Colorado killer claims 48 murders across US

Robert Charles Browne

LOS ANGELES - A Colorado man serving a life sentence for the 1991 kidnapping and murder of a 13-year-old girl claims to have killed 48 people across the United States, authorities said today.

If Robert Charles Browne's story is true, he would rank as one of America's worst serial killers.

Sheriff's officials in El Paso County, Colorado, say Browne told them that the grisly killings began in 1970 and ended with his 1995 arrest for the murder of 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church.

Browne says he killed 48 people in California, Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and overseas, the El Paso County Sheriff's Office said.

Browne, 53, pleaded guilty today to a second murder, the 1987 strangling of wife and mother Rocio Sperry.

Sheriff Terry Maketa told the Colorado Springs Gazette he believed Browne's confession, which came during four years of interviews and written communications with detectives.

The paper reported that Browne has provided detectives with details about many of the murders that only the killer or police would know.

In one case, the paper said, Browne told investigators that he killed a woman and dismembered her in a motel bathtub, then put the body parts in a suitcase and threw it on a roadside.

Browne has been in a high security state prison since 1995, when he pleaded guilty to Church's murder.

In entering that plea Browne told a judge that he broke into the Church family home intent on committing burglary and unexpectedly found the teenager, an honour student who was baby-sitting her younger brother.

Heather Church's skeletal remains were found two years later in a ravine. Coroner's investigators determined that she had died from blows to the head and tied Browne to the crime through fingerprints found from a window screen at the home.

In 2003, former lorry painter Gary Leon Ridgway pleaded guilty in Seattle to killing 48 women attributed to the so-called "Green River Killer." He was sentenced to life in prison.

- REUTERS