Ann Rule: 10 cases, 40 years of killings

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The two young men being walked through the jail - both late teens to early twenties, both with the middle name Eugene, both raised in Ritzville, west of Spokane - seem subdued and perhaps penitent in their photographs.

Thomas Braun stares at the ground through heavy, dark-rimmed glasses, date-stamping the era as the late '60s, 1967 precisely. Leonard Maine cocks his head towards the camera, wearing a neutral expression. Neither betrays any sign of infamy.

"Empty Promises: Ann Rule's Crime Files Vol. 7" by Ann Rule Pocket Books, $7.99

In 1967, spree-killing stories weren't so ho-hum as today, and coverage of the Braun-Maine rampage - three people dead and one critically injured, across three states - painted them infamous indeed.

At their Washington state murder trial, jurors and spectators watched a film retracing victim Deanne Buse's final trip, from the spot on Route 202 where her killers pulled her over with a ruse, to the woods near Echo Lake where, the jury concluded, Braun pulled the trigger on his .22 five times. "The wooded scene - the last thing Deanna saw before she was killed - lingered in the courtroom. ... "

"I am drawn," Ann Rule remarks on her Web page, " ... to cases where the suspect is NOT the classic murderer. ... If a person has all those things that most of us long for - physical beauty, wealth, charm, intelligence, talent, love - and still wants more and more ... he or she may be an antisocial personality, someone who has no empathy for other human beings at all."

Braun and Maine had little to lose except anonymity and freedom. But others forsake more than that when they choose to kill.

"Empty Promises" covers 10 cases spanning 40 years, and their antagonistic protagonists, varying from a lovelorn college-campus bomber to lesbian lovers struggling to kill one partner's husband. Each lose something different by losing everything, and each for a different ideal.