Empty Promises

interview room on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building in Seattle and signaled to his sergeant to come out. And then he told Don Cameron about Arnold’s background.
    They weren’t dealing with a twenty-four-year-old man who just happened to be present in a house on the night his niece was murdered; they were questioning a man whose life had been laced with violence and suspicion for eight years. And most of the incidents had involved harm to children.
    Arnold Brown’s family had supported him, believed in him, hired lawyers to get him out of prison. And he had been taken into the Reilly home as a welcome guest. He was allowed to baby-sit for Jannie and Max, and he slept in a bedroom only steps from theirs.
    Now, in the Seattle Police Homicide Unit, Arnold held out his hands so detectives could take fingernail scrapings. Then he was placed under arrest.
    Three hours later he faced Cameron and Nordlund again. He had sent word from his jail cell that he wanted to talk more about Jannie’s death. He was ready to give another statement.
    His story of the evening of June 18 began just as it had before. He watched television upstairs until 2:30 A.M. and then went downstairs, where he peeked into the children’s room. In this version, though, he admitted that he saw Jannie sleeping in her bed.
    John Nordlund looked at him and said quietly, “I think you are a sick person, and that you killed Jannie. You probably belong in a mental hospital.”
    “I probably do.”
    “Arnold, where did you kill her?” Nordlund asked quietly.
    “The sewing room.”
    “Did you rape her?”
    “Yes.”
    Arnold said that he had picked Jannie up from her bed and carried her, still sleeping, into the shop area of the basement where he found a single-braided rope. He then carried her to the sewing room behind his bedroom, but Jannie, who weighed only 66 pounds, began to wake up, stirring slightly.
    “I placed the rope around her neck … Then I pulled.”
    As Jannie’s breath was cut off, Arnold admitted that he placed his finger in her vagina. Although any forcible penetration of a body orifice for sexual purposes is considered rape by Washington State statute, it was clear that Arnold Brown understood very little about sexual intercourse or the human body. He insisted if his niece’s vaginal vault had semen in it, it must have been from her; he thought both males and females produced semen.
    Jannie Reilly had suffered trauma to her vagina, but it was questionable whether she had been raped in the traditional sense of the term.
    “And then what did you do?” Nordlund asked.
    “I carried her outside and lowered her over the fence next door. I think her heart was still beating. I didn’t mean to kill her.”
    The terrible danger that walked with Arnold Brown had come, finally, to an end. He was returned to jail, while Cameron and Nordlund went to the Reilly home to search for the braided, tasseled rope that Brown had described as the murder weapon. They found the hemp rope lying against the backyard fence on the east side of the property. They took it to Dr. Eisele, who said it fit exactly into the indentations on the dead child’s neck.
    Arnold Brown was placed in a cell with an inmate who was in jail for violation of probation on a theft charge. The twenty-one-year-old prisoner asked him the usual question: “What are you in for?”
    Arnold lied and said he was in for manslaughter for hitting a woman with a car. But his cell mate’s father had read of Jannie’s death and informed his son about the real charges against Arnold Brown. In jails and prisons, there are crimes that prisoners cannot stomach; molestation and cruelty to children top the list. Arnold’s cell mate, an expectant father, did not relish sharing a cell with him. He confronted him with what had really happened, pointing out that he was aware of the real charges against him.
    “You did it, didn’t you?” he demanded of Arnold.
    Arnold admitted to him that he had strangled his niece—for a reason that was both shocking and unfathomable to a normal man. He said that he had never had sex with a woman and he resented other men who had. The sight of Jannie in her nightclothes had “infuriated” him, reminding him that he had missed out on sexual experience. And so he had placed the rope around her neck and taken what he wanted.
    The other prisoner was filled with revulsion. He saw tears in Arnold’s eyes, and asked him why he didn’t just go ahead