Empty Promises

Buse’s Buick Skylark. The car was a charred hulk, and they could see bullet holes in the gas tank. It’s VIN was still quite readable; the clumsy suspects had thought the flames would obliterate all connections to the missing Washington bride, and once again they were wrong.
    With directions relayed from Tuolumne County, Detectives Russ Jubie and Tom Hart of Snohomish County, Washington, left headquarters at 11:00 P.M. on August 22. Deanna Buse had been missing for three days and now, though they dreaded what they might find, they had their first clue to her whereabouts.
    Following the directions that Braun and Maine had given the lawmen, Jubie and Hart headed for the densely wooded area surrounding Echo Lake, eight miles south of Monroe, Washington, then down Highway 202 and east on the Echo Lake Road, where they eventually turned off and traveled half a mile down a gravel road. Finally, they came to a one-way lane leading into the woods. Even in the middle of an August day, the woods were a dark and inky green, shut off from the sun by evergreens that grew so close together it was hard to tell where the branches of one tree ended and another began. Now, at midnight, the woods were absolutely pitch dark.
    Carrying a high-powered light, the officers walked into the morass of brush and fir trees; the only sound was their boots crunching on the forest floor. Some twenty-five yards from the end of the lane, Tom Hart found Deanna Buse.
    It was obvious that the pretty young housewife had not had even the slight chance of survival granted to Susan Bartolomei. Had she been left grievously wounded, there was no way Deanna could have crawled out of the deep woods. She lay on her back, her arms crossed over her chest. She was nude, and her clothes were folded meticulously and left in a neat pile beside her body. From what the detective sergeant could tell in the artificial light, she had been shot beneath her left eye and just below her ear. While Snohomish County detectives began their night-long investigation at the scene, representatives from the sheriff’s office undertook the sad task of informing Deanna Buse’s relatives that she had been found.
    Dr. Alexander G. Robertson performed the autopsy on Deanna’s body the next morning, August 23. He found five “projectile entries”—five entrance wounds from .22 caliber bullets. Several of them would have been instantly fatal. Any assailant who aims for the head of a human being is intent on killing that person. There was only small comfort for her husband and family. Deanna had been forced to remove her clothes out there in the deep woods; folding them neatly may have been a desperate attempt to delay the inevitable. She had not been raped, however; perhaps something had spooked the two men who took her there, or maybe her pleading had dissuaded them.
    Morning papers all over the West Coast headlined the monstrous results of Thomas Braun’s and Leonard Maine’s flight from Washington to Oregon to California. There was little doubt that the deadly pair would be tried for murder in each of the three states. They were swiftly indicted in California and arrangements were made for their trial for the murder of Tim Luce and the shooting and sexual assault of Susan Bartolomei.
    Miraculously, Susan was still alive. She had made it through intricate brain surgery, although the extent of the damage to her brain wouldn’t be known for some time. The brain, which feels no pain, swells tremendously when it is insulted, forcing it against the hard surface of the skull where it is crushed and bruised. If surgeons aren’t present to cut the skull away temporarily, the human brain begins to die. Susan had lain unattended for hours with bullets in her brain.

    The murder of Tim Luce had inflamed public opinion against the defendants. Because of all the publicity, their California trial was moved to San Jose in a change of venue. This first trial was carried out in two phases; only during the penalty phase did the prosecution bring out the cases of Deanna Buse and Samuel Ledgerwood. Susan Bartolomei, the girl neither defendant ever expected to see alive again, was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher. There, painfully, slowly, with the use of hand signals, the brave girl proved to be a devastatingly damaging witness against the men who had meant to kill her.
    The San Jose jury found Braun guilty and recommended the death penalty. He was sentenced to the gas chamber and