“Seven holy virgins, buried side by side, the least worthy, are scattered. The score is, one of you, the other team 48”. The enigmatic words of Robert Browne, a convicted murderer serving time for the murder of a minor, resonated with force in the head of the county sheriff. What was he trying to tell her with this cryptic message? And above all, why now?
During the following years, a large group of researchers dedicated themselves to holding conversations with the criminal to solve the enigma. In time, they discovered that they were up against a dangerous serial killer, who had never been shy about killing men, women, or children. His modus operandi made him undetectable. Only a map, marked with a trail of corpses, could lead the agents to their remains. However, not all experts believed that spontaneous confession. Could he be lying?
Robert Charles Browne was born on October 31, 1952 in Coushatta (Louisiana) into a large family -he was the youngest of nine siblings-, much loved by the locals and owner of a dairy farm. Over the years, Ronald, our protagonist’s father, worked as a Red River deputy sheriff.
There are many who remember little Robert as an intelligent and studious child, although with a somewhat introverted, lonely and curmudgeonly character. After dropping out of high school, the boy decided to enlist in the army and serve in Vietnam and South Korea. But his addiction to drugs caused his immediate expulsion.
At the end of the seventies and after returning to Louisiana, Robert worked as a delivery man in different states and also as a tobacconist’s employee; he was married six times and had a son with his second wife, a Vietnamese woman he met in his military days.
In half of the cases, the criminal became physically and verbally violent and aggressive with his women, to the point of losing his temper and showing his most misogynistic side. Robert hated women, a conclusion reached by three of his six wives.
Looking at his criminal history prior to his two first-degree murder convictions, Robert was convicted three times for auto theft, as well as multiple counts of burglary, drugs, arson and animal abuse. However, as soon as he arrived, he spent a year behind bars.
Between 1987 and 1995, Robert perpetrated almost fifty crimes, although, for the moment, only those perpetrated within a period of five years (1987-1991) have been corroborated. According to the murderer’s testimony, his criminal career began in 1970: he killed a soldier during a fight in a South Korean bar.
From then on, he did not hesitate to take the lives of men, women and children, although his predilection was always the female sex due to his fervent misogyny. “Women are unfaithful, they screw around a lot, they cheat and they don’t have the highest moral value. They deceive and are abusive ”, she came to affirm before the investigators on one occasion.
It should be noted that none of those crimes was planned, but rather obeyed opportunities that were presented to him and that he had to take advantage of. “He was simply upset with the person and in part it was just confrontation,” he assured to justify his possible motivation.
Nor did he have a predilection for the place to kidnap and/or kill his victims. It could be in any public place, from motels to grocery stores.
The same was the case with the method chosen to perpetrate the crime: from shooting, stabbing with ice picks and screwdrivers, strangulation, launching from high places like cliffs, to poisoning with chemical products.
Once the victim lay dead, Robert proceeded to dismember his body and leave the remains in remote places: rivers, lakes and ditches, passing by cliffs, the very desert or garbage cans in any passing town.
To this was added that, given the non-existent link between victim and perpetrator, the authorities saw it as impossible to hunt him down. This is how Robert ran wild with him for decades feeling absolutely unpunished.
According to the experts who analyzed his case, that is where his danger lies. “Sometimes, killers don’t replicate things from one crime to another. That makes it difficult for the police, ”wrote police officer and detective Robert Keppel, known for his contributions to the investigations of murderers Ted Bundy and Gary Ridgwar.
Or FBI profiler Robert Ressler, who coined the term serial killer: “When people like him feel like it, the whole world is in danger.”
On the afternoon of September 17, 1991, Robert broke into the Church home where 13-year-old Heather was taking care of her little brother, Sage, 5. Apparently, the murderer’s intention was to steal her, but not finding the house empty, he became enraged and lashed out at the teenager, killing her with a strong blow to the head.
He then took the body in his truck and dumped it about 30 miles on a trail in the Rampart Range Recreation Area. For the next two years, the Church family and police desperately searched for the little girl in what appeared to be a disturbing disappearance case. The only clue: three fingerprints from an unknown individual on the windowsill. Nobody knew who it was, the first match did not work.
Later on, on September 16, 1993, a camper reported the presence of a human skull in the Rampart Range Road area. After the pertinent analysis, it was confirmed that it was Heather and an autopsy was carried out. Coroners ruled the cause of death blunt force trauma and a homicide investigation was opened.
Given this new result, the investigation group again sent the fingerprints of unknown origin to the FBI and CBI (California Bureau of Investigation) system. They also did not get a positive result.
Ultimately, it was the captain of the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office who, in 1995, decided to send the prints to the 92 other Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) across the country, as well as to depository fingerprints from each of the states of the union. It was the only way to find out if whoever was at the Church house had a record or a criminal record.
On March 24 of that same year, a miracle occurred: fingerprints recovered at the Church crime scene were reported to match those of a convict, Robert Browne, 42, who lived less than a kilometer from the murdered girl. They already had his man.
Several investigators went to Robert’s home to take his statement. During cross-examination, the killer denied any connection to Heather or the Church home and maintained his innocence. He didn’t even budge when they showed him his fingerprint report. But the evidence was clear and the agents proceeded to arrest him for the first degree murder of Heather. It was March 18, 1995.
Two months later, on May 25, Robert accepted a plea bargain to escape the death penalty. Thus, the killer pleaded guilty to the murder of Heather Church and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
On March 20, 2000, Robert decided to confess to the rest of the crimes. He did so by writing a cryptic letter to the El Paso County sheriff in which he spoke of 48 murders. From then on, an epistolary relationship began between the murderer and the investigators: the criminal listed the places, victims, and dates on which he committed each murder.
He even drew a map with the trail of victims he had left in Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas. Agents corroborated seven more murders, and Robert accepted another plea deal for the murder of a second victim, 15-year-old Rocio Sperry, who disappeared on November 10, 1987, in Colorado Springs, whose body was never recovered.
“None ever escaped; the opportunity was never given. If you are going to do it, do it ”, he recounted from prison. However, Robert never finished providing enough information to find the remains of those alleged victims. Hence, the investigators of the case and some experts in criminal profiling consider that everything is the product of an invention to feel like a protagonist.
“Probably, without a doubt, the guy murdered a lot of people, but the numbers are for media purposes only. This guy has lied, cheated and stolen his entire life, and there is no indication that he is going to tell you the whole truth about all of his victims, ”Keppel wrote in an interview.
Currently, Robert Browne remains in the Limon Correctional Center (Colorado) while his family, mainly one of his older brothers, a police officer like his father, wonders how he did not realize that the youngest of the house he had become a ruthless serial killer.
“We are shocked. We cannot understand it in any way. They educated us well. Our parents were great parents. We know the difference between right and wrong, and we were taught that,” Raymond Browne said in an interview. But, sometimes like this, even that isn’t enough to stop the criminal instinct from coming to the fore.
