Robert Charles Browne, a Louisiana native, has claimed he's taken the lives of 4 dozen people across 9 states, but he's only been tried for 2 of them.
Hey, y’all! I’m your host, Peyton, and today I’m going to tell you the confessions of a man from Louisiana you’ve probably never heard of who has claimed to have taken dozens of lives while traveling the United States during the latter end of the 20th century.
This is The Crimes-Picayune.
- Ronald and Beulah Browne were living in a small town in Red River Parish with their 8 kids when on October 31, 1952 they welcomed their newest and final member of their family, Robert Charles Browne.
- The family lived in Coushatta, LA. According to a book by Stephen Michaud and Debbie Price, the town’s population sat at about 2500 people and many of whom were related whether by blood or marriage.
- The name of the parish might give it away, but the town sits around the Red River.
- His family was rather typical for the area; his dad ran a dairy farm in the 60s before becoming a sheriff’s officer for the parish while his mom stayed home with the kids. His childhood was also typical and nothing kids with older siblings didn’t also experience.
- Browne was described as smart but short-tempered. His brother, Ray, actually described him as the brightest of the 9 children. Ray also stated, though, that Robert did endure some teasing from the older kids and he, Robert, often felt very resentful towards his siblings. In the book I talked about earlier by Michaud and Price called The Devil’s Right Hand Man, his sister, Mary, talks about how puberty really affected him and how their mother would say how Robert felt as if he was owed everything and that “they could not give him enough to please him.” [This is a common theme in Robert’s life and will surface again later.]
- If you’ve been into true crime for a while, you know that there are similar characteristics among serial killers, murderers, and family annihilators, such as: fire starting, the torturing of animals, bedwetting, parental drug/alcohol use, and head injuries. Browne was known to abuse and torture animals and set fires, but (as far as I could tell) he didn’t engage in or experience any of those other circumstances.
- He did, however, have to endure fits of rage exhibited by his mother. Nowadays we are able to associate her patterns of behavior with some sort of mental illness, but this was a very poor area of Louisiana in the 60s so..
- Additionally, her father - Melvin, Robert’s maternal grandfather, was also known to suffer from mental illness. He took his own life at 67 years old by jumping into a 27-foot water well near New Years Eve 1961; Robert was 8 years old.
- At 16, he dropped out of high school and joined the army a few months later where he’d serve in the Vietnam War as a medic in South Korea.
- Browne had just started his time with the army when he came home on leave in September of 1970 and married 13 year old Terry Ward but they didn’t really get to be married because he was sent to Vietnam shortly after they said “I do.”
- He returned home to her in February of the next year but he had secretly been back in the states for several weeks living in Texas. And this is when his behavior was noted as having obviously changed.
- The two moved into an apartment in San Antonio. But according to The Devil’s Right Hand Man after he moved the teenager almost 400 miles away from her friends and family, he told Terry that “he didn’t love her anymore, but that he didn’t want to give her up altogether, either. So Terry was to be his daytime wife, responsible for domestic chores. But at night he would leave to see a ‘girlfriend.” Yeah, they divorced in 1973.
- She reported that Browne was never physical with her, but he did have a quick temper where he would lash out and in the book it mentions how he dangled her from a balcony of a hotel - which will also resurface later.
- In October of the year he and Terry divorced, Browne married for the second time. He married a young Vietnamese woman by the name of Tuyet Minh Huynh. Just 9 months later, Tuyet gave birth to their first and only son, Thomas. Browne re-enlisted and was sent back to Vietnam but this time he didn’t serve in any combat roles, and primarily worked desk jobs.
- Browne received several awards while serving overseas; he was given a bronze star in 1972, and awarded “exemplary behavior, efficiency, and fidelity” several times, as well as being awarded with “outstanding service in connection with military operations against a hostile force” in October of 1975.
- At this point in time, the US had been fighting in Vietnam for almost 20 years, and when the war ended in 1975, Browne was sent to Germany but his wife was still back in Texas and asked him for a divorce.
- While he was in Germany, Browne became wrapped up in an affair with another soldier’s wife - no surprise there. The woman, Marjorie Miller, was so head-over-heels for Browne that she left her husband for him and made her way back to the states, specifically Colorado Springs.
- So once Marjorie left, Browne did everything he could to get discharged so he could also return to the states to be with her. He was regularly drug tested and these continued to come back positive, even though his leadership counseled him. He was eventually dishonorably discharged for drug use after serving 7 years.
- Records show that Browne had been a decent soldier; he had obtained several awards and maintained a good, clean record with the army until 1975. He had several life events happen within a few years of each other - his dad passed away in 1974, his marriage ended with Tuyet in 1975, and he began his love affair that same year.
- So I’m not sure if the drug use can be pin-pointed to any one event or if it was a combination of coping, grieving, and/or wanting to be back with his lover in the states.
- But the first stop Browne made when he had finally been discharged was to Colorado Springs, CO to see Marjorie.
- Browne regained custody of his son, Thomas, who had been living with his sister since he was born, and the pair returned to Louisiana in May of 1977.
- In September of that year, Browne met and married his third wife, 17 year old Brenda Gale Ware, who was still finishing up high school. There’s definitely a pattern with the characteristics of his wives as well as his victims, but I’ll touch on that a little later.
- So far, I haven’t told you about any of Robert Browne’s murders or victims and that’s because up until this point, there aren’t any that can be corroborated by police.
- He did claim that his first murder took place in South Korea in 1970 right before he married his first wife. Browne said he and another American soldier got into it over a “whore” when the soldier attacked him with a knife. That’s when Browne broke his neck and left him in the alley behind a bar. The army’s Criminal Investigations Division (CID) was contacted but as far as I could see no information was able to be gathered about the incident.
- Robert Charles Browne has claimed he murdered 48 victims across 9 states.
In the spring of 2000, Browne sent an unsolicited letter to the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s office in Colorado Springs - and remember he spent some time here after leaving the army to be with his lover. This letter was featured in a 44-page affidavit I found on Murderpedia and I’m going to read you what he wrote in his first of many letters to law enforcement. It writes: “The letter, addressed to “Whom it May Concern,” was written in cryptic and poetic prose and intimated that he had killed 48 people throughout the United States, including nine in Colorado. Aside from indicating how many victims there were in each state, the letter provided very few details other than “Seven sacred virgins, entombed side by side, those less worthy, are scattered wide. The score is you 1, the other team 48. If you were to drive to the end zone in a white Trans Am, the score could be 9 to 48. That would complete your home court sphere.” Mr. Browne included a map which was traced from an atlas. This map showed outlines of the states of Colorado, Washington, California, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi. Mr. Browne wrote a number inside the outline of each respective state. Totaling the numbers yielded the sum of 48, i.e., the same number of homicides he claimed to have committed. Mr. Browne closed the letter by demanding that he not be contacted.”
- The affidavit is written in the order of how the investigation unfolded and not in chronological order, but I’m going to continue recounting events as they happened in real-time.
- In a letter to Charles Hess, a former FBI agent that volunteered with the county to help solve cold cases, Browne insinuated that he had something to do with the death of a woman in New Orleans, LA shortly after he married his 3rd wife in 1977. He was staying about 5 minutes from the French Quarter and had invited (what we believe to be) a sex worker to his motel room. He claims that the motel wouldn’t allow her in (probably due to her occupation) - and I want to note here that on this podcast, I believe sex work is work and we will not slut shame or victim blame ever ever ever, so now that that’s out of the way - Browne stated that she gave him directions to her hotel. I’m not sure if they engaged in any sexual acts, but Browne claims to have strangled her and left her in her room. New Orleans PD has not been able to match any cases to these claims.
- About a year after the alleged murder in New Orleans, Browne claims to have met another woman in a bar in Morgan City. Morgan City sits about an hour and a half’s drive southwest of New Orleans. They’re known to have very strong, Cajun accents down there and that’s how Browne described her in an in-person interview he had with Hess.
- The Cajun Lady was white, with dark hair and eyes, and he stated she had on a wedding ring the night he met her.
- Browne recalled they left together and he drove to a secluded spot around a body of water he believed to be the Atchafalaya River. He said they had sex before he strangled her and dumped her body off of a bridge into the water.
- The Cajun Lady has never been identified and this story has not been substantiated.
- This same year, Browne took his wife Brenda down to a remote waterway and beat her so badly she almost lost her life.
- She endured copious amounts of abuse while being married to Robert. She claimed that he would get set-off by the smallest of things like one time he beat her because she forgot to put a spoon in the gravy at dinner. Browne abused her for a little over 2 years before she filed for divorce in early 1980.
- July 3, 1980 - so just a few months later - Browne was driving around his hometown of Coushatta, LA when he pulled into the parking lot of a fried chicken restaurant. He saw these two men talking to a young girl and when the men left the girl alone in the parking lot, he offered her a ride and a place to stay. He was staying at his mother’s house because, well, he was getting divorced for the third time.
- Browne pulled into his residence and shortly after arriving, he and 15 year old Katherine Hayes had sex. He claims they got into an argument (over something he conveniently forgot what about) and after she got dressed and fell asleep, he grabbed shoelaces from an old pair of shoes and strangled her until she died.
- He placed her into the trunk of his car and drove about 45 minutes before dumping her body off of a bridge into the water below.
- Katherine Hayes’ remains were found several months later on October 16, 1980 in the Nantachie Creek.
- October 1980 was a (for the lack of a better word) eventful month for Robert Browne: he divorced from his 3rd wife, Katherine Hayes’ remains were found, and by the end of the month he had married for a 4th time to 26 year old Rita Coleman. Also in that same month, Browne strangled Rita so badly that doctors at the ER said her larynx was almost crushed.
- This same year, Browne claims to have killed two more victims, but this time they were men. He said he was on the outskirts of Mississippi - almost to Alabama - in a swampy area along I-10. Browne claims he had pulled off into a spot when he noticed another car with 2 men do the same. He said when they approached him he wasn’t sure what they were going to do but they seemed like “bad guys” so he shot each of them in the chest. There haven’t been any reports matching what Browne described, but in the affidavit it states, “Mississippi authorities said the area which Mr. Browne described had been a “dumping ground” for victims of homicides.”
- In 1981, Browne was arrested for stealing 3 rolls of copper wire from Wireways Inc. in Natchitoches, LA - about 30 miles south of Coushatta.
- He was reported as having a job at International Paper Co in Mansfield, LA in 1981 but was arrested in 1982 for burglarizing a trailer that belonged to the company. He pleaded guilty to lesser theft charges and only spent 45 days in jail.
- In early 1983, Robert Browne met a woman at a bar in Natchitoches who said she was from Mansfield - about an hour’s drive northwest. She was married but Browne alleges she was upset that her new husband worked so much. Her husband coincidentally worked for the paper company that Browne had been convicted of burglarizing. He said she agreed to spending the night together so Browne drove them to a motel in a small town about 10 minutes away. And you’ve probably guessed what happened next - the pair had sex and afterwards he strangled her. He then put her in the back of his vehicle and dropped her over a cliff into the Red River.
- But just like the others, this one also cannot be connected with any missing persons cases.
- Two more women would be killed that year by Browne, or so he claims.
- On the night of March 30, 1983 Robert Browne was at a bar when he saw a familiar face. His next door neighbor, 26 year old Faye Self was there dancing with a friend.
- Hours later, Browne returned to the complex he shared with Faye. He grabbed a bag and a rag that he soaked in chloroform to her apartment where he discovered the front door was unlocked. He entered her apartment, making his way to her bedroom where he placed the rag up to her face. Browne claims he left the rag on her face so he could return to his apartment for some rope to restrain her but says when he returned she was already dead.
- In every letter and interview Browne has written or participated in, he claims that every sexual act he engaged in with these women was consensual - I’m not sure if you can tell, but my eyes have rolled so far back inside my head. If every act was consensual, why would he need rope to restrain her? Browne claims that it was in case the chloroform stopped working and she came to, he wanted her to be restrained.
- He brought her body down to the trunk of his car. He drove her to the Red River and dumped her body; it has still never been found.
- Two months later, Browne was working at the apartment complex as a maintenance man. He claims to have been drinking heavily on the night of May 26, 1983 when he made a “spur of the moment” decision to kill 21 year old Wanda Faye Hudson in her apartment. As a maintenance man, Browne had access to each of the keys that opened the doors in the complex. He went up to Wanda’s apartment and unlocked her front door. He brought with him an ant killer - which at the time one of the main ingredients was chloroform.
- As Browne opened the door, he saw that Wanda had latched the security chain, meaning even with the key he wasn’t going to be able to enter her apartment. But Browne thought ahead, and also brought a screwdriver with him. He reached between the small gap in the door frame and unscrewed the plate from the door that held the chain in place.
- Just as he did with Faye, he placed the chloroform soaked rag across Wanda’s face, causing her to lose consciousness. He stabbed her numerous times in the chest and vaginal area with the screwdriver he brought with him. As he left, he reattached the plate to the door and tossed the screwdriver in a trash bin somewhere in the complex.
- She was found the next day by her boyfriend.
- Authorities actually had Robert Browne on their radar because just before her death, Wanda had mentioned to her uncle that she thought Browne had kept a key to her apartment. But when officers canvased the complex, Browne said he had been out with his wife that night and wasn’t looked into further.
- Jumping to 1984, his 4th wife, Rita Coleman - the one whose larynx was almost crushed, was finally granted a divorce and the two split.
- Browne started working for J+H Wholesale Flower Company as a delivery driver out of Sibley, LA. This job would take him out on major highways through states all over the South.
- Up until this point, Browne was starting to create a consistent pattern in the way that he killed. That was until February of 1984 when he met a woman while in the area on a delivery for work in southeast Texas. 17 year old Nidia Mendoza was working at a topless club as a dancer when Robert Browne approached her asking to pay her for sex. She agreed and met with him at the end of her shift that night. The two went to Browne’s motel room where he claims they had sex and then he manually strangeled her. And here’s where things took a graphic turn.
- For the first time that we know of, Browne dismembered his victim before disposing of the body.
- He placed Nidia into the bathtub in the motel room and began to separate her head and her legs from her body by using a dull knife from the kitchenette of his motel room. He grabbed his suitcase and placed the pieces of her body down into it. He then brought the suitcase down to his company van before making another trip to fill the bag.
- Once he had Nidia’s entire body in his van, he drove out to highway 59 and disposed of her body. She was found 4 days later in a drainage ditch.
- Two months later, Browne found himself headed west on I-10 where his job brought him to Flatonia, TX. It was March 25, 1984.
- He went down to the bar that was located to the rear of his motel to have a few drinks. He said a woman wearing jeans and a blouse with no shoes entered the bar and she was obviously very drunk and upset. There are different accounts of the story depending on the source, but Browne claims the woman was upset with her boyfriend/husband and thought he had gone to a different bar close by and the bartender asked Browne to bring her to that bar. The woman gets into Browne’s car and he says she came onto him and they began making out which lead to him bringing her to his motel room where they had sex. Browne and the woman, 22 year old Melody Bush, spent less than 20 minutes together before he knocked her out with a chemical soaked rag and stabbed her with an ice pick.
- He left Melody on the bed in his motel room and returned back to the bar at closing time where he would go to breakfast at a local truck stop with the bartender.
- When he got back to his room, he claims he loaded her up into his truck and brought her to a bridge where, once again, he tossed her body over the railings and into the water below.
- There are some inconsistencies in Browne’s recollection of events that leave detectives unable to completely link him to this crime.
- The bartender was interviewed twice about the night of Melody Bush’s murder: once right after it happened and again after Browne had confessed to it in one of his letters to Hess.
- The bartender recalled Melody leaving the bar alone and she did not ask Browne to bring her to her husband at the other bar. She actually says that Browne wasn’t even there the night Melody was killed. She was familiar with Robert Browne because he had come in a few times before. She also states that she never went anywhere with Browne, so she did not go eat breakfast with him as he has claimed.
- Melody Bush’s autopsy report shows that acetone was used to knock her unconscious and was ultimately the cause of her death. The report does not mention stab or puncture wounds, such as from an ice pick as Browne had claimed.
- He also said he used ether (e-ther) on Melody and never used acetone on any of his victims.
- The next year, 1985, he was arrested for stealing a bell from a baptist church. I’m not sure if he did time for that or what but he would serve time the next year for stealing a truck from a dealership in Louisiana and driving it all the way to Colorado to meet up, again, with Marjorie Miller.
- He was able to evade capture for 8 months until he was arrested and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
- He claims that after stealing the truck, he drove to the west coast and killed 3 people in 2 separate incidents.
- He says he shot a man in Washington state and threw his body over the guardrail down I-90. A few months later he claimed to have shot a couple on the beach near San Francisco with the same gun he used on the man in Washington. But none of these bodies have ever been found. So these claims can’t be corroborated.
- Browne served 7 of his 18 month sentence - I’m sure we’re all shocked - and was released on parole in April of 1987.
- In November of that same year, Browne confessed to having murdered yet another woman, this time in Colorado Springs, CO.
- He was working at a Kwik Stop gas station when a female customer walked in. He recognized her because she would come in with her husband to rent movies and video players. But that night she was alone because her husband gone to visit family in Florida and had taken their baby with him.
- Browne claims the woman agreed to go out with him that night and she gave him her address so he could pick her up and they’d go to a movie together.
- After the movie they returned to his apartment where he strangled her. He left her body on the side of his bed and covered her with blankets because he said he was too tired to dispose of her body that night.
- He did, however, drive her car to her apartment to see if there was anything of value he could take. He didn’t find much but remembered she had told him they just bought a new tv, so he located it and made his way back to her car, but before he could make it he was stopped by a security guard that asked him if the tv was his and he said “yes” and the guard let him go.
- He returned to his apartment where the next day he would finally get rid of the woman’s body. He says he placed her into his bathtub and dismembered her.
- Browne then placed her body parts into trash bags and brought them down to the complex’s dumpster before returning to his bathroom to clean up.
- He then parked her car in another complex’s parking lot where he said he knew it would be found.
- The woman would later be identified as 15 year old Rocio Sperry. Her body has never been found.
- Robert Browne married for a fifth time in 1988 to a woman named Diane Marcia Babbitts.
- He remained pretty quiet for several years until 1991 when he kidnapped 13 year old Heather Church from her home in El Paso County, CO.
- But Browne finally slipped up and his fingerprints were found on the windowsill of the Church home.
- It took detectives 4 years to compile enough evidence against Browne, but he was eventually arrested March 28, 1995. Detectives searched through 92 fingerprint databases and found his prints in Louisiana’s system from when he was arrested for stealing that truck in 1986.
- The death penalty was on the table, but he said he wouldn’t plead guilty unless he was given life in prison. Heather’s family agreed to the plea and he was sentenced to life.
- Authorities wanted to get another murder conviction on Browne in case there was an appeal and he was able to be released from prison.
- So a cold case team was put together in hopes of finding enough evidence to charge Browne with another murder.
- Authorities could see so many similarities between cases and they knew Heather Church wasn’t his only victim.
- This is how the letters between Browne and Charlie Hess began. If you remember at the beginning of the episode, I mentioned the really cryptic message Browne sent to Hess about the “7 sacred virgins.”
- The two wrote back and forth for months and months and Browne saw this as kind of a game where he would tease detectives about crimes he claimed to have been involved in.
- The clues he gave detectives allowed them to link Browne to the case of the missing mother in Colorado from 1987.
- He plead guilty to her murder in July of 2006, leading to another sentence of life in prison. Meaning, Robert Browne will never step foot outside prison walls.
- Browne would eventually stop communicating with detectives, but they were able to identify 27 or 28 murders within his letters and they’d be able to directly link him to 9, although none of the cases have been able to provide enough physical evidence to convict him of any of them. Of the 48 he’s confessed to: he claims to have killed 17 in Louisiana, 3 in Mississippi, 4 in Arkansas, 5 in Texas, 2 in Oklahoma, 2 in New Mexico, 8 in Colorado, 2 in California, and 1 in Washington.
- Earlier I mentioned that there were some characteristics between his wives and his victims, and that is that they are all very tiny petite women, standing on average, at about 5’3/4” and no more than 125 pounds.
- I think this is interesting because Browne, himself, was not a small guy. He stands at about 6’2”. And I’m no psychologist but I did go to school for psychology and it’s a topic I find very fascinating - but I think the reason why he killed very small, petite women is because they remind him of his mother. I didn’t mention this earlier, but his mother was said to have condoned the teasing done by his siblings.
- I feel as if this is a way to have that power and control over, not just a woman, but a human being and to regain that loss of power he experienced as a child.
- Browne was asked by Hess on multiple occasions why he killed all of these women, to which he replied that they were all spur of the moment opportunities. They weren’t planned or well thought out. He said “women are unfaithful, they screw around a lot, they cheat, and they are not of the highest moral value. They cheat and are users.” In the affidavit, it states, “Mr. Browne said in some way, he feels justified in what he has done… He had been disappointed with women his whole life. He accused women of being “users” and “not loyal.” He said women will attach themselves to men whom they believe they can get the most from.”
- I find it very funny and also ironic that he calls these women users, but he is the one to get sexual gratification from them, essentially using them before he kills them.
- 41 of these cases are still considered cold. But if he is guilty of all 48, that would make him one of the most prolific serial killers in United States history.