Empty Promises

vehemently, claiming that the detectives had misled him by promising him that he could still join the Job Corps even if he was found guilty of stabbing the two children. The Oregon investigators were adamant that they had made no such promises.
    It ended in a draw. Brown’s confession was ruled inadmissible because the judge felt Arnold had been read his rights under Miranda too rapidly for him to understand them. He was made a ward of the court and committed indefinitely to the Parrot Creek Boys’ Ranch in Oregon City. He stayed there only eighteen months and then moved back to his family home in Eugene.
    Arnold Brown was slow, but his borderline IQ didn’t cause his rage. There was something else—something either genetic or environmental—that contributed to his losing control when he didn’t get his way. The treatment he received at Parrot Creek didn’t change his basic personality structure at all. Psychiatrists have long agreed that the antisocial personality is probably the most resistant personality disorder to treat. Most children develop a conscience around the age of three and a half. When that doesn’t happen, it is next to impossible to acquire a conscience and to develop empathy and compassion for others. The child grows tall; his conscience shrivels.
    Released from the boys’ school, Arnold was angry, frustrated, and, worse, possessed by unfulfilled sexual cravings.
    He was a time bomb.
    Arnold applied for admission to the National Guard that summer. He was rejected in his efforts to find a place where he would be “accepted as a man.” But he was turned down not so much because of his lack of intellect as because the National Guard interviewers found him lacking in maturity and empathy for others.
    A month later, Arnold strolled toward the Willamette River to go fishing. Five-year-old Summer Rogers lived near the river too. She was a pixyish little girl with dark eyes and pigtails. She wore a bathing suit on this hot summer day. Her mother was fixing supper inside the house, and she told Summer to stay close because they were going to eat in fifteen minutes. The child nodded and ran outside to play.
    Summer’s stepfather came home and called her to come in to supper, but she didn’t respond. Her parents assumed she had gone next door to her friend’s house to play, as she often did; it was still sunny and light out and they weren’t worried. They went ahead and ate dinner, saving a plate for her, and then called Summer again. But their voices hung in the air. There was only silence in response. Frightened now, they scoured the neighborhood for Summer, asking everyone they met if they had seen her.
    Arnold Brown walked by as they searched, and Summer’s mother asked him if he’d seen her little girl. He shook his head and walked on. By sunset, the parents were frantic. As night fell, they notified the police.
    Summer Rogers was the second five-year-old girl to disappear in the Eugene area that summer. When more young girls were found murdered in the Salem area forty miles north, it began to appear that a serial killer—referred to back then as a mass murderer—was roving in central Oregon. Because Eugene detectives were aware that Brown had stabbed Maria and Jimmy Coleman on the bank of the Willamette three years earlier when he was sixteen, Arnold Brown became their prime suspect in the disappearance of Summer and, tangentially, in the decapitation killing of another child, whose murder was still unsolved.
    They soon found witnesses who had seen Summer walking with Arnold toward the Willamette River. But they didn’t find anyone who had seen Summer walking back. They found traces of blood on Arnold’s tackle box and on his pants; he explained that it was from his dog, who was in heat. In that era, the samples were too minuscule to test for blood type classification or even to verify that it was human blood, so they had no way to disprove his statement.
    After hours of interrogation, Arnold Brown gave a statement admitting that Summer had accompanied him down to the river. Lane County District Attorney Pat Horton recalled Arnold’s version of what happened: “He admitted seeing her fall while she was wading, and hitting her head on a rock. He said she looked dead and he panicked. He thought he would be in a lot of trouble because of his background. After she was dead, he said he simply pushed the body off into the current and watched it drift downriver. But there was never any