Empty Promises (34 page)

They finally admitted that they were not Mike and John Ford. Nor were they from Oklahoma as they had told Susan Bartolomei. They were from Ritzville,
Washington, a little town of 1,500 residents that sat on a lonely stretch of I-90 west of Spokane. The taller, rather-studious-looking member of the duo gave his name as Thomas Braun. He wore thick, dark-rimmed classes. His slight, wispy-mustached partner said he was Leonard Maine.
The California authorities checked with the sheriff of Adams County, Washington. Surprisingly, neither suspect had a criminal record. Braun had been employed at a service station in Ritzville while Maine, married and the father of a three-month-old baby, worked in a local cement-mixing plant. The two had left Ritzville on August 17 in Braun's recently purchased Borgward sedan. They were both eighteen years old.
If they were guilty of killing Tim Luce and raping and shooting Susan Bartolomei, no one who knew them in Ritzville had ever had any reason to expect such violent behavior from them. They seemed to be ordinary guys living ordinary— if boring— lives in a little town that baked hot in the summer and froze in the winter. Sometimes it seemed that if Ritzville wasn't being blasted by sandstorms, it was being pelted by blizzards.
As the questioning continued, the local officers were joined by John B. Smoot of the California Investigation and Identification Department. Tom Braun admitted to Smoot that he had raped and shot Susan Bartolomei, killed Tim Luce, and killed a woman near Seattle and a middle-aged man in Oregon. The admitted mastermind of the killing spree calmly agreed to help detectives in those states locate the bodies of the victims.
Leonard Maine confirmed Braun's story. Maine, however, insisted that he had been an unwilling pawn who was terrified of Braun and that he continued on the journey only because Braun would have killed him if
he didn't. The men questioning him wondered why— if he feared for his life— Maine hadn't crept out of the hotel in Jamestown and escaped instead of falling asleep with a fully loaded gun in his possession.
California I.D. men compared the .22 caliber bullets taken from the bodies of Tim Luce and Susan Bartolomei with the bullets in the suspects' Ruger and Frontier Scout and in the drawers in rooms 26 and 19 of the Jamestown Hotel. They all proved to be from the same lot and the same manufacturer. More significant, the tool marks on the casings on the road where Susan was found indicated that the bullets had been fired by the Ruger and the Scout. No other guns could have made those exact markings.
The lawmen in Tuolumne and Mendocino Counties hoped they had apprehended Maine and Braun in time to prevent other killings; they hadn't reckoned with the possibility that their cases came at the end of a murder spree. Now the word coming back from Snohomish County, Washington, and Portland, Oregon, seemed to confirm Braun's and Maine's stories: their killing spree had obviously begun in the North.
Braun and Maine had described a murder up near Cannon Beach, Oregon, that had not yet been discovered. There, they said they had encountered "an old guy" on a logging road where they had detoured to take a look at the Pacific Ocean. Oregon salesman Samuel Ledgerwood, fifty-seven, had apparently had a successful day's fishing and was heading home when he came across the two suspects, who were changing a tire on the side of the road. He pulled over to help them. It was the last act of kindness he would ever perform.
Within a very short time, Ledgerwood lay dead on the isolated logging road with two .22 caliber slugs in his head. Tom Braun and Leonard Maine had still been
driving Deanna Buse's car when Ledgerwood stopped to help them, but now they set it on fire— they didn't need it anymore. They headed toward California in their latest victim's green Buick. Perhaps it was Ledgerwood's newer model Buick that tempted the killers and led to his death. Or perhaps murder just for the hell of it had been their goal all along when they rolled out of Ritzville. They didn't know any of their victims and the victims themselves were different ages, different sexes. The only thing they had in common was that they were there when Braun and Maine roved along roads and freeways.
Oregon officers had a Missing Report on Sam Ledgerwood, but they hadn't found his body yet. Even as they headed out to the spot Leonard Maine described— a wooded area off a logging road near Cannon Beach— a report came in. A hunter had just discovered the remains of a man in that area, and there were indeed two bullet wounds in his head. It was Ledgerwood.
Nearby, the Oregon investigators found Deanna Buse's Buick Skylark. The car was a charred hulk, and they could see bullet holes in the gas tank. It's VIN was still quite readable; the clumsy suspects had thought the flames would obliterate all connections to the missing Washington bride, and once again they were wrong.
With directions relayed from Tuolumne County, Detectives Russ Jubie and Tom Hart of Snohomish County, Washington, left headquarters at 11:00 P.M. on August 22. Deanna Buse had been missing for three days and now, though they dreaded what they might find, they had their first clue to her whereabouts.
Following the directions that Braun and Maine had given the lawmen, Jubie and Hart headed for the densely wooded area surrounding Echo Lake, eight
miles south of Monroe, Washington, then down Highway 202 and east on the Echo Lake Road, where they eventually turned off and traveled half a mile down a gravel road. Finally, they came to a one-way lane leading into the woods. Even in the middle of an August day, the woods were a dark and inky green, shut off from the sun by evergreens that grew so close together it was hard to tell where the branches of one tree ended and another began. Now, at midnight, the woods were absolutely pitch dark.
Carrying a high-powered light, the officers walked into the morass of brush and fir trees; the only sound was their boots crunching on the forest floor. Some twenty-five yards from the end of the lane, Tom Hart found Deanna Buse.
It was obvious that the pretty young housewife had not had even the slight chance of survival granted to Susan Bartolomei. Had she been left grievously wounded, there was no way Deanna could have crawled out of the deep woods. She lay on her back, her arms crossed over her chest. She was nude, and her clothes were folded meticulously and left in a neat pile beside her body. From what the detective sergeant could tell in the artificial light, she had been shot beneath her left eye and just below her ear. While Snohomish County detectives began their night-long investigation at the scene, representatives from the sheriff's office undertook the sad task of informing Deanna Buse's relatives that she had been found.
Dr. Alexander G. Robertson performed the autopsy on Deanna's body the next morning, August 23. He found five "projectile entries" —five entrance wounds from .22 caliber bullets. Several of them would have been instantly fatal. Any assailant who aims for the
head of a human being is intent on killing that person. There was only small comfort for her husband and family. Deanna had been forced to remove her clothes out there in the deep woods; folding them neatly may have been a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable. She had not been raped, however; perhaps something had spooked the two men who took her there, or maybe her pleading had dissuaded them.
Morning papers all over the West Coast headlined the monstrous results of Thomas Braun's and Leonard Maine's flight from Washington to Oregon to California. There was little doubt that the deadly pair would be tried for murder in each of the three states. They were swiftly indicted in California and arrangements were made for their trial for the murder of Tim Luce and the shooting and sexual assault of Susan Bartolomei.
Miraculously, Susan was still alive. She had made it through intricate brain surgery, although the extent of the damage to her brain wouldn't be known for some time. The brain, which feels no pain, swells tremendously when it is insulted, forcing it against the hard surface of the skull where it is crushed and bruised. If surgeons aren't present to cut the skull away temporarily, the human brain begins to die. Susan had lain unattended for hours with bullets in her brain.

* * *

The murder of Tim Luce had inflamed public opinion against the defendants. Because of all the publicity, their California trial was moved to San Jose in a change of venue. This first trial was carried out in two phases; only during the penalty phase did the prosecution bring out the cases of Deanna Buse and Samuel Ledgerwood. Susan Bartolomei, the girl neither defendant ever expected to see alive again, was carried into the court
room on a stretcher. There, painfully, slowly, with the use of hand signals, the brave girl proved to be a devastatingly damaging witness against the men who had meant to kill her.
The San Jose jury found Braun guilty and recommended the death penalty. He was sentenced to the gas chamber and transferred to death row in San Quentin. Maine, who steadfastly insisted he'd been an unwilling accomplice, was found guilty but sentenced to ten years to life. He began that sentence in the prison at Tracy, California, immediately following the trial.

* * *

Still more trials lay ahead. In Everett, Washington, the Snohomish County seat, Leonard Maine and Thomas Braun now went on trial for Deanna Buse's murder.
There were two phases of the trial— one to decide the guilt or innocence of the accused, and one to set the penalty for Braun and Maine should they be found guilty. Testimony from California authorities during the first phase of the trial was restricted to facts pertaining to the youths' arrest in Jamestown.
Spectators packed the second-floor courtroom each morning as testimony began. This would be the first time that Washington trial watchers would hear the entire story of the murderous duo's trail of death and destruction.
Judge McCrea issued an order to the news media weeks before the trial. The three-page document drawn in open court on October 8, 1970, decreed that reporters could not disseminate to the public any testimony given in the absence of the jury, judge, court reporter, defendants and counsel for all parties. Cameras and recording devices were banned from the second floor of the Snohomish County Courthouse. Sketches would be allowed, but only if they were "non-inflammatory" in nature.
Judge Thomas McCrea had good reason to caution newsmen. The Braun-Maine trial was expected to last four to six weeks, so he decided not to sequester the jury. He doubted that the attorneys could choose a representative panel from the pool of potential jurors if they learned they would be separated from their families for such an extended time. Without McCrea's gag rule, jurors who went home each night might hear, and be influenced by, comments and testimony that was off the record.
At that, selecting a jury whose members were not familiar with some aspect of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine's crimes would prove difficult; the Ritzville pair had cut a swath of violence across three states three years earlier, and that was difficult to forget. Ordinarily, jury selection lasts a day or two. In the Braun-Maine trial, it took almost two weeks before Defense Attorneys Richard Bailey (for Thomas Braun), Samuel Hale (for Leonard Maine), and Prosecutors David Metcalf and Bruce Keithly were all satisfied with a jury of seven men and five women, plus three alternates.
Judge McCrea instructed the jury, "Don't let sentiment, pity, passion, sway your judgment. You will be judging these men on the axiom of reasonable doubt. You will not be judging them by whim or intuition."
It was 2:00 P.M. on an uncommonly bright October day when Deputy Prosecutor Metcalf rose to make his opening statement to the jury. As he spoke about the murder of the victim, Deanna Buse, Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine listened to the state's damning statements with no change of expression. Braun wrote constantly on a yellow legal tablet— as he would do throughout the trial. Both wore conservative suits, and their haircuts bore no resemblance to the wild "hippie"
locks they had affected at the time of their arrest. If there was one clue to the fact that they had, indeed, been in jail for the past three years, it was their dead-white prison pallor. They looked as if they'd been underground for a long, long time.
"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.

* * *

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 California 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.