Empty Promises

yes.”
    Leonard Maine himself took the stand briefly to testify regarding the alleged sodomy assault in the Ukiah jail. He agreed that he had been in the cell with two other prisoners but denied having participated in, or even witnessed, any sexual attacks.
    That Braun and Maine did kill is known. Why they killed is not. One officer who worked on the case says, “I don’t know that they had murder in mind when they started out from Ritzville, but I think after they killed their first victim, they continued to seek out victims for nothing more than the sheer pleasure of killing.”
    Only one person who faced the guns of Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine remains alive: Susan Bartolomei, whose grievous wounds changed her from a sparkling teenager to an invalid. Although Susan was able to talk with Howardine Mease on the morning after her night of horror, the damage done to her brain robbed her of speech. There was only so much doctors could do, and she spent her days in a wheelchair and lived with extensive paralysis and impaired vision.
    But Susan Bartolomei did survive in spite of the tremendous odds against her, and she lived to see the men who shot her convicted of their crimes. Had it not been for the courage she summoned up as she inched her way up the steep bank to the road on that scorching day in August 1967, law enforcement officers can only imagine how many more victims might have been added to the list written in blood by Thomas Braun and Leonard Maine.
    At 3:40 P.M. on Friday, December 18, the jury once again retired to consider a verdict. The longest capital punishment trial in Snohomish County was at last over. The jury voted unanimously to impose the death sentence upon Thomas E. Braun on both counts of first-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping. They voted not to inflict the death penalty upon Leonard Maine; this meant he would receive an automatic sentence of life imprisonment.

A Dangerous Mind
    The third week in June 1981 was a macabre, albeit informative, time for me. Along with a few hundred detectives and physicians, I attended King County Medical Examiner Dr. Donald Reay’s seminar on death investigation. After forty hours of lectures and slides detailing death by fire, gunshot, strangulation, bludgeoning, and drowning, and studying the parameters that denote lust murder, I was more than ready for a vacation from violence. Even though homicide detectives and crime writers spend their working hours in a world where a knowledge of the patterns of death is essential, we can still be shocked and sickened. Indeed, if we are not sensitive to the pain and pathos of unnatural death, we shouldn’t be in the careers we have chosen.
    But some times are rougher than others. On the last day of Reay’s seminar—Friday, June 19—six Seattle homicide detectives in the audience were working the kind of case that can bring the toughest investigators to their knees. The victim was a child, a tiny seven-year-old girl. This case predated the JonBenét Ramsey case in Boulder, Colorado, by almost two decades, but the details were almost identical: a pretty blond child murdered in her own home during the dark hours before dawn. As in the Ramsey case, there was no sign at all that someone from the outside had broken in.
    At each coffee break during the medical examiner’s seminar, the Seattle detectives checked in with their office to see how the case was progressing. They were grateful they had not been on duty when that call came in. Although they had not been summoned to the initial crime scene, they were responsible for finding the killer.
    It would take four months for the full story of the murder of Jannie Reilly* to unfold, and with its denouement, it would trigger even more tragedy. Lives were destroyed and hearts broken. When the last chapter was written, it became all too clear that misguided kindness had ended in murder. Good people had offered hospitality to someone whose promises meant nothing. But at least, unlike JonBenét’s murder, there were answers and the killer was caught and taken to trial.

T he Joseph Reillys seemed to have the safest home possible. Joseph had once been a priest and his wife, Lorraine, was also a devout Catholic. After realizing that the calling was not right for him, Joseph had left the priesthood, but he and Lorraine maintained close connections to their church.
    Joseph and Lorraine had met sometime after he rejoined the secular community. They fell in love, married,