Post by Joanna on Nov 4, 2017 0:58:53 GMT -5
Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? by Robert G. Lawson
Quincy Brown put a heating pad in her 19-year-old daughter’s bed, then climbed in herself to do some light reading. It was a chilly Oct. 26 and she didn’t want her only child coming home to a cold bed after a study session at Transylvania College. Betty Gail Brown never got home that night in 1961 and her death is one of Lexington’s great unsolved mysteries and its oldest cold case.
The Brown investigative file, released by Lexington police under the Kentucky Open Records Act, reveals that the investigation into her killing was doomed by starts and stops, leads that went nowhere and a confession full of holes.
The Brown case is the subject of attorney Robert G. Lawson’s new book, Who Killed Betty Gail Brown? Murder, Mistrial and Mystery. Lawson will appear with his book at the Kentucky Book Fair on Nov. 18 at Alltech Arena.
This much is clear about the case of Betty Gail Brown: She was found in her little car in the driveway in front of Transylvania’s Old Morrison building early Friday, Oct. 27, 1961, strangled to death with her own bra. Police files indicate she left nearby Forrer Hall about midnight, died around 1 a.m. and was found strangled in her car about 3 a.m. by a Lexington police officer. She hadn’t been raped. Her purse was untouched, her books and notes undisturbed. Her keys were slung into the back seat of her little French-made Simca car. Beyond this, the case veers into chaos.
No one, even the man who confessed to the murder in 1965, had a motive. Betty Gail was a member of Phi Mu sorority at Transylvania. She was popular, studious, focused. She was a Sunday school teacher at Central Christian Church. A commuter student who lived with her parents on Lackawanna Road, she was supposed to be going home about midnight Oct. 26. She had checked out of Forrer Hall, which had a housemother who made notes of comings and goings. A witness said he saw her car headed south down Upper Street, maybe 10 minutes from home on Lackawanna Road. But for some reason, she returned to campus. Was she alone? Was she forced? What led her to park in front of Old Morrison when she had parked elsewhere for her study session?
Her mother, Quincy Stanton Brown, a local decorator and the sister of actor Harry Dean Stanton, knew that her daughter wouldn’t normally run so late, but she also never knew her to park in front of Old Morrison. Quincy Brown made three trips downtown to search for Betty Gail, but failed to turn into the Old Morrison driveway. On Quincy Brown’s third trip, she was stopped by a policeman, who told her Betty Gail was dead.
Betty Gail Brown, a French major with doe eyes, clear skin and Breck Girl hair, became more famous in death than she ever was in life. Her killer became a mythological figure in Lexington, a sort of all-purpose boogeyman. A man approached a woman standing beneath a tree on the Transylvania campus and proclaimed himself the “Transylvania strangler.” Another man pinned his wife to their trailer floor and threatened to give her the same treatment that Transylvania girl got. A cross-dressing male who had graduated from Transylvania and moved to New York got a leering write-up in the newspaper as he was run through the grinder of suspects: “Shorn of his high heels, sheer silk stockings, grey bandanna, grey skirt, falsies and girdle,” the newspaper sneered.
In 1965, a man losing his battle with alcohol addiction confessed to the crime in Klamath Falls, Ore. His name was Alex Arnold, alias Don Eagle, alias Don Ringo, and he told quite a tale about the night Betty Gail Brown died. While Arnold was in a Lexington jail awaiting trial, Quincy Brown came to see him. “You did not kill my daughter,” she told him, according to Arnold. In fact, rumors had circulated that Quincy Brown herself had killed her daughter. She asked a neighbor about them, according to Lawson’s book, and was told they were given no credence.
Arnold’s trial in Lexington ended in a hung jury – seven for acquittal, five for conviction – and a mistrial was declared. Arnold recanted his confession during the trial, saying maybe he had dreamed the scenario. He was not retried. The case was marked “cleared by arrest,” but it was never cleared by the court of public opinion. In his book, Lawson says he doesn’t believe Arnold killed Betty Gail Brown, but acknowledges he might have.
In his confession, Arnold said he was drunk and this wasn’t unusual. He claimed to have approached Brown’s car, where he said two women were making out, and asked for a light for his cigarette. According to Arnold, the two repeatedly “cussed” him, so he reached into the car on the drivers’ side, grabbed Brown’s hair and smashed her head into the dashboard, leaving a bloody stain. The other girl fled, Arnold claimed, leaving him alone with the 98-pound Brown, who wasn’t even 5-feet-tall. A woman’s Bulova watch was found nearby, although the police apparently didn’t consider it of any significance. Arnold said he grabbed Brown’s bra and used it as a ligature to strangle her, bracing himself with a knee jammed against the back seat. Apparently Brown was already unconscious, because Arnold said her only reaction “was just (to) quiver a little bit.” Afterward, he got his first look at Brown – telling her, “What a cute little son of a bitch you are” – kissed her on the right breast, wiped for fingerprints and locked the car.
Arnold told police he then went to the nearby apartment of a friend named Mae Hedges, where the two had a drink and he passed out on her couch. Hedges later disputed Arnold’s account.
After Betty Gail Brown’s body was found, Lexington police took photos of the body, her neck at an impossible angle and a bloody dent in the top of her head. She might have fought for her life: a photograph was taken of a broken fingernail on her left index finger. These photos, which graphically show the damage to Brown’s body, aren’t attached to the released file.
Brown’s clothing was cataloged: a light-beige silk shirt, tan wool sweater, black walking shorts and a pair of heavy white socks beneath brown size 4½ oxfords. Brown had been studying with friends for a biology test and left the women’s dorm after the group dispersed. She had worn the clothing all day, had dinner with her parents and then returned to the Transylvania campus.
The terror of her death dominated Lexington for years, reflecting the hysteria of the situation of a defenseless young woman attacked for no apparent reason very close to hundreds of college students. At the visitation for Betty Gail at Kerr Brothers Funeral Home, a classmate cried out, “I know who did it, I know who did it.” She didn’t know who had done it, after all and told police she was just processing a theory.
Betty Gail Brown was buried at Blue Grass Memorial Gardens just over the county line in Jessamine County off Harrodsburg Road.
The death continued to occupy Lexington’s imagination to the point that on Jan. 21, 1988, Sergeant Fran Root sent a memo to then-Lt. John Bizzack, instructing him to get up to speed on the case so that the department could handle future inquiries. “It should be pointed out that none of the past inquiries have materialized into leads that have been substantiated,” Bizzack wrote. “It should also be pointed out that the case materials from this 1961 homicide lack sufficient documentation to determine whether some information was ever fully known or pursued during the 1961-63 investigation.” He also wrote that “no consistent records were kept of assignments, follow-ups, directions, eliminations, possible suspects ... for future evaluation of the evidence.
Then Bizzack made a stunning admission: None of the evidence introduced at Arnold’s trial was available for reexamination. It had all been destroyed, though he doesn’t indicate by whom. Bizzack added the Commonwealth Attorney’s Office archives “also fail to reflect the location, condition or existence of files, materials or evidence related to the case.” He concluded his memo, saying, “While the case may be classified as cleared by arrest under UCR (uniform crime report) standards, whether the murder is resolved is another question.”
In 2006, Lexington police sought hand prints and fingerprints from a California convict who they thought could have been associated with the case. Adolph Laudenberg had been charged in California in connection with four homicides during the 1970s in which all the victims were female and all were strangled. The prints were initially ruled inconclusive. Police also spoke with Laudenberg’s wife, but determined she had no knowledge of the murder. They spoke with his brother and sister, but neither knew if Laudenberg had lived in Lexington in 1961.
Finally, in 2012, the FBI confirmed that Laudenberg’s prints did not match the prints found on Brown’s car. In 2015, the Kentucky state police forensic laboratory came to the same conclusion.
Betty Gail Brown’s clothing was retrieved from an uncle in Florida in 2005 and was retested in an attempt to identify a DNA profile, which yielded no new leads. Around the same time, police probed whether the Brown murder was related to a strangulation killing in Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1963. In 2008, police followed up on a frequent visitor to Betty Gail Brown’s grave who would have been 13 at the time of her death.
Arnold died June 18, 1980, at the Veterans Administration Hospital on Cooper Drive. The cause of death was listed as cirrhosis of the liver.
Fayette Circuit Judge George Barker, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney who assisted Donald Moloney in Arnold’s prosecution, told Bizzack, the police lieutenant, on Jan. 14, 1988, that he thought Arnold was responsible for the death, though he didn’t accept all of what Arnold said about the murder.
Shortly after her daughter’s killing, Quincy Brown told the newspaper that she didn’t want the killer to get the death penalty. Her father, life insurance agent Hargus Brown, took a slightly different tack: “I want to let the law take its course. Even if he is never found, he will be punished by his conscience, but I want to see him caught – I’m afraid this could happen to another person.” Hargus Brown died in 1990 in Brevard County, Florida. Quincy Alice Stanton Brown died in 2002 at age 81, also in Florida. Her cause of death was listed as an injury. The Browns are buried at Blue Grass Memorial Gardens, near Betty Gail. The area, once rural, has grown considerably since her death. Across the street is a shopping center anchored by a Kroger store; the cemetery itself bustles with families visiting their dead.
The mystery surrounding Betty Gail Brown’s death continues. “No one, no relative, no friend, no acquaintance, no investigator, no lawyer, and no witness has ever provided anything resembling evidence of a motive for the killing of this young woman,” Lawson writes in his book. “And this above all else accounts for the fact that the question of who killed Betty Gail Brown has now been a baffling mystery for more than 50 years and is almost sure to remain that way forever.”
Source: Cheryl Truman, The Lexington Herald-Leader, November 3, 2017.