Empty Promises (41 page)

Tom smiled, his teeth white in the dusk, and lowered the gun. They made their way back to the campfire.
Hank and Robin prepared to sleep in their car again.
"I'll rap on your hood in the morning when I get up," Tom said, "about five."
Alone in their car, with Rusty tied outside, Robin told Hank she didn't like Tom. "He seems to enjoy killing for its own sake," she whispered.
Hank held her close and said softly, "You just have to understand everyone in his own way, honey."
Hank was like that. He didn't judge people— he accepted them, but Robin felt an overwhelming rush of fear that she couldn't shake. She clung to Hank all night. While she watched him as he slept, she had a
numbing thought. What would she do if something took him away from her? She loved him so much, but she knew that sometimes there was nothing she could do to stop whatever Fate had planned for them.
At dawn on Saturday, July 24, they awoke to Tom pounding on the hood of their car. They'd slept in their clothes, and now they hurriedly pulled their shoes on. The three of them agreed they would fish before breakfast and Tom drove them in his truck deeper into the woods to a large clearing. He had trouble finding the trail, and Robin found this odd since he'd told them that he came here to hunt every weekend.
They finally found the path and headed up the overgrown trail. Robin ran ahead with Rusty and waited for Tom and Hank to catch up. The sun was shining now, and there were field daisies and wildflowers growing everywhere. The night's dread began to recede.
They had to climb over logs and rocks to reach the riverbank. Once there, Robin and Hank sat on a rock, and Tom stayed behind them. They all threw lines in, but their luck was no better here than it had been anywhere else. None of them caught anything.
Suddenly Robin felt prickles running up and down her spine and she sensed that Tom was pointing his gun at them. But when she turned to look, he was staring elsewhere, his gun cradled carelessly in his arms.
They decided to go back to camp and fix breakfast. They wouldn't have the fresh fish they'd counted on, but Robin would manage to throw something together. They were tired from tromping through the thick woods and climbing over deadfalls, and so they rested on a log along the trail. Robin whistled, and a bird flew close to them, checking to see if she was a bird, too.
She started to make a joke about her name being ap
propriate when Tom's rifle roared. He fired repeatedly at the birds all around them. Eerily, the more he fired, the closer the birds came.
"Why do they do that?" Robin asked. Tom seemed to have some weird aura about him.
"They're curious about the sound," he explained.
"Haven't you got better things to do than try to kill poor little birds?"
Tom didn't answer. In the sunlight when he squinted, he had eyes like a fox or a ferret; they seemed to see everything between his half-closed lids. He finally stopped firing at the birds, but he held his gun so that it appeared to be pointing at Hank, who didn't notice. Now Tom looked at their Rusty. He was stroking the dog as he said, "There're only two things wrong with Rusty," he said. "He's alive and walking."
It was a sick joke, and neither Hank nor Robin laughed.
Robin studied Tom. She couldn't figure him out. When he'd first seen her, his eyes had practically undressed her and he'd smiled broadly. She recognized male interest, but he'd barely glanced at her since, talking only to Hank.
Still, Hank told her he didn't trust Tom around her. When they got back to the truck in the thick early morning heat, Robin unbuttoned her blouse, revealing her bikini top, and Hank quickly told her to button it up again. Then Hank gave her a kiss, smiled, and walked away with Tom. They each carried a gun and were headed back toward the clearing.
Robin was alone now. She could hear the birds chirping and Rusty panting in the heat. She knew she should fix breakfast, but she was immobilized with a dread that was much worse than before. She tried
whistling loudly but no one responded, not even the birds.
And then she heard the shot. Only one shot. It reverberated through the woods until the echoes diminished into dead silence.
She waited, wondering what the men had shot at. After a time, Tom came strolling back. "We got us a deer," he said laconically. "I need a knife to gut it out."
Something wasn't right. Hank would have been the one to come back and tell her. He wouldn't have sent Tom back. With Rusty close beside her, she began to run toward where she'd heard the shot.
Tom's gun roared again behind her and she looked back to see Rusty falter and fall dead in the path, his blood staining his silky sable fur. Horrified and sobbing, Robin turned toward Tom with a question on her lips. But now Tom was leveling the rifle at her.
"You shot my dog!" she screamed.
"Yeah, I know," Tom smiled. "I shot your husband, too."
Tears coursed down her face, and she pleaded, "Oh, God… please don't hurt me!"
She believed Hank was dead. She knew Rusty was dead. Robin Marcus was sixteen years old, and she was alone in the wilderness with a killer. She fully expected to die, but it didn't seem to matter much at that point; she had lost the two beings who were closest to her.

* * *

It would be three days— Saturday, Sunday, and Monday— before Robin would get the chance to tell anyone what had happened up there in the woods near the meadow. When she did, she appeared rational— in shock, certainly— but basically lucid.
The detectives and attorneys who listened to her
story took her at her word. They didn't understand then that they might as well have been listening to a programmed robot.
On Tuesday, July 27, Robin Marcus and Tom Brown entered the offices of an Oregon City attorney, James O'Leary. O'Leary, who had served as Tom Brown's attorney in the past, listened while Tom and Robin explained that Brown had accidentally killed Robin's husband in the Bagby Hot Springs area on Saturday, July 24. Robin sobbed as she recalled witnessing the accident. She said that she wanted to go with Brown to talk with the Clackamas County sheriff about the incident. She didn't want him to be blamed for something that wasn't his fault.
O'Leary contacted Detectives Hank Reeves and Lynn Forristall and they listened to the incredible story that Tom Brown and Robin Marcus gave. On the face of it, it seemed to be a tragic story about the accidental discharge of a gun. According to Brown, he and Hank Marcus had been looking for deer when they decided to exchange rifles. Brown said that one was a Winchester lever action and the other a .22 caliber high-power Savage. As they had passed the guns between them, Brown said one of the guns had gone off, fatally wounding Hank Marcus in the head. He died in an instant.
Tom Brown said that after Hank died, the Marcuses' pet collie, Rusty, went wild and attacked him. Robin nodded as Tom explained that he had no choice but to shoot Rusty. In the shocked aftermath of what happened, he said he and Robin wandered the wrong way in the forest and lost their bearings for three days.
Brown admitted that he had an extensive prior record, and conceded that this made him reluctant to report the accident. But then Robin promised to go to the authorities with him and confirm what had happened.
She told him she would explain to the police that she had witnessed her husband's death, and she would verify that Tom was telling the truth.
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.