Empty Promises

that he will ever see the light of day again.
    Norbert Waitts, meanwhile, was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for the Wilson kidnappings and the murder of Deputy Carlton Smith. He ended up in federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he is still serving his term. Waitts’s first possible date of release will be November 14, 2040. If he is still alive then, he will be ninety-nine years old.
    Jill Fina went to jail for a relatively short time on charges of harboring and concealing an escaped prisoner. She is almost fifty now, and does not find danger nearly as titillating as she once did.

Killers on the Road
    In American criminal folklore, there have always been roving killers who travel the freeways and back roads. Jim Morrison wrote a hit song about them: “There’s a killer on the road.” The Woody Harrelson movie Natural Born Killers explored the same concept. I don’t know why the mindless sacrifice of perfect strangers should fascinate us so much. Maybe it’s because we all harbor a certain nagging fear that we may meet one of these traveling maniacs one day. They don’t fit the profile of serial killers, who always look for a specific victim type. The roving killers have no patterns at all, beyond the fact that they kill unpredictably. Maybe little seeds of violence lie dormant in their brains, only to blossom suddenly, bringing with them the coldest manner of murder.
    Why? I don’t know why ….
    This was the first trial in my career as a fact-detective writer, but it wasn’t just that milepost that stamped it in my memory. In the years since, I’ve attended over a hundred trials but this one keeps coming back to me. The judge, the jury, and everyone in the gallery of the Snohomish County courtroom actually slipped for a time into the consciousness of a murder victim. We all saw what she saw and heard; we all went with her to the place where she would die. There was no way, of course, that we could actually feel her terror and despair, but this was as close as I ever came to gazing through the eyes of a murder victim. To say this was disturbing and unsettling doesn’t even begin to describe what everyone in that courtroom felt.

T he first-degree murder trial of Thomas Eugene Braun and Leonard Eugene Maine in Superior Court Judge Thomas G. McCrea’s courtroom had been a long time coming. More than three years had passed since the brutal crime they were accused of had occurred. Now, finally, these two young men, their skin faded to a greenish-white jail pallor, were charged with four felonies: first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, grand larceny by possession, and robbery. The jury would not know that they were also accused of other crimes in other jurisdictions. What they would learn, however, was chilling enough.
    Deanna Buse was born toward the end of World War II and turned twenty-two on August 19, 1967. Had she not met up with two strangers on that summer day so long ago, she would now be almost fifty-five and probably a grandmother. She was a very pretty young woman with delicate features and a halo of soft brown hair. She was a newlywed, married to Denton Buse, a longshoreman, for less than a year.
    Deanna worked for the United Control Company at their Redmond, Washington, location. In the late sixties, Redmond was still a sleepy rural town northeast of Seattle where the residents knew one another and where there were far more pastures for horses than office buildings. No one in Redmond had ever heard of computers or software. The concept that would make Microsoft revolutionize communication had not yet bloomed in the brain of Bill Gates, who was still in grade school. There were no condominiums or shopping malls or fast-food restaurants in Redmond. It was a different world then, a safe place to live and work. So were most of the other little towns in the area—Issaquah, North Bend, Monroe, Snohomish.
    Deanna and Denny lived in Monroe, and they both worked hard so that they could one day have the house and family they wanted. During the week, Deanna worked from eight until five, and on Saturdays she went in for an early morning shift. She usually left home at 4:00 A.M. and was through by 2:30 P.M. She always went to her mother’s home after work on Saturdays to do her laundry, and she always arrived by 4:00 P.M.
    But on August 19, she never made it to her mother’s house. This was totally unlike her, and her mother began to worry before five. She knew Denny was