The Devil’s Defender: My Odyssey Through American Criminal Justice from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar Massacre

202 Pages·2016·1.01 MB·English

by  John Henry Browne

Copyright © 2016 by John Henry Browne
All rights reserved
Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373489-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Browne, John Henry, 1946– author.
Title: The devil’s defender: my odyssey through American criminal justice
from Ted Bundy to the Kandahar massacre/John Henry Browne.
Description: Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press Incorporated, 2016. |
Includes index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data
provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015050333 (print) | LCCN 2015050255 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781613734889 (pdf) | ISBN 9781613734896 (epub) |
ISBN 9781613734902 (Kindle) | ISBN 9781613734872 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Browne, John Henry, 1946– author. | Lawyers—United
States—Biography.
Classification: LCC KF373.B76 (print) | LCC KF373.B76 A3 2016 (ebook) | DDC
340.092—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050333
Interior design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN
Interior layout: Nord Compo
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.
For Deborah Beeler and all victims of senseless crimes—
and all victims of an imperfect justice system.
They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group.
Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen,
where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it
is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.
—Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Prologue
1 - The Ted Murders
2 - “Where’d You Get Those Shoes?”
3 - The Shadows of Secret Cities
4 - “Are You Experienced?”
5 - The Spiro Agnew Acid Test
6 - Deborah
7 - A Total Eclipse of the Sun
8 - Chicago
9 - I Go to Prison
10 - The Killer Beside Me
11 - Escape
12 - A Bargain
13 - Confessions
14 - Success
15 - “The Floor Is Supposed to Be Green”
16 - Defending Benjamin Ng
17 - I Want a New Drug
18 - Fighting for Women Who Fight Back
19 - The Execution of Ted Bundy
20 - Presumed Guilty
21 - Colton Harris-Moore
22 - A Massacre in Kandahar
Epilogue
Appendix A - John Henry Browne’s Ten Rules for Trials
Appendix B - The Letters of Ted Bundy
Acknowledgments
Index
PROLOGUE
On an unusually clear morning in May 2012 I took the ferry from Bainbridge
Island, where I had lived for the past twenty-three years, to Seattle, where
I’ve had a private law practice since the 1970s. From the ferry terminal I drove
to the studio of Q13, the local Fox TV affiliate. Over the years reporters from all
over the world had interviewed me on camera, but this was going to be different.
Host C. R. Douglas would be asking me questions I had declined to answer for
three decades. The subject would be my most notorious client, the sociopath and
mass murderer Theodore Robert Bundy.
The decision to break my silence did not come easily. My counsel of Bundy
has always been a complicated matter in my career and personal life. When I
was twenty-nine years old I sat with Ted in a jail cell in Florida and he confessed
things to me he said he’d never told anyone else. Finally, as I was about to leave
his cell, he stopped me. He had one more confession to add: the reason he’d
consulted me as a lawyer for so long—nearly five years—was because we were
“so much alike.” I remember returning to my cheap motel room, lighting a
cigarette, and looking at my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I felt sick to my
stomach.
Bundy’s assertion, which of course I’ve never agreed with or even
understood, nonetheless grinded at me for years. So much so that I avoided even
thinking about the conversation. My memory of it, I hoped, would never be
tapped again.
Recently, though, as I’ve thought and wrote about other events in my life,
Ted and his words kept bubbling up. I made the mistake of digging out from
storage “the Ted box,” which contained Bundy’s case files as well as numerous
letters he had sent me. Many of the old feelings of disgust and resentment came
rushing back.
At the same time two new cases had thrown me back into the international
spotlight. First, I took on, pro bono, the case of Colton Harris-Moore, the
teenager known as the Barefoot Bandit, who’d been accused of breaking into
countless homes, stealing airplanes, and leading authorities on a two-year
manhunt that extended from western Washington State to the Caribbean.
Second, and also pro bono, I had accepted as a client Sgt. Robert Bales,
accused of performing a solo raid on two Afghan villages on March 11, 2012.
Bales allegedly shot, knifed, and in some cases burned innocent men, women,
and children. Military prosecutors charged him with sixteen counts of first-
degree murder, but the government’s case seemed shaky to me from the start,
largely because Bales was on his fourth deployment in almost as many years and
was clearly suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. He was also under the
influence of steroids, which his superiors had provided. “If Sergeant Bales did
it,” I told anyone who would listen, “and I do mean if, we as a nation are to
blame. We created this situation.”
Despite the weight and obvious intrigue of these two cases, reporters would
invariably bring up Ted Bundy, a topic I didn’t want to discuss. But slowly I
came to suspect that maybe, finally, it was time, that perhaps the public deserved
to understand not only who Ted Bundy was but also why I and other criminal
defense lawyers feel so duty bound to protect the rights of those accused of the
most heinous crimes.
I decided to put pen to paper and open up about a life and career that
included a leading role in the anti–Vietnam War movement, bringing awareness
to the plight of battered women, and fighting for civil rights for prisoners, as
well as my brushes with (as a fellow musician) the likes of the Grateful Dead
and Jimi Hendrix and (as a member of the media) the Nixon administration. I
would also talk about my work in some of the biggest criminal cases of the past
forty years, including that of murder suspect David Kunze—when I put the
forensic “science” of ear prints on trial—the Wah Mee massacre, and others,
each seemingly more bizarre than the last.
I’d resolved to begin the process at this television studio on the shore of
Seattle’s Lake Union, answering C. R. Douglas’s questions about Ted. I knew
Douglas and I would only touch the surface. The biggest thing to come out
would be that Bundy, whom history remembers as killing about thirty women,
confessed to me that he had killed more than one hundred people, and not just
women. I would describe a phone conversation I had with Ted shortly after his
second escape from custody. And I would reveal that my former girlfriend had
been murdered in a manner similar to a Ted Bundy victim.
That would be it. The rest is too big to fit into a twenty-five-minute
conversation—partly because Ted told me so much more, but mostly because the
story is larger and more complex than just Ted Bundy.
I have been thrown in jail myself. I have been a drug addict. I have been
married more times than I care to tell you. But I have also followed a passion for
justice and freedom since I was a child. I have won cases everyone else thought
were impossible to win. I have defended innocent people. And I have defended
monsters who nonetheless still deserved the fair trial our Constitution promises.
I stepped onto the set. A studio tech stuck a microphone in my left breast
pocket. I sat across from C. R. Douglas, who looked out from a pair of horn-
rimmed glasses, the glare of a klieg light bouncing off his impressive domelike
head. The set behind us, seemingly lit with every conceivable shade of blue,
convulsed in the manner known to anyone who watches cable news. Douglas
looked at his notes. Then back at me. He asked the first question and waited for
me to speak. I said what I could.
I’m going to tell you the rest here. While much of it, I hope, will be fun to
read, we need to understand each other right now, from the top. A lot of this isn’t
going to be pretty.
I won’t flinch if you won’t.