Empty Promises (35 page)

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.
Joseph and Lorraine had met sometime after he rejoined the secular community. They fell in love, married, and adopted two children. Jannie was seven years old in June of 1981; her brother, Max,* was six months younger. The Reillys lived in a pleasant white frame house in the Magnolia Bluff section of Seattle. They had a dog and plenty of neighbor children for Jannie and Max to play with. The children's bedroom was in the basement, close to Lorraine's sewing room, conveniently near the door that opened into the big backyard. The Reillys slept upstairs.
Joseph Reilly was educated by the Jesuits, the scholars of the Roman Catholic priesthood, and he made a solid, comfortable living working for a furnace company. Lorraine was involved in the community, devoted to her adopted children and her extended family in Oregon. She had a warm and forgiving heart, but she was, perhaps, naive. She believed in giving people endless second chances and she felt that love and ac
ceptance could cure most of the ills of the mind and spirit.
Despite the serenity of the Reilly home, something unspeakable happened there during the night of June 18. One of their neighbors awakened sometime that night. She would be the first person outside the Reilly home to sense that something horrible had happened.
Just before the summer solstice in Seattle, it stays light until 10:00 P.M. and the sun rises again a little after 4:00 A.M. The Reillys' neighbor was unsure of the time she woke, but she was positive it was full dark when she heard voices outside. She pulled back the curtain next to her bed and saw two figures walking on the street, but she thought little of it; the neighborhood was close to Discovery Park, a sprawling greensward that ended abruptly at a dizzyingly high bluff overlooking Puget Sound. There were people in the park at all hours of the day and night.
The Reillys' restless neighbor finally fell back to sleep, but something woke her again near dawn. She looked at her bedside clock, noting that it was 4:00 A.M. She heard a car door slam shut, or perhaps it was a house door. Peering out at the street again, she saw Lorraine Reilly's brother, who was visiting from Oregon. Lorraine had told her that her brother, Arnold, was twenty-four, but somehow he seemed much younger. Now he was standing anxiously at the curb, apparently waiting for someone. As she watched, she heard the wail of a siren and saw a fire department aid unit pull up next door. It was followed almost immediately by a Medic One rig. The neighbor's first thought was "heart attack." The Reillys were barely middle-aged, but such things did sometimes happen.
She could not have imagined what had occurred inside the protective walls of the house next door. Even
the paramedics, who are used to tragedy, were shocked when they saw their patient. A small girl lay on the living room couch, her body covered with a blanket. Her face was suffused with a deep cherry-red flush, something they knew was characteristic in cases of suffocation or carbon monoxide poisoning.
Jannie Reilly was unresponsive to stimuli, and the paramedics could detect no heartbeat or pulse. Still, they tried to resuscitate her. They lifted her to the carpet and cut away the red, white, and blue shirt she was wearing over a pair of red panties. They attached leads from their Life-Pak to her chest to monitor any sign of heart activity and then began CPR.
Nothing.
They started a peripheral I.V. and slid an endotracheal tube down her throat to force oxygen into her lungs.
Nothing.
With permission from a supervising M.D. at Harborview Hospital, they attempted to start her heart with an injection directly into the heart itself. It was too late. In truth, they had known it was too late going in, but it was so hard to believe that a child so young was beyond help, even when they saw that her pupils were fixed and dilated. And she had not been dead long; her flesh was still warm.
While her agonized parents and her uncle stood by, the paramedics stopped their efforts and marked the time of death at 4:14 A.M.
Seattle Police Patrol Officers Ty Kane, Jon Mattox, Garry McLenaghen, and J. G. Burchfield had been dispatched moments after the call for help came from the Reilly home. Now the paramedics beckoned them over and pointed out the angry scarlet crease on the child's
neck. It was an obvious ligature mark. Jannie Reilly had not died of natural causes.
Unlike the Ramsey investigation in Boulder, Colorado, this crime scene was immediately sealed to all but the police. The patrol officers cordoned off the home and yard with yellow crime-scene tape and sent for a homicide team.
While a police radio operator was alerting the on-call sergeant, Don Cameron, the officers inspected the exterior doors and windows of the home. There was no sign of forced entry, and Joseph Reilly assured them that the doors and windows had been locked when the family went to bed the night before. He had double-checked them himself.
Understandably, the Reillys were nearly overwhelmed with shock and grief, and their priest hurried over to give what comfort he could to the family who were now confined to the kitchen while the police began their investigation. Lorraine Reilly's brother, Arnold Brown, crouched on his heels next to the refrigerator, his large brown eyes fixed on the opposite wall. Antsy and tense, he made several trips to the bathroom to wash his hands.
Nobody was acting normal— but it was a far from normal situation. Only Jannie's little brother, Max, slept on, unaware that his world had changed forever.
It was 4:36 A.M. when Don Cameron called his crew— Danny Melton and John Nordlund— at home. Then he left for the crime scene. The three detectives arrived at the Reilly home shortly after 5:00 A.M. and tried to make some sense of what had happened. The house was warm and homey, but the Reillys were obviously not at all wealthy. Why would someone choose their home to invade?
Cameron asked the Reillys what they remembered
of the previous night. Had they heard or seen anything out of the ordinary? Shaking his head as if waking from a nightmare, Joseph Reilly said that everything had been completely routine the night before— until Arnold woke him in the wee hours of the morning. "He said he had walked past Jannie's room and she wasn't there," Reilly recalled. "We immediately began to search for her."
He and Arnold had hurried to the backyard, accompanied by the family dog. "Our dog immediately went to the right with his tail wagging, and then he went to the corner of the fence," Reilly said. "I looked over the fence, and that's when I saw Jannie over on the other side of the fence, lying on the ground."
Reilly said he scaled the fence and ran to his daughter, who was lying on her side in a fetal position. He lifted her and carried her in his arms, while Arnold wrenched a section of the fence out with his bare hands so that Reilly could bring Jannie through. She felt warm and soft, like herself, and he thought she had only been walking in her sleep. But he couldn't figure out how she had gotten over the fence.
He tried to fight down the panic that kept bubbling up. Jannie's body was very still, and she wasn't making a sound. The horrified father called out to his wife as he ran toward the house, shouting for her to call 911. They laid Jannie on the couch and covered her with a blanket while Arnold ran out to watch for the paramedics.
Arnold Brown explained to the trio of detectives that he was not a regular member of the Reilly household; he had arrived only three days earlier and was visiting from Eugene, Oregon, where he lived with his parents and his other sisters. "I'm only going to stay and visit about ten days," he said.
Arnold said that he'd spent the previous evening at the Reillys' house, except for a short stroll from 10:30 to 11:00, when he took their dog for a walk. After that, he stayed up late watching television while the Reillys went to bed.
"How was it that you noticed Jannie was missing?" Don Cameron asked.
"Well, I watched TV upstairs until about two-thirty and then I went down to my room to watch on my set there," he answered. "I got thirsty and started upstairs to get a glass of water, and I noticed that Jannie wasn't in her bed, but Max was there. That's when I went and woke up my sister and brother-in-law and we started to look for her. I helped Joseph over the fence, and then went to where I thought there was a gate, but there wasn't any, so I just pulled the fence apart."
Dr. John Eisele, assistant King County medical examiner, arrived to examine the victim's body at 7:15 A.M. He agreed with the investigators that the reddish purple mark on her neck indicated that some kind of ligature had been tightened around her throat with terrific force.
There was very little in the way of physical evidence. Eisele found a few single hairs inside the victim's red panties. They appeared to be pubic hairs and they were much darker than her blond hair. John Nordlund bagged these into evidence.
The detectives took hair samples from members of the household. Arnold Brown was asked to supply samples from his head and pubic area and he did so without argument.
They noted what appeared to be blood spatters on the wall of Brown's room, which was located directly across the hall from the children's bedroom on the ground floor. Both rooms were close to the back door
that led out to the yard. The detectives photographed the spatters before they carefully lifted blood samples from the wall with swabs moistened with a sterile water solution.
Something about Arnold Brown niggled at them; they sensed that he was experiencing something more than grief. He was nervous, but that was to be expected. He looked young for twenty-four. He still had that gawky, unfinished look that teenagers have. He was medium-tall, medium-built, brown-haired. He had just lost his niece, a child he said he was very fond of, but his reactions were slightly off, and his demeanor was flat. Still, people deal with grief and shock differently. Maybe they were looking at Arnold so closely because he was the one new element in the household's composition; he had been visiting for only three days.
When they questioned him more closely, Arnold Brown grudgingly revealed that he was in Washington State on a travel permit from the Oregon State Department of Corrections. "I'm on probation," he said quietly.
"For what?" Nordlund asked.
Arnold said he had a conviction for first-degree burglary because he'd been found inside a roller rink after it was closed.
Nordlund knew that it took more than that to be convicted of first-degree burglary, but he said nothing. "Anything else?" Nordlund asked.
Arnold admitted that he also had a juvenile record because of an assault, but he declined to be more specific. Nordlund didn't press him— they would check on his record later.
Arnold's hands were scratched and they had curious red pressure marks on them, creases that were not quite bruises.
"Where did you get those?" Danny Melton asked.
He stared at his hands and said finally, "I must have gotten those from the blackberry bushes."
John Nordlund took pictures of Arnold's hands; they would be part of a growing photographic record of the scene where Jannie Reilly had lived and died. Among the photos were shots of the house, the yard, and the body of the victim.
Asked what clothes he wore the evening before, Arnold said he had on his Movin' On jeans when he walked the dog, but had changed into the cutoffs he wore now. He readily agreed to turn over his cutoffs and jeans to the detectives so they could be tested in the crime lab. He couldn't find his jeans in his room, but then he finally dug down into his backpack and pulled them from the bottom. "If they have blood on them, it would be Jannie's from her getting hurt at the playground today," he said.
They knew that Jannie Reilly's body had no cuts or abrasions on it— nothing beyond the mark on her neck. Arnold was protesting too much.
The homicide detectives had yet to find the weapon of death— some cord or rope that might have caused the deep groove in Jannie's neck. They searched the backyard in the gray light of early morning, scanning it for anything that looked out of place. Eventually, they found a wire cord near the fence. They thought it might match the cruel indentation on the small victim's neck. But Dr. Eisele looked at it and shook his head. No match.