"Cowboy" Mike Braae Sentenced to 48 Years for Rape and Murder

July 30, 2008

The ladies seemed to always like Mike Braae, now 48.  The wanderer and suspected serial killer who became known as "Cowboy Mike," and who never seemed to have any problem impressing the women he encountered, was finally sentenced to 48 years in prison on Thursday, July 24, 2008 for the 2001 rape and murder of a Lacey, Washington woman.  He was a real lady-killer-literally.

Braae, who commonly wore cowboy boots and hats and made money playing his guitar and singing in bars, was initially suspected in the disappearances and/or deaths of several women in Oregon and Washington since 1997.  Cowboy Mike's name always seemed to come up in connection with the missing women as having been seen talking with them shortly, often in a bar, before they disappeared.  He typically carried a guitar with him and was fond of serenading the women he picked up.  His drink of choice was a "snakebite," which consists of Yukon Jack and a shot of lime juice.

"He's known as a womanizer, known to pick up women in taverns," Yakima County Sheriff's Lt. Dan Garcia said back in July 2001, shortly after 50-year-old Marchelle Morgan was found shot in the head, alive but in critical condition, alongside a road in Washington state.  "He's not from anywhere.  He's from here and there."

Braae was also known to have a volatile temper, especially after he had been drinking.

Morgan had last been seen with Braae in a Yakima bar around the middle of July 2001.  Although Morgan survived the shooting, she was left with severe brain damage that forced her to live in a nursing home after partially recovering from the shooting.  She was able to identify Braae as the person who shot her, but by the time the case went to trial in 2006 Morgan's condition had deteriorated to the point that she was unable to testify against him.  As a result, the jury deadlocked 11-1 and the judge declared a mistrial.  That wasn't the end of Cowboy Mike's legal problems, however.

Susan Ault, Braae's girlfriend, had disappeared in June 2001 following an argument with Braae and has not been seen since and, about a week before Marchelle Morgan was found left for dead at the side of the road, the naked body of Lori Jones, 44, was found stuffed beneath the bed inside her Lacey, Washington apartment.  She had been raped and strangled.  Jones had been involved in a last-minute e-mail quarrel with a man she was supposed to have gone out with that evening, Friday, July 6, 2001, and instead ended up going to Bailey's Lounge, a local dive in nearby Olympia, where she met Braae.

Two other women that police were able to connect with Braae disappeared in the late 1990s.  Valina Larson, 37, a homeless woman, was last seen arguing with him outside a storage locker in Clackamas County, Oregon in September 1997, and her bones were found the following January by school children playing in a field.  Another Oregon woman, Debra Van Luven, 45, was also last seen with Braae in 1997 and has not been seen or heard from since.

The authorities in both Oregon and Washington badly wanted Braae behind bars, especially after Lori Jones' body was found and she had been connected to him, but they first had to find him.  To their surprise, the cops did not have to wait long.  On Friday, July 20, 2001 Braae was seen at a truck stop on I-84 in Idaho, just across the border from Oregon.  When he realized that he had been spotted, he took his pursuers on a 13-mile high-speed chase back into Oregon.

Baton Rouge Serial Killer Sean Vincent Gillis Finally Goes to Trial

July 22, 2008

It looks like Baton Rouge, Louisiana serial killer Sean Vincent Gillis, now 45-years-old, is finally going to trial.  After six weeks of the process of jury selection which, at times, did not seem hopeful that a jury would even be seated in Baton Rouge, Gillis's trial is finally slated to begin on Monday, July 21, 2008, although there have been indications that a delay might occur.  The prosecution has indicated that it will seek the death penalty against Gillis.

Gillis's method of operation seems as varied as his victims.  While he nearly always mutilated his victims' bodies and frequently tool body parts as trophies, he sometimes chose to strangle his victims but more often chose to stab them to death.  He defied typical FBI serial killer profiles by crossing defined boundaries regarding age and race, and his lengthy "cooling off" periods between kills, particularly at first, challenged what FBI profilers had become accustomed to seeing in such killers and may have significantly contributed to his remaining free for so long.  His victims ranged in age from 29 to 82; some of his victims were white, others were black; most were from the poor side of town, but at least one lived in an affluent area.  Linked to several of his victims by DNA evidence, Gillis has confessed to a total of eight murders.  In addition to the damning DNA evidence, Gillis was also tied to one of his victims by unique tire tracks that were left at the site where one victim was found.

Gillis has a long criminal history dating back to 1980 when he was charged with criminal trespass, but his pre-murder rap sheet contains mostly minor legal infractions that stemmed from traffic citations, a DUI, a possession of marijuana charge, and contempt of court charges.  Police believe that he did not commit his first murder until March 21, 1994, when he broke into the small retirement home apartment of 82-year-old Ann Bryan during the early morning hours.  Although his intention had been simply to rape the elderly white woman, she began screaming and would not stop until he cut her throat with the foot-long hunting knife he carried with him.  As she lay bleeding to death, Gillis allegedly stabbed her repeatedly and slashed her body with the knife.  Ann Bryan's murder remained unsolved for 10 years.

Nearly five years would pass before Gillis killed again.  He told a reporter after his arrest that he waited so long before killing his next victim because he was "happy." During that lengthy period, he worked at a convenience store located across the street from Ann Bryan's home, and lived in a small, ranch-style house on Burgin Avenue in a quiet, middle class neighborhood about a mile from the scene of his first murder.  The house belonged to Gillis's mother, where the two of them lived from the time that Gillis was a teenager.  His mother, however, eventually moved to Atlanta and left the house with her son who, by the time of Ann Bryan's murder, shared it with his girlfriend.

His neighbors did not like him.  In fact, many of his neighbors were afraid of him, particularly girls and women.  Some considered him strange, and one neighbor said that Gillis gave him "the willies."  He was once caught peeping into the bedroom window of a neighbor's house, and he has been seen on a number of occasions lying out on his front lawn barking at the moon in between yelling curses at his mother.  Most people, naturally, avoided him whenever possible.

Gillis's next victim was 30-year-old Katherine Hall, a black drug addict who resided in a housing project on North Street, long known for its drug dealers, pimps, and prostitutes.  When Katherine climbed into Gillis's car on a chilly night in early January 1999, he overpowered her, placed a plastic cable tie around her neck, and choked her, after which he stabbed her in the throat and in her left eye.  After committing the violent carnage against the young woman, Gillis raped her and then further mutilated her body.  A squirrel hunter (squirrel has long been a food source in those parts of the country) found her nude body lying face down on a road in a rural area of East Baton Rouge Parish, in front of a Dead End road sign.  Investigators later theorized that Gillis's choice of dumping the woman's body in front of the sign might have been symbolic in nature.

Some four months later, toward the early part of May 1999, Gillis, while trolling for a new victim, saw Hardee Schmidt, 52-year-old mother of three, out for an early morning jog in a well-heeled neighborhood of South Baton Rouge.  Schmidt was an ardent runner who had previously taken part in the Boston Marathon, and Gillis sized her up that morning as an easy target.  He returned to her neighborhood frequently for the next three weeks, hoping to encounter her again.  It was not until Sunday, May 30, at approximately 6:30 a.m. that Gillis was able to seize his opportunity.

The Baffling Disappearance of Nan Cecile Dixon

July 08, 2008

I receive several e-mails each day, usually from readers desiring to connect with me about one or more of the many true crime books I've written over the years.  Some people write to compliment me with a pat on the back for a job well-done; others write to express their disappointment in the manner that I handled a particular story.  But it's all in a day's work,  and reading and responding to them keeps me comfortably nestled within the confines of my "big boy" reclining office chair that sits in front of my computer which, admittedly, I rarely leave except to go on an errand or to occasionally interview a subject that I'm writing about.  Once in a blue moon, however, I receive an e-mail of another sort, from a person or persons who are hoping that I can help them in some way—usually to aid them in solving the mystery of a long lost loved one, which is what this week's blog article is all about.

The first e-mail came to me late Thursday evening, while I was busy working through the remaining chapters of my book about Robert Pickton, the Canadian pig farmer-turned-serial killer.  The e-mail was from Mona Mansfield-Erhardt, and her motivation for sending it to me was to solicit my help in renewing interest in finding the remains of her grandmother, Nan Cecile Dixon, 72 at the time she disappeared, who Mona and other family members believe was murdered at some point after setting out from her home in Grass Valley, California on September 21, 1978 for a nearly three-hour trip to visit her brother, Harry Leighton, his wife, Lulu, and their adult son, Arthur, also known as "Butch," at Seven Troughs, Nevada, near Lovelock in the northern part of the Silver State in an unincorporated part of Pershing County.  The Leightons were gold miners and ceramicists in the Seven Troughs area, and the purported purpose of Dixon's visit was to collect her original $6,000 investment that she had made in her brother's mining operation in 1961.  She had needed the money, family members said, so that she could make it financially through the rest of 1978.  According to those interviewed by law enforcement and private detectives at the time, as well as newspaper accounts of her disappearance, Dixon never arrived.  It turned out to be a bizarre mystery far stranger than fiction, one that hasn't been solved to this day.

Dixon's family reported the 4'10," 110 pound woman with reddish-grey hair missing to the Pershing County Sheriff's Department a short time later.  She was last seen driving a 1976 Datsun B210 4-door, the color of which was somewhere between lime and yellow.  Even though air and ground searches were conducted throughout much of the desert mining area, the sheriff at the time said that his office didn't have any evidence that Dixon had ever reached his county.  Then, nearly three months later, Dixon's husband, Robert, received a charge card bill for $4.18 from a Texaco gas station in Lovelock.  The new revelation prompted a subsequent round of searches, but there were no results.

Dixon's family then sent psychics that they had hired to advise the Pershing County Sheriff of their purported findings, but their efforts, when all was said and done, yielded nothing that could definitively point to Dixon's whereabouts.  The relatives also hired a private detective and sent him to Nevada.  According to a report that appeared in a Lovelock newspaper more than two years after Dixon's disappearance, the family believed that a Lovelock police officer had tampered with...

Continue Reading The Baffling Disappearance of Nan Cecile Dixon

Photos courtesy: Mona Mansfield-Erhardt