Robert Charles Browne and Charles J Hess

[albion]

I thought this was mentioning. There is plenty of info about Browne on the internet. And I wonder about his connections to the Goleta and the couple he says he murdered while they camped on the beach. It seems similar to the couple murdered there in Goleta or Torrey Pines.

Browne's service in the military is interesting. He was dishonorably discharged for drug use in 1976 after serving three tours. And while Browne served in South East Asia, so did Hess, as a member of the Phoenix Program.

FYI, Hess is the retired LE who got Browne to give details to the murders. It took him 2 years via letters and visits to the prison Browne was at.

[albion]

Browne was arrested in 1995 on charges of murdering Heather Dawn Church in 1991.

On July 27, 2006, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the death of Rocio Delpilar Sperry, who was killed at the age of 15 on November 10, 1987, at a Colorado Springs apartment complex.

In his confession, authorities say Browne admitted to murdering up to 48 other people in a period spanning from 1970 until his arrest. Browne instigated a new investigation by sending a cryptic letter to the authorities in 2000. The letter read "Seven sacred virgins entombed side by side, those less worthy are scattered wide, the score is you 1, the other team 48.” The letter included a hand drawn map with outlines of Colorado, Washington, California, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, with the body count written inside each state.

[albion]

DENVER -- Robert Charles Browne says he shot some of his victims and strangled others, in one case with a pair of leather shoelaces. He knocked out one woman with ether, then used an ice pick on her. He put a rag soaked in ant killer over another victim's face and stabbed her nearly 30 times with a screwdriver.

If Browne is telling the truth about killing 49 people across the country, his crimes practically constitute a manual on the many ways in which to kill.

In fact, it may have been the variety in his methods that kept authorities from connecting the crimes until Browne sent a taunting letter to prosecutors six years ago.

"Sometimes killers do not replicate things from one crime to the next," said criminologist Robert Keppel, a professor at Sam Houston State University and author of the 1997 book "Signature Killers." ``That makes it hard on police."

Colorado authorities announced on Thursday that Browne, 53, claimed to have committed scores of killings between 1970 and his arrest in 1995. He has pleaded guilty to two slayings and is serving a life sentence for murdering a Colorado girl in 1991.

Investigators so far have been able to corroborate Browne's claims in six slayings -- three in Louisiana, two in Texas, and one in Arkansas, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said.

In some cases, however, investigators have been unable to confirm some of his claims to have dumped bodies in certain places. And in other cases, he cannot remember enough details for investigators to check out what he is telling them.

Court papers paint a picture of a predator who loathed women and thought he was justified in killing them because they were cheating on their husbands and boyfriends -- in many cases, with him.

Browne, who has been married six times, said he has been disappointed with women his whole life. ``Women are unfaithful, they screw around a lot, they cheat, and they are not of the highest moral value," he told investigators. ``They cheat and they are users."

He told investigators he rarely if ever planned a killing, choosing his prey at random. He met his victims in everyday settings -- a motel bar, a convenience store where he worked. In one case, he was familiar with a victim's apartment because he had changed the locks there as a maintenance man.

He said he used different types of guns and sometimes beat his victims. One died after he put a rag soaked in ant killer over her face while she slept, he said.

An Army veteran who served in South Korea during the 1970s, Browne described killings committed with unspeakable cruelty. He said he dismembered Rocio Sperry, whose remains have never been found, in a bathtub, ``just popping" her joints and taking the body apart, investigators said. He said he was worried about being spotted carrying the body outside.

The remains of Nidia Mendoza, 17, were found dumped along a Houston interstate, her legs and head cut from the body. Browne told authorities he used a dull butcher knife that was in his motel kitchenette.

He told investigators in prison interviews that he never just went "looking for someone." When the opportunity was there, Browne said he took it -- "it was just disgust with the person and some of it just confrontation."

Maketa said Browne probably got away with his crimes because he never spent much time with his victims before killing them and was adept at disposing of their bodies.

[albion]

Robert Charles Browne

Age: 53

Hometown: Browne grew up in Coushatta, La., a town of fewer than 3,000 people about 50 miles southeast of Shreveport in northwestern Louisiana.

Family: He was one of nine children, including three sets of twins. Browne has a twin sister. His father worked at a dairy farm, and a brother, Donald Browne, was once a trooper for the Louisiana State Police.

Education: Browne dropped out of Coushatta's high school in 1969 and joined the Army, serving in South Korea as a medic.

[albion]

The sheriff's office says Browne claims to have strangled, shot or stabbed men and women he encountered at roadside turnouts, in bars or on the street. He would stab people with a knife, a screwdriver, or an ice pick. Browne told authorities he dismembered one victim in a motel room bathtub so he would not be seen carrying the body from the room, then put the parts in a suitcase and dumped it beside a road.

[albion]

Reared in the Coushatta and Fairview-Alpha areas of Red River and north Natchitoches parishes, Brown is one of nine children, including three sets of twins. His father is a former Red River Parish sheriff's deputy and his brother a former state trooper. Browne worked a short time as a dispatcher for the Red River Parish sheriff's office.

Browne was dishonorably discharged from the Army in 1976. He worked for IP's Mansfield Mill from 1981-83. He also drove a truck for a wholesale company, that gave him the opportunity to go on "ramblings." Browne, 53, referred to women as "trash," and didn't hide his disdain for them. While incarcerated in 2000, Browne drew a map showing where some of the killings took place. Some of the victims he remembered, others he didn't.

[albion]

Hess put in 10 years with the bureau, and then 3 as the city manager of National City, just south of San Diego. But with his 40th birthday looming and his marriage getting rocky, he was restless and ready for an adventure. He ran into an old classmate from the F.B.I. Academy who had been hired by the U.S. Agency for International Development (Usaid) to teach police work to the South Vietnamese. Hess was hired by Usaid, and late in the spring of 1967 he flew to Vietnam as a foreign-service officer of the State Department. “I don’t think I was in favor of the Vietnam War ideologically as much as I just wanted to find out what was going on over there,” he told me.

One day in the summer of 1967, Hess went on an inspection tour in a plane with a C.I.A. paramilitary officer named Robert Wall, who outlined a joint American-South Vietnamese program that the C.I.A. was organizing to “neutralize” the Vietcong political cadres. Wall offered Hess a job as a deputy coordinator for the Phoenix Program.

The Phoenix Program remains as controversial today as it was during the war. Depictions of it range from a flawed but valuable intelligence and counterinsurgency operation to a lawless, terror-for-terror assassination program that paved the way for some of the more dubious tactics in the United States’ current “war on terror.” Hess supervised Phoenix operations in III Corps, a group of 11 provinces comprising 53 districts. Wall noted in a 1968 report that Hess “actually pioneered the investigative aspects of the program, and the success he has achieved has led . . . to the implementation of his concepts and ideas in other Corps areas.”

When I pressed him on the issue, Hess said he had not participated in, or witnessed, the more brutal interrogation practices that were aired in Congressional hearings in the early 1970s, when United States soldiers gave accounts of prisoners being thrown out of helicopters, or “rung up” by electric shocks from hand-cranked field telephones, or pierced through the eardrums by sharpened bamboo dowels. Hess, who has a hat stitched with the message, “Vietnam — If You Weren’t There, Shut Up,” also made a point of telling me he had no objection in principle to such techniques during wartime: “In a war, and this is strictly my opinion, you do whatever is necessary to save American lives. The only people who know if it’s appropriate are the people who are doing it at the time.”

Within six months or so, around February 1968, Hess knew the program he had helped design was working poorly. “Essentially we did not understand the Vietnamese culture,” he told me. “Our tactics were based on what we had accomplished with informants in the West, especially in Europe during World War II. We were too stupid and ignorant and misinformed to understand that in Vietnamese culture it was O.K. to be a traitor and leave your village, but it was not O.K. to be a traitor and go back and be a mole.”

[almagata]

I wonder what else Hess was managing in his post in National City? Most City Managers are graduates of college with Public Administration degrees not with backgrounds in Federal law enforcement. National City was a hot bed of gang activity by the mid 1970's. A whole lot of illegal activity with Mexico was centered there.

In tracking behavior of all these serial killers, I've come to realize that what we have been fed on TV is not accurate. Serial Killers often do not follow a template like we see on Criminal Minds and other TV shows. They pick victims more randomly. Victims don't always have the same gender or appearance. They use a variety of killing methods. They dispose of bodies inconsistently. They often work with accomplices in some of their crimes including male-female teams. Yes, some of these guys have preferred types but a victim's looks do not preclude them from becoming a victim if they cross paths with a serial killer and the killer is in the mood to kill and the situation is right.

I found this quote from Browne's 7/29/02 letter interesting: "Location: Murky plaza depth -- cool caressing mire Amount: Seven Instructions: Drain-dig Accomplice: High Priestess Motive: Sacred virgins-less worthy scattered"

I found a book that may explain this quote. Plate 4: Avebury Trueslow August 9,1994 books.google.com/books?id=vCIxrjTAzaMC&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=seven+sacred+virgins&source=bl&ots=jtIdLe7bvh&sig=vvsyZ1FJFuMp4oeDzdmuLwYp8c4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjj7O_B4cXYAhVK0lMKHdfuDa0Q6AEIYDAI#v=onepage&q=seven%20sacred%20virgins&f=false

[marionumber1]

I've really wondered about Robert Charles Browne as well. What made me hear of him for the first time was actually studying the JonBenet Ramsey case, looking into the background of Lou Smit (who was on the Ramsey defense team), and discovering his role in solving the Heather Dawn Church murder and his partnership with Charlie Hess in getting Browne to confess to more. Hess's role for the CIA in Vietnam certainly caught my eye, especially since the Vietnam War was a common incubator for serial killers (Joseph DeAngelo, Mr. Y of the GSK case who I still suspect had some involvement, Richard Ramirez's cousin who mentored him, Arthur Shawcross, etc.) and the serial killer phenomenon is effectively a domestic form of the Phoenix Program.

Browne strikes me as another Henry Lee Lucas type who is eager to confess and is being used by law enforcement to clear the books on old cases. And like Lucas, I think it is too simplistic to say every confession is a hoax, but each one has to be carefully scrutinized. Lucas and his partner Ottis Toole claimed to be a part of the Hand of Death cult that did contract murders, which operated in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, California, and Colorado among other places. I could very well see Browne being involved in a similar group if not the exact same one. One of the murders attributed to Browne, that of Rocio Chila Sperry, gives me pause because I am pursuing a different potential pedophile suspect in Colorado and Ohio who was very well protected for his crimes and may have had tangible evidence linking him to Sperry's death.

albion, when you get a chance, what murder of a couple camping on the beach in/near Goleta are you referring to? Is it the Hood and Garcia murders (www.zodiacciphers.com/santa-barbara-murders-1970.html)? I did find it interesting that that murder was followed 4 months later by another in the same place, and one of the victims had false identification with the surname of, of all things, Hess (www.zodiacciphers.com/the-sleeping-bag-murders.html).

Also catching my eye is that Brett Glasby and his brother were purportedly found in Mexico at the scene of their death (web.archive.org/web/20110803042951/http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm241/portofleith-2008/3glasby.jpg) by "a Colorado man walking on the beach", who supplied the narrative of what happened. This would have been in 1982, and I don't think Browne officially relocated to Colorado until 1987, bu it did interest me.