Coushatta, La. – Through her frequent black eyes and swollen cheeks, Rita Morgan saw her ex-husband Robert Browne as a violent and controlling man but not a serial killer.
Browne, however, claims to have killed 48 people in nine states and South Korea during a nearly 25-year span that ended in El Paso County when he was arrested in 1995 for the murder of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church.
Morgan also said she was with Browne the night of May 28, 1983, when he claims he killed 21-year-old neighbor Wanda Faye Hudson.
“We had been out playing cards until late, and then we came home and made coffee and sat in the kitchen, then we went to bed, and he was there all night,” she said, adding that Colorado police never contacted her. “I just don’t see (how) he was supposed to have done anything like that when he was with me the whole time.”
Browne knows details of Hudson’s murder, she said, “but everybody in town knew everything the very next day. This is a real small town.”
Browne’s father was a sheriff’s deputy on a force of fewer than 20 people.
Others in his hometown remembered Browne as a liar and braggart who loved elaborate practical jokes. Some of those people questioned whether Browne is confessing to get attention or better prison conditions.
Colorado investigators, however, stand by their account. El Paso County Sheriff’s Lt. Clif Northam said he did not know if investigators had spoken to Rita Morgan or any other townspeople in Coushatta, but he said many of the details Browne provided about the homicides were accurate accounts.
“A lot of what he told us was corroborated independently and information only the murderer would know,” Northam said. “There are probably people there who disagree, especially people who were acquaintances who knew him or who knew his family. They are probably in shock because they know his family is a good family.”
“Story has many gaps”
But Kathy Cole, the older sister of 26-year-old Faye Self, doubts Browne killed her sister.
At the time he lived here, Browne worked and stayed at apartments owned by his brother. Self was another resident of the nine-unit complex when she disappeared without a trace.
Browne claims to have met up with Self at a bar across town, where her car was found parked and locked the next day. He said he used chloroform to knock her unconscious in her bedroom and that she died from the fumes before he could have sex with her.
“His story has so many gaps in it that I’m afraid to believe him,” Cole said. “Nobody saw her drunk. Why would she leave her car there?”
Cole said “it was shoddy police work from start to finish.”
She said Browne’s father worked on the case, a conflict of interest. In the early days of the disappearance, the sheriff’s department reassured the family that Self had just run off – that there was no evidence of foul play. A year and a half after Self’s disappearance, sheriff’s investigators had lost her dental records and the few scraps of investigative work they had assembled, Cole said. Attempts to reach former Sheriff Buddy Huckaby were not successful.
Current Sheriff Johnny Norman said Colorado investigators never worked with his department on the cases in any level of detail.
The investigation into Browne’s connection to the Self case brings the family no peace.
“I want to be able to put my sister to rest,” Cole said. “It’s been like a wound that never heals.”
For former wife Rita Morgan, her wounds, physical and mental, have healed.
Browne had been a handsome boy about town from a nice, though poor, family. When they started dating, she was a divorcee in her 20s with two young sons. Browne was good to the boys, Morgan said, and never abused her in front of them.
She wonders if Browne is just bored in prison. By listening to his tales and making deals for information, authorities are playing the kind of manipulative games Browne loves, Morgan said.
“They should have never plea-bargained with him when he killed that little girl” in Colorado, she said. “They should have given him death. They (authorities) just don’t know Robert.”
Staff writer Felisa Cardona contributed to this report.
Staff writer Joey Bunch can be reached at 303-820-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com.
20 cases among Robert Browne’s murder claims
Key
NC = not corroborated
UI = under investigation
SUB = substantiated
2 cases closed with murder convictions.
1. 1970 or 71 – Killed a soldier in South Korea; UI
2. 1975 or 1979 – Strang led a prostitute in a New Orleans motel; NC
3. Late 1970s – Strangled a woman he met in a Morgan City, La., bar. Dumped body from bridge; NC
4. 1980 – Strangled Katherine Jean Hayes, 15, in Coushatta, La. Dumped body near Montgomery, La.; SUB; body found then
5-6. 1980 – Shot young couple at I-70 rest stop in western Colorado; NC
7. 1983 – Chloroformed Faye Self, a female neighbor, in Coushatta, La. Dumped body in bayou; body not found; declared dead 1991; SUB
8. 1983 – Strangled a woman he met in a Clarence, La., bar. Dumped body in a river next to a county road; NC
9. 1983 – Strangled Wanda Faye Hudson, 21, in Coushatta, La. Body found in apartment. Browne’s name surfaces in initial investigation; SUB
10. 1984 – Stabbed Melody Bush with ice pick in his Flatonia, Texas, motel room. Body found along highway; SUB
11. 1984 – Strangled and dismembered an exotic dancer, Nidia (Bolivar) Mendoza, 17, outside Houston. Dumped body parts in field alongside road; SUB; body found.
12. 1986 – Shot a man at a roadside turnout in Washington state; NC
13-14. 1986 – Shot a man and woman camping on California coast near Oregon line. Crammed bodies between driftwood and boulders; NC
15. 1987 – Strangled Rocio Sperry in Colorado Springs. Dumped body in trash bin; murder charge 2006; body never found
16. 1991 – Strangled Lisa Lowe after meeting her in a Memphis, Tenn., bar and driving her across the Mississippi River; SUB; body found in river
17. 1991 or 1992 – Met a woman in a cowboy bar in Colorado Springs, strangled her at his home; UI; identity being researched.
18*. 1991 – Killed Heather Dawn Church in El Paso County; arrested in 1995 for murder; sentenced to life in prison; skull recovered in 1993
19. 1992 – Shot a man in Tulsa, Okla., and rolled his body into a lake; UI
20. 1993 – Shot a man at a scenic overlook on U.S. 64 in New Mexico; UI; body recovered then
*Browne has not “claimed” this killing and, despite pleading guilty, maintains his innocence.
– Compiled by Nancy Lofholm
Source: El Paso County Sheriff’s Office
