Empty Promises

couldn’t bring the actual shooting back. When she talked to the detectives, she believed she had seen it. But now she could not remember it.
    Although she didn’t realize it, Robin Marcus was beginning to come down from the intensive brainwashing she had undergone for three days after Hank’s death. Whenever she began to go over the events in her mind the way Tom told her they happened, a very clear picture kept getting in the way—a picture that warred with Tom’s words. She kept seeing his smile as he told her that he had shot Hank as well as Rusty. Why did he smile? It was such an odd smile, like the grimace on a devil’s mask. But then she recalled that Tom had smiled when he was talking with detectives, too. Even though tears were running down his face when he told them about the accident, he’d had that same peculiar grin on his face. Maybe that’s just the way he was.
    As the days passed, Robin began to remember what had happened more and more clearly. She’d told the detectives what Tom wanted them to hear; she’d even told her family and Hank’s that his death had been an accident. And she had believed it herself. Now she no longer did; her memory was coming back.

    On August 2, Robin and her parents appeared at the sheriff’s office again. “I want to tell you what really happened,” Robin blurted. “It wasn’t an accident. Tom Brown killed Hank.”
    She seemed so positive about what she was saying that the detectives immediately ushered her into an interview room where she gave a second statement. There were to be five more statements as her memory fought its way to the surface.
    Robin explained that she had gone with Tom after Hank was killed, but only out of fear for her life. Tom had not been her savior in the woods. He had raped her again and again. She still didn’t understand how but Tom had somehow managed to convince her that she was there when Hank died, that the killing had been an accident, and that she should return to town with him to verify his story. At the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
    This new version was hard to swallow, and the detectives interviewing her looked at each other doubtfully. Robin Marcus was given a polygraph exam—and failed.
    Indeed, Robin Marcus would fail more lie detector tests, but the investigators came to believe her even though they couldn’t say why. She agreed to talk with a psychiatrist in the hope that it would help her explore which memories were real and which had been planted there by Tom Brown.
    The forensic psychiatrist talked with Robin at length and reported his findings. He explained that Tom Brown had played such tricks with her mind that it would be a long time before she would be able to remember exactly what had happened. She wasn’t lying; she had been very skillfully brainwashed.
    At this point, the Clackamas County sheriff’s office didn’t have much of a case to take into court. Conflicting statements. Conflicting polygraphs. Nothing tangible to work with. Worse, Tom Brown was gone. He was a drifter; he could be anywhere. He might never be found.
    The case, however, was taken to a grand jury, which would decide if the death of Hank Marcus had been a murder or an accident. The case remained there for some months. In the interim, Brown’s lawyer, James O’Leary, ran for district attorney of Clackamas County and won. Even if the grand jury decided that Brown should be charged, there was no way O’Leary could prosecute a case in which he had originally been the defendant’s lawyer.
    The grand jury ultimately agreed that Tom Brown should be tried for the murder of Hank Marcus. An indictment charging Thomas Brown with murder, forgery, and car theft was handed down by the grand jury in late December, five months after Hank Marcus died; it was not going to be an easy case to prosecute. (The latter two charges were from another state, and both crimes had occurred before the events of July 24.)
    James A. Redden, Oregon’s attorney general, maintained a special Criminal Justice Division. It was manned by assistant attorneys general and investigators who were available to help county D.A.s prosecute cases if they requested assistance. Small counties often had complicated cases that required more manpower than they had on staff. Most of the attorney general’s lawyers and several of the investigators had years of experience in criminal investigation. The investigators were once the cream of the detectives in