They call themselves “dinosaurs,” the three retirees who meet at the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office twice weekly to look over unsolved homicides.
In 2002, Charlie Hess, Lou Smit and Scott Fischer sipped coffee and decided to look into serial killers. Smit, whose work as an investigator cracked the 1991 Heather Dawn Church murder, suggested her killer: Robert Charles Browne.
Hess, who served 10 years as an FBI agent and worked with the CIA in Vietnam, drafted a handwritten letter to Browne. Fischer typed it because Hess doesn’t know how to use a computer.
Hess said he was interested in bringing closure for victims’ families. He sent a picture of himself holding up a goldfin tuna fish.
“He wrote back to me, saying, ‘Depending how you answer several questions, I’ll decide on whether or not I want to communicate with you,”‘ Hess said.
Browne wanted to know how Hess felt about people jailed for crimes they didn’t commit, but who had not been caught for other crimes they had committed.
“I said I thought people should be incarcerated for crimes they actually do,” Hess said.
Right answer.
Hess gave Browne his home address and telephone number.
Early on, Browne asked Hess for a book, the latest in a series from author Jean Auel.
“He read all the previous ones, but the latest book had not found its way into the prison library,” Hess said. “He’s a voracious reader, and he’s well up on just about everything. There’s hardly any subject he can’t talk about.”
Hess, in the course of 20 to 25 letters, began to share personal details. He shared that his son-in-law was killed on Christmas Eve 16 years ago. He said his wife had had heart surgery.
“If I want to look into his soul, I know he has to feel like he can look into mine,” Hess said.
Most of the information about Browne’s connection to as many as 48 homicides came after the two began meeting in prison. Hess said the two probably shared a half-dozen letters that had nothing to do with killing.
“I think that’s one of the things that he missed was being able to communicate with someone in the outside world who was not going to judge him,” Hess said.
At one point, Browne asked if Hess could send in a doctor to review whether the Department of Corrections doctor was properly treating his arthritis. “He said, ‘Get me a private doctor and I’ll give you three murders.”‘
Hess arranged for the visit. The doctor concurred with the DOC doctor’s treatment.
By the eighth or 10th letter, Browne’s clues were more concrete. “He provided specific information on names of towns, circumstances, methods,” Hess said.
A 2003 letter invited Hess on a “hypothetical road trip.”
The letter said: “We started in Colorado Springs. … From there we went to Flatonia … (a reference to a Texas killing) Let’s continue east on Interstate 10. New Orleans was very fertile grounds. We are now in Mississippi but just barely. We are very near the Alabama border. There is a swampy areas just north of the Interstate. There, two bodies were dumped. Both of these were male. … I made a point of stating that they were male so you couldn’t dismiss the incident. It was around 1980 then.”
When Hess would ask for the reason behind all the killing, Browne had no answer.
“Were you on a hunting trip?” Hess would ask.
“No. If the opportunity presented itself, I took it,” Browne reportedly told Hess.
One subject Browne never discussed was his family, telling Hess, “That’s off the table.”
Throughout the course of their conversations, Hess told Browne there would come a day when investigators would announce what they knew.
Hess recalled Browne’s answer: “He said, ‘I really dread that day.”‘
Hess said Browne “doesn’t want to seek publicity. He doesn’t have a great deal of contact with the media. He agreed that our relationship would remain, regardless of what is in the media.”
Hess said Browne probably has not not told him everything.
“If I were in that place, I wouldn’t either because in the event he needs to trade someday for something … well, what does he got to trade for?”
Staff writer Erin Emery can be reached at 719-522-1360 or eemery@denverpost.com.
