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The Devil's Defender
My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre
John Henry Browne
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The Devil's Defender
My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre
John Henry Browne
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About This Book
In the tradition of bestselling legal memoirs from Johnnie Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Gerry Spence, and Alan Dershowitz, John Henry Browne's memoir, The Devil's Defender, recounts his tortuous education in what it means to be an advocate—and a human being. For the last four decades, the Seattle-based criminal defense lawyer has defended the indefensible. From Facebook folk hero "the Barefoot Bandit" Colton Harris-Moore, to Benjamin Ng of the Wah Mee massacre, to Kandahar massacre culprit Sgt. Robert Bales, Brown has stood at the forefront of our national debate over the death penalty, putting on trail our most base and violent instincts—and the institutional deficiencies that let our most vulnerable fall through the cracks. His unceasing advocacy and the daring to take on some of the most unwinnable cases—and nearly win them all—has led 48 Hours ' Peter Van Sant to call him "the most famous lawyer in America." But although the Browne that America has come to know cuts a dashing and confident figure, he has forever been haunted by his job as counsel to Ted Bundy, the most famous serial killer in American history. A formerly drug- and alcohol-addicted (yet wildly successful) defense attorney who could never let go of the case that started it all, Browne here traces the roots of his discontent as well as his dedication, asking himself the question others have asked him all along: Does defending evil make you evil, too?
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1
THE TED MURDERS
That’s all we had. A name. Women had vanished from Seattle and the surrounding region all year. And at first there was no way to talk about it—a woman, usually in her late teens or early twenties, would disappear and that was it: empty space where a promising young person had been. Aside from all the synonyms for fear, we had no language with which to discuss it. And then we did.
The Seattle Times, July 17, 1974, top of the fold: MISSING WOMAN LEFT BEACH WITH MAN, SAY WITNESSES. The article described the disappearance, three days earlier, of Denise Naslund, nineteen, and Janice Ott, twenty-three, at Lake Sammamish State Park. They were the eighth and ninth women to disappear in six months. Witnesses said the man had an injured arm and had asked the women for help loading a small sailboat onto his car. They described him, according to the newspaper, as “about 5 feet 6 or 7 inches, with a medium build and blondish-brown hair ‘down to his neck.’ He wore expensive-looking white tennis shoes, socks, shorts, and T-shirt. He also was described as smooth-talking with a ‘small English accent.’”
But the next detail would prove the most critical. The witnesses said they overheard the man tell Janice Ott that his name was Ted.
Although the police were quoted as saying these disappearances were unrelated to the seven others, they would quickly change their minds, and the fear that had gripped Seattle soon had a title, a monosyllable you’d hear whispered in conversation all over the city—on the sidewalk, in the checkout line, the elevator. No one, it seemed, could avoid talking about it. Everywhere it was Ted, Ted, Ted.
As the new chief trial attorney with the King County Office of Public Defense, I had just moved to Seattle from Olympia, where I’d spent the two previous years working in the Washington State attorney general’s office. But like everyone else, I’d followed the missing woman cases in the media since the beginning. The story seemed to have started not with a disappearance but with a University of Washington student savagely beaten.
Near campus on the morning of January 4, 1974, roommates found Karen Sparks, eighteen, unconscious in her bed. Blood covered the sheets. She’d been beaten with a metal rod and raped with some sort of shaft or dowel.
Just blocks away, on February 1, Lynda Ann Healy disappeared from her basement bedroom. On March 12 Donna Manson left her dorm to attend a concert at Evergreen State College in Olympia and was never seen again. April 17 Susan Rancourt vanished from Central Washington State College in Ellensburg, a hundred miles east of Seattle. At Oregon State University in Corvallis, Roberta Parks disappeared on May 6, followed in quick succession by Brenda Ball (June 1) in Burien, just south of Seattle, and Georgeann Hawkins (June 11), apparently kidnapped as she walked down an alley directly behind her Kappa Theta Alpha sorority house at the University of Washington.
Now Denise Naslund and Janice Ott had vanished in front of thousands of witnesses. (July 14, 1974, was an uncommonly hot and cloud-free day in western Washington, and people had come out in droves to soak up the sun on the beaches of Lake Sammamish.) The nine women had much in common. They were all pretty and nearly all college students, and all wore their hair long, mostly parted down the middle, which in 1974 was the fashion. Women began to cut their hair short that summer, presumably to avoid abduction. Investigators fielded hundreds of tips from people who thought they might know “Ted.” People turned in their friends, their coworkers, their boyfriends. If your name was Ted or Theodore in King County in the summer of 1974 and you drove a Volkswagen Bug—another detail witnesses were able to provide about the man at Lake Sammamish—the police likely knew about you. The lead detectives on the case called themselves the Ted Task Force. All their leads came up empty.
Then, just as abruptly as the abductions started, they stopped. There were no more disappearances after Naslund and Ott. The cease in activity was as eerie as it was relieving. But hysteria rose anew in early September when bird hunters found an open grave in the woods two miles southeast of Lake Sammamish. Investigators identified the skeletal remains of Naslund and Ott and uncovered dozens of other bones. They would later discover the remains of four victims—Ball, Healy, Parks, and Rancourt—on nearby Taylor Mountain, including skulls that showed blunt force trauma.
And that was it. After months of no abductions, police assumed that the killer had died, been incarcerated on another charge, or moved somewhere else.
Just as the Pacific Northwest shed its abduction problem, the state of Utah gained one. On October 2, 1974, sixteen-year-old Nancy Wilcox went missing from a neighborhood in a Salt Lake City suburb. Two and a half weeks later seventeen-year-old Melissa Anne Smith disappeared from another. On October 18 another seventeen-year-old, Laura Aime, was apparently snatched in Lehi, thirty miles south of Salt Lake.
On November 8 Carol DaRonch, a pretty nineteen-year-old telephone operator with brown hair parted down the middle, steered her maroon Camaro into the parking lot of Fashion Place Mall, the biggest shopping center in Salt Lake Valley. It was Friday night, and the place was packed. She found a parking spot in front of Sears, locked her car, and entered the mall. At a window display at Walden Books, a tall man with a mustache and a head of thick hair approached her. He introduced himself as Officer Rosebud and said he believed her car had been broken into. She needed to come with him to identify a suspect his partner had detained in the parking lot. She thought she smelled alcohol on his breath, but she explained it away in her mind when he flashed her what looked like a police badge.
Carol followed Rosebud out to her Camaro, which looked as if it hadn’t been touched since she left it half an hour earlier. There was no partner and no suspect. Officer Rosebud insisted she accompany him across the street to the “police substation,” the door of which was inexplicably behind a Laundromat. When the door wouldn’t open—it was locked—he insisted that she accompany him to the Murray police station. She followed him to what had to be the most decrepit police car ever issued to an officer: a banged-up VW Bug with torn upholstery.
Against better judgment, Carol climbed into the passenger seat, and Officer Rosebud drove them eastbound, which Carol knew didn’t lead to the police station. Suddenly he flipped a U-turn, stopped the car, and brandished a pair of handcuffs. He quickly cuffed her left wrist, and when she struggled to break free he inadvertently snapped the second cuff on the same wrist. She fumbled for the door handle, and he raised what looked like a metal pipe and swung it at her head. She dodged the blow and ran out into oncoming traffic. A car stopped, and the passenger door opened. Carol dove across the lap of its passengers, a married couple.
By then the VW was long gone.
An hour later, about twenty miles north of the mall, Debra Kent, seventeen, disappeared after a play at Viewmont High School. Witnesses reported seeing a handsome, if suspicious, man with a moustache lurking around the school before the play.
The abductions spread east into Colorado, where between January 12, 1975, and April 6, 1975, three women, all in their twenties, went missing, including twenty-three-year-old Caryn Campbell, who disappeared from a ski resort near Aspen. May and June saw the youngest victims to date, a twelve-year-old in Pocatello, Idaho, and a fifteen-year-old in Provo, Utah.
Slowly, the authorities in the western states began to connect the dots. The kidnappings, and the few bodies that had been recovered, seemed too similar not to be related. Could the “Ted” that terrorized the Seattle region in the first half of 1974 be the same man stalking the young women and teenagers of Colorado and Utah?
Decades later retired Utah highway patrolman Robert Hayward would tell a Deseret News reporter he thought it was an act of “the Lord”—the wrong turn he took at 3:00 AM on August 16, 1975, in his own neighborhood, placing the Volkswagen in the beam of his headlights. The Bug sat in front of the suburban home of two teenagers Hayward knew and whose parents he knew were out of town.
The suspicious car bolted away, and Hayward pursued it for several blocks before it pulled over at an abandoned gas station. A man popped out of the car and said, “I’m lost.” He wore a black turtleneck, and his dark hair curled down the length of his neck. He said he was a second-year law student at the University of Utah and, at Hayward’s request, handed over his driver’s license: Theodore Robert Bundy, age twenty-eight.
When the man couldn’t explain what he was doing in the neighborhood at that hour to Hayward’s satisfaction, the patrolman got his permission—later contested—to look inside the car. The search revealed two pairs of handcuffs, an ice pick, a crowbar, panty hose, and a ski mask. A sheriff’s deputy arrived and arrested Bundy on suspicion of burglary.
Detectives soon connected Bundy to the DaRonch kidnapping nearly a year earlier, as well as the multiple missing persons investigations. Then, over the next few weeks, more dots as they consulted the Ted Task Force in Seattle. All agreed: they had found “Ted.” Bolstered by the positive lineup identification of abduction survivor Carol DaRonch—also later contested—Utah authorities charged Bundy with kidnapping.
Soon out on bail—it had been set for $100,000, unusually low given the nature of the crime—and bound for Seattle, where he was now the Ted Task Force’s top suspect, Bundy called two friends whom he’d met while working on Washington governor Dan Evans’s recent election. They were attorney Marlin Vortman and another attorney, who is now a judge and wishes to remain anonymous (we’ll refer to him as “Nick” here).
Bundy told Nick and Marlin there’d been a mix-up, a stupid little problem in Utah, he said, a total misunderstanding, and asked if they knew of a good criminal defense attorney. They said they knew just the man, a new up-and-coming defense attorney in Seattle who, like them, recently worked with the governor’s office.
Then Marlin and Nick offered a warning, one important consideration. Five years earlier in California, they said, the defense lawyer’s twenty-three-year-old girlfriend was murdered. He might be sensitive about defending someone implicated in the homicide of young women.
Bundy thought about that for just a beat. “That’s the guy I want.”
2
“WHERE’D YOU GET
THOSE SHOES?”
Marlin called me in October 1975. I knew him and Nick through my former job at the attorney general’s office, and I respected them both, as well as their boss, Governor Dan Evans. Marlin asked if I was aware of the Bundy investigation and if I would be willing to help. I said “Sure” but reminded him I was only three years out of law school. He said Ted had “researched” me and desired my help.
Coincidentally, on the same day, and unrelated to my conversation with Marlin, the King County Office of Public Defense officially assigned me Bundy’s case. It was their policy at the time to assign an attorney to a case even if it was in the investigation stage and there were no charges.
Ted, Marlin, Nick, and I convened later that day in my office. News crews had followed Ted to my building, and Marlin and Nick had to slip in through a side door. Ted entered waving and joking with reporters. When he told my receptionist who he was, the lobby cleared out and my receptionist, Brenda, quit on the spot.
I was immediately struck by Ted’s appearance. He wore a turtleneck sweater under a corduroy jacket, khakis, and Bass Weejun loafers. The look seemed to be an attempt to telegraph “Ivy League law student.” But it was a caricature of an Ivy League law student.
He referred to the charges in Salt Lake as “this little stupid” case in Utah. I told him there was a much bigger problem. The Seattle newspapers were running headlines such as IS THE UTAH TED THE SEATTLE TED? He scoffed, saying, “If they haven’t put it together by now, they never will.” I found this chilling and, frankly, way too much information.
The day after my highly publicized meeting with Bundy, detective Robert Keppel, who’d established and co-led the Ted Task Force, called me to say, “In a case of this magnitude the attorney-client privilege should not apply.” He wanted me to provide him with evidence against my client! I laughed and suggested he reread the Bill of Rights.
Another of the Seattle detectives working the case was Roger Dunn, whom I’d known from previous cases. He was friendly and smart, the kind of person Ted would like. Despite my telling the police Ted would not talk, Roger stopped over at Ted’s house “just to chat.” Ted invited him in and promptly called me. I was polite but told Roger to leave, which he did. He did have time for coffee though, and Ted, as usual, asked the questions and answered none.
Frustrated with the investigation, Detective Keppel put a tail on Ted, who took to wearing fake beards and moustaches to fool the cops. He would taunt them by making them sandwiches and offering them coffee and advice on how to lie low during stakeouts.
At one point I arranged for Ted to take a lie detector test, which he failed. He said he was sure he would pass because his “personality type” could fool the mach...