Empty Promises

going to beat the case because the girl was so nervous and the jury wouldn’t believe her. Then he said he was going to kill her, too, as soon as he got out.”
    “Did he say why?” Byrnes asked, keeping his voice calm. “Yeah, because she won’t corroborate the lie he made her tell police in the first place. He told me how he beat the polygraph. He said you just have to tell yourself the same story over and over, and then you get to believe it yourself. Then you have no worry, no stress at all when you take it yourself. Then he showed me how to breathe and all when you take it.”
    Stokeberry said that Tom was sure a jury wouldn’t believe Robin because she looked about twenty-four or twenty-five. “She’s a Jezebel type,” he says. “They won’t believe her.”
    Tom added that he’d been 8 or 10 feet away from the victim when he shot him. “Tom says powder burns won’t show from that far away, and he’s worried about that now.”
    “Did he say why the girl gave the wrong statement?”
    “Yeah. He says he convinced her that the police wouldn’t believe her.” Then Brown explained to Stokeberry how he’d worked on the girl’s mind until she believed him.
    Jim Byrnes knew there was no way Stokeberry could have known certain details about the case unless Tom Brown had told him. No one beyond Robin and the investigators knew all these details. Wendell Stokeberry was clearly telling the truth.
    With the added impact of this witness, Steve Keutzer and Bob Hamilton felt they had more than enough to go ahead with a first-degree murder charge against Tom Brown. There would be no jury. The case was to be heard in front of a judge only—Judge Winston Bradshaw.
    Two days before the trial, Tom Brown scraped up enough money for bail and walked out of jail. He had threatened to kill Robin Marcus, so the attorney general’s office put her into a motel under guard until the trial. She was petrified with fear even though they assured her that Brown couldn’t find her. She was registered under a fake name and a police officer would always be there to ensure that no one could approach her.

    When the time came for trial, the smug defendant wasn’t nearly as confident as he had been. As the eight-day trial progressed, Robin testified for a day and a half. Wendell Stokeberry testified, too, although he drew giggles from the gallery as he swaggered to the witness chair. He adeptly parried defense efforts to discredit him by saying, “If you say I got busted for something, then I guess I must have. My record is ex -ten-sive.”
    He might not have been a law-abiding citizen, but he was telling the truth—and it showed.
    Prosecutor Bob Hamilton presented expert testimony on the fact that there were no lead particles in the tissues around Hank Marcus’s wounds. Using a long wooden dowel, he demonstrated just how far the killer had to have been away from Hank so that a shot wouldn’t leave gunpowder stippling on his skin. There was no way that it could have happened as Tom Brown said.
    Hamilton showed the judge the angle of the wound. Again, it contradicted Brown’s version. Brown had even forgotten which side of the victim’s head the bullet entered.
    After hearing his story riddled with errors, Tom Brown insisted on testifying. Now he gave a different version of his recall of the gun exchange, but his efforts were feebly transparent.
    Over defense objections, Judge Bradshaw allowed testimony on the mechanisms of brainwashing into the record. This was a major coup for the prosecution. As Dr. Treleaven explained it, the brainwashing of Robin Marcus was a classic example of mind control. Her mind literally became evidence in the case.
    As the trial wound down, it was apparent that the attorney general’s prosecutors, Bob Hamilton and Steve Keutzer, had presented a brilliantly organized case—a case that had begun with all the earmarks of a loser.
    Judge Bradshaw retired to make his decision. Three days later, he came back with a verdict of guilty. Thomas Leslie Brown was sentenced to life in the Oregon State Penitentiary. His motion for a new trial was denied on July 19, 1977.
    The testimony in the Marcus-Brown case on brainwashing was something of a landmark in legal precedent. Bob Hamilton pointed out that, although such testimony is generally not admissible, furtive conduct to cover up a crime is evidence of guilt. In this instance, the evidence that Tom Brown covered up was Robin Marcus’s memory. If he