by Ann Rule
The cops separated the strange pair, and each gave a formal statement. The two statements matched in every detail. Then Robin, exhausted and covered with scratches and insect bites, was driven back to her home in Canby. Tom Brown agreed to accompany the Clackamas County investigators into the wilderness to show them where the bodies of Hank and the dog lay.
Medical Examiner Ken Dooley would join the detectives for a cursory examination of the bodies. It was 5:45 p.m. on July 27 when the group left headquarters; they reached the Buckeye Creek Road at 8:20. It was dark and they needed high-powered flashlights as they moved along the trail looking for the dead man and his fallen dog. They found the remains of the trio's campsite, and 200 yards farther on, they came across Hank Marcus's body.
Fully clad in jeans and hiking gear, the dead man lay 30 feet from the logging road, his body partially covered with ferns. From the position of the body, it appeared that he had rolled over an embankment and landed 8 feet below. He lay on his face as if asleep, his left arm tucked under him. According to Tom Brown and Robin, Hank Marcus had been there for almost four days in the baking July heat. Decomposition was advanced, particularly in the area of the head wound.
The investigators took photographs in the twilight of that Tuesday night, and Detective Forristall placed stakes at the edge of the road to mark the probable site of the actual shooting, where dried blood stained the earth about four feet from the edge of the bank.
Tom Brown had voluntarily turned over the Savage rifle, saying it was the gun he had used to kill Rusty, the collie. He told them he had discarded the other weapon— the one that had fired unexpectedly, killing Hank Marcus. He didn't know if he'd be able to find it again; it was in a heavily wooded area much farther away.
They found Rusty's body along the trail. The huge collie was also covered with vegetation and he too had suffered a single gunshot wound in the head. Someone had apparently made an attempt to protect the two bodies. Or perhaps to hide them.
Tom Brown, age twenty-nine, seemed both cooperative and contrite as he told the investigators about the fatal accident. They put him up in a motel for the night, and he agreed to come to sheriff's headquarters the first thing in the morning to help them find the missing rifle.
Detective Sergeant Bill Werth and Forristall and Reeves, met with Thomas Brown early the next day. They went with him again into the Mount Hood National Forest in the Colowash River area to recover the gun.
They took more photos of the campsite, the Marcuses' car, and the scene where Hank had died. Then they hiked into the wilderness beyond. They crashed through underbrush for a mile to the banks of the Colowash, where they walked upstream for three miles, then crossed the river and came to a smaller stream. There Werth noted footprints that appeared to match Brown's shoes and much smaller footprints in the soft sand. Both sets were headed in the opposite direction from where Brown was leading the investigators.
In the heat of the day, the pace was rapid and wearying. The group walked three more miles upriver and then cut away from the riverbank again and moved into the woods in a northerly direction. They were now so deep into the forest that civilization seemed not to exist at all. Indeed, the terrain here had changed little since pioneers first came to Oregon almost 140 years before. Lost in these woods, a novice hiker might never find his way out. It was easy to understand why Tom Brown and Robin Marcus had become disoriented. But now Brown led the group, pointing out landmarks as they moved along. All of this was beginning to look familiar to him.
He pointed to a very heavily vegetated area. "We spread our sleeping bags out here on the night of the twenty-fifth," he said. "There it is! There's my rifle. It's a
.22 high power with lever action. I had about eleven bullets left in a plastic bag. I tossed them out into the brush."
The gun was there all right, but even when they dropped to their hands and knees and searched through the undergrowth, the detectives could not find the bullets. To preserve any latent prints, they fashioned a sling in which to carry the rifle.
Back down along the creek bed, Brown showed them where he and Robin had dumped a sleeping bag when they had finally found their way to the trail head. The sleeping bag was literally torn to pieces from being dragged through the underbrush.
The exhausted search party got back to the campsite at 9:35 P.M., after more than ten hours of slogging through the forest. Packing the two bodies out along the trail for postmortem examination was extremely difficult. When they returned to the sheriff's office, the investigators secured the .22 rifle in the property room to await ballistics tests and dusting for fingerprints. They had also retrieved blood samples from the dirt near Hank's corpse, and from Rusty's body.
On July 29, Tom Brown gave a more detailed statement of the accident. He explained he hadn't known ei ther of the Marcuses before he met them near the dam; they decided to join up for a fishing trip. The next morning he and Hank Marcus took a hike before breakfast.
"Hank and I walked up to the clearing the morning of the twenty-fourth. He was looking through my binoculars and he spotted a deer. He handed the binoculars to me so I could see, and I handed the rifle over to him at the same time. Then, after I got a bead on the deer, I gave the glasses back to Hank and he handed the gun back. As it was being passed to me, I grabbed it by the balance with my finger on the trigger. It fired… and the bullet hit Hank in the head."
"And his wife saw this?"
Brown nodded. "Like she said, she was standing a couple feet behind us. Hank fell to the ground, and I scooped up both the rifles. Robin started screaming. I ran toward the campsite."
Brown said that Rusty had been asleep back at the site and came running toward him, snarling as if he was about to attack. "I had to shoot him."
Brown said he'd been in shock. He sat around the campsite for several hours trying to decide what to do. "I finally knew I had to split— that no one would believe me. I told Robin she could do what she wanted, but that I was going to head to the mountains. She said I couldn't leave her there, that I had to take her back to civilization, but I said, 'No way. I'm going.' I told her she could go with me if she wanted, but she'd better hurry and get her stuff together."
It was obvious that Brown lacked gallantry, but it was easy to imagine that Robin Marcus, lost in the woods, in deep shock after seeing her husband killed, might have chosen to stay with the only other human being around.
She told the investigators she had witnessed the accidental shooting. And then, she said, Brown told her that he was afraid no one would ever believe him— not with his record. He was panicking and determined to head up and over the mountain. He said he knew the woods; she didn't. She decided, Brown said, to go with him rather than wander around in the wilderness where she probably would have died of fatigue or starvation or as prey for a bear or a cougar.
Brown acknowledged that he had dragged the collie's carcass off the trail and that he'd rolled Hank's body off the bank and then covered both bodies with sword ferns to deter the ravages of animals. That stamped him as a novice in the woods, the detectives thought. A few ferns wouldn't keep animals away, but they might hide the bodies from a human hiker.
So Tom Brown took off into the deep woods, with Robin trailing behind. He said he spent the next three days trying to calm himself down, and he finally decided the best thing to do was to turn himself in. Robin promised him that she would stand by him, and tell the cops she was a witness to her husband's death. "Then we headed back to Oregon City."
On July 29, a polygraph expert from the Oregon State Police gave Tom Brown a lie detector test. All the tracings of his body's reactions indicated that he was telling the truth. The victim's own wife was supporting Brown's story, all the evidence had been turned over by Brown himself, and he passed the polygraph test. It was tragic that the young husband should have died on his first wedding anniversary, but it clearly wasn't a homicide.
Tom Brown vacated the motel room and disappeared. There was no reason to require him to
stay around.
The postmortem examination of Hank Marcus confirmed that he had died of a single gunshot wound to the head with the bullet entering the right cheek and traveling out the left side of his neck. The path of the bullet had been almost horizontal, indicating that he was standing next to someone of similar height when he was shot. Unfortunately, because of the extreme decomposition of the tissue, there was no way to determine if there had been any blotching or stippling of powder burns around the wound. That eliminated their chance to establish how far the shooter had been from the victim.
However, because the Oregon State Crime Lab was doing a special study on lead traces in bullet wounds, two fragments of Hank Marcus's tissue— each no more than an inch or so in diameter— were excised from the site of the entrance and exit wounds so they could be examined under a scanning electron microscope equipped with a laser beam.
Because of an oversight, Rusty's body was buried before the direction of the wound to the dog's head could be determined. And he wasn't buried in a single grave, but in a mass grave at the city dump with several other dogs.
Hank Marcus was buried, too, and Robin and their families tried to pick up the loose threads of their lives.
* * *
Everyone thought Robin was going through normal, predictable grief. In truth, Robin Marcus was suffering through her own private hell, something far beyond normal grief. There was something just below the surface of her mind that kept bubbling up, no matter how hard she tried to keep it submerged. As the days passed, it grew stronger and stronger.
Her memory was playing games with her. It was very odd. She could remember everything about preparations for their trip, remember the day they spent before they met Tom, and even recall how she'd been afraid of him at first. But the three days after Hank and Rusty were shot were all a blur. For the life of her, she could not pull those memories into focus.
She liked Tom. She thought she liked Tom. She could remember riding to the sheriff's office with Mr. O'Leary, Tom's attorney, and telling him Tom was a nice person. They asked her a lot of questions in the Clackamas County sheriff's office about why she'd gone up into the woods with Tom. Could she have escaped from him? She said yes— yes, she could have. She could have left when they got to Mr. O'Leary's office, but she promised Tom she would stick by him and tell them about how he'd shot Hank accidentally. The gunshot haunted her. She kept hearing the boom in her head and seeing Hank's blood. And it frightened her. But she couldn't bring the actual shooting back. When she talked to the detectives, she believed she had seen it. But now she could not remember it.
Although she didn't realize it, Robin Marcus was beginning to come down from the intensive brainwashing she had undergone for three days after Hank's death. Whenever she began to go over the events in her mind the way Tom told her they happened, a very clear picture kept getting in the way— a picture that warred with Tom's words. She kept seeing his smile as he told her that he had shot Hank as well as Rusty. Why did he smile? It was such an odd smile, like the grimace on a devil's mask. But then she recalled that Tom had smiled when he was talking with detectives, too. Even though tears were running down his face when he told them about the accident, he'd had that same peculiar grin on his face. Maybe that's just the way he was.
As the days passed, Robin began to remember what had happened more and more clearly. She'd told the detectives what Tom wanted them to hear; she'd even told her family and Hank's that his death had been an accident. And she had believed it herself. Now she no longer did; her memory was coming back.
* * *
On August 2, Robin and her parents appeared at the sheriff's office again. "I want to tell you what really happened," Robin blurted. "It wasn't an accident. Tom Brown killed Hank."
She seemed so positive about what she was saying that the detectives immediately ushered her into an interview room where she gave a second statement. There were to be five more statements as her memory fought its way to the surface.
Robin explained that she had gone with Tom after Hank was killed, but only out of fear for her life. Tom had not been her savior in the woods. He had raped her again and again. She still didn't understand how but Tom had somehow managed to convince her that she was there when Hank died, that the killing had been an accident, and that she should return to town with him to verify his story. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
This new version was hard to swallow, and the detectives interviewing her looked at each other doubtfully. Robin Marcus was given a polygraph exam— and failed.
Indeed, Robin Marcus would fail more lie detector tests, but the investigators came to believe her even though they couldn't say why. She agreed to talk with a psychiatrist in the hope that it would help her explore which memories were real and which had been planted there by Tom Brown.
The forensic psychiatrist talked with Robin at length and reported his findings. He explained that Tom Brown had played such tricks with her mind that it would be a long time before she would be able to remember exactly what had happened. She wasn't lying; she had been very skillfully brainwashed.
At this point, the Clackamas County sheriff's office didn't have much of a case to take into court. Conflicting statements. Conflicting polygraphs. Nothing tangible to work with. Worse, Tom Brown was gone. He was a drifter; he could be anywhere. He might never be found.
The case, however, was taken to a grand jury, which would decide if the death of Hank Marcus had been a murder or an accident. The case remained there for some months. In the interim, Brown's lawyer, James O'Leary, ran for district attorney of Clackamas County and won. Even if the grand jury decided that Brown should be charged, there was no way O'Leary could prosecute a case in which he had originally been the defendant's lawyer.
The grand jury ultimately agreed that Tom Brown should be tried for the murder of Hank Marcus. An indictment charging Thomas Brown with murder, forgery, and car theft was handed down by the grand jury in late December, five months after Hank Marcus died; it was not going to be an easy case to prosecute. (The latter two charges were from another state, and both crimes had occurred before the events of July 24.)
James A. Redden, Oregon's attorney general, maintained a special Criminal Justice Division. It was manned by assistant attorneys general and investigators who were available to help county D.A.s prosecute cases if they requested assistance. Small counties often had complicated cases that required more manpower than they had on staff. Most of the attorney general's lawyers and several of the investigators had years of experience in criminal investigation. The investigators were once the cream of the detectives in the departments from which they were recruited.
Assistant Attorney General Stephen Keutzer was from the Lane County district attorney's office in Eugene, and Assistant Attorney General Robert Hamilton had once been on staff in the Marion County D.A.'s office in Salem. Between them, they had a great deal of experience in prosecuting homicide cases. Now they responded to Clackamas County's request for help in the investigation and prosecution of Tom Brown.
* * *
Robin Marcus's many statements suggested that she might be a good candidate for Sodium Amytal (truth serum) and the grand jury requested an examination by Dr. J. H. Treleaven, head of the Psychiatric Security Unit of Oregon State Hospital, to see if the drug might unveil hidden areas in her mind.
Treleaven's conclusion was that the young widow would probably reveal nothing more under truth serum. He determined that she had been subjected to classic brainwashing during the time she was held captive after her husband's murder. All the elements were there: psychic shock, isolation, programming, the promise of reward and, for Robin, the need to alleviate her guilt that she had been responsible for Hank's death.
The shock of hearing her husband was dead and seeing her dog shot before her eyes would have been profound. The wilderness of the Mount Hood National Forest was as isolated as a place could get. And over the three days Robin was held captive, Brown syst
ematically programmed her to believe whatever he told her about the "accident." Robin's promised reward was that she might escape with her life. Perhaps more important to her, she wanted to believe it had all been accidental. That would relieve her of the burden of knowing Hank had died because this stranger desired her sexually and was willing to kill to get her. In her mind, she would have felt responsible for the death of the man she loved more than anyone on earth.
Robin Marcus was, after all, only sixteen years old. She was suggestible and pliable. Before her ordeal, she had been an exceptionally trusting person. She was deeply religious, and she had only her Bible for protection against the stalking killer.
Now Keutzer and Hamilton and their team of investigators would start from the beginning, reviewing all the evidence on the case, the conflicting statements, and the circumstances of the killing. Optimally, a homicide case is easier to prepare when the prosecution team has been at the crime scene within hours of the event, just as the time element in solving a murder is so vital. The more time that passes after a killing takes place, the less likely investigators are to solve it.
