Robert Charles Browne

What the record shows

Robert Charles Browne is a Louisiana-born former soldier who is serving two life sentences in Colorado for the murders of two girls in the Colorado Springs area. In 1995 he pleaded guilty to the 1991 kidnapping and murder of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church and was sentenced to life without parole; in July 2006 he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in the 1987 death of Rocio Sperry, about 15, and received a second life term. He has claimed responsibility for 48 killings in nine states between 1970 and 1995. Investigators have said a handful of those claims were corroborated, but he has not been charged in any killing outside Colorado.

According to the Wikipedia article, Browne was born on October 31, 1952, in Coushatta, Louisiana, the youngest of nine children. He left high school shortly before turning 17 to join the Army, and the Associated Press reported that he served from 1969 to 1976 before being dishonorably discharged for drug use. Wikipedia says he married five times, with every marriage ending in divorce, and that he worked at various businesses in Louisiana, Texas and Colorado.

Heather Dawn Church disappeared on September 17, 1991, from her family's home in Black Forest, Colorado, where she had been babysitting. According to the Wikipedia article, her remains were found in September 1993 off Rampart Range Road, and the case stayed unsolved until an investigator working for the Colorado Springs police ran crime-scene fingerprints through dozens of fingerprint databases that had not been searched before. The prints matched Browne through earlier felony records, and he was charged with Church's murder on March 28, 1995. Under a plea agreement he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder; prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, and he was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In March 2000, Browne sent El Paso County prosecutors a taunting letter written in cryptic prose; Newsweek reported that it read in part, "The score is you, one, the other team, 48." A group of unpaid retired investigators working with the El Paso County Sheriff's Office, among them former FBI and CIA officer Charlie Hess, retired Colorado Springs detective Lou Smit and former newspaper publisher Scott Fischer, took up the case. The Associated Press reported that Hess corresponded with Browne, and that in early 2003 Browne wrote, "Try the missing persons files on a young Army wife." That pointed investigators to Rocio Sperry, a 15-year-old who was married to a soldier and had vanished from Colorado Springs in 1987. Browne then confessed in a prison interview to killing her. Her remains have never been found.

On July 27, 2006, Browne pleaded guilty in Colorado Springs to first-degree murder in Sperry's death. Newsweek reported that investigators had confirmed details of his account, including a ring he said he took from her and sold, which the sheriff's office traced to the buyer. He received a second life sentence. The same week, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa announced that Browne claimed 48 killings: 17 in Louisiana, nine in Colorado, seven in Texas, five in Arkansas, three in Mississippi, two each in California, New Mexico and Oklahoma, and one in Washington. Some reports gave the figure as 49, counting a claimed killing of a fellow soldier in South Korea in 1970, which the sheriff said had not been verified.

Maketa said authorities had corroborated six of the out-of-state claims, three in Louisiana, two in Texas and one in Arkansas, according to the Associated Press; a later WAFB report put the total at seven when the two Colorado cases were included. Newsweek quoted Maketa as saying Browne had given information on 19 of the 48 claimed killings and was a strong suspect in seven. The Louisiana cases named in reporting are three young women from Coushatta: Wanda Faye Hudson, Faye Self and Katherine Jean Hayes. Published accounts differ on the years of those deaths, which fall in the early 1980s. Reporting also linked Browne to Nidia Mendoza, 17, whose body was found near Houston in 1984, and the Wikipedia article lists further possible victims in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, among them Timothy Lee Warren, found shot in a Tulsa park in March 1992.

Maketa said Browne might be exaggerating but that investigators could not proceed on that assumption, and then-Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said he believed the claims of multiple killings. Others were more doubtful. Criminologist Robert Keppel told the Associated Press that such numbers were "just for media purposes." The Wikipedia article notes that most of the 48 claims remain uncorroborated. As of February 2023, according to Wikipedia, Browne was held at the Limon Correctional Facility in Limon, Colorado.