Empty Promises

the death penalty, the jury’s decision would have to be unanimous. After much deliberation, ten jurors voted for the death penalty. The other two could not. On October 23, 1981, Arnold Brown was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The majority of the jurors expressed sympathy for the Reillys’ pleas for mercy but said they could not spare Brown on that basis alone. Their deeper sympathies lay with the little girl who had died at the age of seven, strangled by the hands of a man she had loved and trusted.
    As Judge Tuai meted out the life sentence, he looked at Arnold Brown and said, “Consider yourself a very fortunate young man, having received this sentence rather than the alternative.”
    Clad in the bright red jail coveralls worn by high-risk felons, Arnold took the sentencing quietly, shifting from one foot to another. Asked if he wished to say something, he shook his head.
    “You realize this is your last chance to talk to me?” Judge Tuai asked, but Arnold still refused to speak. He had never murmured a word during the trial, and he would not talk now. He was removed from the courtroom and placed in one of seven single cells in the jail’s mental health unit in the Public Safety Building, a precaution because he had been harassed by other inmates in the general population. He was interviewed by a psychiatrist and a psychiatric social worker and found to be subdued but basically stable emotionally.
    He was not.
    Arnold Brown had been incarcerated before, but this time he probably knew that his chances of surviving inside the walls after the other convicts learned of his crimes were slight. He must have known he was a pariah. Perhaps he could not bear the thought of never going free, of never seeing his dog Queenie again; he seemed to find something in the companionship of animals that he never realized with people.
    There may well have been ghosts haunting him in his cell, memories of the children he had injured and killed.
    Prisoners in the jail’s mental health unit were looked in on every fifteen minutes, but Arnold took advantage of seven minutes of solitude. Eight minutes after a check, he fashioned a noose from the sheet on his bed and hanged himself. Paramedics could not revive him.
    Arnold Brown left several suicide letters—to his attorney, to a Catholic priest, to his parents, and “To Whom It May Concern.” The contents of those letters are sealed and will never be revealed in their entirety, but some of his thoughts were published in the newspaper. He wrote, “I didn’t mean for her to die, but when that feeling came over me, I somehow couldn’t control myself.”
    Although he didn’t know the terms that described his sickness, in his own words Arnold admitted in his last letters that he was an addicted pedophile. He had seen a picture of children in a magazine, and his eyes had gone out of focus as he was seized with a terrible headache, “something a little worse than a migraine,” he wrote. “That’s when it started to happen.”
    It may be that Arnold Brown was born without the restraints that normal humans have; he may not have possessed the ability to resist a strong impulse. In the end, he gave himself the sentence that a jury could not bring itself to hand down. If only he had confided his bizarre fantasies to the many psychiatrists who tried to understand his behavior while he lived, he might well have provided a key to treat other pedophiles—but he left only those last vague letters. With his suicide, a deadly siege ended. Arnold Brown, at least, would do no further harm.

To Kill and Kill Again
    A decade before Arnold Brown was sentenced to life in prison, a similar drama played out in the King County Courthouse. The nineteen-year-old defendant in this case was an exception to the long-held belief that multiple murderers tend to stalk similar victims, repeatedly seeking out the same kind of quarry. This killer did, however, represent a frightening category of murderers who kill simply for the sake of killing. Because he varied his choice of victims, he was all the more difficult to trap. Nothing connected his four victims, save for the fact that each of them vanished suddenly and inexplicably. They were seen, and then they were not seen, until their bodies were found in wooded areas.
    Although the media are quick to publicize profiles and categories, it’s always a mistake to describe murderers too narrowly. Aberrant behavior can never be