Robert Charles Browne Serial Killers Murders Cold Case Investigator Charlie Hess

At this late hour of his life, Charlie Hess said the question "Why?" didn't matter anymore. After all the years he spent in the F.B.I. tilting at the criminal mind, all his years in private practice running lie-detector tests, his time extracting secrets as a C.I.A. agent in Vietnam, he was no longer interested in "Why?" What counted were simple, incontestable facts: who, when, where, what. Names, dates, locations; cause and manner of death - these were his goals as he tried to flesh out the transgressions of a man who, by his own account, killed 48 people. Robert, can you remember what year that was? Was the body north or south of the highway? Where did you get the ice pick? "Why?" was bottomless and slippery and often fraught with useless moral overtones. "Why?" didn't close cases. "Why?" was for intellectuals, and Charlie Hess had seen enough of them to say there were two kinds of people: intellectuals and those who got things done.

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Charlie Hess in front of the Kwik-Stop where the serial killer Robert Browne met Rocio Sperry

El Paso County (Colorado) Sheriff's Office/Corbis

"The Devil's Right-Hand Man" Robert Charles Browne has claimed to have murdered 48 people in nine states.

Now here he was at 2 a.m. on a cold November night, escorting an interviewer to a rental car parked outside his trailer in a poor neighborhood on the east side of Colorado Springs. "I could pack up and move tomorrow - just give me my woman and my dogs," he said, craning his head back at the torrent of stars above the Front Range. He said that the footloose spirit came from Gypsy blood on his father's side, but he was 80, and after two heart operations, a brush with death from kidney failure, and two hip-replacement surgeries, you had to wonder if his wanderlust had a leg to stand on. Under the wan streetlight, he looked a little like Spencer Tracy after a hard winter.

For the past five years, Hess had worked as a volunteer in the El Paso County Sheriff's Office's cold-case unit in Colorado Springs. He'd helped to organize files no one had looked at, in some cases, for decades. Then he began poring over one case in particular. He'd started writing letters and tracking down names. He'd done hundreds of interviews. He'd made dozens of trips by car for meetings at the penitentiary an hour south, near Canon City. He'd faxed police jurisdictions all over the West. He'd sifted through jewelry boxes for a stolen wedding ring. Two or three times frustrations got the better of him and he had quit. But he always came back, persevering as the months rounded into years. It wasn't as if he lacked other interests. He could have been fishing. He could have been walking the dogs. He had two daughters. A grandson. Two great-granddaughters. And his wife, Jo, with whom he was so happy he could scarcely bring himself to eat when she left to visit relatives. So: Why? Why spend so many hours trying to beguile a man already locked away for life with no hope of parole?

"There are five or six reasons," he said with a long-suffering sigh.

He'd already mentioned he didn't care for golf. He'd already explained he wanted to be of use before he was ushered off the stage. He'd already confessed to a competitive streak, and the satisfaction of showing the office hotshots he still had chops. One of the deepest reasons was not a secret at all: his son-in-law had been murdered in Colorado Springs in 1991.

"Some I've told you about," he reminded me. "But the others I won't."

"Could one assume the others have to do with feelings you have about things that happened in the past, maybe when you were with the bureau or in Vietnam - things you feel now you want to atone for in some way?"

He seemed almost amused, like Garry Kasparov contemplating a poisoned pawn from a high-school chess-club upstart.

"You're a very good interrogator," he said. "But you'll never get that out of me."

2. The Apple Dumpling Gang

El Paso County is a Delaware-size district on the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains with a population of about 575,000; a murder rate well below regional and national averages; and, outside the city, fewer than two dozen unsolved homicides going back to 1969. The injustice of any one unsolved murder probably looms larger in a community where murders are rare, but the cold-case unit informally established in the county sheriff's office in 2001 owes its existence less to the expressed values of an uncallused electorate than to the zeal and friendship of three retired volunteers: Scott Fischer, Lou Smit and Charlie Hess. Tickled by their ages - now 61, 72 and 80 respectively - an office manager in the sheriff's office teasingly nicknamed them the Apple Dumpling Gang, after the bumbling dimwits in the 1975 Disney movie.

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Chip Brown is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about the new-media company Flavorpill.