The Devil's Right-Hand Man: The True Story of Serial Killer Robert Charles Browne by Stephen G. Michaud & Debbie M. Price

Author:Stephen G. Michaud & Debbie M. Price
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-10-02T07:00:00+00:00

Browne’s motive for discussing the Mendoza murder with Charlie Hess in such apparently self-incriminating detail is not clear. He may have erroneously believed Hess was responsible for his move to the Fremont facility, an improvement from the state penitentiary, and was offering Mendoza as a quid pro quo.

As usual, little or nothing of what he said was verifiable. The part about the victim’s head and legs being severed had appeared in both of the big Houston daily newspapers. Browne also probably understood that since he was neither tape-recorded nor under oath, the only way this “confession” eventually could be heard in court was secondhand, as hearsay.

Still, since he openly feared Texas justice—“Texas does like to kill people!” he had written in an early letter—it seemed pointless for him to risk a capital murder indictment, unless Browne believed, as he had in the Church case, that no physical evidence linked him to Nidia Mendoza’s murder. In light of his experience in the Church case, such a faith would be difficult for a rational person to sustain.

Then there was the nature of the crime. Assuming, as Charlie Hess did, that Browne was telling the truth, this was the cold case squad’s first clear look at the manner in which Robert Browne went about his crimes. Nothing lyrical here, no sacred virgins tucked away in their dark and watery tomb. Browne had dispassionately admitted to sex with a tiny, teenaged hooker. Then he methodically hacked her to pieces.

There was a practical reason for dismembering Nidia Mendoza; it was an efficient, if ghoulish, way of removing her body—incriminating evidence—from the hotel. But it seems likely that something more was going on in her killer’s mind as he took up his knife.

Experts in aberrant crime recognize that a common objective among sexually motivated killers is total possession of their victims. As Ted Bundy famously put it, “possessing [a victim] physically as one would possess a potted plant, a painting or a Porsche. Owning, as it were, this individual.”

But just as no two deviant offenders will kill in exactly the same way, or for precisely the same reasons, they also differ in what they mean by possession, which to them is synonymous with power. Janet Warren, a professor of clinical psychiatric medicine and associate director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy at the University of Virginia, has studied sexual killers extensively. Among them was a sexual sadist who found the act of murder exhilarating, so much so, that if his female victims lost consciousness too quickly, he revived them.

In a 1999 interview on Salon.com, Warren recalled this particular deviant killer. “He said, ‘I wasn’t going to let myself be robbed of the experience. I wanted to see in her eyes that she knew she was going to die, and that I was going to take her life.’ ”

For Bundy, who enjoyed sex with his dead victims, possession meant control of a lifeless female, and time to do what he wanted with her body. For Jeffrey Dahmer, a cannibal, possession meant consumption.

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