. Buse eased her car over to the side of the road. The suspects then pulled in behind her. After walking around her car and finding all her tires in good shape, the young woman turned to face the two strangers with a questioning look, only to be met by the sight of a gun in Braun's hand. He then ordered her back into her own car, got in with her, and instructed Maine to follow them in the Borgward. Slowly, the two-car caravan proceeded, under Braun's direction, onto less and less traveled roads until the trio pulled up at the end of the dirt lane leading into the woods near Echo Lake.

  Maine alleged that Braun then disappeared into the woods with his helpless captive. Minutes passed and then Maine told Jubie of hearing five shots ring out in the wilderness. Braun returned to the car alone.

  The film shown to the jurors retraced the route Deanna Buse was forced to drive at gunpoint. Following Maine's directions, a sheriff's patrol car drove that route while a deputy sat on the hood of the car with a camera. Those watching the film could not help but put themselves in the place of the terrified woman as the film showed first a well-traveled highway and then focused on side roads and finally on deep woods. The wooded scene— the last thing Deanna saw before she was killed— lingered in the courtroom as the film ended.

  According to Maine, both cars were driven from the scene of the murder but the ancient Borgward had become excess baggage, so they abandoned it on a busy Seattle street. The two men were seen by witnesses removing articles from the Borgward and transferring them to a maroon Buick Skylark.

  Sergeant Tom Hart told the jury that he searched the Borgward, which had been impounded by the Seattle Police Department, on August 23, 1967. Hart found five .22 caliber shell casings in the black foreign car.

  After a weekend recess, the first witness to be heard on Monday morning, November 9, was an uncle of co-defendant Leonard Maine. The uncle, a resident of Fife, Washington, twenty-two miles south of Seattle, told about a visit from his nephew and a friend during the afternoon of August 19, 1967. The two arrived in a 1964 or 1965 Buick and asked him the quickest way to get to Portland, Oregon. The uncle could not identify Maine's companion during the visit.

  The next witness shed some light upon the frame of mind Leonard Maine was in on that grim Saturday. The pretty woman who lived next door to another uncle of Maine's and who told the jury she had been dating Maine for about a year, described a phone call she received from him at about nine o'clock that evening while she was baby-sitting in the uncle's home.

  "We talked for about five or ten minutes— just a casual conversation. But then he said to come out on the porch or he would start shooting!" The witness said she did not go out on the porch but instead hung up and called the Seattle police. The murderous duo left the area then and headed south. On the Oregon coast, according to one motel manager, they attempted to register at his establishment but when they gave him incomplete information, he asked the wild-haired pair to leave. Although the Snohomish County jury would not hear the name Samuel Ledgerwood until the penalty phase of the defendants' trial, it was just after this incident that the kindly salesman met his killers.

  Weeks of testimony in the first phase of the trial were coming to a close. Neither Hale nor Bailey called any witnesses for the defense.

  Prosecutor Metcalf summed up his case by reviewing the voluminous testimony presented, and then said, "By use of force and fear, this girl was kidnapped, killed, and robbed. The state has proved its case. The defendants are guilty as charged."

  Bailey, the attorney for Braun, challenged the prosecution by saying, "There was no motive for this killing. Thomas Braun didn't even know Deanna Buse. You must decide if he intended to kill her."

  Samuel Hale, in defense of Leonard Maine, hit hard at the concept that Maine had been a frightened, unwilling pawn in the hands of his traveling companion. He recalled testimony where Maine told California officers that Braun had pointed a gun at him just before the two stopped Deanna Buse's car.

  On rebuttal, Prosecutor David Metcalf deplored Bailey's argument that there had been no motive. "I don't know why murders are committed. I don't know why kidnappings are committed. I don't know why robberies are committed." He stressed that the reason for Deanna's brutal murder did not matter; it had been committed. Hale's contention that Maine had acted under duress and fear for his own life prompted Metcalf to point out that Maine had many opportunities to get away from Braun, yet had remained with him.

  On November 19, after twenty-seven days of testimony, the jury retired to deliberate. In seven hours, they returned with a verdict. Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine remained stoic as they heard the decision of their peers. Ten times the word "Guilty" was repeated. Each of the defendants was found guilty of first-degree murder, kidnapping, robbery, grand larceny, and possession of a dangerous weapon during the commission of the murder, kidnapping, and robbery.

  Judge McCrea polled the jury as the defendants sat stone-faced. All of the jurors affirmed their decisions.

  After a weekend's rest, the case moved to the penalty phase. For Braun, already under the death penalty in California, his sentence seemed academic. He could only be executed once. If he was given the death penalty in Washington, a successful appeal to the Supreme Court on the Cal
ifornia death penalty still wouldn't save him. For Maine, whose much lighter sentence in California made the Washington trial crucial, the jury's decision could be disastrous.

  Now all the evidence and testimony previously barred concerning the crimes against Susan Bartolomei, Tim Luce, and Samuel Ledgerwood was placed before the jury, beginning with a chronology of events that linked the attacks.

  Snohomish County had taken the missing persons report on Deanna Buse on Saturday, August 19. Then word had come from Portland that Sam Ledgerwood, an automobile salesman, had failed to return from a fishing trip to the Oregon coast. The last call from him came on Sunday, August 20. When his body was found days later, the police also found Deanna Buse's burned Buick. Next came the kidnapping of Susan Bartolomei and Tim Buse in Hopland, California, on Monday. The time line was unassailable.

  In addition, the jurors heard testimony from a Seattle hotel proprietor who told of events on the Friday evening of August 18, 1967, the day before Deanna Buse was murdered. The hotel owner described a young man who had requested a room. "But then I saw a shadow in front of me," she recalled. "I looked up and he was pointing a gun at me. Then I screamed and stepped into an adjoining room and shut the door."

  She identified Thomas Braun as the man who had threatened her with the gun.

  California Superior Court Judge Arthur E. Broaddus took the witness stand to read lengthy portions of a transcript of an interview he had with both Braun and Maine as they were questioned following their arrests in Jamestown.

  Broaddus, at that time the Tuolumne County district attorney, read the damaging statements concerning the savage attacks on Tim Luce and Susan Bartolomei. Attorney Hale then asked Judge Broaddus to read sections of the transcript where Maine said he felt sorry for the victims and that he was afraid of Braun, who usually had a pistol in his possession or nearby.

  Further testimony during the penalty phase brought out the shocking magnitude of the defendants' antisocial feelings. A former cell mate of Maine's in Ukiah, California, told of being forced to commit sodomy by the defendant, who threatened him with a straight-edged razor. Braun hadn't been the ideal cell mate either. A twenty-one-year-old inmate of the Snohomish County jail testified that Braun had threatened him while the two shared a cell. In the ensuing scuffle, the witness was injured and had to be treated at an Everett hospital.

  Tension in the courtroom mounted during the final phase of the trial. Twice Leonard Maine told Judge McCrea that he was too ill to continue and court had to be recessed while he was examined by a county physician, who found nothing seriously wrong with him. Braun's attorney asserted that his client wasn't responsible for his acts because of mental irresponsibility, although such a plea had already been ruled out in this trial. He detailed the defendant's wretched childhood and told the jury that Braun's mother had died after having an illegal abortion; Braun's father, an alcoholic, according to the defendant, routinely locked Braun and his sister in his truck and left them for hours while he visited taverns.

  A Seattle clinical psychologist, Dr. Ralph Hirschstein, who interviewed Braun twice and conducted psychiatric tests, told the jury that he considered the defendant a "pseudo-psychopathic schizophrenic" —a "bright man" who had been out of contact with reality during August of 1967.

  Virtually the same opinion was given by Paul Handrich, a clinical psychiatrist from Ukiah, California. Handrich defined a psychopath as a person who has no conscience and a schizophrenic as a person who has a conscience but does not know how to use it. "Schizophrenia is characterized by disturbance of emotions, marked ambivalence, and loose associations of thought. This man is genuinely perplexed." Braun's sister recalled the pathetic and trauma-fraught childhood they had endured. Alternately neglected and abused by a punishing father, she said her brother had once been forced to shoot his own dog because the animal had killed chickens. Hale's plea for Leonard Maine also hit hard at the mental irresponsibility of his client. He called Maine's parents and wife, who had been in the courtroom since the beginning of the trial. They described the diminutive defendant as a man continually beset by feelings of inferiority because of his borderline intelligence.

  "He was a good boy," Maine's mother recalled, "who had a record of good behavior in school. His two main interests were cars and horses. It hurt him that he couldn't keep up with the other children in school." She told of Maine's being held back in the third grade and of how he finally dropped out of school just before his ninth grade year was over because the struggle to keep up had been too much.

  Dr. Fariborz Amini, a California psychiatrist, testified regarding his examination of Maine. He said that the defendant viewed himself more "as a victim… than as a participant in the crimes. Maine has an inadequate personality with some characteristics of passive dependency, accentuated by below-normal intelligence." He said his examination of Maine showed that the defendant's IQ was somewhere between 80 and 90. "In August of 1987," Dr. Amini said, "Mr. Maine was under severe stress, which made him unable to deliberate. Given Maine's need to be dependent on others, he is not able to act on his own when under heavy emotional stress." Cross-examined by Deputy Prosecutor Metcalf, Dr. Amini was asked if Maine knew the difference between right and wrong during the events of August 1967. "If you're asking me if he had absolute knowledge, no. If he had an awareness, yes."

  Leonard Maine himself took the stand briefly to testify regarding the alleged sodomy assault in the Ukiah jail. He agreed that he had been in the cell with two other prisoners but denied having participated in, or even witnessed, any sexual attacks.

  That Braun and Maine did kill is known. Why they killed is not. One officer who worked on the case says, "I don't know that they had murder in mind when they started out from Ritzville, but I think after they killed their first victim, they continued to seek out victims for nothing more than the sheer pleasure of killing."

  Only one person who faced the guns of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine remains alive: Susan Bartolomei, whose grievous wounds changed her from a sparkling teenager to an invalid. Although Susan was able to talk with Howardine Mease on the morning after her night of horror, the damage done to her brain robbed her of speech. There was only so much doctors could do, and she spent her days in a wheelchair and lived with extensive paralysis and impaired vision.

  But Susan Bartolomei did survive in spite of the tremendous odds against her, and she lived to see the men who shot her convicted of their crimes. Had it not been for the courage she summoned up as she inched her way up the steep bank to the road on that scorching day in August 1967, law enforcement officers can only imagine how many more victims might have been added to the list written in blood by Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine.

  At 3:40 P.M. on Friday, December 18, the jury once again retired to consider a verdict. The longest capital punishment trial in Snohomish County was at last over. The jury voted unanimously to impose the death sentence upon Thomas E. Braun on both counts of first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. They voted not to inflict the death penalty upon Leonard Maine; this meant he would receive an automatic sentence of life imprisonment.

  A Dangerous Mind

  The third week in June 1981 was a macabre, albeit informative, time for me. Along with a few hundred detectives and physicians, I attended King County Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Reay's seminar on death investigation. After forty hours of lectures and slides detailing death by fire, gunshot, strangulation, bludgeoning, and drowning, and studying the parameters that denote lust murder, I was more than ready for a vacation from violence. Even though homicide detectives and crime writers spend their working hours in a world where a knowledge of the patterns of death is essential, we can still be shocked and sickened. Indeed, if we are not sensitive to the pain and pathos of unnatural death, we shouldn't be in the careers we have chosen.

  But some times are rougher than others. On the last day of Reay's seminar— Friday, June 19— six Seattle homicide detectives in the audience were working the kind of case that can
bring the toughest investigators to their knees. The victim was a child, a tiny seven-year-old girl. This case predated the JonBenét Ramsey case in Boulder, Colorado, by almost two decades, but the details were almost identical: a pretty blond child murdered in her own home during the dark hours before dawn. As in the Ramsey case, there was no sign at all that someone from the outside had broken in.

  At each coffee break during the medical examiner's seminar, the Seattle detectives checked in with their office to see how the case was progressing. They were grateful they had not been on duty when that call came in. Although they had not been summoned to the initial crime scene, they were responsible for finding the killer.

  It would take four months for the full story of the murder of Jannie Reilly* to unfold, and with its denouement, it would trigger even more tragedy. Lives were destroyed and hearts broken. When the last chapter was written, it became all too clear that misguided kindness had ended in murder. Good people had offered hospitality to someone whose promises meant nothing. But at least, unlike JonBenét's murder, there were answers and the killer was caught and taken to trial.

  The Joseph Reillys seemed to have the safest home possible. Joseph had once been a priest and his wife, Lorraine, was also a devout Catholic. After realizing that the calling was not right for him, Joseph had left the priesthood, but he and Lorraine maintained close connections to their church.