On March 20, 2000, a letter from a prison inmate arrived at the El Paso County district attorney's office in Colorado Springs. It was written, officials later said, in "cryptic and poetic prose." "Seven sacred virgins entombed side by side, those less worthy are scattered wide," it read. "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." With it came a map traced from an atlas, showing the outlines of nine states with a number written inside each one. The numbers added up to 48.
The writer was Robert Charles Browne, who five years earlier had pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murdering a 13-year-old girl, Heather Dawn Church, and was serving life without parole. The letter went into a file. Two years later, three retired men volunteering with the El Paso County Sheriff's Office took it out again. What they drew from Browne over the next four years led to a second murder conviction, the corroboration of six more killings in three states, and a list of claims that has never been proved.
Those three things have to be kept apart. Browne stands convicted of two murders. Investigators said they corroborated six others, through details only the killer would know, but no charge in any of those cases has been reported. The rest of the 48 rest on his word.
Browne was born on October 31, 1952, according to 9News in Denver, and grew up in Coushatta, Louisiana, a town of fewer than 3,000 people about 50 miles southeast of Shreveport. He was the youngest of nine children, a family that included three sets of twins; he has a twin sister. The Denver Post reported that his father worked at a dairy farm, and Johnny Norman, later sheriff of Red River Parish, said the family ran a dairy in the 1960s and had hard times. Norman also said Browne's father, Ronald, served for a time as a parish deputy. A brother, Donald, was once a Louisiana state trooper.
Norman had been a physical education teacher in Coushatta and taught Browne in the eighth and ninth grades. He remembered a smart, aloof boy from "a tough family" with a quick temper. "He was a loner, but not somebody you'd expect to do this," Norman told the Associated Press in 2006. "In a pickup basketball game, somebody fouled him or hit him, he'd fly off the handle."
Browne dropped out of high school in 1969 and joined the Army. He served from 1969 to 1976, including in South Korea, and the Denver Post reported he worked as a medic. El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa said he was dishonorably discharged in 1976 for drug use. His record afterward, as summarized by 9News, included motor vehicle theft, arson, cruelty to animals and burglary. He was jailed in Louisiana for car theft, and his fingerprints were on file there and in California. After his parole he moved to Colorado, in 1987.
He married six times. Investigators said in 2006 that all six former wives were alive. His last marriage, to Diane M. Babbitts, ended when she filed for divorce in El Paso County in 1995, the year of his arrest. Charlie Hess, the investigator who later spent four years with him, described him as polite, intelligent and antisocial, a man who did not swear or use street talk, and said Browne had an IQ of 145.
Rocio Delpilar Sperry was 15 years old and living in Colorado Springs in November 1987. She was married to a soldier, Joseph Sperry, and the Associated Press later described her as a 15-year-old Army bride. She had a baby daughter, Amie, who was three months old when her mother disappeared. Rocio was reported missing on November 15, 1987. For years her case was treated as a missing-person report rather than a homicide. Her remains have never been found.
Browne was working at a convenience store a block from her home. Nineteen years later he told investigators that he met her there, that the two agreed to go to a movie, and that afterward he took her to his apartment and strangled her. Her husband, he said, was out of town. He described taking her body apart in the bathtub and carrying it out in trash bags to the dumpster behind the apartment building, because he was worried about being seen. The date of the killing given in the plea was November 10, 1987.
Amie Sperry told the Denver Post in 2006 that she grew up thinking her father had killed her mother. She and Joseph Sperry attended the sheriff's press conference on July 27, 2006, the day Browne pleaded guilty.
Heather Dawn Church was 13 in September 1991 and lived with her mother, Diane, and her brothers on a five-acre property in Black Forest, a sparsely settled area about 12 miles north of Colorado Springs. Her parents had separated, and her father, Mike Church, lived on his own. On the evening she disappeared, her mother took the older boys to a Cub Scout meeting. Heather, who had taken babysitting classes, asked to stay home and look after her five-year-old brother, Sage. Diane Church called home a little before 8:30. Heather told her she had let Sage stay up but would put him to bed.
When Diane and the boys returned around 10 p.m., the house was dark and the front door was unlocked. Sage was asleep in his bed. Heather was gone. The family searched the house and property and called the sheriff's office. There was no sign of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, and nothing taken but Heather. The next morning Diane Church noticed that the screen on her bedroom window was askew. Evidence technicians lifted three fresh fingerprints from the outside of its frame.
Heather was reported missing on September 17, 1991. (A transcript of the Forensic Files episode on the case renders the date as September 7; the Denver Post's case list, drawn from the sheriff's records, gives September 17.) Volunteers set up a Heather Dawn Church organization with an office in Colorado Springs to keep the search going; a Rocky Mountain News photograph from October 1991 shows its bulletin board covered with reminders of her. Investigators looked first at the family, as they routinely do. Mike Church, who had been at a support group meeting that evening, was questioned for hours by the FBI and took a polygraph, as did Diane. Both were cleared. "As a father I felt like I should have been there and I wasn't," Mike Church said later.
The prints from the window screen were run through the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's files and then through the FBI's automated fingerprint system, which then held some 45 million sets. Neither produced a match.
On September 16, 1993, almost exactly two years after Heather disappeared, a hiker found a human skull in a steep ravine off Rampart Range Road, northwest of Colorado Springs and about 15 miles from the Church home. Dental records identified it as Heather's. The coroner found she had died of blunt force trauma to the back of the head, on the right side. Near the remains investigators found a pair of girls' pajamas. Diane Church said they were not Heather's.
A new sheriff took office in El Paso County and made the case a priority. He asked Lou Smit, a veteran Colorado Springs homicide detective who had become the sheriff's chief investigator, to reopen it. At the same time Tom Carney, a latent print examiner who had come to the county crime lab from Miami, looked at the three prints again. Carney knew something many investigators did not: the FBI database held prints mainly from people convicted of serious crimes, and many states kept separate files of people arrested or convicted for lesser offenses such as car theft and burglary. He identified 92 fingerprint databases in North America that had never been searched, had 92 sets of the prints made, and mailed them out. The Deseret News, reporting in 1997, credited Smit, as the sheriff's chief investigator, with sending the crime-scene prints to the 92 agencies.
About four weeks later Louisiana reported a match. The prints belonged to Robert Charles Browne, then 42, whose car-theft record in Louisiana had never reached the federal system. When investigators looked him up, they found he lived about a quarter mile from the Church house, according to the Forensic Files account (the Colorado Independent put it at half a mile). He was working as a tree farmer. Detectives put him under surveillance and arrested him in March 1995 as he walked out of an art supply store.
In a recorded interview Browne denied any involvement and insisted the prints could not be his. Prosecutors' theory, as described in the Forensic Files account, was that he had come to the house after dark intending to burgle it, seeing no lights and no car in the garage. He took off his gloves to work the window screen loose, and left the prints. When Heather heard him and came to look, he struck her, carried her out through the front door, and drove her body into the mountains. Smit was never satisfied with the burglary explanation. "If it was a burglary, all he had to do was go in there and just walk out if she didn't recognize him or kill her right there," he said in 2006. "But he took her out, and that always set wrong with me."
Browne first pleaded not guilty. In May 1995, facing a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder in Heather's death under an agreement that took the death penalty off the table, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. There was no trial. No appeal has been reported.
Smit believed from the start that Heather was not the first. During the Church investigation he learned that two women had been killed in Coushatta in an apartment complex owned by Browne's brother, where Browne had worked as the maintenance man. "I know a guy who might be a serial killer," he remembered telling colleagues years later. In 1997 Smit left for Boulder to work on the JonBenét Ramsey investigation, where he became known for arguing that an intruder had killed the six-year-old.
Browne wrote to the district attorney's office five years into his sentence. Besides the lines about the "seven sacred virgins" and the score of 1 to 48, the letter's map broke the 48 down by state. When the sheriff's office later released Browne's full claims, they ran: 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. He added a 49th, a fellow soldier he said he killed in South Korea in 1970. That claim has never been verified. The "9" in the letter matched the number of Colorado killings he would later claim. Authorities wrote back, but Browne stopped responding for a while.
In 2002 three retired men who had volunteered to work cold cases for the sheriff's office were looking for a new project. Charlie Hess was 75 then: a former FBI agent of ten years who had joined the CIA and, he said, worked in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, and who had long experience as a polygraph examiner. Lou Smit had retired. Scott Fischer was a former publisher of the Colorado Springs Gazette. Hess told NPR in 2008 that they had gone to the sheriff at the time, John Anderson, because "we just don't want to sit down the couch and watch television." Deputies came to call them the Apple Dumpling Gang, after the Disney film.
"We were sitting around having coffee one morning," Hess recalled, "and I think Scott asked Lou, 'You've been around forever. Who would be at the top of your list as a potential serial killer that's already incarcerated?' And Lou immediately came up with Robert Browne." The sheriff's office gave them the 2000 letter and access to the case file.
Hess began writing to Browne. The three men read each reply together and composed the answers jointly. "When we would receive a letter from Robert, we'd all sit down, we'd kick it around," Hess said. "What's he trying to tell us? Is there a message here?" They had learned that pressing too hard, or showing disgust, made Browne go silent. In December 2002 Browne wrote that he would not hand the authorities his cases "on a golden platter with nothing to gain for my efforts," adding: "There are eight other states that may be interested; Colorado only has nine points of interest. Louisiana has seventeen." Hess wrote back: "So Robert, where do we go from here?"
Less than two months later the answer came: "Try the missing persons files on a young Army wife." By about the sixth letter Browne was dropping hints about Rocio Sperry. When he stopped writing, Hess went to the prison, and the two began meeting face to face. About six months after the "Army wife" letter, Browne confessed in a prison interview to killing and dismembering Sperry. In early 2003 he described two killings in Texas and one in Oklahoma. In 2005 he described three in Louisiana.
What Browne asked for in return was small. At first, Hess said, he claimed to want nothing and to have no conscience. Then he asked for a single cell; he had a cellmate and wanted to be alone. The Colorado Department of Corrections arranged it. He asked for a prison job, and the team helped with that as well; Hess also got him an outside doctor and a particular book. Hess said he prepared himself the night before each visit to be respectful and not judgmental. "We never had a contentious moment," he said. Asked whether they were friends, he quoted Browne: "I don't know if we're friends or not... we certainly have established a relationship."
Over four years of letters and sporadic meetings, Browne described men and women he said he had strangled, shot or stabbed after meeting them on roads, in bars, at a motel bar, at a convenience store where he worked, and in an apartment complex where he did maintenance. He said he rarely planned. He described road trips he called "ramblings," stopping when he felt like it. "None ever got away; never gave the opportunity," he told investigators. "If you're going to do it, just do it." Asked what drove him, he said it was "just disgust with the person and some of it just confrontation." He said he had been disappointed with women all his life and called them unfaithful cheats and "users," and said he felt in some way justified. When investigators pressed him about sex with the victims, which he described as consensual, he would say: "That's off the table."
He was poor at names. "In many cases, he would just give us a description of the area that he was in or a nickname that he came up with to identify the victim," Maketa said. He once mixed up two victims during interviews. That vagueness is a large part of why most of his claims could never be verified.
On July 27, 2006, Sheriff Maketa announced the results, and the story, first reported on The Gazette's website, went around the world. Investigators said they had found bodies, police reports and other evidence that corroborated Browne's accounts of seven killings, in each case through information only the killer would know. The Denver Post reported that all seven were petite women, about five feet tall and about 100 pounds. Besides Rocio Sperry, they were these six women. None of the six is reported to have produced a charge.
Katherine Jean Hayes, known as "Fuzzy," was 15 and lived in Coushatta. According to the Denver Post's case list she was reported missing on July 4, 1980, and her body was found on October 16, 1980, in Nantachie Creek; she had been strangled. An AP report carried by WAFB in Baton Rouge gave the year as 1984 and said hunters found her off U.S. 71 in northwest Winn Parish. Browne told investigators he picked her up from a chicken stand and strangled her with shoelaces.
Faye Self was 26 and lived in the apartment next to Browne's in Coushatta. She was reported missing on March 30, 1983. Browne said he met her at a nightclub, went to her apartment and put a chloroform-soaked rag over her face, and that she died before he returned with rope. He said he put her body in the Red River, about 200 yards from the complex. She has never been found.
Wanda Faye Hudson, 20 or 21 by different reports, was found dead in her Coushatta apartment on May 28, 1983. She had been stabbed many times. Browne, a neighbor, had changed the lock on her door as the complex's maintenance man. He told investigators he subdued her with a rag soaked in red ant pesticide, which then contained chloroform, and stabbed her with a screwdriver, a killing he called spur-of-the-moment. Her death was being investigated while Browne's father was a parish deputy, Sheriff Norman said. Norman said he heard about Browne's confession from the news media rather than from Colorado, and that he had since spoken with Colorado investigators and the Louisiana State Police. "We never close a case," he said.
Nidia Mendoza was 17. She was reported missing in Texas on February 2, 1984, and her body was found in a ditch beside a Houston interstate four days later. Browne said he killed her in a motel room and used a knife from its kitchenette to dismember her.
Melody Bush was 22. Her body was found on March 30, 1984, in a drainage ditch in Fayette County, Texas, near Flatonia, about 85 miles east of San Antonio. The coroner ruled she died of acute acetone poisoning. Investigator Rick Cole of the Fayette County Sheriff's Office said he had worked with Colorado for years and that the case "looks like it's going to maybe come to a close."
Lisa Lowe was 21 and lived in West Memphis, Arkansas. She was last seen on November 3, 1991, seven weeks after Heather Church disappeared. Her body was found on November 26, 1991, in a river: the St. Francis, according to the Denver Post, or the Mississippi, according to an AP report. Browne said he met her at a blues club in Memphis, drove with her into Arkansas on Interstate 40 to a wooded area, and strangled her.
The count of seven is not used the same way in every report. The Denver Post and the site's own news page count Sperry plus the six above. Some AP stories that day said six, meaning the out-of-state cases, and one AP version said seven while counting "the two in Colorado," that is, Church and Sperry, with only five others. On the Denver Post's count, Heather Church is an eighth case, proven by conviction rather than corroborated by confession.
On the day of the announcement Browne, then 53, pleaded guilty in El Paso County Court to the first-degree murder of Rocio Delpilar Sperry and received a second life sentence. District Attorney John Newsome had agreed not to seek the death penalty in return for the plea. Browne was represented by a public defender, Bill Schoewe. A 44-page affidavit set out what he had told investigators. The sheriff's statement said the charge came "as a result of communications initiated by Mr. Browne in 2002."
Lt. Clif Northam of the sheriff's office said another state could seek the death penalty if its prosecutors could prove a case, but Browne "would have to complete his sentence here, which is two life sentences, so that makes it almost a moot point."
Forty-one of the 48 killings Browne claimed were not substantiated when the case was announced, and there has been no report that any has been since. The numbers given in 2006 varied. The Gazette, as reported by the AP, said authorities had linked him to 19 killings in nine states and South Korea. The Denver Post said investigators were pursuing leads on 22 homicides Browne had referred to them, including the seven. The Colorado Independent reported that the team considered 28 of his claims "solid" only in the sense that dates and places matched people who had gone missing. In Colorado, beyond Sperry, Browne said almost nothing about the seven other killings he claimed. The sheriff's office was trying to identify one El Paso County woman he called "Cowboy Girl." "We're hoping that he will continue to communicate with us and that some day we will be able to shed light and place names with those seven additional victims," Maketa said.
Some of Browne's descriptions could not be verified because he did not remember enough, and in some cases investigators could not confirm that bodies were where he said he left them. Smit noted that Browne used ditches and rivers and that many old police and missing-person reports no longer existed. "There are some I don't think he'll ever tell us about," he said.
Officials differed on how far to trust him. "It's possible he's exaggerating, but I don't think you can conduct business assuming he's exaggerating," Maketa said. "We'll hold the No. 48 until he tells us otherwise." Colorado Attorney General John Suthers, a former El Paso County district attorney, said he believed the claims, citing "the combination of moving around a lot, picking random victims and being pretty clean about it." Robert Keppel, a criminologist at Sam Houston State University, was more doubtful. "Probably no doubt the guy's murdered a lot of people," he said, "but numbers are just for media purposes."
There is one claim that runs the other way. According to the Denver Post, Browne told investigators he had been wrongly accused of killing Heather Dawn Church, the murder he pleaded guilty to in 1995 and the one his own fingerprints tied him to. Mike Church saw the confessions as a bid for attention. "He feels like he has control over us," he told The Gazette. "He's wanting to become a Charles Manson or a Ted Bundy. He wants us all to think how smart he is. But he's nothing but a coward."
In the days after the announcement the sheriff's office received more than 100 calls from families and friends of missing people around the country, so many that it stopped counting. "They want to know if their family member or friend could have been one of his victims," Lt. Northam said. Other agencies with unsolved cases called too, and some asked about the sheriff's use of volunteers. The department had 602 full-time employees and about 450 volunteers. "They could sit and have coffee and talk about their plan," Maketa said of the three men. "They're not in a rush." Fischer said he hoped the case would push departments to reopen their files. "There's a lot of victims out there that Robert Browne didn't kill," he said.
Asked why Browne talked, Hess said he did not know. "Does he have a conscience? Is that what motivated him? I really have no idea and I'm not sure he knows." In 2008 Hess published a book with Davin Seay, Hello Charlie: Letters from a Serial Killer, built on the correspondence. By then the Apple Dumpling Gang had disbanded: Fischer had moved away, Smit planned to travel, and Hess's wife, Jo, had died the previous October. Hess told NPR the team's main accomplishment was that Browne had given details of unsolved killings that brought some families "a degree of closure," while adding, from his own family's experience of a murder, that "there's no such thing as complete closure." A second book on the case, The Devil's Right-Hand Man by Stephen G. Michaud, also appeared.
The Church case also became a teaching example about fingerprints. The Forensic Files episode on it closes on the point Tom Carney had found: that a match had sat for years in state files the national system did not reach, and that the case was solved only because someone mailed the prints to 92 agencies.
Browne is convicted, by his own guilty pleas, of two murders, and both convictions are final. He is serving life without parole for the kidnapping and murder of Heather Dawn Church and a second life sentence for the murder of Rocio Sperry. A Rocky Mountain News caption in July 2006 described him as a Cañon City inmate. Law Week Colorado reported on July 23, 2021, that he was held at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City. No charge in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas or anywhere else has been reported, and Rocio Sperry's and Faye Self's remains have never been recovered.
October 31, 1952: Robert Charles Browne born; grows up in Coushatta, Louisiana.
1969: Leaves high school and joins the Army; serves in South Korea.
1970: The killing of a fellow soldier in South Korea that Browne later claimed. Never verified.
1976: Dishonorably discharged for drug use, according to the sheriff.
July 4, 1980: Katherine "Fuzzy" Hayes, 15, reported missing in Louisiana (body found October 16; year given as 1984 in one AP report). Corroborated, not charged.
March 30, 1983: Faye Self, 26, reported missing in Coushatta. Corroborated, not charged.
May 28, 1983: Wanda Faye Hudson found dead in her Coushatta apartment. Corroborated, not charged.
February 1984: Nidia Mendoza, 17, missing in Texas on February 2 and found near Houston on February 6. Corroborated, not charged.
March 30, 1984: Melody Bush, 22, found in Fayette County, Texas. Corroborated, not charged.
1987: Browne moves to Colorado after parole on a Louisiana car-theft sentence.
November 10, 1987: Rocio Sperry, 15, killed in Colorado Springs (reported missing November 15). Convicted by plea in 2006.
September 17, 1991: Heather Dawn Church, 13, reported missing from her Black Forest home. Convicted by plea in 1995.
November 3, 1991: Lisa Lowe, 21, last seen in West Memphis, Arkansas; found November 26. Corroborated, not charged.
September 16, 1993: Heather's remains found off Rampart Range Road.
March 1995: Browne arrested after prints from the Church window screen are matched through Louisiana records.
May 1995: Pleads guilty to kidnapping and murder of Heather Church; life without parole.
March 20, 2000: Sends the "you 1, the other team 48" letter to the El Paso County DA.
2002: Volunteer cold-case team (Hess, Smit, Fischer) begins corresponding with him.
Early 2003: Points investigators to "a young Army wife"; later confesses to the Sperry killing and describes cases in Texas and Oklahoma.
2005: Describes three Louisiana killings.
July 27, 2006: Pleads guilty to first-degree murder of Rocio Sperry; second life sentence. Sheriff announces 48 claims, seven corroborated.
February 2008: Hess's book Hello Charlie published.
July 23, 2021: Law Week Colorado reports him held at the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility (latest custody report found).