Empty Promises

to her.

    It would be three days—Saturday, Sunday, and Monday—before Robin would get the chance to tell anyone what had happened up there in the woods near the meadow. When she did, she appeared rational—in shock, certainly—but basically lucid.
    The detectives and attorneys who listened to her story took her at her word. They didn’t understand then that they might as well have been listening to a programmed robot.
    On Tuesday, July 27, Robin Marcus and Tom Brown entered the offices of an Oregon City attorney, James O’Leary. O’Leary, who had served as Tom Brown’s attorney in the past, listened while Tom and Robin explained that Brown had accidentally killed Robin’s husband in the Bagby Hot Springs area on Saturday, July 24. Robin sobbed as she recalled witnessing the accident. She said that she wanted to go with Brown to talk with the Clackamas County sheriff about the incident. She didn’t want him to be blamed for something that wasn’t his fault.
    O’Leary contacted Detectives Hank Reeves and Lynn Forristall and they listened to the incredible story that Tom Brown and Robin Marcus gave. On the face of it, it seemed to be a tragic story about the accidental discharge of a gun. According to Brown, he and Hank Marcus had been looking for deer when they decided to exchange rifles. Brown said that one was a Winchester lever action and the other a .22 caliber high-power Savage. As they had passed the guns between them, Brown said one of the guns had gone off, fatally wounding Hank Marcus in the head. He died in an instant.
    Tom Brown said that after Hank died, the Marcuses’ pet collie, Rusty, went wild and attacked him. Robin nodded as Tom explained that he had no choice but to shoot Rusty. In the shocked aftermath of what happened, he said he and Robin wandered the wrong way in the forest and lost their bearings for three days.
    Brown admitted that he had an extensive prior record, and conceded that this made him reluctant to report the accident. But then Robin promised to go to the authorities with him and confirm what had happened. She told him she would explain to the police that she had witnessed her husband’s death, and she would verify that Tom was telling the truth.
    The cops separated the strange pair, and each gave a formal statement. The two statements matched in every detail. Then Robin, exhausted and covered with scratches and insect bites, was driven back to her home in Canby. Tom Brown agreed to accompany the Clackamas County investigators into the wilderness to show them where the bodies of Hank and the dog lay.
    Medical Examiner Ken Dooley would join the detectives for a cursory examination of the bodies. It was 5:45 p.m. on July 27 when the group left headquarters; they reached the Buckeye Creek Road at 8:20. It was dark and they needed high-powered flashlights as they moved along the trail looking for the dead man and his fallen dog. They found the remains of the trio’s campsite, and 200 yards farther on, they came across Hank Marcus’s body.
    Fully clad in jeans and hiking gear, the dead man lay 30 feet from the logging road, his body partially covered with ferns. From the position of the body, it appeared that he had rolled over an embankment and landed 8 feet below. He lay on his face as if asleep, his left arm tucked under him. According to Tom Brown and Robin, Hank Marcus had been there for almost four days in the baking July heat. Decomposition was advanced, particularly in the area of the head wound.
    The investigators took photographs in the twilight of that Tuesday night, and Detective Forristall placed stakes at the edge of the road to mark the probable site of the actual shooting, where dried blood stained the earth about four feet from the edge of the bank.
    Tom Brown had voluntarily turned over the Savage rifle, saying it was the gun he had used to kill Rusty, the collie. He told them he had discarded the other weapon—the one that had fired unexpectedly, killing Hank Marcus. He didn’t know if he’d be able to find it again; it was in a heavily wooded area much farther away.
    They found Rusty’s body along the trail. The huge collie was also covered with vegetation and he too had suffered a single gunshot wound in the head. Someone had apparently made an attempt to protect the two bodies. Or perhaps to hide them.
    Tom Brown, age twenty-nine, seemed both cooperative and contrite as he told the investigators about the fatal accident. They put him up in a