Empty Promises

admission that he caused her death. Basically, he said he had done the wrong thing by pushing the body in the river, but that the girl just slipped, fell, and was killed in front of him. That he wasn’t responsible.”
    Arnold Brown’s story seemed incredible, and Horton wasn’t happy with the progression of the case. The Eugene detectives were convinced that Brown had deliberately crushed Summer Rogers’s skull with a rock and then disposed of her body in the fast-moving river. But they had no body and no physical evidence to take to court. Many bodies are lost forever in the Willamette. The police realized that they might never find Summer.
    The Willamette River did give up Summer’s remains ten weeks later, but the body was so decomposed that it was at first misidentified. Today DNA would be used to identify her small torso, but when Summer died, they retrieved only shreds of clothing and enough blood to type. Even in the year 2000, cause of death of a body that long in a river would be difficult to determine. There was nothing left of the little girl but a decaying torso with ragged bits of a blue-and-white bathing suit clinging to it. The head and extremities were gone forever. Pathologists could not determine cause of death or say for sure if the head, arms, and legs had been cut off or had simply fallen away as the result of decomposition.
    If Arnold Brown’s life was frustrating, it was nothing compared to the agony of detectives who were sure that a desperately dangerous man was walking free in their community. There was not enough left of the victim to arrest Arnold; they had only their terrible suspicions. The Oregon investigators kept an eye on Arnold, but they didn’t have the manpower to trail him all the time, and his family closed in around him in fierce protection. He was cleared in the murder of the second child after another Eugene resident confessed.
    The Eugene detectives remained angry and bitter. “I could write a book about Arnold Brown,” one muttered years later. “We know all about him, and it makes us sick.”
    So there it was. Arnold remained free for two years after Summer Rogers died. He was arrested once more on February 16, 1978—but not for murder. He was convicted of stealing $45,000 from the roller rink. He went to the Oregon State Penitentiary with a twenty-year sentence. The prosecution brought up the death of Summer Rogers in the burglary trial, and Circuit Judge Helen Frye gave Arnold the maximum twenty-year sentence.
    Not surprisingly, Arnold Brown’s lawyers immediately filed an appeal, the basis of which was the admission of the testimony regarding Summer Rogers’s death. Legally, Arnold’s attorneys were on sturdy ground; he had never been charged in what was only presumed to be murder. In a convoluted legal tangle, his sentence was struck down in February 1980. He was given a suspended sentence for the roller rink burglary and placed on probation. Once again he walked free.
    Arnold Brown went back to his family and his pet dog. He lived in the old neighborhood where all the crimes he was suspected of had occurred. He often visited the Reillys in Seattle, and their young children adored him.
    But none of his deep-seated problems were gone; they only lay festering. In March of 1981, Arnold began making reports to the police about “people” who were “bugging” him. On March 26 he reported that someone had damaged a boat on his family’s property. A day later he claimed that strangers had assaulted him while he walked Queenie. On March 29 he reported that someone had damaged their boat further and had also cut the phone lines to his family’s residence.
    The police doubted his claims; they suspected that Arnold himself was doing the damage. But when they asked him if he would take a lie detector test, he refused. They weren’t sure why he was getting restive, but it worried them. Was Arnold sending out signals that something bad was going to happen again? Or was he only enjoying the attention he got when he cried wolf?
    Few clever con men have walked away from as many suspicions, charges, and convictions as deftly as Arnold Brown, despite his lack of intellect. The family who loved, protected, and cosseted him from the law and from responsibility did so at unspeakable cost. And now their refusal to allow him to be punished for anything might have led to tragedy in their own family.

    John Boatman, voluminous notes in hand, knocked on the door of the