Empty Promises

transferred to death row in San Quentin. Maine, who steadfastly insisted he’d been an unwilling accomplice, was found guilty but sentenced to ten years to life. He began that sentence in the prison at Tracy, California, immediately following the trial.

    Still more trials lay ahead. In Everett, Washington, the Snohomish County seat, Leonard Maine and Thomas Braun now went on trial for Deanna Buse’s murder.
    There were two phases of the trial—one to decide the guilt or innocence of the accused, and one to set the penalty for Braun and Maine should they be found guilty. Testimony from California authorities during the first phase of the trial was restricted to facts pertaining to the youths’ arrest in Jamestown.
    Spectators packed the second-floor courtroom each morning as testimony began. This would be the first time that Washington trial watchers would hear the entire story of the murderous duo’s trail of death and destruction.
    Judge McCrea issued an order to the news media weeks before the trial. The three-page document drawn in open court on October 8, 1970, decreed that reporters could not disseminate to the public any testimony given in the absence of the jury, judge, court reporter, defendants and counsel for all parties. Cameras and recording devices were banned from the second floor of the Snohomish County Courthouse. Sketches would be allowed, but only if they were “non-inflammatory” in nature.
    Judge Thomas McCrea had good reason to caution newsmen. The Braun-Maine trial was expected to last four to six weeks, so he decided not to sequester the jury. He doubted that the attorneys could choose a representative panel from the pool of potential jurors if they learned they would be separated from their families for such an extended time. Without McCrea’s gag rule, jurors who went home each night might hear, and be influenced by, comments and testimony that was off the record.
    At that, selecting a jury whose members were not familiar with some aspect of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine’s crimes would prove difficult; the Ritzville pair had cut a swath of violence across three states three years earlier, and that was difficult to forget. Ordinarily, jury selection lasts a day or two. In the Braun-Maine trial, it took almost two weeks before Defense Attorneys Richard Bailey (for Thomas Braun), Samuel Hale (for Leonard Maine), and Prosecutors David Metcalf and Bruce Keithly were all satisfied with a jury of seven men and five women, plus three alternates.
    Judge McCrea instructed the jury, “Don’t let sentiment, pity, passion, sway your judgment. You will be judging these men on the axiom of reasonable doubt. You will not be judging them by whim or intuition.”
    It was 2:00 P.M. on an uncommonly bright October day when Deputy Prosecutor Metcalf rose to make his opening statement to the jury. As he spoke about the murder of the victim, Deanna Buse, Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine listened to the state’s damning statements with no change of expression. Braun wrote constantly on a yellow legal tablet—as he would do throughout the trial. Both wore conservative suits, and their haircuts bore no resemblance to the wild “hippie” locks they had affected at the time of their arrest. If there was one clue to the fact that they had, indeed, been in jail for the past three years, it was their dead-white prison pallor. They looked as if they’d been underground for a long, long time.
    “Each piece of this trial is part of a puzzle,” Prosecutor Metcalf told the jury. “On Tuesday, August 22, Deanna Buse was found nude in the vicinity of Echo Lake. She had been shot five times in the head; there were four .22 caliber bullets in her brain and one beneath her body. The state will prove that Thomas Eugene Braun and Leonard Eugene Maine are guilty of this killing.” Metcalf outlined the testimony he would present to the jury as the trial moved ahead. Most of this information was new and unfamiliar to those present in the courtroom, including the media. The prosecutors and the Snohomish County Sheriff’s investigators had deliberately guarded the facts in the Buse case against the day when Braun and Maine would answer to them in court. In doing so, they had managed to avoid a change of venue.

    If there are such things as ghosts, there were ghosts in that brightly lit courtroom. Timothy Luce, Susan Bartolomei, and Samuel Ledgerwood had never known Deanna Buse, but they had all faced the same terror